The Lord Mayor's Show and the Politics of London's Clothworkers’ Company in the Mid-Seventeenth Century

Abstract

This article uses detail from the records of the Clothworkers’ Company to explore the tensions that lay beneath the surface of the elaborate Lord Mayors’ Shows of Sir John Ireton in 1658 and Sir John Robinson in 1662. Nearly one hundred members of the Company failed to pay their contributions (or ‘fines’) towards the Shows, leading to a shortfall in funding that the Company's Court of Assistants sought to remedy through protracted and expensive institutional and legal proceedings. The article seeks explanations for such behaviour. While the invidiousness of financial burdens and the inability of members to pay their fines are instructive, explicit evidence of enduring divisions between elements of the Company's hierarchy demonstrate how institutional non-participation is inextricable from wider political and religious issues. In the final analysis, suggestive evidence of radical tendencies among the Clothworkers’ membership conveys that the Shows of 1658 and 1662 could be vectors of opposition to the regimes of which Ireton and Robinson were representative, as well as the extravagant Shows themselves.