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Genesis: Historical research
Reference:

Religion and Politics in Early Modern Royal Travels: Queen Elizabeth's Progress to Kent in 1573

Tauber Vladimir

ORCID: 0000-0003-0857-3367

PhD in History

Research assistant, Russian State University of Humanities

125047, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Miusskaya Ploshchad str., 6, p. 6, office 337

vtauber@yandex.ru

DOI:

10.25136/2409-868X.2022.9.38728

EDN:

QCRRZP

Received:

07-09-2022


Published:

19-09-2022


Abstract: The article is devoted to the consideration of the summer travels of the English royal court of early Modern times. This practice, originating from the traveling courts of the Middle Ages, flourished in England in the second half of the XVI century. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth Tudor, summer progresses became an integral part of the court ceremonial, an important means of representing the monarch and a mechanism for implementing royal policy. The article focuses on one of these trips, namely, a summer trip to Kent in 1573, whose central episode was a reception hosted for the Queen by Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker. The author examines the preparation and course of this reception, analyzes the motives and expectations of all participants in the events and fits the royal visit into the context of church history and religious policy of England in the second half of the XVI century. The scientific novelty of the work lies in a detailed, based on a wide range of sources, consideration of the royal visit of 1573, which had not previously attracted special attention of researchers. The main conclusion of the study is the observation about the peculiar nature of the reception in Canterbury, due to the increased attention of all participants to the religious and political content of this event. For Elizabeth, this reception was an occasion to emphasize her image of a pious monarch and defender of the true faith. On the other hand, such a visit in the first half of the 1570s, during a harsh period for the Church of England, was on its part a gesture of support for the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom the latter sorely needed. Parker, in turn, made considerable efforts to extract the maximum benefits for himself from this reception. Thus, the conducted research shows how the royal progress could be used for the purposes of religious policy and complements our understanding of the methods and mechanisms of its implementation in early Modern England.


Keywords:

early Modern times, court culture, religious policy, summer progress of the court, Queen Elizabeth, Kent, Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England, England

This article is automatically translated. You can find original text of the article here.

The Royal Court occupied a central place in the political and cultural life of any European state of the early Modern period. His daily life was determined by traditions, ceremonies and rituals that created the image of the monarch and presented him to his subjects, being the most important means of realizing the ruler's power. The England of the sixteenth century was by no means an exception to this general rule. Political and court ceremonial actively developed under the Tudors and reached its heyday in the second half of the century — during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. One of its important elements was summer outings (summer progresses), during which the Queen and her courtiers visited various parts of England, where they were received by representatives of local authorities, city corporations and aristocrats. Of course, this practice, rooted in the constantly traveling royal courts of the Middle Ages, was not an invention of Elizabeth and her entourage. However, she went on summer trips much more often than her predecessors: twenty-three times during the forty-four years of her reign [1, p. 27].

Naturally, each such trip was not just an entertainment event, but an important political act and a means of communication between the queen and her subjects. In fact, for a very significant proportion of Englishmen, this was the only chance to see the monarch firsthand. Therefore, often the receptions that were arranged for the queen during her visits were magnificent theatrical performances. The most striking example of this is the famous reception given to Elizabeth by the Earl of Leicester in Kennilworth in 1575, to which the classical work of F. is largely devoted. Yates [2, pp. 64-172]. However, even less well-known and solemn visits had important political content, for example, by staying at the house of an aristocrat or showing her satisfaction with this or that reception, the queen clearly showed her disposition to the host, which could become an argument for him in local disputes or even in a political struggle on the scale of the kingdom [3, pp. 200-219].

