“Following the death in 1678 of Sir Richard Powle of Shottesbrooke in Berkshire his trustees sold a pair of coach horses for £20, a postillion horse for £5, the best coach for £50 (out of which they paid £6 3s 0d for parking fees in the city of London), a travelling coach for £30 and an old coach ‘past useing’ for £5. Sir Richard had served for a time as master of the horse to the Duchess of York (an office which he had bought) but according to Andrew Marvell he had been unable to ride because of a venereal infection.”
The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England, by J.T. Cliffe