With the arrival of James and his horde of hungry Scots, and the

setting-up of supernumerary establishments for Anne and the royal

children, the progress became a more unwieldy institution than ever.

During the greater part of 1603 the court was abroad. The triumphal

descent of the King in April and May was practically a progress. So was

that of Anne in June. There was a regular progress in August and

September, and the prevalence of plague compelled the prolongation of

this throughout the autumn, until the weary court sank into its winter

quarters at Christmas. A groan went up to Lord Shrewsbury from Robert

Lord Cecil at Woodstock, which he found an 'unwholesome' and 'uneaseful'

house, not able to lodge more than the King and Queen, the privy chamber

ladies, and some three or four of the Scottish Council. 'Neither

Chamberlain, nor one English counsellor have a room, which will be a

sour sauce to some of your old friends that have been merry with you in

a winter's night, from whence they have not removed to their bed in a

snowy storm.' The plague was driving the court up and down. 'God bless

the king, for once a week one or other dies in our tents.'[416] In the

same strain wrote Levinus Muncke a little later to Winwood from Wilton

of 'these arrant removes', in which 'we endure misserie apace and want

of all things, which I never thought the country so unable to supply

us'.[417] Nevertheless, James maintained the tradition, and devoted a

month or two in each year to a progress, which, but for the occasional

presence of the queen or prince, and the attendance, not quite

invariable, of the council and household, did not differ much in

character from his far more frequent hunting journeys. His direction was

generally determined by the existence of hunting facilities, and such

districts as the New Forest, Wychwood and Sherwood Forests, and

Salisbury Plain figure again and again in the 'gestes'. He had reached

Southampton and even the Isle of Wight in 1603, and probably repeated

his visit in 1607 and 1611. He also touched the sea at Lulworth in 1615.

He visited Oxford from Woodstock in 1605 and Cambridge twice during

hunting journeys in 1615. Anne made an independent progress to the west,

for the sake of the Bath waters, in 1613, and got as far as Bristol.

We have had sufficient peeps behind the court arras to give a pleasantly

sub-acid flavour of irony to the effusive accounts of royal receptions

contained in official chronicles, or in the semi-official narratives of

poets who were anxious to preserve the memory of the verses and devices

contributed by themselves.[418] These in their turn enable us to

recapture something of whatever rapture the rather artless forms of

_mimesis_ employed may have awakened in Renaissance breasts; although of

course the few devices of which details have reached us are but a tithe

of those on whose fantasy and grace the dust of oblivion has for

centuries lain thick. It was naturally at the visits to private houses

that the spirit of sheer entertainment had fullest scope, and a glance

at the diaries for Kenilworth in 1575 or for Elvetham in 1591 will show

the variety of pastime which ministered spectacle to the eyes and

flattery to the self-esteem of Oriana on her holidays. The visit to

Kenilworth extended over three weeks. The Queen arrived on 9 July and

was greeted with speeches by Sibylla, by a porter as Hercules, and by

the Lady of the Lake, and that she might not forget that she was a

scholar, with a Latin speech by a Poet. July 10 was a Sunday, and after

divine service there was a display of fireworks. On 11 July the Queen

hunted, and on her return listened to an out-of-door dialogue between a

Savage Man--the mediaeval folk-personage known as the 'wodwose'--and the

classical Echo. July 12 was a day of rest, and 13 July was again devoted

to hunting. On 14 July came a bear-baiting, another display of

fireworks, and acrobatic feats by an Italian. After two days' interval,

the sports began again on 17 July, with country shows of a bride-ale, a

quintain, and the Coventry Hock-Tuesday play.[419] This was followed in

the evening by a play and banquet. A mask was held in readiness, but not

used. On 18 July, after a hunt, came the principal show, an aquatic one

of the Delivery of the Lady of the Lake, with the classical Arion riding

on a dolphin; and the Queen held an investiture, and 'touched' poor folk

for the 'evil'. On 19 July the Coventry show was repeated, and by this

time the weather had broken up, and the royal zest for spectacles was

perhaps exhausted. A projected show of Zabeta and a device of an ancient

minstrel were laid aside, and the final week was uneventful, until the

departure on 27 July after a show in farewell by Silvanus. All this was

described, for the benefit of such of the Queen's lieges as had not the

fortune to be present, in a printed narrative by George Gascoigne, who

shared with William Hunnis of the Chapel Royal the main responsibility

for the mimetic devices, and in another, racy and full of vivid detail,

by one Robert Laneham, keeper of the council chamber door, who was in

attendance as an officer of the household.[420] The entertainment at the

much shorter visit to the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham in Hampshire,

sixteen years later, was on very similar lines. The house was small, and

a temporary 'room of estate' and other buildings had been constructed in

the park, near an artificial pond, containing a Ship Isle, a Fort, and a

Snail Mount. The Queen was greeted on arrival with a Latin speech by a

Poet, and a ditty by the Graces and the Hours. A salute was fired from

the pond. After supper there was a concert with a pavane by Thomas

Morley. On the second day, after the Countess had made her offering in

the morning, there was a great water-show on the pond, with Silvanus and

the sea-gods Neptune, Oceanus, Nereus, and Neaera, which served to

introduce further gifts. On the third day Elizabeth was awakened with a

pastoral song of Phyllida and Corydon. After dinner there was an

exhibition game of 'board and cord', which must have been a very close

anticipation of lawn-tennis, and in the evening a banquet in the garden

and a display of fireworks. On the fourth morning came Aureola, the

fairy queen, with a round of dancing fairies, and as the Queen departed

there were Nereus and Sylvanus and their companies at the pond, the

Hours and Graces weeping, a speech from the Poet dressed in black, and a

farewell ditty at the park gate.[421] I have set the Kenilworth and

Elvetham entertainments side by side, partly to illustrate the

permanence of type, and partly because, if any actual sea-maid and

fireworks gave Shakespeare a hint for Oberon's famous speech in _A

Midsummer-Night's Dream_, it must surely have been those which were

comparatively fresh in the memories of his hearers.[422]

The medley of Kenilworth and Elvetham repeats itself elsewhere; nor is

the imaginative range a very wide one. Classical, romantic, pastoral,

and folk-lore elements blend in quite sufficient congruity. The pagan

divinities called upon are the out-of-door ones, Pan and Ceres at

Bisham, Apollo and Daphne at Sudeley; and these, with the Nymphs

(Orpington, Cowdray, Harefield) and Satyrs (Harefield, Althorp), may

make easy acknowledgement of fundamental kinship with Aureola or Queen

Mab and the native fairies (Woodstock, Norwich, Hengrave, Althorp) and

woodwoses (Cowdray, Bisham). So, too, the rustic revelry of morris or

country dance (Warwick, Cowdray, Althorp, Wells) or the choosing of the

Cotswold Queen (Sudeley) passes readily enough into the manner of the

formal pastoral, as we find it in Sidney's _Lady of the May_ (Wanstead)

or his sister's later dialogue of _Thenot and Piers_; which in turn have

their affinities to the mediaeval _débat_, surviving in the dialogue of

Constancy and Inconstancy (Woodstock), and in the 'contentions' of Sir

John Davies between a Gentleman Usher and a Poet, and a Maid, a Wife,

and a Widow.[423] To a modern taste, perhaps the most attractive

entertainments are the simple ones in which the Gardener and the

Mole-catcher or the Bailiff and the Dairymaid offer the naïve welcome of

the rustic folk, or those to which the circumstances of place and time

give something of a personal touch; as at Theobalds, where the hermit's

cell typifies the temporary retirement of Burghley from public life, or

at Rycote, where messengers bring in letters and jewels from sons and

daughters of the house in Ireland, Flanders, France, and Jersey. Only

fragments are preserved of the Harefield entertainment in 1602, but here

a delicate fancy must have governed the devices, suggesting, for

example, the presentation of a robe of rainbows on behalf of St.

Swithin, and the personification of Harefield itself as Place 'in a

partie-colored robe, like the brick house', accompanied by Time 'with

yeollow haire, and in a green roabe, with an hower glasse, stopped, not

runninge'. Here, too, was repeated the pretty notion of Elvetham, and at

the royal departure there was Place again 'attyred in black mourning

aparell', to bid farewell. In many instances the _mimesis_ is so

contrived as to lead to the introduction of the gift, which we may

gather from the Hicks correspondence to have been looked upon as an

obligatory rite of hospitality. The frugal and ostentatious soul of

Elizabeth loved gifts; but James is said, at any rate on his first

coming, to have thought it the more kingly part to decline them.[424]

The mimetic entertainment itself, indeed, seems to have lost something

of its vogue with the change of reign; possibly the King was less

tolerant than his predecessor of pedantries other than his own. There

are, of course, the three Sibyls at Oxford in 1605, which are said to

have given a hint for _Macbeth_, and the amazing Queen of Sheba show in

1606, which has been preserved for us by the wicked wit of Sir John

Harington.[425] And there are three examples from the pen of Ben Jonson,

to whose ingenuity and learning the _genre_ made a natural appeal, and

who had the art to give dramatic life and point even to such trifles.

These are the _Satyr_, with which Lord Spencer welcomed Anne and Henry

at Althorp in 1603, the _Penates_, written when James, like Elizabeth

before him, went a-Maying with Sir William Cornwallis at Highgate in

1604, and the graceful Theobalds entertainment, in which the Genius of

the house, first weeping for the loss of his master, and then consoled

by Mercury, Good Event, and the Parcae, made symbolical delivery of it

to the Queen on its exchange by Lord Salisbury with James for Hatfield

in 1607.

The civic entertainments naturally followed more formal lines than those

in private houses. The citizens rode in their official gowns of black or

scarlet. There was a learned oration by the recorder, and very likely

also by the schoolmaster or a promising scholar of the grammar school.

In a cathedral town there was divine service to be attended in state.

The gift was no fantastic trifle, but a solid cup with angels in it. The

_mimesis_, too, was of a more old-fashioned type. Mercury or a nymph

might be there, but there were also the traditional pageants of the

guilds, bearing their scenes from the miracle plays, or more modern

allegories, or representations of local history and industry. At

Coventry, in 1566, stood the Corpus Christi cars of the Tanners,

Drapers, Smiths, and Weavers.[426] The variegated Norwich entertainment

of 1578 included a speech by King Gurgunt, a pageant of the

Commonwealth, with local craftsmen working at their looms, and a pageant

of the City of Norwich, with Deborah, Esther, Judith, and Queen

Martia.[427] Even as late as 1613, it was with scriptural pageants,

curiously contaminated with intrusive classical themes, that the

citizens of Wells greeted Queen Anne when she visited them from the

Bath. The Hammermen furnished the Building of the Ark, Vulcan, Venus,

and Cupid, and part of St. George; the Tanners, Chandlers, and Bakers,

St. Clément and his Friar, part of Actaeon and Diana, and 'a carte of

old virgines' in hides; the Cordwainers Saints Crispin and Crispinian;

the Tailors Herodias and John Baptist; and the Mercers the remaining

parts of St. George and of Actaeon and Diana. Three morrises also

accompanied the pageants.[428] George Ferebe's shepherd's song, as the

Queen had crossed the Wansdyke at Bishop's Cannings, two months before,

had struck a more up-to-date note.

In the university cities, municipal eloquence was redoubled by that of

public orators and professors. The sovereign was expected to attend

sermons and the academic exercise of disputations, and perhaps to wind

up the latter with a Latin speech. The spectacles generally took the

form of regular plays in Latin and occasionally in English. As the

academic drama lies rather aside from the main purpose of this book, I

confine myself to a brief chronicle. Elizabeth's first and only visit to

Cambridge was from 5 to 10 August 1564.[429] The plays took place in the

chapel of King's College, since the hall had been found unsuitable, and

the two provided by the University were directed by Dr. Roger Kelke, the

Master of Magdalene, with the aid of five others, one of whom was Thomas

Legge of Trinity, himself a dramatist. On Sunday, 6 August, the

_Aulularia_ of Plautus was given by actors selected from colleges other

than King's. Courtiers ignorant of Latin were wearied, but Elizabeth sat

through the three hours' performance without sign of fatigue. On 7

August came _Dido_, a Latin tragedy by Edward Halliwell, formerly Fellow

of King's, and on 8 August _Ezechias_, an English comedy by Nicholas

Udall, who was an Oxford man. Both these plays were performed by King's

men and both are lost. Elizabeth's patience was now exhausted, and she

gave some disappointment by declining to hear a Latin translation of the

_Ajax Flagellifer_ of Sophocles, which men of various colleges had been

appointed to give on 9 August. A contemporary letter from the Spanish

ambassador gives an account of a singular epilogue to the royal visit.

On 10 August Elizabeth had made her farewells, picking out Thomas

Preston of King's for special favour on account of his performances both

in the disputation and as an actor in _Dido_, and had reached the next

stage in her progress, Sir Henry Cromwell's at Hinchinbrook.

