Читать книгу Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century - Roy Strong - Страница 24

Richard II’s Coronation was the first to respond in any very substantial way to this shift in the balance of political power, for on that occasion the vigil procession was invented. This established a sequence of events which was to remain immutable until 1661, the last occasion when there was a state entry into London. That sequence involved the Lord Mayor and Aldermen together with representatives of the great craft companies meeting the new ruler outside the City and conducting him to the Tower. On the morrow they would return to take their places in a great procession on horseback through the City to the Palace of Westminster. First in 1377, and then intermittently, that entry was to be elaborated by the introduction of symbolic pageantry. The involvement of the City on such a scale was an innovation of the first magnitude, fully recognising its crucial importance to the crown. The emergence of pageantry occurred virtually simultaneously on both sides of the Channel, reflecting the dilemma of both monarchies as they tried to free themselves from the juridical restraints which had been imposed on them by institutions and customs earlier in the Middle Ages. The result was an explosion of spectacle and display which was to be repeated in the twentieth century. On both occasions they were profound acknowledgements of where in society the monarchy now had to look for its support.

That change began in 1377 when the boy king was welcomed into what was billed as camera vestra, your chamber. The sudden and innovative appearance of pageantry is likely to have been triggered by the real fears that attended the accession of a child of ten and the need to build him up in the eyes of the populace. It was equally an act of reconciliation by the City with the king’s uncle, John of Gaunt. On 15 July, at some time after 9 a.m., the magnates together with the Lord Mayor and Aldermen went to the Tower. They were all attired in white, the colour of innocency, in tribute to the ten-year-old boy king who was also clothed in the same colour. A great procession was then formed, led by men of Bayeux, in which also took part the citizens of London representing the different wards, some of them making music, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, with the king himself surrounded by the great magnates. Ahead of him rode John of Gaunt and the earls of Cambridge and Hertford and, immediately before them, Simon Burley, the young king’s guardian, who carried the Sword of State. The king himself rode bareheaded as if to emphasise that his Coronation had yet to come and that this exhibition of him to the populace was a public version of the recognitio in the Abbey.

The procession made its way through Cheapside and along Fleet Street and, via the Strand, to Westminster Hall. En route the great conduits were made to run with red and white wine. At the one in Cheapside there stood a castle with four towers, on each turret of which there was a virgin of the king’s age who blew golden leaves on to him and offered him a cup of wine from the conduit. In the centre of the castle there was a spire, on the summit of which floated an angel who descended and offered the king a crown of gold. On reaching Westminster Hall there was enacted what was known as a voidee. The king went up to the marble table and requested wine, after which all drank and retired.³³

We already know some of the underlying reasons for such an innovation, but what in the case of the young Richard did it signify? The key figure in the 1377 Coronation was the king’s uncle, John of Gaunt, who presided over the Court of Claims. The accession, in fact, occurred at a period when there was trouble both at home and abroad. The government itself was split between the great magnates, hereditary custodians of power, and the new men, like Simon Burley, who increasingly began to figure in the administration. The whole Coronation was stage-managed to present a public face of unity in which various contending parties were equally balanced in the ceremonial roles assigned to them. But the most arresting feature of 1377 was the castle with its maidens and crown-bestowing angel. Pageantry of this kind was a late-fourteenth-century phenomenon; the rapid development of the entrance of a ruler into his capital city was a major occasion for symbolic theatre on the grand scale.³⁴ England led the way in this development in an era which saw the emergence of the miracle play. It followed shortly after in France, but with a crucial difference. There the solemn entry into Paris occurred after and not before the sacre at Reims.³⁵ In England the processional entry preceded the Coronation. This meant that the ruler was not yet king in the fullest sense of the word. So the London reception becomes that of a ruler-to-be, one who can be appealed to, and instructed through the language of pageantry in the art of monarchy as cast by the citizens of London.

What was this castle? It was a materialisation in paint and canvas of the Heavenly Jerusalem brought down to earth, a realisation of the text of the Apocalypse (Revelation 21: 2–3); ‘And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’ The Heavenly City is ‘like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal’ (21: 11). These castles, which were to become a recurring feature of London royal entries, were indeed painted jasper green. But why was such a feature thought apposite to greet a royal personage? The medieval entry has liturgical roots.³⁶ In the Rituale Romanum, amidst prayers concerning the Office of the Dying, are also ones concerned with the soul’s arrival in paradise. This arrival is described as an entrée joyeuse with the heavenly host gathered to receive the soul into the celestial Jerusalem. The medieval reception of a ruler was modelled on this, combined with Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. So, when the King of England entered London, the City took on the guise of the New Jerusalem with the ruler as the Anointed One. Any pre-Reformation London royal entry was not only a secular but also an ecclesiastical event. Along the route from time to time there would be gatherings of clergy arrayed in rich copes, bearing crosses and candles, who would cense the king as he passed. So the royal entry was a combination of a re-enactment of Palm Sunday, with its cries of Benedictus qui venit, with the apocalyptic vision of the end of things, Christ’s Second Coming back to earth as envisioned in the Book of Revelation. Already by 1236 the City had adorned its streets for a royal welcome on the occasion of Henry III’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence and her Coronation:

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