betwixt the heels of a double row of horses, wincing under
the curry-combs of grooms and postilions, over and above the
hazard of being obstructed or overturned by the carriages
which are continually making their exit or their entrance.
I suppose, after some chairmen shall have been maimed, and
a few lives lost by those accidents, the corporation will
think in earnest about providing a more safe and commodious
passage.... If, instead of the areas and iron rails, which
seem to be of very little use, there had been a corridor with
arcades all round, as in Covent Garden, the appearance of the
whole would have been more magnificent and striking; those
arcades would have afforded an agreeable covered walk, and
sheltered the poor chairmen and their carriages from the rain,
which is here almost perpetual. At present the chairs stand
soaking in the open street from morning to night, till they
become so many boxes of wet leather, for the benefit of the
gouty and rheumatic, who are transported in them from place to
place. Indeed, this is a shocking inconvenience, that extends
over the whole city; and I am persuaded it produces infinite
mischief to the delicate and infirm. Even the close chairs,
contrived for the sick, by standing in the open air, have
their fringe linings impregnated, like so many sponges, with
the moisture of the atmosphere.”
It was to Bath that Princess Amelia was carried in a sedan by eight
chairmen from St. James’s, in April, 1728. This must easily have been
the longest, and, so far as the chairmen were concerned, the most
wearisome journey ever performed by a chair.
[Illustration: “_The Social Pinch_”
_By John Kay_]
[Illustration: _Sedans in “The Present Age”_
_By L. P. Boitard_ (1767)]
John Wilkes mentions in one of his letters to his daughter that he
ascended Mont Cenis in a chair “carried by two men and assisted by
four more.” “This,” he says, “was not a sedan chair, but a small
wicker chair with two long poles; there is no covering of any kind to
it.” Such open chairs seem to have been very uncommon, and were, I
imagine, unknown in England. Some, however, had more glass than others,
and their size fluctuated. Fashionable ladies must have found a
difficulty in getting into a public chair of the ordinary size at the
time of the large hoop petticoat, and there is a satiric print, dated
1733, which shows a lady thus attired, being hauled out through the
opened roof of one with ropes and pulleys. Similarly, when forty or
fifty years later the head-dress of the women became so enormous, a
ludicrous print appeared showing a patent arrangement whereby the roof
of a chair could be raised on rods to as great a height as was required.
In general the roof opened upwards, being hinged at the back. This
is clearly shown in a print published in 1768, called _The Female
Orators_, in which a clergyman is stepping out of his chair, and the
chairmen very obviously demanding their fare. Another print published
about 1786, called the _Social Pinch_, shows a very famous chairman,
Donald Kennedy, offering his “mull” to Donald Balack, a native of
Ross-shire, whom he had just set down. Here the structure of the public
chair in use at this date is clearly shown.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the chair as a
mode of conveyance was on the wane. Fenimore Cooper in his _Sketches
of English Society_ (1837) was able to write: “Sedan chairs appear
to have finally disappeared from St. James’ Street. Even in 1826 I
saw a stand of them that has since vanished. The chairs may still
be used on particular occasions, but were Cecilia now in existence,
she would find it difficult to be set down in Mrs. Benfield’s entry
from a machine so lumbering.” Which suggests that the chair had not
only degenerated in numbers, but also in appearance. They had become
larger and uncouth in Cooper’s day. One is reminded of that chair in
_Pickwick_, which “having been originally built for a gouty gentleman
with funded property, would hold Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Tupman at least
as comfortably as a modern post-chaise.” Yet so late as 1775 the
popularity of the chair had been at its highest. It was the old story.
With the new century were coming new ideas. The chair slowly and quite
naturally was dropping out of existence.
In Edinburgh, as I have said, it lingered on for rather a longer time.
In 1806 stringent regulations were still required. Those chairs which
maintained their stand at night had to have “a light fixed on the
fore part of one of the poles.” On the occasion of a fire or a mob
the chairmen had to hurry to the scene of excitement, and there await
the magistrate’s orders. They were not allowed to charge more than
ninepence a mile, seven-and-six a day, or a guinea and a half a week.
Such rates, too, continued to be set out in the _Edinburgh Almanac_
until 1830. After that comes an ominous silence. By that time only the
private chair was in use.
