number of hackney coaches in London; we may glance at it again, as
it gives a few interesting particulars. No license was to be granted
to any person following another trade or occupation, and nobody
might take out more than two licenses. Preference was to be given to
“ancient coachmen” (by which expression we shall doubtless be right
in understanding, not aged men but men who had followed the calling in
previous years), and to such men as had suffered for their service to
Charles I. or Charles II.
Horses used in hackney coaches were to be not less than fourteen hands
high. The fares were duly prescribed by time and distance; for a day
of twelve hours the coachman was to be paid not over 10s.; or 1s. 6d.
for the first and 1s. for every subsequent hour. “No gentleman or other
person” was to pay over 1s. for hire of a hackney coach “from any of
the Inns of Court or thereabouts to any part of St. James’ or the city
of Westminster (except beyond Tuttle Street)”; and going eastwards
the shilling fare would carry the hirer from the Inns of Court to the
Royal Exchange; eighteenpence was the fare to the Tower, to Bishopsgate
Street or Aldgate. This Act forbade any hackney coach to ply for hire
on Sunday; thus the hackney carriage was placed in the same category as
the Thames wherries and barges. The restrictions concerning the persons
to whom licenses might be granted obviously afforded the Commissioners
opportunity for the malpractices we have already mentioned.
PEPYS ON CARRIAGES.
For further information concerning this period we naturally turn to Mr.
Pepys, who patronised the hackney coach so frequently that when he was
considering the propriety of setting up his own private carriage, he
justified his decision to do so by the fact that “expense in hackney
coaches is now so great.” Economy was not the only motive; on the
contrary, this entry in his Diary appears to have been merely the
salve to a conscience that reproached his vanity. In 1667 he confides
more than once to the Diary that he is “almost ashamed to be seen in a
hackney,” so much had his importance increased: and on July 10, 1668,
he went “with my people in a glass hackney coach to the park, but was
ashamed to be seen.” The private carriage he set up in December of that
year will be referred to presently.
The public conveyance available for hire in Pepys’ time was evidently
a cumbrous but roomy conveyance; as when a great barrel of oysters “as
big as sixteen others” was given him on March 16, 1664, he took it in
the coach with him to Mr. Turner’s: a circumstance that suggests the
vehicle was built with boots.
No doubt many of these hackney carriages had formerly been the private
property of gentlemen, which when old and shabby were sold cheaply to
ply for hire in the streets.
Coaches with boots were being replaced by the improved “glass coach” a
few years later, and of course the relative merits of the old and new
styles of vehicle were weighed by all who were in the habit of using
hackney coaches. It was one of the old kind to which Pepys refers in
the following passage:—
August 23, 1667. “Then abroad to Whitehall in a hackney coach with
Sir W. Pen, and in our way in the narrow street near Paul’s going the
back way by Tower Street, and the coach being forced to put back, he
was turning himself into a cellar [parts of London were still in ruins
after the Great Fire], which made people cry out to us, and so we were
forced to leap out—he out of one and I out of the other boote. _Query_,
whether a glass coach would have permitted us to have made the escape?”
Other objections to glass coaches appear in the following entry:—
September 23, 1667. “Another pretty thing was my Lady Ashley speaking
of the bad qualities of glass coaches, among others the flying open
of the doors upon any great shake; but another was that my Lady
Peterborough being in her glass coach with the glass up, and seeing a
lady pass by in a coach whom she would salute, the glass was so clear
that she thought it had been open, and so ran her head through the
glass and cut all her forehead.”
The usage of the time appears to have been for the driver of a hackney
carriage to fill up his vehicle as he drove along the streets somewhat
after the manner of a modern ‘bus conductor, if we correctly understand
the following entry in the Diary:—
February 6, 1663. “So home: and being called by a coachman who had a
fare in him he carried me beyond the Old Exchange, and there set down
his fare, who would not pay him what was his due because he carried a
stranger [Pepys] with him, and so after wrangling he was fain to be
content with sixpence, and being vexed the coachman would not carry me
home a great while, but set me down there for the other sixpence, but
with fair words he was willing to it.”
Whence it also appears that some members of the public objected to this
practice. The cabman of that time was evidently an insolent character,
for Pepys refers contemptuously to a “precept” which was drawn up in
March, 1663, by the Lord Mayor, Sir John Robinson, against coachmen who
“affronted the gentry.”
GLASS WINDOWS IN CARRIAGES.
