“Just at Holborn Circuit the bolt broke, that holds the fore-wheels to the perch, and so the horses went away with them, and left the coachman and us; but being near our coachmaker’s and we staying in a little ironmonger’s shop, we were presently supplied with another.”
Accidents of this kind were continually happening. Glasses smashed, bolts broke, and, what seems incredible, doors were lost! Even so late as 1710, a reward of 30s. was offered for a lost door. “Lost,” runs this remarkable advertisement, “the side door of a Chariot, painted Coffee Colour, with a Round Cipher in the Pannel, Lin’d with White Cloath embos’d with Red, having a Glass in one Frame, and White Canvas in another, with Red Strings to the Frames.”
To return to Pepys. In a month or two another matter connected with his coach was occupying his attention. There were some people who did not think that a man in the comparatively humble position of Secretary to the Admiralty had any right to possess a coach, even though, in its owner’s estimation, it might be “genteel and sober.”
“To the Park,” he is recording in April, “my wife and I; and here Sir W. Coventry did first see me and my wife in a coach of our own; and so did also this night the Duke of York, who did eye my wife mightily. But I begin to doubt that my being so much seen in my own coach at this time, may be observed to my prejudice, but I must venture it now.”
This was no idle fear, for in a while there was printed an ill-written and scurrilous pamphlet called Plane Truth, or Closet Discorse betwixt Pepys and Hewer, in which the following passage occurs:—
“There is one thing more you must be mightily sorry for with all speed. Your presumption in your coach in which you daily ride as if you had been son and heir to the great Emperor Neptune, or as if you had been infallibly to have succeeded him in his government of the Ocean, all which was presumption in the highest degree. First, you had upon the fore-part of your chariot, tempestuous waves and wrecks of ships; on your left hand, forts and great guns, and ships a fighting; on your right hand was a fair harbour and galleys riding, with their flags and pennants spread, kindly saluting each other, just like P[epys] and H[ewer—his chief clerk].”
How far Pepys’s carriage was decorated is not known, though this description does not tally in the least with Pepys’s own. In any case, he took no notice of such attacks, and so far from making his coach less conspicuous, arranged to have it newly painted and varnished.
“19th April, 1669.—After dinner out again, and, calling about my coach, which was at the coachmaker’s, and hath been there for these two or three days, to be new painted, and the window-frames gilt against next May-day, went on with my hackney to White Hall.”
A few days later he gave orders for some “new sort of varnish” to be used on the standards at a cost of forty shillings, this being in his view very cheap. Indeed, “the doing of the biggest coach all over,” he learnt, “comes not above £6.” On his next visit to the coachmaker, he was surprised to find several great ladies “sitting in the body of a coach that must be ended tomorrow ... eating of bread and butter and drinking ale.” His own coach had been silvered over, “but no varnish yet laid on, so I put it in a way of doing.” A few hours later he called back again,
“and there vexed to see nothing yet done to my coach, at three in the afternoon; but I set it in doing, and stood by till eight at night, and saw the painter varnish it which is pretty to see how every doing it over do make it more and more yellow: and it dries as fast in the sun as it can be laid on almost; and most coaches are, now-a-days, done so, and it is very pretty when laid on well, and not too pale, as some are, even to show the silver. Here I did make the workmen drink, and saw my coach cleaned and oyled.”