Ceremonial processions were a key feature of the state opening of Parliament in the Tudor and early Stuart eras, just as they are today, but the form they took was very different from current practice, as Dr Paul Hunneyball of our Elizabethan Lords project explains…

No modern state opening of Parliament would be complete without the impressive sight of the monarch travelling by coach from Buckingham Palace to the Palace of Westminster, escorted by the Household Cavalry in full dress uniforms. The route down The Mall, through Horse Guards Parade, and along Whitehall is so familiar that it’s hard to imagine an alternative. And yet this ceremonial pattern dates only from 1852, when Queen Victoria, the first sovereign to live in Buckingham Palace, held her first state opening at the modern Houses of Parliament. Earlier versions had a very different character.

State openings are known to have included royal processions from at least the 15th century, but the first reliable descriptions date only from the early years of Henry VIII’s reign. A verbal record by a herald survives from 1510 and, remarkably, we have a visual depiction from just two years later, a painting on a long parchment roll which shows the splendid costumes worn in early Tudor processions.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of this image of the 1512 procession is that the participants, even the king, are all on foot. The reason is simple; at that juncture the Palace of Westminster was still Henry’s principal London residence, and the procession needed only to cross Old Palace Yard to Westminster Abbey for the church service held prior to the state opening. For this short distance of a few hundred metres a mounted procession would have made no sense. Even so, this must have been an impressive event. During a modern state opening the monarch travels only with his or her consort and a military escort. Five hundred years ago, the king was accompanied by the entire House of Lords, then more than 70 strong, the bishops and mitred abbots walking ahead of him, the lay peers following after him, all dressed in their parliamentary robes. The procession also included some junior members of aristocratic families, other knights, esquires and lesser clergy, heralds, and officers of the royal household, in addition to the royal bodyguard and other soldiers.

At the Abbey, the king was greeted by the abbot and chapter, who temporarily swelled the ranks of the procession. While inside the church, Henry walked along under a richly decorated canopy carried by monks, and when he returned to the Palace he took the canopy and its bearers with him. Consequently, we can say for certain that the 1512 roll shows the return procession, not the outward one. Once Parliament had been formally opened, the king simply withdrew to his own apartments within the Palace, so no further procession was required.

A few months after the 1512 procession, the Palace of Westminster suffered a major fire. Enough repairs were carried out for Parliament to continue to meet there, but Henry opted to move elsewhere. By 1536 he had taken up residence at Whitehall Palace, a quarter of a mile to the north. It was out of the question for the monarch to walk that sort of distance in public, so this logistical change forced a rethink about state opening processions. That year, for the first time, the king and the members of the Lords rode from Whitehall down to Westminster, where they donned their parliamentary robes before processing on foot to the Abbey in the time-honoured fashion. The innovation of a mounted procession to Westminster was evidently deemed a success, and thereafter it became a staple feature of state openings.

Three years later, in 1539, the horseback procession became a more prominent element of the state opening, since this time the lords temporal and spiritual rode in their parliamentary robes from Whitehall straight to Westminster Abbey, bypassing the old palace until after the church service. A further significant change occurred during Henry’s final state opening in 1545; until then, the processions were still being marshalled in the same order as in 1510, with the spiritual peers at the front, the lay peers towards the rear, and the king in the middle. However, an Act of Parliament in 1539 formalised the precedence of all members of the Lords, placing the bishops between the barons and viscounts in the pecking order. This same hierarchy was adopted for the 1545 procession, which comprised the most junior peers, the barons, at the front, followed by the bishops, then the more senior lay peers, and finally Henry himself as the culmination of the whole event.

These Henrician innovations established a new processional pattern which endured well into the 17th century.  Inevitably there were some subsequent adjustments to this basic model. While male monarchs preferred to ride on horseback, Mary I and Elizabeth I generally travelled by coach or horse-litter, as did James I in old age. Mary and Elizabeth sometimes began the main procession at St James’s Palace, rather than Whitehall, thereby extending the route almost to its modern dimensions. Elizabeth also increased the size of the procession by including her ladies-in-waiting. However, when Parliament met in 1593 London was experiencing a plague outbreak, on which grounds the procession was cancelled, and the queen travelled by boat to Westminster. Similarly, in 1640 Charles I came by river for the opening of the Long Parliament, though this was probably due to security concerns.

Sadly, there are no contemporary illustrations of these mounted processions. The closest we can get is this etching of Charles II in 1661, which actually shows him processing in state from the city of London to Westminster a few weeks prior to the opening of the Cavalier Parliament. Even so, the king is dressed as he would have been for a state opening, and the other figures milling around him give a good sense of how the processions must have looked.

In the days before modern media, few people got to see the monarch in person, so the state openings attracted large crowds even before the grand horseback processions were introduced. Once those became customary, people with houses along the route from Whitehall to Westminster began hanging tapestries and rich cloths out of their windows on the day, and by 1621 scaffolds were being erected to accommodate some of the spectators. The processions were also accompanied by music; one account that same year mentions drums and fifes.

Predictably things didn’t always go smoothly; in 1614, there was heavy rain, and one baron and a bishop were thrown from their horses while they waited for the procession to set off. Indeed, these were not public relations exercises in the modern sense. In 1621 one witness, Simonds D’Ewes, was completely taken aback when James I ‘spake often and lovingly to the people, standing thick and three-fold on all sides to behold him, “God bless ye! God bless ye!”’ (Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes ed. J.O. Halliwell (1845), i. 170). Ultimately the processions were a show of strength by the nation’s elite, a reminder of where the real power lay in Parliament during this era. As such, their resemblance to modern pageantry shouldn’t be exaggerated. Even so, by Tudor times Parliament was already a significant component of national government, albeit an intermittent one, and the importance of its meetings was underlined by the splendour of the state opening processions.

PMH

Further reading:

Henry S. Cobb, ‘Descriptions of the State Opening of Parliament, 1485-1601: a Survey’, Parliamentary History 18 (1999), 303-15

Jason Peacey, ‘The Street Theatre of State: the Ceremonial Opening of Parliament, 1603-60’, Managing Tudor and Stuart Parliaments ed. Chris R. Kyle (2015), 155-72