NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM E
laborate pageants have been staged on the River Thames for more than five centuries to celebrate coronations, marriages and royal arrivals. King Richard III appears to have started the tradition by becoming the first
monarch to travel by boat to Westminster Abbey for his coronation in 1483. Fifty years later, an impressive spectacle of 50 richly-decorated barges provided by the Livery Companies, and 250 other vessels, accompanied the equally ill-fated Anne Boleyn from Greenwich to the Tower of London for her coronation on 29 May 1533. King Henry VIII had invited the Lord Mayor and the city’s inhabitants to fetch their new Queen with due pageantry. The organisers rose to the challenge by laying on a magnificent procession led by a barge sporting a
mechanical, fire-breathing dragon along with other monsters and wild men. The richly-coloured Lord Mayor’s barge followed astern and was flanked on the starboard side by the ‘batchelor’s barge’ that was described by the 1548 version of Hall’s Chronicle. “The deckes of the sayd barge and the sailyardes and the toppe castles were hanged with riche cloth of gold and silke. At the foreship and the sterne were two great banners riche beaten with the armes of the kinge and the queen, and on the toppe castle also was a long stremer newly beaten with the sayd armes. The sides of the barge was sette full of flagges and banners of the deuises of the Company of Haberdashers and Marchauntes Aduenturers, and the cordes were hanged with innumerable penselles (small pointed flags) hauing little belles at ye endes whiche made a goodly noyse, and a goodly sight waueryng in
Above: The Thames on Lord Mayor’s Day, painted in 1748 by Canaletto
CLASSIC BOAT JUNE 2012
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