Stage-coach and Mail in Days of Yore, Volume 1 (of 2) / A picturesque history of the coaching age

Meanwhile the first stage-coaches had been put upon the chief roads out of London, and had begun to ply between the capital and the principal towns. Stage-coaches are, on insufficient authority, said to have begun about 1640, but no particulars are available in support of that statement, and in considering this point we are bound to look into the social state of England at that time, and to consider the likelihood or otherwise of a public service of coaches being continued throughout those stormy years which preceded, accompanied, and followed the great Civil War that opened with the raising of the King’s standard at Nottingham in 1642, and ended with the Battle of Naseby in June 1645. That victory ended the war in favour of the Parliament men, but the political troubles and their attendant social displacements continued.

It has been said that hawking parties pursued their sport between the opposed armies on Marston Moor, and the inference has been drawn that the nation was not disturbed to its depths by what we are usually persuaded was a tremendous struggle between King and Parliament. Certainly the Associated Counties of East Anglia were little affected by the contest, but theirs was an exceptional experience, brought about by that association, entered upon for mutual protection against either side, and to prevent the scene of warfare being pitched within those limits. It is not likely that any service of coaches ran in the disturbed period, when confidence was so rudely shaken; and it was not until the Commonwealth had been established some years that the first coaching advertisement of which we have any knowledge appeared.

In writing thus, it is not forgotten that somewhere about the year 1610 a foreigner from the wilds of Pomerania obtained a Royal patent granting him, for the term of fifteen years, the exclusive right of running coaches or waggons between Edinburgh and Leith. We have no details of this purely local service, but it is to be supposed that it was little more than a stage-waggon carrying goods and passengers too infirm to ride horseback between Edinburgh and its seaport. We are equally ignorant of the length of time the service lasted.

The next reference to stage-coaches is equally detached and inconclusive. It is found in a booklet issued by John Taylor, describing a journey he made to the Isle of Wight in 1648. He and his party set out on October 19th to see the captive Charles the First, their “gracious Soveraigne, afflicted Lord and Master,” imprisoned at Carisbrooke Castle. They “hired the Southampton Coach, which comes weekly to the Rose, near Holborn Bridge”—a statement that at least proves the existence of a public vehicle of sorts. But it is the first and last reference to the Southampton Coach that has come down these two hundred and fifty-odd years. If Taylor tells us nothing of its history, he at least gives a description of the journey that retains something of its original amusing qualities, and, with the lapse of time, becomes something of an historic document:—

Southampton, eighty miles from their starting-point, was therefore a three days’ journey in the autumn of 1648. That they were careful not to be on the road after dark is evident from the time they got to Staines, the first stopping-place. The sun sets at exactly 5 p.m. on October 19th.

The reference to a place called “Bawwaw,” between Bagshot and Alton, is not to be explained by any scrutiny of maps.

Thenceforward until 1657 stage-coaches are not mentioned in the literature of the age, and we set foot upon firm ground only with the advertisement in the Mercurius Politicus of April 9th in that year:—

“FOR the convenient accommodation of Passengers from and betwixt the Cities of London and Westchester, there is provided several Stage-Coaches which go from the George Inn without Aldersgate upon every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to Coventry, in Two days for Twenty five shillings, to Stone in Three days for Thirty shillings, and to Chester in Four days for Thirty five shillings, and from thence to return upon the same days; which is performed with much safety to the Passengers, having fresh Horses once a day. In Mondays Intelligence last the severall sums and rates were by the Printer mistaken.”

The objective of the first stage-coach ever established being Chester naturally provokes inquiry. There seems to have been no other stage upon any road in that pioneer year. The preference for Chester argues a large traffic already existing on that road: men riding post-horses, women riding pillion behind friends, relatives, or servants, or possibly in some stage-waggon whose history has not come down to us. The coach can only have been established to satisfy a pre-existent demand. The question why there should have been more travellers on this route than any other is answered in this being the road to Ireland then generally followed, and Chester itself the port of embarkation for that country. Coventry and Stone were only served incidentally.