Hither she was pursued by some of the scholars with what appears to

have been a mask, originally intended to serve as an afterpiece to the

_Ajax Flagellifer_. They were allowed to present it, but it proved to

have been conceived in a spirit unsuited to the colour of the Queen's

Protestantism, and gave considerable offence. It was, in fact, a

burlesque of the Mass.[430] Two years later, from 31 August to 6

September 1566, it was the turn of Oxford.[431] The plays were in Christ

Church Hall, and in them the University had the assistance of Richard

Edwardes, formerly Student of Christ Church, and now Master of the

Children of the Chapel Royal. At the first, a Latin prose comedy called

_Marcus Geminus_, on 1 September, the Queen was not present. But she

attended Edwardes's _Palamon and Arcite_, an English play in two parts,

given on 2 and 4 September, and expressed high appreciation of the play

and the acting. The fact that three persons were killed by the fall of a

wall near the entrance door was not allowed to interfere with the

representation.[432] She also attended James Calfhill's Latin tragedy

_Progne_ on 5 September. The plays were all written by Christ Church

men, but the actors appear to have been drawn in part from other

colleges. John Rainolds of Corpus, afterwards a bitter opponent of the

academic stage, played Hippolyta in _Palamon and Arcite_.[433] All the

plays are unfortunately lost. The Spanish ambassador reported that there

had been nothing about religion in them, and delivered himself of the

compliment, 'Memorabilia profecto sunt Oxoniensium spectacula'.[434]

More deserving, more felicitous, or less audacious than Cambridge,

Oxford received the honour of a second royal visit in 1592.[435] It

lasted from 22 to 28 September.[436] The plays, given on 24 and 26

September, were Leonard Hutten's _Bellum Grammaticale_ and Gager's

_Rivales_. Both performances were at Christ Church, but probably actors

from other colleges took part. A jaundiced Cambridge visitor described

them as 'but meanely performed'. Elizabeth, however, was gracious, and

before departing 'schooled' John Rainolds, who had recently been

fulminating against Gager, for 'his obstinate preciseness'. It was,

perhaps, as a result of the mirth shown at Oxford, that both

Universities were invited to produce English plays at Court during the

following Christmas. This, however, Cambridge at any rate declined to

do, giving as their excuse the shortness of time, but more particularly

the customary limitation of their academic plays to the Latin

tongue.[437] There is no evidence, and little probability, that Oxford

were any more amenable.

James passed through the outskirts of Oxford in 1604, but plague

deferred his formal visit until 1605, when he came with the Queen and

Henry, and stayed from 27 to 31 August.[438] As he came down St. Giles',

he was greeted from St. John's with Matthew Gwynne's device of the _Tres

Sibyllae_. The plays were in Christ Church hall, and apparel was hired

from the King's Revels company in London. Inigo Jones, 'a great

traveller', was employed to furnish special machinery for changing the

scenes, but opinions differed as to his success, and also as to the

extent to which the King kept awake during the performances. Of these

there were four. On 27 August a piece, variously named _Alba_ and

_Vertumnus_, and written in part by Robert Burton, was acted by Thomas

Goodwin and other Christ Church men.[439] On 28 August actors from

various colleges gave an _Ajax Flagellifer_, not apparently a

translation from Sophocles, but an independent play. On 29 August St.

John's men gave a play by Gwynne, also called _Vertumnus, sive Annus

Recurrens_. These three, of which only the last survives, were in Latin.

On 30 August, for the sake of the ladies, the fourth play, again by men

of various colleges, was in English. It was Daniel's _Arcadia

Reformed_, afterwards published as _The Queen's Arcadia_. The King was

not present on this occasion. It is a little surprising that he did not

visit Cambridge until 1615. He had been preceded by Henry, who was there

with the Elector Palatine in 1613, and saw performances by Trinity men

in their college hall of Samuel Brooke's _Adelphe_ and _Scyros_ on 2 and

3 March respectively.[440] James went from Royston, and stayed from 7 to

11 March 1615.[441] The plays, given in Trinity College hall, were

successively Edward Cecil's Latin _Aemilia_, by St. John's men, which is

lost, Ruggle's _Ignoramus_, by men from Clare Hall and other minor

colleges, and Tomkis's _Albumazar_ and Brooke's _Melanthe_, both by

Trinity men. King's had prepared Phineas Fletcher's _Sicelides_, but the

King did not stay long enough to hear it. The visit evoked an outburst

of satirical verses, both from Oxford and from the lawyers, who were

stung by the wit of _Ignoramus_, with which the King was so pleased

that, after a vain attempt to get the actors to Whitehall, he paid

another visit to Cambridge, and saw it again on 13 May.[442] In March

1616 Cambridge men played before him at Royston; the name of the play is

not known.[443] Oxford did not get its chance again until 1618, which

falls outside the scope of this record.

The opportunities for spectacular display, which provincial towns

enjoyed during a progress, fell to London chiefly at the time of a

coronation, when on the day before the actual ceremony the sovereign

passed in state from the Tower to Westminster, through the principal

streets of the city which claimed to be, in a special sense, the royal

'Chamber'.[444] The outstanding architectural features of these

streets, St. Paul's, the gates at Ludgate and Temple Bar, the conduits

in Cornhill and Fleet Street, the great and little conduits, the

Standard, and the Cross in Cheapside, were recognized stations for

music, speechifying, and pageantry. At some of them temporary arches,

adorned with symbolical devices and hung with verses, spanned the

highway. When Elizabeth started, in a slight snow-storm, on 14 January

1558, the City companies, in their black and red hoods, lined both sides

of the way from Fenchurch to the Cross. The Queen, a coronetted and

golden figure, rode in a litter, surrounded by her train of pensioners

bearing their axes, and yeomen of the guard in their scarlet liveries

with the Tudor rose and crown upon their backs. Behind came the Master

of the Horse, leading a white hackney, and the Lords of the

Council.[445] There were seven pageants, each with its verses in English

or Latin and a child for interpreter. At the first, on a scaffold near

Fenchurch, the child delivered a speech of welcome. At the upper end of

Gracechurch Street was an arch bearing 'The Uniting of the two Houses of

Lancaster and York'; at the Cornhill conduit another, with 'The Seat of

Worthy Governance'; at the great conduit a third, with 'The Eight

Beatitudes'. The first bore representations of Henry VII, Henry VIII,

and Elizabeth herself; the other two allegorical figures of the morality

type. At the Cross stood the Mayor and Aldermen, with a speech by the

Recorder, and a thousand marks in a purse. At the little conduit was the

fourth and principal arch, with sterile and green mounts symbolizing 'A

Ruinous and a Flourishing Commonweal'; and Time and Truth presented the

Queen as she went by with an English Bible. At the door of the school in

St. Paul's Churchyard, a boy of Colet's foundation delivered a Latin

speech. At the Fleet Street conduit was 'Deborah, with her Estates,

consulting for the good Government of Israel'. At St. Dunstan's church

was another speech by a child of the hospital. And, finally, at Temple

Bar stood those ancient folk-figures and palladia of the City, without

whose beneficent presence no holiday could be complete, the giants

Gotmagot and Corineus.[446] When James was crowned on 25 July 1603, a

state entry on the traditional lines was planned, but when the arches

were already up it was decided that the risk of plague was too great,

and the ceremony was put off, first to the opening of a parliament

contemplated in October, and ultimately to the following spring.[447] It

took place on 15 March 1604. Jonson, Dekker, and Middleton were employed

to furnish verses and devices, and the structure of the five pageants

provided by the City was entrusted to Stephen Harrison, a joiner.[448]

There were three additional ones, of which two were contributed by the

Italian and Dutch traders in London, and the third, erected outside the

City boundary, by the City of Westminster and the Savoy Liberty. The

Venetian ambassador was perhaps prejudiced in reporting that the Italian

pageant excelled the others in design and workmanship. But all the

pageants, although they were enlivened by speeches and songs, for which

the services of trained actors were enlisted, appear to have relied more

upon architectural embellishment and less upon allegorical symbolism

than those of 1559.[449] The order was as follows: At Fenchurch were the

Genius of London and Thamesis, impersonated by Edward Alleyn of the

Prince's men and a boy from the Queen's Revels; at the Exchange the

Dutch and Italian arches, in neither of which a definite theme is

traceable; at Soper Lane end 'Arabia Britannica', with a speech by a

Paul's choir-boy and the song 'Troynovant is now no more a city'. In

Cheapside stood once more the civic dignitaries, with a speech by the

Recorder and three cups of gold for the King, Queen, and Prince. At the

Cross were Sylvanus and Vertumnus, with the 'Garden of Eirene and

Euporia'. In Paul's Churchyard the choristers sang, and a boy from the

grammar school was ready with his Latin. The pageant at Fleet conduit,

where William Borne of the Prince's had a speech as Zeal, represented

the 'Globe of the World'; that at Temple Bar the 'Temple of Janus'; that

of Westminster and the Savoy in the Strand the Rainbow, Sun, Moon, and

Pleiades. Jonson seems to have been responsible for the devices at

Fenchurch, Temple Bar, and the Strand; Dekker for those at Soper Lane

and the Cross; Middleton for at any rate a part of that in Fleet Street.

A few London entertainments of less importance are upon record. When

Elizabeth first came to the Tower on 28 November 1558, there were 'in

serten plasses chylderyn with speches, and odur places, syngyng and

playing with regalles'.[450] When James first came to London on 7 May

1603, Dekker had prepared a show of the Genius Loci and Saints George

and Andrew for performance at the Bars beyond Bishopsgate, which he

afterwards printed; but he was disappointed, for James entered by

another route, direct from Stamford Hill to the Charterhouse.[451] On 31

July 1606 he brought the King of Denmark to see the City, and there was

an arch with Neptune, Mulciber, Concord, and the Genius of London, and a

Summer Bower with a shepherd and shepherdess on the Fleet Street

conduit.[452] On 16 July 1607 he dined with Henry at the hall of the

Merchant Taylors, who spent £1,000 on the festivity. Ben Jonson wrote

verses to be spoken by John Rice, then a boy actor at the Globe, as an

angel of gladness, with a taper of frankincense in his hand, and the

hall was filled with music. There were lutenists in the windows,

wind-instruments on the screen, and three singers in a ship hanging

aloft. The court musicians, Thomas Lupo and Mr. Lanier, and Nathaniel

Giles and the Chapel were amongst those who made melody.[453] London was

to the fore again in welcome to Prince Henry on his creation as Prince

of Wales, sending the barges of the Lord Mayor and the companies to meet

him, as he came up by river from Richmond on 31 May 1610, with Corinea

on a whale to offer salutation on behalf of Cornwall at Chelsea, and

Amphion on a dolphin to do the same for Wales at Whitehall. The speeches

were written by Anthony Munday and delivered by Richard Burbage and John

Rice.[454] A month earlier, on 23 April, another show in Henry's honour

had been held at Chester. It was devised by Robert Amerie, an

ex-sheriff of the town, and consisted of a horse-race on the Roodeye,

after a procession in which the bearers of the bells that served as

prizes were accompanied by St. George and his dragon pursuing a Green

man or 'wodwose', while speeches were uttered by Fame, Mercury, Chester,

Britain, Cambria, Rumour and Peace, and Joy composed a _débat_ between

Love and Envy.[455]

Even in the absence of the sovereign, London had pageantry for its own

delight; folk-pageantry in the May-games, morrises and lords of misrule,

which sometimes made their way to Court;[456] municipalized

folk-pageantry in the Midsummer and St. Peter's Eve 'watches', which

barely survived into Elizabeth's reign;[457] municipal pageantry fully

established in the ceremony which has come down to our own day of the

Lord Mayor's show. The Mayor was installed on St. Simon and St. Jude's

Day, 28 October, and on 29 October he went by water to Westminster Hall

to be admitted before the barons of the Exchequer in the Exchequer

chamber. On his return he was met by his guildsmen and other citizens at

the waterside, and escorted to dinner in the Guildhall, and after dinner

to service in St. Paul's and back to his own house. There had been

pageants on this occasion in the fifteenth century, but these were

suppressed in 1481, and during the earlier part of the sixteenth century

the spectacular element was limited to a 'foyst or wafter' upon the

river, such as that with a device of a crowned falcon on a mount

environed with white and red roses, which the City provided by royal

command for the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533.[458] But shortly

after, and perhaps as a result of, the discontinuance of the 'watches'

in 1538, the installation pageant makes its appearance again. It can be

traced in 1540, and then, with the accompaniment of speeches, fireworks,

devils, and wodwoses', in the pages of Machyn's diary during most years

from 1553 to 1562.[459] Many details are preserved of the Merchant

Taylors' pageant of 1561 for Sir William Harper, and of the Ironmongers'

pageant of 1566 for Sir James Draper, in the device of which James

Peele, clerk of Christ's Hospital, and father of George Peele, had a

hand. On both occasions the speeches and songs were entrusted to boys

from Westminster, under the 'Mʳ of the quirysters', John Taylor.[460]

Some speeches are preserved from the Merchant Taylors' pageant of St.

John Baptist for Sir Thomas Roe in 1568, while James Peele was again

engaged by the Ironmongers to prepare a device, which, however, came to

nothing, for Sir Alexander Avenon in 1569.[461] It must be doubtful

whether there was a pageant in every year, but when William Smythe

described the installation ceremonies in 1575, he included as regular

features the 'deveils and wyldmen' which met the returning mayor at

Paul's Wharf, and 'the pageant of Tryumphe rychly decked, whervppon by

certayne fygures and wrytinges (partly towchinge the name of the sayd

mayor) some matter towchinge justice and the office of a magestrate is

represented'.[462] Von Wedel saw the Drapers' pageant for Sir Thomas

Pullison in 1584.[463] Custom seems to have assigned the provision of

the pageant to the 'bachelors' of the Lord Mayor's company, that is to

say, those freemen who were not yet advanced to be members of the

'livery' or governing body. The Ironmongers paid for the printing of

their pageant in 1566, but the first printed description now extant is

that of the Skinners' pageant for Woolstan Dixie in 1585, which was

written by George Peele. Peele seems to have inherited his father's

connexion, for he had, according to the _Merry Jests_, 'all the

oversight of the pageants', and certainly he devised the Drapers'

pageant for Martin Calthorpe in 1588, which is now lost, and the

_Descensus Astraeae_ of the Salters for William Webbe in 1591. The

Fishmongers' pageant for John Allot in 1590 was, however, by one T.