It is no coincidence that the summer travels of the Elizabethan court have regularly attracted the attention of researchers over the past two centuries, since the publication in 1823 by J. Nichols of a three-volume collection of sources dedicated to them [4]. For a long time, researchers have considered summer travel mainly in the context of court culture. In this sense, it is noteworthy that the first iterarium of the court was published as part of the "Court Calendar" — an appendix to the study of the Elizabethan theater [5, p. 77-116.]. Gradually, the subject of these studies expanded, and in the works of the late XX — early XXI century. summer travels of the Elizabethan court are considered as a specific mechanism of communication between the crown and subjects, having symbolic, political, social and cultural content. Thus, in M. E. Cole's monograph, the most complete study of Elizabeth's summer travels, much attention is paid to their context, organizational issues, ceremonial and political motives [1]. Published in 2007, the collective work devoted to Elizabethan travels also covers an extremely wide range of topics — from traditional problems of representation of power and political theater to gender and religious history [6]. Each of the visits was unique: its circumstances and course were determined by the historical and political context, the region where it took place, as well as the interests of the organizers of the receptions. Therefore, a detailed examination of each individual journey is of independent interest both for the study of the court and political culture, and for understanding a wider range of problems that determined its content.

The subject of study in this article is the royal visit to Kent in 1573, which had not previously attracted independent attention of researchers. The central episode of this trip was a reception organized for Elizabeth in Canterbury by Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker. In itself, the royal visit to the primate of the Church of England was not an extraordinary event: in the 1560s, Elizabeth visited Matthew Parker's house four times during her summer travels, not counting several receptions that he gave for her on other occasions. However, they were all brief — trips to the east usually began with lunch at Lambeth Palace, the metropolitan residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whereas in 1573 Elizabeth spent two weeks in Canterbury [1, p. 135-144]. Precedents when a bishop played a key role in organizing a long reception of the queen are extremely rare and have not been specifically considered by researchers, despite the fact that the religious and political content of royal travels has naturally been studied (the most famous example is a trip to Norfolk in 1578 [7, p. 122-141]). At the same time, such incidents are also of considerable interest in the context of modern studies of the English Reformation — the problem of communication of the episcopate with the crown and secular authorities is one of the most interesting directions in the study of the "Elizabethan religious settlement" [8; 9; 10, p. 32-50], and royal visits as a special mechanism of such communication certainly deserve special attention.

Unfortunately, the possibilities of their analysis are partly limited by the state of the source base. The royal summer travels were very significant events, and information about them is found in a large number of different sources — chronicles, letters, court documents, and so on. Collections of such documents are published in the already mentioned collection of J. Nichols [4, p. 333-355] and as part of the Elizabethan Court Day by Day database compiled by M. E. Colthorpe [11, p. 20-40]. They allow us to reconstruct in sufficient detail the route of the Elizabethan court's journey in 1573, however, some of its episodes are covered in them very unevenly: we do not know anything about some of them except the place of the queen's stay, others are reconstructed in sufficient detail. A significant addition to this information is Matthew Parker's epistolary legacy — he repeatedly discussed the royal visit and his preparations for it with his correspondents, primarily with Lord Treasurer William Cecil, Baron Burleigh, and Archbishop of York Edmund Grindel [12]. Despite some lacunae, these sources together allow us to analyze the context, preparation and course of Queen Elizabeth's trip to Kent and to determine the specifics of the Queen's reception by the bishop, as opposed to the entertainment arranged for her by other persons who received her, as well as to characterize the religious and political content of this visit.

The first interesting feature of the visit of 1573 is the moment chosen by the Queen for a trip to Kent. The first half of the 1570s was a difficult time for the English Church [13, pp. 255-256]. On the one hand, most of the administrative difficulties faced by the Church of England at the very beginning of Elizabeth's reign by the 1570s had been overcome. In 1571, the Parliament adopted Thirty—nine articles as an act - a doctrinal document approved six years earlier by the convocation. At the same time, the church synod made an attempt to approve new canons, which testified to some normalization of church life. At the same time, in the early 1570s, the church also faced new challenges: the first significant Puritan protests occurred at this time, and the uprisings in the northern counties in the late 1560s and the papal bull Regnans in excelsis marked a new complication of relations with Catholics.

