Never had the banks of Thames seen a sight so gay or so busy, since London Stone was first placed by the verge of the old Prætorian-road!
In a gorgeous barge, covered by an awning, decorated by pennons and rowed by men in the royal livery, Henry VII. was on the river, accompanied by the Lord Mayor and commonalty, all in smaller barges, garnished with streamers and surrounded by a swarm of lesser boats, crowded by knights, courtiers, citizens, and beautiful women, all wearing the gayest of colours.
He wore his royal robes—a kirtle and surcoat, with his furred hood and mantle, and the George upon his breast. A smile of gratification lit up his usually grave face from time to time, as he caressed his chief favourite—an abominable monkey.
As he stood up in the barge to bow in return to the people, whose shouts rent the sunny air, his tall thin figure was conspicuous above his courtiers, "among whom we observed," as the newspapers would have said had there been one in this year of grace, 1488, Sir William Stanley, Lord Chamberlain of England, wearing his gold key of office; Robert Lord Brook, Knight of the Garter, and Lord Steward of the Household; Sir Richard Crofts, the King's Treasurer, and Sir Richard Edgecumbe, his comptroller, each bearing a white wand; Berkely, the Earl Marshal; Lord Dinham, the Treasurer of England; and Gerald, Earl of Kildare, the newly appointed Governor of Henry's lordship of Ireland, all attired in gorgeous costumes, while the fifty Yeomen of the Guard—a body established only two years before—clad in scarlet coats and black velvet caps, and armed with partisans and swords, were in the king's great barge, with their captain, Sir Charles Somerset, afterwards Earl of Worcester.
It was quite a gala day in London. The beautiful cross in Cheapside, and the Conduit, recently built by the Sheriff, Thomas Ilam, were covered with garlands of flowers; all the bells were tolling, and the houses which faced the river had their windows crowded with heads, and their horn lattices open,—for glass was not common in England until the middle of the sixteenth century, and even in 1558, when "the proud Earl of Northumberland" left Alnwick Castle for a time, the glass windows were carefully taken out, and thriftily replaced by plain wooden boards.
The culverins and bombardes of the Tower thundered out their farewell salute as the ships got under way; flags were displayed on the old Church of St. Katharine, where now the Docks are; and all the foreign argosies and the corn traders from the Cinque Ports, which in those days were compelled to land their cargoes at Queen-hithe, the rival of Billingsgate, were bedecked with banners and streamers, while many a broad piece of tapestry floated from the keep of the Tower, and from Baynard Castle, which had been rebuilt about sixty years before by the Duke of Gloucester.
The roofs and windows of quaint Old London Bridge, through the narrow arches of which the ebb tide was rushing, displayed a thousand faces and waving caps. It had then a grotesque row of houses and shops, forming a narrow street across the river, with a gothic Chapel of St. Thomas à Becket; an embattled drawbridge-tower, on which Hentzner, one fine morning, counted no less than thirty human heads, all of which had been carefully cooked and parboiled, according to act of parliament, in the kitchen of the said tower.
At last the topsails were sheeted home, and while their ordnance, amid clouds of smoke replied to the farewell salutes of the Tower and the deafening cheers of the people, St. George's red cross was thrice lowered in adieu to the king, and the vessels began to drop down the river, while a fry of wherries pulled by barefooted and barelegged watermen shot after them, their occupants cheering with delight at the anticipation of pelting with the mud of the then unpaved streets "the rough-footed Scots" of Andrew Wood; for those of Andrew Barton, when marched in chains through the thoroughfares of London, obtained some weighty marks of the goodwill borne by the citizens to foreigners in general, and the abhorred Scots in particular. In the days of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., we are told the London streets "were very foul, and full of pits and sloughs," and thus, plenty of muddy ammunition lay always at hand.
On board the ship of Miles Furnival sailed Hew Borthwick, bound to Scotland on another mission of infamy.
A deadly and subtle poison had been prepared by a certain Master Kraft, an herbalist whom Henry VII. patronised, and who was a brother of Quentin the Notary. This personage kept an apothecary's booth in Bucklersbury, a street which, from a very early period, until the great fire of 1666, was inhabited solely, or nearly so, by renders of simples, medicines, cosmetics, and deleterious drugs.