“Lady Don,” says Lord Cockburn in his _Memorials_, “was about
the last person (so far as I recollect) in Edinburgh, who
kept a private sedan chair. Hers stood in the lobby and was
as handsome and comfortable as silk, velvet, and gilding
could make it. And when she wished to use it two well-known
respectable chairmen, enveloped in her livery cloaks, were the
envy of her [superannuated] brethren. She and Mrs. Rochead
both sat in Tron Church; and well do I remember how I used to
form one of the cluster that always took its station to see
these beautiful relics emerge from coach and chair.”
The time, indeed, had come when the sight of a chair was as much a
public entertainment as it had been when Buckingham had been borne
through the streets “on men’s shoulders.”
Yet although they so rapidly disappeared off the face of Europe, in
Asia they lost little of their popularity, and in many places to-day
are the only methods of conveyance in common use. China, in particular,
had long been a land of sedans. John Barrow in his _Collection of
Authentic, Useful, and Entertaining Voyages and Discoveries_, 1765,
mentions the fact that at an early date the Chinese “small covered
carriages on two wheels, not unlike in appearance to our funeral
hearses, but only about half their length,” had been superseded by
chairs. To a European, he relates, this was hardly surprising, as the
carriage was anything but comfortable, and required you to sit on your
haunches at the bottom—“the most uneasy vehicle that can be imagined.”
“‘The Chinese,’ records another eighteenth-century traveller,
‘occasionally travel on horseback, but their best land
conveyance by far is the sedan, a vehicle which certainly
exists among them in perfection. Whether viewed with regard to
lightness, comfort, or any other quality associated with such
mode of carriage, there is nothing so convenient elsewhere.
Two bearers place upon their shoulders the poles, which are
thin and elastic and in shape something like the shafts of a
gig, connected near the ends, and in this manner they proceed
forward with a measured step in an almost imperceptible
motion, and sometimes with considerable speed. Instead of
panels, the sides and back of the chair consist of woollen
cloth for the sake of lightness with a covering of oilcloth
against rain. The front is closed with a hanging blind of the
same materials in lieu of a door, with a circular aperture of
gauze to see through.... Private persons among the Chinese are
restricted to two bearers, ordinary magistrates to four, and
the viceroys to eight, while the Emperor alone is great enough
to require sixteen.’”
There is further mention of these Chinese chairs in Oliphant’s much
later account of Lord Elgin’s mission. Lord Elgin himself travelled in
a chair of the kind usually reserved for mandarins of the highest rank,
which was larger than those in ordinary use and had a fine brass knob
on the top. Eight bearers carried it. In processions a _hwakeaou_ or
flowered chair was often used.
Japan, too, had early had sedans both for travelling and for more
purely ceremonial purposes. Light bamboo chairs, they were, called
_kangoes_ or _norimons_, which were borne by two or more persons. On
the introduction of the European coach, however, a kind of brouette, as
I have said, was substituted, and in a few years there were hundreds of
thousands of these _jin-rick-shaws_ on the streets, not only in Japan,
but throughout Asia. At first many of these were grotesquely adorned,
but their appearance is too well-known at the present day for need of a
lengthy description. Equipped with “every modern convenience” and very
well built indeed, they afford a European a delightful sensation on his
first ride, even though he may have visions of those earlier days of
his youth when he was carried about in a similar way (though at a less
speed) in the homely perambulator.
_Chapter the Fifth_
_SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY INNOVATIONS_
“We took our coach, two coachmen and four horses,
And merrily from London made our courses.
We wheel’d the top of th’ heavy hill called Holborne
(Up which hath been full many a sinful soule borne,)
And so along we jolted past St. Gileses,
Which place from Brainford six (or neare) seven miles is.”
_Taylor._
The seventeenth century saw great changes in vehicular design. In 1660
the first _berlin_ was made. Steel springs, as we have seen, appeared
a few years later in the brouette. About this time, too, a hooded gig
or _calèche_ made its appearance in the streets of Paris, the first of
many carriages to be built upon entirely new lines. Glass windows and
complete doors were used in the coaches, both public and private, which
became smaller, more compact, and certainly more graceful. Improvements
were not confined to one country, but proceeded simultaneously not only
in various European countries, but also in South America. Roads, too,
were improved, and laws for the regulation of traffic framed with some
regularity and effect.
