Richard III., “as every schoolboy knows,” marched out from Leicester to defeat and death at Bosworth, but he did not march forth from the Castle, even then dilapidated. He slept—or, as Shakespeare would have it, his guilty conscience refused to let him sleep—the night before the battle at the “Blue Boar” inn.

Two days later, his body, flung ignominiously across the back of a horse, was brought back, and exposed publicly to view in the Hall of the Guild of Corpus Christi, and was then buried without any ceremony in the Greyfriars Church. There it remained for fifty years, until the destruction of the religious houses caused the remains of all who lay there to be cast away. Bow Bridge, crossing the river Soar near by, was replaced by the present iron bridge in 1862, and on it may be seen the inscription, “Near this spot lie the remains of Richard III., the last of the Plantagenets.”

The Corporation of Leicester has an ancient and honourable history, and has included in the many centuries of its existence a number of public-spirited men. “Many centuries” truly it is that the Corporation has existed, for the time is not known, since Leicester was Leicester, when there was not a Corporation. There was, however, no Mayor, so-styled, until 1251.

The Town Hall that served the purpose from 1563 until 1876, when the great modern building was completed, still stands, hard by St. Martin’s Church, with which in fact it was closely associated, having been originally the home of a religious fraternity—the Corpus Christi Guild. The Mayor’s Parlour, built in the time of Charles the First, panelled with bog oak, remains, as also does the public hall, with timber roof, like a boat reversed. The building was self-contained to the minutest particulars, for adjoining the Parlour where the Worshipful the Mayor took his ease, was, and is, the cell where petty malefactors found what ease they might until justice, as then understood, dealt with them. A very full and complete account might be written of the old Town Hall, for the records concerning it are full and precise, but they lack confirmation of the tradition that Shakespeare himself acted with Richard Burbage’s company of players here. Mayor, aldermen, and common councillors were not averse from merry-making, and we have accounts of the mafficking that took place here to celebrate the defeat of the Armada, when the Town Waits were had into the gallery and discoursed on pipe and tabor, and the town went wild with joy, and fell on each other’s necks and wept, by which it seems that the glories of Mafeking Night in the twentieth century had their counterpart in the sixteenth. And a good thing, too; for when we cease to rejoice in victory we shall be a pitiful folk indeed. What the pro-Spaniards thought of it all is not recorded.

The old town library, adjoining, in what was once the Chantry House belonging to the Guild of Corpus Christi, was founded in 1632, chiefly from books until then belonging to St. Martin’s Church, and remains practically a museum of ancient devotional manuscripts and early printed works.

The modern Town Hall, eminently characteristic of the architecture that came into so extraordinary a vogue in the ’seventies and was completed in 1876, is of course in the style called “Queen Anne,” and largely in red brick. So greatly has the municipal business of Leicester grown that it is already much too small; but it is one of the most tasteful buildings of the kind in the country, and designed more with a view to excellence of detail than of the flamboyant eccentricity that has later prevailed. The design of the Crown Court is especially beautiful, in the restrained way, and even in the detail of the finely imagined decorative iron railings of the gardens in Town Hall Square this rare artistic quality is seen.

It will be judged from all the foregoing that Leicester is a large and busy place. It now numbers 215,000 inhabitants, engaged chiefly in the making of boots and shoes and hosiery. With a well-deserved Radical reputation—Leicester ever was Radical, even before it made boots—the Corporation now owns the Water, Gas, Electricity, and Tramways undertakings and makes them all pay a profit in relief of rates. Indeed, they do things on a business footing. In the public libraries of other towns where the betting news in the newspapers is discouraged, it is simply blacked out, but here it is neatly pasted over with local advertisements, and from them the Library garners in a modest income of between £20 and £30.

In every way this is very different from what John Evelyn, writing in 1654, calls “the old and ragged Citty of Leicester.” In his time it was “large and pleasantly seated, but despicably built, the chimney-flues like so many smiths’ forges.” But it is within the last decade that Leicester has suddenly rebuilt itself. It had grown enormously, but the ancient central streets were until then obviously ancient. Now they are Twentieth Century streets, in all—in the way of gigantic and highly ornate frontages with show-shops—that the expression indicates.

