celebrated by a mock sea-fight between merchantmen and Turkish pirates on 6 June 1610, and the effect of this spectacle was also enhanced by a display of fireworks. On the previous 31 May Henry had been given the welcome of the City, as he came up the river, with a device by Anthony Munday, in which Burbage and Rice of the King's men rode upon two great fishes to deliver the speeches. Burbage, as Amphion, represented Wales, and Rice, as Corinea, Cornwall.[1] Similarly the festivities at the Princess Elizabeth's wedding in 1613 included a fight between Venetian and Turkish galleys on 11 February and a firework representation of St. George delivering the Amazonian Queen Lucida from Mango the Necromancer.[2] The City had to find a pension for a man who was maimed in this triumph.[3] Bristol, the second seaport of the realm, also favoured water shows, welcoming Elizabeth in 1574 with an assault on the forts of Peace and Feeble Policy, and Anne in 1613 with a version of the more modern theme of merchantman and pirate.[4] We do not know the nature of the Devises of Warre prepared by Thomas Churchyard for one of Sir Thomas Gresham's entertainments of Elizabeth at Osterley; but an example of the conversion of military training into mimesis is afforded by the archery show of Prince Arthur with his Knights of the Round Table, which was displayed by Hugh Offley before the Queen between Merchant Taylors and Mile End in 1587.[5]
More than two centuries before this, when Edward III associated this same Round Table with the foundation of his chivalric order of the Garter, pageantry had already begun to cast its mantle over the mediaeval exercises of knightly feats of arms. As the actual practice of warfare dissociated itself more and more from the domination of the mail-clad horseman, the spectacular tendency had naturally grown. Not that, even at Whitehall, the tournament had ever become a mere pageant and nothing more. It had still its value, both as part of the courtly training of a gentleman and as a test of physical endurance; and it was chiefly about the
- ↑ Cf. ch. xxiii.
- ↑ John Taylor, Heaven's Blessing and Earth's Joy (Nichols, ii. 527). The use of fireworks at Kenilworth in 1575 and Elvetham in 1591, with a miniature sea-fight at the latter, has already been noted. An undated device for three days' fireworks by an Italian before the Queen, 'in the meadow', 'in the courtyard of the Palace', 'in the river' (Pepys MSS. 178) may belong to 1575, or possibly to the Warwick visit of 1572, at which a firework assault upon a fort in the meadow below the castle is recorded by La Mothe, v. 96.
- ↑ M. S. C. i. 89.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xxiv.
- ↑ Nichols, Eliz. ii. 529, from a MS. in private hands.
