84 The New -York Historical Society of incurring the Queen's jealousy. Soon, however, the growing importance of the mercantile class was also being displayed from the interior of gilded coaches and even Parliamentary restrictions failed to confine the coaching fever within class boundaries. Thus the proud Duke of Buckingham, finding that riding in coaches with two horses was no longer any distinction at all, and that the exclusive honor of four horses was allowed to nobility even of low degree, was forced by pride to set up a coach with six horses, whereupon the Earl of Northumberland, not to be outdone, established one with eight horses. In the colonies, however, right up to the eve of the Revolution, a coach and four was still a mark of aristocratic distinction. Thus, when Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere tabulated the aristocratic vehicles in use in the three principal American cities in 1770, he found a total of but twenty-six coaches owned by New Yorkers; and Kiliaen Van Rensselaer V, 15 th Patroon and 13 th Lord of the Manor of Rensselaerwyck, in his article in the Quarterly Bulletin for January 1945, reports that "whenever it was announced in New York that the Patroon was coming to the city by land, the day he was expected crowds would turn out to see him drive through Broadway with his coach and four." The only specimen of its class still remaining from Colonial times is the Beekman family coach, dating from the early 1770's, in which Washington (according to Beekman family tradition) was driven through the city during his residence here as President. This coach was presented to the Historical Society in 1911 by Gerard Beekman. The first century of the Republic witnessed two revolutions in the history of American coaching. By the first, the coach became a democratic institution, spreading its tentacles throughout the countryside, changing byways to highways, binding the sovereign States into a national community. By the second, the stage-