London: The Biography

But then it first touched the imagination of poets and chroniclers. It became the river of magnificence, used as a golden highway by princes and diplomats. Barges were “freshly furnished with banners and streamers of silk” while other boats were “richly beaten with the arms or badges of their craft”; there were many covered with awnings of silk and silken tapestry, while around them the wherries took their course heavily weighted with merchants or priests or courtiers. This was a time when, in the early years of the sixteenth century, the oars of the London watermen might become entangled in water lilies while they kept stroke “to the tune of flutes” which made “the water which they beat to follow faster.” The Thames has always been associated with song and music, beginning with the watermen’s chant of “Heare and how, rumblelow” or “Row, the boat, Norman, row to thy lemen” dated respectively to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

More formal music, beating not to the ebb and flow of the current but rather to its history, could be heard on diplomatic or nuptial occasions. When in 1540 Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife, removed to Westminster by water on their bridal day they were accompanied by “instruments sweetly sounding” in barges “gorgeously garnished with banners, pennons and targets richly covered.” On the previous ceremonial entrance of Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn from Greenwich into London in 1533, “there were trumpets, shawms, and other divers instruments, all the way playing and making great melody.” Her welcome provided one of the richest pageants upon the Thames ever recorded, with the state barge of the mayor leading the procession “adorned by flags and pennons hung with rich tapestries and ornamented on the outside with scutcheons of metal, suspended on cloth of gold and silver.” It was preceded by a flat vessel, rather like a floating stage, upon which “a dragon pranced about furiously, twisting his tail and belching out wildfire.” Here the freedom of the river inspires extravagance as well as music. The barge of the mayor was followed by fifty other barges belonging to the trades and guilds, “all sumptuously decked with silk and arras, and having bands of music on board.” Here commerce makes its own music upon the water, which was itself the conduit of its wealth.

It is clear, however, that the Thames can harbour and accommodate supernatural forces as well as more conventional goods. It was typically described as the colour of silver, the great alchemical agent; the “silver streaming Thames” in Spenser is followed by “the silver-footed Thamesis” in Herrick and the “silver Thames” in Pope. Herrick introduces nymphs and naiads, but his central tone is one of mournful regret upon being forced to abandon the river in leaving London for the country-no more sweet evenings of summer bathing, no more journeys to Richmond, Kingston or Hampton Court, no more departures “and landing here, or safely landing there.” Drayton invokes the “silver Thames” also, and uses the familiar metaphor of a “clearest crystal flood,” where Pope describes “Old Father Thames” whose “shining horns diffused a golden gleam.” It has often been suggested that rivers represent the feminine principle within the general masculine environment of the city, but with the Thames this is emphatically not the case. It is the “Old Father,” perhaps in a somewhat menacing or primeval way equivalent to William Blake’s vision of “Nobodaddy.”

It looked, from a distance, as if it were a forest of masts; there were approximately two thousand ships and boats each day upon the water, as well as three thousand of the then notorious watermen who transported goods and people in every direction. “The Pool of London,” the area between London Bridge and the Tower, was filled to capacity with barges and barks and galleons, while a map of the middle sixteenth century shows boats moored beside the various stairs which were the transportation stops of the capital. Upon this map the streets are depicted as almost devoid of activity while the river is a hive of business; it was a pardonable exaggeration, designed to emphasise the paramount importance of the Thames. There is a London story which is appropriate. One sovereign, more than usually irate about the reluctance of London to subsidise his adventures, threatened to move his court to Winchester or Oxford; the mayor of London replied, “Your Majesty may with ease move yourself, your Court and your Parliament, wheresoever you wish, but the merchants of London have one great consolation-you cannot take the Thames with you.”