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Royal Journeys in Early
Modern Europe
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003284154
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
Royal Itineraries
Index
Figures
DOI: 10.4324/9781003284154-1
In the early summer of 1522, 500 years before this book was
completed, King Henry VIII and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
undertook a spectacular joint tour around the south of England. The
sight of early modern royalty leaving their palaces and travelling with
an extensive entourage through the countryside or approaching a
city would doubtless have been astonishing to behold and a
memorable experience for those who witnessed it in person. Such
royal journeys were captured in various contemporary drawings and
paintings, as well as in the dramatic accounts of observers, who
often describe events in elaborate and picturesque detail. Perhaps,
the most well-known artistic impression is that commemorating the
diplomatic meeting of the kings of England and France at the Field
of Cloth of Gold outside Calais in June 1520, a dual royal progress on
the grandest scale (see frontispiece).
The movement of the court according to season and circumstance
remained a fundamental feature of the Renaissance monarchies of
England, France and the Habsburg territories, articulating a common
diplomatic language of pageantry, religious ritual and the exchange
of gifts. But if the display and panache can look strikingly similar, the
purpose of royal journeys and progresses differed markedly between
the princely states of Europe. The government of sixteenth-century
England was increasingly focused on London and Westminster, with
a corresponding reduction in the range of royal tours by comparison
with those undertaken by later medieval kings; Henry VIII travelled
to York just once, Elizabeth I not at all, and neither contemplated
visiting Cornwall or Cheshire or Ireland, as their forebears had done.
The rulers of France and the Holy Roman Empire, by contrast, were
more fundamentally peripatetic. As Etienne Faisant points out in his
contribution to this volume, the English concept of a summer
‘progress’ is effectively untranslatable into French, even if the pursuit
of hunting was essential to both Francis I and Henry VIII. Such
distinctions of meaning made encounters like those of 1520 and
1522, when European monarchs travelled to meet each other or
toured in tandem, all the more significant as moments of political
and cultural exchange.
This book examines how early modern royal journeys and
progresses were perceived and defined, the purposes for which they
were undertaken and aspects of their logistical and material history.
Chapters are grouped into sections addressing royal itineraries in
England and France, the administrative and spatial dimensions of
progresses, questions of spectacle and symbolism and the political
culture of royal journeys in terms of theatricalisation memory and
the performance of justice. Recurring themes throughout the book
include the importance of gender as a category of analysis (the
exercise of queenship on progress, the masculinity implicit in the
royal hunt); elements of unpredictability and royal agency; the
challenges of reading source materials (financial accounts,
architecture, descriptions of ceremony and etiquette) to recover
what actually took place on royal journeys; and how historians of
different specialisms can establish a common set of approaches to a
diverse topic spanning multiple territories and cultures. While
defining a royal journey may seem like semantics, there were
perceptual and logistical differences (so John Cooper and Keely
Hayes-Davies argue) between what English contemporaries regarded
as a ‘removing’ and a ‘progress’, which go some way towards
explaining how the scope and intention of royal journeys were
changing during the first half of the sixteenth century. Aside from
the geographical extent of a progress, some difference is also
discernible (Maria Hayward observes) in what Henry VIII chose to
wear – a distinction which would have been immediately evident to
those involved but has been less noticed by historians. The precise
nature of a removing or progress determined how much baggage,
and what particular possessions, the king took with him. For
instance, the practice of royal piety continued on progress but took a
different form as the king’s riding chapel separated from the main
body of the chapel royal and temporarily took in local singers to
sustain the liturgy surrounding the monarch – a practice that
continues in Britain to this day.
Of what benefit were progresses to the monarch and the
monarchy? As the chapters collected here demonstrate, there could
be a spectrum of reasons for embarking on a royal journey, but they
normally comprised a mixture of business and pleasure and were
linked to particular seasons in the year. Sport and other leisure
pastimes (especially hunting) figured largely on the agenda, notably
for Henry VIII and Francis I but also for the Stuart kings. However,
royal journeys were undertaken for distinct ends in themselves,
whether for military purposes or as part of a diplomatic mission (to
prevent war), on pilgrimage to religious shrines, in light of
impending nuptials or to nip potential rebellion in the bud. They
could also offer a means of escape: from the stench of London or
unsavoury politics, even (in the case of marriage journeys) to start a
new life. While the royal party’s location and schedule were often
proclaimed in advance, the duration and venues on the king’s
itinerary were nevertheless subject to the mood and whims of the
royal person, be it a preference for following the deer, a decision to
meet a particular host or a sudden change of plan to avoid the
plague.