The following spring witnessed an amazing burst of coaching activity, for the Mercurius Politicus in April contained an advertisement announcing stage-coaches on the Exeter and Great North roads, to begin on the 26th of that month. They ran from the “George” Inn, Aldersgate Street Without:—

“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to Salisbury in two days for XX^s, Blandford and Dorchester in two days and a half for XXX^s, Burput in three days for XXX^s, and Exmaster, Hunnington, and Exeter in four days for XL^s.

“Stamford in two days for XX^s, Newark in two days and a half for XXX^s, Doncaster and Ferribridge for XXXV^s, and York in four days for XL^s.”

Every Monday and Wednesday others were to set forth for,

“Ockinton and Plimouth for L^s.

“Edinburgh, once a fortnight for £4 apeece.

“Darneton and Ferryhill for L^s, Durham for LV^s, and Newark for £111.”

Every Friday,

“To Wakefield in four days for XL^s.”

This advertisement then concluded by inviting passengers to another “George” Inn:—

“Let them repair to the George Inn on Holborn Bridge, and they shall be in good Coaches with good Horses at and for reasonable rates, to Salisbury, Blandford, Exmaster, Hunnington, Exeter, Ockinton, Plimouth, and Cornwal.”

The extraordinarily misspelt names of some of the places mentioned in these notices show how ill-known the country then was. For “Burput” we must read Bridport; for “Hunnington,” Honiton; and for “Exmaster,” Axminster; “Ockinton” is probably Okehampton.

At this time, and for very many years yet to come, the stage-coaches were strictly fair-weather services. With every recurrent spring they were brought out from their retirement, and so early as Michaelmas were taken off the roads and laid up for the winter. How the pioneer coach to Chester fared in its second season is hid from us, but the announcement of its third year, in 1659, is instructive:—

“These are to give notice, that from the George Inn, without Aldersgate, goes every Monday and Thursday a coach and four able horses, to carry passengers to Chester in five days, likewise to Coventry, Cosell (Coleshill), Cank, Litchfield, Stone, or to Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Newport, Whitchurch, and Holywell, at reasonable rates, by us, who have performed it two years.

“William Dunstan.
“Henry Earle.
“William Fowler.”

It now took a day longer to reach Chester—assuming that the promise to perform the journey in four days ever was kept; and it will be observed that Birmingham, Shrewsbury, and other places, on a different route than that through Lichfield and Stone, are named in the manner of an alternative. The Chester stage of this year, in fact, varied its itinerary to suit its passengers. The “by us, who have performed it two years,” looks suspiciously like an opposition already threatened; while the “four able horses” insisted on (but not mentioned in the first announcement) reads like an improvement upon a former team that was not able. Those, of course, were times before horses were generally changed on the way, and the same long-suffering beasts that dragged the coaches from London often brought them to their destination. According to the first advertisement of this Chester stage, quoted above, this particular coach was an exception to the usual practice, and actually had fresh horses once a day.

A stage seems to have plied between London and Oxford in 1661, but new coaches for a time were few, and it is said that there were but six in 1662. In the following year a coach of sorts ran from Preston in Lancashire to London; and, as may be gathered from a letter from Edward Parker to his father, it was a very primitive contrivance:—

“I got to London on Saturday last; my journey was noe way pleasant, being forced to ride in the boote all the waye. The company y^t came up with mee were persons of greate qualitie, as knightes and ladyes. My journey’s expense was 30^s. This travell hath soe indisposed mee, y^t I am resolved never to ride up againe in y^e coatche. I am extremely hott and feverish. What this may tend to I know not. I have not as yet advised my doctor.”

Our natural curiosity on that head cannot be satisfied, for the Parker correspondence ends abruptly there; but we fear the worst. Heading that testimony to the quality of early coach-travelling, we may find it not altogether without significance that from this year forward to 1667 little is heard of coaches. Perhaps those who gave the early ones a trial were glad to get back to their saddles and ride horseback again. However that may be, certainly coaching history, except by inference, is in those years a blank. We may infer services to other towns from oblique and scattered references, but direct information is lacking. That a stage-coach—or possibly more than one—was on the road between London and Norwich in 1665 is to be gathered from the proclamation issued in that East Anglian city on July 20th of that terrible year of the Great Plague, which destroyed half the population of London: “From this daie,” ran that ordinance, “all ye passage coaches shall be prohibited to goe from ye city to London, and come from thence hither, and also ye common carts and wagons.” Already, before that notice was issued, wayfarers from that doomed city had been struck down by the deadly and mysterious disease, and at Norwich itself travellers hailing from the centre of infection had died, swiftly and in circumstances that struck terror into the hearts of the people. Not that plagues were things unknown; for Hobson, the Cambridge carrier, had died from the vexation and enforced idleness of the Cambridge edict of 1631, forbidding intercourse with London, even then ravaged with an infectious disorder.

