And laughs at honesty, and trudging wits.”
Perhaps he is thinking of some personal inconvenience, rather than of mere unnecessary luxury, when he asks:—
“What walker shall his mean ambition fix
On the false lustre of a coach and six?”
And so late as 1770, the eccentric Lord Monboddo, who still maintained the superiority of a savage life, refused to “sit in a box drawn by brutes.” It is, of course, easy to magnify such opposition to coaches as followed on the grounds of mere luxury and display, but in the earlier history of the coach, to which we are now come, it is a factor which must by no means be neglected. The coach, like every other novelty, had to fight its way, and if one is inclined to believe, after reading such accusations as there are of the earliest coaches with their magnificent adornments and numerous attendants, that the owners altogether deserved the reproaches of their more Spartan fellows, it may be well to recall Macaulay’s words. In his sketch of the state of England in 1685, when coaches were still lavishly adorned, he says of them: “We attribute to magnificence what was really the effect of a very disagreeable necessity. People in the time of Charles the Second travelled with six horses, because with a smaller number there was great danger of sticking fast in the mire.” And what is true of 1685 is certainly true of 1585.
Buckingham is supposed to have been the first man to use a coach and six in this country, though this is by no means certain. Of him a well-known story apropos of this question of undue luxury is told. “The stout old Earl of Northumberland,” it runs, “when he got loose, hearing that the great Favourite Buckingham was drawn about with a Coach and six horses (which was wondered at then as a novelty, and imputed to him as a mastring pride) thought if Buckingham had six he might very well have eight in his Coach, with which he rode through the City of London to the Bath, to the vulgar talk and admiration.... Nor did this addition of two horses by Buckingham grow higher than a little murmur. For in the late Queen’s time there were no coaches, and the first [had] but two Horses; the rest crept in by Degrees as men at first venture to sea.”[18] Yet what may have been true of Buckingham, whose love of luxury was notorious, need not have been true of those other owners of coaches, who were constantly travelling about the country.
Finally there is the other side of the question to be remembered, and, as M. Ramde quaintly points out in his History of Locomotion, the very luxury which people so disliked had a beneficent effect; for “after the development of the use of carriages, and their frequent employment by the court and nobility, the liberty to throw everything out of the window became intolerable! Thus the carriage of luxury has been the cause of cleanliness in the streets.”
Now it must be understood that the coach proper differs from all earlier vehicles in being not only a covered, but also a suspended carriage. The canopy has given place to the roof, a roof, that is to say, which forms part of the framing of the body; and the body itself is swung in some fashion, however primitive, from posts or other supports. Further, it seems reasonable to suppose, on the analogy of the berlin and the landau—two later carriages which took their names from the towns in which they were first made—that the first coaches were built in a small Hungarian town then called Kotzee. Yet it is to be observed that Spain, Italy, and France, in the persons of various enthusiasts, have claimed the invention—their claims being mainly based on such similarities as may be observed between the real coach and the earlier cars and charettes.[19] Bridges Adams, indeed, not to be outdone, hazards the suggestion that England might also be included in such a list by reason of her invention of the whirlicote, though he is obliged to admit that nobody knows exactly what a whirlicote was like. It is probably due to these patriotic gentlemen that several rather ludicrous suggestions have been made to explain the derivation of the word coach, which has a similar sound in nearly all European languages. Menange rashly suggests a corruption of the Latin vehiculum. Another writer puts forward the Greek verb ὀχέω, to carry. Wachten, a German, finds in kutten, to cover, a suitable explanation, and Lye produces the Flemish koetsen, to lie along. This last, perhaps, is the most reasonable suggestion of those unwilling to give the palm to Hungary, for not only were the Flemish vehicles well known before the introduction of the new carriage, but there is also some confusion, at any rate, in this country, between the two words coach and couch, both being found in the old account books. Even in the sixteenth century the word seems to have bothered people. There is an amusing reference to this point in an early seventeenth-century tract called Coach and Sedan Pleasantly Disputing, of which I shall have more to say in the next chapter.
“Their first invention,” says a character in this dialogue, “and use was in the Kingdome of Hungarie, about the time when Frier George, compelled the Queen and her young sonne the King, to seeke to Soliman the Turkish Emperour, for aid against the Frier, and some of the Nobilitie, to the utter ruine of that most rich and flourishing Kingdome, where they were first called Kottcze, and in the Slavonian tongue Cottri, not of Coucher the French to lie-downe, nor of Cuchey, the Cambridge Carrier, as some body made Master Minshaw, when hee (rather wee) perfected his Etymologicall dictionarie, whence we call them to this day Coaches.”