have been modelled on analogous French establishments. The Pensioners had a Captain, a Lieutenant, a Standard Bearer, and a Clerk of the Cheque. They were gentlemen of good birth, and to them the Court looked for its supply of accomplished tilters. They attended the Queen, bearing gilded battle-axes, on her way to chapel, and in public processions.[1] By the sixteenth century the control of the guards clearly fell within the sphere of the Lord Chamberlain. Both the Hunsdons themselves acted as Captains of the Pensioners, and the Captaincy of the Yeomen was sometimes, although not always, attached to the Vice-Chamberlainship.
The Secretaries, with the Clerks of the Signet and Privy Council, the Master of the Posts, and the Masters of Requests, although they had grown out of the Chamber, and were still, like the Lords Treasurer, Chancellor, Admiral, and Privy Seal, lodged in the Household, cannot at this period be regarded as under the Lord Chamberlain.[2] But he had some responsibility for the royal Chaplains, the Chapel, the Vestry, and the Clerks of the Closet, whence the Queen heard prayers, especially after Elizabeth suppressed the Deanship of the Chapel.[3] And he controlled the physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, the astronomer, the serjeant-painter, the surveyor of ways, the various hunting equipages, the rat-taker and mole-taker, and a number of artificers ministering to the diverse needs of the Queen and the palace. Probably he controlled the royal fools and other survivals of that characteristic mediaeval interest in mental and physical abnormality.[4] And, what is more to our purpose, he certainly controlled the players, and the extensive establishment of musicians. Amongst these the old royal ministralli or
- ↑ Cf. App. F.
- ↑ On the development of the Secretaries, cf. Tout, 175; Davies, 228; Nicolas, P. C. vi, xcvii; Cheyney, i. 43; R. H. Gretton, The King's Government, 25; L. H. Dibben, Secretaries in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (E. H. R. xxv. 430).
- ↑ On the Chapel, cf. ch. xii, s.v.
- ↑ Payments on account of Robert Grene, a court fool, appear in the Privy Purse Accounts for 1559-69 (Nichols, i. 264). Apparently the post was hereditary; a warrant of 1567 for the clothes of 'Jack Grene our foole' is in Addl. MS. 35328. C. C. Stopes, Elizabeth's Fools and Dwarfs (Shakespeare's Environment, 269), adds from a Wardrobe book of 1577-1600 (Lord Chamb. Books, v. 36) 'Thomasina', a dwarf or muliercula, and from another (Lord Chamb. Books, v. 34) 'The Foole', 'William Shenton our Foole', 'Ipolyta the Tartarian', 'an Italian named Monarcho', 'a lytle Blackamore'. References to Monarcho, including L. L. L. IV. i. 101, are collected in Var. iv. 345, and McKerrow, Nashe, iv. 339. Dee, 7, records a visit from the Queen's dwarf 'M^{rs} Thomasin' on 7 June 1580.
