Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ... those days,1 which, in spite of their poverty, they were enabled to gather together. That the great prosperity and glory of Coventry passed away with the Tudor kings is undoubted, just as the special interest in the city's history closes with the Wars of the Roses. A royal visit ceased to be a political event, it became merely an occasion for splendour, or an act of courtesy. Elizabeth visited the city in 1565, and was greeted with much courtier-like compliment by the recorder,9 but the reception given to her has none of the significance which attaches to the welcome, say, of Margaret of Anjou. Coventry saw the great queen's rival a few years later, when, 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. But memorable events connected with Coventry grow rarer and rarer as time goes on. 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,3 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 1 Corp. MS. B. 75. 2 Poole, Coventry, 90. 3 Green, Hist. Eng. People, 460. 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 now charter to the city until he was certified by the bishop that...