Ralph Straus

“ The outside is beautifully painted and gilt, and though now somewhat faded, the splendour of the vehicles can be imagined, even in their decay. The gorgeously attired king within, or it might be the queen or some reigning favourite, would be attended by a gay escort of gentlemen of the court, with a crowd of bearers and lacqueys, not to speak of armed guards, whose liveries probably equalled in grandeur the courtly habits of the greater men who surrounded the royal chair. ”

“ Women only appear in this carriage, the men riding behind it.
“Nothing,” remarks M. Jusserand, “gives a better idea of the encumbering, awkward luxury which formed the splendour of civil life during this century than the structure of these heavy machines. The best had four wheels; three or four horses drew them, harnessed in a row, the postilion being mounted on one, armed with a short-handled whip of many thongs; solid beams rested on the axles, and above this framework rose an archway rounded like a tunnel; as a whole, ungraceful enough. ”

“ Leigh Hunt writes, after confessing that he has no ambition to drive tandem, as was so often done, or to run into danger with a phaeton, “is the curricle, which is also the safest. There is something worth looking at in a pair of horses, with that sparkling pole of steel laid across them. It is like a bar of music, comprising their harmonious course. But to us, even gigs are but a sort of unsuccessful gentility. The driver, to all intents and purposes, had better be on the horse.” ”

“ If a man, who believed he had the handsomest leg in this kingdom, should take a fancy to adorn so deserving a limb with a blue garter, he would be justly punished for offending against the Most Noble Order; and, I think, the general prostitution of equipage and retinue is as destructive to all distinction, as the impertinences of one man, if permitted, would certainly be to that illustrious fraternity.”
The temptation for display must have been great. Nothing attracted the public attention like a fine coach. In the north of Scotland, indeed, any carriage caused the profoundest astonishment. ”

“ But the details,” he goes on to say, speaking of the carriage shown in the Louterell Psalter, “were extremely elegant, the wheels were carved and their spokes expanded near the hoop into ribs forming pointed arches; the beams were painted and gilt, the inside was hung with those dazzling tapestries, the glory of the age; the seats were furnished with embroidered cushions; a lady might stretch out there, half sitting, half lying; pillows were disposed in the corners as if to invite sleep, square windows pierced the sides and were hung with curtains. ”

“ Cabs are all very well in cases of expedition, when it’s a matter of neck or nothing, life or death, your temporary home or your long one. But, besides a cab’s lacking that gravity of deportment which so peculiarly distinguishes a hackney-coach, let it never be forgotten that a cab is a thing of yesterday, and that he never was anything better. ”

“ We have recently observed on certain stands, and we say it with deep regret, rather dapper green chariots, and coaches of polished yellow, with four wheels of the same colour as the coach, whereas it is perfectly notorious to every one who has studied the subject, that every wheel ought to be of a different colour, and a different size. These are innovations, and, like other miscalled improvements, awful signs of the restlessness of the public mind, and the little respect paid to our time-honoured institutions. Why should hackney-coaches be clean? ”

“ If anything could grind us young again, it would be the wheels of a post-chaise. The only monotonous sight is the perpetual up-and-down movement of the postilion, who, we wish exceedingly, could take a chair. ”

“ The very spokes of the wheels were decorated, paintings appeared on the panels, and every inch of the coach made as brilliant as possible. France in particular possessed carriages of the most gorgeous possible description. These were not only entirely gilded over, but in some cases actually bejewelled. The richest stuffs lined their interiors, and masters painted their panels. Immense sums were spent. There is preserved at Toulouse a carriage of this date which shows most of these features. ”

“ Most of the morning is wasted by such desultory talk, and the street becomes blocked. There comes on the scene a waterman, who, of course, is equally antagonistic to both, and would throw coach and sedan into the Thames if he were not afraid of blocking the stream, and so bringing harm to himself. There follows him a country farmer, who thinks the sedan the honester and humbler of the two, but really knows very little about it. ”

“ Ever since the building of the Irish Lord Chancellor’s state coach by Hatchett or Baxter in 1790, coachbuilders had endeavoured to produce a graceful outline of body, of a fair size no larger than was necessary; the C-springs had been made of a perfect curve, the perch followed the sweeps of the body, the carving was reduced to a moderate amount, the ornamental painting was confined to the stripes upon the wheels, and the heraldic bearings of the owners of the carriages were beautifully emblazoned on the panels. ”

“ Paris, in short, went mad over its carosses à cinq sous, and the excitement soon spread to the suburbs, sending their inhabitants flocking to the city to see the new vehicles. But very few of the visitors managed to obtain a ride, for day by day the rush for seats became greater. The king himself had a ride in one coach, and the aristocracy and wealthy classes hastened to follow his example, struggling with their poorer brethren to obtain a seat. Many persons who possessed private coaches daily drove to the starting-point, and yet failed to get a drive in one for a week or two. ”

“ THE year of Queen Victoria’s Coronation saw the successful opening of the London and Birmingham Railway, and from that time all but a few obstinate folk recognised the fact that the horse as a necessary adjunct to cross-country travelling was doomed. For some time, indeed, certain ingenious gentlemen had been carrying out a number of experiments with self-propelled carriages. Fifteen years before, several inventors had produced cumbrous machines which, without requiring rails, were able to progress along the roads at speeds which compared favourably with those attained by the ordinary coaches. ”

