“It is impossible to express,” wrote a country clergyman to his bishop in a letter which deserves quotation as affording an insight into the lesser equipages used in the country at this time, “the various impressions your lordship’s letter, relating to the tax upon coaches, made here; as people imagined it a jest, or serious: As most inclined to the former, it would be too tedious to trouble you with the witticisms and conundrums it occasioned. B. said the Church was in danger; C. observed it would be like the gospel-feast inverted, that the maimed and lame being the only guests admitted there, would be the only ones excluded here.... As we have now no reason to doubt such a tax being really intended, give me leave to represent to you our thoughts of it here. My living, your Lordship knows, is under £70 per Ann., yet out of this, some years since, I made a shift to lay out six pounds on an old chariot, which, with the help of my ploughman and a pair of cart-horses, has drawn my wife, etc., half a mile to church, who, for the future, must go in a cart, or stay at home. Repairs, etc., have cost me, communibus annis, for the eleven years I have had it, about 7s. so the interest of my money, at 5 per cent, on the £6 and 7s. in repairs, is 13s. per Ann., which with tax on this my pompous luxury, will be increased to £4 13s. per Ann., almost the prime cost of setting up my Equipage. I am afraid this is not my case singly, but will be found pretty nearly so, of most of the small clergy in England. Among the laity we have several gentlemen farmers, who manage, in some degree, with the same frugality, and who, for the same reasons, are prepared to part with, or continue them according to the fate of this bill; insomuch, that I can compute that in sixteen parishes I have in my eye three times that number of coaches will be disposed of, for we look on the same sum, which is but a trifling duty on grand equipages, to amount to a prohibition on ours, which resembles them no more than a ragged coat does an embroidered suit. I shall not dwell on the quantity of glass (not to mention leather, etc.), this will bring to market, nor the future consumption of these commodities it will prevent.... To me I own it looks a little like the son eating the father.... How many single gentlemen,” he goes on to ask, after pointing out that it is the poorer married men who will suffer most, “from 2, 3, to 800l. a year, and more, have no coaches, yet keep a stable of hunters (the worst of which would purchase my equipage) and a pack of hounds, whom this duty will not affect?”
But the bill was passed, and so we must suppose that our clergyman and his farmer friends were forced to walk to church.
Some verses printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine at this time may also be quoted as reflecting the general opinion about the bill.
“Before Bohemian Anne was Queen,
Astride their steeds were ladies seen;
And good Queen Bess to Paul’s, I wot,
Full oft astride has jogg’d on trot:
Beaus then could foot it thro’ all weather,
And nothing fear’d but wear of leather.
But now (so luxury decrees)