Richard Evans was highly successful in the combined parts of coach-master, horse-owner, and innkeeper. The variety of his business was surprising, and his methods matched every shade. He ruled his stable-yards with a passionate storm of objurgatory eloquence, bore himself with a tactful but self-respecting deference to the great ones who honoured his house, was popular with the townspeople who used his assembly-rooms, and at one with the Town Commissioners, a body first established in 1779, and meeting, in those days before Town Halls, under his roof. One of his strange guests was the body of the Duke of Dorset, killed in 1815 in an Irish hunting-field, and brought to England for sepulture with his forefathers in the Sackville vault at Withyham, in distant Sussex. A kind of lying-in-state, with the public admitted to view, took place at every town where the mournful procession halted. The next year, 1816, Napoleon’s travelling carriage, captured after Waterloo, was here, being shown in the stable-yard for a week at sixpence a head to thousands of country-folk and colliers. The pit-men were not content with gloating over the capture: they wanted to mark their hatred of “Boney” by dragging his carriage out and burning it. [Illustration: HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1797. _After Rowlandson._] Richard Evans in 1821 sold his coaching business to his son, who took it to the newly built “New Hotel” in Bell Street, itself now a thing of the past. Shortly afterwards he relinquished the “Lion” into other hands, but in a few years the old house began to decline. Landlords and landladies succeeded one another at increasingly frequent intervals, and at last it was closed in 1838, to be used for a period partly as a private house and partly as a chemist’s shop. The growing dignity of the town and of municipal life had by this time begun to demand the provision of a Town Hall, and it was acquired and altered at a large cost for that purpose, only to be found so highly inconvenient that it was pulled down in 1869 and the building erected that now stands upon the site. Next in importance to the “Lion” was the “Swan,” already mentioned, which stood on the east side of High Green, where Lloyd’s Bank now is. In the old theatre down its yard, built in 1779, the Kembles, Mrs. Siddons, and many another trod the boards, and from the balcony over the “Swan” entrance Daniel O’Connell addressed excited crowds before the passing of the first Reform Bill. Reform, however, did not still political passions, for it was in front of this house that the election riot of 1835 took place, with the result that the military were sent for, the Riot Act read, volleys fired, and several persons—not rioters, but women and children—severely wounded.