hours. All is changed, and yet how unchanged! The Gothic city has grown into a modern Babylon. Granted, my masters! But for all that, the heartbeat of a mighty people throbs as strongly within its railway-girded circuit as it beat within its turreted walls and narrow streets in those far-off days when Poet Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales, and the victories of Crecy and Poictiers, Agincourt and Flodden, were welcomed with a shout of joy throughout the land.

The Parliament to vote it down,
Conceived it very fitting,

Lest it should fall,

And kill them all,

In the House, as they were sitting,
They heard (God wot),

It had a plot,

Which made them so hard hearted,

To give command, it should not stand,
But be taken down and carted."

CHAPTER XXI

PAGEANTRY IN LONDON UNDER HENRY VIII

W

In

HEN Henry VIII. ascended the throne he was in the flower of early manhood and singularly handsome. The Venetian Ambassador described him as the finest man he had ever seen; tall, stalwart, and graceful, well featured, with a complexion and skin many a woman might have envied. His portrait by Paris Bordone, belonging to the Merchant Taylors' Company, confirms this description, but the steel-grey eyes and aquiline features are a trifle small for so large and wellproportioned a head. His neck and shoulders were so white and soft that, like Francis 1. of France, he often wore a sort of lownecked dress-bodice in order to display them to advantage. the earlier years of his reign he exhibited the better side of his character and made himself extremely popular, especially in London; a popularity which was shared by the Queen, a short, stout lady with a good complexion, rather indistinct features, and ruddy brown hair. Katherine of Aragon compensated for lack of beauty by her kindly manners, her great charity, and her dignified bearing. She was religious without bigotry, and could be extremely lively and agreeable; indeed, even in her greatest trials she was good-natured and uncomplaining. On the other hand, she was uncompromising and obstinate, and nothing on earth or in heaven would induce her to relinquish her queenly position. She had come from a Southern Court, where the grandeur of the Spanish Renaissance was blended with something of Oriental magnificence borrowed from the

1 The Roman archives prove that every effort was made to induce her to solve the divorce question by retiring to a nunnery, but Katherine would have none of it. She was a wife, and as such would live and die.

lately conquered Moors of Grenada. No doubt the excessive splendour of the Court of England during the first years of Henry the Eighth's reign was, in a measure, due to the taste of this cultured Princess, who shared her husband's passion for pomp and pageantry.

Henry VII. had left a full Exchequer, the nation was at peace with itself and with the outside world, commerce was fairly flourishing, and as yet the religious unity of the country had not been disturbed. London was still the beautiful Gothic capital of the Plantagenets, with its glorious silhouette of spires, towers, and gables.

Unhappily, however, from time to time the gaieties of the Court and capital were disturbed by the apparition of that most unwelcome guest the plague. In Henry the Eighth's reign the visitor took a new form, that of the sweating sickness. This epidemic was apparently distinct from the plague, and resembled in many ways the malady now known as influenza, of which it was doubtless a violent form. It was extremly contagious, and we are assured children who had come from an infected house might easily spread it by merely playing on the doorstep. It made its first appearance before the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, when two successive Lords Mayor died of it, besides six aldermen and some six thousand commoners. Again, in 1507, it filched away many thousands of people in various parts of the country; but its worst attack was in 1517, under Henry VIII., when Lord Clinton, Lord Grey de Wilton, and Andrea Ammonio, the King's secretary, were among the victims. It raged again fiercely in 1528-29, and Henry, in dire distress lest Anne Boleyn should be seized by it, begged of her to retire to her father's place, Hever Castle, now the property of Mr. W. Astor. Erasmus attributed it to the dirty habits of the people; but if this was the case, how is it that it was not chronic? It continued to appear and reappear at lengthy intervals until nearly the end of the century, when it disappeared altogether. The plague was in a sense another affair, and this also raged in Henry's time; but epidemics, however terrible, do not seem to have interfered very greatly with the festivities of the Court.

The costume of the earlier part of the sixteenth century was the gayest and most beautiful ever devised for either men or

women.

Yet on ordinary occasions, we are assured, the citizens. wore sombre colours, and favoured dark cloths and homespuns. But when occasion served, the streets were full of rainbow-tinted velvets, silks, and satins. A royal marriage, a coronation, even a State funeral, called forth the artistic taste and spirit of an age powerfully influenced by the Italian Renaissance, which reached England through Flanders and France. Henry VIII. employed a galaxy of foreign artists. Besides the matchless Holbein, he welcomed Bartolomeo Toto, the brothers Luca and Francesco Penni, Vincenzo Volpone, Luke Cornelius, Guillem Streete, Gerard, Luke Hornibaud, and his sister Susanna, a renowned miniature painter, and Lavinia Tyrling,1 who could paint a perfect likeness in a space not bigger than a pin's head. Among the English artists were Mr. Brown, Mr. Fyler, Mr. Williams, Mr. Maynard (the best of the early English painters), Mr. Thomas Stirr, Mr. John Reynolds, Mr. Renoeveer, Mr. Nichols, and Mr. Suete or Sweet. These and scores of others, artists, glass-blowers, jewellers and gilders, native and foreign, designed and organised the gorgeous masques and pageants that beautified Court and town life at this period.

Henry the Eighth's Court, the most sumptuous ever known in England, lived, indeed, in one perpetual pageant. This strange sovereign, who destroyed more fine buildings and dispersed more works of art than all his predecessors put together, was essentially a virtuoso and collector of things rare and beautiful : even on his deathbed he was still buying works of art. He furnished Whitehall with a magnificence that amazed even the Italian Envoys, accustomed to the luxury and artistic splendour of Venice, of Medician Florence and Papal Rome. To the treasures amassed by Wolsey and confiscated from him, he added the spoils of a thousand abbeys and

1 There is at Sudely Castle, where Katherine Parr died, a miniature said to have been painted by Lavinia Tyrling, representing Katherine Parr, who wears round her neck a chain with a pendant. Miss Agnes Strickland on one occasion examined it under a strong magnifying glass, when, to her astonishment, she discovered that the pendant, no bigger than a pin's head, contained a second miniature of Henry VIII. seated on his throne-probably the smallest picture in the world.

2 See the account of this palace in the Chapters on the Riverside Palaces.