The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 1

by E. K. Chambers

Much additional inconvenience was evidently caused to voluntary and involuntary hosts alike by the characteristic indecision which led Elizabeth, in small things as well as great, to be constantly chopping and changing her plans. The 'gestes' might be set down, but they were never final, to the last minute. The good city of Leicester was warned four times to make preparation, in 1562, 1575, 1576, and 1585, and never had the felicity of beholding its sovereign at all.[380] The point comes out clearly enough in the letters already quoted; perhaps even more clearly in a final group written in August 1597 by one of Burghley's secretaries, Henry Maynard, from London to another, Michael Hicks, who was in fluttered anticipation of a visit at Ruckholt in Essex. Maynard wrote three times in the course of five days. On the 10th he warned Hicks to expect the Queen in the following week, 'if the iestes hold, which after manie alterations is so sett downe this daie'. He will let him know if there is any further change, 'for wee are greatlie aferd of Theobalds'. On the 12th there had been no change as yet and Hicks had better come to court for advice. There was still danger of Theobalds, 'but as yett it is not sett downe'. With a sigh, Maynard adds, 'This progresse much trowbleth mee, for that we knowe not what corse the Queen will take'. On the 15th he can at last announce that no change was now expected. He had told the Lord Chamberlain that Hicks was troubled at the insufficient accommodation he could provide for the royal train. 'His awnsweare was that you weare unwise to be at anie such charge: but onelie to leave the howse to the Quene: and wished that theare might be presented to hir Majestie from your wief sum fine wastcoate, or fine ruffe, or like thinge, which he said would be acceptablie taken as if it weare of greate price.' Maynard was still anticipating a descent on Theobalds, although nothing had been said about it.[381] As a matter of fact, his anticipation was justified, and Theobalds was visited in the course of September. In 1599 there was a scare lest the short progress planned should be extended, 'by reason of an intercepted letter, wherein the giving over of long voyages was noted to be sign of age'.[382]

Contact with the great is not ordinarily, for the plain man, a bed of roses; and there is no reason to suppose that it was otherwise in the spacious times of Elizabeth. You probably got knighted, if you were not a knight already, which cost you some fees, and you received some sugared royal compliments on the excellence of your entertainment and the appropriateness of your 'devices'. But you had wrestled for a month with poulterers and with poets. You had 'avoided' your house, and made yourself uncomfortable in a neighbouring lodge. You had seen your trim gardens and terraces encamped upon by a locust-swarm of all the tag-rag and bobtail that follows a court. And with your knowledge of that queer streak in the Tudor blood, you had been on tenterhooks all the time lest at some real or fancied dislike the royal countenance might become clouded, and the compliments give way to a bitter jest or to open railing. 'I have had hitherto a troublesome progress,' writes Cecil to Parker in 1561, 'to stay the Queen's majesty from daily offence conceived against the clergy, by reason of the undiscreet behaviour of the readers and ministers in these countries of Suffolk and Essex.'[383] Parker himself was something of a favourite with Elizabeth, yet John Harington can record an incredible insult to his wife on the doorstep of Lambeth.[384] And Richard Topcliffe, hunter of recusants, describes with indecent glee how the hospitality of Edward Rookwood in 1578 was rewarded with a committal to prison and a public obloquy on his religion.[385] The arrogance of the royal train had always to be reckoned with. As far back as 1526 Henry VIII had issued a formal household order against the spoliation of houses in progress.[386] In 1574 Leicester instigated a surprise visit to Berkeley Castle, which was not in the 'gestes', and so ruined the head of deer by killing twenty-seven in one day that Lord Berkeley in a passion disparked the estate. This appears to have been a deliberate scheme by Leicester to bring Berkeley into disfavour and secure the castle himself.[387] The Stuart households were probably just as bad. After Anne's visit in 1603, the Leicester corporation had to pursue the court 'aboute lynnyns and pewter that was myssinge'.[388]