Royal journeys were extremely complex enterprises involving
hundreds, sometimes thousands of people. Organisation was thus
key to their implementation, requiring close communication between
the court and the localities on the venues to be visited, purveyance
of supplies, accommodation arrangements and performed activities
(whether hunting parties, liturgies, plays and tournaments or
dispensing royal justice). The logistics of ensuring that the monarch
got from A to B, safely and with everything that he and his
entourage needed, was dependent upon careful arrangements made
by officials to prepare for the king’s arrival (harbingers in England,
fourriers in France) and physically to transport the personnel of the
royal household, their servants and a vast accumulation of baggage.
As Sebastian Edwards demonstrates, to maintain levels of splendour
the king needed either to buy or to bring along many of his own
necessaries rather than rely wholly on his hosts, even when staying
with members of the nobility. The role of the royal Wardrobes is
remarkable in this respect, in the carriage and protection of precious
items as also in the repair and replacement of commonplace and
more valuable objects, from various grades of royal bed and ornate
tapestries to carved desks and delicate musical instruments.
Accounts of royal journeys, both contemporary and modern,
naturally tend to emphasise the power and the glory. For the royal
party itself, however, travel could be wearisome and dangerous, with
risk of disease or inclement weather – especially if voyaging by sea.
For brides in particular, the trials of the journey could be offset by
the opportunity to study and acclimatise to new roles, languages and
customs. As Valerie Schutte demonstrates, Anne of Cleves used her
protracted progress towards England to acquire knowledge of
English speech and card games enjoyed by her intended husband
Henry VIII and to learn a little of English politics. The logistics of a
royal progress themselves could have gendered aspects. On a bridal
journey, as James Taffe notes, a princess would be accompanied by
a whole court of women. She may nevertheless have lacked choice
or discretion as to who it was that accompanied her, it being a
matter for her parents or royal officials. This leads to important
questions, only some of which can currently be answered, about the
presence and role of women on progress: among the royal
entourage when queen consort Katherine of Aragon undertook a
religious pilgrimage, for instance, or attending Mary I when she
travelled to wed Philip of Spain at Winchester.
What made royal journeys special or exciting to observe and
experience? Progresses and royal tours were performances and at
times were actively choreographed, especially during formal entries
into cities. Their visual impact was increased by the procession of
household officers on horseback, accompanied by the royal baggage
carts (in Henry VIII’s case painted with a gilded livery of royal
shields, Garter, imperial crowns and supporters), wending their way
through the countryside and led by heraldic banners of St George.
The theatricality of a progress was further enhanced by the clothing
worn by participants, including brightly coloured liveries (usually
scarlet, for those meeting the king and queen) and chains of office.
Both king’s and queen’s costumes were carefully coordinated and
intended to show off their masculinity and femininity respectively,
while changes of clothes were similarly stage-managed. As Taffe
indicates, the attention to detail and extravagance in dressing the
queen and her ladies for a diplomatic encounter provided a
gendered form of competition, contrasting with the masculine
physical competition of wrestling and jousting. Clothing could also
form the substance of a wedding gift; as Patrik Pastrnak points out,
some continental brides controlled their prospective husband’s
appearance by sending him a series of different robes or forms of
attire each day as a prelude to their nuptials.
Performance equally involved cultural display that was integral to a
Renaissance ruler’s self-fashioning. In addition to the sight of gold
gowns (as worn, for example, on a journey by Princess Mary, Henry
VIII’s sister), audiences at progress events witnessed a public
spectacle of opulence in the form of the king’s jewels and plate. As
Timothy Schroder explains, it was not just at banquets that such
treasures were revealed: chapel services and tournaments equally
provided stages for these arrays of gold and silver plate.
Considerable human ingenuity and labour was required to create
such magnificent displays. Portable palaces and tents erected as
temporary accommodation for the court provided sleeping quarters
for the household, but some also functioned as receiving areas for
the king. As Glenn Richardson contends, the wooden palace at
Guînes, with its monumental gateway and huge scallop-shell
pediment flanked by English roses, though purely a temporary
structure (later dismantled, stored and repurposed), was in itself an
exhibition of English bravura in the style and talent of the
workmanship on show. It was testimony, on the one hand, to its
own magnificence (analogous to the Crystal Palace of 1851) but also
in a broader vein a reflection of Henry VIII’s personal prestige and
the glory of England.