Nelson, a stationer. The absence of Elizabethan prints later than these

does not necessarily mean that pageants fell out of use. There was one

in 1600;[464] the Merchant Taylors had one for Sir Robert Lee in 1602;

there would have been one in 1603 but for the plague; and there was

probably one in 1604.[465] On the other hand, it can hardly be inferred

from the chaff of Munday as a 'peeking pageanter' in _Histriomastix_ and

as 'pageant-poet to the city of Milan' in _The Case is Altered_ that he

stepped regularly into Peele's shoes about 1591. Jonson's reference, at

least, is subsequent to Munday's first 'book' of a pageant, which was,

so far as we know, the Merchant Taylors' _Triumphs of Reunited

Britannia_ for Sir Leonard Holliday in 1605. I do not know on what

evidence _Campbell, or the Ironmongers' Fair Field_, for Thomas Campbell

in 1609, the only known copy of which has lost its title-page, is

sometimes ascribed to him. But he was responsible for the Goldsmiths'

_Chryso-Thriambos_ for Sir James Pemberton in 1611, the Drapers'

_Himatia Poleos_ for Sir Thomas Hayes in 1614 and their _Metropolis

Coronata_ for Sir John Jolles in 1615, and the Fishmongers'

_Chrysanaleia_ for John Leman in 1616. His chief competitors in civic

favour were Dekker and Middleton, the former of whom prepared the

Merchant Taylors' _Troja Nova Triumphans_ for Sir John Swinnerton in

1612, and the latter the _Triumphs of Truth_ for Sir Thomas Middleton in

1613, to the 'book' of which he annexed an account of a quite

exceptional entertainment on occasion of the opening of Hugh Middleton's

New River on 29 September 1613.

Middleton's title-page refers scornfully to the 'common writer' of

mayoral pageants, which may perhaps indicate Munday. A full analysis of

all this municipal imagery would be extremely tedious. The original

single pageant with its devils and 'wodwoses' underwent much elaboration

in the seventeenth century. 'By this light', says a character in

_Greenes Tu Quoque_ (1611-12), 'I do not think but to be Lord Mayor of

London before I die, and have three pageants carried before me, besides

a ship and an unicorn.' Dekker's _Troja Nova Triumphans_ has three

movable 'land-triumphs', a chariot of Neptune, a chariot of Virtue, and

a House of Fame, which met the Mayor successively at Paul's Chain,

Paul's Churchyard, and the Cross in Cheapside, while the little conduit

was transformed into a Castle of Envy, and met an assault with

fireworks. Sometimes the old 'foist' was revived, and part of the

spectacle took place on the water. Or one of the land pageants was

designed in the form of a ship. There were personages mounted on strange

beasts. Speeches and dialogues afforded opportunities for laudation of

the Lord Mayor and his brethren. There was generally some theme bearing

upon the history of the company or the industry to which it was related.

The Fishmongers made play, both in 1590 and 1616, with Sir William

Walworth; the Drapers, both in 1614 and 1615, with Sir Henry Fitz

Alwine, and with the Ram with the Golden Fleece. The Merchant Taylors,

on whose roll Prince Henry had been inscribed at the dinner of 1607,

proudly displayed an impersonation of him in 1611. Often the _mimesis_

was renewed on the way to St. Paul's in the afternoon, or at the Lord

Mayor's house in the evening. The Ironmongers have preserved an

interesting series of coloured designs for _Chrysanaleia_, the notes on

which indicate that the pageants were preserved as permanent decorations

for the company's hall. The ship, which held musicians at the Merchant

Taylors' dinner of 1607, was probably a relic of their pageant of 1602.

The growing maritime power of England during the sixteenth century and

the significance of the river as a highway between London and the

palaces up and down stream led naturally to a development of pageantry

by water. There was a water triumph, with an assault of a castle, on

Midsummer Day, 1561, and another, arranged by Captain Stukeley, when

Elizabeth went down to Greenwich in June 1563.[466] Christian of Denmark

gave James a show of the Burning of the Seven Deadly Sins' in 'wildfire'

near his flag-ship at Gravesend on 11 August 1606.[467] The creation of

Henry was celebrated by a mock sea-fight between merchantmen and

Turkish pirates on 6 June 1610, and the effect of this spectacle was

also enhanced by a display of fireworks. On the previous 31 May Henry

had been given the welcome of the City, as he came up the river, with a

device by Anthony Munday, in which Burbage and Rice of the King's men

rode upon two great fishes to deliver the speeches. Burbage, as Amphion,

represented Wales, and Rice, as Corinea, Cornwall.[468] Similarly the

festivities at the Princess Elizabeth's wedding in 1613 included a fight

between Venetian and Turkish galleys on 11 February and a firework

representation of St. George delivering the Amazonian Queen Lucida from

Mango the Necromancer.[469] The City had to find a pension for a man who

was maimed in this triumph.[470] Bristol, the second seaport of the

realm, also favoured water shows, welcoming Elizabeth in 1574 with an

assault on the forts of Peace and Feeble Policy, and Anne in 1613 with a

version of the more modern theme of merchantman and pirate.[471] We do

not know the nature of the _Devises of Warre_ prepared by Thomas

Churchyard for one of Sir Thomas Gresham's entertainments of Elizabeth

at Osterley; but an example of the conversion of military training into

_mimesis_ is afforded by the archery show of Prince Arthur with his

Knights of the Round Table, which was displayed by Hugh Offley before

the Queen between Merchant Taylors and Mile End in 1587.[472]

More than two centuries before this, when Edward III associated this

same Round Table with the foundation of his chivalric order of the

Garter, pageantry had already begun to cast its mantle over the

mediaeval exercises of knightly feats of arms. As the actual practice of

warfare dissociated itself more and more from the domination of the

mail-clad horseman, the spectacular tendency had naturally grown. Not

that, even at Whitehall, the tournament had ever become a mere pageant

and nothing more. It had still its value, both as part of the courtly

training of a gentleman and as a test of physical endurance; and it was

chiefly about the preliminaries, the challenge and the entrance of the

knights into the lists, that the decorative fancy of the Renaissance

gave itself free play. The double appeal of vigorous exercise and

sumptuous spectacle was irresistible to the youthful temperament of

Henry VIII, and the pages of Halle gleam with his tiltings as Cœur Loyal

in 1511, of which a fine heraldic record is preserved, and with the

international splendours of the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520.[473]

It was largely to a desire to maintain the tradition of the spear that

the existence of the Pensioners as an element in the royal household

must be ascribed. Elizabeth had much of her father's blood in her, and

to the end took delight in the strength of a man and a horse, so that it

was still possible for an aspiring youth, such as Sir Henry Lee or Sir

Robert Carey, to win his way to Court favour by the accuracy of his seat

or the appropriateness of his trappings, no less than by his proficiency

in the gentler antics of the mask. The rules for courtly combat had been

laid down by John Tiptoft, Earl of Warwick and Constable of England in

1466, and revised for Elizabeth in 1562.[474] The generic term 'jousts

of peace' covered three distinct varieties of exercise. The most

important was the tilt, in which horsemen met in the shock of blunted

spears across the 'tilt' or _toile_, a barrier covered with cloths,

which ran longitudinally down the centre of the 'lists' or space staked

out for the encounter. A record was kept of the courses run, in which

marks were credited to the competitors for spears fairly broken or for

'attaints' on the head or body, and corresponding deductions made for

spears ill broken. The tourney was also on horseback, with swords

instead of spears; while in the foot-tourney or 'barriers' the

assailants were dismounted and fought alternately with push of pike and

stroke of sword across a wooden obstacle.[475]

The tilt and tourney took place by daylight. Henry VIII constructed a

tiltyard in Whitehall, which was improved and closed in by Elizabeth in

1561.[476] It ran between the highway and St. James's Park, from the

stables on the site of the present Admiralty to the tennis court and

cockpit on the site of the present Treasury buildings, and at the south

end was a gallery for spectators, communicating by another across the

highway with the privy apartments. The sentries in the courtyard of the

Horse Guards have been officially known to recent times as the Tiltyard

guards. There were permanent tiltyards also at Greenwich and at Hampton

Court; at the latter spectators were accommodated in five small towers,

of which one still survives.[477] The less serious exercise of the

barriers was sometimes conducted by torchlight, and even within doors,

on the floor of a banqueting house.[478] Thus it could be introduced, in

a purely mimetic form, as an episode in a mask, or even a play.[479]

Tilts took place in almost every year of Elizabeth's reign.[480] The

custom was for a few picked champions to issue a challenge for a given

day, on which they would be prepared to meet the onset of all who chose

to offer themselves as 'answerers' or defendants. Sussex, Leicester,

Hunsdon, and of the next generation Oxford and Arundel, are prominent

amongst the challengers. I do not find that any particular season was at

first especially appropriated to tilts. There was often one early in the

new year, but just as often one in the spring or summer. But at some

date, possibly as early as 1570, and almost certainly as early as 1581,

Sir Henry Lee was forward in establishing an annual tilt on Queen's Day,

the anniversary of the accession on 17 November. He may have enrolled

some kind of guild of tilters; certainly he undertook to appear

personally as challenger year by year, and for this purpose received or

assumed the designation of Knight of the Crown. In his devices he

appears under the personal name of Loricus.[481]

Only occasional examples of the pageantry used at tilts are upon

record. An account of the proceedings on the occasion of the wedding of

Ambrose Earl of Warwick and Anne Russell, daughter of the Earl of

Bedford, on 11 November 1565 will show how it was introduced. The

challenge took place in August, at the churching of the Princess Cecilia

of Baden. York Herald introduced Richard Edwardes of the Chapel, who

assumed the character of a post sent from four strange knights, and

announced their challenge to be defended before the Queen and Cecilia in

November. On 11 November the Queen was in the gallery at the end of the

tiltyard. Edwardes entered with a trumpeter, and delivered another

speech. Then the challengers rode in from the mews, each accompanied by

a patron and by an Amazon with his spare horse. They circled round the

tilt and took up their position at the Queen's end, to await the

defendants, hanging their shields on posts beneath her window. Then the

actual tilting began. The programme, although departed from, was one

which seems to have been conventional, of one day for tilt, one for

tourney, and one for barriers.[482] The women leading the horses by

their bridles perhaps appear more frequently in earlier _hastiludia_

than in those of the sixteenth century.[483] They represent, I think,

the 'damsels' of the ladies in whose names the knights fought, and whose

colours they were accustomed to wear. Elizabeth's personal colours for

this purpose were black and white.[484] It was a function of the ladies

to award to the most successful of the defendants a jewel provided by

the challengers. The principal opportunities for mimetic speechifying

were afforded by the challenge, which was sometimes delivered in person,

sometimes, as in the 1565 example, by deputy, and was probably also

hung up on the court gates, and by the shields which bore _imprese_ or

mottoed emblems, and called for interpretation by the squires or pages

who bore them.[485] Often, moreover, the tilters themselves entered in

elaborately mimetic caparisons, incongruous enough to a modern taste

with the vigorous manly exercise to which they were a preliminary, but

no doubt attractive to that of the Renaissance, which for all its

literary talk about 'decorum' cared at heart but little for congruity.

The speechifying might be resumed when the tilting was over, or at the

banquet which closed the day's festivity.[486] I gather together the few

details of this tilt pageantry which have escaped a perhaps merited

oblivion. There were speeches, and a chariot with a damsel and an old

knight made their appearance at the torchlight tourney for the Duc de

Montmorency in 1572.[487] In 1579 Oxford and his fellow challengers

prepared a device, 'prettier than it happened to be performed', the

nature of which is not specified.[488] In 1581 Arundel issued a

challenge on 6 January, under the name of Callophisus, for a tilt which

took place on 22 January, and there were 'devices in the mean season',

to which some documents in a romantic vein amongst the _Lansdowne MSS._

probably belong.[489] The coming of the French commissioners in 1581 was

the occasion of spectacular entertainments on an elaborate scale. There

appear to have been two distinct jousts. One, at Hampton Court, probably

on 6 and 7 May, is described in a French report. An antique tower with a

triangular lantern at the top was rolled forward. Out of this issued a

snake, which endeavoured to climb fruit-laden trees. Then followed six

eagles, concealing musicians, and two Irish youths dressed in floating

robes of silver tiffany, with long gilded hair and mounted on gilded

horses. Finally came a triumphal car moving backwards, on which were the

Fates, holding prisoner in a golden chain a knight in brown velvet and

golden armour. The next day furnished new devices, including little

coaches drawn by asses sewn up in white satin.[490] The second, at

Whitehall on 15 and 16 May, is the famous triumph in which Sir Philip

Sidney tilted before 'that sweet enemy, France'. The royal gallery was

transformed into a Fortress of Perfect Beauty, and the four challengers,

Arundel, Windsor, Sidney, and Fulke Greville, besieged it before each

day's tilting as the Four Foster Children of Desire, finally making

their submission, through a boy clad in ash-colour and bearing an

olive-branch, to the unconquerable occupant. Each of the twenty-one

defendants also had his 'invention' and speech, including Sir Thomas

Perrot and Anthony Cooke, 'both in like armour, beset with apples and

fruit, the one signifying Adam, the other Eve, who had hair hung all

down her helmet'. In the midst of the first day's tilting came in Sir

Henry Lee as an unknown knight, broke his spears, and departed in true

romantic fashion without revealing his identity.[491] In 1587, when the

tilting on Queen's Day was 'not so full of devises and so riche as I

have seene', is a mention of books given 'for a token' to the

spectators[492]; and to 1590 belongs such a book in the extant

_Polyhymnia_ of George Peele.[493] This was a notable occasion, for upon

it Sir Henry Lee, now past his youth, resigned the post of challenger to

the Earl of Cumberland. Peele describes the _imprese_ of the tilters.