What were the first stage-coaches like?

If we are to credit Taylor’s description of the earliest coaches, some of them must have resembled the present Irish jaunting-car, or Bianconi’s mid-nineteenth century coaches, in the manner of carrying passengers. He tells us, in his fanciful way, that a coach, “like a perpetual cheater, wears two bootes and no spurs, sometimes having two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes (against nature) it makes faire ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are carried back to back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in that miserable manner, and thrown overboard into the sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate sea-crabs, in being drawn sideways, as they are when they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a dangerous kind of carriage for the commonwealth, if it be considered.” This boot, or this pair of boots—which did not in the least resemble, in shape or position, the fore and hind boots of a later age—was a method of carrying the outsides in days before the improvement of roads rendered it possible for any one to ride on the roof without incurring the danger of being flung off. No illustration of this type of coach has ever been found, but it seems possible that the back-to-back boots, to carry four, were built on to the hinder part of the coach, and really formed the first attempt to carry outsides.

This type of coach described by Taylor must have been freakish and ephemeral. Those in general use were very different, resembling in their construction the private carriages and London hackney-coaches of the time, and varying from them only in being built to hold a number of people—usually six, but on occasion eight. In Sir Robert Howard’s comedy, The Committee, printed in 1665, the Reading coach brings six passengers to London.

The body was covered with stout leather, nailed on to the frame with broad-headed nails, whose shining heads, gilt or silvered, picked out the general lines of the structure, and were considered to give a pleasing decorative effect. Windows and doors were at first unknown. In their stead were curtains and wooden shutters, so that the interior of an early coach on a wet or chilly day, when the curtains were drawn, must have been a close and dismal place. It was this feature that gave Taylor an opportunity of comparing a coach with a hypocrite: “It is a close hypocrite, for it hath a cover for knavery and curtains to vaile and shadow any wickedness.” The first vehicle with glass windows was the private carriage of the Duke of York, in 1661, and we do not begin to hear of glazed windows in stage-coaches until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when “glass coaches” were announced. It is, indeed, unlikely that glass could in any case have been introduced for the purpose of country travelling at an earlier date, for it would need to have been of extraordinary strength and thickness to survive the shocks and crashes of travel of this period.

All these vehicles were low hung, for the heavy body, slung by massive leather braces from the upright posts springing from the axletrees of front and hind wheels, was too responsive to any and every rut and irregularity of the road to be placed at the height to which the coaches of a century later attained.

In the excessive jolting then incidental to travelling, the body of a coach swayed laterally to such an extent that it would often swing, in the manner of a pendulum, quite clear of the underworks. Occupants of coaches were thus often afflicted with nausea, not unlike that of sea-sickness, and to be “coached” was at that time an expression which meant the getting used to a violent motion at first most emphatically resented by the human stomach.

Although the body of a coach enjoyed a wide range of motion sideways, it had not by any means the same freedom back and forth. A severe strain, in the continual plunging and jolting, was therefore thrown upon the supporting uprights, so that they not infrequently gave way under the ordeal, and suddenly threw passengers and coachman in one common heap of ruin. To aid him in making such roadside repairs as these and other early defects of construction often rendered necessary, the coachman carried with him a box of tools placed under his seat, and it is from this circumstance that the name of “hammercloth”—the hangings decorating the coachman’s seat on many a State carriage—was derived.

Bad as was the situation of the passengers, that of the coachman was infinitely worse. His was a seat of torture, for it was placed immediately over the front pair of wheels, and, totally unprovided with springs, transmitted to his body the full force of every shock with which those wheels descended into holes or encountered stones.

