The story of Coventry

by Mary Dormer Harris

If the father had chastised the men of Coventry with whips, the son was to chastise them with scorpions. Loans and subsidies were the order of the day, for the great treasure gathered together by Henry VII. was quickly dissipated by his successor. In 1524 a hundred and ninety-four persons advanced to Henry a hundred and fifty pounds eleven shillings by way of loan,[339] and this is only a single example of what was then a very common arrangement. But the citizens could ill bear the pressure of increased taxation. For some time their prosperity had been waning, for foreign competition had begun to tell upon the English cloth manufacture.[340] Discontent and divisions were rife among them as in the preceding century. During years of dearth the common lands had been ploughed up, and when the dearth was over—when, "thanks be now to almighty God," as the Leet Book says, "corn is comen to good plente and to easy and reasonable price," the ploughing was still continued, and the cattle of the common folk deprived of pasture.

In 1525 the citizens rose, after their old practice, to resist the enclosure of the common lands. On "Ill Lammas Day," say the annals, "... the commons of Coventre rose and pulled down the gates and hedges of the grounds inclosed, and they that were in the cittie shutt the Newgate against the chamberlain and their company. The mayor was almost smothered in the throng; he held with the commons, for which he was carried as prisoner to London; he was put out of his office and Mr. John Humphrey served out his year." A special commission under the Marquis of Dorset was appointed to try the rioters. Thirty-seven prisoners were sent to Warwick and Kenilworth Castles, and seven to the Marshalsea.[341] Some suffered at the pillory, others after long imprisonment were pardoned by the King on the occasion of the Pope's jubilee.[342] But the rulers of the city were highly unpopular, and frequent "slanders" were proclaimed against them.[343]

The annals record the discovery of the wildest schemes, which sprang, no doubt, from the misery of the people. In 1523 two men, Pratt and Sloth, were arrested in Coventry on the charge of treason. They confessed that their purpose was to kill the mayor and his brethren, rob S. Mary's Hall, where the common chest was kept, and take Kenilworth Castle. They were taken to London for judgment, but executed at Coventry, and their remains figured on the city gates.[344] The next year a further scheme came to light. This time the King's subsidy was the object at which the plunderers aimed; it was to be stolen from the collectors on the highway to London; the conspirators proposed to seize Kenilworth Castle and to fight there for their lives. These men, Phillips, a schoolmaster, Pickering, clerk of the King's larder, and Anthony Manville, gentleman, were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.[345]

The "King's Proceedings" of 1536 undoubtedly intensified the misery of the citizens. The monastery was dissolved by the royal commissioners; the cathedral church defaced and its roof pulled off, and the lead, worth £647, stacked within the desecrated building;[346] the house of the Franciscans razed "because the poor people lay so sore upon it;[347] and all monastic property seized into the King's hand." Dugdale, quoting Hales' letter to the Protector Somerset, attributes to the dissolution the state of decay and misery into which the city had fallen in the third year of Edward VI. "There were not at that time," the letter runs, "more than 3,000 inhabitants, whereas within memory there had been 15,000."[348] It is very doubtful whether the high figure is correct, and certainly the population never sank to so low as 3,000. In a petition coming from the people of Coventry in 1548 it is stated that there were "to the number of eleven to twelve thousand housling people"[349] within the city. But it was the sweeping and iniquitous act of confiscation, known as the suppression of the guilds and chantries, rather than the dissolution of the monasteries, which brought the citizens to the verge of ruin. So extensive was the house property belonging to the guilds, and so intimately were these bodies connected with the corporation, that this calamity involved the city finances in the most terrible confusion. Having no property from which to draw the money for the annual fee-ferm of £50, one or two persons, the citizens declared to the Earl of Warwick, were yearly ruined by the tax levied for its payment.[350] The poorer class—of late years greatly increased in numbers—were deprived of the guild charities, the children of a schoolmaster[351] and the less wealthy craftsmen of all hope of provision for old age and an honourable burial after death. The burgesses of Lynn and Coventry protested against the confiscation. There were but two churches in the city, the latter declared, "wherein God's service is done, whereof the one, that is to say, the church of Corpus Christi, was specially maintained of the revenues of such guild lands as had been given heretofore by divers persons to that use.... If therefore now by the act the same land should pass from them, it should be a manifest cause of the utter desolation of the city." For the people, the petitioners declared, "when the churches were no longer supported, nor God's service done therein, and the other uses and employments of those lands omitted, should be of force constrained to abandon the city and seek new dwelling places."[352] This energetic protest was not without its effect. The citizens were permitted to purchase back the guild lands for the sum of £1315, 1s. 8d., a very large amount in those days,[353] which, in spite of their poverty, they were enabled to gather together.

Once more in Mary's reign, January 31, 1554, when Coventry closed its gates against Lady Jane Grey's father, the Duke of Suffolk, the city became of strategic importance. The city failed to rise, and the Protestant cause in the midlands was for the moment lost. May be the citizens regretted their inertia in the years that followed when in 1556 Laurence Saunders and Robert Glover, martyrs, were led out to die in the Little Park. Of Glover, it is said that he remained "lumpish," being dull of spirit, and fearing that the Lord had withdrawn His favour from him. But a change overtook him on his way to the stake, so that he clapped his hands with joy, "seeming rather to be risen from some deadly danger to liberty and life, than as one passing out of the world by any pains of death."

By this time a royal visit had ceased to be a political event, it became merely an occasion for splendour, or an act of courtesy. Elizabeth visited the city in 1565, being lodged at Mr Hales' at the Whitefriars, and was greeted with much courtier-like compliment by the recorder, but the reception given to her has none of the significance which attaches to the welcome, say, of Margaret of Anjou. Little remains of Whitefriars save the east wing of the cloister with its fine groined roof of the fifteenth century; but an oriel window on the western side is still called after Queen Elizabeth, Coventry saw the great Queen's rival a few years later, when in 1569, in order to be out of reach of her confederates in the north, Mary Queen of Scots was hurriedly conveyed from Tutbury to the city, and placed under a strong guard. She was confined first in the "Bull Inn," and then in S. Mary's Hall. Some years later this Queen's grand-daughter, another of the fascinating, luckless Stuarts, was hurried in November 1605 from Combe Abbey to Coventry, out of reach of the plotters of the Gunpowder Treason. This was Elizabeth, later the "winter Queen" of Bohemia. She was lodged for the nonce with Mr Hopkins of Palace Yard.

Queen Mary's Chamber

The old town house of the Hopkins' family still stands in Earl Street, having undergone perhaps more vicissitudes than any other well-known house in Coventry. Once a coaching-inn, known as the "Golden Horse," and a ladies' school, kept by one Miss Sheldrake, it was originally the home of the Hopkins' family, who first appear in Coventry history in the late fifteenth century. Its best-known member, when sheriff of Coventry, suffered much by reason of his openly expressed Protestantism, and fled to Basle in Queen Mary's reign. In this house James II. held his court in 1687, and here were also lodged Princess Anne and George of Denmark. It is a beautiful old seventeenth-century quadrangle with fine exterior lead-work, containing in its upper storey, a stone chimney-piece of classic type, disfigured by a coat of paint, while its banqueting-chamber with its finely panelled plaster ceiling presents a veritable image of decay. The tombs of the family with their busts and togas, 'mid all the panoply of classic memorial and woe, appear in the Cappers' chapel of S. Michael's church.