But the principal device took place after the courses had been run. A

Temple of Vesta rose out of the earth, and at its door Lee's emblem of

the crowned pillar. An appropriate song was sung, the well-known

'My golden locks time hath to silver turned,'

and the Vestal Virgins presented the Queen with a veil and cloak and

safeguard; after which Lee doffed his armour, put it on Cumberland as

his successor, and himself assumed, as a sign of his retirement, a side

coat of black velvet and a buttoned cap of the country fashion. He

continued, however, by the royal direction, to attend the annual Queen's

day, as a kind of Master of the Ceremonies. Cumberland, who took the

name of the Knight of Pendragon Castle, probably remained knight of the

crown until the end of the reign, but may have been rather overshadowed

by the reputation, both as a courtier and a tilter, of the popular and

magnificent Earl of Essex.[494] Robert Carey also claims to have played

a considerable figure in the jousts, and tells us how in 1593 he

appeared and made the Queen a present as 'the forsaken knight that had

vowed solitarinesse' at a cost of £400.[495] To 1595 belongs the device

of Eros and Philautia, in which Essex is believed to have had the

assistance of no less a hand than that of Francis Bacon.[496] In 1598 it

is noted that Queen's day passed 'without any extraordinarie matter

more than running and ringing'. In 1600 Essex, then under a cloud, was,

contrary to expectation, 'no actor in our triumphs', but Cumberland

delivered a speech in the capacity of a Melancholy Knight. In 1602 one

Garret came disguised, like Carey in 1593, and gave the Queen his

scutcheon and _impresa_.[497] In 1601 there seems to have been a

barriers, for which Sir John Davies was invited by Sir Robert Cecil

through Cumberland to write an introductory speech.[498]

James transferred the annual tilting to his own accession day, and it

continued to be regularly observed on 24 March. Shows 'costly and

somewhat extraordinary' are recorded on this day in 1605.[499] In 1607

the French ambassador comments that there were 'plus de beaux habits que

de bons gendarmes'.[500] In 1609 Sir Richard Preston made a sensation

'in a pageant which was an elephant with a castle on his back'.[501]

James himself was no tilter; his horsemanship was considerable, but he

employed it in the chase rather than in the onset. It is noteworthy that

running at the ring, which was quite a subsidiary sport at the court of

Elizabeth, tends under her successor to replace the more hazardous

jousts. And even at the ring the marked inferiority of James to his

brother-in-law Christian of Denmark during the latter's visit in 1606

became the subject of popular comment, and did not tend to improve the

relations between the sovereigns. The 'incomparable pair of brethren',

William Earl of Pembroke, and Philip Earl of Montgomery, shone in the

tilt-yard[502]; and it was a fall from his horse at a joust that first

attracted the King's attention to Robert Carr, afterwards Earl of

Somerset.[503] But the most prominent man-at-arms, during the earlier

years of the reign, was James's cousin, Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox.

He led on one side for Truth, against the Earl of Sussex for Opinion on

the other, at a barriers given to celebrate the wedding of the Earl of

Essex on 6 January 1606, and the invaluable Jonson wrote a dialogue of

Truth and Opinion as a setting for the combat.[504] Later in the same

year Lennox was at the head of a plan to honour the visit of King

Christian by a challenge to be issued by certain knights of the

Fortunate Island, who fabled themselves to be inspired by the adventure

of the Lucent Pillar, foretold by Merlin, and declared their intention

to joust on behalf of certain amorous propositions in the valley of

Mirefleur. The original idea was to publish the challenge in the courts

of Europe, but this feature was dropped, somewhat to the relief of the

French ambassador, who had received instructions from Paris to

discourage it, as a coming royal baptism there would make sufficient

demands on shrunken French pockets, and feats of arms had, moreover,

fallen into disuse in France since the days of Henri II. A challenge was

in fact proclaimed, for England only, in the royal presence and the

public places of Greenwich, on 1 June. Then the death of the

child-princess Mary supervened, and although there was a tilt, in which

Christian took part, on 5 August, it does not appear that the romantic

setting was used.[505] Merlin, however, was utilized by Jonson, some

years later, when Prince Henry, to whom knightly exercises were as

congenial as they were repugnant to his father, made his first public

appearance in the barriers of 6 January 1610.[506] He issued his

challenge under the name of Meliadus, Lord of the Isles, and Jonson's

device, in which Merlin and the Lady of the Lake hail him as the

awakener of Chivalry from her cave, reflects something of the enthusiasm

with which Englishmen were beginning to look forward to the future of

the high-spirited prince.[507] There was a joust on 6 June 1610, after

Henry's creation as Prince of Wales, although Henry did not himself take

part in it.[508] He was tilting daily in January 1612, and a challenge

by Lennox, Southampton, Pembroke, and Montgomery is dated in this

year.[509] But the chivalric revival was fated to be dashed for ever by

the untimely death of its princely patron on the following 6 November.

The Accession tilt of 1613 is made memorable by the fact that the Earl

of Rutland had the signal honour of being furnished with an _impresa_ by

the united genius of Shakespeare and Burbage, whom we must presume to

have been the poet and the painter respectively.[510] At Elizabeth's

wedding in 1613 there was ringing only.[511] One more device by Jonson,

with Cupids and Hymen, introduced a tilt on 1 January 1614, after the

wedding of the Earl of Somerset, and my chronicle must end with the

Accession tilt of 1616, for which again Burbage furnished the Earl of

Rutland with a shield, although the name of Shakespeare, then probably

on his death-bed, does not appear.[512]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 363: Thomas Herbert to Robert Cecil, 26 Aug. 1601 (_Hatfield

MSS._ xi. 362): 'Her Majesty, God be praised, liketh her journey, the

air of this soil, and the pleasures and pastimes showed her in the way,

marvellous well'; cf. p. 111 (1577). In March 1581, Thomas Scot reported

to Leicester (_S. P. D._ cxlviii. 34) the scurrilous statement of one

Henry Hawkins, 'that my Lord Robert hath had fyve children by the

Queene, and she never goethe in progress but to be delivered'.]

[Footnote 364: Machyn, 262, 267, describes the start from and return to

London in 1561. Puttenham, iii. 22 (ed. Arber, 266), has a story of

Elizabeth's mirth at one Serjeant Bendlowes, 'when in a progresse time

comming to salute the Queene in Huntingtonshire he said to her Cochman,

stay thy cart good fellow, stay thy cart, that I may speake to the

Queene'.]

[Footnote 365: Hunsdon to Cecil, 31 Aug. 1599 (_S. P. D._ cclxxii. 94):

'She ... will go more privately than is fitting for the time, or

beseeming her estate; yet she will ride through Kingston in state,

proportioning very unsuitably her lodging at Hampton Court unto it,

making the Lady Scudamores lodging her presence chamber, Mrs. Ratcliffes

her privy chamber.' James said of certain law courts, 'They be like

houses in progress, where I have not, nor can have, such distinct rooms

of state as I have here at Whitehall or at Hampton Court' (Bacon,

_Apophthegms_, in _Works_, vii. 166). The distribution of rooms at

Theobalds for a visit of 1572 is given in _Hatfield MSS._ xiii. 110.]

[Footnote 366: Dasent, vii. 238; viii. 401; x. 284, 286, 305.]

[Footnote 367: The Duchess of Suffolk wrote to Cecil in 1570 (_Hatfield

MSS._ i. 481) to 'speak but one good word for me to the harbingers, in

case my man shall not be able to entreat them to help me to some lodging

near the court'. The harbingers, as in origin Hall officers, would

provide for the Court generally; the Gentlemen Ushers of the Chamber for

the Queen in person. A P. C. warrant of 29 June 1575 (Dasent, viii. 402)

is for post-horses for Simon Boier, Gentleman Usher, 'being this

progresse tyme appointed to prepare her Majesties lodginges' (cf. App.

A, _Bibl. Note_).]

[Footnote 368: For references to the 'gestes', cf. 1 Ellis, ii. 274;

Wright, ii. 16; Kempe, 266; Birch, _Eliz._ i. 87; Hunter, _Hallamshire_,

123. Copies of those for 1603 and 1605 are at the Heralds' College

(Lodge, _App._ 97, 99, 108, 109). Those for 1605 are printed (from

_Harl. MS._ 7044?) by Leland, _Coll._ ii. 626, and those for 1614, with

the corporation's endorsement of receipt, from the Leicester archives by

Nichols, _James_, iii. 10.]

[Footnote 369: A survey of houses for a progress in Herts is in _S. P.

D._ CXXV. 46.]

[Footnote 370: _Hatfield MSS._ v. 19, 309; vii. 378.]

[Footnote 371: Kelly, _Progresses_, 302, 319, 345, 360; Nichols,

_James_, iii. 11; Wright, ii. 16; Howard, 211. A 'Remembrance for the

Progress' of 1575 (_Pepys MS._ 179) contains elaborate notes for routes

(not those ultimately followed) and mileage, for the provision of

vehicles, for instructions to sheriffs about corn and hay, and justices

about flesh, fish, and fowl, for the carriage of wine from London, and

the brewing of beer locally. If the country ale doesn't please the

Queen, a London supply must be provided, or a brewer taken down.]

[Footnote 372: Kempe, 265. Wingfield's letter is only dated 2 Aug.; Lord

Clinton, who is named, became Earl of Lincoln in May 1572. More

preserved a letter of 5 Aug. 1567 from William Lord Howard to the Mayor

of Guildford, asking for a close to graze his horses in during the

Queen's visit to the town. On 24 Aug. 1576 a Mr. Horsman wrote to More

(Nichols, ii. 7), 'Tis thought the Queen will not come to your house

this summer'.]

[Footnote 373: 1 Ellis, ii. 265.]

[Footnote 374: Ibid. 266. In 1570 Bedford had written to urge on Cecil

the unsuitability of Chenies for the Queen (_Hatfield MSS._ i. 477).]

[Footnote 375: 1 Ellis, ii. 267.]

[Footnote 376: Ibid. 271.]

[Footnote 377: Ibid. 272.]

[Footnote 378: _Sussex Arch. Collections_, v. 194.]

[Footnote 379: Nicolas, _Hatton_, 269. Lady Norris, to whom Elizabeth

wrote affectionately as her 'crow', was the daughter of Lord Williams of

Thame, who had befriended her as a prisoner at Woodstock; on the Rycote

entertainment of 1592, cf. p. 125.]

[Footnote 380: Kelly, _Progresses_, 296. On 6 July 1576 Gilbert Talbot

wrote to Lord Shrewsbury (Lodge, ii. 75): 'There hath been sundry

determinations of her Majesty's progress this summer.... These two or

three days it hath changed every five hours.']

[Footnote 381: 1 Ellis, ii. 274.]

[Footnote 382: Sir Charles Danvers to the Earl of Southampton (_Hatfield

MSS._ ix. 246). For other letters of courtly deprecation, which I have

no room to quote, cf. Hatton, 223; _Hatfield MSS._ v. 19, 299, 309.]

[Footnote 383: _Parker Correspondence_, 148.]

[Footnote 384: Harington, ii. 16, 'She gave him very speciall thanks,

with gratious and honorable tearms, and then looking on his wife; "and

you (saith she) _Madam_ I may not call you, and _Mistris_ I am ashamed

to call you, so I know not what to call you, but yet I do thanke you".']

[Footnote 385: Lodge, ii. 119: 'This Rookwood is a Papist of kind newly

crept out of his late wardship. Her majesty, by some means I know not,

was lodged at his house, Ewston, far unmeet for her Highness, but fitter

for the blackguard; nevertheless (the gentleman brought into her

Majesty's presence by like device) her excellent Majesty gave to

Rookwood ordinary thanks for his bad house, and her fair hand to kiss;

after which it was braved at. But my Lord Chamberlain, nobly and gravely

understanding that Rookwood was excommunicated for Papistry, called him

before him; demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her real

presence, he, unfit to accompany any Christian person; forthwith said he

was fitter for a pair of stocks; commanded him out of the Court, and yet

to attend her Council's pleasure; and at Norwich he was committed. And,

to decipher the gentleman to the full; a piece of plate being missed in

the Court, and searched for in his hay house, in the hay rick such an

image of our Lady was there found, as for greatness, for gayness, and

workmanship, I did never see such a match; and, after a sort of country

dances ended, in her Majesty's sight the idol was set behind the people,

who avoided. She rather seemed a beast raised up on a sudden from hell

by conjuring, than the picture for whom it had been so often and long

abused. Her Majesty commanded it to the fire, which in her sight by the

country folks was quickly done, to her content, and unspeakable joy of

every one but some one or two who had sucked of the idol's poisoned

milk.' Rookwood's committal and release are recorded in the P. C. Acts

(Dasent, x. 310, 312, 342). He suffered at a later date as a recusant

and died in gaol. His cousin, Ambrose Rookwood of Stanningfield, was a

Guy Fawkes conspirator (_D. N. B._; Dasent, xxv. 118, 203, 252, 371,

419; Copinger, _Manors of Suffolk_, i. 292).]

[Footnote 386: _H. O._ 145: 'It is often and in manner dayly seene, that

as well in the kings owne houses, as in the places of other noblemen and

gentlemen, where the kings Grace doth fortune to lye or come unto, not

onely lockes of doores, tables, formes, cupboards, tressells, and other

ymplements of household, be carryed, purloyned, and taken away, by such

servants and others as be lodged in the same houses and places; but also

such pleasures and commodities as they have about their houses, that is

to say, deer, fish, orchards, hay, corne, grasse, pasture, and other

store belonging to the same noblemen and gentlemen, or to others

dwelling neere abouts, is by ravine taken, dispoiled, wasted and spent,

without lycence or consent of the owner, or any money paid for the same,

to the kings great dishonour, and the no little damage and displeasure

of those to whose houses the Kings Highnesse doth fortune to

repaire....']

[Footnote 387: 1 Ellis, ii. 277, evidently misdated 'ann. 15' for 'ann.

16'.]

[Footnote 388: Kelly, _Progresses_, 325.]