In 1667 a London and Oxford coach is found, performing the fifty-four miles in two days, halting for the intervening night at Beaconsfield; and in the same year the original Bath coach appears, in this portentous announcement:—

“FLYING MACHINE.

“All those desirous to pass from London to Bath, or any other Place on their Road, let them repair to the ‘Bell Savage’ on Ludgate Hill in London, and the ‘White Lion’ at Bath, at both which places they may be received in a Stage Coach every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which performs the Whole Journey in Three Days (if God permit), and sets forth at five o’clock in the morning.

“Passengers to pay One Pound five Shillings each, who are allowed to carry fourteen Pounds Weight—for all above to pay three-halfpence per Pound.”

This is the first appearance of the epithet “Flying” in the literature of coaches. Possibly it was used in this first instance in order to distinguish the new conveyance from a stage-waggon that must for many years before have gone the journey, as well as to justify the higher fare charged by the new vehicle. The waggon would have conveyed passengers at anything from a halfpenny to a penny a mile; by “Flying Machine” it came to threepence. The term “Flying,” for a coach that consumed three days in performing a journey of 109 miles, raises a smile; but it was only relative, and in contrast with the pace of the waggons of that period, which would probably have made it a six-days’ trip.

This Bath coach would seem to have set the fashion in nomenclature, for in April 1669 a “Flying Coach” began to fly between Oxford and London. It was, it will be noticed, a “coach,” and not a “machine”; the term “machine” did not come into general use until about seventy years later. But although the Oxford coach did not call itself by so high-sounding a title, it made a better pace than the Bath affair, doing the fifty-four miles in one day, between the hours of six o’clock in the morning and seven in the evening. Moreover, its fare—twelve shillings, reduced two years later to ten—was somewhat cheaper. Perhaps one was always charged higher rates on the fashionable Bath Road.

How, in this thirteen years’ interval between 1657 and 1669, had the older stages progressed? The Chester stage was going its way, promising to do the distance in five days, but taking six—a sad falling off from the original four; of the others, presumably continuing, we hear nothing further, and of new ventures there is not a whisper. Yet it is surely not to be supposed that, at a time when coaches ran to Bath, to York, to Coventry, and to Norwich, such a place (for instance) as Bristol would be without that convenience. For Bristol was then what Glasgow is now—the second city. London came first, with its half a million inhabitants; Bristol came next, with some 28,000, and Norwich third, with 27,000. It is, then, only fair to assume that other coaches existed of whose story nothing has survived. A strong reason for coming to this conclusion is found in the publication in 1673 of Cresset’s violent tirade against coaches, not, surely, called forth apropos of the already old-established stages, but provoked, doubtless, by some sudden increase, of which we, at this lapse of time, know nothing. What brief John Cresset could have held for the innkeepers and horse-breeders, and for the other trades supposed to be injuriously affected by the increase of stage-coaches, we know not, nor, indeed, anything of Cresset himself, except that he lived in the Charterhouse.

Between London, York, Chester, and Exeter he calculated that a total number of fifty-four persons travelled weekly, making a grand total for those roads of 1,872 such travellers in a year. A brief examination of his arithmetic shows—as we have already pointed out—that the coaches of that age lay up for the winter months.

His indictment of coaches is to be found in his Grand Concern of England Explained, and is very vigorous indeed, and—as we see it nowadays—extravagantly silly:—

“Will any man keep a horse for himself and another for his servant all the year round, for to ride one or two journeys, that at pleasure, when he hath occasion, can slip to any place where his business lies for two or three shillings, if within twenty miles of London, and so proportionately to any part of England? No, there is no man, unless some noble soul that seems to abhor being confined to so ignoble, base, and sordid a way of travelling as these coaches oblige him to, and who prefers a public good before his own ease and advantage, that will keep horses.”

According to this vehement counsel for the suppression of stage-coaches, they brought the country gentlemen up to London on the slightest pretext—sometimes to get their hair cut—-with their wives accompanying them; and when they were both come to town, they would “get fine clothes, go to plays and treats, and by these means get such a habit of idleness and love for pleasure that they are uneasy ever after.

