184 ROAD, TRACK, AND STABLE. 
so slowly that these functionaries could easily go 
ahead, when necessary, and engage apartments and 
refreshments at the next inn where a stop was to be 
made, They were also extremely useful in putting 
their shoulders to the wheel, when, as often hap- 
pened, the vehicle stuck in a rut or in some “ peril- 
ous slough.” Later, in the seventeeth century, many 
Flemish mares were imported to England for carriage 
horses. They had more style and quality, but lacked 
endurance, as Gervase Markham pointed out in his 
well known work. The cream-colored coach horses, 
which are still bred in the Queen’s stables, though 
they have seldom been used since the death of Prince 
Albert, are descended from the same strain. In 
France, the Norman breed furnished the carriage 
horses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
and one writer speaks of the “richly mottled grays” 
that drew the coach of Richelieu. 
It is an apt illustration of the conservatism which 
prevails in, or perhaps more correctly is an essential 
part of, forms and ceremonies, that the state carriage 
horse of England has always been a century or so 
behind the times. Shire horses were used to draw 
Queen Anne’s coach, though they had been given up 
by private persons for many years before she came to 
the throne; and in the same way, during the present 
reign, the Hanoverian horse has held a place in the 
royal stables to which he is entitled only on the 
score of antiquity. Another similar example was to 
be found, until lately, in the steeds that horsed the 
chariots of the Roman cardinals. These too were of 
Flemish origin, “of great size, as fat as prize oxen, 
proud and prancing at starting, — all action and 
no go.” 
