[231] Ib., 174.
[232] Leet Book, 152. The total cost of these presents (exclusive of the 50 marks and the cup), with the carriage, was £12, 15s. 4d. In addition to this, the expenses of officers and all the worthy men, riding to Fullbrook, amounted to 29s. 6d.
[233] Ib., 138.
The Red and White Rose
We are now come to the time when the history of Coventry is closely interwoven with that of the nation at large. The city and its neighbourhood became the chosen home of the Court circle during the earlier part of the Wars of the Roses. The Lancastrian cause found some of its staunchest supporters among the folk of the "Queen's secret harbour," as the city was called, because Margaret of Anjou so often took refuge therein to plot and scheme for the undoing of the Yorkists. But the devotion of Coventry to Lancaster did not last throughout the struggle; the citizens' minds were alienated by the Queen's partizan fury at the "Diabolical Parliament" in 1460, and by the unruliness of her troops, and they afterwards professed themselves devoted followers of Edward IV. These professions did not, however, hinder them from backing the winning side when Edward's supremacy was imperilled through Warwick's revolt, and the Yorkist King punished their treachery by the confiscation of the city liberties. It was only by means of Clarence's costly mediation and the payment of an enormous fine that the citizens were enabled to make their peace with Edward. Thus Coventry partook to a greater extent than other towns of the miseries of this dynastic conflict. The citizen class were, as a rule, only too glad to let the barons fight out the question among themselves, submitting, as far as we can judge, to whichever army was victorious and at their gates. After all, the battles of the Roses meant little more than the concentration of the fighting power of the kingdom, usually at that period employed in desultory local warfare, into one place, and frequent provincial frays and skirmishes were really more harmful to the district wherein the feud raged than civil war itself.
Happily for the Coventry men there was in the earlier part of the fifteenth century no great lord living within the walls to drag them into his frays and quarrels, and to anticipate that great period of party strife which was so soon to break in upon the kingdom. It is true that the townsfolk had not always been able to keep clear of baronial influence. We hear of fighting between the young Earl Stafford, the lord of Maxstoke, and the citizens, though we are not told what was the cause of the quarrel. Such animosity was felt by the two parties at variance that in 1427 the Duke of Gloucester summoned the mayor with others of the citizens to Leicester, and bound them over to keep the peace.[234] Men held this earl, better known by his later title of the Duke of Buckingham, in great awe, for in war-time he could arm two thousand fighting men bearing the Stafford knot.[235] "The indignation of the lordship of the said duke,"[236] said Sir Baldwin Montfort, whom Buckingham imprisoned in Coventry because he made some difficulty about surrendering his manor of Coleshill into the duke's keeping ... "had in those days been too heavy and unportable for me to have born." We find the citizens, however, on good terms with this omnipotent nobleman during the civil war; and in 1458 the mayor and his brethren received an invitation to come and share in the festivities which took place at Maxstoke Castle on the occasion of the marriage of one of his younger sons.