Were Royal Entries Propaganda?

Gordon Kipling

University of California, Los Angeles

Although there have often been sophisticated analyses of the royal entry as a form of medieval or Renaissance theatrical spectacle, for the most part those who have commented on the form have sought to explain it in terms of propaganda. It has become commonplace to suggest that medieval and Renaissance royal entries were designed primarily to disseminate political propaganda on behalf of some royal or civic establishment. Despite Sydney Anglo’s often erudite analyses of the imagery of these spectacular shows, he thus found it impossible to consider Tudor court festivals ‘from a purely artistic viewpoint’ and was obliged at last to view them ‘partly as specific propaganda, partly as specific comment, and partly as a general princely mode of displaying power and magnificence’. Tudor court festivals in general, and the royal entry in particular, seem to define a new awareness of the possibilities of propaganda, ‘a new period of political imagery expressed in public ceremony and spectacle’. Roy Strong, similarly, describes the ‘world of fantastic allegory’ created by ‘these endless [Renaissance] festivities’ as ‘crammed with contemporary comment, but in a language that is today virtually incomprehensible as a means of presenting a programme of political ideas’. So, too, we read that Henry V’s entry into London was ‘demonstrably linked to an immediate international propaganda effort’, or that Venetian ceremonial welcomes were ‘integral to the statecraft of the period’ because they could ‘give visible form to many-layered messages, both abstract and material’, or that French royal entries played their part in an ‘immense "golden age" of propaganda" around François Ier, or even that the French employed the monumental arch in their royal entries as "the central device in the propagation of a new philosophy of government’. As Jennifer Loach sums up this commonplace assumption, ‘courtly entertainments are now universally understood as having a serious political purpose: to transmit a message about the dynasty and its ambitions, and to claim . . . a place among the cultural élite of Europe’.

This fascination with the royal entry as a form of political propaganda raises an interesting question of hermeneutics. Do we interpret royal entries as attempts at political suasion because the medieval and Renaissance citizens who staged them were fascinated by propaganda, or do we interpret these shows in that way because we are fascinated by propaganda? Is a medieval and Renaissance political art form really best understood in the same ways that we interpret modern art forms, or in regarding these shows as propaganda have we merely embodied them with our own obsessions? I think we have done just that, and in this essay I would like to suggest the limitations of propaganda as a hermeneutical method of understanding the royal entry and to propose an alternative hermeneutical approach, one based upon an understanding of these shows as a form of ritual acclamation.

I do not mean to suggest, of course, that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century devisers of royal entries had to understand the modern political senses of ‘propaganda’ to attempt political suasion in their pageants. Nor do I want to deny that royal entry pageants were in some sense political. What I do mean to suggest is that the pervasiveness of propaganda in our age has made us interpret all earlier usages of political art as if they, too, were propaganda. Most recent analyses of the royal entry thus adopt what I would call the hermeneutics of propaganda. Such analyses thus commonly consider what messages are being sent by the pageants, whose interests are being served by sending those messages, who are the intended recipients of the political messages, what the intended effect of those messages might have been on the intended recipients, and so forth. Often the citizens or the makers of the pageantry are charged with sending a political message to the monarch by means of the pageantry of the royal entry procession. Just as often, however, the message is seen to be destined to the throngs who watch the procession. And there are variants of this scheme: sometimes the monarch coopts the civic designers of royal entries and sends a message to the citizens by means of pageantry.

This propaganda-driven hermeneutics raises a number of questions, however. Since the early twentieth century, political propaganda has chiefly been about the indoctrination of the masses. As a consequence, in order to function well to serve this goal, the form of the message must be kept simple: the slogan, the poster, the advertisement, and the jingle are the preferred methods of propagating one’s political message among the masses. The more complex the message, the greater chance there is that the message will be widely misunderstood and will fail to catch the attention of the masses. But royal entry pageants are not slogans; they are often extremely complex in their imagery and in their interpretative demands. A Princess of Spain enters London in November, 1501, for instance, and pauses dutifully before each of the city’s six pageants to hear actors declaim their speeches. Not only do the speakers declaim their lines in English, a language she does not understand, but the speeches and pageant imagery often embody such difficult ideas drawn from Boethius, Pope Gregory the Great, Martianus Capella, and Jean Molinet that it is unlikely she could grasp them even if she could understand the language. The concepts would have been equally opaque to the crowds of Londoners who gathered about to see the Princess make her entry, and they would scarcely have been aided by the brief, often cryptic, two-line Latin inscriptions posted on each pageant. As Sydney Anglo observes, ‘not one of the three surviving eyewitness observers (all of them otherwise competent and circumstantial) even hints at having an inkling as to what it was all about.’ And if the Princess could neither understand the speeches nor decipher the visual imagery of her royal entry, it seems unlikely that she understood that the pageants were arranged to make her seem to rise from earth, pass through the spheres of the cosmos, and arrive in heaven before the throne of the Almighty. Certainly the throngs of Londoners standing in the street could not perceive that feature of the city’s pageants either, for the crowd stood marshaled and confined in orderly rows and had little opportunity to move from place to place or to view more than a single pageant. Whatever else happened, very little communication of political ideas seems to have occurred in London that day.