The situation was not easy for the bishops, including Matthew Parker himself: they became the target of fierce criticism of the Puritans, many of whom enjoyed the support of public opinion and the sympathies of the queen's inner circle. Parker's conflict with the Earl of Leicester was the most acute, so that in the autumn of 1572 the latter refused to read the letters of the Archbishop of Canterbury [12, p. 406-408]. His relationship with the Queen was not cloudless either. Although Parker throughout his reign positioned himself as an exceptionally loyal person to Elizabeth and generally behaved accordingly, which the queen certainly appreciated, in the late 1560s - early 1570s he had to face the monarch's discontent several times. In particular, just at the beginning of the summer of 1573, the Queen was extremely annoyed by the appointment of a new head of the ecclesiastical court of the province of Canterbury and demanded that the archbishop change his decision [12, p. 427-429]. Parker himself felt these events hard — his letters to his friend and regular correspondent Lord Burleigh in the first half of the 1570s are full of regrets and lamentations [12, p. 391, 399, 472, 474, 478]. In such a situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury was, of course, one of the main stakeholders in the highest visit to Kent. Of course, he was not alone in this: each of those who arranged a reception for the queen associated their expectations with him.

The journey of the royal court began in mid-summer: on July 15 or, according to other sources, on July 14, Elizabeth and her entourage arrived in Croydon (now a borough in south London, about ten miles from Westminster), where they stayed at the Archbishop of Canterbury's palace, and Parker himself was still in Lambeth and was just going to go to Canterbury to prepare for the royal visit, about which he wrote to Lord Burleigh on July 15 [6, p. 436]. They stayed there for a week, about which little is known. M. E. Colthorpe assumed that this visit was successful, judging by the fact that the following year the royal court's summer trip also began with Croydon, and one of the courtiers reported that in 1573 and 1574 he was housed in the same room [11, p. 20]. Already at the very beginning, the royal journey was in danger of disruption: on July 18, Parker wrote to Lord Burleigh that the Vice Admiral of Kent, Baron Cobham, had informed him about measles and smallpox in Canterbury and the plague in Sandwich, so that the Archbishop of Canterbury began to doubt whether he should continue the hassle associated with sending provisions and supplies to his Kent residences [6, p. 437]. It is known that Baron Cobham had recently asked the Lord Mayor of Canterbury to inform him about the state of affairs with the disease in the city, but at the same time he began to prepare Dover Castle for the royal reception [11, p. 21]. Perhaps it was the threat of illness that led to the delay in Croydon, but in the end the threat was apparently not considered serious, and on July 21 Elizabeth entered Kent.

The first stop on her way was Orpington, where she was received at her home by Percival Hart, the chief tailor and knight-harbinger under all English monarchs since Henry VIII. During the celebration, Elizabeth was greeted by a nymph who embodied the genius of the house, and then the scene changed: several rooms of the house represented a boat from which one could watch a naval battle. The queen liked this sight so much that, leaving two days later, she named the house Barkhart (from the word bark, "boat", and the owner's surname) [4, p. 332]. Unfortunately, we do not even know such details about most of the royal receptions during this trip, although the route is known to us in sufficient detail: during the month Elizabeth and her courtiers visited nine cities and manors, until finally, on August 25, they reached one of the main points of their destination and the main cities of Kent — Dover.

At the entrance to Dover, in Folkestone, the Queen was met by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Vice Admiral of Kent - two of the most important representatives of the local nobility, who were accompanied by three hundred knights and nobles. Parker wrote later that "all his people" were with him, and this meeting itself was for him not only a way to show his respect to the queen, but also to show his "affection" for the county [12, p. 475]. For the bishop, this was extremely important: his activity largely consisted in the church administration of his diocese, which inevitably implied interaction and sometimes confrontation with the local nobility. The Archbishop of Canterbury, on the one hand, was in a better position than many of his colleagues, since there were no people of high enough status in his region to compete with him for patronage and influence on the church (as, for example, in Sussex in the 1570s, where Bishop Richard Curtis of Chichester regularly clashed with Lord Lieutenant Viscount Montagu [14, p. 327]). On the other hand, due to his status as primate of the Church of England, he spent most of his time in Lambeth, for example, during the first four years of his reign he had never been to his diocese, and therefore the opportunity to emphasize his high local status, and even on such a solemn occasion, must have seemed attractive to him. He and his men accompanied the Queen to Dover Castle, and then left for Canterbury to prepare for the royal reception. In Dover, the royal entertainments were organized by Baron Cobham, and again we have to state that we know few details about Elizabeth's pastime, except for reports about the participation of ships in royal entertainments (which is not surprising — Dover was one of the largest ports in England), as well as reports about a golden bowl presented to Elizabeth with the coat of arms of Five ports [15, no. 1399]. In total, the queen's stay in Dover lasted six days, and on August 31, the court went to Sandwich.

