Then there was the phaeton, which had lost none of its popularity, and was built as lofty as ever.
“The handsomest mixture of danger with dignity,” wrote Leigh Hunt, “in the shape of a carriage, was the tall phaeton with its yellow wings. We remember looking up to it with respect in our childhood, partly for its loftiness, partly for its name, and partly for the show it makes in the prints to novels of the period. The most gallant figure which modern driving ever cut was in the person of a late Duke of Hamilton; of whom we have read or heard somewhere, that he used to dash round the streets of Rome, with his horses panting, and his hounds barking about his phaeton, to the equal fright and admiration of the Masters of the World, who were accustomed to witness nothing higher than a lumbering old coach, or a cardinal on a mule.”
But far more conspicuous a figure than this Duke of Hamilton was Colonel (Tommy) Onslow, afterwards Lord Cranley, of whom there is a caricature by Gillray, with the following once famous lines:—
“What can little T. O. do?
Why drive a phaeton and two.
Can little T. O. do no more?
Yes, drive a phaeton and four!”
The Colonel, however, was surpassed, as we have seen, by Sir John Lade, who drove six greys. George IV, when Prince of Wales, was satisfied with a pair, but his horses were “caparisoned with blue harness stitched with red,” their manes “being plaited with scarlet ribbons, while they wore plumes of feathers on their heads.”
The structure of these phaetons differed. Gillray’s picture shows the body hung midway between the two axles, though he may not have troubled to be exact in this respect. The commonest form was the perch-high phaeton, in which the body was hung directly over the front axle, the hind wheels being much larger than those in front, and the bottom of the body being five feet from the ground. Others were less lofty. In the one-horse phaeton the body was hung over the back axle with “grasshopper” springs, and “was joined to the forecarriage, which was without springs, by wooden stays”—a very different carriage. This in time led to the pony phaeton used by George IV in 1824. Here all idea of great height had been abandoned so as to allow His Majesty to enter his carriage without the fatigue of climbing several steps. Queen Victoria’s pony phaeton was a similar vehicle, and indeed it was from such a carriage that the victoria was evolved at a rather later date.
“What connexion there could be,” wrote Bridges Adams some forty years later in a passage not altogether devoid of epithets, “between this vehicle and the fabled car of the Sun-God, to obtain for it such a title, it is difficult to conceive.... The vehicle looked like a mechanical illustration of the play of Much Ado about Nothing. It was a contrivance to make an enormously high and dangerous seat for two persons, inconvenient to drive from, and at the same time to consume as much material and mix as many unsightly and inharmonious lines as possible. The framework of the carriage was constructed with two iron perches, the outline of which was hideously ugly; but the camel-like hump had at least the mechanical advantage of permitting a higher fore wheel than could otherwise be used. The shape of the body was as though the rudest possible form capable of affording a seat had been put together. An ungraceful form of upright pillar or standard was first selected, into which was framed a horizontal ugly curve for a seat, connected at the top by an ungainly-looking elbow, and a formal serpentine curve behind, from which was projected like an excrescence an ugly leathern box called a sword-case. The front of the upright pillar was continued into a most formal curve, and from its point rose an ungraceful bracket, to support a footboard, on the extreme edge of which was coiled an ugly piece of leather called an apron. The construction of the body was such that it could not possibly hold together by the strength of its own framing; and to remedy this, a curved iron stay was introduced in the worst possible taste.... The fore springs rather resembled the flourishing strokes made by a schoolmaster, when heading a copy-book or Christmas piece, than any legitimate mechanical contrivance; and the motion must have been detestable, rendering the act of driving difficult, and lessening the power of the drivers over their horses. The servant’s seat behind”—not always present—“placed on curved blocks without any springs, completed this extraordinary-looking vehicle. To sit on such a seat, when the horses were going at much speed, would require as much skill as is evinced by a rope-dancer at the theatre.”