John Evelyn in his Diary gives interesting glimpses of such carriages
and other vehicles as he saw during his several European tours. In
Brussels (1641) he was allowed the use of Sir Henry de Vic’s coach and
six, and travelled luxuriously in it as far as Ghent. “On the way,” he
notes, “I met with divers little waggons, prettily contrived, and full
of peddling merchandize, drawn by mastiff dogs, harnessed completely
like so many coach-horses; in some four, in others six, as in Brussels
itself I had observed. In Antwerp I saw, as I remember, four dogs draw
five lusty children in a chariot.” When dogs were first used for the
purpose of traction does not appear, but they are still to be seen in
the Netherlands in a like capacity. A few days later, to continue with
Evelyn’s observations, he was going from Ostend to Dunkirk “by waggon
... the journey being made all on the sea sands.” On his return to
England, however, it is to be noticed that he rode post to Canterbury.
In 1643 he was again in Paris, mentioning “the multitude of coaches
passing every moment over the bridge,” this being, he says, to a new
spectator, “an agreeable diversion.” In the following year, while
standing in the garden of the Tuileries, he saw “so many coaches as
one would hardly think could be maintained in the whole city, going
late as it was, towards the course”—the fashionable rendezvous of the
day—“the circle being capable of containing a hundred coaches to turn
commodiously, and the larger of the plantations for five or six coaches
abreast.” The road from Paris to Orleans he describes as “excellent.”
Coming to Italy, he found Milan, in spite of the narrowness of its
streets, abounding in rich coaches. In Paris again, two or three
years afterwards, the design of a new coach so took his fancy that he
determined, like his friend Mr. Pepys, to possess one for himself.
And so on May 29th, 1652, “I went,” he writes, “to give orders about a
coach to be made against my wife’s coming, being my first coach, the
pattern whereof I brought out of Paris.” This was probably “booted,”
but differed from the earlier coaches in having a curved roof.
The commonest French coach of this time seems to have been the
_corbillard_, a flat-bottomed, half-open, half-close coach, furnished
with curtains of cloth or leather in the front part. These were merely
tied on to the supports, and would roll up when required. Doors there
were none, but there was a “movable rail, over which a leather screen
was hung” at the back portion of the carriage, which was about six
feet long, and here were the seats. There were also projecting movable
step-seats. Possibly Evelyn saw a newer model with a curved bottom and
door half-way up, panelled in the lower part, but curtained above. Such
a carriage was hung low, and would have swung from side to side, giving
such passengers as were “bad sailors” a fit of nausea.
The English-designed coaches of this time, though without glass
windows, were almost completely enclosed, and, compared with the new
_chariots_, which were just upon making their appearance, of a huge
size. In many of them three people could sit abreast, and seven or
eight find room for themselves. In 1641 when Charles I passed through
London on his return from Scotland, his was the only coach in the royal
procession, but seven people, including His Majesty, were driving,
apparently in comfort, within it.
The Commonwealth produced no new carriage, although isolated
experiments were already being made. Cromwell himself was wont to drive
his own coach and six “for recreation-sake” in Hyde Park, then as now a
fashionable resort.
“When my Lord Protector’s coach,” wrote Misson, a Frenchman
then on a visit to England, “came into the Park with Colonel
Ingleby and my Lord’s three daughters, the coaches and horses
flocked about them like some miracle. But they galloped (after
the mode court-pace now) round and round the Park, and all
that great multitude hunted them and caught them still at the
turn like a hare, and then made a lane with all reverent haste
for them, and so after them again, and I never saw the like in
my life.”
Cromwell’s desire to play coachman once led to an accident which might
have been serious. The particulars are given in a letter from the Dutch
Ambassador to the States-General, dated October 16th, 1654:—
“His Highness, only accompanied with secretary Thurloe and
some few of his gentlemen and servants, went to take the
air in Hyde Park, when he caused some dishes of meat to be
brought, when he had his dinner; and afterwards had a mind to
drive the coach himself. Having put only the secretary into
it,” he whipped up “those six grey horses, which the Count of
Oldenburgh had presented unto His Highness, who drove pretty
handsomely for some time. But at last, provoking these horses
too much with the whip, they grew unruly and ran so fast that
the postillion could not hold them in, whereby His Highness
was flung out of the coach upon the pole.... The secretary’s
ankle was hurt leaping out, and he keeps his chamber.”