In The Annals of Sandwich, published by W. Boys and reproduced by J. Nichols, preserved a fairly detailed description of how the royal visit took place [4, p. 337-339]. Before entering the city, the queen was met by the mayor, along with nine jurors and three hundred escorts. He presented Elizabeth with a mace — a sign of his power, which was an unambiguous loyal gesture, and a salute was arranged in honor of the queen. Then Elizabeth and her accompanying procession proceeded through the city decorated with flowers and vines to the house on which the royal coat of arms was installed and in front of which Richard Spicer, the priest of St. Clement's Church and the city's best preacher, delivered a welcoming eulogy, subsequently published. Here the queen was presented with a golden cup and a New Testament in Greek. The central event of the next day was a paramilitary performance arranged for the queen: a special wooden fort was built outside the city, which was stormed by three detachments led by local captains. A show battle was also played out between two ships at sea. The next day, the Queen participated in a banquet hosted in her honor by the wives of the mayor and the jury, consisting of 160 dishes, which required a 28-foot (about ten meters) table. The banquet was held in the school building, and on the way there, the queen was again greeted with speeches and another thicket was presented to her. She was so pleased that she ate even without the usual pre—check of food in such cases in order to avoid poisoning - this is emphasized in the source.

It is clear that such a reception was expensive and difficult to organize: it is known that the decoration of the city, the repainting of houses in black and white, the expansion and repair of streets, and so on, as well as the hassle of buying gifts for the queen began more than a month before her reception. In mid—August, for example, local brewers were banned from brewing beer for export altogether - they had to deal exclusively with ensuring the royal visit. It was all for a reason. As a result of such entertainment, the Queen should have developed a certain image of Sandwich — a city of great importance, capable and ready to defend the maritime borders of England. But not only: the sandwich was presented to Elizabeth both as a shopping center and as a center of scholarship and piety. The purpose of such a representation of the city became clear at the end of the visit, when the mayor presented the queen with a petition for the allocation of funds for the repair of the harbor and she, pleased with the reception, promised to submit it to the Privy Council and provide her support. It seems that the presentation of the mace worked for the same purpose, in fact reproducing the procedure of the vassal oath and reminding Elizabeth that she, the lord and patron of the Sandwich, has certain responsibilities in relation to this city. As M. E. Cole notes, a similar tactic was used two weeks earlier by the residents of Folkstone, who suffered losses from competition with Dover and took advantage of the fact that the queen was walking through their city to present her with a petition [1, p. 108-109].

The Queen left Sandwich on September 3 and, after stopping for lunch at Wingham, arrived in Canterbury that evening, where her reception was organized by the Archbishop of Canterbury. As already noted, this visit was very important for Matthew Parker, and therefore he began to prepare for it in advance, and did it in a rather characteristic manner. In the middle of July, informing Lord Burleigh of his intention to go from Lambeth to Kent, he attached to the letter a "treatise on Dover" [12, p. 436]. It was, he said, not the first book about Kent that he had sent to Burleigh in connection with the upcoming royal trip. Indeed, as early as May 9, he sent the Lord Treasurer a description of Kent, compiled by the famous antiquary William Lambard and not yet published at that time [12, p. 424-425] (this book is considered the first history of a separate county in England [16, p. 136-147]). Later, on July 19, he sent a new edition of the "treatise on Dover", supplemented by the last part, which "was in an ancient book" [12, p. 439], and on July 27 — a preface to the treatise by W. Lambard with a dedication addressed to Thomas Wotton, with whom Elizabeth was staying at that time (the author himself I considered it unsuccessful and was not going to publish it without improvements) [6, p. 441]. Such an exchange of books was quite in the spirit of the times and in the character of the Archbishop of Canterbury: he became widely known as a collector of manuscripts, patron of antiquaries and collector of a brilliant library, after his death transferred to his alma mater — Cambridge Corpus Christi College [17, p. 1061-1083; 18, p. 322-341].