It is not quite clear how far these annoyances were aggravated by the financial burden of the royal entertainment. There is some evidence that, so far as the essentials of food and drink and fuel were concerned, the household was prepared to pay its way, and that, although the hosts had to make provision of these necessaries, they were entitled to recoupment for the cost by the Cofferer.[389] Certainly the progress, once an economy for the Crown, had become an expense.[390] Burghley's papers contain an estimate, based on the accounts of 1573, showing an 'increase of chardgies in the time of progresse' to the extent of £1,034, 'which should not be if her Majestie remeynid at her Standing Howses within XX myles of London'.[391] This is not wholly conclusive, because in any case part of the time was usually spent, not in private houses, but at royal manors or even in inns.[392] But its indication is confirmed, so far as civic visits are concerned, by entries in corporation accounts, which appear to be limited to expenditure upon the hire or purchase of plenishing, the repair of streets and pavements and painting of gates and public buildings, the provision of a fairly costly gift in the form of a gold cup with money in it, and the payment of fees to the queen's waymaker for inspecting the roads, and to various officers of the chamber, hall, and stable. The visit of 1575 cost the city of Worcester £173, raised partly out of corporation funds, partly by a special levy. The city of Leicester met that of 1612 with a levy of £74 1s. 9d., while that of 1614 cost them £102 12s. 6½d.[393] Anything in the way of a mimetic entertainment would probably fall by civic custom on the guilds.[394] And the establishment of the Revels, which followed the progress, was ready to help at need, with a mask or banqueting house.[395] There are definite statements as to the recoupment of the cost of light, rushes, and fuel at Oxford in 1566, and of beer when Prince Charles passed through Leicester in 1604.[396] Of course, the Crown used its feudal right of purveyance; that is to say, of purchase within the verge at rates fixed by itself; and for this purchase a local jury was empanelled to assist the Clerk of the Market in drawing up a tariff and supervising weights and measures.[397]

But the abuses of purveyance, which included the impressment of vehicles by the royal cart-takers, cannot have borne very heavily upon districts rarely visited, although the home counties, which were more often traversed and contained standing houses, had no doubt their grievances.[398]

The Hicks correspondence suggests that, even in 1597, the household was still prepared to provision itself, at any rate in the smaller private houses. But there is a good deal of evidence to show that, where persons of wealth were concerned, a different practice grew up. A visit to Gorhambury in 1577 cost Sir Nicolas Bacon £577.[399] Parker's son recorded that his father's entertainment of the Queen at Canterbury and other houses, with his gifts to her and the lords and ladies, cost him above £2,000, and that in addition he spent £170 at Canterbury in rewards to the officers of the household.[400] Burghley's domestic biographer tells us that the twelve visits to Theobalds cost him 'two or three thousand pounds every tyme', which sufficiently explains why his adherents were not particularly anxious for a visit in 1597.[401] Parker had to find many nights' lodging, as the Queen passed up and down stream, and at Canterbury Elizabeth is known to have occupied a house of her own. But Burghley's heavy expenditure must surely have covered more than the mere gifts and the spectacular side of his entertainments. A visit to the Marquis of Winchester in 1601 was 'with more charge than the constitution of Basing may well bear'.[402] For that to Harefield in 1602 the bills are preserved, and amount to £2,013 18s. 4d., of which £1,255 12s. 0d. was apparently for provisions, £199 9s. 11d. for temporary buildings, and the balance presumably for gifts, spectacles, and the like. There is no indication of any repayments by the royal Cofferer, although Sir Thomas Egerton's friends came nobly to his assistance, and sent in innumerable presents, including no less than eighty-six stags and bucks, eleven oxen, sixty-five sheep, and forty-one sugar-loaves, as well as birds, fish, oysters, Selsea cockles, cheese-cakes, sweetmeats, wine, wheat, and salt.[403] Finally we have the definite statement of the French ambassador La Mothe Fénelon in 1575, that at Kenilworth Leicester 'a deffrayé toute la court a cent soixante platz d'assiette, l'espace de douze jours'.[404] And we have that of the Venetian ambassador Foscarini in 1612, that 'his Majesty's charges are borne by the owners of the houses where he lodges'. Foscarini had accompanied the progress to Belvoir, and was much struck with the large numbers, more than a thousand, who were housed there, and with the costly style in which things were done, 'far exceeding that of the court when in London or a neighbouring palace'. He found personally, as others have found since his day, that visiting was much more expensive than staying at home, on account of the largesse expected.[405] I am inclined to think that we have come here upon a point of honour, and that, while it was not in theory incumbent upon a poor man to feed as well as lodge his mistress, it gradually became customary for rich men to give a special proof of their devotion by omitting to claim the recoupment to which they were strictly entitled. And if this was so, of course in the long run the poor men had to follow suit. Sir William Clarke in 1602 was counted a churl, for he 'neither gives meat nor money to any of the progressors. The house Her Majesty has at commandment, and his grass the guard's horses eat, and this is all.'[406] The right to occupy the house of a subject was indeed a matter of feudal tradition. All manors were ultimately held of the Crown. We find Elizabeth dating from 'our manor of Cheneys' in 1570, although Chenies had long been in the hands of the Russells; and it was an obiter dictum of Lord Northampton in a Star Chamber case of 1606 that 'the kinge by his prerogative may take vp any howse in his progres'.[407]