[Illustration: _Coach in the time of Charles I_
(_From “Coach and Sedan Pleasantly Disputing”_)]
[Illustration: _Coach in the time of Charles II_
(_From Thrupp’s “History of Coaches”_)]
“From this,” comments Sir Walter Gilbey, who quotes the letter, “it is
evident that when six horses were used a postillion rode one of the
leaders and controlled them; while the driver managed the wheelers and
middle pair. When four horses were driven,” he continues, “it was the
custom to have two outriders, one to ride at the leaders’ heads, and
one at the two wheelers’. In town this would be merely display, but on
a journey the outriders’ horses might replace those of the team in case
of accident, or, more frequently, be added to them to help drag the
coach over a stretch of bad road.”
It is just possible that this coach which was overturned by Cromwell’s
faulty driving is at present in existence, repaired, of course, and
redecorated, and, incidentally, painted by Cipriani, as Mr. Speaker’s
coach. This undoubtedly belongs to the period, and one writer actually
commits himself to the statement that the two are identical. A commoner
report assigns the Speaker’s coach in the first place to Lenthall,
Cromwell’s Speaker. Whatever be its history, the coach is a fine
example of Jacobean work. It is of carved oak, the body being hung
upon leather braces. The workmanship, Mr. Oakley Williams thinks,[28]
is Flemish. Cipriani’s work, added late in the eighteenth century, is
still in good preservation. Five people can comfortably sit inside.
“The Speaker,” says Mr. Williams, “presumably occupied the seat of
honour alone. Opposite him sat his Chaplain and the Sergeant-at-Arms.
For the accommodation of his other attendants ... a low bench is
arranged across the floor of the coach, with a semicircular space for
the legs of its occupants scooped out against either door”—relic,
of course, of the boot. “The coach,” he continues, after mentioning
that the Speaker always has his own arms painted on the side of the
body, and is allowed an escort of a single Lifeguardsman, “weighs two
tons one hundredweight and several pounds, yet for all its size it so
beautifully hung and balanced that an able-bodied man was able without
undue effort to draw it out for my inspection. Its coach-house is one
of the vaults in the inner courtyard of the House of Lords.” Both
origin and subsequent history of this coach, however, are wrapped in an
impenetrable mystery.
Cromwell’s mishap naturally gave the Royalist writers an opportunity
for satire. Cleveland wrote the following lines:—
“The whip again; away! ’tis too absurd
That thou should lash with whipcord now, but sword.
I’m pleased to fancy how the glad compact
Of Hackney coachmen sneer at the last act.
Hark! how the scoffing concourse hence derives
The proverb, ‘Needs must go when th’ devil drives.’
Yonder a whisper cries, ‘’Tis a plain case
He turned us out to put himself in place;
But, God-a-mercy, horses once for aye
Stood to ’t, and turned him out as well as we.’
Another, not behind him with his mocks,
Cries out, ‘Sir, faith, you were in the wrong box.’
He did presume to rule because, forsooth,
He’s been a horse-commander since his youth,
But he must know there’s a difference in the reins
Of horses fed with oats and fed with grains.
I wonder at his frolic, for be sure
Four hamper’d coach-horses can fling a brewer;
But pride will have a fall; such the world’s course is.
He [who] can rule three realms can’t guide four horses;
See him that trampell’d thousands in their gore;
Dismounted by a party but of four.
But we have done with ’t, and we may call
The driving Jehu, Phaeton in his fall.
I wish to God, for these three kingdoms’ sake,
His neck, and not the whip, had giv’n the crack.”
Evelyn met with a similar mishap, but fortunately escaped injury.
He, too, was accustomed to ride in Hyde Park, and on one occasion is
grumbling that “every coach” there “was made to pay a shilling, and a
horse sixpence, by a sordid fellow who had purchased it of the State,
as they called it.”
Such experiments as were being made in this country were in the
direction of a safer and swifter vehicle than those in general use.