As for the more practical aspects of the preparation, Parker had some difficulties with it: he did not quite understand how exactly a bishop should organize such a large-scale royal visit. Back in mid-July, he (as well as the Canterbury city authorities) took care of buying the necessary supplies and spent the next month and a half at their residences in Kent, where he was preparing for the visit. In the middle of August, he wrote to Lord Burleigh: "There is no other advice that I could follow, otherwise how to find out what kind of service was in the custom of my predecessors" [12, p. 441]. It wasn't just Parker who had this problem. A year and a half later, in the first half of 1575, the idea of the first royal journey to the North arose (usually Elizabeth's route was limited to the southern and eastern parts of the country), and Edmund Grindel, Archbishop of York, faced similar difficulties. Then he turned to Parker for advice, and from their correspondence we know some additional details of the royal reception in Canterbury [12, p. 475; 19, p. 353-354]. Discussing Elizabeth's upcoming visit with Lord Burleigh, the primate of the Church of England paid special attention to the ceremonies that were to take place in the cathedral. He suggested that, in accordance with the order of past royal receptions, Elizabeth should stay in the former abbey of St. Augustine, dissolved in the second half of the 1530s and turned into a royal residence, and her entourage should be accommodated in the houses of the dean and prebendaries of the cathedral. The central events of the entire visit were to be a meeting of the queen in the cathedral, a Sunday service that the archbishop himself was going to conduct, and a subsequent sermon. Apparently, according to his idea, this was supposed to be a demonstration that the queen fully supports the official Church of England and treats her primate favorably, on the other hand, it would be quite consistent with the traditions of royal receptions in Canterbury [12, 442-443].

We have at our disposal several generally consistent descriptions of how this visit took place: in addition to the letters of Parker mentioned above, a description of this event is contained in some versions of the Latin biography of Matthew Parker, compiled by his secretary John Joslin and known as Matthaeus, as well as in the "Chronicles" of Raphael Holinshed [4, p. 347-352]. Elizabeth arrived in Canterbury on the evening of September 3. In accordance with Parker's plan, the solemn meeting took place in the cathedral: at the west gate, a "scholar" from the grammar school greeted the queen with a solemn Latin speech. Then she dismounted and four prelates — the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of Lincoln and Rochester (the latter was also Archdeacon of Canterbury), as well as the vicar Bishop of Dover — greeted her with a Deus misereatur psalm in English and several prayers. In his story to Grindel, Parker emphasized that all four were dressed in liturgical vestments, including a rocher — a special cape. For him, this was an important detail, since the "golden vestments of papism" [20, p. 63], preserved in the Church of England, were an important debatable issue in the religious disputes of the Elizabethan era and a constant object of criticism from the Puritans. Then the queen, under a canopy and surrounded by members of the chapter and choir of Canterbury Cathedral, went to the communion table, where she listened to evening prayer, and left for her residence, while Parker hosted a dinner for fourteen or fifteen members of the Privy Council in his palace.