The growth of industrialism has wrought this marvellous change. History—a fine stirring history—the town has, but towns cannot live on the memory of times past. For the first small beginnings of modern Leicester you must trace back to 1680, when one Alsop began—not brewing—but stocking-weaving, in a small way. He prospered, and his success attracted others, and thus the “ragged old Citty” that Evelyn saw was first set upon its march to modern greatness. But I do not see, anywhere, a statue to that original stockinger. In a century from that time the trade of town and shire in hose was the largest in the world. The total population of Leicester was then only 14,000, and of these 6,000 were stocking-weavers.

In recent times Leicester had a reputation for cheap cotton hose and “side-springs.” All the “Jemimas” in the kingdom came from Leicester, and the prototypes of Arthur Sketchley’s porky “Mrs. Brown at the Seaside,” and at half a hundred other places, and the fat old women pictured in the comic prints of 1860-1870, with their legs encased in white cotton stockings bulging over their “side-spring” boots, were fully furnished, as to coverings of legs and feet, from here. “Jemimas”—that is to say, “side-spring” boots—are no longer worn, but elastic webbing for other purposes continues to be a staple product.

Leicester became a boot and shoe manufacturing town in 1859. The trade began in a small way, but now employs close upon 40,000 people. Boots and shoes for women and children, and canvas shoes, are the kinds specially made. Fancy hosiery also is an important trade, and when jerseys were the fashion, about 1879, Leicester did very well. The blouse has probably come to stay, and Leicester rejoices in the prospect, for it has busy factories engaged in the production of them. In addition to these, and a host of minor industries, the stout tapestry fabrics used in upholstery, and particularly in the cushions of railway carriages, are made almost exclusively here.

And lastly, it was at Leicester in 1841 that the idea of railway excursions first occurred to Thomas Cook; and from Leicester to Loughborough, a distance of 10¾ miles, the first excursion train and the first Cook’s tourists set out, on July 15, 1841. The double journey cost a shilling and 670 excursionists took tickets.

The site of the great Abbey of Leicester, the place where Cardinal Wolsey died in 1530, on his way from York to London, where he would undoubtedly have been executed had he survived the journey, lies beside the river Soar—own brother to the Saar in Alsace, and the Suir in Ireland—which skirts the western and north-western sides of the town, and has always rendered it subject to floods.

You come to the site of Leicester Abbey by way of many hosiery factories, whence emerge the warm oily smells of wools and worsteds and the click-clack of machinery; and thence by Frog Island. The Abbey of St. Mary de Pratis, i.e. “St. Mary of the Meadows,” stood, as its name indicates, by the water-meadows of this sluggish river. The site, with merely the old surrounding precinct wall, is alone left, and even the first secular mansion built there stands a roofless ruin.

Wolsey was under arrest, and worn with illness and misfortune, when he came here. In the words of Shakespeare:

He died the third day of his arrival, in the sixtieth year of his age. On the second day, observing his custodian, the Lieutenant of the Tower, in the room, he said, “Master Kyngston, I pray you have me commended to His Majesty. Had I but served God as I have served him, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs. But this is my just reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but only my duty to my prince.”

And thus died the proud Cardinal, before whom all in the land, except his Sovereign, had earlier abased themselves. They buried him in the Lady Chapel, but in another seven years the Abbey itself was dissolved, its lands seized, and the buildings themselves destroyed; and no man knows what became of the body of Wolsey. Like that of Richard the Third, it was obscurely dispersed with others, and hence these two great historic characters have no known resting-place and no monument. The site was granted to a Mr. Cavendish, and on it in another thirty years was built the mansion whose ruins are now to be seen.

This way ran the old original road out of Leicester to the north, instead of the existing road through Belgrave. The change, like that in the southern approach to the town, was due to the dread with which wayfarers in the early years of the seventeenth century regarded the place, sore stricken with the plague. They sought the byways and unfrequented paths outside the walls, and were careful not to enter the town itself. Traffic has ever been conservative, and when all fear of infection had at last died out, the new routes thus struck out were retained.