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Royal Thames
Royalty and nobility kept ornate river vessels and retained
their own liveried watermen. On 29 May 1533, fifty
decorated barges with musicians and cannons set out
against the tide from Billingsgate to meet Anne Boleyn for
her coronation with Henry VIII. Three years later almost
to the day, the return journey from Greenwich to the
Tower formed a far grimmer. procession. Without a band.
Anne’s daughter Elizabeth I also travelled by water from
the Palace of Placentia at Greenwich to the Tower on her
own ascension to the throne in 1558. When she died her
coffin travelled on a black-draped and torch-lit barge in the
dead of night from Richmond to Whitehall. When Charles
II travelled by royal barge down the Thames from
Hampton Court to Whitehall with his bride Catherine of
Braganza, John Evelyn described the event as “the most
magnificent triumph ever floated on the Thames”.
Handel composed his Water Music for King George I after
he requested a concert on the River Thames. The first
presentation took place on a July night in 1717, on a barge
carrying the King and his guests somewhere between
Lambeth and Chelsea. George is said to have liked the
music so much that he made the increasingly exhausted
musicians play it three times. He was enjoying his very
comfortably appointed evening of ornate gilding and
lavish soft furnishings the evening with a party described
as his close friends made up of almost entirely of ladies:
Anne Vaughan, the Duchess of Bolton, the Duchess of
Newcastle, Countess of Darlington, the Countess of
Godolphin and Madam Kilmarnock. Cynics suggested
it wasn’t just the music that the king didn't want to end”.
After a supper in Chelsea which lasted until 2am, the
poor musicians had to play it all again on the return by
river to Whitehall Palace.
It is said that Thomas Doggett established his prize Wager
in grateful thanks for being rescued from drowning by a
waterman. A less romantic theory is that the race was first
run in 1715 to commemorate George I’s first year on the
throne. Hence the horse on the silver badge. The horse of
the House of Hanover also accounting for why we have so
many pubs called The White Horse.