[Footnote 389: The Cofferer's Account for the progress of 1561, printed

in Nichols, _Eliz._ i. 92, from _Cott. Vesp._ C. xiv, shows expenditure

while the court lay or dined at several private houses. On 24 July 1560

Sir N. Bacon wrote to Parker, 'The Queen's majesty meaneth on Monday

next to dine at Lambeth; and although it shall be altogether of her

provision, yet I thought it meet to make you privy thereto, lest, other

men forgetting it, the thing should be too sudden' (Parker, 120). This

was a dinner on a remove from Greenwich to Richmond, not during a

progress; but the principle was probably the same. The older practice

was certainly for the crown to pay. Puttenham, iii. 24 (ed. Arber, 301),

records that Henry VII, 'if his chaunce had bene to lye at any of his

subiects houses, or to passe moe meales then one, he that would take

vpon him to defray the charge of his dyet, or of his officers and

houshold, he would be maruelously offended with it, saying what priuate

subiect dare vndertake a Princes charge, or looke into the secret of his

expence?' And the discreet courtier adds, 'Her Maiestie hath bene knowne

oftentimes to mislike the superfluous expence of her subiects bestowed

vpon her in times of her progresses'.]

[Footnote 390: Cf. p. 17.]

[Footnote 391: 1 Ellis, ii. 265, from _Lansd. MS._ 16, f. 107.]

[Footnote 392: In 1576 the Board of Green Cloth paid £3 6_s._ 8_d._ by

way of 'rewards given to inns in progress time where her majesty hath

been' (Nichols, _Eliz._ ii. 48).]

[Footnote 393: Kelly, _Progresses_, 298, 320, 345, 359; Nichols, _Eliz._

i. 551.]

[Footnote 394: At Coventry in 1566 'The tanners pageant stood at St.

Johns Church, the drapers pageant at the Cross, the smiths pageant at

Little Park Street End, and the weavers pageant at Much Park Street' (H.

Craig, _Coventry Corpus Christi Plays_, xxi, misdated 1567; cf. ibid.

106).]

[Footnote 395: Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 105, 109, 118, 130, 182, 225, shows

that the Revels followed the progresses of 1559, when they furnished a

banqueting house and mask at Horsley; of 1566, when their expenses came

to £187 8_s._ 11½_d._; of 1571, when the Master took nine men, three

horses and a wagon; of 1573, when they spent £21 10_s._ 8_d._ on

carriage and apparently the mask at Canterbury; and of 1574, when they

furnished the Italian players at Windsor and Reading. A Green Cloth

document of 1576 (Nichols, _Eliz._ ii. 50) also records the expenditure

of £109 1_s._ 11_d._ by the Woodyard on 'necessaries, as plancks,

boards, quarters, tressets, forms, and carpenters, hired in time of

progresses'. Another of 1604 (Nichols, _James_, i. xi) is a record of

wood felled to furnish the king's house with fuel during the recent

progress.]

[Footnote 396: _Ch. Ch. Accts._ 1566 (Boas, 107), 'to the clerkes of the

greene clothe for unburdeninge at our requeste the universitie & us of

the lightes & rushes iij payre of gloves ... xviijˢ ... to the yeoman of

the woodyarde for helpinge us to a recompence of our woode & cole spent

... xˢ'. Kelly, _Progresses_, 328, 'for the which you shall have

satisfaction'.]

[Footnote 397: Kelly, _Progresses_, 361, prints the precept for the jury

at Leicester in 1614. Jacobean proclamations (_Procl._ 950, 994, 1096,

1098, 1135), regulating the functions of the Clerk of the Market, claim

that local prices, especially on progress, are often extortionate.

Nichols, _Eliz._ iii. 252, prints a memorandum of Puckering's for

Elizabeth's intended visit in 1594, which contemplates 'purveyed diet'.]

[Footnote 398: On the history of purveyance in general, the protests of

Jacobean parliaments, and the attempts to persuade the shires to accept

'compositions', cf. Gardiner, i. 170, 299; ii. 113; Cheyney, i. 29; Bray

in _Archaeologia_, viii. 329; Nichols, _James_, i. x; Kempe, 272;

_Procl._ 1033. Nichols prints a table of c. 1604 showing the proportion

of carts, 220 in all, charged on each of eight counties at removes from

Richmond, Windsor, Hampton Court, Nonsuch, or Oatlands. The king paid

2_d._ a mile and required not more than twelve miles a day. A Green

Cloth order of 1609 limits the charge on the bailiwick of Surrey (in

Windsor Forest) to eight carts on a remove from Windsor or other houses

in the bailiwick, or from Easthampstead, to Hampton Court, Oatlands,

Richmond, or Farnham. The household officers were accused of

blackmailing owners of carts to avoid impressment, and of requisitioning

superfluous provisions and reselling them at a profit. In 1605 the

Venetian ambassador reported (_V. P._ x. 267, 285) that James's servants

were under less good control than Elizabeth's, and that the longer time

now spent in the country and more frequent removes aggravated the burden

of purveyance. The carts were wanted for harvest. Moreover, hunting

destroyed the crops.]

[Footnote 399: Birch, _Eliz._ i. 12.]

[Footnote 400: Parker, xii.]

[Footnote 401: Peck, _Desiderata Curiosa_, 25.]

[Footnote 402: Thomas Tooke to John Hubbard (Goodman, ii. 20).]

[Footnote 403: _Egerton Papers_, 340. The second of the documents there

printed is one of Collier's forgeries. On 27 April 1603 Sir Robert Cecil

wrote to Egerton (_Egerton Papers_, 369) to borrow some plate, 'because

of my self I am not able to furnish my house at Theobalds of all such

necessarys as are convenient for his Maiestys reception without the

helpe of my frends'.]

[Footnote 404: La Mothe, vi. 478. Gossip said that Leicester's

magnificence was in return for an 'octroy de quelques vaquanz' worth

200,000 crowns.]

[Footnote 405: _V. P._ xii. 409.]

[Footnote 406: Northumberland to Cobham (_S. P. D._ cclxxxiv. 97).]

[Footnote 407: Wright, i. 370; Hawarde, 311.]

[Footnote 408: Nichols, i. 601, prints from _Lansd. MS._ 16, 'The Q.

Prayer after a Progress, Aug. 15 [1574] being then at Bristow'. It

contains a thanksgiving for 'preseruinge me in this longe and dangerus

jorneye'.]

[Footnote 409: Kelly, _Progresses_, 301, from _Harl. MS._ 6996. The

letter is undated, but as the court was going to Kenilworth, it may

belong to 1575.]

[Footnote 410: Wright, ii. 16.]

[Footnote 411: 'I am old, and come now evil away with the inconveniences

of progress. I followed her Majesty until my man returned and told me he

could get neither fit lodging for me nor room for my horse,' writes Sir

Henry Lee in 1591 (_Hatfield MSS._ iv. 136).]

[Footnote 412: _Sydney Papers_, ii. 210.]

[Footnote 413: Walsingham wrote to Shrewsbury from Oatlands on 2 Sept.

1584 (Lodge, ii. 245), that the Privy Council was divided 'by reason of

a little by progress her Majesty hath made for her recreation'.]

[Footnote 414: Chamberlain, 166, 169, 'All is to entertain the time, and

win her to stay here if may be'.... 'These feastings have had their

effect to stay the Court here this Christmas, though most of the

cariages were well onward on theire waye to Richmond.']

[Footnote 415: Harington, i. 314: 'Her Highness hath done honour to my

poor house by visiting me, and seemed much pleased at what we did to

please her. My son made her a fair speech, to which she did give most

gracious reply. The women did dance before her, whilst the cornets did

salute from the gallery; and she did vouchsafe to eat two morsels of

rich comfit cake, and drank a small cordial from a gold cup. She had a

marvelous suit of velvet borne by four of her first women attendants in

rich apparel; two ushers did go before, and at going up stairs she

called for a staff, and was much wearied in walking about the house, and

said she wished to come another day. Six drums and six trumpets waited

in the court, and sounded at her approach and departure. My wife did

bear herself in wondrous good liking, and was attired in a purple

kyrtle, fringed with gold; and my self, in a rich band and collar of

needle-work, and did wear a goodly stuff of the bravest cut and fashion,

with an under body of silver and loops. The Queen was much in

commendation of our appearances, and smiled at the ladies, who in their

dances often came up to the stepp on which the seat was fixed to make

their obeysance, and so fell back into their order again. The younger

Markham did several gallant feats on a horse before the gate, leaping

down and kissing his sword, then mounting swiftly on the saddle, and

passed a lance with much skill. The day well nigh spent, the Queen went

and tasted a small beverage that was set out in divers rooms where she

might pass; and then in much order was attended to her palace, the

cornets and trumpets sounding through the streets.']

[Footnote 416: Lodge, iii. 38.]

[Footnote 417: Winwood, ii. 155.]

[Footnote 418: Many of the numbers in the song-books of the madrigalists

and lutenists probably had their origin in entertainments. _The Triumphs

of Oriana_ (1601), for example, may have been written as a whole for a

royal birthday or maying; cf. also examples in Fellowes, 121, 328, 434,

464, 485.]

[Footnote 419: Cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 154.]

[Footnote 420: Cf. ch. xxiv.]

[Footnote 421: Cf. ch. xxiv.]

[Footnote 422: _M. N. D._ 11. i. 148:

'Thou rememb'rest

Since once I sat upon a promontory.

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,

That the rude sea grew civil at her song,

And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,

To hear the sea-maid's music.'

On the chronology, cf. _Sh. Homage_, 154.]

[Footnote 423: On the _débat_, cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 79, 187; ii.

153, 201.]

[Footnote 424: _V. P._ x. 25. Leicester left the Queen by will in 1588

(_Sydney Papers_, i. 71) a 'Jewel with three great Emrodes with a fair

large Table Diamond in the middest, without a foyle, and set about with

many Diamonds without foyle, and a Roape of fayre white Pearl, to the

number six Hundred, to hang the said Jewel at; which Pearl and Jewel was

once purposed for her Majesty, against a Coming to Wansted'. Rowland

Whyte says of the visit to Lord Keeper Puckering at Kew in 1595 (_Sydney

Papers_, i. 376), 'Her Intertainment for that Meale was great and

exceeding costly. At her first Lighting, she had a fine Fanne, with a

Handle garnisht with Diamonds. When she was in the Midle Way, between

the Garden Gate and the Howse, there came Running towards her, one with

a Nosegay in his Hand, deliuered yt vnto her, with a short well pened

speach; it had in yt a very rich Iewell, with many Pendants of vnfirld

Diamonds, valewed at 400_l_ at least. After Dinner, in her Privy

Chamber, he gaue her a faire Paire of Virginals. In her Bed Chamber,

presented her with a fine Gown and a Juppin, which Things were pleasing

to her Highnes; and, to grace his Lordship the more, she, of her self,

tooke from him a Salt, a Spoone, and a Forcke, of faire Agate'. Of the

visit to the Earl of Nottingham in 1602, Chamberlain, 169, writes, 'The

Lord Admiralls feasting the Quene had nothing extraordinarie, neither

were his presents so precious as was expected; being only a whole suit

of apparell, whereas it was thought he wold have bestowed his rich

hangings of all the fights with the Spanish Armada in eightie-eight'.

These hangings were bought by James at the Princess Elizabeth's wedding

in 1613 (_Abstract_, 15; _V. P._ xii. 499) for £1,628, and were long

preserved in the House of Lords.]

[Footnote 425: Cf. ch. vi, p. 172.]

[Footnote 426: Cf. p. 116.]

[Footnote 427: Cf. ch. xxiv.]

[Footnote 428: Nichols, ii. 673; _V. P._ xiii. 36; _Hist. MSS._ i. 107.]

[Footnote 429: There are four narratives: (_a_) MS. by Matthew Stokys,

the University Registrary, printed by Nichols, _Eliz._ i. 151, and from

a transcript in _Harl. MS._ 7037 (_Baker MS._ 10) and with a wrong

ascription to N. Robinson, by Peck, _Desiderata Curiosa_, ii. 259; (_b_)

Anon. in _Camb. Univ. Library MS._, Ff. v. 14, f. 87, printed by

Nichols, i. 183; (_c_) Abraham Hartwell (of King's), _Regina Literata_

(1565), reprinted by Nichols, _Eliz._¹ (1788), i; (_d_) Nicholas

Robinson (of Queen's), _Commentarii Hexaemeri Rerum Cantabrigiae

actarum_, printed by Nichols, _Eliz._¹ iii. 27. The ascription of _Dido_

to Halliwell is due to Hatcher's biographies of King's men in _Bodl.

Rawl. MS._ B. 274. Hartwell gives some analysis both of _Dido_ and of

_Ezechias_.]

[Footnote 430: I borrow from Boas, 383, De Silva's description to the

Duchess of Parma as given in Froude's transcript (_Addl. MS._ 26056 A,

f. 237) of the original in the Simanças archives. There is a translation

in _Sp. Papers_, i. 375. Froude, vii. 205, paraphrases the story. After

premising that during the Queen's visit 'they wished to give her another

representation, which she refused in order to be no longer delayed', and

that, 'those who were so anxious for her to hear it followed her to her

first stopping-place, and so importuned her that at last she consented',

De Silva continues, 'Entráron los representantes en habitos de algunos

de los Obispos que estan presos; fué el primo el de Londres [Bonner]

llevando en las manos un cordero como que le iba comiendo, y otros con

otras devisas, y uno en figura de perro con una hostia en la boca. La

Reyna se enojó tanto segun escriben que se entró á priesa en su camara

diciendo malas palabras, y los que tenian las hachas, que era de noche,

los dexáron á escuras, y assí cesó la inconsiderada y desvergonçada

representaçion.' Of course, there is nothing about this in the academic

narratives. It was an indecent proceeding, but in view of the character

of the _farsa_ or mummery which enlivened Elizabeth's first Christmas

(cf. ch. v), the misunderstanding of her taste is perhaps explicable.]

