Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century

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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