Illustrations of Charles II's Royal Entry into London - 1662
(Illustrations pulled from John Ogilby's The Most Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in His Passage through the City of London to His Coronation.)
Processional Map 1572
(Image pulled from Lees-Jeffries article in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, p.66)
An image of the Queen's Majesty's Passage
(Image accompanying the Richard Mulcaster account in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments edited by Arthur F. Kinney)
Robert E. Stillman discusses Queen Elizabeth I's coronation process through the city of London. He explains that "as Elizabeth assumes a plurality of roles within the Passage's script, as subject of its celebratory rhetoric, object of its rhetorical persuasions, and spectacularly independent reader of its advisory content, she at once illuminates the growing political importance of humanist hermeneutics and the real complexity of an early modern culture that resists the simplifications sometimes imposed upon it by postmodern theory." (52) The speeches, and the texts in general, for the royal entry pageants were much more sophisticated than what had been included in the Midsummer Watches and Lord Mayor's Shows.
Hester Lees-Jeffries in an article entitled "Location as Metaphor in Queen Elizabeth's Coronation Entry (1559)" astutely describes the purpose of the royal entries, saying that the "ceremonial purpose of the procession was a formal welcome and declaration of fealty by citizens to monarch, but it was also a process whereby, beneath the ritualized, conventionally adultery surface, the complex relationship between crown and city was enacted and worked out. Through specially erected stages, triumphal arches, and tableaux, Elizabeth's presence was absorbed, albeit temporarily into the very fabric of the city. More permanently, if less tangibly, she became part of London's history and mythology..." (Lees-Jeffries 65) The royal entries were meant to deify the crown and acknowledge the relationship between the monarch an the citizens. The placement of the pageants symbolically represented seven different stories and locations that centre around Time, Truth and the Book. These are meant to immortalize Elizabeth as almost a Christ-like figure and recreate the city of London as a "New Jerusalem". (Lees-Jeffries 72)
Hester Lees-Jeffries in an article entitled "Location as Metaphor in Queen Elizabeth's Coronation Entry (1559)" astutely describes the purpose of the royal entries, saying that the "ceremonial purpose of the procession was a formal welcome and declaration of fealty by citizens to monarch, but it was also a process whereby, beneath the ritualized, conventionally adultery surface, the complex relationship between crown and city was enacted and worked out. Through specially erected stages, triumphal arches, and tableaux, Elizabeth's presence was absorbed, albeit temporarily into the very fabric of the city. More permanently, if less tangibly, she became part of London's history and mythology..." (Lees-Jeffries 65) The royal entries were meant to deify the crown and acknowledge the relationship between the monarch an the citizens. The placement of the pageants symbolically represented seven different stories and locations that centre around Time, Truth and the Book. These are meant to immortalize Elizabeth as almost a Christ-like figure and recreate the city of London as a "New Jerusalem". (Lees-Jeffries 72)
A Blast from the Past
My interest in this subject in fact goes back to 2003. I took a Tudor and Stuart History Course at Queen's University (yes, my major was history) and I wrote a paper called "A Critical Analysis of the Rhetorical Content of An Ode upon the Happy Return of King Charles II to His Languishing Nations". And so, since for a procession to happen there must be a start, here is mine: