Torches, a hall full of people who have eaten too much, and then a ship. Eighteen feet of her, gliding across the flagstones with Neptune aboard, no water anywhere, no visible means of moving. On this day in 1594, at Stirling Castle, James VI baptised his first child, Prince Henry, and put on a masque to mark it, written by William Fowler with Patrick Leslie, Lord Lindores.

There was to be a chariot too, drawn by a live lion. Sense prevailed somewhere between the plan and the night, and a man took the harness instead, on the reasonable grounds that a lion in a crowded candlelit room is a special effect that can develop opinions of its own. The ship had no such problem, because the ship was full of men. Under the hull, bent double, pushing in step, listening for cues they could not see. Whatever the guests remembered afterwards, that is the performance I would have paid to watch: half a dozen crew moving a sea by hand and staying quiet about it.

The hall below is the room, more or less, though bright now and empty of banqueting. The miniature is Anna of Denmark, the baby's mother, painted at nineteen. Henry was six months old and slept through most of it, I imagine, as the best-behaved members of any audience do.