These and similar reasons have occasioned so many of the recent modern complaints about the capability of the royal entry to convey messages at all. Even while admiring the great ‘subtlety and complexity’ of the schemes which scholars invented for triumphal entries and other decorative programmes, for instance, Robert Klein could not help but remark that ‘no spectator of average intelligence and culture could hope to understand them in the time he would normally spend looking at them’. Theodore K. Rabb, for one, plainly thinks that analyses of the propaganda value of royal entries have been vastly overblown: ‘none of these scholarly investigations . . . has paid much attention to audience or reception. Nothing in their evidence suggests that public displays could convey (beyond a tiny group of cognoscenti) more than a prince’s personal splendour or exuberance.’ And Elmar W. Eggerer cannot be the only scholar to suggest that we may have all been conned: ‘Man fragt sich, ob die Menschen, die die "royal entries" planten und durchführten, sich wirklich aller Symbolismen ihrer Zeremonien bewußt waren’.

Almost all these analyses–whether skeptical or confident about the existence of such erudite programmes of political iconography–nevertheless tend to agree on a common hermeneutical approach to the study of the royal entry: they all accept that royal entries existed primarily to communicate particular political messages and to facilitate programmes of political suasion. The difference of modern scholarly opinion is mainly about the relative effectiveness of royal entries as instruments of propaganda. To the one extreme, we thus find modern analyses expressing confidence that ‘all these messages [transmitted by the pageants] were received, and

. . . all parties concerned were to some degree placed under obligation by the ritual and dramatic dialogues in which they had participated’. Or it may suggest that only some members of the ‘audience’ were capable of understanding the message: ‘the neo-classical principles that underlie the Entry,’ together with a ‘strong dose of erudition, while giving expression to an exalted view of national culture, helps to insert a wedge between the King and the plebs, unable to grasp all the symbolism of such a grandiose pageant’. The skeptical extreme may readily concede that royal entries may have been designed to propagate political ideas, but this school insists that these shows were so ineffective as to have negligible political effect and were ultimately important only for making princes seem suitably impressive. We might well ask, ‘what person was ever moved to take political action as a result of seeing a royal entry pageant’?

But is this message-propagating hermeneutical approach entirely correct? Are there alternative hermeneutical approaches to this obviously political art form–for no one, I take it, would deny that it is in some sense a political art form–that don’t involve the communication of esoteric messages to masses who could not hope to perceive them? In this respect, it is perhaps useful to remind ourselves that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance thought of symbolic communication in quite different and often more complex ways than the hermeneutics of modern propaganda might allow. These include, for instance, theories of multiple levels of meaning, such as the four-fold allegorical method, which allow for the same symbol to be differently understood depending upon the level of meaning which the observer either sought or was capable of perceiving. Indeed, some popular Renaissance theories went so far as to suggest that allegory was valuable precisely because it divided the audience into different interpretative groups: one group might understand the symbolic message at a fairly literal, though often misleading, level, while another, more privileged and elite group might perceive the same symbolic message in a truer, more sophisticated sense.