A performance requires an audience. It is important to consider to
what extent responses to royal journeys were also crafted, and what
the impact would have been on ordinary people who participated in
or simply observed the occasion. Many local people watched or took
part in civic entries. The journeys of royal brides and grooms
deliberately incorporated a number of staging points, so that
festivities could take place at various towns along the way. This
enabled public celebration of the dynastic union but also (by
including ordinary people in festivities) the engendering of goodwill
for the future. Civic entries also enabled the local elite or nobility to
position themselves within social hierarchies and to promote their
communal and individual causes with the crown. Royal journeys
were equally an auditory experience, a soundscape that included the
pealing of church bells and musicians playing as well as cheering
crowds. The procession of Anne of Cleves, for example, was
announced by the sound of trumpets and the firing of cannon.
Royal journeys were above all displays of kingship and queenship,
intended to enhance public perceptions of the monarch and to
project an image of power beyond the principal palaces such as
Hampton Court and Fontainebleau. It follows that a progress was
not simply about being seen; it was also about engaging with nobles
and courtiers in their home regions, as well as the civic and
ecclesiastical authorities who hosted or met with the royal party. In
this respect, both hunting and feasting were significant ways of
bringing people together, combining pleasure with business (‘soft
power’), elements of competition and physical prowess mixed in with
conversation and communal dining. As part of ‘functioning’
queenship both English and French consorts had formal roles on
state occasions but also provided informal support by their presence
at tournaments and hunting parties. As Taffe argues, the drinking
and carousing by their gentlewomen attendants at the 1520 joust
was very much part of the diplomatic endeavour.
If progresses were an opportunity to dispense and display good
kingship, courting regional elites and making monarchy temporarily
visible to the population outside the royal capital, one of the
significant implications of being on tour was that it brought
sovereign and people together face to face. This was not only true
through the hosting of the monarch by subjects in their own houses,
but also (as Laura Flannigan reveals) an opportunity for litigants
following the royal train to seek redress of grievances by presenting
a petition directly to the king. The public-facing and performative
nature of progresses, and the hosting of the sovereign by subjects
outside the domain of one of his own houses, raised issues not only
about security but to what extent conventional royal etiquette was
adapted, compromised or even subverted while on progress. The
daily rituals and ceremony normally surrounding monarchs could not
be maintained in the same degree and were often curtailed or
diminished. As Cooper and Hayes-Davies indicate, there were
deliberate attempts to provide a degree of privacy by mimicking the
separate king’s and queen’s royal apartments at the new wing of
Acton Court and elsewhere when Henry VIII was on tour. However,
as Richardson remarks, a ruler’s very presence beyond the confines
of a royal palace meant they were more accessible to their subjects;
to the nobles they visited or hunted with; and to the people more
generally with whom they could interact, notably through the
medium of gift-giving.
Royal progresses could be enlivened by unscripted moments. In
breach of protocol, the monarch occasionally deliberately evaded
foreign ambassadors, his own officials and the public gaze. Henry
VIII may have visited Bristol incognito in 1535, when plague
disrupted plans for more conventional celebrations; four years later
he went in disguise to view his new bride Anne of Cleves.
Undercover assignations, unscripted visits and concealed identities
were, as Lesley Mickel argues, a feature of the game of one-
upmanship enacted in private by Henry VIII and Francis I at the
Field of Cloth of Gold in June 1520, complementing the more public
diplomatic stance adopted by the two kings. Francis’s impromptu
visit, which found Henry VIII in a state of undress, was mirrored 18
years later when Francis came aboard Charles V’s moored galley
while he was taking a siesta. These reveal a hidden side to the
monarch’s travels: not only boldness in the breaking of protocol but
also unexpected intimacy and forcible gift-giving to achieve a
breakthrough in relations that ordinary diplomacy would not permit.
What did royal progresses achieve? This is a difficult question to
answer and, as Richardson points out, depends upon whether you
are looking at the short-or longer term. The ephemerality of such
ostentatious displays is symbolically brought home by the weather
wreaking havoc on French tents at the close of the Field of Cloth of
Gold. In addition to the social, political and diplomatic goals they
might have met, there were cultural achievements in the form of
paintings, textile and metalwork craftsmanship, literature, poetry and
music produced for progresses. That Henry VIII himself felt the need
to justify or validate his achievements on progress is, as Brett
Dolman argues, borne out by the spectacle of military and diplomatic
journeys commemorated in so-called history paintings, which formed
murals and decorations in the royal palaces. This self-conscious
chronicling in art was envisaged not just in the form of the Guînes
paintings (as they have come down to us) but on a more
extravagant scale, involving large teams of painters and commissions
from Netherlandish and Italian artists in particular.