Those who accompanied the progress had their own woes to bear. There was a good deal of 'roughing it'. The rate of advance, at ten or twelve miles a day, broken by a dinner at some wayside mansion or in a temporarily constructed 'dining house', was inevitably slow. The weather and the roads were often unkind; nor was the advance guard of two hundred and twenty carts carrying baggage likely to have mended the condition of the latter.[408] The numbers were great, and if accommodation was scant, some had to make shift with tents and booths. The commissariat was not always perfect. Even the Queen might come off badly. On one occasion Leicester reported to Burghley that the beer had been unsatisfactory. 'Hit did put her very farr out of temper, and almost all the company beside.' Happily, a better brew had been discovered. 'God be thanked she is now perfectly well and merry.'[409] Burghley himself was apparently timed to join the progress at Dudley, and he received a discreet hint from Walsingham that a change of programme would bring the Queen there earlier than had been expected, 'whereuppon your Lordship may take some just cause to excuse you not coming thither'.[410] No doubt Burghley's duties as Lord Treasurer often kept him at Westminster. But the fact is that the sixteenth-century growth of luxury was making a migratory court something of an anachronism.[411] The progress was by no means always on the same scale of elaboration. In some years it was limited to a month or so in the counties nearest to London; in others it extended over three or four months, and the Queen went fairly far afield. During the earlier years the most important progresses were those of 1564 and 1566, which included visits to Cambridge and to Oxford respectively. In 1562, 1563, and 1565 there were no progresses at all, owing to plague or other reasons. The period of the great progresses was the second decade of the reign; and it culminated in the 'Princely Pleasures' of Kenilworth of 1575. During 1572, 1574, and 1575 Elizabeth covered a large part of the Midlands; during 1573 Kent and Sussex; during 1578 East Anglia. She reached Southampton in 1560 and 1569, Dover in 1573, Bristol in 1574, Stafford and Chartley in 1575. Farther north or west I do not find her; visits were planned to the chief towns of the Presidencies of Wales and of the North, to Shrewsbury in 1575 and to York in 1584, but these never came off. Progresses were practically suspended during the troublous decade before the Armada, when the Queen's life was hardly ever safe from plots, and she generally spent the autumn quietly at Oatlands or Nonsuch. In 1591 and 1592 the old custom was revived; Southampton was revisited in the former year, Oxford and the Cotswolds in the latter. There was another revival towards the end of the reign, and there were short progresses in 1597, 1600, 1601, and 1602. Two unsuccessful plans were made to get as far as Wiltshire. Elizabeth's strength was failing, but the restlessness of her latter years was upon her, and she would not have it said that she was too old to travel. She had to reckon, however, with courtiers who had learnt to love their ease. 'The Lords are sorry for it,' wrote Rowland White to Sir Robert Sidney, when she determined to set out from Nonsuch in 1600, 'butt her majestie bids the old stay behind, and the young and able to goe with her. She had just cause to be offended, that at her remove to this place she was soe poorely attended; for I never saw so small a train.'[412] At all times, and particularly during the later years, the formal progresses were supplemented by short visits of a few days, or even a few hours, to favoured courtiers, sometimes by way of a 'by-progress' in spring or autumn, sometimes in the course of a remove from one standing house to another, sometimes merely to relieve a continuous residence at the same palace.[413] Several of the twelve visits to Theobalds, for which Elizabeth had evidently a liking, and which had been rebuilt to accommodate her, were by progresses. The household did not always accompany her on these occasions. Within London itself, she also occasionally paid a visit. In the last winter of her life, several entertainments were carefully arranged for her, in the hope of keeping her at Whitehall.[414] In 1601 and 1602 she went a-Maying at Highgate and Lewisham. Another day's visit, probably of 1600, is elaborately described by Sir Robert Sidney to Sir John Harington.[415]

