It is also to be noted that the first English coaches, so called, were probably not suspended at all, but merely upholstered carts for reclining—in fact nothing more than the old chariots. In the second half of the sixteenth century, practically every pleasure carriage in England, though not on the Continent, was called a coach or a carroche. Consequently it is difficult to give a date for the importation of the first real coach into this country. Indeed, it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty precisely when carriages of the suspended type were first made. Such early accounts as exist are at once fragmentary and obscure, and the few illustrations little better than caricatures with a perspective reminiscent of that in Hogarth’s famous example of false drawing. It can only be repeated that the hammock slung from the four posts of a waggon, such as we have seen existed amongst the Anglo-Saxons and possibly was also in use in parts of Europe, may have provided the idea of permanent suspension as a means to comfort, and that such scanty evidence as there is goes to prove that the carriages exported from Hungary towards the end of the fifteenth century seem to have been the first coaches to be built.
So early as 1457 there is mention of such a carriage, given by Ladislaus, King of Hungary, to the French King, Charles VII. The Parisians who saw it described it as “branlant et moulte riche.” What this “trembling” carriage was like there is no means of discovering, but it certainly suggests an attempt at suspension, and may perhaps be taken for the earliest coach to be recorded by history. This obviously was Hungarian, and Hungary is again mentioned in the same connection by Stephanus Broderithus, who relates that in 1526, “when the archbishop received intelligence that the Turks had entered Hungary, not content with informing the King of this event, he speedily got into one of those light carriages which from the name of the place we call kotcze, and hastened to His Majesty.” And apparently these light carriages were actually used for military purposes, Taylor avowing that “they carried soldiers on each side with cross-bowes,” this being the best purpose to which he considered the coach had ever been put or was likely to be put in the future. All this is clear enough, but Beckmann, in his History of Inventions, mentions another circumstance which strengthens the evidence: “Siegmund, Baron de Herberstein, ambassador from Louis II, to the King of Hungary, says in his Commentarie de rebus Moscoviticis, where he occasionally mentions some travelling-stages in Hungary: ‘The fourth stage for stopping to give the horses breath is six miles below Taurinum, in the village of Cotzi, from which both drivers and carriages take their name, and are generally called cotzi.’”[20]
Very probably these new Hungarian carriages were seen in most European countries before 1530. “At tournaments,” says Bridges Adams, “they were made objects for display; they are spoken of as being gilded all over, and the hangings were of crimson satin. Electresses and duchesses were seldom without them; and there was as much rivalry in their days of public exhibition as there is now [1837] amongst the aspirants of fashion in their well-appointed equipages at a queen’s drawing-room.”
What did these early coaches look like? Shorn of their hangings, they must have resembled nothing so much as the hearse of to-day. The first illustrations show no signs of suspension, and portray what appear to be gaudily decorated waggons, and that in effect is what they were. The first coach makers of Hungary, like their predecessors, were certainly content to take for their model the common agricultural waggon of Germany. Indeed, Hungary seems to have played pioneer in this respect at a very early date. Von Ginzrot, in his work on early vehicles, gives an illustration of a closed passenger carriage which bears more than a superficial resemblance to the later coaches. “The body,” says Thrupp, “is a disguised waggon; the tilt-top has two leather flaps to fall over the doorway, and the panels are of wicker-work.” It would have been quite easy, he continues, to use such waggons, as had been the case long before, for passenger traffic, “by placing the planks across the sides, or suspending seats by straps from the sides”; and he further mentions an oil painting at Nuremberg, of two waggons “with carved and gilt standard posts both in front and behind the body”—an interesting stage in the transformation from rude cart to private coach. There is a detailed and technical description of these waggons in Thrupp’s own book, but it will be enough here to notice that they were generally narrower at the bottom than at the top, as were the first coaches, and that the four wheels were nearly of the same size. Working from such a model, the Hungarian artificers produced a comparatively light, though large, four-wheeled carriage with some pretensions to grace of line, a roofed body, broad seats, and a side entrance. The body, however, was not completely enclosed by solid panels, which only took the place of the curtains at a later date. Carvings and other ornamentation followed on the owner’s rank and taste. And towards the end of the sixteenth century, if not before, the actual body was suspended on straps or braces. There are preserved at Coburg and Verona one or two coach-bodies which show signs of the iron hoops by which they were hung. The earliest of these was built for Duke Frederick of Saxony in 1527, and Count Gozzadini, in a slim folio which he privately printed some sixty years ago, describes a coach-body built in 1549 which still shows traces of its heraldic ornamentation on the framework.
