Here, perhaps, we may consider the introduction of the coach into England in rather greater detail. “It is a doubtful question,” remarks Taylor in his ill-natured way,” whether the divell brought Tobacco into England in a Coach, or else brought a Coach in a fogge or mist of Tobacco.” Apparently he had an equal dislike for both coach and tobacco. But although we owe to the water-poet such contemporary satirical writings on the subject as there are, he is not to be trusted as an historian. Taylor, indeed, is a very bad historian, not so much on account of his inability to see two sides of a question, as because, like many another poet, he has made of exaggeration a fine art, and allowed his memory to play second fiddle to his inclinations. It is to the worthy Stowe that we must turn for the facts. Stowe liked the coaches little better than did Taylor, but his training had made him exact, and we may take it for granted that he is more or less correct when he says that the first coach to be seen upon British roads belonged to the year 1555. Curiously enough, this is the date of the first General Highways Act. The preamble of this Bill stated that certain roads were “now both very noisesome and tedious to travel in and dangerous to all passengers and carriages [carts].” The local authorities were empowered to compel parishioners to give four days’ work every year to the repairing of the roads, though how far such orders were carried out it would be impossible to say. The merit of actually introducing the coach is given by Stowe to Henry Manners, second Earl of Rutland, who caused one Walter Rippon to build him a carriage from some foreign, most probably Dutch, pattern. This Earl of Rutland had borne the Spurs at the coronation of Edward VI, and in 1547 had been made Constable of Nottingham Castle. He had received the French hostages in 1550 at the time of the treaty which followed on the loss of Boulogne. It is to be regretted that neither in his correspondence nor in the family account-books preserved at Belvoir is there mention of either Rippon or his coach. There is, indeed, the “Book of John Leek of riding charges carriages [carts] and forrene paymentes” in 1550, and another book compiled by Leek’s successor, George Pilkington, in the following year, but all travelling entries concern only horses and the cartage of goods. In 1555 “George Lassells, Esquyer” was “Comptroller to the householde” and paid “to Edward Hopkynson for ij ryding roddes of bone for my Ladye and other thinges, xxijd,” but there is no mention of any carriage for his Lordship’s own use. What is more unfortunate is that there are no account-books of the Manners family between 1559 and 1585, and it is not until 1587, when a fourth Earl of Rutland was head of his house, that this significant entry occurs:—
“Coach, a newe, bought in London, xxxviijli.xiijs.ijd.”
To go back to Rippon, it is not known who he was. He is supposed to have built a coach for Queen Mary in 1556, and in 1564 the first “hollow turning coach” with pillars and arches, for Queen Elizabeth, though precisely what is meant by a “hollow turning” coach it is difficult to conjecture. This same Rippon twenty-four years later built another coach for the Queen, which is described as “a chariot throne with foure pillars behind, to beare a crowne imperiale on the toppe, and before two lower pillars, whereon stood a lion and a dragon, the supporters of the armes of England.” It cannot have been very comfortable, and Elizabeth seems to have preferred another coach brought out of Holland by one William Boonen, who about 1560 was made her coachman, a position he was still occupying at the end of the century. This Boonen was a Dutchman, whose wife is said to have introduced the art of starching into England, whence followed those huge ruffs so conspicuous in all the Elizabethan portraits. Boonen’s coach could be opened and closed at pleasure. On the occasion of the Queen’s passing through the town of Warwick, she had “every part and side of her coach to be opened, that all her subjects present might behold her, which most gladly they desired.” This coach is described as “on four wheels with seven spokes, which are apparently bound round with a thick wooden rim secured by pegs. It is precisely such a vehicle,” adds the anonymous historian in the Carriage Builder’s and Harness Maker’s Art Journal, “as is now [1860] used by the brewers, with a tilt over it, which opens in the centre on one side, and would contain half a dozen persons.” On the other hand, one may safely assert that no brewer’s cart was ever decorated in the same way, for the framing of Elizabeth’s carriage was of wood carved in a shell pattern and gilded. “The whole composition,” runs another account, “contains many beautiful curves. The shell-work creeps up to the roof, which it supports, and which is dome-shaped.... The roof is capped by five waving ostrich feathers, one at each corner, and the fifth on the centre of the roof, and springing from a kind of crown.” The driver’s seat was apparently a kind of movable stool, and two horses were used. Even this coach, however, of which there is a print by Hoefnagle, dated 1582, cannot have been very comfortable, and in 1568, when the French ambassador obtained an audience, Elizabeth was complaining of “aching pains” from being knocked about in a coach driven too fast a few days before. “No wonder,” comments one historian, “that the great queen used her coach only when occasions of state demanded.” Whenever possible, indeed, she used her horse. “When Queen Elizabeth came to Norwich, 1578,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne a hundred years later, “she came on horseback from Ipswich, by the high road to Norwich, in the summer time; but she had a coach or two,” he added, “in her trayne.”
