coaches started from Leicester to Nottingham and London. It was probably the same house and the same sign as the Maiden Head, which is mentioned in the Chamberlains' Accounts for 1591-2. "Recd. of Wm. Hobbye for a messuage or tent, with the appurtenances called the Maydenheadd and a garden thereunto belonging lying on the East syde of St. M'tyn's Churche in his occupation." The Maiden Head is said to have been adopted as a sign by many inns in compliment to Queen Catharine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII, whose family bore for a crest, "a female's head, coup'd below the shoulders, habited az. on her head a wreath of roses alternatively ar. and gu."
The Lion and Dolphin stood in the Market Place, and coaches used to start from its doors for London, running through Northampton, St. Albans and Barnet. These Post-coaches with postilions "on a new plan," commenced running in 1765, leaving London every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday mornings at four o'clock, and starting from the Lion and Dolphin on the return journey at the same hour on the same days.
At the end of the 18th century the Bell in Humberstone Gate was a great coaching house. Every morning the London stage-coach started from its doors, and another coach used to leave three times weekly for Derby, Buxton and Manchester. It was the rendezvous of the Whigs during the unsuccessful candidature of Major Mitford in 1754, on which occasion the windows of the Three Crowns and the Lion and Lamb were broken by riotous mobs. The inn at that time seems to have been sometimes known as the "Blue Bell," for one of the popular election rhymes which were then being sung at Leicester began thus:—
"As I was going to the Blue Bell
I met Major Mitford going to hell."
A tragedy which befell a few years later, when John Douglas, then landlord of the Bell Hotel, was tried, condemned and executed for a highway robbery committed some years before, is related in Thompson's "History of Leicester in the Eighteenth Century."
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