“If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet . . . you would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I’ll not march through Coventry with them that’s flat; nay, and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if they had gyves on; for indeed I had the most of them out of prison. There’s but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half shirt is two napkins tied together, and thrown over the shoulders, like a herald’s coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host at Saint Albans, or the red-nosed innkeeper of Daintry.”
Coventry, in right of this importance, became a city in 1451, and went on from good to better, until the suppression of the religious houses. At that time its population numbered 15,000, but within a few years it had declined to 3000. Yet in another thirty years the city is found receiving Queen Elizabeth not only with enthusiasm and splendid pageants, but with the present of a purse of £100; although the depression was still acute.
“It is a good gift, an hundred pounds in gold; I have but few such gifts,” said her Majesty, who was great but greedy.
“If it please your Grace,” answered that courtly Mayor, “there is a great deal more in it.”
“What is that?” she asked.
“The hearts,” he rejoined, “of all your loving subjects.”
“We thank you, Mr. Mayor,” said the Queen, “it is a great deal more, indeed.”
But she did not confer the honour of knighthood upon him.
James the First, visiting Coventry in 1617, was given £100 and a silver cup; probably in the hope of getting a renewal of the charter; but in the next reign we find a very different spirit. “Ye damnable puritans of Coventry,” says a letter-writer of the time, “have thrown up earthworkes and rampires against his Maiestie’s forces, and have put themselves in a posture of defence.” It was at this time that the expression arose of “sending to Coventry” any objectionable person. Those thus consigned to Coventry were prisoners of war, Royalists captured by the people of Birmingham, for whom no prison could be found except in this walled and fortified city.
Those walls were promptly destroyed at the Restoration, by order of Charles the Second, the citizens of Coventry offering no objection. They had grown weary of the Commonwealth, and when the King came to his own again the city was given over to festivity. The fountains spouted claret (not good claret, nor very much of it, we may suppose); bonfires blazed; and a deputation waited upon the King in London and gave him £50 and a basin and ewer of gold.