Beyond their logistics and aesthetics, royal journeys had
ramifications for a nation’s economy and infrastructure as well as a
significant impact on the landscape and built environment. The
socioeconomic effect of this influx benefitted the regions by bringing
ordinary and high-status consumers and much-needed employment
to an area, albeit on a temporary basis. As Hayward points out, royal
servants could be sent out shopping while on progress, and quality
materials (such as silks and lace) were sometimes purchased to
supplement the royal wardrobe. Innkeepers and shopkeepers but
also those who provided services, from farriers and water boatmen
to laundresses and musicians, could profit from the presence of the
royal court. Enterprising merchants and traders (to say nothing of
pickpockets and conmen) may also have followed the household
train in the hope of taking advantage of the throng of people.
Repairs to royal residences, or the remodelling of aristocratic houses,
in advance of the court’s visit assisted stone masons, carpenters,
painters, glaziers and others involved in the crafts necessary to
adorn a country house. There was a knock-on effect on the national
highway system and waterways as arterial routes were improved, as
well as some amenity to towns visited where the civic authorities
ordered roads to be mended and houses painted. The royal visit to
York, in 1541, was particularly noteworthy in this respect. The influx
may have been good for some economically while the royal party
was there, but the sheer numbers may also have strained suppliers
of food, ale and other commodities. When the king altered his route
at the last minute, a community may have regretted the investment
made in advance of a royal visit. What the underclass of a town, the
homeless and poverty-stricken swept from the streets lest they
create trouble or a bad impression, thought of a royal visit can only
be guessed.
The monarch’s own building plans in advance of a progress and
subsequently had an enormous impact on the landscape. In
England, this was linked particularly to the insatiable appetite of
Henry VIII for new properties, but the preferences of later monarchs
who favoured new residences (or abandoned old ones, on grounds
of economy or taste) also need to be taken into consideration. The
extraordinary expansion in the number of royal houses during
Henry’s reign was partly down to the crown’s acquisition of forfeited
aristocratic estates but even more significantly a consequence of the
reallocation of land and franchisal rights resulting from the
dissolution of the monasteries. As Maurice Howard demonstrates,
while no former monastery became a ‘standing’ palace, nor was
anything long-term in their use necessarily envisaged, the king’s
architects and builders created temporary timber lodgings at
monastic sites and reconfigured former ecclesiastical buildings to
provide domestic living quarters that were comfortable and secure.
Both Howard’s and Thurley’s contributions prompt us to think
about the different purposes and logistics of royal palaces within a
monarch’s domain. The decline of castles as residences and the
removal of the monasteries as convenient accommodation affected
the route of a royal progress but so too did their expense and
inconvenience. It appears that the choice of venue was exceedingly
personal, in France as well as in England. While there might be some
logistical reasons for using a certain residence (such as its
convenient geography), the king’s decision could also verge on the
capricious. A greater willingness to visit the houses of courtiers, as
demonstrated by Henry VIII and taken further by his daughter
Elizabeth I, represented a simultaneous need to shift the burden of
expense away from the royal purse while making a visit appear a
positive thing.
Collectively, the chapters in this volume demonstrate how the
visibility of a ruler was paramount to personal monarchy, how royal
journeys affected the socioeconomic environment and interaction
with regional communities and how government and royal display
functioned on tour. The evidence and arguments presented here
underline the value of royal progresses and civic entries as offering a
window on state and society in early modern Europe, providing an
opportunity to consider not only what has been lost in terms of
cultural heritage but also what might have been if historical accident
had not intervened. As Thurley laments, Charles II’s death occurred
before a magnificent palace in Winchester could be constructed by
Christopher Wren while the great fire that destroyed Whitehall
Palace shifted the balance of royal accommodation in the English
capital.
Sharing the findings of research by scholars from both the
academic and professional curatorial worlds, this book also raises
important questions that have yet to be answered and highlight the
need for further investigation. Future work will need to continue the
careful examination of archival and printed sources that underpins
the chapters presented here, but also to embrace digital
technologies and explore what the close study of architecture,
archaeology and material culture can tell us about royal journeys.
Considering Tudor and Stuart royal progresses, there is a need to
evaluate which venues were reclaimed by the crown and courtiers
after the dissolution of the monasteries, how the architectural works
carried out mirrored what the king was doing elsewhere and the
extent to which these buildings with their extensive lands became
more accessible to communities. In a broader European context, this
book moreover pinpoints the need for greater understanding of the
political and performative roles played by queen’s consort and other
members of the royal family on progress, to evaluate contrasting
approaches to royal publicity and privacy during royal journeys and
to connect these and other questions to the political cultures of rival
Renaissance monarchies. Above all, this book emphasises the value
of a comparative approach within (and potentially beyond) early
modern European states and between the disciplinary studies of
history, ritual and performance, art and architecture and
archaeology.
