These early _berlins_ were not nearly so gorgeous as the heavier coaches which they gradually supplanted. Red cloth and black nails had taken the place of the gilt ornamentation and crimson hangings of the previous generation.[31] Only on festivals, we learn, the black harness “was ornamented with silk fringe.” The coaches used by the Emperor himself had leather traces, but the ladies of his suite had to be content with carriages the traces of which were made of rope. The glass windows which were such a conspicuous feature of the _berlins_, were also used in the larger coaches, finally, as I have said, eliminating the boot. Mr. Charles Harper thinks that the first English coach to possess them belonged in 1661 to the Duke of York. At first these windows seem to have caused trouble, and there is the ludicrous incident mentioned by Pepys, of my Lady Peterborough who “being in her glass-coach with the glass up and seeing a lady pass by in a coach whom she would salute, the glass was so clear that she thought it had been open, and so ran her head through the glass!” Lady Ashly did not like the new invention, because, as she said, the windows were for ever flying open while the coach was running over a bad piece of road. Lady Peterborough’s misfortune was tribute indeed to the maker! In this matter of the glass it would seem that Spain had taken the lead, and it is quite possible that Spain invented the first two-seated chariots. In 1631, thirty years before the first _berlin_ was made, an Infanta of Spain is reported to have traversed Carinthia “in a glass-carriage in which no more than two persons could sit.” What this was like we do not know. It may have had rude springs, and been built from the common coach models to a smaller measurement; it was certainly bootless, and framed glass or mica took the place of curtains. In France the first coaches to have glass windows, according to M. Roubo, created something of a Court scandal in the time of Louis XIII. The glass, he says, was first used in the upper panels of the doors, but was soon extended to the whole of the upper half of the sides and front of the body, so making of the carriage literally a glass-coach.