Royal entry

• 1. Introduction

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  Royal entry is the name historians give to one of the most theatrical rituals of medieval and early modern Europe: the formal procession of a ruler into a city, surrounded by pageantry, propaganda, and the calculated display of power. From the entry of Richard II through London in 1377 to the last great royal progresses of Louis XIV, these occasions were never simply parades. They were negotiations, sometimes tense ones, between a sovereign and the city he or she claimed to rule.

  At its core, a royal entry was a public act of loyalty. A city welcomed its ruler, confirmed his authority, and in return received the formal recognition of its own rights and privileges. The earliest accounts make clear that something real was at stake. Galbert of Bruges, writing in April 1127, described an unadorned entry by a newly installed Count of Flanders into Bruges that looked more like a parley than a celebration. Relics of the saints were carried out to meet the procession; a charter of liberties was read aloud in the public square; oaths were sworn. There was no lavish imagery, no triumphal arch, no allegorical car rolling through decorated streets.

  What transformed these practical ceremonies into spectacular theatre? How did the humble exchange of keys and charters become an occasion for the greatest artists of the age, from Leonardo da Vinci to Rubens, to spend months constructing elaborate, temporary worlds that might stand for only a day? And why, by the 17th century, did the whole tradition begin to hollow out and fade? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Origins in Rome and Bruges

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  Galbert of Bruges recorded the scene at Bruges in the opening days of April 1127. The new count, William, arrived at twilight with the king. Canons of Saint Donatian came forward carrying relics. The next morning, on April 6, a public assembly was held in a field, where the charter of the liberty of the church and the privileges of Saint Donatian was read aloud before all present. Then, as Galbert put it, the king and count took an oath on the relics of the saints in the hearing of the clergy and people. No decoration, no allegory; just an oath and a promise.

  The roots of the ceremony reached further back than the Middle Ages. The entry drew on the Roman adventus, the formal arrival celebrated for emperors, which were far more frequent than the famous Roman triumphs. As classical learning revived in Italy, the literary accounts of Roman triumphs in Livy, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, and Josephus began to shape how Italian cities imagined the ideal entry. Alfonso V of Aragon entered Naples in 1443 seated on a triumphal car under a baldachin, in a deliberate echo of ancient Roman practice; a surviving bas-relief commemorates the occasion at the earliest post-classical permanent triumphal arch, which he built the same year.

  In England, the entry developed on its own terms. The first pre-coronation royal entry staged in England came in 1377 for the ten-year-old Richard II, serving the dual purpose of enhancing the boy-king's image and patching the crown's relationship with the economically powerful City of London. The public conduits ran with wine; a large temporary castle representing New Jerusalem was a centrepiece. That event's success established a template that English coronations would follow well into the 17th century.

• 3. The Art of Pageantry

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  During the 14th century, entries started to incorporate staged pageant tableaux, usually organized by the trade guilds. At first these were religious in theme. Gradually they evolved, through the 15th and into the 16th century, into a consistent vocabulary: Fortune with her wheel, the seven virtues in both Christian and classical guise, the Nine Worthies, genealogical trees, and allegorical figures who stepped forward to address the procession.

  The guild members themselves became part of the spectacle. In Tournai in 1464, three hundred men wore large embroidered silk fleurs-de-lis on their chests and backs at their own expense, the royal badge displayed as a gesture of loyalty across the bodies of the craftsmen who made the city run. On the route itself, houses were hung with tapestries, embroideries, carpets, and bolts of cloth. At Valladolid in 1509, an eyewitness wrote that the town was so lavishly decked out that not even Florence or Venice could match it; the bulls in fields outside the city were caparisoned with cloths painted with the royal arms and hung with bells.

  To the occasional frustration of later art historians, the greatest artists of their time devoted enormous energy to these ephemeral creations. Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer, Holbein, Andrea del Sarto, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Rubens all contributed. For some court artists, like Inigo Jones or Jacques Bellange, it appears to have been their principal occupation. Composers from Lassus and Monteverdi to John Dowland contributed music; writers including Tasso, Ronsard, and Ben Jonson wrote texts. When Medici Pope Leo X entered Florence in November 1515, Andrea del Sarto painted chiaroscuro canvases to designs by Jacopo Sansovino, temporarily completing the long-unfinished facade of Santa Maria del Fiore.

  For the entry of Henry II of France into Paris on the 16th of June 1549, a loggia designed by Pierre Lescot with sculptures by Jean Goujon had been in preparation for two years. A naval battle was staged on the Seine, a tournament was held, and heretics were burned. The Antwerp decorations for Philip II's entry in 1548-49 were overseen by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose pupil and future son-in-law Pieter Bruegel the Elder probably worked on them.

• 4. Politics in Plain Sight

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  Behind the flowers and the allegories, the entries were instruments of political argument. A disputed succession increased the emphasis on legitimacy. After the Reformation, most entries carried a sectarian edge. French entries and Habsburg ones in the Low Countries became especially loaded with implication after about 1540, as rulers' attempts to suppress Protestantism drove both Protestant and Catholic populations toward ruin.