Royal Itineraries
1 The Court on the Move
Problems and Perspectives
Simon Thurley
DOI: 10.4324/9781003284154-3
Three times he had been at Windsor with his cart to carry away,
upon summons of a remove, some part of the stuff of her
majesty’s wardrobe; and when he had repaired there once,
twice and the third time, [and heard] that the remove held not,
clapping his hand to his thigh said these words ‘Now I see’ said
the carter, ‘that the queen is a woman as well as my wife’.
Which words being overheard by her majesty, who then stood
at a window, she said, ‘what villain is this’ and so sent him three
angels [gold coins] to stop his mouth.1
Over the last twenty years or so, historians have become acutely
aware of the value of studying the royal itinerary – again and again
it has proved to be a key tool in first understanding and then
explaining events. Scholars working on the Tudor and Stuart period
have come to realise that you can’t get anywhere without knowing
where the court was, who was with it and why they were there. This
applies to both the winter itinerant court and the court on formal
summer progress.
There are still gaps in our knowledge, and none of the Tudor or
Stuart royal itineraries have yet been published. There are two
scholarly itineraries of Henry VII’s reign, a quite old one for Henry
VIII’s and several incomplete but serviceable ones for Elizabeth. We
have Emily Cole’s superb scholarly itinerary for King James and the
present writer has compiled itineraries, mainly from published
sources, for Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Anna Keay has produced
a scholarly itinerary for Charles II, and for William and Mary there is
one from the newspapers. This is enough to give a general picture of
the movements of the court, but other than for Henry VII and James
I it is normally necessary to go to The National Archives to confirm
the precise movements of the court.2
This chapter takes a view of the court on the move over the
course of the Tudor and Stuart period from 1485 to 1703. The
purpose is twofold: first to catalogue the geographical and
architectural shifts of the monarchy, the skeleton of the royal
itinerary; and second, to draw out some of the themes that are
raised by a summary of a hundred years of royal movements
suggesting avenues of future research.
Apart from a couple of hours spent at Westminster Palace as a
teenager in 1470, when he became king Henry VII had never been
in an English royal palace, let alone lived in one. His schooling in the
ways of the English monarchy was at the hands of his wife and
mother, veterans of the court and palaces. His court, like that of his
predecessors, was peripatetic and in the fifteen years up to 1500,
Henry probably moved location around a thousand times. His most
favoured place was Westminster, easily, and his average length of
stay there was longer than anywhere else. Although there were lots
of short stays in the winter, he could be in residence for a month
before he had to move on to allow the palace to be cleaned. Then
came Sheen, where he would stay on average for around ten days,
rarely for longer. Third was Greenwich, and fourth was Windsor.
These residences formed the spine of his existence.
Outside London, Henry VII owned perhaps as many as eighteen
other residences. The largest and most splendid, like Woodstock and
Kenilworth, would be visited regularly; perhaps ten times in fifteen
years, staying for a total of 100–120 nights in each. Other royal
houses like Nottingham or Pontefract might only be visited a handful
of times for a few nights. Most of the summer progress was made
up of visits to the houses of courtiers, bishops and abbots.3
This pattern of royal movements hardly changed in the early years
of Henry VIII despite the acquisition of a small number of new
houses, such as New Hall in Essex. Henry’s itinerary, like his father’s,
was initially reliant on houses owned by bishops and abbots. After
1530, it was radically redrawn because of the acquisition of Wolsey’s
former houses, especially York Place and Hampton Court, but also,
gradually, of most of the monastic houses that he had used before
the dissolution. This meant that while, before 1530, around 65 per
cent of the moves Henry VIII made were to houses he owned, after
1530, the figure was 91 per cent.4
The annual round of Elizabeth’s life was not materially different
from her father’s. During the winter months the court was itinerant,
oscillating between the standing houses in the Thames valley,
although unlike her father she mainly travelled by coach between
them. Whitehall was her most popular residence followed, in order,
by Greenwich, Richmond and Hampton Court. If the queen was
staying at these, she would choose to reside either in the west or
the east; rarely would she travel from Hampton Court or Richmond
directly to Greenwich or vice versa. Visits to Hampton Court, which
were mainly autumnal, would often be combined with trips to
Windsor or Oatlands.
On twenty-three summers the queen made a progress. These, like
her father’s, typically started in July and ended in late September
lasting around fifty days. Her travels took her as far west as Bristol,
east to Norwich, and as far north as Staffordshire. Yet most of her
time was spent in the south, and in half of her progresses she barely
moved out of a fifty-mile radius of London.