“ The coachman is Fersen himself.
“Dust shall not stick to the hoofs of Fersen: crack! crack! the Glass-coach rattles, and every soul breathes lighter. But is Fersen on the right road? Northeastward, to the Barrier of Saint Martin and Metz Highway, thither were we bound; and lo, he drives right Northward! The royal Individual, in round hat and peruke, sits astonished; but right or wrong, there is no remedy. Crack, crack, we go incessant, through the slumbering City. Seldom, since Paris rose out of mud, or the Longhaired Kings went in Bullock-carts, was there such a drive. ”

“ The Lord Chancellor’s coach was of course an exceptional carriage, and Mr. Felton is careful to give details of such lesser coaches as were being made. These he catalogues as a plain coach, a neat ornamental town coach, a landau, a travelling coach, an elegant crane-neck coach, and a vis-à-vis, which last, he says, “is seldom used by any other than persons of high character and fashion.” ”

“ Molyneux, and I have spent this day in making experiments with a new invented calesh, along with the inventor thereof; ’tis he that was in London when I was there, but he never made any of these caleshes there, for his invention is much improv’d since he came from thence: it is in all points different from any machine I have ever seen: it goes on two wheels, carries one person, and is light enough. As for its performance, though it hangs not on braces, yet it is easier than the common coach, both in the highway, in ploughed fields, cross the ridges, directly and obliquely. ”

“ Taylor, indeed, is a very bad historian, not so much on account of his inability to see two sides of a question, as because, like many another poet, he has made of exaggeration a fine art, and allowed his memory to play second fiddle to his inclinations. It is to the worthy Stowe that we must turn for the facts. Stowe liked the coaches little better than did Taylor, but his training had made him exact, and we may take it for granted that he is more or less correct when he says that the first coach to be seen upon British roads belonged to the year 1555. ”

“ To be any one, moreover, you had to have your private coach. Doctors, for instance, found it very well worth their while to keep a coach, though, as Sir Thomas Browne122 told his son, they were certainly “more for state than for businesse.” On the other hand those who were well able to keep a private carriage occasionally preferred the use of a hackney, and sometimes at times when they had no business to do so. Mr. Pepys, with clear ideas upon the dignity and responsibilities of rank, was indignant at any such foolery. ”

“ These were the apologists for the lighter waggons with large but slender wheels. Decrease your weight, said they, and never mind about the wheels; it is the great weight that ruins the roads. How can you decrease the weight, asked the broad-wheel faction, without increasing the cost of carriage? Increase the cost of carriage for a while, was the reply, and see what happens to the roads. ”

“ Now it must be understood that the coach proper differs from all earlier vehicles in being not only a covered, but also a suspended carriage. The canopy has given place to the roof, a roof, that is to say, which forms part of the framing of the body; and the body itself is swung in some fashion, however primitive, from posts or other supports. Further, it seems reasonable to suppose, on the analogy of the berlin and the landau—two later carriages which took their names from the towns in which they were first made—that the first coaches were built in a small Hungarian town then called Kotzee. ”

“ The perch, axle-trees, and carriage timbers have been reduced to thin sticks. The four wheels are made so slender as to resemble a spider’s web; in their construction of the wheels the principle of the patent rim used in England in 1790 has been adopted. Instead of five, six, or seven felloes to each wheel, there are only two, of oak or hickory wood, bent to the shape by steam. The ironwork of the American buggy is very slender, yet composed of many pieces, and, in order to reduce the cost, these pieces of iron are mostly cast, not forged, of a sort of iron less brittle than our cast iron.... ”

“ To this period belongs the present State Coach of Great Britain—that famous “glass-coach” which Londoners had an opportunity of seeing at King George’s Coronation. Who built it is not known. Sir William Chambers, “an amateur,” as Thrupp is careful to point out, designed it in 1761 for George III. “There is come forth,” wrote Walpole to Horace Mann, “a new State Coach which has cost £8000. It is a beautiful object, though crowded with improprieties. Its supports are Tritons, not very well adapted to land carriage, and formed of palm trees, which are as little aquatic as Tritons are terrestrial. ”

“ While, however, the wretched state into which the roads were being allowed to fall had a great deal to do with the almost total, though indeed temporary, extinction of the wheeled pleasure carriage in western Europe, there is another fact which must be taken into consideration in any endeavour to account for it. As will appear in a little, the renaissance of carriage-building in the sixteenth century was for a time retarded in various places by a widespread feeling of distrust against anything that could be thought to lead to an accusation of effeminacy. ”

“ Take a regular, ponderous, rickety, London hackney-coach, of the old school, and let any man have the boldness to assert, if he can, that he ever beheld any243 object on the face of the earth which at all resembles it unless, indeed, it were another hackney-coach of the same date. ”

“ At times the wheels were furnished with scythes, which projected from the axle-tree ends, and helped to maim those unfortunate enough to be run down.9 Cicero, hearing good opinions of it, besought a friend to bring him a good pattern from Britain, and took occasion to add that the chariot was the only pleasing thing which that benighted country produced. The essedum speedily became popular in Rome, though not as an engine of war. Decorated and constructed of fine materials, it was the fashionable pleasure carriage. ”