“Travelling in these coaches can neither prove advantageous to men’s health or business, for what advantage is it to men’s health to be called out of their beds into their coaches an hour before day in the morning, to be hurried in them from place to place till one, two, or three hours within night, insomuch that sitting all day in the summer time stifled with heat and choked with dust, or in the winter time starving or freezing with cold, or choked with filthy fogs? They are often brought to their inns by torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get a supper, and next morning they are forced into the coach so early that they can get no breakfast. What addition is this to men’s health or business, to ride all day with strangers oftentimes sick, or with diseased persons, or young children crying, to whose humours they are obliged to be subject, forced to bear with, and many times are poisoned with their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of their boxes and bundles? Is it for a man’s health to travel with tired jades, to be laid fast in the foul ways and forced to wade up to the knees in mire, afterwards to sit in the cold till teams of horses can be sent to pull the coach out?”

Cresset was also of opinion that the greater number of the many roadside inns would lose their trade owing to the rapidity of coach-travelling. Here, at least, he exceeded his brief, for coaches by no means attained so speedy a rate of travel as that reached by horsemen. Thoresby, ten years later, is a case in point. He was wont to travel horseback between Leeds and London in four days, but when he journeyed from York to London in the coach, no greater distance than from Leeds, it took six days. Swift, too, in 1710, rode from Chester to London in five days; when the degenerating Chester stage, which had started to perform it in 1657 in four days, had already taken one additional day, and was about to take another. Cresset, summing up such objectionable things as “rotten coaches” and traces, and coachmen “surly, dogged, and ill-natured,” advocated the total suppression of such methods of travelling, or at least—counsels of moderation prevailing—of most of them. In conclusion, he proposed that coaches should be limited to one for every county town in England, to go backwards and forwards once a week.

Unhappily for Cresset’s peace of mind, coaches did not decay. Nor did they wilt and wither before the onslaught of another writer, who, under the pen-name of “A Country Tradesman,” published a pamphlet in 1678, called The Ancient Trades Decayed, Repaired Again. According to this writer, if coaches were suppressed, more wine and beer would be drunk at the inns, to the great increase and advantage of the Excise; and the breed of horses would be improved, in consequence of the gentlemen who then rode in coaches being obliged to return to horse-riding.

In 1673, in an announcement of stages to York, Chester, and Exeter, the journey to Exeter is put at “eight days in summer, ten in winter.” Here was at least one coach that had already begun to run throughout the year, but its summer performance justified the remarks of those ancients who, seeing the original “four-days” announcement of 1658, had shaken their heads and suspected it would never last.

The year 1678 saw a coach on the road between the important seaport of Hull and the city of York, probably in connection with the York stage between that and London; but our only knowledge of its existence at so early a date is—to put it in rather an Irish way—a reference to its having been taken off. Ralph Thoresby, the Yorkshire antiquary, is our authority. In his diary he notes that he landed at Hull in November of that year, and that the stage-coach was already over for the winter. This Hull and York coach we may suppose to have been in connection with a York and London stage already existing—that original vehicle, started in 1658 and alluded to in 1673, which was to perform the journey in four days, the fare 40s. The first detailed account of the “York Old Coach,” as it came to be known, is found in an old advertisement broadside discovered some years since at the back of an old drawer at the “Black Swan,” in York. It is dated 1706, and is evidently an announcement of the coach resuming its season after one of its annual hibernations:—

It still took four days, as it had done when first established close upon half a century before. Clearly times and coaches alike moved slowly.

That York even then displayed its sub-metropolitan character will be seen from the footnote to the handbill, relating to the Newcastle coach. Local services apparently radiated from the city to Hull, Leeds, Wakefield, and other places.

Meanwhile, other provincial towns had not been idle, and we must needs make a slight divergence here to give an outline of what Glasgow was attempting in local intercommunication. Nothing thus early was on the road between Glasgow and London, but strenuous efforts were made to link Glasgow and Edinburgh (forty-four miles apart) together by a public service so early as 1678, when Provost Campbell and the magistrates of Glasgow agreed with William Hoorn, of Edinburgh, for a coach to go on that road once a week: “a sufficient strong coach, drawn by sax able horses, whilk coach sall contine sax persons and sall go ance ilk week, to leave Edinburgh ilk Monday morning, and to return again (God willing) ilk Saturday night.” To travel those forty-four miles was, therefore, the occupation of three days. Even thus early we see the beginnings of that spirit of municipal enterprise which has in modern times carried Glasgow so far. Now the local tramway, water, gas, and electric lighting authority, she, so early as the seventeenth century, essayed a public service of coaches.

