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waistcoat; so much is the fashion of the times now altered." Roger North has left us a curious record of the equestrian ambition of a Lord Chancellor -Shaftesbury-in 1672:

"His lordship had an early fancy, or rather freak, the first day of the term (when all the officers of the law, king's counsel, and judges, used to wait upon the great seal to Westminster Hall), to make this procession on horseback, as in old time the way was, when coaches were not so rife. And accordingly, the judges, etc., were spoken to, to get horses, as they and all the rest did, by borrowing and hiring, and so equipped themselves with black foot-cloths in the best manner they could; and divers of the nobility, as usual, in compliment and honour to a new lord-chancellor, attended also in their equipments. Upon notice in town of this cavalcade, all the show-company took their places at windows and balconies, with the foot-guards in the street, to partake of the fine sight; and being once well settled for the march, it moved, as the design was, statelily along. But, when they came to straights and interruptions, for want of gravity in the beasts, and too much in the riders, there happened some curvetting, which made no small disorder. Judge Twisden, to his great affright, and the consternation of his grave brethren, was laid along in the dirt. But all at length arrived safe, without loss of life or limb in the service. This accident was enough to divert the like frolic for the future, and the very

next term after, they fell to their coaches as before." *

Nor was the use of saddle-horses confined to men in the early days. Chaucer thus describes his 'Wife of Bath :'—

"Upon an ambler easily she sat,

Ywimpled well, and on her head a hat,
As broad as is a buckler or a targe,
A foot-mantle about her hippes large,
And on her feet a pair of spurres sharp."

When Katharine of Spain came over in 1501 to marry Prince Arthur, a horse was provided for her conveyance from the Tower to St. Paul's, upon which she was to ride "with the pillion behind a lord to be named by the king;" but it was also ordered that "eleven palfreys in one suit be ordained for such ladies attending upon the said princess as shall follow next unto the said pillion." The great ladies long after this rode on horseback on ordinary occasions. Elizabeth commissioned Sir Thomas Gresham to purchase a horse at Antwerp; and the merchant-prince writes to Cecil in 1560-" the Queen's Majesty's Turkey horse doth begin to mend in his feet and body; which doubtless is one of the readiest horses that is in all Christendom, and the best." Of poor Mary of Scotland, the Earl of Shrewsbury, after conveying her to Buxton, writes to Cecil in 1580:-"She had a hard beginning of her journey; for when she should have taken her horse, he started aside, and therewith she

*Examen, p. 57.

fell, and hurt her back, which she still complains of, notwithstanding she applies the bath once or twice a day." The "horse-litter" appears to have formed a connecting link between the saddle and the coach.

Luxury had its appliances ready for the almost exclusive mode of equestrian travel. "A lover of his country," who, in 1673, saw that coaches would be the ruin of the kingdom, says, "Before these coaches were set up, travellers rode on horseback; and men had boots, spurs, saddles, bridles, saddlecloths, and good riding suits. . . . . Most gentlemen, before they travelled in their coaches, used to ride with swords, belts, pistols, holsters, portmanteaus, and hat-cases; for when they rode on horseback they rode in one suit, and carried another to wear when they came to their journey's end, or lay by the way. . . . And if they were women that travelled, they needed to have safeguards and hoods, side-saddles, and pillions, with strappings, saddle or pillion-cloths, which, for the most part, were either laced or embroidered." The saving of much of this expenditure, by travelling in coaches, the writer holds, is the ruin of trade. "For, formerly, every man that had occasion to travel many journeys yearly, or to ride up and down, kept horses for himself and his servants, and seldom rid without one or two men." In 1526, the Earl of Cumberland rode from Skipton to London, with thirty-three servants.* In 1582, the Earl of Shrewsbury writes to a dependant: "I think my company will be twenty gentlemen and twenty

*Whitaker's Craven.

yeomen, besides their men and my horse-keepers. I think to set forwards about the 11th of September, from Wingfield to Leicester, to my bed, and to make but four days' journey to London."* In 1640, the wife of the last Earl of Cumberland rode from London to Londesborough, having thirty-two horses in her train; and the journey occupied eleven days. These slow progresses were the relics of the old times of sumpter-horses, when princes and nobles travelled with vast cavalcades, like an oriental caravan. We must notimagine that all equestrian travelling was at this slow rate. "Ride for your life-haste, haste, post-haste!"—were the commands of ambitious peers and crafty ministers in the days of Elizabeth, to the unhappy courier who was to post from London to Edinburgh. Onward he went, through miry ways and over trackless commons,-sometimes dashing up to his saddle-bows through a ford swollen by mountain rains-sometimes bewildered in the mists of the trackless moorlands. As he approaches the borders new terrors await him. He rides in the dim morning twilight, with his ears alive to every sound. He fancies that the tread of horses and of cattle is at hand. He dares not hide himself, for he would be mistaken for a spy. He rides boldly on into the troop of marchers who are returning from their foray; and, to his surprise, is permitted to escape, after he has been saluted with a few words of opprobrium, and a snatch of the ballad of Johnnie Armstrong. At last he reaches "Edina, Scotia's

*Lodge's Illustrations.

darling seat," after a perilous journey of five days. His dispatches are brought forth from their hidingplace; the great men meet and deliberate ;-and after a tarrying of a day or two, the express has to face again the same rough road.

James I. of England was nearly five weeks on his padded saddle, in his royal progress from Edinburgh to London; but Sir Robert Carey, determining to be the first to tell James that he was king of England, stole out of Richmond Palace, at three o'clock of the morning of Thursday, the 24th of March, and reached Edinburgh on the night of Saturday, the 26th, the king having gone to bed by the time he had knocked at the gate. This ride of four hundred miles, in seventy hours, gives one an elevated notion of the travelling accommodations of two centuries and a half ago. But it must be borne in mind that such instances were the exceptions to the rule of slow travelling. Although the Post was not established by law, there were post-masters, at the end of the sixteenth century, on all the great lines of roads; and, for a sufficient consideration, they would furnish such a traveller as Sir Robert Carey with abundant horses, that he might ride till they dropped,-as, indeed, he records one of his horses to have done. Then, again, although the roads were bad, the equestrian had many a mile of the smooth turf of an unenclosed country to gallop over. Let it not be forgotten, that if Sir Robert Carey rode from London to Edinburgh at the rate of six miles an hour, keeping on night and day,

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