The story of Coventry

by Mary Dormer Harris

The chief feature of the Stuart period is the strengthening of the Puritan feeling among the citizens. Either owing to the influence of the Presbyterian Cartwright, who, during his tenure of the mastership of Leycester's hospital at Warwick, established his system of church discipline among the clergy of the county, or from some hereditary instinct, which had led them to embrace Lollardism under the Lancastrians, and furnish martyrs for the faggot under the Tudors, the men of Coventry grew more Puritan year by year. They greatly vexed the soul of King James in 1611 by refusing to kneel in receiving the Sacrament, a circumstance the English Solomon never forgot, and ten years later he refused to grant a new charter to the city until he was certified by the bishop that the orders of the Church were complied with.[354] Nor did a lawsuit, which the Prince of Wales carried on for many years with the corporation about the rent due to him from the monastery lands as lord of Cheylesmore, improve the understanding between the people and the Stuart kings. When, however, the famous writ of ship-money was first issued in 1635, it was not against the principle, but rather against the unfair assessment of the local tax, that the men of Coventry murmured. The city, they complained, was no longer prosperous, nor was it able to pay a sum so disproportionate to that levied on the remainder of the county. Many were the journeys the diligent town clerk, Humphrey Burton, undertook ere he could get the tax lightened for the citizens.[355]

PALACE YARD

But no readjustment of the assessment of this unpopular tax could win over the hearts of the Coventry men to King Charles. And when in August 1642, a few days before the royal standard was unfurled at Nottingham, Charles appeared before the walls and summoned the people of Coventry to admit him, they refused to allow him to enter the city.[356] This circumstance rankled sore in the King's mind, and it seems that the feeling was shared by his son, for when Charles II. came into his own again, he ordered that the walls of the city where his father had suffered this check should be demolished. The work of destruction, which was begun by the Earl of Northampton on July 22, 1662, occupied nearly 500 men for three weeks and three days,[357] and when it was over the history of Coventry as a fortification comes to a close. Moreover, the title of the bishopric was now transposed, running henceforth not Coventry and Lichfield but Lichfield and Coventry.

King James II., who tampered here as everywhere with the civic constitution in favour of the Tories, his supporters, paid the city a peaceful visit in 1687, was lodged in Palace Yard, and touched for the evil in S. Michael's church, on which occasion "the very galleries crackt again," the throng was so great.[358] This closes the list of notable royal visits to Coventry, and the interest shifts to the varying fortunes of the citizens. Although, as compared with London, provincial towns ceased to be great centres of trade, Coventry never gave itself wholly up to stagnation and decay, but always kept alive some sort of manufacturing activity. At first the settlement of Huguenot exiles gave an impulse to the silk industry, and for nearly two centuries the weaving of silk and ribbons was the main employment of the citizens. In the eighteenth century the manufacture of watches was introduced,[359] but it has been reserved for our own day to see the city again put on that busy, eager, thriving look which must have distinguished it under the later Plantagenets. The cycle manufacture has won back for the city some of the prosperity it once enjoyed. But nothing can bring back the pomp and grandeur and the semi-independence of mediæval times; neither can the modern builder lend it any of the consistent beauty of the architecture of the Middle Ages. Still, unlike Abingdon, Winchester, or S. Alban's, it is a town with a present to work in, as well as a past on which to look back. As for the future, who can tell?

FOOTNOTES:

[278] Leet Book, 322.

[279] They declared that Cheylesmore was "seyntwary," i.e. sanctuary. On the evils of rival jurisdictions, and the consequent escape of offenders fleeing from town justice, see Green, i. 311.

[280] Leet Book, 326.