To which the Mayor answering boldly, replied: “If it please your Grace, there is a good deal more in it.” “What is that?” said she. “The hearts,” he replied, “of all your loving subjects.” “We thank you, Mr. Mayor,” said the Queen. This at any rate is a much more courtier–like account of the presentation than that recorded by another writer, by whom the Mayor is said to have made the following rhyming address to the Queen, which, if the idea is based on fact at all, is probably a travesty fabricated at a later date:— “We men of Coventree Are very glad to see Your gracious Majesty, Good Lord, how fair ye bee!” To which somewhat over–bold remark the Queen is stated to have replied sarcastically:— “Your gracious Majesty Is very glad to see Ye men of Coventree, Good lack, what fools ye bee!” In the year previous to the Queen’s visit the plague had committed great ravages in the city, hundreds of the inhabitants falling victims, and the “dreadful dead carts passing constantly through the streets taking their horrible toll from most houses, and picking up those who had fallen of the sickness in the streets.” Thus with the clothing business falling to decay without any substitute being introduced to fill its place, and suffering from the suppression of the religious houses, Coventry was in but a poor state at the time of Elizabeth’s visit. The Recorder’s speech, however, which was very lugubrious, probably exaggerated the situation, although, as Mr. Brewer says, “the ardour of the natives had been damped when they saw the gorgeous piles of religious splendour, so long their pride and boast, one vast heap of ruins.” The Queen during her visit lodged at the White Friars, then a residence of the Hales family, and was, notwithstanding the reputed decay and poverty of the times, entertained with lavish magnificence. The next Royal visitor within the city walls had no pageants, addresses, or honours showered upon her, but hapless Mary Queen of Scots was brought to Coventry and shut up a prisoner in the Mayor’s parlour during the year following the coming of her royal cousin. Again, three years later, in 1569, she was brought to Coventry and incarcerated in the Bull Inn (the site of which is now occupied by the Barracks), and kept under the charge of the Earls of Shrewsbury and Huntingdon. The citizens had during her incarceration within their walls the melancholy and troublesome task of keeping watch and ward night and day at each of the gates, so that none might pass to or fro without good cause.