But if we are to understand properly the political meaning of the royal entry, we must first understand its political purposes. To begin with, we should consider why royal entries were performed so infrequently, usually only once in a reign. This has always seemed a particularly difficult problem for those who interpret these shows primarily as of propaganda. Sydney Anglo speaks for many such scholars, I suspect, in observing that ‘it is a poor instrument of propaganda and communication which is experienced only once or twice in an entire reign.’ But royal entries, like coronations, were primarily inaugural rituals. They customarily took place immediately before or after the coronation itself, or upon the prince’s first official appearance there as sovereign, even if his arrival might be delayed for a considerable time. As such, civic triumphs marked the king’s first advent; they celebrated his coming to his kingdom. That is why they occurred so infrequently. Second royal entries in the same city occur relatively infrequently, but when they do, they often do so under circumstances which emphasize the primary inaugural function of these shows. Anne of Brittany celebrated two civic triumphs in Paris, but then she was twice crowned Queen Consort to two successive kings of France and so twice inaugurated. Others take place in the context of a re-inauguration, a broken feudal contract being reinstated. Richard II’s ‘reconciliation’ triumph (1392) offers once such example, while Philip the Good’s entry into Ghent (1458) offers another. In the first case, the city’s denial of Richard’s ‘request’ for a loan had constituted, in Richard II’s eyes, a breach of the city’s feudal loyalty. In the second, Ghent had actually taken up arms against its sovereign. Both Richard and Philip, in fact, demanded a royal entry as part of the settlement agreement with their rebellious citizens, and it thus served as a ceremonial means of restoring the damaged relationship between city and sovereign.

Conceived of in this way as inaugural rituals, royal entries even assumed a certain legal status in some parts of Europe. In the Netherlands and in France, the shows customarily served as the ceremonial means of sealing the feudal contract between ruler and subject. Their explicit inaugural functions here teach us a great deal about how the shows were regarded throughout the north. Successive dukes of Brabant from 1356, for example, were required to confirm a charter of rights known as the Joyeuse Entrée before they could be received as lawful sovereigns. Only then could a duke enter the gates of the city and enjoy his royal entry. The Low Countries’ civic triumphs, also knows as joyeuses entreés, thus served as the ceremonial acknowledgements that the charter had been agreed and the prince had legally entered his reign. Parisian royal entries often embody a similar legal ceremony. Since French kings usually entered Paris only after being crowned at Reims, they could not be prohibited from entering the city until they had sworn to uphold a charter of rights. Instead, a French king celebrated his royal entry, but at the end of it he might find the Cathedral of Notre-Dame barred to him until he swore an oath promising to uphold the rights and privileges of the three estates: clergy, nobles, and commons. In both cases, the pageantry of the civic triumph served as the counterpart to the prince’s oath. He swore a formal oath to be his subjects’ good lord, and the pageantry dramatizes his subjects’ acceptance of their sovereign and their joy at his advent.

There is considerable evidence that pageant designers and citizens alike understood that royal entries served as inaugural rituals. For over 150 years, from the 1370s to the early sixteenth century, royal entries all over northern Europe based their pageants upon imagery drawn from the Church’s liturgy for Advent and Epiphany. In doing so, they were dramatizing a traditional metaphor: the king’s entry into the city was a type of Christ’s entry into the holy Jerusalem. The royal entry thus transformed the city into a type of Jerusalem–sometimes the earthly Jerusalem, sometimes the celestial Jerusalem, sometimes the New Jerusalem of St John’s Apocalypse–and the king was greeted as a type of Christ. Jasper-green pageants inhabited by angels might serve to transform the city into the celestial Jerusalem at the King’s approach. His presence might transform water into wine like the Wedding at Cana. The New Jerusalem might descend from heaven at his approach. John the Baptist might appear in the streets to recognize the king as the foretold Messiah; a conclave of Old Testament prophets might declare their prophecies fulfilled at the king’s approach. By sleight of pageantry, mechanical miracles might testify that the king’s divine powers. The Magi might bring him their gifts. Doves might descend from heaven as at the Baptism of Christ. Such pageants may strike one as inventive, but what strikes one most strongly is the consistency of imagery throughout Northern Europe. Until the mid-sixteenth century, we find that royal entry pageants throughout Northern Europe are apt to adopt such imagery.

Royal entries for queens served the same inaugural functions as that of a king, and they, too, were apt to enter cities transformed by pageantry into images of the celestial Jerusalem. For the most part, however, queens were precluded from being received as if they were types of Christ. Instead, their entries were generally modeled on the pattern of the Virgin’s Assumption and Coronation in heaven. The Queen’s royal entry, in other words, was seen all over Europe to be a type of the Virgin’s ascension and entry into heaven. The pageants imagined them as a royal mediatrix, the Sponsa of Canticles, divine childbearer, and holy mother. Crowns descended from heaven to rest upon her head. Her heavenly Sponsus invites her to take a place beside her upon his throne. Once again, we can find royal entries throughout the north employing such themes, thus testifying both to a consistency of approach and a wide understanding of the function of these entries as ritual inaugurations.

