Royal entry

The devising of the iconography, aside from highly conventional patterns into which it quickly settled,[3] was managed with scrupulous care on the part of the welcoming city by municipal leaders in collaboration with the chapter of the cathedral, the university, or hired specialists.

[4]In England, the first pre-coronation royal entry was staged in 1377 for the 10 year-old Richard II, and fulfilled the dual purpose of enhancing the image of the boy-king and reconciling the crown with the economically powerful City of London.

The city authorities waited for the prince and his party outside the city walls, and after handing over a ceremonial key[9] with a "loyal address" or speech,[10] and perhaps stopping to admire tableaux vivants such as those that were performed at the entry into Paris of Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, described in detail by the chronicler Froissart, conducted him through the streets which were transformed with colour, with houses on the route hanging tapestries and embroideries[11] or carpets[12] or bolts of cloth from their windows, and with most of the population lining the route.

Along the route the procession would repeatedly halt to admire the set-pieces embellished with mottoes and pictured and living allegories, accompanied by declamations and the blare of trumpets[14] and volleys of artillery.

Initially these were on religious themes, but "gradually these tableaux developed, through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century, into a repertory of archways and street-theatres which presented variants of a remarkably consistent visual and iconographical vocabulary.

The court now often had a major role in both designing and financing entries, which increasingly devoted themselves to the glorification of the absolute monarch as hero, and left the old emphasis on his obligations behind; "any lingering possibilities of its use as a vehicle for dialogue with the middle classes vanished".

[19] At the third "triumph" at Valladolid in 1509, a lion holding the city's coat-of-arms shattered at the King's arrival, revealing the royal arms: the significance could not have been lost, even on those unable to hear the accompanying declamation.

[20] During the 16th century, at dates differing widely by location, the tableau vivant was phased out and mostly replaced by painted or sculpted images, although many elements of street-theatre persisted, and small masques or other displays became incorporated into the programmes.

[21] During the Hundred Years' War, the entry of the ten-year-old Henry VI of England, to be crowned king of France in Paris, 2 December 1431, was marked with great pomp and heraldic propaganda.

At the porte Saint-Denis the royal party were greeted with a grand achievement of the French arms that Henry claimed, gold fleurs de lis on an azure ground.

Cardinal Bibbiena reported in a letter of 1520 that the Duke of Suffolk had sent emissaries to Italy to buy horses and bring back to Henry VIII of England men who knew how to make festal decorations in the latest Italian manner.

After Mantegna's great mural of the Triumphs of Caesar rapidly became known throughout Europe in numerous versions in print form, this became the standard source, from which details were frequently borrowed, not least by Habsburg rulers, who especially claimed the Imperial legacy of Rome.

Although Mantegna's elephants were difficult to copy,[32] chained captives, real or acting the part, were not, and elaborate triumphal carts, often pulled by "unicorns" might replace the earlier canopy held over the prince on horseback.

The woodcuts and text of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499 were another well-known source, and Petrarch's I Trionfi was printed in many illustrated editions; both were works of mythological allegory, with no obvious political content.

Entries became displays of conspicuous learning, often with lengthy Latin addresses, and the entertainments became infused with matter from the abstruse worlds of Renaissance emblems and hermeticism, to which they were very well suited.

[34] All the city's artistic resources were drawn upon to create this exemplary entry, to a planned programme perhaps devised by the historian Jacopo Nardi, as Vasari suggested; the seven virtues represented by seven triumphal arches at stations along the route, the seventh applied as a temporary façade to the Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore, which still lacked a permanent one.

After about 1540 French entries and Habsburg ones in the Low Countries[35] were especially freighted with implication, as the rulers' attempts to suppress Protestantism brought Protestant and Catholic populations alike to the edge of ruin.

"[36] The Pompa Introitus of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp in 1635, devised by Gaspar Gevartius and carried out under the direction of Rubens, was made unmistakably pointed, and included a representation of the god of commerce, Mercury, flying away, as a lamenting figure representing Antwerp points at him and looks imploringly out at the Viceroy, whilst beside her lie a sleeping sailor and a river god, representing the wrecked trade of the city from the blockading of the river Scheldt.

Eventually the Viceroy managed to obtain the lifting of the ban on trade with the Indies which the entry had represented as Antwerp's only hope of escaping ruin; but by then the Spanish had agreed to the permanent blockade of the river.

Spectacular displays and water pageants took place in the city's harbor; a procession was led by two mounted trumpeters; a large temporary structure erected on an artificial island in the Amstel River was built especially for the festival.

The distinguished poet and classicist Caspar Barlaeus wrote the official descriptive booklet, Medicea Hospes, sive descriptio publicae gratulationis, qua ... Mariam de Medicis, excepit senatus populusque Amstelodamensis.

A few weeks later he dictated the programme of a deliberately humiliating anti-festival, with the burghers coming barefoot with nooses round their necks to beg forgiveness from him which, after imposing a huge fine, he consented to do.

[39] The entries of Charles and his son Philip in 1549 were followed the next year by a ferocious anti-Protestant edict that began the repression that led to the Revolt of the Netherlands, in the course of which Antwerp was to suffer a terrible sack in 1576 and a long siege in 1584–85, which finally ended all prosperity in the city.

The Duchy of Lorraine, a great centre of all festivities, was swallowed up in the Thirty Years War, which left much of Northern and Central Europe in no mood or condition for celebrations on the old scale.

In France the concentration of power in royal hands, begun by Richelieu, left city elites distrustful of the monarchy, and once Louis XIV succeeded to the throne, royal progresses stopped completely for over fifty years; in their place Louis staged his elaborate court fêtes, redolent of cultural propaganda, which were memorialised in sumptuously illustrated volumes that the Cabinet du Roi placed in all the right hands.

[44] Shakespeare does not seem to have written anything for such an occasion, but with Jonson he was one of a group of twenty gentlemen processing in The Magnificent Entertainment, as the published record called the first entry of James I of England into London.

[49] Thomas Dekker, the playwright and author of the book on The Magnificent Entertainment for James I is refreshingly frank: The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, went a step further, commissioning enormous virtual triumphs that existed solely in the form of print.

[53] An early meeting between the festival book with travel literature is the account of the visit in 1530 of the future Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, then King of Hungary and Bohemia to Constantinople.

Printed commemorative pamphlets spelled out in detail the elaborately artificial allegories and hieroglyphic emblems[54] of the entry, often drawn from astrology, in which the Viceroy would illuminate the city as the sun.