re were grand festivities including
the presentation of some of those masques then coming into vogue.
Indeed, Daniel's _Vision of the Twelve Goddesses_, presented in the
Great Hall here by the Queen and her Ladies of Honour on 8 January,
1604, has been described as the first true masque in the literary
sense. Many contemporary letters throw light on this Christmas
celebration, when, if one letter writer is to be believed, as many as
thirty masques and interludes were presented, when all the Court, the
foreign ambassadors and their attendants thronged to Hampton Court.
The twelve hundred rooms of the Palace did not suffice, many people
had to put up in the outbuildings, while tents were erected in the
park for a number of the servants--the fact that three or four people
died daily in these tents from the plague (then ravaging London) does
not appear to have been allowed to interfere with the festivities.
There was tilting and running at the ring in the park and other
diversions, but the masquings seem to have formed the most important
part of the celebration, and of these, of course, the chief was that
"Vision" in which the Queen took part in the Great Hall. King James
sat in state on the dais by the great oriel window, spectators were
presumably ranged in tiers along either side of the hall, and from a
"heaven" above the Minstrels' Gallery the goddesses descended to their
dancing on the floor of the hall. The "scenes" at either end of the
hall were designed by no less notable a craftsman than Inigo Jones.[1]

That same month of January, 1604, which saw here such magnificent
masquings saw also in Hampton Court a gathering of a very different
kind--a gathering which, although it proved abortive so far as its
particular purpose was concerned, yet had one remarkable consequence.
Says Carlyle in his survey of the beginnings of the seventeenth-century
prefatory to the Cromwell letters:

"In January, 1603-4, was held at Hampton Court a kind of
Theological Convention of intense interest all over
England ... now very dimly known, if at all known, as
the 'Hampton Court Conference'. It was a meeting for the
settlement of some dissentient humours in religion....
Four world-famous Doctors from Oxford and Cambridge
represented the pious straitened class, now beginning to
be generally conspicuous under the nickname _Puritans_.
The Archbishop, the Bishop of London, also world-famous
men, with