The early importance of the Derby inns as starting and arrival points for the coaches was somewhat obscured at a later date, when coaching had grown enormously, leading to the establishment of special coach-offices in the town, of which Stenson’s General Coach Office, in Sadler Gate, was the chief. An early notice of the “Bell” is found in 1698, when it was kept by one G. Meynell. In 1702 a “Widow Ward” was landlady. In 1761 the house and all its eatables and drinkables were made free to all-comers by Sir Henry Harpur during his Parliamentary candidature. A few years later, the house was rebuilt by a retired West India merchant, John Campion, whose initials, and the date 1774, elaborately done in leadwork, are to be seen to this day on an old pump, still in working order in the courtyard. The house remained in the Campion family until about 1865. The old claret-coloured brick front of the “Bell” looks down upon Sadler Gate, very much as of old, and its courtyard still echoes with the sound of prosperous business. [Sidenote: _HIGH TREASON_] The curtain of romantic history was rung down at Derby on a most dramatic situation, so late as 1817, in the executions here for High Treason. [Illustration: COURTYARD OF THE “BELL” INN.] The “high treason” for which Jeremiah Brandreth and his associates were then executed was a singular incident to have occurred so late as the nineteenth century. It was nothing less than an attempted rising against the Government; an armed effort at subverting the existing order of things that seemed more in keeping with the insurrections of earlier ages. It certainly never became a formidable movement, and was really an affair fomented by one Oliver, an agent of the Sidmouth-Castlereagh administration, which was uneasy at the generally disturbed state of the country, and fearful that the strong language indulged in by the Radical agitators among the working class and the swiftly increasing numbers of factory-workers might, if unchecked, lead to very serious movements. In this frame of mind, the weak and criminal Ministers appear to have considered that their best course was to employ spies who should worm their way into the confidence of the discontented classes, and actually provoke them into acts of armed rebellion that would give the Government an opportunity of repressing them violently.