“This coach,” says Thrupp, acting as the Count’s translator, “was built under the direction of an Italian at Brussels, for the ceremony of the marriage of Alexander, the son of Octavius Farnese, Duke of Parma, with a Portuguese princess. The wedding took place in 1565 at Brussels. There were four carriages Flanders fashion [? charettes] and four coaches after the Italian fashion, swinging on leather braces. The chief, or state, coach is described as being in the most beautiful manner, with four statues at the ends, the spokes of the wheels like fluted columns. There were seraphims’ heads at the end of the roof and over the doorway, and festoons of fruit in relief over the framing of the body. The coachman was supported by two carved figures of lions, two similar lions were at the hind wheel, and the leather braces that supported the body and the harness were embossed with heads of animals. The ends of the steps were serpents’ heads. The whole of the wood and ironwork was covered with gold relieved with white. The coach was drawn by four horses, with red and white plumes of feathers, and the covering of the body and of the horses was gold brocade with knotted red silk fringe. The cushions of gold-embroidered stuff were perfumed with amber and musk, that infused the soul of all who entered the coach with life, joy, and supreme pleasure.”
Truly a Southern notion!
What is apparently the oldest coach to be preserved practically intact is to be seen at Coburg. This coach was built for a particular occasion—the marriage of John, Elector of Saxony, in 1584. The body is long and ornate, and is hung from four carved standard posts surmounted by crowned lions. The wheels are large—four feet eight inches and five feet—and the roof is at a slightly higher level than the lions’ heads. Mounting steps must have existed, but have been lost.
Not unnaturally the advent of these coaches followed upon the commercial prosperity of each country. Germany seems to have imported a number of carriages from Hungary, and made others from Hungarian models, but even more prosperous than Germany at this time was Holland, which probably possessed more coaches than any other country in Europe. Here there would have been native designs to follow and improve upon, and, as I shall show in a moment, it was probably from the Netherlands that the first coach was imported into England. Antwerp, for instance, a superlatively rich city in the sixteenth century, is credited by Macpherson with having no less than five hundred coaches —and so five hundred scandals, according to the local philosophers—in 1560, at which date London had but two, and Paris no more than three. Of the French trio of carosses, as they were called, one was the Queen’s property, a second belonged to the fashionable Diana of Poitiers, and the third had been built for the use of that corpulent noble who has already been mentioned. Some Italian towns possessed many, others none. There is preserved at the Musée Cluny in Paris a Veronese carriole built in the sixteenth century by Giovanna Batta Maretto, with panels painted by a distinguished artist of the time. Verona, indeed, seems to have had many coaches. But it was easily surpassed by Ferrara, which so early as 1509 is credited with the possession of no less than sixty coaches, the whole of these forming the Duke’s procession on the occasion of a state visit from the Pope. And, as Thrupp points out, these sixty carriages were not litters or cars, as might be supposed, but coaches, for it is particularly mentioned by the historian that “the Duchess of Ferrara rode in a litter, and her ladies followed her in twenty-two cars.” Spain had apparently no coaches until 1546, and here again there was considerable opposition to their use. Yet although England, France, and Spain seem to have been behind other countries in taking to the new carriages, all three possessed a flourishing, if not very large, coach-building trade before 1600.
From a Print by Hofnagel, 1582