A Brief History of the Tudor Age (8 page)

The Dover Road ran across London Bridge and along the south bank of the Thames to Gravesend, though wealthy travellers usually covered the first lap of the journey by barge down
the river. From Gravesend they proceeded overland to Rochester, Sittingbourne, Faversham and Canterbury, and across Barham down to Dover. The seventy-mile journey could just be done in
two days by the ordinary traveller; but there were good posthorses on the road, and a fit and strong rider travelling in post could do the whole journey in one long day’s hard riding.

A third great road ran along the route of the old Roman road, the Watling Street, from London by Dunstable, Stony Stratford, and Tamworth to Shrewsbury, and on to Chester, which was the chief
port of embarkation for the Tudor sovereigns’ second realm of Ireland. The fourth road went west from London to Exeter and Plymouth; but travellers who went further west into Cornwall had to
go by tracks and byways.

The 215-mile journey from London to Plymouth took the ordinary traveller a week; but by Elizabeth’s reign posthorses were available at eighteen staging posts along the road, and government
officials and messengers travelling in post regularly covered the distance, by Basingstoke, Andover, Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Sherborne, Honiton, Exeter and Ashburton, in thirty-six hours. In 1595 a
letter from a local official to the Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, at Windsor, left Plymouth at 9.30 a.m. on 23 September, was at Exeter by 4.30 p.m., at Sherborne by midnight, at Andover by
6.30 a.m., and was received at Staines at 5 p.m. on 24 September.

Cardinal Wolsey made a famous rapid journey along the Dover Road when he was a rising junior official in Henry VII’s service. The King, who was at his palace at Richmond, ordered Wolsey to
go on a diplomatic mission to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian, which was probably at or near Gravelines in the Netherlands; and Henry impressed on Wolsey the urgency of the
business. Wolsey left Richmond at noon, and rode to London, where he took a barge to Gravesend. He arrived at Gravesend after a three-hour journey, and rode through the night in post to Dover. He
reached Dover early in the morning, and, as the wind was favourable, he crossed to Calais in three hours and rode to Gravelines, reaching the Emperor’s court there
on the
evening of the second day. Next morning he had an audience with the Emperor, and left by noon with Maximilian’s reply to Henry’s message. He was in Calais by nightfall, and, crossing
the Channel on the morning of the fourth day, was in Dover by 10 a.m. and at court at Richmond that night. When the King saw Wolsey next morning, ninety-six hours after he had ordered him to go on
his journey, he reprimanded him for not having left already; but he was amazed, and very favourably impressed, when Wolsey explained that he had already been and returned.

But if ambitious young men travelled quickly, established dignitaries travelled slowly. Today it is considered smart to travel fast, but in the Tudor Age the smart thing was to travel slowly. In
1518, when Henry VIII sent the Earl of Worcester on a diplomatic mission to Paris, Worcester took ten days to travel from Boulogne to St Denis, and waited for two days at Senlis, because, as he
explained to Henry, a nobleman could not fittingly travel on ‘Our Lady’s Day’ (8 December) though a gentleman of lower rank might have done so. When Wolsey, thirteen years after
his quick journey to Flanders, went from Calais to Bruges on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor Charles V, he insisted on travelling at a pace which was consistent with his rank as Archbishop of
York, Lord Chancellor of England, and a Papal Legate; and though the Emperor was waiting impatiently for him, and urging him to hurry, he took three days over the sixty-mile journey.

When kings and queens travelled, they went even more slowly. Apart from the question of dignity, they were slowed down by the numerous bodyguards, servants and carts which accompanied them, and
by the official receptions, with speeches and toasts in wine, at the county and parish boundaries. When Henry VIII and Elizabeth I went on a ‘progress’ through their realm, they did not
usually travel more than ten miles a day.

On four occasions during his reign, Henry VIII visited ‘his town of Calais’ – on two occasions when he was at war with France, and twice to meet the French King at a friendly
interview. On the first two occasions, in 1513 and 1520, he went from Greenwich to Gravesend by water, and then overland to Dover, taking five days over the journey, and staying
overnight at Rochester, Sittingbourne, Faversham and Canterbury. On his last two visits, in 1532 and 1544, he went from Gravesend to Faversham by sea to avoid the plague which was raging at
Rochester, and called on the way at the house of the Lord Warden of the Five Ports, Sir Thomas Cheyney, in the Isle of Sheppey.

