of Lord Northampton in a Star Chamber case of 1606 that 'the kinge by his prerogative may take vp any howse in his progres'.[1]
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.[2] 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.'[3] 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'.[4] 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.[5] 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
- ↑ Wright, i. 370; Hawarde, 311.
- ↑ Nichols, i. 601, prints from Lansd. MS. 16, 'The Q. Prayer after a Progress, Aug. 15 [1574] being then at Bristow'. It contains a thanksgiving for 'preseruinge me in this longe and dangerus jorneye'.
- ↑ Kelly, Progresses, 301, from Harl. MS. 6996. The letter is undated, but as the court was going to Kenilworth, it may belong to 1575.
- ↑ Wright, ii. 16.
- ↑ 'I am old, and come now evil away with the inconveniences of progress. I followed her Majesty until my man returned and told me he could get neither fit lodging for me nor room for my horse,' writes Sir Henry Lee in 1591 (Hatfield MSS. iv. 136).
