Six Wives (75 page)

    There were also some innovations. Powerfully symbolising Anne's francophilia, the procession was headed by twelve Frenchmen – merchants and servants of the French ambassador – all dressed in violet velvet with one sleeve in Anne's colours of violet and blue. Anne's own dress was in the French fashion, and an anonymous Frenchman who wrote an account of the event seems to have acted as a sort of style consultant – claiming credit, for instance, for the pennants hung with bells in the water procession, which he describes as being trimmed 'by my advice' with '
or clinquant
', to reflect the sun's rays as well as to make a noise. New groups were also invited to march in the procession, including the judges, who turned up in a body. They were headed by FitzJames, the Chief Justice and included Sir John Spelman. And they wore their full judicial finery of scarlet gowns, hoods and tippets and gold collars of Ss. At the end of the procession, Anne bestowed kind words on the judges, saying to them: 'I thank you for all the honour you have done me this day'. The thanks were well repaid, for, over the next few years, the judges were to be very busy enforcing her title against the many who would deny it.
¹⁹

    The result of including such extra groups was that the procession was unusually long: 'from beginning to end', according to Cranmer, who rode next to the French ambassador, '[it] extended half a mile in length by estimation or thereabout'.
²⁰

    The procession followed the usual route through the City, along streets which were freshly gravelled, railed on one side and hung with arras. At key points, the Queen paused to hear and applaud pageants. These, like the rest of the ceremonies, were a rather successful mixture of old and new.

    The first was at Fenchurch Street, where children dressed as merchants welcomed the Queen to the City. This was an allusion to Anne's wide range of contacts with the merchant community – through the overlapping circles of Reform, book-sellers and the importers of French luxury goods. But there was also surely more than a nod to the fact that Anne was the first Queen of England who numbered a Mayor and citizen of London among her ancestors: when the citizens saluted Anne, they were hailing one of their own.

    The next pageant, at Gracechurch Street, was mounted by the Hanseatic merchants of the Steelyard. These were another group heavily influenced by Reform. But it was the Renaissance, rather than the Reformation, which shaped their offering. It was designed by Holbein and it represented Mount Parnassus, with Apollo and the Nine Muses, who saluted Anne in appropriate verse. If the pageant as executed followed Holbein's surviving preparatory drawing at all faithfully, it was the most sophisticated piece of Renaissance theatrical design that London would see till the spectacular masque settings of Inigo Jones almost a century later.

    Nor were the natives far behind in adopting the new fashions. The pageants laid on by the City included the Judgement of Paris, in which, predictably, Paris gave the prize to the Queen, not Venus, because Anne uniquely combined the attributes of the three rival goddesses:

The theme of the Three Graces, performed at the Conduit in Cornhill, underwent a stranger transformation. The Graces were given their proper Greek names, which must have sounded mighty odd to English ears. But the translations changed them from the ethereal qualities of female beauty in the Greek into stolid badges of worldly prosperity in the English: Aglaia (
Brilliance
) became 'Hearty Gladness', Thaleia (
Bloom
) 'Stable Honour' and Euphrosyne (
Mirth
) 'Continual Success'.
²¹

    These translations were the result of deliberate choice and cultural difference, not ignorance. For the authors of the pageant-verses, Nicholas Udall and John Leland, were the cream of English scholarship. Udall, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, had been caught up in the illicit book scandal of 1529, when Anne had tried to protect the miscreants whom Wolsey was seeking to root out, and he would go on to be an equally scandalous headmaster of Eton, whence he was dismissed after charges of pederasty with one pupil and complicity in a robbery committed by two others. Leland's life was scarcely less colourful. A student at both Oxford and Cambridge, he had in 1526–9 paid an extended visit to Paris, where he had been influenced by Lefèvre d'Étaples in religion and Guillaume Budé in scholarship and antiquarianism. Finally he went mad, after laying more or less single-handed the foundations of English historical scholarship on the wreckage of the monastic libraries. But what mattered in 1533 was that he was the most skilled Latin poet in England: 'Leland stands', it has been asserted, 'to the Latin poetry of sixteenth-century England as Wyatt and Surrey do to the English.'
²²

    None but the best would do for Anne.