[Footnote 431: There are five narratives: (_a_) _Twyne MS._ xvii, f.

160, in the University archives, by Thomas Neale, Professor of Hebrew,

used by A. Wood, _Hist. of Oxford_, ii. 154, and Boas, 98; (_b_) Richard

Stephens, _A Brief Rehearsall_, a summary of (_a_), printed by Nichols,

_Eliz._¹ i. 95, and C. Plummer, _Elizabethan Oxford_, 193; (_c_) _Twyne

MS._ xxi. 792, by Miles Windsor of Corpus; (_d_) Nicholas Robinson (of

Queens', Cambridge), _Of the Actes done at Oxford_, printed from _Harl.

MS._ 7033, f. 142, by Nichols, i. 229, and Plummer, 173; (_e_) John

Bereblock (of Exeter), _Commentarii de Rebus Gestis Oxoniae_, printed by

T. Hearne (1729) and Nichols, _Eliz._¹ i. 35, and from _Bodl. Addl. MS._

A. 63, by Plummer, 113, and translated by W. Y. Durand in _M. L. A._ xx.

502. Bereblock gives full analyses of the plays. Boas, 106, adds

extracts from a Christ Church account of the expenditure.]

[Footnote 432: Bereblock (Plummer, 128) says, 'Hoc malum quamvis potuit

communem laetitiam contaminare, nihilominus tamen eandem commaculare non

potuit. Ad spectacula itaque omnes, alieno iam periculo cautiores,

revertuntur'.]

[Footnote 433: Cf. Boas, 106, 390.]

[Footnote 434: _Sp. Papers_, i. 578; cf. Boas, 385.]

[Footnote 435: Sometimes the Chancellor brought distinguished foreign

visitors, who were entertained with plays. In May 1569 Thomas Cooper,

Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Christ Church, wrote to Leicester (_Pepys

MSS._ 155), proposing 'a playe or shew of the destruction of Thebes, and

the contention between Eteocles and Polynices for the governement

therof', for a projected visit on 15 May by Odet de Coligny, Cardinal de

Châtillon, and asking help 'for provision for some apparaile' (not

'apparaiti', as the _Hist. MSS._ report on the _Pepys MSS._ has it). It

is not certain that the visit actually took place (Boas, 158). But in

1583 Leicester brought Albertus Alasco, Prince Palatine of Siradia in

Poland, who saw the _Rivales_ and _Dido_ of William Gager (q.v.) on 11

and 12 June. The plays were given at Christ Church by men of that and

other colleges, with the assistance of George Peele (Boas, 179, from

Holinshed and academic archives). In Jan. 1585 Leicester came again,

with Pembroke and Philip Sidney, and saw Gager's _Meleager_ at Christ

Church, and possibly also a comedy at Magdalen. Apparel was borrowed

from John Lyly, who was then connected with the Blackfriars theatre

(Boas, 192, from academic archives).]

[Footnote 436: There is only one narrative, by Philip Stringer (of St.

John's, Cambridge), printed by Nichols, _Eliz._¹, and Plummer, 245.

Wood, _Hist. of Oxford_, ii. 248, follows an independent source. Boas,

252, makes some additions from academic archives, and cites from _Twyne

MS._ xvii, f. 174, an order that 'the schollers which cannot be admitted

to see the playes, doo not make any outcries or undecent noyses about

the hall stayres or within the quadrangle of Christchurch, as usually

they were wont to doo'. This was repeated at the visit of 1605. John

Sanford's _Apollinis et Musarum Eidyllia_, reprinted by Plummer, 275,

contains verses laudatory of the various guests.]

[Footnote 437: _M. S. C._ i. 198, from _Lansd. MS._ 71, f. 204.]

[Footnote 438: There are four narratives: (_a_) Anthony Nixon, _The

Oxford Triumph_ (1605, S. R. 19 Sept. 1605); (_b_) Isaac Wake, _Rex

Platonicus, sive Musae Regnantes_ (1607); (_c_) a Cambridge report,

probably by Philip Stringer, printed from _Harl. MS._ 7044, by Leland,

_Coll._ ii. 626, and Nichols, i. 530; (_d_) a letter from John

Chamberlain in Winwood, ii. 140. F. S. Boas and W. W. Greg (_M. S. C._

i. 247) print schedules of the apparel and necessaries obtained from

Kirkham and Kendall of the Queen's Revels, and from one Matthew Fox.

They were partly for _The Queen's Arcadia_, partly, I think, for _Ajax

Flagellifer_, and partly for _Alba_. Provision was made for a magician,

and 'those scenes of the Magus', for which Robert Burton tells his

brother (Nichols, iv. 1067) that he was thanked by Dr. King, Dean of

Christ Church, were presumably in _Alba_. This is Stringer's name for

the first play. Wake calls it _Vertumnus_, but it is clear from his

analyses that it is distinct from Gwynne's, which he calls _Annus

Recurrens_. Stringer's rather critical narrative contrasts with the

self-complacency of the Oxford writers. He tells us how bored the King

was and how the Queen and the ladies disliked the almost naked man in

_Alba_.]

[Footnote 439: Goodwin's performance was made an excuse for securing the

King's recommendation for his election as a Student of Christ Church

(_S. P. D. Addl. Jac. I_, xxxvii. 66, 67, 70).]

[Footnote 440: Birch, i. 214; Winwood, iii. 441; Nichols, iv. 1087, from

Hacket's _Life of Williams_.]

[Footnote 441: Birch, i. 303; Stowe, _Annales_ (1631), 1023; _Hardwicke

Papers_, i. 394; _Truth Brought to Light_, 64; Nichols, iii. 43. The

names of the plays are given in a MS. _penes_ Sir Edward Dering, printed

by S. Pegge in _Gent. Mag._ (May 1756) and Hawkins, _Ignoramus_, xxx. I

adopt the dates of this MS., which fit better into James's movements

than the 12-15 March suggested by Chamberlain's letter in Birch, i. 303.

The Vice-Chancellor ordered 'that noe Graduate of the Universitie under

the degree of Master of Arts, or fellow-commoner, presume to come into

the streets neare Trinity Colledge in the tymes the Comedyes are

actinge; or after the Stage-Keepers be come forth; nor that any Schollar

or Student, but those onely before excepted, by any meanes presume or

attempte to come within the said Colledge or Hall to heare any of the

said Comedyes'.]

[Footnote 442: Birch, i. 360, 361; Hawkins, _Ignoramus_, cxix, from a

narrative by James Tabor, Registrary.]

[Footnote 443: Birch, i. 395, 397. Can the play have been _Susenbrotus_,

for which there seems no room in the visit of 1615, although the MS.

claims a performance before James and Charles at Trinity in '1615'?]

[Footnote 444: The term recalls the old use of the _Camera_ as a

treasury; cf. ch. ii. Similarly Bristol claimed to be the 'chamber' of a

queen consort; cf. the patent to the Children of Bristol (ch. xii).]

[Footnote 445: Cf. ch. xxiv.]

[Footnote 446: Cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 172.]

[Footnote 447: _V. P._ x. 64, 67, 74; Birch, i. 8, 9. Chamberlain wrote

to Carleton (10 July 1603), 'Our pageants are pretty forward, but most

of them are such small timbered gentlemen that they cannot last long,

and I doubt, if the plague cease not the sooner, they will rot and sink

where they stand.' The double preparation must have cost the City

something. There was a levy, amounting to £12 10_s._ on some of the

guilds, in 1603, and in February 1604 another £400 had to be raised 'for

the full performance and finishing of the pageants'. Towards this the

Carpenters paid £2, but in all they had to pay an additional £8 3_s._

4_d._ in 1604. There must have been protests, for the wardens of the

Brewers were imprisoned for refusing to pay a levy of £50 (Jupp, _The

Carpenters_, 68, 294; Young, _The Barber-Surgeons_, 110; Williams, _The

Founders_, 222).]

[Footnote 448: Cf. ch. xxiv.]

[Footnote 449: Dekker sadly records that a great part of the speeches

was left unspoken, lest they should be tedious to James.]

[Footnote 450: Machyn, 180.]

[Footnote 451: See ch. xxiv, s.v. Dekker, _Coronation Entertainment_. On

15 April 1605 the Spanish ambassador provoked a riot by 'joys and shews'

to celebrate the birth of a Spanish prince (Lodge, iii. 147; Stowe,

_Annales_, 862).]

[Footnote 452: _V. P._ x. 384; Nichols, iv. 1074.]

[Footnote 453: Clode, _Early History of the Merchant Taylors_, i. 276,

gives many details from records of the company, including the item, 'To

Mʳ. Hemmyngs for his direccion of his boy that made the speech to his

Majesty 40_s._, and 5_s._ given to John Rise the speaker'.]

[Footnote 454: Cf. ch. xxiii. The entry of payments to Burbage and Rice,

trumpeted as a discovery by C. W. Wallace in _The Times_ for 28 March

1913, was in fact published by Halliwell-Phillipps in the _Athenaeum_

for 19 May 1888; it is also in Stopes, _Burbage_, 108.]

[Footnote 455: Cf. ch. xxiv.]

[Footnote 456: Machyn, 191, 196, 201, 261, 273; cf. App. A (1559-1561).]

[Footnote 457: Cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 165, 382. Machyn, 287, records

a watch with a 'castylle' at the Tower on 28 June 1562. There was

another on 28 June 1564, which Elizabeth saw privately from Baynard's

Castle (_Sp. P._ i. 366; cf. App. A). Puttenham, 165, speaks of 'these

midsommer pageants in London, where to make the people wonder are set

forth great and vglie Gyants marching as if they were aliue, and armed

at all points, but within they are stuffed full of browne paper and tow,

which the shrewd boys vnderpeering, do guilefully discouer and turne to

a great derision'.]

[Footnote 458: Sharpe, _Letter Book_, L. 187, prints an order of 23 Oct.

1481 forbidding from thenceforth any 'disguysyng nor pageoun', when the

Mayor went from his house to the water or the water to his house, 'as it

hath been used nowe of late afore this time'. Halle, ii. 232, describes

the reception of Anne Boleyn.]

[Footnote 459: Machyn, 47, 72, 96, 117, 155, 270, 294. In 1553 were a

'duyllyll' and 'ii grett wodyn, with ii grett clubes all in grene, and

with skwybes bornyng'. For 1540, cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 166. A

fragment of a Salters' pageant, printed by E. D. Adams in _M. L. N._

xxxii. 285, from _T. C. C. MS._ B. 15, 39, may belong to 1530 or 1542,

when they had Mayors.]

[Footnote 460: Clode, ii. 262; Nicholl, _Ironmongers_, 84; cf. ch. xii

(Westminster). The subject in 1566 is not recorded. Richard Baker,

painter-stainer, had £18 for the pageant and everything except the

children and their apparel; John Tailor 40_s._ to find six children 'as

well for the speeches as songs'; James Pele 30_s._ 'for his devise and

paynes in the paggent'; and Thomas Giles of Lombard Street (cf. chh.

iii, v) £5 10_s._ for apparel. The company paid 5_s._ 'to the prynter

for printing of poses speches and songs, that were spoken and songe by

the children in the pagent'.]

[Footnote 461: Clode, _Memorials_, 115; Nicholl, _Ironmongers_, 97,

'Paid unto James Pele and Peter Baker, for the devise of a pageant,

which tok none effecte, xxvjˢ. viijᵈ.']

[Footnote 462: W. Smythe, _A breffe description of London_ (1575); cf.

_Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 165. Dramatic allusions are 2 _Promos and

Cassandra_, i. 6, '[_Enter_] Two men, apparrelled lyke greene men at the

Mayor feast, with clubbes of fyreworke'; _Cobbler's Prophecy_, 469,

'comes there a Pageant by, Ile stand out of the green mens way for

burning my vestment'; _Dutch Courtesan_, iii. 1, 117, 'all will scarce

make me so high as one of the giants' stilts that stalks before my Lord

Mayor's pageant'; _Northward Hoe_, ii. 1, p. 195, 'Simon and Jude's

gentlemen ushers'.]

[Footnote 463: _2 R. Hist. Soc. Trans._ ix. 252, 'a representation in

the shape of a house with a pointed roof painted in blue and golden

colours and ornamented with garlands, on which sat some young girls in

fine apparel, one holding a book, another a pair of scales, the third a

sceptre. What the others had I forget.' He gives full details of all the

installation ceremonies.]

[Footnote 464: Chamberlain, 93.]

[Footnote 465: Clode, _Early History_, i. 264, 390, cites payments for a

ship, a pageant, a lion, and a camel, and to Mr. Haines, schoolmaster of

the Merchant Taylors school, for a wagon and the apparel of ten

scholars, who represented Apollo and the Muses before the Mayor in

Cheapside. Young, _Barber-Surgeons_, 111, prints the Lord Mayor's letter

of 22 Oct. 1603 directing that there should be no show that year. Felix

Kingston entered 'a thing touching the pagent' in S. R. on 29 Oct. 1604

(Arber, iii. 273).]

[Footnote 466: Machyn, 261, 309.]

[Footnote 467: Stowe, _Annales_ (1615), 887.]

[Footnote 468: Cf. ch. xxiii.]

[Footnote 469: John Taylor, _Heaven's Blessing and Earth's Joy_

(Nichols, ii. 527). The use of fireworks at Kenilworth in 1575 and

Elvetham in 1591, with a miniature sea-fight at the latter, has already

been noted. An undated device for three days' fireworks by an Italian

before the Queen, 'in the meadow', 'in the courtyard of the Palace', 'in

the river' (_Pepys MSS._ 178) may belong to 1575, or possibly to the

Warwick visit of 1572, at which a firework assault upon a fort in the

meadow below the castle is recorded by La Mothe, v. 96.]

[Footnote 470: _M. S. C._ i. 89.]

[Footnote 471: Cf. ch. xxiv.]

