Note 233b — XIII—MATURITY OF GENIUS

Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Outlines, i. 213, cites a royal order to this effect, but gives no authority, and I have sought in vain for the document at the Public Record Office, at the British Museum, and elsewhere. But there is no reason to doubt the fact that Shakespeare and his fellow-actors took, as Grooms of the Chamber, part in the ceremonies attending the Constable’s visit to London. In the unprinted accounts of Edmund Tilney, master of the revels, for the year October 1603 to October 1604, charge is made for his three days’ attendance with four men to direct the entertainments ‘at the receaving of the Constable of Spayne’ (Public Record Office, Declared Accounts, Pipe Office Roll 2805). The magnificent festivities culminated in a splendid banquet given in the Constable’s honour by James I at Whitehall on Sunday, August 19/29—the day on which the treaty was signed. In the morning all the members of the royal household accompanied the Constable in formal procession from Somerset House. After the banquet, at which the earls of Pembroke and Southampton acted as stewards, there was a ball, and the King’s guests subsequently witnessed exhibitions of bear baiting, bull baiting, rope dancing, and feats of horsemanship. (Cf. Stow’s Chronicle, 1631, pp. 845-6, and a Spanish pamphlet, Relacion de la jornada del excmo Condestabile de Castilla, etc., Antwerp, 1604, 4to, which was summarised in Ellis’s Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. iii. pp. 207-215, and was partly translated in Mr. W. B. Rye’s England as seen by Foreigners, pp. 117-124).