Glass was used in carriages at this time, as the entries quoted from
Pepys’ Diary on pages 43 and 44 tell us. Mr. Thrupp states that “no
trace of glass windows or perfect doors seem to have existed up to
1650.” Glass was in common use for house windows before that date,
and Mr. Thrupp refers to the statement that the wife of the Emperor
Ferdinand III. rode in a glass carriage so small that it contained only
two persons as early as 1631. The manufacture of glass was established
in England in 1557[10] (Stow), but plate glass, and none other could
have withstood the rough usage which coaches suffered from the wretched
roads, was not made in England until 1670; previous to that date it was
imported from France. A patent (No. 244) was granted in 1685 to John
Bellingham “for making square window glasses for chaises and coaches.”
[10] James I., by Proclamation, in 1615, forbade the manufacture of
glass if wood were used as fuel, on the ground that the country was
thereby denuded of timber. In 1635 Sir Robert Maunsell perfected a
method of manufacturing “all sorts of glass with sea coale or pitt
coale,” and Charles I. forbade the importation of foreign glass in
order to encourage and assist this new industry.
Pepys writes in his Diary, December 30, 1668: “A little vexed to be
forced to pay 40s. for a glass of my coach, which was broke the other
day, nobody knows how, within the door while it was down: but I do
doubt that I did break it myself with my knees.” Forty shillings for a
single pane seems to indicate that it was plate glass. This passage
also shows us that the lower part of the coach door must have received
the glass between the outer woodwork and a covering of upholstery of
some kind. Had there been wooden casing inside Pepys would not have
broken it with his knees, and had it been uncovered the accident could
not have escaped discovery at the moment.
IMPROVEMENTS IN CARRIAGES.
With reference to the introduction of springs: the patent granted to
Edward Knapp in 1625 protected an invention for “hanging the bodies
of carriages on springs of steel”: the method is not described.
Unfortunately, the Letters Patent of those days scrupulously refrain
from giving any information that would show us _how_ the inventor
proposed to achieve his object. Knapp’s springs could not have been
efficacious, for forty years later ingenious men were working at this
problem. On May 1, 1665, Pepys went to dine with Colonel Blunt at
Micklesmarsh, near Greenwich, and after dinner was present at the
“... trial of some experiments about making of coaches easy. And
several we tried: but one did prove mighty easy (not here for me to
describe, but the whole body of the coach lies upon one long spring),
and we all, one after another, rid in it; and it is very fine and
likely to take.”
These experiments were made before a committee appointed by the Royal
Society, from whose records it appears that on a previous date Colonel
Blunt had “produced another model of a chariot with four springs,
esteemed by him very easy both to the rider and horse, and at the same
time cheap.”
This arrangement of springs evidently did not give such satisfactory
results as the one mentioned above by Pepys. On May 3, 1665, we learn
from Birch’s _History of the Royal Society_:—
“Mr. Hook produced the model of a chariot with two wheels and short
double springs, to be drawn with one horse; the chair [seat] of it
being so fixed upon two springs that the person sitting just over or
rather a little behind the axle-tree was, when the experiment was made
at Colonel Blount’s house, carried with as much ease as one could be in
the French chariot without at all burthening the horse.”
Mr. Hook showed:—
“Two drafts of this model having this circumstantial difference, one
of these was contrived so that the boy sitting on a seat made for him
behind the chair and guiding the reins over the top of it, drives the
horse. The other by placing the chair clear behind the wheels, the
place of entry being also behind and the saddle on the horse’s back
being to be borne up by the shafts, that the boy riding on it and
driving the horse should be little or no burden to the horse.”
It seems to have been this latter variety of Colonel Blount’s
invention, or a modification of it, which Pepys saw on January 22,
1666, and describes as “a pretty odd thing.”
On September 5, 1665, Pepys writes:—
“After dinner comes Colonel Blunt in his new chariot made with springs.
And he hath rode, he says now, this journey many miles in it with one
horse and outdrives any coach and outgoes any horses, and so easy, he
says. So for curiosity I went into it to try it and up the hill to the
heath and over the cart ruts, and found it pretty well, but not so easy
as he pretends.”
Colonel Blunt, or Blount, seems to have devoted much time and ingenuity
to the improvement of the coach, for on January 22, 1666, the committee
again assembled at his house
“—to consider again of the business of chariots and try their new
invention which I saw my Lord Brouncker ride in; where the coachman
sits astride upon a pole over the horse but do not touch the horse,
which is a pretty odd thing: but it seems it is most easy for the
horse, and as they say for the man also.”
On February 16, 1667, a chariot invented by Dr. Croune was produced
for inspection by the members of the Royal Society and “generally
approved.” No particulars of the vehicle are given: we are only told
that “some fence was proposed to be made for the coachman against the
kicking of the horse.”
