Queen's day passed 'without any extraordinarie matter more than running and ringing'. In 1600 Essex, then under a cloud, was, contrary to expectation, 'no actor in our triumphs', but Cumberland delivered a speech in the capacity of a Melancholy Knight. In 1602 one Garret came disguised, like Carey in 1593, and gave the Queen his scutcheon and impresa.[1] In 1601 there seems to have been a barriers, for which Sir John Davies was invited by Sir Robert Cecil through Cumberland to write an introductory speech.[2]
James transferred the annual tilting to his own accession day, and it continued to be regularly observed on 24 March. Shows 'costly and somewhat extraordinary' are recorded on this day in 1605.[3] In 1607 the French ambassador comments that there were 'plus de beaux habits que de bons gendarmes'.[4] In 1609 Sir Richard Preston made a sensation 'in a pageant which was an elephant with a castle on his back'.[5] James himself was no tilter; his horsemanship was considerable, but he employed it in the chase rather than in the onset. It is noteworthy that running at the ring, which was quite a subsidiary sport at the court of Elizabeth, tends under her successor to replace the more hazardous jousts. And even at the ring the marked inferiority of James to his brother-in-law Christian of Denmark during the latter's visit in 1606 became the subject of popular comment, and did not tend to improve the relations between the sovereigns. The 'incomparable pair of brethren', William Earl of Pembroke, and Philip Earl of Montgomery, shone in the tilt-yard[6]; and it was a fall from his horse at a joust that first attracted the King's attention to Robert Carr, afterwards Earl of Somerset.[7] But the most prominent man-at-arms, during the earlier years of the reign, was James's cousin, Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox. He led on one side for Truth, against the Earl of Sussex for Opinion on the other, at a barriers given to celebrate the wedding of the Earl of Essex on 6 January 1606, and the invaluable Jonson wrote a dialogue of Truth and Opinion as a setting for the combat.[8] Later in the same
- ↑ Chamberlain, 29, 163; Winwood, i. 271, 274.
- ↑ Hatfield MSS. xi. 462, 540, 544.
- ↑ Winwood, ii. 54.
- ↑ Boderie, ii. 144.
- ↑ Birch, i. 92.
- ↑ Rowland Whyte (Lodge, iii. 162) writing of a 'great tilt' in which
Montgomery was to take part on 20 May 1605, adds the lines—
The Herberts every cockpit day.
Do carry away
The gold and glory of the day.The Westminster tilt-yard was, of course, close to the Cockpit.
- ↑ A. Wilson (Compleat Hist. ii. 686).
- ↑ Cf. ch. xxiii (s.v. Jonson, Hymenaei).
