Abstract
In February of 1432, ten-year-old King Henry VI of England returned to his capital in triumph. Two months before, he had been crowned king of France in Paris. Henry was the living outcome of the Treaty of Troyes — meant to end the Hundred Years War by marrying Henry V of England to the French princess Catherine of Valois, bringing the elder Henry and his heirs into the French succession — and, officially, the Parisian coronation was a glorious moment that united the English and French thrones in the person of young Henry. To commemorate the French coronation and the king’s return to London, the city celebrated his arrival with a pageant, consisting of a series of lavishly presented tableaux along his entry route.1 The pageant was staged by the citizens of London, and at Mayor John Welles’s commission. When Henry and his retinue reached London Bridge, which led from the suburb of Southwark over the Thames into the city of London, they were greeted by a sword-wielding giant who stood near or atop one of the bridge’s gate-towers.2 In what must have been a visually spectacular tableau, the giant spoke to the child-king, or perhaps presented a written text to him, quoting briefly from Psalms before vowing to protect the king’s person and to drive off foreign enemies.
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Notes
Most accounts of this entry, including Lydgate’s, do mention that the giant preceded, or was possibly accompanied by, two antelopes with the royal arms of England and of France held between them (a clear reference to Henry’s dual ancestry). However, civic historian Gordon Kipling has read the two moments as separate — the giant admits Henry into the bridge gate, which features the antelopes — and if they are in fact one tableau, its focus seems to be on the giant rather than the antelopes, given that most descriptions spend far more time on the giant. See Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
For Carpenter’s letter as source of Lydgate’s poem, see Henry Noble McCracken, ‘King Henry’s Triumphal Entry into London, Lydgate’s Poem, and Carpenter’s Letter’, Archiv für das Studium der Neuen Sprachen und Literaturen 126 (1911): 75–102.
See Mary-Rose McLaren, The London Chronicles of the Fifteenth Century: A Revolution in English Writing (Woodbridge: Brewster, 2002) 54.
On Lydgate’s medieval popularity, and for his subsequent unpopularity, see David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History 54 (1987): 761–99.
On Lydgate’s influence, see Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, 1997) 9.
Pearsall, Bio-Bibliography, 15. For more on Lydgate’s relationship with Henry V, see Lee Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate’, in Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (eds), New Historical Literary Studies: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) 69–107 (72–3).
Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 1989) 36–7.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 29.
For the problems Henry’s lack of authority would eventually cause in his adult reign, see chs 5–7 in John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). I will also discuss some of these problems at greater length later in the chapter.
Robert R. Edwards (ed.), John Lydgate, Troy Book: Selections (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998) 835.
For an in-depth discussion of the marginal positions of non-human creatures on mappaemundi (and how this, in relation to England’s similarly marginal cartographic position, lent England a special significance and selfperception), see Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Richard Hamer (ed.), Gilte Legende, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) II, 501.
For more on Lydgate’s strategic use of piety to legitimize Henry VI through Lydgate’s St. Edmund and St. Fremund, see Fiona Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyn- tis for to make affray”: Lydgate the “Poet-Propagandist” as Hagiographer’, in Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (eds), John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) 258–77.
John Lydgate, ‘Guy of Warwick’, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. H. N. McCracken, 2 vols (London: Trench, Trübner; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911–34) II, 516–38; and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 3 vols (London: Nichols & Sons, 1899–1904).
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© 2014 Joseph Rodriguez
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Rodriguez, J. (2014). ‘With the grace of God at th’entryng of the Brigge’: Crown versus Town and the Giant of London Bridge in Lydgate’s Triumphal Entry of Henry VI. In: Performing Environments. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320179_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320179_11
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