The Queen s Coacii-iiokses. 243 



action esteemed for state occasions and fashionable parades. Tliey are to be seen in perfection 

 in the equipages of royal personages. They are one of the principal parts of the show on the 

 days of drawing-rooms and levees. They catch the eye on their way to state dinners, to 

 garden parties at Chiswick or Sion House, and the suburban villas of the leaders of fashion 

 and the pillars of finance — the harness, like the liveries of the coachmen and footmen, gorgeous ; 

 the carriages brilliant, and fitted to the horses. They are also one of the sights of London, 

 in less magnificent trappings, but not less proudly stepping, in the height of the season in the 

 daily parades of the Park, when cotton stockings replace tht silk of the much-calved footmen 

 and coachmen on Court days. As a matter of course, in the several thousand pairs at work in 

 London alone, every degree of merit down to simple utility i-5 to be found. 



Specimens of this class of horse ascend as well as descend in the same scale ; sometimes 

 they rise from drawing one of the huge spring vans of a city warehouseman to be one of 

 a pair in the Court chariot of a duchess or the barouche of a millionaire ; more frequently they 

 fall, after losing their action, to drawing fiy-broughams. 



The type of the coach-horse of the time of Qusen Anne and the greater part of the reign of 

 the fir>t two Georges was the same as that which was lately found in the coaches of the cardinals 

 at Rome — of great size, as fat as prize oxen, proud and prancing at starting, " all action and 

 no go." This type is still preserved in the royal stables, in the shape ol the cream-co'oured 

 Hanoverian stallions, which were once invariably employed to draw the royal coach when the 

 British Sovereign proceeded in full state to open or close the Houses of Parliament, or any 

 other ceremony of equal importance. 



Since the death of the Prince Consort the state coach and its team of eight gigantic cream 

 stallions has never been used, but the breed is still carefully preserved at the royal breeding 

 paddocks, Hampton Court. During the reigns of the four Georges and until the death of 

 William IV. — when the kingdom of Hanover passed, by the operation of the Salic Law, to 

 Her Britannic Majesty's uncle the Duke of Cumberland — the royal stables always contained, 

 beside the creams, two other sets of Hanoverian state horses, one black, the other white (albinoes) 

 the last being the representatives of the white horse of Hanover. These were regularly imported 

 from the king's stud farms in Hanover. Since the Prussian conquest and the incorporation 

 of the kingdom of Hanover with the German Empire, the breeding-stud has disappeared, and 

 when inquiries were made in Germany in 1870, with the view of purchasing a team of white 

 horses for a circus, not a single specimen could be found. There is a picture at Windsor 

 Castle, by the late R. B. Davis, of the procession of King William and Queen Adelaide to 

 their coronation, in which the carriages with six black stallions, six white stallions, and several 

 sixes of Yorkshire bay geldings, precede the state coach containing the king and queen, 

 drawn by eight creams. 



By the kindness of Colonel Maude, C.B., the Crown Equerry, three of the original oil sketches 

 for that picture have been engraved for this work. The manes of the creams are plaited with 

 purple ribbons, the whites, blacks, and bays with crimson. This ribbon-plaiting, a most elaborate 

 and alniost artistic operation, takes a great deal of time. In 1S31 it assumed the importance of 

 a political incident. When Earl Grey and Lord Brougham waited upon the Sailor King, to 

 request him to dissolve the Parliament which had all but rejected the first Reform Bill, at 

 the last moment, when all the king's scruples had been overcome, the Earl of Albemarlcj 

 the Whig Master of the Horse, protested that there was not time to plait the manes of the 

 state carriage-horses. The answer of the king, that he " would go down in a hackney coach," 

 was soon spread through the country, and for the time he was the most popular of European 