During the Middle Ages, the Kings of England often travelled all over their kingdom, showing themselves to their people. Henry VII continued this tradition, going to Newcastle and Exeter, and on
several occasions to York and Lincoln; but Henry VIII hardly ever left south-east England. Apart from his four visits to Calais, he went twice in his life north of the Trent, once to Nottingham and
once to Lincoln and York; but for thirty years he never went north of Grafton Regis in Northamptonshire or west of Bristol, though his contemporary sovereigns, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and
Francis I of France, travelled almost continuously throughout their dominions. Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, only once left the neighbourhood of London during his short life; and Henry’s
daughter Mary, after she became Queen, never travelled further from London than Winchester. Elizabeth I often travelled throughout south-east England, but never went north of Worcester or west of
Bristol.

This reluctance of the Tudor sovereigns to leave south-east England was only partly due to the bad state of the roads. A more important factor was probably their fear of what would happen if
they went too far from London. In 1553, during the nine-day reign of Jane Grey, the Duke of Northumberland marched from London to Cambridge at the head of an army to suppress the rising in favour
of Mary. His colleagues on the Privy Council carried out a
coup d’état
as soon as he had left London which put Mary on the throne and led to the execution of Jane Grey and
Northumberland.

In 1541 Henry VIII at last decided to make his long-promised
visit to Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, where a serious revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, had broken out five years
before. In view of the possible danger to his life among his formerly rebellious subjects, he was escorted by 7,000 soldiers, who slept in tents while Henry and his councillors and courtiers stayed
in the King’s hunting lodges and in the houses of the noblemen and gentlemen in the counties who had been ordered to receive and entertain him.

Henry left Whitehall on 30 June, and planned to take three weeks over the journey to Lincoln. He spent the first night at Enfield, the second at St Albans, the third at Dunstable, and the fourth
at Ampthill. So far he was up to schedule, but at Ampthill he heard that a hundred miles to the north the roads had been flooded by the heavy rains of a very wet summer. He decided to wait at
Ampthill until the floods had subsided, and stayed there for three weeks. He then moved north to Langley, to Grafton Regis and Pipewell in Northamptonshire, to Liddington in Rutlandshire, to
Collyweston, to the Duke of Suffolk’s house at Grimsthorp near Bourne, and to Sleaford, and entered Lincoln in state on 9 August. He then went on to Gainsborough, to Scrooby in
Nottinghamshire, and, after entering Yorkshire, to Hatfield Close, Cawood, Wressel in ‘Howdenshire’, and to Leconfield and Hull in the East Riding, before entering York on 18 September,
having taken eighty-one days to travel there from Whitehall. After staying in York for nine days, he travelled home more quickly, taking only thirty-two days to go from York, by Hull, to Thornton
Abbey across the Humber in Lincolnshire, to Ingoldsby, Sleaford, Collyweston, Fotheringhay, Higham Ferrers, Ampthill and Windsor to Hampton Court, where he arrived on 29 October.

Kings and queens stayed in the houses of the nobility and gentry, who had the delicate task of impressing the king by the lavishness of their hospitality without arousing his anger and
resentment by being too lavish and thus showing that they were presumptuous enough to seek to live above their social station. Ordinary travellers had to stay in inns along the road. There
were many inns offering reasonably comfortable accommodation and hospitality, where the traveller would find plenty of food and ale. Shakespeare, and many people in his audiences, knew
what the First Murderer in
Macbeth
was talking about when he said:

Travel was dangerous as well as arduous, because there were robbers and ‘footpads’ on the King’s highway. The roads were not as dangerous in the Tudor Age as
they would become a hundred years later, after 1650, when the country had been thrown into the chaos of another civil war, and after the expansion of trade, the development of banking, and
increased national wealth caused many more valuable consignments to be carried for long distances overland than in the sixteenth century. But robberies and murders did take place on the highway in
the Tudor Age. There was a spate of them in the autumn of 1577, when four yeomen of Kent were robbed of £200 by eleven ‘lewd persons’ on the highway between the important city of
Coventry and the little town of Birmingham. A month later, the Privy Council gave orders to the sheriffs to suppress rogues and vagabonds who were committing offences on the highways in Middlesex,
Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Surrey. Shakespeare was thinking of more recent incidents than the activities of Sir John Falstaff in 1403 when he included a scene in his
First Part of King Henry IV
of a robbery of travellers on the Dover Road at that dangerous spot, Gadshill, just south of Blackheath.