    With authors like these, it was only to be expected that Anne's interests in Reform would also feature. They appeared in the great pageant at the Gate to St Paul's Churchyard. It showed an empty throne – Anne's throne – round which was written
Regina ANNA prospere! precede!
et regna!
'That is, in English, "Queen Anne prosper! proceed! and reign!" ' Beneath were three ladies, each holding a gold or silver tablet inscribed with versions of the kind of Biblical texts that figured in Anne's own religious reading. The tablet of the Lady on the left read:
Confide in
DOMINO
(from Psalm 11.1, 'In the Lord I put my trust'); and the tablet of the Lady on the right:
DOMINE! dirige gressos meos
(from Psalm 119.133, 'Order my steps in Thy word'). These two tablets were of silver. But the lady in the centre held a golden tablet with the words:
Veni amica
coronaberis
: 'Come my love! thou shalt be crowned!' These words, which apply so neatly to Anne, are rather more difficult to track to their Biblical source. They
sound
like the ecstatic
Song of Songs
. But the precise quotation does not appear. Instead, it is almost certainly based on
Esther
2.17:

Vashti's offence had been to refuse to come when the King, Ahasuerus (Xerxes of Persia), had commanded. This was the crime of disobedience, for which that other displaced Queen, Catherine, could likewise be plausibly condemned.
²³

    But all that was, for the moment, in the past. Instead, the principal message of the pageant looked firmly to the future and found it golden. For written at the feet of the ladies were Latin verses, of which the following is the contemporary translation:

As Anne passed by, the ladies threw rose-petals and confetti ('wafers') over her head, with the verses written on the wafers in letters of gold. The theme was continued in St Paul's' Churchyard, where she was greeted by a massed choir of children. 'Amen', she said, 'with a joyful smiling countenance', when their performance was over. Was it relief? Or appreciation?

    She then passed through Ludgate, which was freshly painted and gilded, along Fleet Street and finally came to Westminster. The Hall was hung with tapestries and reglazed. In the middle of the Hall, she was helped out of her litter. She processed to the dais under the Cloth of Estate and took refreshments. By this time it must have been 8 or 9 at night. But still she was all graciousness. She sent the refreshments to her ladies, and thanked each group of participants in the procession.
²⁴

* * *

But now, it was over. She had, as
The Royal Book
required, showed herself to the people, going 'bareheaded and bare-visaged till she come to Westminster that all men may behold her'. Many, like Chapuys, had thought that she could not survive such exposure. She had proved them wrong. Still, it was with relief that she withdrew from the gaze of so many eyes – first to the Queen's Chamber, beyond the White Hall, where she changed, and then to the greater security of York Place itself and Henry's arms.
²⁵

    Cranmer, privileged by both his position and his intimacy with the Queen to step behind the scenes, caught this moment of withdrawal from the public to the private with unique vividness. 'She was conveyed', he wrote to Hawkins, 'out of the backside of the palace to a barge and so unto York Place, where the King's Grace was before her coming.' 'For this you must ever presuppose', he continued, 'that his Grace came always before her secretly in a barge, as well from Greenwich to the Tower, as from the Tower to York Place.'
²⁶

    Henry, as usual, was having his cake and eating it. It was Anne's day, not his, and he did not want to steal her thunder. But equally he wanted to savour Anne's triumph, for which they had both waited so long. In his barge on the Thames he was in earshot of the procession: he could follow its progresses, and hear the singing and cheers. He was also at hand to protect her with his powerful presence in case – God forbid – anything went wrong.

    But it did not. His people acquiesced; some even rejoiced. A golden world had been promised by the poets; it must have seemed very near with Anne in the royal bedchamber at York Place.