[Footnote 472: Nichols, _Eliz._ ii. 529, from a MS. in private hands.]

[Footnote 473: Halle, i. 22, 189; Cripps-Day, 118 (misdated 1510). The

illuminated roll of 1511 is engraved in _Vetusta Monumenta_, i, pll.

xxi-xxvi. Some interesting documents on early Tudor tilting are given in

Cripps-Day, xliii, from _Harl. MS._ 69 (_The Book of Certaine

Triumphes_).]

[Footnote 474: The rules are extant in _Heralds' College MSS._ I. 26, M.

6; _Harl. MSS._ 69, 1354, 1776, 2358, 2413, 6064; _Bodl. Ashm. MS._ 763;

versions are printed in _Vetusta Monumenta_, i; Grose and Astle,

_Antiquarian Repertory_, i. 144; Meyrick, _Antient Armor_, ii. 179;

Harington, i. 1; Cripps-Day, xxvii. Viscount Dillon prints (_Arch._

lvii. 29) an illuminated fifteenth-century collection of ordinances of

chivalry which belonged to Prince Henry.]

[Footnote 475: Dillon, _An Elizabethan Armourer's Album_ (_Arch.

Journal_, lii. 113), _Tilting in Tudor Times_ (_A. J._ lv. 296),

_Barriers and Foot-Combats_ (_A. J._ lxi. 276), _Armour and Arms in

Shakespeare_ (_A. J._ lxv. 270); C. ffoulkes. _Jousting Cheques of the

Sixteenth Century_ (_Archaeologia_, lxiii. 31), W. Segar, _Honor,

Military and Ciuill_ (1602), iii. 54, records a number of Elizabethan

jousts, or, as he calls them, 'triumphs'. Dillon (_A. J._ lv. 303)

reproduces drawings of a tilt, tourney, and barriers by William Smith

(_c._ 1597).]

[Footnote 476: W. L. Spiers in _L. T. R._ vii. 62; Machyn, 269.]

[Footnote 477: E. Law, _Hampton Court_, i. 135, 206.]

[Footnote 478: Segar (Nichols, ii. 335) describes a tourney, presumably

a foot-tourney, at Whitehall by night before the French ambassador,

François de Montmorency, in June 1572, with the yeomen of the guard

holding 'an infinite number of torches on the terrace and in the

preaching place'.]

[Footnote 479: The play of _Paris and Vienna_ on 19 Feb. 1572 included a

triumph with hobby-horses 'where Paris wan the christall sheelde for

Vienna at the turneye and barryers' (Feuillerat, 141). A barriers was

also fought by Amazons and Knights in a mask of 11 Jan. 1579

(Feuillerat, 287).]

[Footnote 480: Cf. App. A.]

[Footnote 481: Cf. ch. xxiv. The date at which the annual tilt began is

not clear. It cannot be earlier than the institution of Queen's Day

itself (1570? cf. p. 18), but as that is said to have originated at

Oxford, hard by Woodstock, the two may have come into existence

together. Segar, who compares Lee's enterprise to 'the Knighthood della

Banda in Spaine' assigns it to the beginning of the reign. On the other

hand, I have not found any actual evidence for a tilt on 17 Nov. before

1581, although there is plenty afterwards. The references to the matter

on Lee's tombstone and in the fragments of the _Ferrers MS._ do not

help, unless fragment (iv) belongs to the Woodstock entertainment of

1575, in which case the vow 'not far from hence' must be before that

date. Is it possible that the tilting at first took place at Oxford or

Woodstock itself and was transferred to Whitehall about 1581? In 1593,

perhaps owing to the plague, it was held at Windsor.]

[Footnote 482: Leland, _Collectanea_, ii. 666.]

[Footnote 483: Thus at a joust of 1494 (Kingsford, _Chronicle_, 201),

'iiij fayre ladyes ... ladde their Bridellis with iiij silkyn laces of

white and blewe'. After a joust in May 1571, ladies led the armed

victors to receive their prizes in the presence chamber (Nichols, ii.

334, from Segar).]

[Footnote 484: Cf. p. 52. Hunsdon and Dudley, as challengers, wore black

and white in 1559; in 1560 the heralds were in black and white (Machyn,

216, 231).]

[Footnote 485: A galley on the waterside at Whitehall is described as

hung with these shields by Von Wedel (_2 R. Hist. Soc. Trans._ ix. 236)

in 1584 and by Hentzner in 1598, 'emblemata varia papyracea, clypei

formam habentia, quibus, adiectis symbolis, nobiles in exercitiis

equestribus & gladiatoriis uti sunt soliti, hic memoriae caussa

suspensa', and Manningham, 3, describes 'certayne devises and empresaes

taken by the scucheons in the Gallery at Whitehall' in 1602. The Shield

Gallery was still extant in the time of Pepys. Aubrey, _Wilts._ 88, says

that a similar collection of shields at Wilton were 'of pastboard

painted with their devices and emblems, which was very pretty and

ingenious'. Of course, these were not used in the actual encounter. On

_imprese_, cf. F. Brie, _Shakespeare und die Impresa-Kunst seiner Zeit_

(1914, _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, l. 9); G. F. Barwick, _Impresas_ (_2 Library_,

vii. 140); Lee, _Shakespeare_, 455. A contemporary treatise is Paolo

Giovio, _Dialogo dell' Imprese Militari et Amorose_ (1555). Good

examples are afforded by _Pericles_, II. ii.]

[Footnote 486: Von Wedel (loc. cit. 258) describes the accession tilt of

1584: 'About twelve o'clock the queen with her ladies placed themselves

at the windows in a long room of Whitehall palace, near Westminster,

opposite the barrier where the tournament was to be held. From this room

a broad staircase led downwards, and round the barrier stands were

arranged by boards above the ground, so that everybody by paying 12_d._

could get a stand and see the play.... During the whole time of the

tournament all who wished to fight entered the lists by pairs, the

trumpets being blown at the time and other musical instruments. The

combatants had their servants clad in different colours; they, however,

did not enter the barrier, but arranged themselves on both sides. Some

of the servants were disguised like savages, or like Irishmen, with the

hair hanging down to the girdle like women, others had horse manes on

their heads, some came driving in a carriage, the horses being equipped

like elephants, some carriages were drawn by men, others appeared to

move by themselves; altogether the carriages were of very odd

appearance. Some gentlemen had their horses with them and mounted in

full armour directly from the carriage.... When a gentleman with his

servant approached the barrier, on horseback or in a carriage, he

stopped at the foot of the staircase leading to the queen's room, while

one of his servants in pompous attire of a special pattern mounted the

steps and addressed the queen in well-composed verses or with a

ludicrous speech, making her and her ladies laugh. When the speech was

ended he in the name of his lord offered to the queen a costly present,

which was accepted and permission given to take part in the

tournament.']

[Footnote 487: Nichols, ii. 335, from Segar.]

[Footnote 488: Lodge, ii. 146.]

[Footnote 489: Nichols, ii. 334, from Segar; _M. S. C._ i. 181, from

_Lansd. MS._ 99, f. 259.]

[Footnote 490: Von Raumer, ii. 431, from a letter of M. Nellot of the

French Embassy in _Dupuy MS._ xxxiii. I do not feel sure that the writer

is really describing a distinct joust from that of Whitehall, although

he certainly locates it at Hampton Court, and the French commissioners

certainly visited Hampton Court, with Leicester and Pembroke, on 6 May

(Walsingham's _Journal_). He gives Arundel and Windsor as challengers,

and the two 'Irish youths' might be Perrot and Cooke. Tilney only

charged in the Revels Account (Feuillerat, 341) for one challenge and

two days' triumph.]

[Footnote 491: Cf. ch. xxiv.]

[Footnote 492: Gawdy, 25, sent his father 'ij small bookes for a token,

the one of them was gyven me that day that they rann at tilt, divers of

them being gyven to most of the lordes, and gentlemen about the court,

and one especially to the Quene'. On 18 Nov. 1595, John Danter entered

in _S. R._ (Arber, iii. 53) 'a new ballad of the honorable order of the

Runnynge at Tilt at Whitehall the 17 of November in the 38 year of her

Maiesties reign', but it does not appear to be extant.]

[Footnote 493: Cf. ch. xxiii (s.v. Lee).]

[Footnote 494: Gawdy, 67 (n.d. but ascribed by ed. to 1592), 'Uppon the

coronation day at nyght ther cam two knightes armed vpp into the pryvy

chamber videlicet my L. of Essex and my L. of Cumberland and ther made a

challenge that vppon the xxvjth of ffebruary next that they will runn

with all commers to mayntayn that ther M. is most worthiest and most

fayrest Amadis de Gaule'.]

[Footnote 495: R. Carey, _Memoirs_, 32.]

[Footnote 496: Cf. ch. xxiii (s.v. Bacon).]

[Footnote 497: Chamberlain, 29, 163; Winwood, i. 271, 274.]

[Footnote 498: _Hatfield MSS._ xi. 462, 540, 544.]

[Footnote 499: Winwood, ii. 54.]

[Footnote 500: Boderie, ii. 144.]

[Footnote 501: Birch, i. 92.]

[Footnote 502: Rowland Whyte (Lodge, iii. 162) writing of a 'great tilt'

in which Montgomery was to take part on 20 May 1605, adds the lines--

The Herberts every cockpit day.

Do carry away

The gold and glory of the day.

The Westminster tilt-yard was, of course, close to the Cockpit.]

[Footnote 503: A. Wilson (_Compleat Hist._ ii. 686).]

[Footnote 504: Cf. ch. xxiii (s.v. Jonson, _Hymenaei_).]

[Footnote 505: W. Drummond of Hawthornden, _Works_ (1711), 231; Boderie,

i. 58, 105, 136, 173, 185, 260. The challenge of the Knights Errants,

who were the Earls of Lennox, Arundel, Pembroke, and Montgomery, is sent

by Drummond to a correspondent, with a reply in the same vein, but there

is nothing to suggest that he was the author. Ford's (q.v.) _Honour

Triumphant_ (1606) is addressed to the four Earls.]

[Footnote 506: There are several extant portraits of Henry in tilting

armour; one is engraved in Drayton's _Polyolbion_ (1613). Dillon (_A.

J._ lii. 125; lx. 132) notes that he had five suits of tilting-armour.

One, given him by Lee, cost £200. Another, given by Prince de Joinville,

is in the Tower. A third, at Windsor, was made by William Pickering at

Greenwich, apparently on one of the designs by Jacobe now at South

Kensington. As early as 18 Aug. 1604, when he was ten years old, the

Constable of Castile saw Henry at pike and horse exercise, and gave him

a pony (_V. P._ x. 178).]

[Footnote 507: Cf. ch. xxiii (s.v. Jonson, _Prince Henry's Barriers_).]

[Footnote 508: Nichols, ii. 361.]

[Footnote 509: Clephan, 133, 176, from _Harl. MSS._ 4888, art. 20; cf.

App. A.]

[Footnote 510: _Rutland MSS._ iv. 494, 'Item 31 Martii to Mʳ. Shakspeare

in gold about my Lords impreso xliiijˢ. To Richard Burbadge for paynting

and making yᵗ in gold xliiijˢ'. Wotton, ii. 17, mentions the 'bare

_imprese_, whereof some were so dark that their meaning is not yet

understood, unless perchance that were their meaning, not to be

understood'.]

[Footnote 511: Nichols, ii. 549.]

[Footnote 512: _Rutland MSS._ iv. 508, 'Paid given Richard Burbidg for

my lordes shield and for the embleance, 4ˡ. 18ˢ'.]

V

THE MASK

[_Bibliographical Note._ The origins of the mask are treated in

my book on _The Mediaeval Stage_ (1903), ch. xvii, and, with

its Tudor and Stuart developments, in R. Brotanek, _Die

englischen Maskenspiele_ (1902), and P. Reyher, _Les Masques

anglais_ (1909). An earlier study of merit is A. Soergel, _Die

englischen Maskenspiele_ (1882). R. Bayne contributes a chapter

on _Masque and Pastoral_ (_C. H._ vi.), and P. Simpson one on

_The Masques_ (_Sh. England_, ii. 311). I have not seen W.

Scherm, _Englische Hofmaskeraden_. Useful material, handled

with imperfect scholarship, is in M. Sullivan, _Court Masques

of James I_ (1913), and there are dissertations by A. H.

Thorndike, _The Influence of the Court-Masque on the Drama_,

1608-15 (_M. L. A._ xv. 114), J. W. Cunliffe, _Italian

Prototypes of the Masque and Dumb Show_ (_M. L. A._ xxii. 140),

W. Y. Durand, _A Comedy on Marriage and some Early

Anti-masques_ (_J. G. P._ vi. 412), and J. A. Lester, _Some

Franco-Scottish Influences on the Early English Drama_ (1909,

_Haverford Essays_). Most of the scanty Elizabethan material is

in A. Feuillerat, _Documents relating to the Office of the

Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth_ (1908, _Materialien_,

xxi, cited as Feuillerat, _Eliz._), and the relation of the

Revels Office to masks is studied in his _Le Bureau des

Menus-Plaisirs et la Mise en Scène à la Cour d'Elizabeth_

(1910, cited as Feuillerat, _M. P._); cf. also ch. iii. Many of

the contemporary descriptions of masks are edited amongst the

works of the poets, and are also to be found, with the few that

are anonymous, in J. Nichols, _Progresses of Elizabeth_ (1823),

and _Progresses of James I_ (1828); P. Cunningham and J. P.

Collier, _Inigo Jones, a Life; and Five Court Masques_ (_Sh.

