Dover, situated among cliffs (standing where the port itself was originally, as may be gathered from anchors and parts of vessels dug up there), is more famous for the convenience of its port, which indeed is now much decayed, and its passage to France, than for either its elegance or populousness: this passage, the most used and the shortest, is of thirty miles, which, with a favourable wind, may be run over in five or six hours’ time, as we ourselves experienced; some reckon it only eighteen to Calais, and to Boulogne sixteen English miles, which, as Ortelius says in his “Theatrum,” are longer than the Italian.
Here was a church dedicated to St. Martin by Victred, King of Kent, and a house belonging to the Knights Templars; of either there are now no remains. It is the seat of a suffragan to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, when the Archbishop is employed upon business of more consequence, manages the ordinary affairs, but does not interfere with the archiepiscopal jurisdiction. Upon a hill, or rather rock, which on its right side is almost everywhere a precipice, a very extensive castle rises to a surprising height, in size like a little city, extremely well fortified, and thick-set with towers, and seems to threaten the sea beneath. Matthew Paris calls it the door and key of England; the ordinary people have taken into their heads that it was built by Julius Cæsar; it is likely it might by the Romans, from those British bricks in the chapel which they made use of in their foundations. See Camden’s “Britannia.”
After we had dined, we took leave of England.
FRAGMENTA REGALIA;
Or, Observations on the late Queen Elizabeth, her Times, and Favourites. Written by Sir Robert Naunton, Master of the Court of Wards. A.D. 1641.
To take her in the original, she was the daughter of King Henry VIII. by Anne Boleyn, the second of six wives which he had, and one of the maids of honour to the divorced Queen, Katharine of Austria (or, as the now styled, Infanta of Spain), and from thence taken to the royal bed.
That she was of a most noble and royal extract by her father will not fall into question, for on that side was disembogued into her veins, by a confluency of blood, the very abstract of all the greatest houses in Christendom: and remarkable it is, considering that violent desertion of the Royal House of the Britons by the intrusion of the Saxons, and afterwards by the conquest of the Normans, that, through vicissitude of times, and after a discontinuance almost of a thousand years, the sceptre should fall again and be brought back into the old regal line and true current of the British blood, in the person of her renowned grandfather, King Henry VII., together with whatsoever the German, Norman, Burgundian, Castilian, and French achievements, with their intermarriages, which eight hundred years had acquired, could add of glory thereunto.
By her mother she was of no sovereign descent, yet noble and very ancient in the family of Boleyn; though some erroneously brand them with a citizen’s rise or original, which was yet but of a second brother, who (as it was divine in the greatness and lustre to come to his house) was sent into the city to acquire wealth, ad ædificandam antiquam domum, unto whose achievements (for he was Lord Mayor of London) fell in, as it is averred, both the blood and inheritance of the eldest brother for want of issue males, by which accumulation the house within few descents mounted, in culmen honoris, and was suddenly dilated in the best families of England and Ireland: as Howard, Ormond, Sackville, and others.
Having thus touched, and now leaving her stirp, I come to her person, and how she came to the crown by the decease of her brother and sister.
Under Edward VI. she was his, and one of the darlings of Fortune, for, besides the consideration of blood, there was between these two princes a concurrency and sympathy of their natures and affections, together with the celestial bond (confirmative religion), which made them one; for the King never called her by any other appellation but his sweetest and dearest sister, and was scarce his own man, she being absent; which was not so between him and the Lady Mary.