Much of this was also the case with Henry VIII, but the key
difference was that after 1530, Henry, on progress, stayed in his
own houses most of the time; in contrast, Elizabeth preferred to stay
with her courtiers – around 80 per cent of nights on progress she
was somebody’s guest. So, for example, in 1561, the royal progress
into Essex, Suffolk and Hertfordshire lasted sixty-eight days, during
which Elizabeth visited eighteen private houses and two towns but
stayed only at four royal houses. Although there was a hard core of
Privy Councillors with whom she stayed regularly, in all some 420 of
her subjects hosted their monarch for a night or more over the
reign.5
Figure 1.1 Map showing Henry VIII’s progress of 1526, starting at
Windsor and proceeding through Surrey, Sussex,
Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and
Bedfordshire, in all a journey of over 300 miles.
In 1603, Sir Robert Cecil, with Henry Howard and his nephew
Thomas, Lord Howard hoped that they could simply substitute one
monarch for another and everything would carry on under James VI
of Scotland more or less as before. But James was thirty-seven, and
had been a king all his life. It was far too late to change the way he
was. James was a profoundly different sort of monarch to his
predecessor. The magisterial dignity of Elizabeth, built on an
obsessively cultivated mystique and expressed in magnificent
surroundings and pervasive panegyric, had no attraction for James.
His style was homely, informal, anti-urban and private, a way of life
developed in his long years in Scotland.
Figure 1.2 Map showing Queen Elizabeth I’s progress of 1575, one of
her most ambitious summer progresses lasting some 139
days with 44 overnight locations.
This had a huge impact on the king’s houses, his itinerary and way
of life. He didn’t like Kent, where he thought the hunting poor, and
the former Tudor houses at Dartford, Canterbury and Charing were
given away. The large house at Woking was also granted away,
presumably as he already had several big houses in Surrey. His most
acquisitive period were the four years between 1605 and 1609,
when he bought houses in Newmarket and Royston, the mansions of
Theobalds, and Holdenby, and a house in Thetford.
In 1605, in a letter specifying the requirements for a new hunting
lodge at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, James I drew a distinction
between palaces of necessity, where he was accompanied by only
those who were necessary for his immediate needs, and palaces of
state where the full court would attend. This distinction between
state and necessity existed informally under Henry VIII, who would
visit smaller houses for hunting and pleasure with his riding
household. Such an arrangement did not appeal to Elizabeth, but
James I revived it both architecturally and institutionally. The new
houses at Royston, Newmarket and Thetford were houses of
necessity while Whitehall, Hampton Court and Theobalds were
houses of state for pomp and gravity. Royston and Newmarket were
a new kind of royal residence. Here James would stay for long
periods transacting state affairs as necessary, but there was no state
ceremonial; they revolved round the informality of royal life.6
While James loathed London, Charles I found it magnetic.
Whitehall was by far and away his most favoured, and frequently
visited, residence. In contrast to his father, Charles would move to
Whitehall whenever he had the opportunity and the winter court
season was extended at both ends to become a four- or (in the
1630s) five-month continuous residence. Like his father, during the
summer months, he was there only for business, but then most of
the aristocracy and the whole of fashionable society were in the
country.
Charles made a summer progress every year of his reign up to
1640. Since 1603, of course, the pattern of Stuart itinerance was
Britain and not just England. Yet his itinerary was more restricted
and conservative than James I’s, visiting a relatively small number of
places on multiple occasions and these mostly close to London. It
was again hunting that drove his summer’s activities and took him to
both his own parks and those of his courtiers.
The logistics of the Caroline progresses were no less formidable
than those of the Tudors: the king travelled with some 400 carts,
guarded by 100 yeomen of the guard and accompanied by more
than 1,000 household officers from kitchen scullions to the noblest
aristocrats. On an average two-month progress there would be ten
to fifteen moves, and on the two extended progresses to Scotland in
1633 and 1639, there were three times that many.7
Protector Cromwell was entirely London-focussed and all the
provincial palaces and hunting grounds were disposed of. Apart from
Hampton Court and Whitehall, only Windsor Castle was in an even
vaguely usable state in 1660. But in the first five years of the
Restoration, this did not matter as Charles II barely left Whitehall. In
fact, his was the longest more-or-less continuous stay at Whitehall of
any monarch ever.
What changed things was the plague. In June 1665, there was a
general remove to Hampton Court and, from then on until February
1666, the court was on the hoof, strategically relocating to avoid
infection. The seven months that Charles spent on the road
highlighted the fact that, other than Hampton Court and Windsor,
the crown no longer had any habitable domestic residences outside
London. The following spring, determined to rectify this, Charles
made a trip eastward to Saffron Walden and purchased Audley End,
a house that had been designed from the first to host royalty, with
matching king’s and queen’s sides round an inner court.
