from the reckoning. An estimate for another spectacular mask in April 1581 amounts to about £380, and again it is clear that the materials for garments are not included. It is rather surprising to find that a mask intended to accompany the embassy to Scotland at the time of James VI's wedding cost no more than £17 10s. 10d., but this was a simple mask without a pageant, and garments already in store were 'translated' for the purpose.[1] Nor did Elizabeth desire to do any excessive honour to her cousin. On the other hand, the accounts, and particularly the inventories attached to those for the earliest years of the reign, show that the richest materials were used without stint to deck out the maskers. Clothes of gold and silver, shot with innumerable hues and often further enriched with embroidered 'works', velvets and sarcenets, satins, taffetas, and damasks; all recur in a truly royal profusion, and at a cost of anything up to a guinea or so a yard. The cheaper stuffs were no doubt used for torch-bearers, and there was room for economy in the Cologne and Venice gold and silver and other forms of tinsel that served for fringes and trimmings.[2] Copper lace, as the Duke of Newcastle gravely informed Charles II at the Restoration, looked as well as gold for the two or three nights before it tarnished: 'All Queen Elizabethes dayes shee had itt, & Kinge James.'[3] Burghley's reorganization of the Revels in 1597 apparently left the office without any responsibility for the preparation of masks, and it is not clear what arrangements were made for these during the last few years of the reign. Under James the Revels claimed fees for the personal attendance of the officers at masks, for the lighting of the banqueting-house, for small repairs to its fittings, and for no more.[4] Small sums also appear in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber for services of the mat-layer in making ready the dancing-floor, and of Grooms of the Chamber in attendance on the maskers, and in those of the Office of Works for the erection of stages and scaffolds. The incidence of the main expenditure of course depended upon whether
- ↑ Feuillerat, Eliz. 110, 153, 168, 345, 392.
- ↑ Feuillerat, Eliz. 18, 112, et passim.
- ↑ Newcastle, On Government (S. A. Strong, Cat. of Documents at Welbeck, 223). The direct reference is to tilts, but an earlier passage runs, 'Well Sr Then your Matie is well returned to White-Halle & ther prepare a maske for twelve-tyde,—Etaliens makes the Seanes beste,—& all butt your Matie maye have their Glorius Atier off Coper which will doe as well for two or three nightes as Silver or Golde & much less charge, which otherwise will bee much founde falte withall by those thatt attendes your Matie in the maske'.
- ↑ Cunningham, 203-17; cf. ch. iii.
