Naturally enough, one of the questions of greatest concern at a
mediaeval court was that of precedence—who was the biggest man, and the
next and so on. Talk about comic opera! In more than one historic
instance the question of precedence among diplomats, or the consequent
squabbles between their trains of attendants, fairly “out-Herods Herod”
in farcicalness. “The Conferences of Ryswyk”, we are told, “were held in
a house which seemed to have been built for the purpose, with three
separate entrances and every convenience for preventing collisions; but
it was found impossible from first to last to sit at the single table in
the rooms assigned to the mediators, because no agreement could be come
to about the order of sitting; in that room they could only stand; they
sat in a circle in another room where there was no table. A Latin
protocol, which had been preserved of the proceedings at Nymegen
eighteen years before, was produced as a precedent, but in vain; it
contained a plan of the room used at Nymegen, showing the arrangement of
seats in it, together with the positions of the doors, windows and
fireplace—for these things may be important in determining which is the
top and which the bottom of a table. A round table was used at Cambray,
Soissons and Aix la Chapelle; but even a round table loses its
accommodating quality when it is discovered that the place of honor is
that opposite the door, and that every place of honor has a right hand
and a left.” A quarrel between two ambassadors’ wives has seriously
interfered with international negotiations, and a coachman’s obstinacy
has added thirty pages to the “Compleate History of the Treaty of
Utrecht.”