The Mendicant Merry Monarch
We
have a pool on about which historical figure crops up the most in Pageants. The
obvious money is on Queen Elizabeth, largely because of the phenomenal numbers
of visits she paid to towns and stately homes up and down the land. These
visits, which could last weeks, could bankrupt local nobles through the expense
of putting up her entire retinue of, servants, attendants and various flunkeys,
nobles and ministers (and their attendants, servants and so on).
Queen Elizabeth with a modern guard at the 1908 Chelsea Pageant
These visits could make or break a noble and holding lavish entertainments was the perfect way a disgraced Earl could get back into favour. The Women’s Institute Pageant of Hampshire 1930 featured an episode where Elizabethan visited the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham in 1591. The Earl was desperately trying to get himself back into Elizabeth’s good books after he had married the sister of Lady Jane Grey (who attempted to usurp the throne in 1554). For this the Queen had fined the earl £15 000 and imprisoned the couple until her death in 1568. The book of words remarked that ‘Queen Elizabeth loved Pageants, and loved them best when she was the central figure in them.’ Thus, the Pageant-within-a-Pageant featured an allegory of the Virgin Queen as Aureola, Queen of Fairy land, wooed by prince Oberon. The Queen, in this Pageant at least, was mollified.
In the 1912 Pageant of Bignor, a local Sussex girl, elected the May Queen of the village has her big day upstaged by the unprompted arrival of Elizabeth, in search of a blacksmith to reshod her horse. The May Queen is disconsolate until the Queen awards the sulking girl the honour of being her attendant for the day, as well as freeing her drunken disorderly fiancée from the stocks.
These scenes proved so popular in pageantry that the monarch occasionally featured in pageants running simultaneously, being in two places at once! So ubiquitous was Elizabeth that a reviewer for the 1910 Chester Pageant remarked of the town:
‘Its history is mostly of the earlier periods, nothing of importance happening since the sixteenth century. Apparently, so far as is known, Queen Elizabeth did not include Chester in her tour, and for once in the history of Pageantry that vain-glorious but wonderful monarch is conspicuous by her absence.’ Elizabeth had soon become a firm favourite at local Pageants across the country so that once again, every summer, Gloriana toured up and down the land, drawing huge crowds.
From the Cheltenham Looker-on, 23 July 1910.
Elizabeth as a child and adult with Edmund Spenser at the 1908 Chelsea Pageant