COVENTRY.
The road from Warwick to Kenilworth is one of the loveliest in England; and that from Kenilworth five miles further on to Coventry is acknowledged to be the most beautiful in the kingdom; yet it is only a different kind of beauty from the other, as that is from the beauty of the road between Warwick and Stratford.
COVENTRY CHURCHES AND PAGEANT
Till you reach Kenilworth you have all the varieties of charming rural scenery—hill and dale, field and forest, river-bank and village, hall and castle and church, grouping themselves in ever-changing pictures of beauty and grandeur; and now you come to a straight road for nearly five miles, bordered on both sides by a double line of stately elms and sycamores, as impressive in its regularity as the preceding stretch had been in its kaleidoscopic mutations.
This magnificent avenue with its over-arching foliage brings us to Coventry, no mean city in our day, but retaining only a remnant of its ancient glory. In the time of Shakespeare it was the third city in the realm—the "Prince's Chamber," as it was called—unrivalled in the splendor of its monastic institutions, "full of associations of regal state and chivalry and high events."
In 1397 it had been the scene of the famous hostile meeting between Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford (afterwards Henry IV.), and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, which Shakespeare has immortalized in Richard II. Later Henry IV. held more than one parliament here; and the city was often visited and honored with many marks of favor by Henry VI. and his queen, as also by Richard III., Henry VII., Elizabeth, and James I.
Coventry, moreover, played an important part in the history of the English Drama. It was renowned for the religious plays performed by the Grey Friars of its great monastery, and kept up, though with diminished pomp, even after the dissolution of their establishment. It was not until 1580 that these pageants were entirely suppressed; and Shakespeare, who was then sixteen years old, may have been an eye-witness of the latest of them. No doubt he heard stories of their attractions in former times, when, as we are told by Dugdale, they were "acted with mighty state and reverence by the friars of this house, had theatres for the several scenes, very large and high, placed upon wheels, and drawn to all the eminent parts of the city for the better advantage of spectators; and contained the story of the New Testament composed into old English rhyme." There were forty-three of these ancient plays, performed by the monks until, as Tennyson puts it,
"Bluff Harry broke into the spence,
And turned the cowls adrift."