“I cannot omit to mention,” writes Lord Stafford, “any new thing that comes up amongst us though ever so trivial. Here is one Captain Bailey, he hath been a sea captain, but now lives on land about this city where he tries experiments. He hath erected, according to his ability, some four hackney coaches, put his men in livery and appointed them to stand at the Maypole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rate to carry men into several parts of the town where all day they may be had. Other hackney men veering this way, they flocked to the same place and performed their journeys at the same rate, so that sometimes there is twenty of them together, which dispose up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had at the waterside. Everybody is much pleased with it, for whereas before coaches could be had but at great rate”—one recalls the prices paid by Lord Rutland a few years before—“now a man may have one much cheaper.”
Most of these coaches that were put on to the streets seem to have been old and disused carriages belonging to the quality. Many of them still bore noble arms, and, indeed, it would seem that when the hackneys were no longer disused noblemen’s carriages, the proprietors found it advisable to pretend that they were. Nearly every hansom and four-wheeled cab at the end of the nineteenth century bore some sort of coronet on its panels.
The drivers of these first hackneys wore large coats with several capes, one over the other, for warmth. London, however, seems to have been the only town in which they were to be seen. “Coaches,” wrote Fynes Morison in 1617, “are not to be hired anywhere but in London. For a day’s journey a coach with two horses is let for about 10s. a day, or 15s. with three horses, the coachman finding the horses’ feed.” From the same author it would appear that most travellers still doggedly kept to their horses, and indeed, in some counties a horse could be hired for threepence a day, an incredibly small sum. “Carriers,” he also records, “have long covered waggons in which they carry passengers too and fro; but this kind of journeying is very tedious; so that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort.” These were the stage-waggons which in due course gave rise to the stage-coaches, which in their turn were superseded by the mail-coaches.
A similar movement in France gave rise to the fiacres, so called from the sign of St. Fiacre, which adorned one of the principal inns in Paris, in front of which the public coaches stood. In Scotland, too, one Henry Andersen, a native of Pomerania, had in 1610 been granted a royal patent to provide public coaches in Scotland, and for some years ran a service between Edinburgh and Leith. England had yet to follow Andersen’s example, but the hackneys were increasing so rapidly in London that in 1635 a proclamation was issued to suppress them. And it is to be noticed that Taylor’s diatribes were directed more particularly against these public conveyances than against the privately owned carriages, which, after all, could hardly affect his trade. The proclamation was as follows:—
“That the great numbers of Hackney Coaches of late time seen and kept in London, Westminster, and their Suburbs, and the general and promiscuous use of Coaches there, were not only a great disturbance to his Majesty, his dearest Consort the Queen, the Nobility, and others of place and degree, in their passage through the Streets; but the Streets themselves were so pestered, and the pavements so broken up, that the common passage is thereby hindered and more dangerous; and the prices of hay and provender and other provisions of stable, thereby made exceeding dear: Wherefore We expressly command and forbid, That, from the feast of St. John the Baptist next coming, no Hackney or Hired Coach, be used or suffered in London, Westminster, or the Suburbs or Liberties thereof, excepting they be to travel at least three miles out of London or Westminster, or the Suburbs thereof. And also, that no person shall go in a Coach in the said Streets, except the owner of the Coach shall constantly keep up Four able Horses for our Service, when required.”
It is dated January 19th, 1635/6, and must have had a considerable, if temporary, effect, for as Samuel Pegge points out in his unfinished manuscript on the early use of coaches[25] it could not “operate much in the King’s favour, as it would hardly be worth a Coach-master’s while to be at so great a contingent charge as the keeping of four horses to be furnished at a moment’s warning for His Majesty’s occasional employment.”
It was then that Sir Saunders Duncombe obtained his monopoly, and, of course, everything was in his favour. The actual patent granted to him belongs to the previous year, but the two are approximately contemporary. From a letter written in 1634 to Lord Stafford, it appears that Duncombe had in that year forty or fifty chairs “making ready for use.” Possibly the whole thing was worked up by Buckingham and his satellites. Duncombe’s patent gave the enterprising knight the right “to put forth and lett for hire” the new chairs for a term of fourteen years. In his petition he had explained that “in many parts beyond the seas, the people there are much carried in the Streets in Chairs that are covered; by which means very few Coaches are used amongst them.” And so Duncombe was allowed to “reap some fruit and benefit of his industry,” and might “recompense himself of the costs, charges, and expences” to which he had, or said he had, been put.
For two years these covered chairs held the advantage, and indeed seem to have been exceedingly popular. There is a most amusing pamphlet, which I have already mentioned, “printed by Robert Raworth, for John Crooch,” in 1636, entitled Coach and Sedan pleasantly disputing for Place and Precedence, the Brewer’s Cart being Moderator. It is signed “Mis-amaxius,” and is dedicated “to the Valorous, and worthy all title of Honor, Sr Elias Hicks.” “Light stuffe,” the author calls it, and tells us that he is “no ordinary Pamphleteer ... onely in Mirth I tried what I could doe upon a running subject, at the request of a friend in the Strand: whose leggs, not so sound as his Judgement, enforce him to keepe his Chamber, where hee can neither sleepe or studie for the clattering of Coaches.” It is an interesting little production, both for its own whimsicalities and for the sidelights it affords into the town’s views on the subject of vehicles at the time. It starts with the cuckoo warning the milkmaids of Islington to get back to Finsburie. The writer, accompanied by a Frenchman and a tailor, walks back to the city, and in a narrow street comes across a coach and a sedan quarrelling about which of them is to “take the wall.”
“Wee perceived two lustie fellowes to justle for the wall, and almost readie to fall together by the eares, the one (the lesser of the two) was in a suite of greene after a strange manner, windowed before and behind with Isen-glasse, having two handsome fellowes in greene coats attending him, the one went before, the other came behind; their coats were lac’d down the back with a greene-lace sutable, so were their halfe sleeves, which perswaded me at first they were some cast suites of their Masters; their backs were harnessed with leather cingles, cut out of a hide, as broad as Dutch-collops of Bacon.
“The other was a thick burly square sett fellow, in a doublet of Black-leather, Brasse-button’d down the brest, Backe, Sleeves, and winges, with monstrous wide bootes, fringed at the top, with a net fringe, and a round breech (after the old fashion) guilded, and on his back-side an Atcheivement of sundry Coats in their propper colors, quarterd with Crest, Helme and Mantle, besides here and there, on the sides of a single Escutchion or crest, with some Emblematicall Word or other; I supposed, they were made of some Pendants, or Banners, that had beene stollen, from over some Monument, where they had long hung in a Church.
“Hee had onely one man before him, wrapt in a red cloake, with wide sleeves, turned up at the hands, and cudgell’d thick on the backe and shoulders with broad shining lace (not much unlike that which Mummers make of strawe hatts) and of each side of him, went a Lacquay, the one a French boy, the other Irish, all sutable alike: The Frenchman (as I learned afterward) when his Master was in the Countrey, taught his lady and his daughter French: Ushers them abroad to publicke meetings, and assemblies, all saving the Church whither shee never came: The other went on errands, help’d the maide to beate Bucks, fetch in water, carried up meate, and waited at the Table.”