Elizabeth I was confronted with her genealogy from the very moment she entered London for her pre-coronation progress. Surrounded by a huge crowd, the Queen proceeded through the City following a route signposted by pageants on which symbolic scenes were being staged. After the official welcome of a Latin oration, she was presented with a three-storey pageant called The uniting of the two Houses of Lancaster and York. The whole structure was ‘garnished with Red Roses and White’ and celebrated the unity and peace brought about by Henry VII at the end of the Wars of the Roses. It reproduced Elizabeth's royal pedigree as a visual rendition of the accompanying verse:

The pageant was structured as a three-dimensional genealogical tree rooted in the lower stage; there sat effigies of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, with their red and white roses. From their clasping hands sprang ‘two branches, gathered into one’, leading to a higher stage showing Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Above this second stage was a third, ‘wherein likewise was planted a seat Royal, in the which was set one representing the Queen's most excellent Majesty Elizabeth’. The shape of the genealogical diagram, running bottom to top, mirrored that of the Tree of Jesse, that is, the visual representation of the genealogy of Christ from King David's father, as found in the Gospel of Matthew, and predicted in the Book of Isaiah. The structure of the pageant was most likely similar to the frontispiece of the 1550 edition of Edward Hall's The union of the two noble and illustre families of Lancaster [and] Yorke (Fig. 25), a book published by Richard Grafton, who was also involved in the preparations for Elizabeth's ceremony.

To Elizabeth I the notions of bloodline and heredity were and would remain daunting.