Like many a spur-of-the-moment purchase, Audley End did not live
up to reality. The court visited a handful of times but not at all
towards the end of the reign. In the end, like his grandfather, he
bought a site in nearby Newmarket on which he built a new house.
Unlike its predecessor, that had deliberately been a house of
necessity, Charles’s new house had much greater architectural
presence and even some modest grandeur.8
The second factor that forced Charles II to redraw the royal
itinerary was the exclusion crisis. In 1673, after the passing of the
Test Act and the acknowledgement of the Duke of York’s Catholic
conversion, Charles decided to move the court out of London, which
was racked with political tension and unrest. They went to Windsor
where the king resolved to make the castle his usual summer
residence, commissioning Hugh May to undertake a thoroughgoing
modernisation. Completed for the summer of 1678, the new Windsor
was a residence entirely devoted to pleasure – when the council
met, it did so at Hampton Court, as there was no council chamber at
Windsor.
Although the medieval curtain walls of Windsor kept the court
secure from the disorder of London, rocked by the Popish Plot, it
could not replace Whitehall. The political turmoil of the three
exclusion parliaments, culminating in its meeting in Oxford,
convinced Charles to move the court even further from the capital
and it settled, in 1682, in Winchester. There he ordered Sir
Christopher Wren to build a vast new residence: not just a hunting
lodge but a fully equipped royal palace. It was the first entirely new
palace built since the time of Henry VIII, and it encapsulated all the
refinements in palace planning that had taken place over the past
150 years. The king’s death and James II’s disinclination to finish the
palace robbed history of the opportunity to understand how it would
have changed the royal itinerary and possibly remapped the political
geography of England. Winchester was potentially an alternative
capital, with the new palace invested with the history and
infrastructure necessary for rule.9
James II was entirely focussed on Whitehall as the base for his
crusade to bring about the re-conversion of England to Roman
Catholicism. But his daughter Mary, and her Dutch husband William,
came to the throne, like James I, with firmly developed personal
tastes and preferences. Arriving in London, William disliked Whitehall
and was eager get out to the countryside as quickly as possible.
Orders were given for the court to remove from Whitehall to
Hampton Court.
The decision was met with horror. Keeping the court out of London
was bad for the city’s economy and dreadful for the sanity of his
ministers, all of whom lived in or near Westminster. So, the king was
persuaded to look for somewhere closer to Whitehall and quickly
settled on the second earl of Nottingham’s house in Kensington. Just
a month after the coronation of William and Mary, the Office of
Works was busy rebuilding two royal houses for the joint monarchs.
It was in this way that King William, within a matter of months of
his accession, again redrew the pattern of royal habitation. Whitehall
was now to be principally the centre of the national bureaucracy
while Kensington was to be William and Mary’s normal town
residence and Hampton Court the palace of state. This arrangement
replicated their pattern of existence in the Dutch Republic and was
also much more like that of James I than that of Elizabeth I or
Charles II.10 The new pattern, like James I’s, might have been a
temporary recasting of royal movements if it had not been for the
fact that in 1698, a massive fire destroyed the state apartments at
Whitehall, leaving the central offices of state camping in the former
recreation complex in St James’s Park.
The loss of Whitehall as the architectural and geographical nexus
between monarch, court and ministers must have been felt by
Queen Anne, who had seen first-hand how Charles II had bound the
sinews of state together in the chambers and galleries of the great
palace. But there was no way that she could afford to rebuild it.
Anne used Hampton Court and Windsor as her country retreats, and
in London she preferred the newer and more private metropolitan
palace at Kensington to the official seat of power at St James’s. In
short, St James’s and Hampton Court were for business, Kensington
and Windsor for pleasure.11
Just over a century of court life in England saw a variety of
personal preferences and a range of pragmatic solutions to practical
and political problems, each of which affected the royal itinerary. The
summary presented here is one-dimensional because, apart from the
reign of Elizabeth, there were the complementary and overlapping
itineraries of members of the royal family who had their own houses
and estates. The changes in preference and in geography were as
significant for them as for the sovereign. We should also bear in
mind the decline of the formal progress: Charles II went on a few
summer tours early in his reign, William III went on one and Anne
not at all.
