Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656

Chapter Three Chester’s Triumph

96 Ch a p t e r T h r e e CHESTER’S TR IUMPH Absence and Authority in SeventeenthCentury Civic Ceremonial On 23 April 1610, st. george’s Day, the city of Chester put on a show (subsequently titled Chester’s Triumph in Honor of Her Prince for pamphlet publication).1 the occasion marked two inaugurations: the running of the first st. george’s Day race in Chester as well as Henry Frederick stuart’s upcoming creation as Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester.2 Produced by local ironmonger and sheriff-peer Robert Amery, the show was a triumphal procession, complete with death-defying acrobats, flying gods, and local boys disguised as allegorical personifications . It moved down either Northgate or Eastgate street, paused in front of the High Cross and the Pentice to entertain the mayor and An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “the Absent triumphator in the 1610 Chester’s Triumph in Honor of Her Prince,” in Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Robert H. stillman, 183–210 (Leiden: brill, 2006). Chester’s triumph 97 the assembled aldermen, and then passed west down Watergate street with the civic authorities following in its wake.3 Exiting the city via the Watergate, the procession entered the Roodee, a large tidal meadow used by Cestrians for a variety of ceremonial and recreational purposes. there the show was met with a thunderous cannonade of greeting from a group of ships anchored in the nearby River Dee. guarded by 240 “brauely furnished” soldiers (A4v), the audience first watched a mockbattle between a pair of ivy-clad savages and a fire-breathing dragon and then cheered on two races and a “running . . . at the Ring” (b1r).4 Characters from the procession presented the winners with their prizes (two silver bells and a silver cup respectively), and the show ended with a return to the Pentice building for a sumptuous feast in honor of the local gentry.5 Amery’s show appears to have been a great success. Richard Davies, the local poet who wrote the performers’ speeches, called it “a peoplepleasing spectacle” (A2v), and antiquarian David Rogers can still recall specific details of “the charge and the solemnitie made the first st gerges daye” twenty-seven years later in the ca. 1637 redaction of his Brevary.6 but there was something missing from the show, something crucial to its generic self-designation as a “triumph” (b4r). simply put, there was no guest of honor. Chester’s Triumph in Honor of Her Prince is missing its prince: Henry Frederick stuart was nowhere near Chester on st. george’s Day. Instead, he was in the south of England, giving his cousin Prince Frederick of brunswick a tour of various military sites. John Nichols places the two princes at the tower of London on 20 April 1610 and at Woolwich Dockyard, visiting the still unfinished Prince Royal, on 25 April 1610.7 A trip to Chester was clearly not on Henry’s itinerary that April. scholars like David M. bergeron and David Mills have noted his absence in their accounts of Chester’s Triumph, but no one has yet gone beyond the mere registration of this fact to discuss its ramifications for the show’s sociopolitical goals.8 In the first part of this chapter, I want to directly address the absence (and absent presence) of Henry Frederick stuart. As I will show, Amery’s pageant assumes that the prince is present and capable of taking part in the performance, either as spectator or actor (or as both). However, this sort of virtual presence still leaves an actual vacuum at the center of the show, a performative void available 98 Chester the City for filling by other authority figures and other, more local concerns. Prince Henry’s absence destabilizes the generic affiliations of the Chester triumph, transforming a procession that to some extent assumes the form of a royal entry into a primarily Cestrian affair implicitly engaged in an oligarchic conflict contained by the city walls. As Henry recedes from view (or, rather, fails to materialize in the first place), a psychomachia conflict between the figures of Love and Envy comes to dominate the dramatic action of the show. What begins as a celebration of a royal heir’s creation as Prince of Wales ends up a meditation on local strife, a performative act that raises the...