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Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century. Roy Strong
Читать онлайн.Название Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century
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isbn 9780007397129
Автор произведения Roy Strong
Издательство HarperCollins
The whole city was ornamented with flags and banners, chaplets and hangings, candles and lamps, and wonderful devices and extraordinary representations … The citizens, too, went out to meet the king and queen, dressed out in their ornaments … On the same day, when they left the city for Westminster, to perform the duty of butler to the king (which office belonged to them by right of old, at the Coronation), they proceeded thither dressed in silk garments, with mantles worked in gold, and with costly changes of raiment, mounted on valuable horses, glittering with new bits and saddles, and riding in troops arranged in order. They carried with them three hundred and sixty gold and silver cups, preceded by the king’s trumpeters and with horns sounding, so that such a wonderful novelty struck all who beheld it with astonishment.37
In 1308, something very similar was staged when Edward II and Isabella of France rode through London before their Coronation, but this time the celestial connexion was made: ‘then was London ornamented with jewels like New Jerusalem’.38 The Heavenly Jerusalem was to reappear later in Richard II’s reign, in 1392, when the City staged a pageant entry as a token of submission to the king, with angels descending with golden crowns;39 in 1432, when Henry VI entered London as king of both France and England; in 1445 to greet his wife, Margaret of Anjou, prior to her Coronation (appropriate also because her father claimed to be King of Jerusalem);40 and even as late as 1547 to welcome the Protestant Edward VI.41
Not every king or queen was accorded a Coronation pageant entry. Indeed, they were irregular events, and it was not until the sixteenth century that a pageant entry was to become mandatory. When, however, they did occur they presented material of great importance on the concept of king-and queenship and its duties. In the case of a king, time and again what the citizens staged in the streets was an allegorical representation of the Coronation and its significance as they viewed it. Although there is mention of a tower full of angels, presumably the Heavenly City, at the north end of London Bridge for Henry VI in 1429, what can be argued to have been Henry VI’s delayed Coronation entry proper took place in February 1432, three years on from his actual Coronation at the age of eight as King of England but only two months after his Coronation as King of France. In the London entry the king is cast as the Christ-figure on whom the Holy Spirit descends, that is, a pageant re-enactment of the unction in the Abbey. In one pageant seven angelic virgins appear and stage an allegorical version of the Coronation. On the young king each bestowed a piece of spiritual armour, partly drawing on St Paul’s text defining the ‘whole armour of God’ (Ephesians 6: 11–17), but equally based on the ceremony of investiture in the actual Coronation: the crown of glory, the sceptre of clemency, the sword of justice and the pallium (cloak) of prudence. From that pageant the king proceeded to one in which his capital city was transformed by his sacred presence into the earthly paradise, and from thence he rode on to a vision of the New Jerusalem, with himself cast as the Solomonic king. How much of this programme stemmed from the City and how much from the court is open to question, but the desire to present the boy ruler as the embodiment of theocratic kingship was strong at a period when being king of two countries was under severe strain and moving to collapse.42 That these equations were not lost in the wider context of the whole country can be demonstrated by moving out of London and turning to the city of York’s reception of Henry VII in 1486, where a similar re-enactment of the Coronation for the populace took place. At the city gate the king was greeted with a wilderness from which, at his approach, red and white roses sprang, while above the heavens opened, filled with ‘Anglicall armony’, as the inevitable golden crown descended. Ebrank, the city’s mythical founder, appeared and knelt to present Henry not with the city’s keys but a crown. Next he was greeted by a council of his ancestors, the six Henrys, presided over by Solomon who delivered to the king a ‘septour of sapience’. Later David surrendered the ‘swerd of victorie’ in token of Henry’s ‘power imperiall’, and the citizens of York erupted from their city, cast as the New Jerusalem, all attired in the Tudor colours of white and green. In both these royal entries the tendency to give a symbolic meaning to any royal attribute marries in exactly with what we have seen happen to the processional swords.43
By the close of the fifteenth century much of this pageantry came to be codified. The Household Ordinances of 1494 laid down how a queen was to be received at her Coronation:
At the Tour gate the merye [i.e. mayor] & the worschipfulle men of the cete of London to mete hir in their best arraye, goinge on ffoot ij and ij togedure, till they came to Westminster: And at the condit in Cornylle [i.e. Cornhill] ther must be ordined a sight with angelles singinge, and freche balettes theron in latene, engliche, and ffrenche, mad by the wyseste docturs of this realme; and the condyt in Chepe in the same wyse; and the condit must ryn both red wyn and whitwyne; and the crosse in Chepe must be araied in the most rialle wyse that myght be thought; and the condit next Poules in the same wyse …44
This records more or less what happened both for Elizabeth of York in 1487 and Anne Boleyn in 1533. In 1487 the queen arrived from Greenwich by water and was met by the Lord Mayor and the City companies in barges and ‘a great red dragon spowting fflamys of fyers into tenmys [Thames]’. Although there were no pageants, the route had children attired as angels and virgins singing ‘swete songes’ as she passed by.45 Thirty-six years later the City sent fifty barges to escort Anne Boleyn, and there was much music-making, and the fire-spouting dragon made a second appearance. This was in response to what amounted to a three-line whip from government, Henry VIII requesting that the City authorities prepare for the reception of his ‘moste deare and welbeloued wyfe … with pageauntes in places accustomed, for the honor of her grace’. She rode along a route whose theme was that common for queens, in which a new queen was presented as a parallel to the Virgin Mary, culminating in her Assumption and Coronation, along with biblical analogies of those who were fruitful in progeny, dwelling on ‘the fruitfulnes of saint Anne and of her generacion, trustyng that like fruite should come of her’. But the most spectacular pageant provides us with a rarity, a drawing for one of the arches straddling the street (a design only, for the pageant ended up at ground level and not over an arch), designed by Holbein and representing Mount Parnassus from which the Muses, amidst much music-making and song, harangued the queen-to-be repeatedly on the need for her to produce a male child. She was, in fact, already pregnant with the future Elizabeth I.46
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