Older than either of these is the Angel Inn, at Grantham. This building was formerly in the possession of the Knights Templars, and still retains many remains of its former beauty, particularly the gateway, with the heads of Edward III. and his queen Philippa of Hainault on either side of the arch; the soffits of the windows are elegantly groined, and the parapet of the front is very beautiful. Kings have been entertained in this house; but it seemed to bring ill luck to them, for the reigns of those that are recorded as having been guests in it, stand forth in history as disturbed by violent storms--King John held his court in it on February 23, 1213; King Richard III. on October 19, 1483; and King Charles I. visited it May 17, 1633. Ben Jonson, it is said, used to visit a tavern with the sign of the Angel, at Basingstoke, kept by a Mrs Hope, whose daughter’s name was Prudence. On one of his journeys, finding that the house had changed both sign and mistresses, Ben wrote the following smart but not very elegant epigram:-- “When _Hope_ and _Prudence_ kept this house, the _Angel_ kept the door, Now _Hope_ is dead, the _Angel_ fled, and _Prudence_ turned a w----.” The Angel was the sign of one of the first coffee-houses in England, for Anthony Wood tells us that, “in 1650 Jacob, a Jew, opened a coffee-house at the Angel, in the parish of St Peter, Oxon; and there it [coffee] was by some, who delight in noveltie, drank.” Finally, there was an Angel Tavern in Smithfield, where the famous Joe Miller, of joking fame--a comic actor by profession--used to play during Bartholomew Fair time. A playbill of 1722 informs the public in large letters that-- “MILLER is not with PINKETHMAN, but by himself, AT THE ANGEL TAVERN, next door to the King’s Bench, who acts a new Droll, called the FAITHFUL COUPLE OR THE ROYAL SHEPHERDESS, with a very pleasant entertainment between OLD HOB and his WIFE, and the comical humours of MOPSY and COLLIN, with a variety of singing and dancing. “The only Comedian now that dare, Vie with the world and challenge the Fair.” In France, also, the sign of the Angel is and was at all times, very common. The Hotel de _l’Ange_, Rue de la Huchette, appears to have been the best hotel in Paris in the sixteenth century. It was frequently visited by foreign ambassadors: those sent by Emperor Maximilian to Louis XII. took up their abode here; so did the ambassadors from Angus, King of Achaia, who, in 1552, came to see France, much in the same way as various ambassadors from all sorts of high and low latitudes occasionally honour our Court with a visit. Chapelle, a French poet of the seventeenth century, thus celebrates a tavern with this sign in Paris, frequented by the wits of the period:-- “Je n’ay pas vu vostre theâtre Qu’aussitot je ressors de là, Pour un Ange que j’idolâtre, A cause du bon vin qu’il a.”[389]