The private coach, too, was the last luxury to be given up after financial embarrassment. So we have Lady Flippant, in Wycherley’s Love in a Wood, saying, “Ah, Mrs. Joyner, nothing grieves me like the putting down my coach! For the fine clothes, the fine lodgings,—let ’em go; for a lodging is as unnecessary a thing to a widow that has a coach, as a hat to a man that has a good peruke. For, as you see about town, she is most probably at home in her coach:—she eats, and drinks, and sleeps in her coach; and for her visits, she receives them in the playhouse.” No lady’s virtue, according to this cynical dramatist, was proof against a coach and six.
At the time of the introduction of the light, two-seated chariots, ordinary private coaches were also changing in shape. In Charles I’s reign they had been both very long and very wide; in his son’s time they became much slenderer and less unwieldy. Alterations in this direction were possibly suggested by the ubiquitous and most convenient sedans, and, indeed, there is an allusion to this change of shape in Sir William Davenant’s First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House, in which, during a dialogue between a Russian and a Londoner, the foreigner says: “I have now left your houses, and am passing through your streets; but not in a coach, for they are uneasily hung, and so narrow that I took them for sedans upon wheels.”
Stage-coaches, however, remained just as huge and just as gorgeous as ever. They were built, more particularly in Italy, in the old fashion—unenclosed and curtained. Count Gozzadini describes a State coach built in 1629 for the marriage of Duke Edward Farnese with the Lady Margaret of Tuscany, and as we shall see in a moment, this differed only in the details of its ornamentation from the State coach in which Lord Castlemaine made his public entry into Rome sixty years later.
The body of the Farnese coach, says Gozzadini, “was lined with crimson velvet and gold thread, and the woodwork covered with silver plates, chased and embossed and perforated, in half relief. It could carry eight persons, four on the seats attached to the doors, and four in the back and front. The roof was supported by eight silver columns, on the roof were eight silver vases, and unicorns’ heads and lilies in full relief projected from the roof and ends of the body here and there. The roof was composed of twenty sticks, converging from the edge to the centre, which was crowned with a great rose with silver leaves on the outside, and inside by the armorial bearings of the Princes of Tuscany and Farnese held up by cupids. The curtains of the sides and back of the coach were of crimson velvet, embroidered with silver lilies with gold leaves. At the back and front of the coach-carriage were statues of unicorns, surrounded by cupids and wreathed with lilies, grouped round the standards from which the body was suspended; on the tops of the standards were silver vases, with festoons of fruit, and wraught in silver. In the front were also statues of Justice and Mercy, supporting the coachman’s seat. The braces suspending the body were of leather, covered with crimson velvet; the wheels and pole were plated with polished silver. The whole was drawn by six horses, with harness and trappings covered with velvet, embroidered with gold and silver thread, and with silver buckles. It is said that twenty-five excellent silversmiths worked at this coach for two years, and used up 25,000 ounces of silver; and that the work was superintended by two master coachbuilders, one from Parma and the other from Piacenza.” Lord Castlemaine’s procession into Rome contained three hundred and thirty coaches, of which thirteen were his own property; and of these two were State coaches. These likewise were not properly enclosed, and had no glass.
“They were hung,” says Thrupp, “inside and out, with beautifully embroidered cloths, the one coach with crimson, the other with azure-blue velvet, and gold and silver work. The roofs were adorned with scroll work and vases gilt; under the roof were curtains of silver fringes, and the ambassador’s armorial bearings. The carriage of the principal coach was adorned in front with two large Tritons, of carved wood, gilt all over, that supported a cushion for the coachman between them, and from their shoulders the braces depended. The footboard was formed by a conch shell, between two dolphins. In the rear of the coach were two more Tritons, supporting not only the leather braces of the coach, but two other statues of Neptune and Cybele, who in turn held a royal crown. Below Neptune and Cybele, and projecting backwards, were a lion and a unicorn, and several cupids and wreaths of flowers. The wheels had moulded rims, and the spokes were hidden by curving foliage carving. The second coach had plainer wheels and fewer statues about it.”
They may have been magnificent, but they were certainly not very beautiful. Much the same, too, might be said of those coaches in which foreign ambassadors made their public entry into London. In 1660 Evelyn saw the Prince de Ligne, Ambassador-Extraordinary from Spain, make a splendid entry with seventeen coaches, and a month later Pepys was watching “the Duke de Soissons go from his audience with a very great deal of state: his own coach all red velvet covered with gold lace, and drawn by six barbes, and attended by twenty pages very rich in cloths.”