PEPYS’ PRIVATE CARRIAGE.
On October, 20, 1668, Pepys went to look for the carriage he had so
long promised himself “and saw many; and did light on one [in Cow Lane]
for which I bid £50, which do please me mightily, and I believe I shall
have it.” Four days later the coach-maker calls upon him and they agree
on £53 as the price. But on the 30th of the same month Mr. Povy comes
“to even accounts with me:” and after some gossip about the court,
“—— he and I do talk of my coach and I got him to go and see it, where
he finds most infinite fault with it, both as to being out of fashion
and heavy, with so good reason that I am mightily glad of his having
corrected me in it: and so I do resolve to have one of his build, and
with his advice, both in coach and horses, he being the fittest man in
the world for it.”
Mr. Povy had been Treasurer and Receiver-General of Rents and Revenues
to James, Duke of York: Evelyn describes him as “a nice contriver of
all elegancies.” The opinion of such a personage on a point of fashion
would have been final with a man of Pepys’ temperament, and we hear no
more about the coach with which Mr. Povy “found” most infinite fault.
On 2 November, 1668, Pepys goes “by Mr. Povy’s direction to a
coach-maker near him for a coach just like his, but it was sold this
very morning.” Mr. Povy lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Lord
Braybrooke remarks, “Pepys no doubt went to Long Acre, then, as now,
celebrated for its coach-makers.” On November 5,
“With Mr. Povy spent all the afternoon going up and down among the
coach-makers in Cow Lane and did see several, and at last did pitch
upon a little chariot whose body was framed but not covered at the
widow’s that made Mr. Lowther’s fine coach; and we are mightily pleased
with it, it being light, and will be very genteel and sober: to be
covered with leather and yet will hold four.”
The carriage gave great satisfaction when it came home, but the horses
were not good enough for it: and on December 12 Pepys records that
“this day was brought home my pair of black coach-horses, the first I
ever was master of. They cost me £50 and are a fine pair.”
CARRIAGE PAINTING IN PEPYS’ DAY.
Pepys’ position as an official at the Navy Office was not considered by
his detractors to give him the social status that entitled him to keep
his own coach, and soon after he became the owner of it a scurrilous
pamphlet appeared which, incidentally, gives us a description of the
arms or device with which it was decorated. After denouncing Pepys for
his presumption in owning a carriage at all the writer proceeds:—
“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.
[12] _The Present State of Great Britain._ By Chamberlayne, 1649.
“There is of late such an admirable commodiousness, both for men and
women, to travel from London to the principal towns of the country
that the like hath not been known in the world, and that is by stage
coaches, wherein any one may be transported to any place sheltered from
foul weather and foul ways, free from endamaging one’s health and one’s
body by hard jogging or over violent motion on horseback, and this not
only at the low price of about a shilling for every five miles, but
with such velocity and speed in one hour as the foreign post can make
but in one day.”
There were two classes of coach in the seventeenth century. Mons.
Misson[13] says, “There are coaches that go to all the great towns
by moderate journeys; and others which they call flying coaches that
will travel twenty leagues a day and more. But these do not go to
all places.” He also refers to the waggons which “lumber along but
heavily,” and which he says are used only by a few poor old women. Four
or four miles and a half in the hour was the speed of the ordinary
coach.
[13] _Memoirs and Observations of a Journey in England_, 1697.
The coaches that travelled between London and distant towns were
similar in construction to the hackney coach, which plied for hire
in the streets, but were built on a larger scale. They carried eight
passengers inside, and behind, over the axle, was a great basket for
baggage and outside passengers, who made themselves as comfortable as
they might in the straw supplied. The “insides” were protected from
rain and cold by leather curtains; neither passengers nor baggage were
carried on the roof; and the coachman sat on a bar fixed between the
two standard posts from which the body was hung in front, his feet
being supported by a footboard on the perch.
Mr. Thrupp states that in 1662 there were only six stage coaches in
existence; which assertion does not agree with that of Chamberlayne,
quoted on a previous page; the seventeenth century writer tells us that
in his time—1649—stage coaches ran “from London to the principle towns
in the country.” It seems, however, certain that the year 1662 saw a
great increase in the number of “short stages”—that is to say, coaches
running between London and towns twenty, thirty, forty miles distant.
OBJECTIONS RAISED TO STAGE COACHES.