  The Pompa Introitus of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp in 1635 made the argument in unmistakable terms. Devised by Gaspar Gevartius and carried out under the direction of Rubens, it showed the god of commerce, Mercury, flying away while a lamenting figure representing Antwerp pointed at him and looked imploringly at the incoming Viceroy. Beside her lay a sleeping sailor and a river god, representing the trade strangled by the blockade of the river Scheldt. Eventually Ferdinand managed to lift the ban on trade with the Indies that the entry had identified as Antwerp's only hope; but by the time he did, Spain had also agreed to the permanent blockade of the river.

  The most pointed entries of all came after military defeat. Louis XII of France crushed the Genoans outside their city in 1507 after their revolt against French rule that had persisted since 1499. The subsequent entry that was agreed as part of the capitulation was followed by the execution of the Doge and other revolt leaders. Louis entered in full armour, holding a naked sword, which he struck against the city gate, saying, "Proud Genoa! I have won you with my sword in my hand." The gestural content, as the source notes drily, was rather different from a peaceful entry.

  The citizens of Ghent revolted against Philip the Good in 1453 and against Charles V in 1539. After the second revolt, Charles arrived with a large army, received an entry, and a few weeks later staged a deliberately humiliating anti-festival: the burghers came barefoot with nooses round their necks to beg forgiveness. He imposed a large fine before consenting to forgive them.

• 5. The Festival Book

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  A great many entries survive today only because someone wrote them down, and those accounts are not always reliable. The festival book, as the genre is known, ranged from short pamphlets noting the order of events to lavish illustrated volumes with fold-out panoramas of the procession. There are many hundreds of these records.

  The problems begin immediately. Some festival books were compiled beforehand from plans, not observations; others were assembled after the fact from fading memories. The authors or artists who produced the books had not always witnessed the entry themselves. Roy Strong observed that festival books are an idealization of an event, often quite distant from the reality experienced by the average onlooker; one of their purposes was to reinforce, through word and image, the central ideas behind the programme. One Habsburg entry was nearly cancelled because of torrential rain, but the festival book shows it as it was planned, not as it happened.

  Thomas Dekker, playwright and author of the book on The Magnificent Entertainment for James I in 1604, was unusually candid. He explained to the reader that because care had been taken not to weary the king with speeches, a great part of those set down in the book had been left unspoken; the reader received them as they should have been delivered, not as they were.

  Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, carried the logic further by commissioning virtual triumphs that existed entirely in print. The Triumphs of Maximilian, begun in 1512 and unfinished at Maximilian's death in 1519, contained over 130 large woodcuts by Durer and other artists. The Triumphal Arch of 1515, printed on 192 sheets that assembled to a size of 3.57 x 2.95 metres, was produced in an edition of seven hundred copies for distribution to friendly rulers and cities, intended to be hand-coloured and pasted to a wall. Maximilian had reason to prefer the printed triumph to the real one; he had been locked up by his own loyal subjects in Bruges in 1488 for eleven weeks, until he could pay the bills from his stay.

• 6. Decline and Survival

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  By the 17th century, the scale of entries began to contract. A shift led from Medici Florence moved festivities involving the monarch into the private world of the court: the intermezzi developed in Florence, the ballet de cour that spread from Paris, the English masque, and elaborate equestrian ballets all grew as public entries declined. When Marie de' Medici commissioned from Rubens in 1628 a painted Triumphal Entry of Henri IV into Paris, it was for a suite of decorations for her own palace, the Luxembourg, not for the streets.

  Protestantism was less hospitable to the entry as a form. In the new Dutch Republic, entries ceased entirely. In England, the entry of James I into London in 1604 was the last until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The English Civil War, the Thirty Years War across Northern and Central Europe, the assassinations of Henry III and Henry IV of France and of William the Silent, and the spread of guns all made rulers more cautious about appearing in slow-moving, publicly announced processions.

  In France, Louis XIV stopped royal progresses entirely for over fifty years after he came to the throne, staging elaborate court fetes in their place, documented in illustrated volumes that the Cabinet du Roi distributed to the right audiences. The visit of Louis XVI to Cherbourg in 1786 was, remarkably, the first French royal entry designed as a public event since the early years of his predecessor. It was considered a success, but arrived far too late to change what was coming.

  Ideologues of the French Revolution took the semi-private court fete and made it public again in events like the Fete de la Raison. Under Napoleon, the Fete de la Liberte of 1798 was arranged as a Joyous Entry for the cultural loot requisitioned from the papacy by the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797, including most of the famous sculptures of Roman antiquity from the Vatican. The form had outlasted the monarchies that created it, available now for republics and emperors alike to use as they saw fit. The Lord Mayor's Show in London, dating back to 1215 and still preserving the Renaissance car or float model, carries that inheritance into the present.