The obvious inference is that Parr had not heard of or (what is more probable considering his advanced age) had forgotten the coach built eleven years earlier for a much less conspicuous person than the sovereign. There is also mention in the Burghley Papers (III., No. 53) quoted by Markland, of Sir T. Hoby offering the use of his coach to Lady Cecil in 1556. It is quite likely that the coach brought by Boonen from the Netherlands served as a model for builders in search for improvements, as we read in Stow’s _Summary_: “In 1564, Walter Rippon made the first _hollow, turning coach_, with pillars and arches, for her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.” What a “hollow, turning” coach may have been it is difficult to conjecture. Drawings of a hundred years later than this period show no mechanism resembling a “turning head” or fifth wheel. Captain Malet[2] says that the Queen suffered so much in this vehicle, when she went in it to open Parliament, that she never used it again. The difference between the coach for ordinary travel and the chariot for ceremony is suggested by the next passage in the _Summary_: “In 1584 he (Rippon) made a _chariot throne_ with four pillars behind to bear a crown imperial on the top, and before, two lower pillars whereon stood a lion and a dragon, the supporters of the arms of England.” [2] _Annals of the Road_, London, 1876. Queen Elizabeth, according to Holinshed, used a “chariot” when she went to be crowned at Westminster in 1558. COACHES IN FRANCE. By way of showing how the old authorities differ, mention may be made of the coach which Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, brought from France and presented to the Queen, it is said, in 1580. This vehicle is cited as the first coach ever seen in public but inasmuch as we have ample evidence to prove the last statement incorrect, apart from the fact that the Earl died in 1579, nothing more need be said about it. France does not seem to have been very far ahead of Britain in the adoption of coaches. In 1550 there were only three in Paris; one belonged to the Queen of Francis I., another to Diana of Poitiers, and the third to René de Laval, who was so corpulent that he could not ride. Mr. George Thrupp, in his _History of the Art of Coach Building_ (1876), observes that “there must have been many other vehicles in France, but it seems only three covered and suspended coaches.” COACHES FIRST USED BY QUEEN ELIZABETH. Queen Elizabeth travelled in a coach, either the one built by Walter Rippon or that brought by Boonen (who, by the way, was appointed her coachman), on some of her royal progresses through the kingdom. When she visited Warwick in 1572, at the request of the High Bailiff she “caused every part and side of the coach to be opened that all her subjects present might behold her, which most gladly they desired.”