Like much else in early coaching history, this is merely a fragment; but again, in 1743, Glasgow is found returning to the question, in an attempt of the Town Council to set up a stage-coach or “lando,” to go once a week in winter and twice in summer. The attempt failed, and it was not until 1749 that the first conveyance to ply regularly between Glasgow and Edinburgh was established. This was the “Caravan,” which made the passage in two days each way. It was succeeded in 1759 by the “Fly,” which brought the time down to a day and a half.

In 1697, according to an entry in the diary of Sir William Dugdale, under date of July 16th, a London and Birmingham coach, by way of Banbury, was then running; but such isolated references are quite obscured by the flood of light thrown upon coaching by the work of De Laune, The Present State of London, dated 1681. In his pages is to be found a complete list of all the stage-coaches, carriers, and waggons to and from London in that year. The carriers and waggons are very numerous, and there are in all 119 coaches, of which number between sixty and seventy are long-distance conveyances, the remainder serving places up to twenty or twenty-five miles from London. In that list we find that, although a marvellous expansion of coaching had taken place, some of the places already catered for in 1658 are abandoned. The Edinburgh stage does not appear, and nothing is to be found on that road farther north than York. The reason for the omission was, doubtless, that York, then relatively a more important place than now, had its own well-organised coaching businesses. Travellers from London for Edinburgh would secure a place to York, and, arriving there, book again by a York and Edinburgh coach. The Edinburgh stage from London, once a fortnight, is, indeed, not heard of again until 1734.

Many of the coaches mentioned by De Laune went twice and thrice a week, and a large proportion of those to places not beyond twenty or twenty-five miles from London made double journeys in the day. Thus Windsor had no fewer than seven coaches, six of them in and out daily. The age, it will be conceded, was not without enterprise. But the omissions are striking; Okehampton, Plymouth, and Cornwall, included in the purview of the pioneers of 1658, are not mentioned. Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle, Leicester, Hereford and others were outside their activities. No one, it seemed, wanted to go to Glasgow; Manchester men were content to ride horseback; Leeds, now numbering some 430,000 inhabitants, and increasing by 2,000 a year, was a town of only 7,000, and the clothiers rode to York and caught the London coach there. To Bath and Bristol, however, there were five coaches; to Exeter, four; to Guildford, three; to Cambridge, Braintree, Canterbury, Chelmsford, Gloucester, Lincoln and Stamford, Norwich, Oxford, Portsmouth, Reading, Saffron Walden, and Ware, two each.

Despite the four coaches between Exeter and London mentioned by De Laune in 1681, the Mayor of Lyme Regis, having in October 1684 urgent official business in London, is found, in company with one servant, hiring post-horses from Lyme to Salisbury. It is quite clear that if there had been a coach serving at the time, he would have caught it at Charmouth, a mile and a half from that little seaport; but there was, for some unexplained reason, a break in the service, and it was not until Salisbury was reached, sixty miles along the road, that he found a stage. The coach fare from Salisbury to London for self and servant was 30s., and he spent, “at several stages, to gratify coachmen,” 4s. 6d.

With the existence of such a volume of trade as that disclosed by De Laune, it is not surprising to find that the scolding voices of opponents to coaching had by this time died down to a mere echo. Instead of reviling coaches, the writers of the age extolled their use and convenience. Thus Chamberlayne, in the 1684 edition of his Present State of Great Britain, the Whitaker’s Almanack of that period, says: “There is of late such an admirable commodiousness for both men and women to travel from London to the principal towns in 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 of one’s health and one’s body by hard jogging or over-violent motion, 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 that the post in some foreign countries cannot make but in one day.” Those foreign countries have our respectful sympathy, for Chamberlayne in thus extolling our superiority was singing the praises of four miles an hour!