As inaugural rituals, these shows were designed to produce an act of acclamation by the people of the city. The acclamation of the people marked the final step, so to speak, in the king’s advent. Here, too, the common people gathered around to watch the entry seem to have understood the parts they were to play, even if they couldn’t see more than a single pageant or understand some of the more complex imagery of the pageants the did see. Not only did they shout joyously, but–if we can believe the reports of chroniclers–they seem to have chosen specific shouts of acclamation appropriate to the Advent symbolism that so many of these shows chose to use. We are told again and again, for instance, that French crowds delighted in shouting ‘Noel, Noel’ to their new kings. A Parisian crowd even managed to shout this cry with enough enthusiasm that a contemporary witness thought ‘one paid him such honour as one ought to pay to God’. For other royal entries, we are told, the crowds sometimes preferred to shout a more potently symbolic cry, the Palm Sunday greeting, ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini’ as the royal entry procession passed by. To some extent, these reactions were even prompted by pageants, which featured characters singing or shouting these particularly appropriate acclamations. Even if we disbelieve the accuracy of the chroniclers in recording these shouts as coming from the people, they nevertheless demonstrate the thinking of those who were devising these shows. Those are the sorts of shouts that the people ought to have shouted in order to perform a proper act of royal acclamation, so they of course must have done so.

From the point of view of the crown, the production of such an act of acclamation was often the show’s most important function. Consider, in this respect, the negotiations between city and Privy Council that preceded Anne Boleyn’s coronation entry into London (1532). Given the political problems created by his divorce from Katharine of Aragon and his break with Rome, Henry desperately needed a popular affirmation for his new queen. On the 13^th of May, Henry commanded the London Common Council to ‘see the citie ordered and garnished with pageauntes in places accustomed, for the honor of her grace, When she should be conveyed from the Tower to Westminster.’ At the same time, he fixed the date for the Queen’s royal entry as the 29^th of May, a little more than two weeks later. The London councillors who met the next day to deal with the King’s demand thought they could perhaps mount only three pageants ‘because the tyme is verye shorte’. The committee of Aldermen was then dispatched to inform the Privy Council about the city’s plans, and the members seem to have carried with them a list of the ‘devices’ for the three pageants that the City thought it could construct in the time available. Would the Privy Council, they were instructed to ask, ‘have eny other devise then these?’ Deeply disappointed with the meager show of acclamation that such few pageants would suggest, the Privy Council demanded a major expansion of the City’s plans. Moreover, it made the resources of the royal household available to the City make such an expansion possible. Painters and carpenters from the King’s Works were provided to help build the pageants. The services of the King’s Minstrels were provided ‘for the ffurnyssheyng of the pagants and barges’. At the City’s request, the Privy Council also used its influence to secure the cooperation of the Hanseatic merchants in sponsoring one of the royal entry pageants. And finally, the Privy Council seems also to have recruited two young scholar poets, Nicholas Udall and John Leland, to take over the devising of the city’s royal entry pageants. In doing so, they incorporated the three pageants that the City had already planned into a much larger and more intellectually impressive conceit: as Queen Anne entered the City, the Golden Age seemed to be returning as the gods descended from Parnassus to greet her, and as she progressed from pageant to pageant, she seemed herself to be a muse, inspiring an outpouring of poetry and music at each station. In the end, Anne Boleyn’s entry, despite the brevity of time, consisted of twelve stations–six full pageants and six stations for musicians and poets. Instead of a short and merely dutiful show, it became one of the most extensive and extravagant of Tudor royal entries.

These negotiations thus chiefly concerned themselves with the extent and scale of the show. While the crown representatives do seem to have inspected (and therefore approved) a list of pageant ‘devices’, they do not seem to have been concerned about the individual messages which these might presumably propagate. Rather, what they were most concerned about was that the show should seem large and grand enough to constitute an impressive acclamation of the new queen. Given the politically fraught situation, that acclamation, of course, constituted a highly significant political act. Anne Boleyn’s entry into London to be crowned Queen in place of Katharine of Aragon was the very symbol of a new Tudor political and religious order. Under these conditions, the entry undeniably served a powerful political function. But that function lay not so much in the messages sent by the pageants as in the ritual act of acclamation required by the Tudor regime as a sign of legitimization.

