The old town house of the Hopkins' family still stands in Earl Street, having undergone perhaps more vicissitudes than any other well-known house in Coventry. Once a coaching-inn, known as the "Golden Horse," and a ladies' school, kept by one Miss Sheldrake, it was originally the home of the Hopkins' family, who first appear in Coventry history in the late fifteenth century. Its best-known member, when sheriff of Coventry, suffered much by reason of his openly expressed Protestantism, and fled to Basle in Queen Mary's reign. In this house James II. held his court in 1687, and here were also lodged Princess Anne and George of Denmark. It is a beautiful old seventeenth-century quadrangle with fine exterior lead-work, containing in its upper storey, a stone chimney-piece of classic type, disfigured by a coat of paint, while its banqueting-chamber with its finely panelled plaster ceiling presents a veritable image of decay. The tombs of the family with their busts and togas, 'mid all the panoply of classic memorial and woe, appear in the Cappers' chapel of S. Michael's church. 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, 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 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 new charter to the city until he was certified by the bishop that the orders of the Church were complied with.[354] Nor did a lawsuit, which the Prince of Wales carried on for many years with the corporation about the rent due to him from the monastery lands as lord of Cheylesmore, improve the understanding between the people and the Stuart kings. When, however, the famous writ of ship-money was first issued in 1635, it was not against the principle, but rather against the unfair assessment of the local tax, that the men of Coventry murmured. The city, they complained, was no longer prosperous, nor was it able to pay a sum so disproportionate to that levied on the remainder of the county. Many were the journeys the diligent town clerk, Humphrey Burton, undertook ere he could get the tax lightened for the citizens.[355] [Illustration: PALACE YARD]