“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. Behind it were high curled waves and ships a-sinking, and here and there an appearance of some bits of land.”
If this is a true description, it would seem as though Pepys’ idea of the “very genteel and sober” cannot be measured by modern standards of sober gentility: however that may be, the Diarist takes no notice of the pamphlet and continues to enjoy possession “with mighty pride” in a vehicle which he remarks (March 18, 1669), after a drive in Hyde Park, he “thought as pretty as any there, and observed so to be by others.”
In the following April, however, we find him resolving to have “the standards of my coach gilt with this new sort of varnish, which will come to but forty shillings; and contrary to my expectation, the doing of the biggest coach all over comes not to above £6, which is not very much.” One morning, a few days later: “I to my coach, which is silvered over, but no varnish yet laid on, so I put it in a way of doing.” Again, in the afternoon:—
“I to my coach-maker’s 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 it 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 nowadays 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 oiled.”
There is a passage in the Diary (April 30, 1669), which suggests that it was not unusual for people of station and leisure to superintend the painting of their carriages; as Pepys found at the coach-maker’s “a great many ladies sitting in the body of a coach that must be ended [finished] by to-morrow; they were my Lady Marquess of Winchester, Lady Bellassis and other great ladies, eating of bread and butter and drinking ale.”
On the day after that he spent at the coach-maker’s, Pepys, on his return from office, takes his wife for a drive: “We went alone through the town with our new liveries of serge, and the horses’ manes and tails tied with red ribbons and the standards there gilt with varnish, and all clean, and green reins, that people did mightily look upon us; and the truth is, I did not see any coach more pretty, though more gay, than ours, all the day.”
Samuel Pepys’ child-like pride in his carriage was no doubt a source of amusement to his contemporaries, but it has had the result of giving us more minute details concerning the carriages of Charles II.’s time than we can obtain from the pages of any other writer.
THE FIRST STAGE COACHES.
We must now turn to the stage coach which had come into vogue about the year 1640.[11] Chamberlayne,[12] writing in 1649, says:—
[11] History of the Art of Coach Building. By George A. Thrupp, 1876.