Almost all of the political commentary occasioned by this spectacle, in fact, derives precisely from the show’s ritual function as an act of acclamation, not because they were reacting to attempts of the pageant emblems themselves to propagate political ideology. Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador, reported the events of the day to his master, Charles V. To read his version, the pageants utterly failed to generate the acclamation of Queen Anne that the Tudor regime so desperately wanted. He regaled Charles, for instance, with tales of the crowd’s unwillingness to take off their hats and cry ‘God save the Queen’ as was the custom. When ‘one of the Queen’s servants told the Mayor to command the people to make the customary shouts’, the Mayor replied that he ‘could not command the people’s hearts, and that even the King could not make him do so’. So, too, he reports that Anne’s fool, ‘seeing the little honor they showed to her, cried out, "I think you have all scurvy heads, and dare not uncover."’ For Chapuys, who merely told his Imperial master what he wanted to hear, these spectacles prompted nothing but resentment and derision among the people: ‘the coronation pageant was all that could be desired, and went off very well, as to the number of the spectators, which was very considerable, but all looked so sad and dismal that the ceremony seemed to be a funeral rather than a pageant’. For such Tudor loyalists as Charles Wriothesley and Edward Hall, by contrast, the show seemed to be an extraordinary success in producing just such a sense of joyous acclamation. ‘To speake of the people that stode on euery shore to beholde the sight,’ Hall remarks of the City’s water pageant that served as a preface for the royal entry, ‘ he that sawe it not would not beleue it.’

I don’t mean to suggest, as some have recently done, that the intellectual substance of royal entry pageants was negligible or unimportant. One doesn’t have to design and erect a pageant series, after all, merely to elicit shouts of affirmation from a crowd. A reasonably colourful royal procession on its own could do that. Study after study has shown convincingly that royal entry pageants were often quite sophisticated in their symbolic referents and intellectual content. To give just a few examples: The London entry of Henry V (1415) adopted tropes from the Office of the Dead to escort the king triumphantly into the Celestial Jerusalem; Ghent used a gigantic pageant based upon the Van Eyck altarpiece to represent the transformation of Philip the Good’s persona from a wrathful Christ-come-to-judgment into a merciful Christ-the-Saviour (1458). Henri II’s royal entry into Rouen (1550) displayed an impressive ‘aesthetic unity,’ according to Margret McGowan, by scrupulously reproducing all the elements of an ancient Roman triumph’. And Kathrine of Aragon’s London entry (1501), constructed a journey from earth to the heavens through allusions to a remarkable variety of scholastic, patristic, and courtly sources. Wherever we look, I would argue, we are likely to observe a sophistication of intellectual content and structure characterizing medieval and Renaissance royal entries.

The planning for Anne Boleyn’s royal entry once again provides an excellent insight into this phenomenon. When the Privy Council provided the services of Udall and Leland to devise pageants and write verses for the show, it may have been anxious about controlling the show’s possible political messages. But it doesn’t take Cambridge scholars just to control political spin. What the appointment of two such bright and ambitious scholars most obviously provided was a sense of intellectual gravitas. It was they who provided the intellectual idea on which the show was based, which dramatized Anne’s entry into London bringing about a return of the Golden Age. By the same token, it was important to enlist the Hanseatic merchants, and through them the services of Hans Holbein, to design one of the shows pageants. By enlisting Holbein, an important measure of artistic dignity was also added to the royal entry. All of these steps suggest that both city and court thought it vital that the show might possess substance. The show, in other words, had to be worthy of its ritual purpose, not merely be politically inoffensive, and intellectual substance was one important sign of worthiness.