So early as 1625, one Edward Knapp had been granted a patent for
“hanging the bodies of carriages on springs of steel.” Apparently
Knapp was wholly unsuccessful, but forty years later Colonel Blunt,
working upon similar lines, produced several carriages which, if not
entirely satisfactory in themselves, led the way towards a wider
appreciation of the problems in question. If, as seems probable, he
was identical with the Blunt or Blount of Wicklemarsh, near Blackheath
(afterwards Sir Harry Blount), who had travelled extensively in
Turkey and elsewhere, it may be that he had brought back with him
several continental curiosities. We hear, indeed, of a French chariot
in his possession. In 1657 the Colonel was making experiments with
a “way-wiser” or “adometer” which exactly “measured the miles ...
showing these by an index as we went on. It had three circles, one
pointing to the number of rods, another to the miles, by 10 to 1000,
with all the subdivisions of quarters; very pretty,” opines Evelyn,
“and useful.” This seems to have been the first instrument of the kind,
and is overlooked by Beckmann in his account of such contrivances. The
Colonel’s work was brought to the notice of the newly formed Royal
Society, and a committee was formed to investigate it. The first model
shown to this committee was of “a chariot with four springs, esteemed
by him very easy both to the rider and the horse, and at the same time
cheap.” The Committee also examined the designs of Dr. Robert Hooke,
a distinguished member of the Society, and Professor of Geometry at
Gresham College, who “produced the model of a chariot with two wheels
and short double springs to be driven by one horse; the chair 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 Blunt’s house, carried with as much ease as one could be
in the French chariot without at all burthening the horse.”[29] Dr.
Hooke 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 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.”
The Colonel continued experimenting both with the older coaches and a
new light chariot. In 1665 Mr. Pepys was taken to see an improvement of
his on a coach.
“I met my Lord Brouncker, Sir Frederick Murrey, Dean Wilkins,
and Mr. Hooke, going by coach to Colonel Blunt’s to dinner....
No extraordinary dinner, nor any other entertainment good;
but afterwards to the tryal 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.”
A few months later Pepys saw the new chariot itself.
“After dinner comes Colonel Blunt in his new chariot made with
springs; as that was of wicker, where in a while since we rode
at his house. And he hath rode, he says, now his journey, many
miles in it with one horse, and out-drives any coach, and
out-goes any horse, and so easy he says. So for curiosity, I
went into it to try it, and up the hill [Shooter’s Hill] to
the heath [Blackheath], and over the cart ruts, and found it
pretty well, but not so easy as he pretends.”
The Colonel persevered. At the beginning of the next year the Royal
Society’s committee met again at his house to consider, says Pepys, “of
the business of chariots, and to try their new invention, which I saw
here 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 odde
thing; but it seems it is most easy for the horse, and, as they say,
for the man also.”
Others were also at work upon carriage improvement, and in 1667 the
Royal Society “generally approved” of a chariot invented by a Dr.
Croune. “No particulars of the vehicle are given,” says Sir Walter
Gilbey, “we are only told that ‘some fence was proposed to be made for
the coachman against the kicking of the horse.’” In the same year, Sir
William Pen possessed a light chariot in which Pepys drove out one day.
This, he says, was “plain, but pretty and more fashionable in shape
than any coaches he hath, and yet do not cost him, harness and all,
above £32.”
All such experiments were undoubtedly in the direction of a light,
swift carriage, such as was built about 1660 in Germany by Philip de
Chiesa, a Piedmontese, in the service of the Duke of Prussia. Indeed,
it is quite possible that Colonel Blunt either possessed, or had seen,
one of de Chiesa’s carriages, which were none other than the famous and
popular _berlins_.[30]
So far Germany had been taking the lead. Her State coaches were the
most wonderful in the world, and her coachbuilders were designing
lesser coaches for the ordinary folk. But the _berlin_ was the first of
these lesser carriages to catch the public fancy, and enjoy more than
a local success. Now the _berlin_ differed in the first place from
previous carriages in having two perches instead of the single pole,
“and between these two perches, from the front transom to the hind
axle-bed, two strong leather braces were placed, with jacks or small
windlasses, to wind them up tighter if they stretched.” The bottom
of the coach was no longer flat, and these braces of leather allowed
the body to play up and down instead of swinging from side to side as
before. Here, then, you had an entirely new principle.