In this year, 1660, there was a proclamation against the excessive number of hackney-coaches, and two years later Commissioners were appointed “for reforming the buildings, ways, streets and incumbrances, and regulating the hackney-coaches in the city of London.” Of this body Evelyn was sworn a member in May, 1662. Pepys, however, never found any difficulty in obtaining one when he desired, and, indeed, of late years, pressure of business had made a hackney-coach an almost daily necessity. Finally, he found it cheaper to possess one of his own, and the story of this coach is particularly interesting, and may be told in some detail.
Long ago, Mr. Pepys had dreamt of owning a private coach. “Talking long in bed with my wife,” he writes on March 2nd, 1661-2, “about our frugal life for the time to come, proposing to her what I could and would do, if I were worth £2000, that is, be a knight, and keep my coach, which pleased her.” Times were bad, however, and although Pepys enjoyed many a ride in a friend’s coach and witnessed Colonel Blunt’s experiments, the great idea did not mature. But one of his particular friends, Thomas Povey, M.P., who had been a colleague of his on the Tangier committee, himself the owner of at least one coach, seems to have kept Pepys’s ambitions astir. This was more especially the case in 1665, at which time Mr. Povey had purchased one of the new and already fashionable chariots. This excited Pepys’s admiration. “Comes Mr. Povey’s coach,” he records, “and so rode most nobly, in his most pretty and best-contrived chariot in the world, with many new contrivances, his never having till now, within a day or two, been yet finished.” Povey was something of an inventor himself. Evelyn calls him a “nice contriver of all elegancies, and most formal.” The necessary money was apparently not forthcoming for a year or two, but in April, 1667, Pepys had a mind “to buy enough ground to build a coach-house and stable; for,” says he, “I have had it much in my thoughts lately that it is not too much for me now, in degree or cost, to keep a coach, but contrarily, that I am almost ashamed to be seen in a hackney.” Accordingly, Mr. Commander, his lawyer, was bidden to look for a suitable piece of ground. The idea had now taken definite shape, and Pepys was committed. “I find it necessary,” he says, “for me, both in respect of honour and the profit of it also, my expence in Hackney coaches being now so great, to keep a coach, and therefore will do it.” The next entry shows the first of his disappointments:—
“Mr. Commander tells me, after all, that I cannot have a lease of the ground for my coach-house and stable, till a lawsuit be ended. I am a little sorry, because I am pretty full in my mind of keeping a coach; but yet,” he adds philosophically—the date was June 4th, 1667—“when I think of it again, the Dutch and French both at sea, and we poor, and still out of order, I know not yet what turns there may be.”
So the summer passed, and “most of our discourse,” he admits, “is about our keeping a coach the next year, which pleases my wife mightily; and if I continue as able as now, it will save me money.” At the beginning of the new year Will Griffin was ordered to make fresh inquiries about the most necessary coach-house, but nothing seems to have been done until the autumn. Then Pepys, more or less it would seem on the spur of the moment, chose a coach for himself, and immediately disliked it. No one seems to have given him the same advice. Some ladies, for instance, Mrs. Pepys amongst them, preferred the large old-fashioned coaches. Others wanted the latest thing from Paris. Says Mrs. Flirt in The Gentleman Dancing-Master: “But take notice, I will have no little, dirty, second-hand chariot, new furnished, but a large, sociable, well-painted coach; nor will I keep it till it be as well-known as myself, and it comes to be called Flirt-coach.” Her friend, Monsieur Paris, shrugs his shoulders. “’Tis very well,” says he, “you must have your great, gilt, fine painted coach. I’m sure they are grown so common already amongst you that ladies of quality begin to take up with hackneys again.” It was felt, no doubt, that fashion in carriages as in everything else would speedily change. Mr. Pepys must have found considerable difficulty in making up his mind. The new chariots were small, light and, so far as he knew, most fashionable; but possibly they were not quite to his taste, and equally possibly they might not be fashionable in ten years’ time. Also they perhaps lacked the solid dignity of the older carriages, and were less likely to attract public attention—two important considerations. In the end, however, he seems to have chosen a large coach of the old style. Mr. Povey saw it, and poor Pepys knew at once that a dreadful mistake had been made.