In fact, if we consider the imagery of the show, we might well conclude that intellectual gravitas was far more important that political spin control to the pageant imagery of the royal entry. Within reason, the form allowed for the inclusion of even critical material, so long as that material was in keeping with the ritual purposes of the royal entry. Just as preachers enjoyed a certain latitude when preaching to royalty, so, too, the makers of royal entries enjoyed a certain latitude in the construction of their pageants. Many royal entries insistently admonish the monarch to prepare himself for the account he or she must bring before the Lord, and may in fact depict the king or queen as both saviour and sinner, entering the city both to render justice and to be judged. Margaret of Austria thus enters Geneva (1501), where she finds an immense Jesse Tree, some 60 or 80 feet high, with actors sitting in its branches to portray her proud, imperial heritage. One scripture on the banner celebrates her lineage, declaring it to be her ortus nobilitas. Another scripture, however, teaches here to regard this flowering tree in quite a different light: Haec es flos agri: ‘all flesh is grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of the field’ (Isaiah 40). And should she overlook this point, an actor portraying death awaits her at the last pageant stage to remind her that ‘Death annihilates all; all are subject to death’ and ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ Or consider the escort that the city of Paris provided for Charles VII’s royal entry (1437): a procession of actors representing the seven virtues and seven mortal sins. Their presence inevitably transformed the king, conceived of as a private person, into a kind of Everyman who might incline toward virtue and achieve salvation or decline toward vice and merit damnation. Royal entry pageants, with the full expectation and consent of the crown, might thus contain explicitly political matter and could even include some material critical of the crown.

Queens particularly expected to experience royal entries that suggested that their exercise of queenly power must be hedged about with limitations. Queens were celebrated as Peacemakers, as bringers of grace, as royal childbearers, as mediators between king and people. But always she is shown to be subordinate to her more powerful and more glorious husband. She enters the city, typically, at the pleasure of her husband, and her own civic triumph pageantry is often dominated by epiphanies of his glory. She rarely enjoys an epiphany of her own glory. Anne of Brittany, for instance, is obliged to contemplate a heroic equestrian image of her spouse, Charles VIII, as Charlemagne during her entry into Paris in 1492. At Aberdeen (1511) Queen Margaret similarly finds herself contemplating her husband’s image depicted as The Bruce, an image redolent with anti-English sentiment. Isabella of Bavaria (1389) finds herself depicted as a type of the Virgin, but the pageant is dominated by Charles VI’s heraldic device, a resplendent golden sun spreading its rays through the heavens as a manifestation of divine glory.

It should not surprise us, then, to discover that the pageantry for Anne Boleyn’s entry into London (1532) repeatedly suggested limitations to the acclamation she was receiving. The pageants indeed continually play upon the fact that the new Queen enters London visibly pregnant. Anne will restore the Golden Age, the pageants imply, because she is about to produce a male heir to the throne. At one pageant station, for instance, an angel descends from heaven to place a crown on a white falcon (Anne’s heraldic badge). At first, the image seems little more than a spectacular cliché suggesting divine pleasure in the new Queen’s coronation. At the very same pageant station, however, this angelic coronation is paired with another image: the Queen’s patron, St Anne, proudly displays her miraculous progeny. The two images comment upon and qualify one another. In the pageant, as in life, the coronation and the ability to bear children are inevitably connected. If Anne produces a son, she wears her crown securely and the Golden Age returns. As Anne pauses briefly before this double image, the acclamation of the crowd is undeniably focused upon this conjunction of genealogy and heavenly coronation. Later, a pageant of sibyls makes this point even more directly: they scatter wafers containing a hopeful prophecy of Anne’s future: ‘Queen Anne, when thou shall bear a new son of the King’s blood, there shall be a golden world unto thy people.’ The Golden Age thus anxiously awaits the promised birth.

All this constitutes intellectual substance, and there are clearly messages here, but does such pageantry function as propaganda? Who is sending all those messages about the Golden Age being dependant upon Queen Anne’s production of a new son of the King’s blood? The court? The city? And who is supposed to be receiving these images? The court? The people? Queen Anne Boleyn herself? The Ambassadors of Charles V? The difficulty here, of course, is that, in some ways, the producers of the show and the audience of the show are pretty much the same body. One can’t properly say whether the civic establishment is putting on the show for the royal establishment or vice versa. Both the Privy Council and the London Common Council seem to have actively cooperated in devising, building, and staging the show, and both parties must therefore have understood and approved of the show’s substance and messages, if any. It is thus as likely to suppose that the people were demanding that Queen Anne produce a new son to guarantee their future as it is to suggest that the Court was asking the people to accept Queen Anne in place of Henry’s first wife, Katharine of Aragon, because Anne could produce the child that Katharine could not. And we have, of course, absolutely no evidence that anyone at all–other than, presumably, the devisers themselves–understood this intellectual substance or comprehended these messages.

