In the foregoing quotations, we have not the least necessity to make an allowance for poetical licence: the historians of the time will justify the poets, and perfectly clear them from any charge of exaggeration; and especially Hall, Grafton, and Holinshed, who are exceedingly diffuse on this and such like popular subjects. The latter has recorded a very curious piece of pantomimical trickery exhibited at the time that the princess Mary went in procession through the city of London, the day before her coronation:--At the upper end of Grace-church-Street there was a pageant made by the Florentines; it was very high; and "on the top thereof there stood foure pictures; and in the midst of them, and the highest, there stood an angell, all in greene, with a trumpet in his hand; and when the trumpetter who stood secretlie within the pageant, did sound his· trumpet, the angell did put his trumpet to his mouth, as though it had been the same that had sounded." A similar deception but on a more extensive scale, was practised at the gate of Kenelworth Castle for the reception of queen Elizabeth.[59] Holinshed, speaking of the spectacles exhibited at London, when Philip king of Spain, with Mary his consort, made their public entry in the city, calls them, in the margin of his Chronicle, "the vaine pageants of London;" and he uses the same epithet twice in the description immediately subsequent; "Now," says he, "as the king came to London, and as he entered at the drawbridge, [on London Bridge,] there was a vaine great spectacle, with two images representing two giants, the one named Corineus, and the other Gog-magog, holding betweene them certeine Latin verses, which, for the vaine ostentation of flatterye, I overpasse."[60] He then adds: "From the bridge they passed to the conduit in Gratious-street, which was finely painted; and, among other things," there exhibited, "were the Nine Worthies; of these king Henry VIII. was one. He was painted in harnesse,[61] having in one hand a sword, and in the other hand a booke, whereupon was written Verbum Dei.[62] He was also delivering, as it were, the same booke to his sonne king Edward VI. who was painted in a corner by him." This device, it seems, gave great offence; and the painter, at the queen's command, was summoned before the bishop of Winchester, then lord chancellor, where he met with a very severe reprimand, and was ordered to erase the inscription; to which he readily assented, and was glad to have escaped at so easy a rate from the peril that threatened him; but in his hurry to remove the offensive words, he rubbed out "the whole booke, and part of the hand that held it."[63]