Only occasional examples of the pageantry used at tilts are upon record. An account of the proceedings on the occasion of the wedding of Ambrose Earl of Warwick and Anne Russell, daughter of the Earl of Bedford, on 11 November 1565 will show how it was introduced. The challenge took place in August, at the churching of the Princess Cecilia of Baden. York Herald introduced Richard Edwardes of the Chapel, who assumed the character of a post sent from four strange knights, and announced their challenge to be defended before the Queen and Cecilia in November. On 11 November the Queen was in the gallery at the end of the tiltyard. Edwardes entered with a trumpeter, and delivered another speech. Then the challengers rode in from the mews, each accompanied by a patron and by an Amazon with his spare horse. They circled round the tilt and took up their position at the Queen's end, to await the defendants, hanging their shields on posts beneath her window. Then the actual tilting began. The programme, although departed from, was one which seems to have been conventional, of one day for tilt, one for tourney, and one for barriers.[1] The women leading the horses by their bridles perhaps appear more frequently in earlier hastiludia than in those of the sixteenth century.[2] They represent, I think, the 'damsels' of the ladies in whose names the knights fought, and whose colours they were accustomed to wear. Elizabeth's personal colours for this purpose were black and white.[3] It was a function of the ladies to award to the most successful of the defendants a jewel provided by the challengers. The principal opportunities for mimetic speechifying were afforded by the challenge, which was sometimes delivered in person, sometimes, as in the 1565 example, by deputy, and was probably also
- [Footnote: two may have come into existence together. Segar, who compares Lee's
enterprise to 'the Knighthood della Banda in Spaine' assigns it to the beginning of the reign. On the other hand, I have not found any actual evidence for a tilt on 17 Nov. before 1581, although there is plenty afterwards. The references to the matter on Lee's tombstone and in the fragments of the Ferrers MS. do not help, unless fragment (iv) belongs to the Woodstock entertainment of 1575, in which case the vow 'not far from hence' must be before that date. Is it possible that the tilting at first took place at Oxford or Woodstock itself and was transferred to Whitehall about 1581? In 1593, perhaps owing to the plague, it was held at Windsor.]
- ↑ Leland, Collectanea, ii. 666.
- ↑ Thus at a joust of 1494 (Kingsford, Chronicle, 201), 'iiij fayre ladyes . . . ladde their Bridellis with iiij silkyn laces of white and blewe'. After a joust in May 1571, ladies led the armed victors to receive their prizes in the presence chamber (Nichols, ii. 334, from Segar).
- ↑ Cf. p. 52. Hunsdon and Dudley, as challengers, wore black and white in 1559; in 1560 the heralds were in black and white (Machyn, 216, 231).