From the limbo of half-forgotten things we drag occasional references to coaches towards the close of the seventeenth century. In April 1694 a London and Warwick stage was announced to go every Monday, to make the journey in two days, “performed (if God permit) by Nicholas Rothwell”; and in 1696 the “Confatharrat” coach was already spoken of as a familiar object on the London and Norwich road. All we know of the “Confatharrat” is that it came to the “Four Swans,” in Bishopsgate Street Within. Its curious name is probably the seventeenth-century spelling of the word “confederate,” and the coach itself was, no doubt, run by an association, or “confederacy,” of owners and innkeepers, in succession to some unlucky person who singly had attempted it and failed.

On some roads enterprise slackened. Thus, in 1700, the “Fly” coach to Exeter slept the fifth night from London at Axminster, where the next morning a woman “shaved the coach,” and on the afternoon of the sixth day it crawled into Exeter. Forty-three years earlier it had taken only four days.

Nicholas Rothwell, of the London and Warwick stage in 1694, reappears in an extremely interesting broadsheet advertisement of 1731, announcing that the “Birmingham stage-coach in two days and a half begins, May the 24th.” Although we have no earlier information of this coach, it is probably safe to assume that this, like the advertisement of the York coach already quoted, merely advertised the beginning of a new season, and that winter was still largely, as it had been seventy-six years before, a blank in the coaching world. Rothwell was evidently established at Warwick, and seems to have been the first notable coach-proprietor, the forerunner of the Chaplins, Nelsons, Mountains, Shermans and Ibbersons of a later age. By his old advertisement we see that he catered for all classes of travellers—by stage-coach, private carriage, chaise, and waggon—and that he hired out horses to the gentlemen who still preferred their own company and the saddle to the coach and its miscellaneous strangers. Even the dead were not beyond the consideration of Mr. Rothwell, whose “Hearse, with Mourning Coach and Able Horses,” is set forth to “go to any part of Great Britain, at reasonable Rates.” Unhappily for the historian eager to reconstruct the road life of those times, this old advertisement is almost all that survives to tell us of Rothwell, and fortunate we are to have even that, for such sheets, as commonplace when issued as the advertisements of railway excursions are at the present time, are now of extreme rarity. It would appear, from the rude woodcut illustrating Rothwell’s bill, that his coach was of the old type, hung on leather straps and quite innocent of springs—the kind of coach that Parson Adams, in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, outwalked without the slightest difficulty. It seems to be more up-to-date in the matter of windows, and to be a “glass-coach,” if we may judge by the appearance of the window at which the solitary and unhappy-looking passenger is standing in an attitude suggestive of stomachic disturbance. There are no windows in the upper quarters of the coach, which in that and some other respects greatly resembles the vehicle pictured in 1747 by Hogarth in his Inn Yard.

Rothwell’s coach is drawn by four horses in hand, with a postilion on the off horse of a couple of extra leaders. The practice of using six horses and a postilion is one to which we find allusion in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, written nine years later than the date of this Birmingham coach. The curious will find the description in the twelfth chapter of that novel, where Joseph, recovering from the murderous attack of two highwaymen, attracts the attention of the postilion of a passing stage-coach. “The postilion, hearing a man’s groans, stopped his horses, and told the coachman he was certain there was a dead man lying in the ditch, for he heard him groan.” (That postilion surely was an Irishman.) “‘Go on, sirrah!’ says the coachman: ‘we are confounded late, and have no time to look after dead men.’ A lady, who heard what the postilion said, and likewise heard the groan, called eagerly to the coachman to stop and see what was the matter. Upon which, he bid the postilion alight and look into the ditch. He did so, and returned, ‘That there was a man sitting upright, as naked as ever he was born.’ ‘O J—sus!’ cried the lady; ‘a naked man! Dear coachman, drive on and leave him!’”

Rowlandson shows that in 1783 six horses were still used, and that a postilion continued to ride one of the leaders. It was about this same period that the generally misquoted remark about the ease of driving a coach-and-six through an Act of Parliament grew proverbial. It had originated so early as 1689, when Sir Stephen Rice, Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer and a bigoted Papist, declared for James the Second, and was often heard to say he would drive a coach and six horses through the Act of Settlement. Later generations, knowing nothing of six horses to a coach, and unused to seeing more than four, unconsciously adapted the saying to the practice of their own times.