And for an even longer time continued that prejudice against carriages which led to the framing of actual prohibitive laws. Even women were occasionally forbidden the use of coaches, and there is the story of the luxurious duchess who in 1546 found great difficulty in obtaining from the Elector of Saxony permission to be driven in a covered carriage to the baths—such leave being granted only on the understanding that none of her attendants were to be allowed the same privilege. So, too, in 1564, Pope Pius IV was exhorting his cardinals and bishops to leave the new-fangled machines to women, and twenty-four years later Julius, Duke of Brunswick, found it necessary to issue an edict—it makes quaint reading now—ordering his “vassals, servants, and kinsmen, without distinction, young and old,” who “have dared to give themselves up to indolence and to riding in coaches ... to take notice that when We order them to assemble, either altogether or in part, in Times of Turbulence, or to receive their Fiefs, or when on other occasions they visit Our Court, they shall not travel or appear in Coaches, but on their riding Horses.” More stringent is the edict, preserved amongst the archives of the German county of Mark, in which the nobility was forbidden the use of coaches “under penalty of incurring the punishment of felony.” So, also, we have the case of René de Laval, Lord of Bois-Dauphin, an extremely obese nobleman living in Paris, whose only excuse for possessing a coach was his inability to be set upon a horse, or to keep in that position if the horse chanced to move. This was in 1550. In England there was a similar feeling of opposition. In 1584 John Lyly, in his play _Alexander and Campaspe_, makes one of his characters complain of the new luxury. In the old days, he says, those who used to enter the battlefield on hard-trotting horses, now ride in coaches and think of nothing but the pleasures of the flesh. The once famous Bishop Hall speaks bitterly of the “sin-guilty” coach:— “Is’t not a shame to see each homely groome Sit perched in an idle chariot roome That were not meete some pannel to bestride Sursingled to a galled hackney’s hide? Nor can it nought our gallant’s praises reap, Unless it be done in staring cheap In a sin-guilty coach, not closely pent, Jogging along the harder pavement.” Possibly the same idea is to be found in the framing of a Parliamentary Bill of 1601 “to restrain the excessive use of coaches,” which, however, was thrown out. So again in 1623, the delightful though sadly biased water-poet, John Taylor, is lamenting the decadence of England, due, according to him, to the growing custom of driving in coaches.