After that, the Queen stayed in Canterbury for two weeks. At this time, she spent a lot of time with the French ambassador Marshal de Re, who arrived to discuss the possibility of her marriage with the Duke of Alencon. Parker also arranged special entertainments for the ambassador, and on September 8 or 10, the latter visited Canterbury Cathedral. As Bishop John Parkhurst of Norwich wrote the following February, the ambassador was delighted, but this hardly had a good effect on Parker's reputation: many (it must be understood from critics and opponents) considered that this was too warm a welcome for a Catholic [11, p. 36]. At the same time, the Archbishop of Canterbury's hopes that the Queen will publicly show support for the Church of England and for him personally seem to have been fully realized. Elizabeth twice attended the solemn Sunday services held by Parker, and on September 7, on her birthday, the archbishop arranged for the queen and the courtiers a luxurious dinner in his palace, which was compared to the reception in Canterbury in 1519, organized on the occasion of the meeting of King Henry VIII with Emperor Charles V [11, p. 37]. After dinner, the queen and her entourage were presented with magnificent gifts, and her servants were given money. According to the calculations of John Parker, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, all this reception, gifts and distribution of money cost his father about 3,000 pounds, which was one and a half times higher than his expenses for the restoration and maintenance of his residences, as well as parish churches in his diocese for the entire decade and a half of his reign [12, p. XII–XIII].

Canterbury was the penultimate long stop during the summer journey of 1573. After leaving the city on September 16, the Queen and her entourage went to Rochester via Faversham and Sittingbourne. There are not many details about this stay, but it is known that Elizabeth again attended a church service here (Rochester is the second diocesan center in Kent), once dined on a ship, watched the triumph at sea and inspected the shipyards in Chatham. After spending four days there, Elizabeth and her entourage went to Cobham, the possession of Vice Admiral Kent, where on September 23 he organized a dinner in honor of the queen, and from there to Dartford, which was the last stop before returning to Greenwich on September 25 [4, p. 353-354; 11, p. 38].

As you can see, the information about the royal trip to Kent in the summer of 1573 is far from complete – we do not have descriptions of royal entertainment, even approximately comparable in volume and details, for example, with descriptions of celebrations in Kenilworth. However, even with the data we have, we can make some interesting observations. First of all, as you can see, royal receptions were held differently depending on who organized them. The entertainment for Elizabeth, which was arranged by cities and aristocrats, often had a maritime theme: the queen was invited to inspect ports, shipyards, sea performances or theatrical events with nautical motifs were arranged for her. This is not surprising if we recall that in the Middle Ages and early Modern times it was Kent that was the main maritime center of England, and transit through Five ports remained the main route connecting it with the continent. We can say little about the content of most of these receptions: we almost never know for sure what benefits the Kentish aristocrats and cities wanted to derive from the royal visit. A remarkable exception in this sense is the Sandwich, thanks to the detailed description of Elizabeth's reception in the city annals. The carefully thought-out representation of the city as an important military center, supplemented by an expression of loyalty and a hint of the city's connection with the queen as a seigneur, should have given more weight to the petition of the citizens, presented on the last day of the visit.

In comparison with these receptions, which emphasized the military and naval glory of Kent, the events arranged for Elizabeth in Canterbury had a different content. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who organized her reception, on the one hand, acted as befitted a local magnate, the most titled aristocrat of Kent. He, along with the Vice Admiral of Kent, led a delegation of local nobility during the solemn meeting of Elizabeth on the way to Dover, demonstrating their connection with the county, so in a sense they both personified the glory of this region as a center of navigation, but at the same time the abode of the true faith. Among the royal entertainments in Canterbury, an important place belonged to the dinner on the occasion of Elizabeth's jubilee, which Parker arranged — quite a secular court event, the organizer is easy to imagine any of the titled aristocrats of England. Finally, the Archbishop of Canterbury took part in the entertainment arranged for the French Ambassador Marshal de Re, just as nine years earlier he had received and entertained other French ambassadors who arrived in England to ratify the peace treaty concluded at Troyes in 1564 [21, p. 79-100]. Thus, the Archbishop of Canterbury played the role of a representative of local authorities and regional elite, but at the same time he acted in another capacity — primate of the Church of England. Therefore, instead of theatrical performances and similar amusements, he took care of "staging" the royal entrance to Canterbury Cathedral and organizing Sunday services, which Elizabeth was supposed to attend.

