She appears again to take part
in innumerable pageants, such as that in which Henry VIII. in 1540,
and on New Year's day, first saw Anne of Cleves and was astonished at
her little beauty, or that which greeted Elizabeth in 1573, or that
which greeted Charles I. and his bride after their wedding at
Canterbury, or that which shouted for the Merry Monarch, when Charles
II. rode down the High Street in 1660, after his landing at Dover. It
was his brother, unfortunate and unhappy, who came in without any
herald and stole away in the night of December 19, 1688, having
foregone a throne and lost a kingdom.
All these, sieges or pageants, however, what are they but a tale that
is told. There remains, in some sort at least, the Cathedral. This is
the oldest thing in Rochester and the most lasting. It was founded in
the end of the sixth century as we have seen, and its first Bishop
was that St Justus who had come with St Augustine from the monastery
of St Andrew on the Coelian Hill in Rome, the monastery we now know
by the name of the man who sent them, St Gregory the Great. St
Augustine and St Justus were not, however, at first received with
enthusiasm in Rochester.
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