Although the highway was cluttered up with so many cattle and pedestrians, as well as with the smaller number of horsemen, the comparative shortage of roads meant that travellers could be
reasonably sure of meeting, and not missing, other travellers coming from the destination to which they were going. They were particularly unlikely to miss travellers who were important
people accompanied by a large escort. It was always possible, however, for fugitives from justice, and others who did not wish to be seen, to avoid meeting other travellers by leaving
the road and riding across country by the byways or the fields.

In the summer of 1527 Wolsey was awaiting the arrival in England of an ambassador from the ruler of Hungary, the Vayvode John Zapolya. Charles V’s brother-in-law, King Ladislaus II, who
reigned over Bohemia and Hungary, had been killed by the Turks in the battle of Mohács in August 1526, and Hungary was overrun by the Turks, who set up Zapolya, a Hungarian nobleman, as
their puppet ruler. Henry VIII and Wolsey had recently quarrelled with their ally, Charles V, and were in the process of making an alliance with Francis I of France against Charles; so they wished
to encourage Zapolya to make trouble for Charles in his rear. It was not easy to establish contact with Hungary across Charles’s intervening territories, but Zapolya managed to send an
ambassador, Jerome à Lasco, to England by way of Italy and France.

Wolsey would have liked to receive the ambassador, but then decided to go to France to meet Francis I. It was more important to meet the French King than the Hungarian ambassador, so Wolsey left
before à Lasco arrived; but they met on the Dover Road. They had no difficulty in recognizing each other, for Wolsey travelled accompanied by several officials and gentlemen and an escort of
900 horsemen; and à Lasco, though he had a far smaller retinue, was suitably escorted. They met on the road between Sittingbourne and Faversham, and discussed the situation in Eastern Europe
before proceeding on their journeys.

Another important political meeting on the road took place in July 1553. When Edward VI was dying, his Protestant councillors were preparing to proclaim Jane Grey as Queen. Their first action
was to try to arrest Mary so as to prevent her from causing trouble; as she was at her house at Kenninghall in Norfolk, they summoned her to come to court at Greenwich. She set out on the journey,
but one of her wellwishers decided to warn her of her danger. Knowing that she would be travelling to
London, he set out to intercept her. He met her on the Great North Road at
Hoddesdon, and warned her that if she went on to Greenwich, she would be arrested. She turned her horse’s head and rode back to Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, where she called on her supporters
to join her at Framlingham Castle and to fight for her as their rightful Queen. Within a few days, Jane’s supporters had capitulated, and Mary had triumphed. The meeting at Hoddesdon had
changed the course of history.

In the autumn of 1565 a Protestant revolt broke out in Scotland in an attempt to prevent their Queen, Mary Stuart, from marrying a Catholic, Lord Darnley. It was led by Mary’s illegitimate
half-brother, the Earl of Moray. Elizabeth I was persuaded by her Council to encourage the rebels, but gave them no effective support; and when they were driven across the Border and took refuge at
Newcastle, she was eager to dissociate herself from them. She sent a messenger to Newcastle with a letter to Moray and his colleagues, ordering them not to come to her presence. But Moray, leaving
the others at Newcastle, had already set out for London, travelling quickly in post along the Great North Road. He had already reached Hertfordshire when the messenger met him on the road between
Ware and Royston. The messenger gave him the Queen’s letter, but Moray decided to risk her anger by continuing his journey, as he had already gone so far, and was admitted to her presence at
Whitehall. She strongly reprimanded him in the presence of the French ambassador, but allowed him and the other rebels to stay at Newcastle, and refused to extradite them to Scotland to stand trial
for high treason.