ABSTRACT
The pageantry associated with the installation of the chief officer of the city of London in the early modern period might have been expected in an unproblematic way to glamorise and praise the mercantile endeavours that underpinned wealth of the city’s oligarchs, and to trumpet their ever wider global reach. In fact, the figure of the venturing merchant, his motives, destinations, and achievements, works as a focal point – on a very public stage – for the articulation of a moment of mixed fortunes for the city and its constituent bodies. Pageant poets also attempted to link mercantile and spiritual endeavours. The city merchants’ mission, according to Thomas Heywood, also includes converting ‘barbarous Nations to humane gentlenesse and courtesie’, erecting ‘braue and goodly structures’ and founding ‘great and famous Cities’. For Richmond Barbour, John Webster’s list of ‘famous Nauigators’ in the 1624 Show Monuments of Honor is a ‘nationalist pantheon [which] expresses global initiative’.
