Mayor's company, that is to say, those freemen who were not yet advanced to be members of the 'livery' or governing body. The Ironmongers paid for the printing of their pageant in 1566, but the first printed description now extant is that of the Skinners' pageant for Woolstan Dixie in 1585, which was written by George Peele. Peele seems to have inherited his father's connexion, for he had, according to the Merry Jests, 'all the oversight of the pageants', and certainly he devised the Drapers' pageant for Martin Calthorpe in 1588, which is now lost, and the Descensus Astraeae of the Salters for William Webbe in 1591. The Fishmongers' pageant for John Allot in 1590 was, however, by one T. Nelson, a stationer. The absence of Elizabethan prints later than these does not necessarily mean that pageants fell out of use. There was one in 1600;[1] the Merchant Taylors had one for Sir Robert Lee in 1602; there would have been one in 1603 but for the plague; and there was probably one in 1604.[2] On the other hand, it can hardly be inferred from the chaff of Munday as a 'peeking pageanter' in Histriomastix and as 'pageant-poet to the city of Milan' in The Case is Altered that he stepped regularly into Peele's shoes about 1591. Jonson's reference, at least, is subsequent to Munday's first 'book' of a pageant, which was, so far as we know, the Merchant Taylors' Triumphs of Reunited Britannia for Sir Leonard Holliday in 1605. I do not know on what evidence Campbell, or the Ironmongers' Fair Field, for Thomas Campbell in 1609, the only known copy of which has lost its title-page, is sometimes ascribed to him. But he was responsible for the Goldsmiths' Chryso-Thriambos for Sir James Pemberton in 1611, the Drapers' Himatia Poleos for Sir Thomas Hayes in 1614 and their Metropolis Coronata for Sir John Jolles in 1615, and the Fishmongers' Chrysanaleia for John Leman in 1616. His chief competitors in civic favour were Dekker and Middleton, the former of whom prepared the Merchant Taylors' Troja Nova Triumphans for Sir John Swinnerton in 1612, and the latter the Triumphs of Truth for Sir Thomas Middleton in 1613, to the 'book' of which he annexed an account of a quite exceptional entertainment on occasion of the opening of Hugh Middleton's New River on 29 September 1613.
- ↑ Chamberlain, 93.
- ↑ Clode, Early History, i. 264, 390, cites payments for a ship, a pageant, a lion, and a camel, and to Mr. Haines, schoolmaster of the Merchant Taylors school, for a wagon and the apparel of ten scholars, who represented Apollo and the Muses before the Mayor in Cheapside. Young, Barber-Surgeons, 111, prints the Lord Mayor's letter of 22 Oct. 1603 directing that there should be no show that year. Felix Kingston entered 'a thing touching the pagent' in S. R. on 29 Oct. 1604 (Arber, iii. 273).