Soc._ 1848); and H. A. Evans, _English Masques_ (1897). A

valuable bibliography is W. W. Greg, _A List of Masques,

Pageants, &c._ (_Bibl. Soc._ 1902). Analogous French texts are

in P. Lacroix, _Ballets et Mascarades de Cour_ (1868-70), and

are studied in V. Fournel, _Les Contemporains de Molière_

(1863), ii. 173, G. Bapst, _Essai sur l'Histoire du Théâtre_

(1893), 193, and H. Prunières, _Le Ballet de Cour en France_

(1914).]

The mask is not primarily a drama; it is an episode in an indoor revel

of dancing. Masked and otherwise disguised persons come, by convention

unexpectedly, into the hall, as a compliment to the hosts or the

principal guests. Often they bring them gifts; always they dance before

them, and then invite them to join the dance. They bring torch-bearers

and musicians, who light and accompany the choric evolutions. Their

intention lends itself to elaboration by spokesmen or presenters, and to

such spectacular decoration as a pageant or scene affords; thus it

readily assumes a mimetic setting. It is necessary to lay stress on the

fact that the guests mingle with the maskers in the dance. This intimacy

between performers and spectators differentiates the mask from the

drama to the end; its goal is the masked ball, not the opera. And as a

corollary to this intimacy, the performers are of the same social

standing as the audience; the mask is an amateur and not a professional

performance.

I have attempted elsewhere to indicate a possible folk origin for the

mask in the visits of excited worshippers, with fragments of a divine

and immolated animal, from house to house of a village, in order that

all may share the direct contact of the beneficent and potent thing.

Those persistent vizards and torches may perhaps recall, the one the

head and skin of the sacrificed victim, the other the brand snatched

from the sacrificial fire, itself perhaps the survival of a sunshine

charm even older than the sacrifice.[513] Obviously in the humanist and

even sceptical court of Elizabeth any consciousness of the 'luck' of the

mask must have been quite subliminal. It was a custom, like the rest,

belonging of right to the twelve days of the Christmas rejoicing, but

adaptable readily enough to a wedding or any other occasion of mundane

festivity. As a medium of courtly compliment to a sovereign it is

already well established in the fourteenth century. When Prince Richard,

afterwards Richard II, was keeping Candlemas at Kennington in 1377,

citizens of London, to the number of 130, rode to visit him with

musicians and torch-bearers. They wore vizards and were dressed to

represent the members of an imperial and a papal court. Entering the

hall, they diced with the prince and his company for jewels, using

loaded dice so as to be sure of losing. After the dicing the music

sounded, and 'the prince and the lordes danced on the one syde and the

mummers on the other a great while and then they dronck and tooke their

leaue'. The whole proceeding is called 'mumming'.[514] It is to be noted

that the 'lucky' character of the gifts is emphasized by the show of

dicing, and that the fraternization of maskers and spectators in the

dance is clearly marked. This is important, because during the changes

of the fifteenth century this particular and primitive element was

apparently forgotten. It was a period of literary and spectacular

elaboration. The dance in disguise attracted to itself other forms of

courtly entertainment that were then in vogue; the speech and dialogue

of allegorical or mythological personages, the architectural pageant,

the mimic tournament, even the interlude.[515] Splendid devices were

shown in Westminster Hall before the sovereigns under their cloths of

estate at the wedding of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Aragon in

1501.[516] On the first night three great pageants were successively

wheeled in. The first was a castle drawn by four beasts and bearing

eight disguised ladies. The second was a ship with mariners, whose

'counteynaunces speaches and demeanor' doubtless furnished an element of

comedy. They brought Hope and Love, who were ambassadors from the third

pageant, a Mount of Love, which bore eight knights. These descended and

assaulted the castle, and finally the ladies yielded and knights and

ladies danced together. On the second night the pageants represented an

arbour and a lanthorn; on the third two mountains; on the fourth, at

Richmond, a chapel. Very similar to these revels of Henry VII's reign

are those described by the chronicler Halle during the early years of

that of Henry VIII.[517] Many variations are possible. There is not

always a pageant. The comic element may take the form of a 'morris'. The

whole thing may form a setting or afterpiece to an interlude.

Occasionally a dicing is introduced, and to this variety the term

'mumming' or 'mummery' appears by the sixteenth century to have been

specialized.[518] The more generic term is 'disguising'. For all its

elaboration, the early sixteenth-century disguising retained many of its

original features. Vizards and torches are employed. The disguisers come

in suddenly, as a surprise to the guests. But unlike the visitors of

Richard II in 1377, they do not, so far as the records show, call upon

the guests to take a part in the dancing. This characteristic feature of

the primitive ceremony seems, under these particular conditions, to have

dropped out. Generally, though not always, there are two sets of

disguised persons, lords and ladies, corresponding to the 'double mask'

of later days, and these dance together. When they go out, the guests

very likely dance amongst themselves, before the 'void', or refreshment

of wine and spices, comes in. But of direct contact between disguisers

and guests, except in the old-fashioned 'mummery' with its dice-play,

there is nothing.

This same divorce between performers and spectators seems to rule in the

_momeries_ and _entremets_, which correspond to the English disguisings

in fifteenth-century France and Burgundy, and in many of the

_intermedii_ and _trionfi_ of fifteenth-century Italy.[519] But

somewhere in Italy, possibly in the carnival masks of Florence, the

primitive practice must have survived; and from Italy it made its way

back again to France, and also to England, under the rather

unjustifiable colour of a novelty.[520] It was on the Twelfth Night of

1512, according to Halle, that 'the Kyng with xi other wer disguised,

after the maner of Italie, called a maske, a thyng not seen afore in

Englande, thei were appareled in garmentes long and brode, wrought all

with gold, with visers and cappes of gold, and after the banket doen,

these maskers came in, with sixe gentlemen disguised in silke bearyng

staffe torches, and desired the ladies to daunce, some were content, and

some that knew the fashion of it refused, because it was not a thyng

commonly seen. And after thei daunced and commoned together, as the

fashion of the maskes is, thei toke their leave and departed, and so did

the Quene, and all the ladies.'[521] There has been much dispute as to

what the precise nature of the innovation of 1512 was. I formerly

thought that it lay in the introduction of some Italian detail of

costume, probably the 'long gowns and hoods with hats' of which the

contemporary _Revels Account_ speaks.[522] But after a careful review of

the earlier descriptions of disguisings, I now feel little doubt that

those are right who find the point precisely in that 'commoning' between

maskers and spectators which remained a characteristic feature of the

mask throughout the days of its most sumptuous development, and which

the good Halle could hardly be expected to recognize as merely a

reversion to a fourteenth-century English usage.[523] Nor is there any

reason to doubt that the impulse to the new-old mode, and perhaps also

the name which, although in an English form, accompanied it, had an

immediate origin in Italy.[524] Ronsard makes a similar acknowledgement

for France:[525]

Mascarade et Cartels ont prins leur nourriture,

L'un des Italiens, l'autre des vieux François, ...

... L'accord Italien quand il ne veut bastir

Un Théâtre pompeux, un cousteux repentir,

La longue Tragedie en Mascarade change.

Il en est l'inuenteur; nous suyuons ses leçons,

Comme ses vestemens, ses mœurs et ses façons,

Tant l'ardeur des François aime la chose estrange.

And in fact it is an Italian festivity of 1492 that furnishes the only

clear account of a revel in which disguised persons took the ordinary

guests out to dance that I have yet come across between 1377 and

1512.[526]

For some time the mask and the old-fashioned disguising are traceable

side by side at the court of Henry VIII. Ultimately they amalgamated. By

the end of the reign, 'mask' has become the official name, and

'disguising' is obsolete.[527] The 'commoning' between maskers and

guests is firmly established. And the mask has taken to itself the

elaborations of the disguisings, the introductory speeches, the pageant,

the mimic fight, the double sets of dancers, the close association with

the interlude.[528] Or, more strictly speaking, it can be either simple

or elaborate, a mere masked dance, or a far-fetched and costly device,

as occasion and economy may demand. As far as I can see, the whole

evolution of the form, as we find it in the seventeenth century, was

already complete under Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn, in 1532, led the first

recorded mask in which women took lords out to dance.[529] Even the

fixed scene had made its appearance, as an alternative to the movable

pageant, before the end of the reign.[530]

The mask retained its vogue under Edward VI and Mary, and Elizabeth,

with her special love of dancing, was not likely to neglect it.[531] The

annals of her court, indeed, have left us few such detailed descriptions

of masks as Halle affords for that of Henry VIII and the mask-writers

themselves for that of James I. This may be an accident, or it may be

that either economy or taste led Elizabeth to a preference for the mask

simple over the mask spectacular, which most invites description. The

story of the Elizabethan mask has to be pieced together from the

account-books of the Revels Office, or, where these fail, from scattered

sources. But though we would gladly have more detail, especially on the

literary and dramatic side, the result of such a survey is sufficient to

show that this particular type of _mimesis_ contributed at least as much

to the Christmas entertainment of Gloriana as to that of either her

father or her successor.

The first mask of the reign was on Twelfth Night, 1559. Some of its

details recall, across a space of two centuries, those of the Kennington

'mumming' of 1377. In both cases the performers represented

ecclesiastical personages, and in both there was the somewhat

exceptional feature of a parade in the streets. Naturally the

Elizabethan show, with its crows, asses, and wolves dressed as

cardinals, bishops, and abbots, made a characteristic sixteenth-century

appeal to the sympathies of a reviving Protestantism.[532] But even in

1377 the satirical element had not been lacking, for after emperor and

pope came riding at the end of the procession '8 or 10 arayed and with

black vizerdes like deuils, nothing amiable, seeming like legates'. The

1559 mask appears to have been on a much larger scale than was

customary. There were at least four cardinals and six priests. There

were popes, monks, summoners, and vergers. And there were friars, in

black, white, yellow, russet, and green, apparently a pair of each

colour. The russet friars wore velvet garments, with sleeves of yellow

velvet and purple satin 'partie paned'; the popes and cardinals rochets

of white sarcenet; the monks kirtles and cowls of black taffeta with

sleeves of purple satin. The Revels Office was careful to provide hats

for the cardinals and 'croger-staves' for the bishops. Four other masks

followed during the same winter. Two formed part of the festivities

accompanying the coronation, which took place on 15 January. These were

a mask, probably of Conquerors in white cloth of silver, on 16 January,

and a mask, probably of six Moors, on 22 January. The Moors had apparel

of cloth of gold and blue velvet, with sleeves of silver sarcenet and

'bases' of red satin. On their heads was curled hair made of black lawn

and wreathed with red gold sarcenet and silver lawn. Their limbs and

faces were of black velvet, and of these it is recorded that 'the lords

that masked toke awey parte'. They carried darts of 'tree and paste

paper gilded', and as the Revels Office also prepared bells and staves,

it is probable that a morris was introduced. The torch-bearers to this

mask were eight Moorish friars, with head-pieces of crimson satin. The

remaining two masks were at Shrovetide. On the Sunday was a double mask,

with an assault in it. The Queen's maids were rifled and rescued

again.[533] One party consisted of eight Swart Rutters, in black and

white jerkins and long breeches, with laced hats, dags, and silvered and

gilded partisans; the other probably of six Hungarians in blue and

purple cloth of gold. The torch-bearers were six Almayns, and the music

a drum and fife. On the Tuesday was another double mask, but of women,

being six Fisher Wives and eight Market Wives, dressed in bodies and

kirtles of various cloths of gold and silver, with elaborate trimmings,

and wearing wicker head-pieces painted with red and silver, and hats

covered with gold lawn. They seem to have had Fishermen for

torch-bearers, and six minstrels in yellow damask, as well as a drum and

fife.

Four masks were given during the summer of 1559. One was on 24 May in a

banqueting house built at Westminster, for the entertainment of the Duke

of Montmorency, Constable of France, who came to ratify a treaty. This

was of Astronomers, in long robes of Turkey red cloth of gold, with

torch-bearers in green damask. The second was in a banqueting house at

Greenwich on 11 July, after a tilt by the Queen's pensioners. The other

two were in August during the progress. One was given by the Earl of

Arundel at Nonsuch on 6 August.[534] The other was in a specially built

banqueting house at Lord Admiral Clinton's place of West Horsley. This

last was a double mask of Shipmen, appropriate to an Admiral, in blue

cloth of gold, and Country Maids. Two 'grasyers or gentillmen of the

cuntrye', whose black damask gowns appear in a Revels inventory, may

have acted as presenters.

The winter masks of 1559-60 were five in number. On New Year's day was a

mask of six Barbarians, in red cloth of gold, with Venetian commoners in

white damask for torch-bearers. On Twelfth Night was a double mask, of

six Venetian Patriarchs in green, with purple head-pieces, and six

Italian Women in white and crimson. They were accompanied by

torch-bearers and a drum and fife. On Shrove Tuesday was another double

mask, of an elaborate mythological character, for which a device of 'a

rocke of founteyne' was employed. The women represented Diana in purple

and three pairs of Huntress Nymphs, in carnation, purple, and blue

respectively; the men Actaeon and his six fellows, in purple, with

orange buskins and gilt boar-spears. They had a drum and fife and, as

torch-bearers, eight Maidens in purple with variously coloured kirtles,

and eight Hunters in yellow with murrey buskins. And they were

accompanied by twelve hounds. It is noted in the Revels inventory that

Actaeon's garments were 'all to cutt in small panes and steyned with

blood'. There were also a mask on New Year's Eve and a second mask at

Shrovetide.[535] One of these was of six Nusquams, allegorical

personages in white, crimson, and yellow, having the breasts of their

scapulars 'steyned with the posy of poco a poco'. Their torch-bearers

were six Turkish commoners in murrey and white. The other was of eight

Clowns in red and green, with flails and spades of gilt wood, black

high-laced shoes made out of the limbs of the previous year's Moors,

hedging mittens, and white gold sarcenet aprons, which were 'gyven awaye

by the maskers in the queenes presence'. They had eight Hinds for

torch-bearers, and a shepherd for a minstrel.[536]