the occasion of this mock marriage, that was celebrated in the private chapel of Placentia, the whole of the park and of the adjoining Blackheath, in spite of the inclement season of the year, was dotted with tents and pavilions of cloth of gold for the accommodation of the queen and her ladies. To quote from Hall's _Chronicle_, the 'esquires gentlemen pensioners and serving men (were so) well horsed and apparelled that whoever well viewed them might say that they for tall and comely personages and clean of limb and body' were able to give the greatest prince in Christendom a mortal breakfast if he were the king's enemy.' In the opinion of this partial chronicler, however, Henry himself, when he rode forth from the palace attended by all his great nobles and the foreign ambassadors, far excelled them all, so rich was his apparel, so gorgeous the trappings of his steed, 'so goodly his personage and his royal gesture.' Neither the doomed Catherine Howard nor the more fortunate Catherine Parr, who, but for the fact that she survived her husband, would probably have shared the fate of her predecessor, were ever at Greenwich, but the palace there was the home for a short time of Edward VI., who spent the Christmas of 1552 there, and died in it in 1553. Queen Mary, too, occasionally resided at Placentia, leading an extremely quiet life, that was one day disturbed by an alarming incident, for a salute from a passing vessel was fired by mistake from a loaded gun, and a ball pierced the wall of the room in which she sat with her ladies, fortunately without injuring anyone. {106} It was Queen Elizabeth who restored to her birthplace something of the éclat it had enjoyed during her father's lifetime. She spent the greater part of several summers there, celebrating on April 23 the fête of St. George, the patron-saint of England, with great pomp, receiving foreign ambassadors in state, and giving audience to her own faithful subjects when it suited her humour and convenience. In the first year of her reign she reviewed in her park at Greenwich a large company of London volunteers, who had banded themselves together to aid her against the rebel Duke of Norfolk, and it was in the palace that she held her first chapter of the Order of the Garter, after which she went to supper with her devoted adherent, the Earl of Pembroke, at his seat of Baynard's Castle, who, the repast over, attended her whilst she indulged in her favourite pastime of boating on the Thames, the royal barge attended by hundreds of smaller craft passing to and fro again and again, to the delight of the crowds assembled on the banks to watch the brilliant scene.