The problem, once again, is one of hermeneutics. If we seek to understand the royal entry solely according to the hermeneutical assumptions of propaganda, we will not be able to understand how shows like this could take such an interest in intellectual substance and little interest in practical ways of propagating that intellectual substance. If we consider these shows primarily as propaganda, we will have to seek out ways that one party–the city perhaps?–is simultaneously transmitting and encoding messages so as to simultaneously propagate a political message to one unsophisticated audience (the people?) while also disguising it from another, more sophisticated one (the Crown?) who, if they understood it, would make life very difficult for the first party. Further, we will have to observe that it is probably impossible to send messages of any complexity in the first place because few can see the entire show anyway, and still fewer, if any, are able to understand complex political emblems in the time it takes to present them. Finally, like several recent commentators, we will be driven to cynical disbelief. Because the royal entry is only infrequently employed it cannot be an effective means of propaganda. Its complex images are ultimately pointless because they cannot communicate their political ideas to a mass audience. Even relatively sophisticated persons seem to have had trouble in understanding them in performance. Indeed, one even wonders whether the devisers and builders of civic triumph pageantry understood the messages they were sending. Maybe we have all been conned.

But if we approach the royal entry according to the hermeneutical assumptions of ritual rather than those of propaganda, I think we are in a better position to understand the form’s political and intellectual purposes. Rituals, like royal entries, are symbolically complex works of participatory art designed to appeal to different audiences in different ways. If one reads such liturgical theorists as Gregory the Great, Amalarius of Metz, Honorious of Autun, Hugh of St Victor, John Beleth, Walafred Strabo, and Gulielmus Durandus, for instance, one quickly becomes aware of the complexity of the allegorical symbolism that these liturgical theorists invested in each phrase, ceremony, movement, and visual sign that comprised the mass. Obviously, many among the congregation could not–nor were they expected–to understand the complex meanings of these liturgical performances. How many members of a semi-literate congregation, for instance, would truly understand that, in standing to hear the gospel, they were supposed to be playing the parts of witnesses to the events being narrated, particularly if they could not understand the language in which the biblical passages were being read? Perhaps we should say that the liturgy was designed to engage various people at a variety of levels, from the priests, to the literate and learned laymen, to the illiterate congregation. There was some thinking, indeed, that the allegorical interpretations of the liturgy in fact drew the illiterate into the celebration of the mass because it provided them with a vivid and dramatic presentation of the Roman rite. What was important was that all were drawn together to play important roles in a scripted and meaningful performance. The priest might perform the central sacrifice of the Mass, for instance, while the congregation played various roles during the performance: now the Chosen People longing for the fulfillment of prophecy, now crowds witnessing Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, now as witnesses of the Crucifixion, finally as disciples and apostles receiving Christ’s blessing before the Ascension.

What I’m suggesting here is that we would do well to think of the pageants of the royal entry as liturgical acts. The whole entry resembles nothing so much as a liturgy of secular worship in which the King is acclaimed by the people at his first advent. As in the Church liturgy, meaning is created through complex imagery–in this case the pageants–and through role playing. Kings and Queens have their parts to play as Christ the King and the Queen of Heaven. The crowd too plays its part as the Children of Israel receiving their Saviour on Palm Sunday, and for this reason, as we have seen, they sometimes are said to shout the Palm Sunday greeting, benedictus qui venit in nomine domini. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, in seeking to find appropriate ways to celebrate the coming of kings and queens to their kingdoms, the royal entry repeatedly borrows imagery, subject matter, even liturgical words and phrases from the liturgy of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, and the Ascension of the Virgin.

I do not mean to say that the royal entry is not a political form of art. Quite to the contrary, I think that any time you have a crowd welcoming a king as if he were a type of Christ you have an intensely political form of art. I simply think that if we are to get at the ways that the royal entry creates political meaning we have to understand first its liturgical and ritual principles. The pageants of the royal entry do not work primarily as political posters, I think, but as the foci for a theatrical and liturgical act of royal acclamation. If we view the shows in this way, we can perhaps understand how the makers of royal entry pageantry tried to structure these acts of royal acclamation, how they defined the roles that king and people would play to each other, and then, in the context of the political moment, perhaps we can understand the political meanings of these spectacular works of art.