ABSTRACT
In 1533 Anne Boleyn’s elaborate two-day coronation pageant was staged on the Thames and then in the streets of London. While the religious politics of this event are significant, it is upon the staging of the wealth, power, and erudition of London that this chapter will focus. Drawing upon accounts in Stow’s Chronicles and Udall and Leland’s verses of praise recorded in Hall’s account, I will argue that Anne Boleyn’s coronation pageant was both a calculated public endorsement of civic solidarity with the new queen and faith, and the city’s opening bid, backed by Henry VIII, for equal might and cultural capital, as well as possibly kinship, with France.
While scholars such as David M. Bergeron have rightly argued for the formulaic structure of English civic pageantry, in writing about seventeenth-century pageants, others (Hunt, Kipling) contend that these events were crafted so that their traditional components could speak specifically to the particular socio-political climate in which they were staged. Building upon this work, I argue that there is clear evidence for Anne’s pageants responding to the particular moment of her ascension to royalty in both the water and land spectacles held in her honour, and attempting to shape national and international readings of that moment.
