Queen Mary’s Coronation carriage--or, as it was called in the language of that time, “coach”--was drawn by six horses, less for reasons of display than of sheer necessity, for, with a less numerous and powerful team, it would probably have been stuck fast in the infamously bad roads that then set a gulf of mud between the twin cities of London in the east and Westminster in the west. Only three other carriages followed her Majesty on that historic occasion, and the ladies who attended rode horseback. Two years after this new departure mention is found of a “coach”--still, of course, a carriage--made for the Earl of Rutland by one Walter Rippon, who in the same year appears to have built a new one for the Queen. The next patron of carriages seems to have been Sir Thomas Hoby, sometime Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the French Court: that Sir Thomas who lies beside his brother, Sir Philip, in their magnificent tomb in the little Berkshire village church of Bisham, beside the Thames. He owned a carriage in 1566. The progressive age of Elizabeth now opens. In 1564, six years after her accession, she was using a carriage brought over from Holland by a certain William Boonen, himself a Hollander. Boonen, indeed, became her Majesty’s coachman, but his services cannot often have been required, for, if we are to believe Elizabeth’s own words to the French Ambassador in 1568, driving in these early carriages, innocent of springs, must have been as uncomfortable as a journey in a modern builder’s cart or an ammunition-waggon would be. When his Excellency waited upon her, she was still suffering “aching pains, from being knocked about in a coach driven too fast a few days before.” Little wonder, then, that the great Queen used her coach only when occasions of State demanded. She journeyed to her palace at Greenwich by water, between Greenwich and her other palace of Eltham on horseback, and to Nonsuch and Hampton Court and on her many country progresses in like manner, resorting only to wheels with advancing years. How bad were even the roads especially repaired for her coming may be judged from a contemporary description of her journey along that “new highway” whose “perfect evenness” is the theme of the writer. “Her Majesty left the coach only once, while the hinds and the folk of a base sort lifted it on with their poles.” Majesty must have been sore put to it to look majestic on such occasions, and in the bad condition of all roads at that time we find a new significance in the courtliness of Sir Walter Raleigh, who at Greenwich threw his velvet cloak upon the ground for Elizabeth to walk over.