Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of
Ceremony (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), x +
277pp, ISBN 1558492143
The court of Queen Elizabeth I was in constant motion. Between
September and July, Elizabeth moved between her various royal
residences and made short trips to visit those courtiers and dignitaries
who lived in or around London. More famously, Elizabeth spent the
summer months on lengthy progresses around the southern counties and
midlands of England. These summer progresses became the occasions
for extravagant entertainments, civic ceremonies, gift-giving and
scholarly disputations, and it is for these literary remains that the
progresses are mostly remembered. At the AHRB Centre for the Study of
Renaissance Elites and Court Cultures, we are engaged on a project to reedit John Nichols’s three-volume collection of material relating to the
progresses.
Containing letters, accounts, petitions and royal
proclamations, the Nichols volumes demonstrate that the Elizabethan
progresses were not simply literary or cultural phenomena, but that they
were equally (and perhaps most importantly) conceived as an extension
and performance of Elizabeth’s queenship. The Portable Queen:
Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony is the first book-length study to
take account of the political, economic and social contexts of the
Elizabethan progresses. But it is equally a study of the means by which
an ongoing ‘ceremonial dialogue’ between monarch and subjects could
adapt to accommodate or to suppress competing interests.
For those of us who have worked on individual progress
entertainments, the need for an overview of the progresses has been
overwhelming.
Drawing on household accounts, ministerial
correspondence, county archives, corporation records and family papers,
Mary Hill Cole expertly brings order to the seeming chaos of the
Elizabethan progresses.
Resisting the temptation to provide a
chronological narrative, Cole teases out the major themes of the
progresses, providing lengthy analyses of Elizabeth’s hosts (both private
and civic), historical and geographical patterns, the impact upon the royal
household and the practicalities of the day-to-day business of ruling the
country whilst on the road. From a simple review of the statistics, some
interesting facts emerge. Of the forty-four years of Elizabeth’s reign,
Cole identifies twenty-three major summer progresses, averaging fifty
days in length and containing an average of twenty-three visits, usually
lasting two days. The pattern of the progresses changed throughout the
reign, and Cole deftly explains the reasons for these changes while
managing to identify general trends. Importantly, Cole also details
exceptions to this pattern—as when, for example, a winter progress was
used to usher the duc d’Alençon out of the kingdom in February 1582. A
review of the geographical extent of the progresses helps to dispel some
popular misconceptions. The extent of the progresses was perhaps
surprisingly limited, and could be circumscribed, as Cole writes, by a
‘line connecting Norwich, Stafford, Bristol, Southampton, and Dover’.
Concentrating on the more populous home counties, Elizabeth avoided
those areas which might prove problematic (whether in terms of terrain,
national identity or religious sympathy): ‘Instead of using progresses to
bring order to troubled regions’, Cole concludes, ‘the queen in her
progresses validated royal authority and social stability where it already
existed.’
The progresses, of course, were not without their critics, both
within and without the court. The rumblings of Burghley and
Walsingham—the one concerned about the drain upon royal finances and
the other about distractions from the business of rule—provided a
continuing undercurrent to the progresses. This discontent was echoed in
the efforts of Elizabeth’s reluctant hosts to avoid the cost of
accommodating and entertaining the ever-growing royal household.
These stories provide some of the most colourful and engaging parts of
Cole’s book—as when, for example, in April 1601 Henry Clinton, Earl of
Lincoln, bolted his doors before the approaching queen and fled for
Lincolnshire. But, as Cole is at pains to point out, the great majority of
Elizabeth’s hosts were more welcoming: for private hosts, entertainment
provided an excellent opportunity to present the queen with personal
petitions; civic hosts also seized the chance to advance their interests by
presenting themselves as prosperous and loyal satellites, complete with
freshly-painted town gates, whitewashed houses and re-tiled roofs.
Again, it is the stories of individual hosts that lend vitality to Cole’s
narrative, including those eager subjects whose invitations were
overlooked by the queen, and successful hosts like Sir Francis Carew,
who took pains to retard the ripening of his fruit trees so that the queen
could dine on fresh cherries when she visited him in August 1600.
Through her extensive research in corporation archives, Cole is able to
show that the costs of entertaining the royal household were not so
onerous as has been suggested: with the expenses of lodgings and
provisions covered by the court, civic hosts concentrated their finances on
ceremonial structures, literary commissions and the ever-important gifts.
Amid the spinning universe of the progresses, Queen Elizabeth
remained the still centre. As for her father and her Continental
contemporaries, progresses enabled Elizabeth to advance the idea and
image of her rule. But to a greater extent than any of her predecessors or
successors, Elizabeth made the process of travel representative of her
government and of herself. Further, the fact of travel itself—problems of
accommodation, delays in communication, inclement weather, lastminute changes to the itinerary—created a studied chaos within which
Elizabeth was able to distinguish herself from her ministers and engage
directly with her subjects. It is in her analysis of this cultivated confusion
that Cole, who writes with grace and clarity throughout, is at her most
eloquent: ‘the progresses provided another opportunity for Elizabeth to
manipulate her environment. Her progresses, I would suggest, created a
dislocating confusion that reminded courtiers, citizens, and hosts of the
queen’s centrality in their lives. Every day on the road began and ended
with the discussions of what the queen wanted: Did she intend to stick to
her schedule? Would the weather allow her to hunt? Did she enjoy the
ceremonies? Would she grant the request or favor? As a single woman in
a sea of male courtiers eager to influence her, Elizabeth used the
dislocation of travel to preserve her royal flexibility. Her travels were an
important part of her efforts to fashion a public image that portrayed her
as both king and queen, man and woman, god's chosen, a warrior and a
judge. Through the chaos of the progresses, so frustrating to her
ministers, came a disorderly structure that Elizabeth used to preserve her
independence.’ One is perhaps reminded of the strategy of equivocation
identified by Frances Teague in her analysis of Elizabeth’s speeches.
Furnished with a series of Appendices in which Cole provides
chronologies of the progresses, lists of hosts and tables of household
servants and expenditure, The Portable Queen will provide an invaluable
resource for those wishing to impose some order on the chaos of the
progresses, and also for those hoping to catch a glimpse of Queen
Elizabeth’s purpose and policy amid this whirligig of motion.
Jayne Archer
University of Warwick