It being farre more worthy than to fill
A file inferiour. Yon’s the Sun’s guilt hill;
On to’ot! Love guardes you on! Cyclopes, a ring
Make with your hammers, to whose musicke sing.
CHAPTER VI.
FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF THE IRONMONGERS’ HISTORY.—III.
The Lord Mayor’s Show of the olden time, unlike the annual carnival of the latter half of the nineteenth century, was in reality illustrative of the trade to which (by Company) the chief magistrate belonged, and notwithstanding the prejudices against pageantry at the present time, we are staunch advocates for some annual popular display whereby the rising generation of our great City may, like the apprentices of old London, have visible proof that the Lord Mayor is a reality and not invisible to his subjects, and that if they will only put their shoulder to the wheel and emulate Hogarth’s industrious apprentice they in time stand the best chance of living in a big house, riding in a gilt coach, and wearing that big gold chain which yearly makes their appetites so keen and their eyes glisten with delight.
These Lord Mayor pageants of the seventeenth century were, as we have stated, partly a show on the Thames and partly a show in the City streets. Designed by the City poet of the period, the descriptions were usually printed in a small volume and circulated among the Lord Mayor’s friends and the members of the company. Probably the largest volume on the subject is the reprint of the Fishmongers’ pageant of 1616, edited by J. G. Nichols in 1844, a large folio with twelve illustrations, facsimiles of the original drawings. Our own copy of this work belonged to Mr. Recorder Gurney, and has the plates beautifully hand-painted and illuminated. And the smallest book upon so great a subject is a 32-paged duodecimo entitled “The Lord Mayor of London: a Sketch of the Origin, History, and Antiquity of the Office,” printed in 1860, and containing, as we believe, every fact to that date worth knowing about the office.
There are two items in connection with the 1629 show which must not be omitted. That “gentle angler,” Izaak Walton, a City apprentice who had been admitted a member of the Ironmongers’ Company eleven years before, on November 12, 1618, was one of the thirty-two members of the yeomanry who took part in the pageant. The “Sea Lion” and the “Estridge,” after the day’s ceremony was over, were brought in state to Ironmongers’ Hall, “to be sett upp for the Company’s use.” We do not know how long the lion remained so proudly exalted, but certainly not so long as the world-renowned relic still called the “original” dagger with which “brave Walworth knight Wat Tyler slew” in 1381, and which, after being carried in many a Fishmongers’ pageant, rests at the present time in a glass case in Fishmongers’ Hall. The carved-wood ostrich still exists.