Henry VI. visited Lincoln and held a Court at the Bishop’s Palace in 1440.
Henry VII. visited Lincoln in 1486, and was right royally entertained.
On the dissolution of monasteries [120c] by Henry VIII., Lincoln became the headquarters of 60,000 insurgents, who, by the subsequent “Pilgrimage of Grace,” made their protest against the spoliation, a.d. 1536.
In 1541 Henry VIII. made a progress to York, and, although he had called Lincolnshire one of
“the most brute and beastly shires in the realm,” he, on his way, visited Lincoln in great state. It is recorded that he found in the Cathedral Treasury 2,621 ozs. of gold and 4,285 ozs. of silver, besides jewels of great value.
On the commencement of the Civil Wars between Charles I. and his Parliament, the King came to Lincoln, where he received assurances of support from the Corporation and principal inhabitants. He convened there a meeting of the nobles, knights, gentry, and freeholders of the county. Lincoln Castle was taken by the troops of Cromwell, under the Earl of Manchester, in the year 1644.
James I. visited Lincoln a.d. 1617, hunted wild deer on Lincoln Heath, touched 50 persons for “the King’s evil,” attended service in the Cathedral, and cockfighting at “The Sign of the George.” [121a]
In 1695 William of Orange visited Lincoln, but it is on record that, being entertained the day before by Sir John Brownlow, at Belton, “the king was exceeding merry there, and drank very freely, which was the occasion, when he came to Lincoln, he could take nothing but a porringer of milk.” [121b] In Lincolnshire phrase, he had been “very fresh.”
Reviewing these historic items, I think we may say, with the historian Freeman, that Lincoln “kept up its continuous being, as a place of note and importance, through Roman, English, Danish, and Norman Conquests,” and that it has a record of which we may fairly be proud, as meriting the praise which old Alexander Necham, in his treatise “De divina Sapientia,” bestowed upon it,”
Lindisiæ columen Lincolnia, sive columna,
Munifica felix gente, repleta bonis.