An Elizabethan progress - Zillah Dovey

A complete and detailed account of one of Elizabeth I's progresses - the great state tours around a particular part of the kingdom. The author uses contemporary documents to study a single, but typical, long progress, covering the court servants' preparations, the stops en route and, in parallel, the work of the Queen's council who had to go along too.;The progress in question was an 11-week journey during the summer of 1578, from Greenwich to Norfolk and back by a different route. It had the twin objectives of showing the Queen and her Court in all their splendour to the people of a hitherto unvisited part of the realm, and of reducing the pockets of recusant Catholics who were a particular problem in East Anglia. Because the Queen and her council constituted the government of the country, her ministers had to travel with her, conducting all their usual domestic and foreign business wherever they happened to be. With them went their staff, the court servants and the Queen's guards, totalling several hundred people and perhaps a thousand horses. Their inconvenience was unimaginable.;Based on contemporary sources and complemented by illustrative material, the text should be valuable to students and scholars, yet is also accessible to the amateur and local historian, and those with a general interest in the age of Elizabeth.