The Story of Coventry by Peter Walters

Author:Peter Walters
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750956635
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

A 1670 painting of the fiery John Davenport. (Yale University)

John Davenport died, appropriately enough, of apoplexy in March 1670 in Boston, half a world away from that old English city where he had spent his childhood alongside his kinsman Christopher. It is tempting to wonder if, as adults, they ever communicated again, or whether all traces of the friendship they had shared as boys had been lost in those bitter times.

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A GREAT REBELLION

On 13 August 1642, a royal herald appeared at the gates of Coventry, bearing news that King Charles I was approaching and wanted to enter the city. The king had with him a small force of 800 cavalry and 300 foot soldiers but the response, when it finally came back, was that he was welcome, but only with an escort of 200.

Charles flew into a rage and ordered his herald to declare the mayor and aldermen, and indeed the whole city, traitors to the Crown. For the herald, or to give him his full title, Rouge Croix Pursuivant of Arms, it must have been an uncomfortable task. He was Sir William Dugdale, antiquarian and Warwickshire country gentleman, and he had friends and even kinsmen inside that treasonous city.

Born at Shustoke in north Warwickshire, Dugdale had been sent to King Henry VIII grammar school in Coventry, where he was amongst the pupils of Philemon Holland, who first inspired in him a love of history. Despite this grounding in a city long known for its non-conformity, he was by 1642 an ardent Royalist.

In the eyes of the king, Coventry had plenty of form for this act of defiance. He shared his father’s suspicion of the place and must have felt himself vindicated when in 1637 Coventry had given a fulsome welcome to one of Charles’s most intractable Puritan critics, the lawyer and polemicist William Prynne, as he passed through on his way to imprisonment in Caernarvon Castle.

Yet Coventry was also a place whose central geographical location and highly defensible town wall made it an ideal headquarters from which Charles could launch the defence of his crown. Militarily, it would be useful in the coming armed confrontation with Parliament.

For months, that confrontation had manifested itself in a quietly ferocious contest for supremacy inside Coventry itself. The struggle centred on two men: Spencer Compton, Earl of Northampton, Warwickshire’s most prominent Royalist and Recorder of Coventry since 1640, and Robert Greville, Lord Brooke of Warwick Castle, a noted Puritan who had taken Parliament’s side from the beginning. Each had their supporters among the city aldermen – Henry Million and John Clarke for the king, John Barker and Thomas Basnet for Parliament, who took on the responsibility of distributing among their followers the ‘colours’ – green ribbons for the king, purple for Parliament.

In June, John Barker defied Northampton when he tried to implement the king’s Commission of Array, Charles’s attempt to raise troops around the country. The following month when the king summoned Coventry’s mayor, Christopher Davenport, and its sheriffs, Nathaniel Barnett and Samuel

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