In the print just mentioned there is shown a second coach, which is perhaps a better example of the carriage of the period. One sees again its hearse-like appearance, though the top is broader than the bottom, and the body is partially enclosed; but there is one peculiarity which deserves particular mention. This was a small seat which projected on either side, between the wheels. It was known as the boot. Here sat the pages or grooms or the ladies in attendance. Taylor, of course, has his fling against it. The booted coach, he says, is like a perpetual cheater, wears “two Bootes and no Spurs, sometimes having two paire of Legs and one boote; and oftentimes (against nature) most preposterously it makes faire Ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are carrried backe to backe like people surpriz’d by Pyrats to be tyed in that miserable manner, and throwne overboard into the Sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate Sea-crabs, in being drawne Side-wayes, as they are when they sit in the boote of the Coach.” The boot, however, was already tending to disappear in Taylor’s day. How it originated is not clear. It was always uncovered, whence followed much hardship, particularly if the weather was unfavourable. Nor can one think that it was very capacious. There is an early seventeenth-century pamphlet entitled My Journie, in which a stout old lady is put into the boot of a coach, and cannot move. When going uphill all the passengers are supposed to get out and walk, but the old lady, once settled, refuses to budge, and, indeed, cannot be extricated until the end of the journey. There is further mention of the discomfort in a boot in 1663, when Edward Barker, writing to his father, a Lancashire squire, complains of his troubles in the side seat. “I got to London,” he says, “on Saturday last, my journey was noe ways pleasant, being forced to ride in the boote all the waye, ye company yt came up wth mee were persons of greate quality as knightes and ladyes. My journeys expence was 30 s. This traval hath soe indisposed mee, yt I am resolved never to ride againe in ye coatch. I am extreamly hot and feverish.” The monstrous width of these early coaches followed, of course, on their projecting side seats, which only entirely disappeared when the coach had come to be completely enclosed and provided with glass windows.
It may be that the boot in process of time was metamorphosed into the large, deep, four-sided basket which was strapped to the back of public coaches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, indeed, this basket seems to have been called the boot in eighteenth-century stage coaches. It was probably in such a basket-boot as this that Mr. Pepys put his great barrel of oysters, “as big as sixteen others,” which was given him in 1664.
An interesting point in this connection is that those who travelled on the seatless and presumably most uncomfortable roof of a coach plying for hire, paid more for the privilege than did those who rode in the boot.
However greatly the chroniclers may differ as to the date of the actual introduction, and others besides Taylor disagree with Stowe, there seems no doubt that by 1585 many of the nobility and some wealthy commoners owned private coaches, and, indeed, certain enterprising tradesmen, as will appear, let other coaches on hire at so much per day.
“After a while,” says Stowe, “divers great ladies, with a great jealousy of the Queen’s displeasure, made them coaches and rid them up and down the countries, to the great admiration of all the beholders, but then little by little they grew usual amongst the nobilitie and others of sort, and within twenty years became a great trade of coach-making.”
Indeed, every one of any wealth was eager to possess them. A private coach settled any doubts as to your quality. It was a new fashion, a new excitement. “So a woman,” says Quicksilver, the rake, in Eastward Hoe, “marry to ride in a coach, she cares not if she rides to her ruin. ’Tis the great end of many of their marriages.” And again, in Ben Jonson’s Alchemist it is said of the Countess that she
“... has her pages, ushers