Yet the picture is clear enough to begin to ask what can be learnt
from all this. What are some of the issues that need to be
confronted in understanding the court on the move? The first must
be the economic impact. Contemporaries were keen to complain
about royal presence in their vicinity. Elizabeth I, who spent more
than 40 per cent of the nights in her reign in Surrey, received a
complaint from its residents that though it was the ‘least and most
barren’ of counties ‘it is charged with continual removes and carriage
of coals, wood and other provisions to the court … also by my lord
treasurer for the repair of her majesties houses’. In the following
reign, the residents of Royston tied a note to the neck of one of
James I’s hunting dogs saying ‘please his majesty to go back to
London, for else the country will be undone; all our provision is
spent already, and we are not able to entertain him any longer’.12
It is certainly true that royal prerogatives of cart-taking,
purveyance and impressment and the activities of the harbingers
could be vexatious and costly. Yet the scorecard was not so one-
sided: the Corporation of Winchester bribed Charles II to come to
their city and build his palace with lavish gifts of land, materials and
plate, much to the dismay of the people of Newmarket who lost the
economic benefits of the court staying. In the 1640s, there was
despair amongst the luxury trades in Westminster as the court left
London.13
It has been estimated that the expenditure of the court increased
by £1,000 during progress time. Benefits to craftspeople and
shopkeepers are worth a more detailed interrogation. The
innkeepers, blacksmiths and brewers were major beneficiaries, as
were suppliers of luxury goods, firewood and fodder. Questions
about the growth and economic development of towns in the orbit of
the royal itinerary are interesting to consider.
More attention has been given to the political implications of
itinerancy: the court did not travel alone, and the huge entourage
frequently contained many of the Privy Council, various
administrators and the occasional ambassador. The overlapping
itineraries of royal ministers have been studied for Henry VIII’s reign
but not for later reigns; they are crucial to the anatomy of power
and the aristocratic geography of England. The earl of Arlington built
his country house at Euston to be close to Charles II at Newmarket.
A few years later leading aristocrats bought and built town houses in
Windsor. Town house purchases and country house building both in
their location and format were profoundly influenced by the royal
itinerary.14
Government continued with the court on the move and
instructions had to be issued, leading to the development of the post
system between the king and Whitehall and between Whitehall and
the south coast and Scotland. For Charles I’s progress in 1636, 150
horses were requisitioned for the royal messengers alone. This is
one example of how, in considering the development of departments
of state and administration, the peripatetic nature of the executive is
an important force.15
The landscape legacy of royal movements is enormous. The
infrastructure for hunting was immense: emparkment still defines
much of the countryside today. Hare warrens at Royston and
Newmarket kept royal coursing supplied, and rabbit warrens supplied
royal tables. Restrictions on local people were fiercely policed, and
those living round Royston were told to flatten their plough furrows
to make it easier for the royal horses.
During Elizabeth’s reign there was a revolution in royal transport
with the widespread introduction of carriages which led to a drastic
improvement in the road network around London and soon further
afield. Winchester was only a possibility for Charles II because of the
good road and excellent stabling in the city. Regular royal routes
created arteries of rapid travel for others generating corridors of
access and economic opportunity. A town like Guildford, a royal
centre, and a staging post to Portsmouth, benefitted enormously
from the frequent passage of the court.16 The hundreds of carts
required by the court on the move were initially pulled by oxen, but
when replaced by the horse put a huge strain on equine
infrastructure, the studs and agriculture. On Edward VI’s first and
only progress half his entourage had to be sent home after the first
week because there was not enough fodder to sustain the 1,000
horses he had brought with him.17
Obviously, construction projects also had a huge impact, especially
during periods of new build. We know quite a bit about the
development of the brick and tile trade in Surrey, but domestic glass
manufacture and lead production, both crucial after the 1580s, were
also stimulated by royal building and fashions. Certain towns
flourished due to the building trades. The growth of Reigate, for
instance, must have owed much to the stone quarries so essential to
the construction of the royal houses.18
Neither progress time or itinerancy was exclusively rural, and the
mobile court had a big impact on towns. The progress of 1634
included a visit to Leicester. The town gates were repainted, while
householders were required to paint the outside of their houses and
pave the streets in front. The roads were laid with sand and gravel
and the streets were strewn with rushes. New liveries were made for
the mayor and aldermen and golden bowls with pictures of the king
and queen were fashioned as gifts. The earl of Huntingdon, the Lord
Lieutenant, was sent ahead to ensure that St Martin’s Church was
properly arranged for the Sunday when the king would attend divine
service.19 Impacts both short-lived and more sustained were
stimulated by royal visits.
All this is to say that the monarch and court moving round the
country had important, deep-seated and long-lasting implications.
Whether they were staying in their own residences or in those of
their subjects, the sovereign presence made impacts, some of which
were long-lasting and important. Many of these are yet barely
investigated, but importantly they demonstrate that the study of
royal itineraries is not just an antiquarian pastime; it is a very
important tool in understanding economy, landscape, politics,
architecture and urban development of England.
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