Читать книгу The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart - Sarah Fraser, Sarah Fraser - Страница 25
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‘WE ARE ALL PLAYERS’
Eleven months after Elizabeth I’s death, the Stuarts had not even made their official entry into London. As the plague petered out, the day was fixed for the Ides of March, to be followed by the state opening of the first Parliament.
Fields and wooded parks divided the two Londons – the cities of London and Westminster. The City of London resounded with the clatters and bangs of hundreds of ‘mechanicians … carpenters, joyners, carvers and other Artificers sweating at their chisels’, energy levels kept up by a ‘suck [on] the honey dew of Peace’. On 15 March the royal family emerged from the Tower, their palace in the City. Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker created the pageant, and Dekker’s company of actors was now Henry’s: the Prince’s Men. To celebrate, Dekker was collaborating with Middleton on a play for their ten-year-old master – The Honest Whore. Jonson, burly, with a square bruiser’s head, dismissed Dekker as ‘a dresser of plays about town’, but they put aside professional rivalries to produce a politicised vision of the new united kingdoms of Britain as an earthly paradise.
The royal procession left the Tower around midday. Henry rode in front of his father, men on foot and mounted nobles in between them, accompanied by the prince’s friends and leading household officers. The prince gazed about, ‘smiling, as overjoyed, to the people’s eternal comfort’. This was just how the late queen Elizabeth had comported herself among her people in the capital. Henry now turned and ‘saluted them with many a bend’. They shouted and cheered ‘fair Prince’ Henry to the skies, riding ‘in glory … as in the abridgement of some famous story’. To them, he was his father and forebears in miniature. In Henry, the poet Michael Drayton identified ‘every rare virtue of each king/Since Norman William’s happy conquering’.
A five-hour parade lay ahead of them. The king sat on his favourite white filly under a canopy of silk and cloth of gold, ‘glittering, as late washed in a golden rain’. Horses and men seemed made of gold. Courtiers great and small, household officers of all ranks, filed into place.
Shakespeare and his fellow actors, now the King’s Men, had received four yards of scarlet cloth to make up their livery for this day. They began to march. As the King’s Men they were also grooms of the chamber in ordinary. At court functions, they came in as ushers. The court resembled a huge three-decker ship, rocking, unsinkable. Courtiers clambered up, fell overboard, conspired against others, flattered and bantered and vied for favour. Hide-bound by ritual to honour each other to their faces, they hid, spied, informed, gave and broke their word just out of sight. It was rich, brutal and elegant. Shakespeare and his friends waited and watched. What a trove of royal material – a cacophony of information to feed into plays about kings, the nature of monarchy and empires.
From the Tower to Temple Bar (gate), labourers had gravelled the muddy, filth-strewn streets, and railed them to separate the crowds from the nobility. Along the road, the City’s Worshipful Companies waited in their liveries with their ‘streamers, ensigns and bannerets’ blowing. The conduits of Cornhill, Cheap and Fleet Street ran with claret. ‘Diverse music’ flowed from every arch, heightening the party atmosphere and making the wine ‘run faster and more merrily down into some bodies’ bellies’.
The Stuarts processed along Cheapside, lined with the gold-workers’ shops and jewellery merchants they would soon patronise. Near Fleet Street they passed the Mitre and Mermaid taverns. Close to the Inns of Court, these taverns attracted many of the artists, thinkers, radical lawyers, MPs and clerics who would soon be drawn to Henry’s circle, to eat and talk about their employers, their work, and plans for their country’s future, when their hopeful young master was called to the thrones.
Between the Tower and Westminster, the pageant passed under seven arches in all, some over seventy feet high. From the top of the second arch, Genius addressed Queen Anne, praising her birth and virtues, and ‘that fair shoot … your eldest joy, and top of all your store’, Henry. After solitary Gloriana, the English revelled in the myth of a royal family. After the Virgin Queen, pure and alone, came marriage, earth, offspring, fecundity and growth, security of succession. Richard Martin MP welcomed the king on behalf of Members of Parliament and lawyers. He praised the ‘fair inheritance from the loins of our ancient kings … your princely offspring’, deliberately tracing the Stuart descent from the Tudors.
When Henry reached the sixth arch by the conduit on Fleet Street, it looked like ‘some enchanted castle guarded by ten thousand harmless spirits’. It was a ‘tower of pleasure’. In the middle a huge globe rotated slowly, ‘filled with all the degrees and states that are in the land’. Astraea – one of the traditional symbols of Elizabeth I – sat on top, her garment thickly strewed with stars, a crown of stars on her head, a silver veil covering her eyes.
Near Astraea stood Envy, eating the heads off adders. Her ‘rank teeth the glittering poisons chew’ and swallowed, as blessings descended on Henry and his family. The City celebrated ‘the attractive wonder of man’s majesty’ after a loved but barren woman’s majesty: ‘Our globe is drawn in a right line again/And now appear new faces and new men.’
Yet, the presence of Envy and her sisters showed that the Stuarts had enemies. They had inherited Elizabeth’s wars, religious divisions and potential assassins, along with her thrones. The previous year, while the Stuarts rode from here to there, outrunning the plague, two Catholic conspiracies – the Main and Bye plots – had been unearthed, resulting in the first religiously and dynastically motivated executions and imprisonments of the new era. Sir Walter Ralegh had become entangled in one. He was sentenced to death, but sent to the Tower until James made up his mind whether to kill or free him.
In a private letter, Father Tesimond, a disenchanted Catholic priest, gloomily concluded it was Prince Henry, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Charles, the king’s ‘numerous progeny’, that really guaranteed this Protestant succession. Tesimond’s colleague, Father Garnet, a prominent English Jesuit, concurred. The king secured the present, ‘but the son that follows him’ was more important in the long run. Over the hill at thirty-eight – an average male life expectancy in 1600 – James might die any moment. However, James’s heir was in place and being educated for the job. The peaceful transition to the new dynasty made clear to the discontented: the cause of other claimants was a dead issue.
The final arch at Temple Bar marked the meeting point of the City and Westminster. Here the City of London handed the royals over to the court and politicians. Beneath the arch the god ‘Janus’ hung the arms of the new kingdom: a life-sized lion and unicorn rampant, made of brass, gold and silver gilding.* The dedication read: to ‘Janus Quadrifrons’, word-play perhaps for James needing four faces (and eight eyes), each one to watch over one of the countries he ruled. This extraordinary union had come about peacefully, after centuries of conflict between the English and Scots. At Whitehall, James’s government had started to work on ending the war with Ireland, and the king and Cecil were negotiating to bring the Armada war to a close.
Towards the end of the day, the court retired to Whitehall to feast and celebrate the new British monarchy. Up the road in the City, the people fell to looting the allegorical world. They hauled down the arches as if it were a revolution, and carried off the chipped, gaudy paintwork, to raise fires and mend houses.
The Stuarts had at last taken possession of Elizabeth’s palaces and hunting lodges, furniture, books, gems, tapestries and jewels. James also inherited her policies and her factions in court, church and state – all competing for power and favour. He reappointed many of Elizabeth’s ministers and lower-ranking officers. He inherited expectations as well as wealth and status. But Henry was new. He had to be settled in a manner suitable for a role hardly anyone remembered – that of crown prince. The last had been Edward VI, born in 1537.* Cecil now set to work, consulting old household books from Henry VIII’s time, to find the protocols for creating the crown prince’s household.
* The arms hang today in the Guildhall.
* Nottingham was born in 1536, his cousin Northampton in 1540; Edward VI inherited in 1547, so even men like these remembered nothing useful of Edward’s time as Prince of Wales.
