e pretensions of the queen of Scots
and her husband the dauphin, who had openly assumed the royal arms of
England, might soon reinvolve her in hostilities with that country and
with Scotland; and it consequently became a point of policy with her to
animate by means of military spectacles, graced with her royal presence
and encouragement, the warlike preparations of her subjects. She was now
established for a time in her favorite summer-palace of Greenwich, and
the London companies were ordered to make a muster of their men at arms
in the adjoining park.

The employment of fire-arms had not as yet consigned to disuse either
the defensive armour or the weapons of offence of the middle ages; and
the military arrays of that time amused the eye of the spectator with a
rich variety of accoutrement far more picturesque in its details, and
probably more striking even in its general effect, than that magnificent
uniformity which, at a modern review, dazzles but soon satiates the
sight.

Of the fourteen hundred men whom the metropolis sent forth on this
occasion, eight hundred, armed in fine corselets, bore the long Moorish
pike; two hundred were halberdiers wearing a different kind of armour,
called Almain rivets; and the gunners, or musketeers, were equipped in
shirts of mail, with morions or steel caps. Her majesty, surrounded by a
splendid court, beheld all their evolutions from a gallery over the park
gate, and finally dismissed them, confirmed in loyalty and valor by
praises, thanks, and smiles of graciousness.

A few days afterwards the queen's pensioners were appointed "to run with
the spear," and this chivalrous exhibition was accompanied with such
circumstances of romantic decoration as peculiarly delighted the fancy
of Elizabeth. She caused to be erected for her in Greenwich park a
banqueting-house "made with fir poles and decked with birch branches and
all manner of flowers both of the field and the garden, as roses,
julyflowers, lavender, marygolds, and all manner of strewing-herbs and
rushes." Tents were also set up for her household, and a place was
prepared for the tilters. After the exercises were over, the queen gave
a supper in the banqueting-house, succeeded by a masque, and that by a
splendid banquet. "And then followed great casting of fire and shooting
of guns till midnight."

This band of gentlemen pensioners, the boast and ornament of the court
of Elizabeth, was probably the most splendid establishmen