Earl of Pembroke, and others, received them at Dover with a great train of the Queen’s carriages, in which they were conveyed to Gravesend, where a great number of the nobility met them with the Queen’s barges to carry them to Somerset House. London itself was crowded with the nobility and Parliament-men, who had been specially ordered to remain in town with their families. “They are also collecting,” says Mendoza, “all their servants and trains, both for the sake of ostentation and because, being a suspicious folk, they fear some disturbance, particularly Leicester, who is making greater efforts than any one to collect a large company of kinsmen and servants.” London itself was gloomy and discontented at the coming of the embassy, but withal was kept from open disturbance by the underlying belief, now pretty general, that State alliance rather than marriage would be the ultimate result of it all. A salute of two hundred guns greeted the envoys as they passed under London Bridge in their barges on the 21st of April. Saturday, the 24th, was St. George’s Day, and the ambassadors were taken in great state by water to visit the Queen at Whitehall. A vast banqueting-hall, says Hollingshead, had been erected on the south side of the palace covered with painted canvas and decorated in a style of most fantastic splendour. Pendants of fruits, and even vegetables, were hung from festoons of ivy, bay, rosemary, and flowers, the whole lavishly sprinkled with spangles. The ceiling was painted like a sky, with stars and sunbeams intermixed with escutcheons of the royal arms, and a profusion of glass lustres illuminated the whole. The envoys themselves, giving an account of their reception,[126] say that the walls of the chamber were hung entirely with cloth of gold and silver; the throne, raised on a dais, being surmounted by a silken canopy covered with roses embroidered in pearls. The Queen herself was dressed in cloth of gold spangled with diamonds and rubies, and smilingly inclined her head as the less important members of the embassy passed before her. When the young Dauphin, a prince of the blood and the representative of the King, approached, however, she stepped down from the dais and in English fashion kissed him on the lips, and said a few gracious words to Marshal de Cossé, Brisson, Carrouges, and La Mothe Fénélon, who followed him. Again and again she besought the young Prince to don his plumed bonnet, and the crowd being dense and the heat great, instead of again mounting her dais she retired to an open window overlooking the Thames. Lansac seized the opportunity of presenting to her a French painter who had been commissioned by Catharine de Medici to paint her portrait, whereupon the Queen, ever avid for compliments, said he must represent her with a veil over her face, so that they might not think her too old. That day and the next passed in almost interminable entertainments,