With the arrival of James and his horde of hungry Scots, and the setting-up of supernumerary establishments for Anne and the royal children, the progress became a more unwieldy institution than ever. During the greater part of 1603 the court was abroad. The triumphal descent of the King in April and May was practically a progress. So was that of Anne in June. There was a regular progress in August and September, and the prevalence of plague compelled the prolongation of this throughout the autumn, until the weary court sank into its winter quarters at Christmas. A groan went up to Lord Shrewsbury from Robert Lord Cecil at Woodstock, which he found an 'unwholesome' and 'uneaseful' house, not able to lodge more than the King and Queen, the privy chamber ladies, and some three or four of the Scottish Council. 'Neither Chamberlain, nor one English counsellor have a room, which will be a sour sauce to some of your old friends that have been merry with you in a winter's night, from whence they have not removed to their bed in a snowy storm.' The plague was driving the court up and down. 'God bless the king, for once a week one or other dies in our tents.'[416] In the same strain wrote Levinus Muncke a little later to Winwood from Wilton of 'these arrant removes', in which 'we endure misserie apace and want of all things, which I never thought the country so unable to supply us'.[417] Nevertheless, James maintained the tradition, and devoted a month or two in each year to a progress, which, but for the occasional presence of the queen or prince, and the attendance, not quite invariable, of the council and household, did not differ much in character from his far more frequent hunting journeys. His direction was generally determined by the existence of hunting facilities, and such districts as the New Forest, Wychwood and Sherwood Forests, and Salisbury Plain figure again and again in the 'gestes'. He had reached Southampton and even the Isle of Wight in 1603, and probably repeated his visit in 1607 and 1611. He also touched the sea at Lulworth in 1615. He visited Oxford from Woodstock in 1605 and Cambridge twice during hunting journeys in 1615. Anne made an independent progress to the west, for the sake of the Bath waters, in 1613, and got as far as Bristol.

We have had sufficient peeps behind the court arras to give a pleasantly sub-acid flavour of irony to the effusive accounts of royal receptions contained in official chronicles, or in the semi-official narratives of poets who were anxious to preserve the memory of the verses and devices contributed by themselves.[418] These in their turn enable us to recapture something of whatever rapture the rather artless forms of mimesis employed may have awakened in Renaissance breasts; although of course the few devices of which details have reached us are but a tithe of those on whose fantasy and grace the dust of oblivion has for centuries lain thick. It was naturally at the visits to private houses that the spirit of sheer entertainment had fullest scope, and a glance at the diaries for Kenilworth in 1575 or for Elvetham in 1591 will show the variety of pastime which ministered spectacle to the eyes and flattery to the self-esteem of Oriana on her holidays. The visit to Kenilworth extended over three weeks. The Queen arrived on 9 July and was greeted with speeches by Sibylla, by a porter as Hercules, and by the Lady of the Lake, and that she might not forget that she was a scholar, with a Latin speech by a Poet. July 10 was a Sunday, and after divine service there was a display of fireworks. On 11 July the Queen hunted, and on her return listened to an out-of-door dialogue between a Savage Man—the mediaeval folk-personage known as the 'wodwose'—and the classical Echo. July 12 was a day of rest, and 13 July was again devoted to hunting. On 14 July came a bear-baiting, another display of fireworks, and acrobatic feats by an Italian. After two days' interval, the sports began again on 17 July, with country shows of a bride-ale, a quintain, and the Coventry Hock-Tuesday play.[419] This was followed in the evening by a play and banquet. A mask was held in readiness, but not used. On 18 July, after a hunt, came the principal show, an aquatic one of the Delivery of the Lady of the Lake, with the classical Arion riding on a dolphin; and the Queen held an investiture, and 'touched' poor folk for the 'evil'. On 19 July the Coventry show was repeated, and by this time the weather had broken up, and the royal zest for spectacles was perhaps exhausted. A projected show of Zabeta and a device of an ancient minstrel were laid aside, and the final week was uneventful, until the departure on 27 July after a show in farewell by Silvanus. All this was described, for the benefit of such of the Queen's lieges as had not the fortune to be present, in a printed narrative by George Gascoigne, who shared with William Hunnis of the Chapel Royal the main responsibility for the mimetic devices, and in another, racy and full of vivid detail, by one Robert Laneham, keeper of the council chamber door, who was in attendance as an officer of the household.[420] The entertainment at the much shorter visit to the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham in Hampshire, sixteen years later, was on very similar lines. The house was small, and a temporary 'room of estate' and other buildings had been constructed in the park, near an artificial pond, containing a Ship Isle, a Fort, and a Snail Mount. The Queen was greeted on arrival with a Latin speech by a Poet, and a ditty by the Graces and the Hours. A salute was fired from the pond. After supper there was a concert with a pavane by Thomas Morley. On the second day, after the Countess had made her offering in the morning, there was a great water-show on the pond, with Silvanus and the sea-gods Neptune, Oceanus, Nereus, and Neaera, which served to introduce further gifts. On the third day Elizabeth was awakened with a pastoral song of Phyllida and Corydon. After dinner there was an exhibition game of 'board and cord', which must have been a very close anticipation of lawn-tennis, and in the evening a banquet in the garden and a display of fireworks. On the fourth morning came Aureola, the fairy queen, with a round of dancing fairies, and as the Queen departed there were Nereus and Sylvanus and their companies at the pond, the Hours and Graces weeping, a speech from the Poet dressed in black, and a farewell ditty at the park gate.[421] I have set the Kenilworth and Elvetham entertainments side by side, partly to illustrate the permanence of type, and partly because, if any actual sea-maid and fireworks gave Shakespeare a hint for Oberon's famous speech in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, it must surely have been those which were comparatively fresh in the memories of his hearers.[422]

