“Item for ij paire of new wheeles for the coache, tymber worke and iron work, and setting them on the axeltrees, iijli.xiijs.iiijd.; payntinge them in oyle colour, vjs.viijd.; a new pole for the horses to drawe by, ijs.vjd.; a paire of springe trees, iijs.iijd.”
The provender bill for six horses is given, also an item “for setting up the coach horses at dyvers times at Walsingham Howse, iiijs.; at Hatton Howse, xijd.; at Baynardes Castle, ijs.; dressing and oyling the coach, ijs.”; while the most necessary whip costs Mr. Screven twelve pence. Other payments are six shillings for two new bearing braces for the “double hanging” of the coach—here at any rate is definite mention of suspension, a fact which might suggest that, after all, either Rippon’s or Lord Arundel’s coach had been of the suspended type—four shillings for a long spring brace, two shillings and sixpence for a new “wynge,” and sixteen pence for two “bearing raynes.” The new coach, however, is not ready in time for his Lordship, who thereupon hires one with three horses to take him “to the Court at Nonesuch, 23, 24, and 25 of September, at xvjs. per diem.” Meanwhile payments for his own coach continue. For four “skynnes of orange colour leather goate” he pays various sums; for the timber work, for more painting, for a covering in “black lether,” and for making the “curtaynes, and setting on the firinge, and making the blew cloth cover” a sum of twenty-six pounds, nineteen shillings, is expended. Nor is this all. My Lord was evidently determined to make his coach as gorgeous as possible. Nine yards of “marygold coulour velvet for the seat and bed in the coach” were required, and each yard cost twenty-three shillings. The quilting for the bed cost forty shillings. In addition, there was a lace of “crymosin silk” and no less than “v elles of crymosin taffaty for curtaynes,” costing three pounds fifteen shillings; also “9 yardes of blew clothe for a cover.” Then, of great interest, comes the final entry:—
“Item, paid to Ryly, embroderer, in full for embrodering iij sumpter clothes of crymosin with his L[ordship’s] armes thereon at large, and vij otheres embrodered onely with great peacocks, with carsey for the garding and tasselles and frynge, 14 July, lxiiijli.”
Mr. Ryly was well paid for his work[21].
From such details it is possible to imagine what this and other coaches of the time were like. You figure a huge, gaudy, curtained apparatus with projecting sides and incomplete panels, large enough to contain a fair-sized bed, hung roughly from four posts, and capable of being dragged at little better than a snail’s pace—“four-wheeled Tortoyses” Taylor calls them—along roads hardly worthy of the name. Twenty miles a day was considered good going. Says Portia, in the Merchant of Venice:—
“... I’ll tell thee all my whole device
When I am in my coach, which stays for us
At the park gate; and therefore haste away,
For we must measure twenty miles to-day.”
The coachman, as we learn from the water-poet, was “mounted (his fellow-horses and himselfe being all in a finery) with as many varieties of laces, facings, Clothes and Colours as are in the Rainebowe.” Nor was he over-polite, particularly if the coach he drove was hired. In Jonson’s Staple of News one of the pieces of mock-news to appear in the ideal paper concerns the fraternity:—