* * *

The couple rose early the following morning, Whitsunday, 1 June, for the coronation itself. Between 8 and 9 o'clock Anne and her ladies entered Westminster Hall and stood on the dais. The Queen wore a royal surcoat and robe of purple velvet furred with ermine, with a high collar and tied with a lace with heavy gold tassels; while her ladies were dressed in their crimson robes, laced and furred according to rank. The Lord Mayor of London and the nobles who would take part in the coronation were already gathered in the Hall to greet her.
²⁷

    Meanwhile, as Cranmer reported to Hawkins, 'there assembled with me at Westminster Church' the officiating clergy. They included the Archbishop of York, five bishops, one of whom was Gardiner of Winchester, the Abbot of Westminster and ten or twelve other abbots. '[We] all', Cranmer continued, 'revested ourselves in our
pontificalibus
, and, so furnished, with our Crosses and Crosiers, proceeded out of the Abbey in a procession to Westminster Hall, where we received the Queen.'
²⁸

    There was now a pause, while the railed way from the Hall to the coronation stage or
theatre
in the crossing of the Abbey was covered over with blue cloth. Then the heralds marshalled the procession in order of precedence and, protected by the cloth, they marched to the Abbey. Anne was supported on her right hand by the Bishop of London and on her left by Gardiner, while her train, 'which was very long', was carried by the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.
²⁹

    Then came the coronation service. Disappointingly, Cranmer's report gives no details, referring simply to 'diverse ceremonies'. But it is clear that the usual ritual for a Queen consort was followed. There was no oath; instead the anointing was followed by the investiture with the ring, the crown, the sceptre and the ivory rod. 'I did set the Crown upon her head', wrote Cranmer, 'and then was sung
Te Deum
.'
³⁰

    What Cranmer did not tell Hawkins, however, was that the crown used was St Edward's Crown itself. This was normally reserved for the coronation of the Sovereign and was very heavy. Immediately after the
Te Deum
, therefore, '[Cranmer] took off the Crown of St Edward, being heavy, and set on the crown made for her', which Anne wore for the ensuing coronation mass. After the mass, Anne went behind the high altar to offer at St Edward's shrine and to rest briefly. Meanwhile, all the peeresses had put on their coronets: 'every Duchess . . . a coronal of gold wrought with flower'; 'every Marchioness . . . a demi-coronal of gold [and] every Countess a plain circlet of gold without flowers'.
³¹

* * *

The procession now reassembled to conduct Anne back to Westminster Hall for the coronation feast. She wore her own crown and this time her right hand was supported by her father, the Earl of Wiltshire, and her left by Lord Talbot and Furnival, deputising for his father, the absent Earl of Shrewsbury. The musicians struck up and 'the trumpets played marvellous freshly'.
³²

    The banquet was described by Cranmer, who sat (though at a considerable distance) at Anne's right hand, 'as a great solemn feast [which lasted] all day'. Two ladies knelt at the Queen's feet, to attend to her private needs. On her right stood the Dowager Countess of Oxford and, on her left, the Countess of Worcester. Their task was to 'hold a fine cloth before the Queen's face when she list to spit or do otherwise at her pleasure'. To the sound of trumpets the Queen was served by great nobles who acted as her carver, sewer and butler, while her ewerer was Thomas Wyatt, deputising for his aged father. And the Lords vied in their obsequiousness: 'these noblemen', as the official souvenir pamphlet noted, 'did their service in such humble sort and fashion, as it was a wonder to see the pain and diligence of them: being such noble persons'.
³³

    The high table was protected by a kind of enclosure, while beneath it were four other tables running the length of the Hall, two against the walls and two free standing. The Barons of the Cinque Ports sat on the first table by the east wall; on the second, free-standing table, were the lords and bishops; on the third the peeresses and ladies; and on the fourth, by the west wall, the Lord Mayor and citizens. Before the feast started, the gentlemen removed their heavy outer robes and sat down to eat in comfort. Meanwhile Suffolk as Constable and Lord William Howard as Deputy Earl Marshal 'rode often times about the Hall, cheering the Lords, Ladies and the Mayor and his brethren'.