The vehicle which could thus be opened on “every part and side” is depicted incidentally in a work executed by Hoefnagel in 1582, which Markland believed to be probably the first engraved representation of an English coach. As will be seen from the reproduction here given, the body carried a roof or canopy on pillars, and the intervening spaces could be closed by means of curtains.
QUEEN ELIZABETH’S TRAVELLING COACH.
About the year 1582.
Queen Elizabeth seems to have preferred riding on a pillion when she could; she rode thus on one occasion from London to Exeter, and again we read of her going in state to St. Paul’s on a pillion behind her Master of the Horse. Sir Thomas Browne, writing to his son on October 15, 1680, says: “When Queen Elizabeth came to Norwich, 1578, she came on horseback from Ipswich by the high road to Norwich, but she had a coach or two in her train.”
Country gentlemen continued to travel on horseback, though ladies sometimes made their journeys by coach. The Household Book of the Kytson family of Hengrave in Suffolk contains the following entry under date December 1, 1574: “For the hire of certain horses to draw my mistress’ coach from Whitsworth to London 26 shillings and 8 pence.”
Other entries show that “my mistress” occupied the coach: whence it would appear that not all our country roads in Queen Elizabeth’s time were impassable during the winter, as we might reasonably infer from many contemporary records. The horse-litter, as we may well suppose, was an easier conveyance than the early springless coach: for example, in Hunter’s Hallamshire we find mention of Sir Francis Willoughby’s request in 1589 to the Countess of Shrewsbury to lend her horse-litter and furniture for his wife, who was ill and unable to travel either on horseback or in a coach.
It may be observed here that the latest reference we have found to the use of the horse-litter occurs in the Last Speech of Thomas Pride (Harleian Miscellany): in 1680 an accident happened to General Shippon, who “came in a horse-litter wounded to London; when he paused by the brewhouse in St. John Street a mastiff attacked the horse, and he was tossed like a dog in a blanket.”
Owing no doubt to their patronage by royalty, coaches grew rapidly popular. William Lilly, in a play called “Alexander and Campaspes,” which was first printed in 1584, makes one of his characters complain of those who had been accustomed to “go to a battlefield on hard-trotting horses now riding in easy coaches up and down to court ladies.” Stow, referring to the coach brought to England by Boonen, says:—
“After a while divers great ladies, with as great jealousy of the Queen’s displeasure, made them coaches and rid in them up and down the countries, to the great admiration of all the beholders, but then by little and little they grew usual among the nobilitie and others of sort, and within twenty years became a great trade of coach making.”