This is proved by the somewhat violent pamphlet written by John
Cressel, to which reference was made on page 33. This publication,
which was entitled _The Grand Concern of England Explained_, appeared
in 1673. It informs us that the stage coaches, to which John Cressel
strongly objects:—
“Are kept by innkeepers ... or else ... by such persons as before the
late Act for reducing the number of hackney coaches in London [_see_
page 33] to 400, were owners of coaches and drove hackney. But when
the number of 400 was full and they not licensed, then to avoid the
penalties of the Act they removed out of the city dispersing themselves
into every little town within twenty miles of London where they set up
for stagers and drive every day to London and in the night-time drive
about the city.”
[Illustration: “THE MACHINE.” A.D. 1640-1750.]
These intruders,[14] whose number John Cressel says is “at least
2,000,” paid no £5, and took bread from the mouths of the four hundred
licensed hackney coachmen.
[14] Owing to the profitable nature of the business these unlicensed
hackney coaches increased until on November 30, 1687, a Royal
Proclamation was issued appointing new Commissioners with authority to
make an end of them.
John Cressel’s purpose in writing his pamphlet was to call the
attention of Parliament to the necessity which, in his opinion, existed
for the suppressing all or most of the stage coaches and caravans
which were then plying on the roads; and incidentally he gives some
interesting particulars concerning the stage coach service of his time.
Taking the York, Chester and Exeter coaches as examples, he says that
each of these with forty horses apiece carry eighteen passengers per
week from London.[15] In the summer the fare to either of these places
was forty shillings and in winter forty-five shillings; the coachman
was changed four times on the way, and the usual practice was for each
passenger to give each coachman one shilling.
[15] The stage coach carried six passengers, and a coach left London
for each of the towns named three times a week.
The journey—200 miles—occupied four days. These early “flying
coaches” travelled faster than their successors of a later date. The
seventeenth century London-Exeter coach did the journey, one hundred
and seventy-five miles, in ten days, whereas in 1755, according to
“Nimrod,” proprietors promised “a safe and expeditious journey in a
fortnight.”
The “short stages,” _i.e._, those which ran between London and places
only twenty or thirty miles distant, were the hackney coaches which had
not been fortunate enough to obtain licenses under Charles II.’s Act.
These were drawn by four horses and carried six passengers, making the
journey to or from London in one day. There were, John Cressel states,
stage coaches running to almost every town situated within twenty or
twenty-five miles of the capital; and it is worth observing that at
this date letters were sent by coach. Coaches ran on both sides of the
Thames from Windsor and Maidenhead, and “carry all the letters, little
bundles and passengers which were carried by watermen.”
This writer’s arguments against coaches are worthless as such, but
they throw side lights on the discomforts of travel at the time. He
considered it detrimental to health to rise in the small hours of the
morning to take coach and to retire late to bed. With more reason he
enquired,
“Is it for a man’s health to be laid fast in foul ways and forced to
wade up to the knees in mire; and afterwards sit in the cold till fresh
teams of horses can be procured to drag the coach out of the foul ways?
Is it for his health to travel in rotten coaches and have their tackle,
or perch, or axle-tree broken, and then to wait half the day before
making good their stage?”
John Cressel was prone to exaggeration, but there is plenty of reliable
contemporary evidence to show that his picture of the coach roads was
not overdrawn. Yet when this advocate for the suppression of coaches
seeks to rouse public sentiment, he reproaches those men who use them
for effeminacy and indulgence in luxury! One of his quaintest arguments
in favour of the saddle horse is that the rider’s clothes “are wont to
be spoyled in two or three journies”; which is, he urges, an excellent
thing for trade as represented by the tailors.
John Cressel, it will be gathered from this, viewed the innovation from
a lofty stand-point. He describes the introduction of stage coaches as
one of the greatest mischiefs that have happened of late years to the
King. They wrought harm, he said:
(1) By destroying the breed of good horses, the strength of the nation,
and making men careless of attaining to good horsemanship, a thing so
useful and commendable in a gentleman.
(2) By hindering the breed of watermen who are the nursery for seamen,
and they the bulwarks of the kingdom.
(3) By lessening His Majesty’s revenues; for there is not the fourth
part of saddle horses either bred or kept now in England that there was
before these coaches set up, and would be again if suppressed.
Travelling on horseback was cheaper than by coach. The “chapman” or
trader could hire a horse from the hackneyman at from 6s. to 12s. per
week. John Cressel estimates that a man could come from “York, Exeter
or Chester to London, and stay twelve days for business (which is the
most that country chapmen usually do stay), for £1 16s., horse hire and
horse meat 1s. 2d. per day.” From Northampton it cost 16s. to come to
London on horseback, from Bristol 25s., Bath 20s., Salisbury 20s. or
25s., and from Reading 7s.