The medley of Kenilworth and Elvetham repeats itself elsewhere; nor is the imaginative range a very wide one. Classical, romantic, pastoral, and folk-lore elements blend in quite sufficient congruity. The pagan divinities called upon are the out-of-door ones, Pan and Ceres at Bisham, Apollo and Daphne at Sudeley; and these, with the Nymphs (Orpington, Cowdray, Harefield) and Satyrs (Harefield, Althorp), may make easy acknowledgement of fundamental kinship with Aureola or Queen Mab and the native fairies (Woodstock, Norwich, Hengrave, Althorp) and woodwoses (Cowdray, Bisham). So, too, the rustic revelry of morris or country dance (Warwick, Cowdray, Althorp, Wells) or the choosing of the Cotswold Queen (Sudeley) passes readily enough into the manner of the formal pastoral, as we find it in Sidney's Lady of the May (Wanstead) or his sister's later dialogue of Thenot and Piers; which in turn have their affinities to the mediaeval débat, surviving in the dialogue of Constancy and Inconstancy (Woodstock), and in the 'contentions' of Sir John Davies between a Gentleman Usher and a Poet, and a Maid, a Wife, and a Widow.[423] To a modern taste, perhaps the most attractive entertainments are the simple ones in which the Gardener and the Mole-catcher or the Bailiff and the Dairymaid offer the naïve welcome of the rustic folk, or those to which the circumstances of place and time give something of a personal touch; as at Theobalds, where the hermit's cell typifies the temporary retirement of Burghley from public life, or at Rycote, where messengers bring in letters and jewels from sons and daughters of the house in Ireland, Flanders, France, and Jersey. Only fragments are preserved of the Harefield entertainment in 1602, but here a delicate fancy must have governed the devices, suggesting, for example, the presentation of a robe of rainbows on behalf of St. Swithin, and the personification of Harefield itself as Place 'in a partie-colored robe, like the brick house', accompanied by Time 'with yeollow haire, and in a green roabe, with an hower glasse, stopped, not runninge'. Here, too, was repeated the pretty notion of Elvetham, and at the royal departure there was Place again 'attyred in black mourning aparell', to bid farewell. In many instances the mimesis is so contrived as to lead to the introduction of the gift, which we may gather from the Hicks correspondence to have been looked upon as an obligatory rite of hospitality. The frugal and ostentatious soul of Elizabeth loved gifts; but James is said, at any rate on his first coming, to have thought it the more kingly part to decline them.[424] The mimetic entertainment itself, indeed, seems to have lost something of its vogue with the change of reign; possibly the King was less tolerant than his predecessor of pedantries other than his own. There are, of course, the three Sibyls at Oxford in 1605, which are said to have given a hint for Macbeth, and the amazing Queen of Sheba show in 1606, which has been preserved for us by the wicked wit of Sir John Harington.[425] And there are three examples from the pen of Ben Jonson, to whose ingenuity and learning the genre made a natural appeal, and who had the art to give dramatic life and point even to such trifles. These are the Satyr, with which Lord Spencer welcomed Anne and Henry at Althorp in 1603, the Penates, written when James, like Elizabeth before him, went a-Maying with Sir William Cornwallis at Highgate in 1604, and the graceful Theobalds entertainment, in which the Genius of the house, first weeping for the loss of his master, and then consoled by Mercury, Good Event, and the Parcae, made symbolical delivery of it to the Queen on its exchange by Lord Salisbury with James for Hatfield in 1607.