Beckmann also informs us, that the great lords of Germany first imagined that they could suppress the use of coaches by prohibitions. There is still preserved an edict, in which the feudal nobility and vassals are forbidden the use of coaches, under pain of incurring the punishment of felony. Philip II., Duke of Pomeranian-Stettin, reminded his vassals also, in 1608, that they ought not to make so much use of carriages as of horses. All these orders and admonitions, however, were of no avail, and coaches became common all over Germany. Persons of the first rank (ladies we presume), in France, frequently sat behind their equerry, and the horse was often led by servants. When Charles VI., wished to see, _incognito_, the entry of the queen, he placed himself behind his master of the horse, with whom, however, he was incommoded in the crowd. Private persons in France, physicians, for instance, used no carriages in the fifteenth century. In Paris, at all the palaces and public places, there were steps for mounting on horseback. Carriages, notwithstanding, appear to have been used very early in France, as appears by an ordinance issued in 1294, for suppressing luxury, and in which the citizens were prohibited from using carriages. About 1550, there were at Paris, for the first time, only three coaches; one of which belonged to the queen; another to Diana of Poictiers, the favourite mistress of two kings, Francis I. and Henry II.; and the third to René de Laval, a corpulent nobleman, unable to ride on horseback. Henry IV. was assassinated in a coach; but he usually rode through the streets of Paris on horseback. For himself and his queen he had only one coach, as appears by a letter which he writes to a friend, which is still preserved: “I cannot _wait_ upon you to-day, because my wife is using my carriage.” Roubo, in his costly treatise on joiners’ work, has furnished three figures of carriages used in the time of Henry IV., from drawings preserved in the King’s Library: from them it is seen those coaches were not suspended by straps, that they had a canopy supported by ornamental pillars, and that the whole body was surrounded by curtains of stuff or leather, which could be drawn up. The coach in which Louis IV. made his public entrance about the middle of the seventeenth century, appears from a drawing in the same library to have been a suspended carriage. Our national chronicler, John Stowe, says coaches were first known in England about 1580; he likewise says, they were first brought from Germany by the Earl of Arundel, in 1589. Anderson places the period when coaches began to be used in common here about 1605. It is remarked of the Duke of Buckingham, that he was the first who was drawn by six horses, in 1619. To ridicule this pomp, the Earl of Northumberland put eight horses to his carriage.