For the Queen herself, the reception in Canterbury was an occasion and a way to show another image of herself — a pious monarch, ruler of the church, defender of the faith. This hypostasis was actually widely represented in its representation, it was closely intertwined with the imperial theme and was actively exploited in the court theater [2, pp. 64-172], but during church services and public prayer it found the most explicit expression. Parker, on the other hand, was in dire need of just such a demonstration of the highest support: he wanted Elizabeth to publicly take part in the divine services that he himself conducted in accordance with all the regulations adopted in the English church, including the vestments criticized by his opponents. A few years earlier, when the debate about vestments was most active, Parker several times asked Secretary of State William Cecil to convince the Queen to express explicit approval of his policy, but he did not wait for anything of this kind [22, pp. 359-360]. In the early 1570s, the criticism he faced was even more fierce, moreover, in the first half of the same year, as mentioned above, Elizabeth herself expressed dissatisfaction with some personnel decisions of the primate of the church. So the royal visit to Canterbury was, if not a victory for Parker, then at least a great chance to achieve the highest favor, and the archbishop put a lot of effort into making it go the way he needed.

The reception arranged by the prelate thus differed significantly from those organized by secular persons and city corporations: special attention was paid to the religious and political component. Significantly participating in church ceremonies and entertainments organized for her, the Queen expressed the approval of the whole Church of England, and this gesture in the context of the religious situation of the first half of the 1570s was addressed not so much to the local audience as to all opponents of the primate of the church. It is difficult to say, however, how much this helped his affairs — puritanical criticism hardly moderated and Parker's relations with some courtiers left much to be desired. Nevertheless, he still continued his policy of unifying the church and fighting the Puritans. He was able to retain his chair until his death in 1575, despite attempts by the royal favorite Earl of Leicester to remove him from office [12, P. 472], and it is likely that Elizabeth's successful visit to Kent in the summer of 1573 played a role in this. In any case, this incident shows how the summer journey of the court could become a tool for the implementation of the royal religious policy, and also demonstrates how important such visits were for the bishops who received them.

 

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to the article Religion and Politics in Royal Travels of the early Modern period: the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Kent in 1573, the title partly corresponds to the content of the article materials. The title of the article conditionally looks at the scientific problem, which the author's research is aimed at solving. The reviewed article is of relative scientific interest. The author partially explained the choice of the research topic, but did not substantiate its relevance. The article does not formulate the purpose of the study, does not specify the object and subject of the study, the methods used by the author. In the opinion of the reviewer, the main elements of the "program" of the study were not fully thought out by the author, which affected its results. The author did not present the results of the analysis of the historiography of the problem and did not formulate the novelty of the undertaken research, which is a significant disadvantage of the article. In presenting the material, the author demonstrated the results of the analysis of the historiography of the problem in the form of links to relevant works on the research topic. There is no appeal to opponents in the article. The author did not explain the choice and did not characterize the range of sources involved in the disclosure of the topic. The author did not explain or justify the choice of the chronological and geographical framework of the study. In the opinion of the reviewer, the author correctly used the sources, maintained the scientific style of presentation, competently used the methods of scientific knowledge, followed the principles of logic, systematicity and consistency of presentation of the material. As an introduction, the author said that "the royal court played a key role in the political and cultural life of any European state of the early Modern period," etc., that Queen Elizabeth of England "went on summer trips much more often than her predecessors," explained why the summer trips of her court "are traditionally considered in historical science in the context of the representation of royal power and the "political theater", and also stated that "among the political problems that determined the content of the court ceremonial of the second half of the XVI century, a special place belonged to the problems of the church and religion." In the main part of the article, the author pointed out to the reader a number of features of the Queen's visit to Kent in 1573, and proceeded to a detailed description of the journey of the royal court itself. The author, in particular, explained that the purpose of the "representation" of the cities of Sandwich and Folkestone was to present petitions to the Queen for the allocation of funds. The author then described the Queen's stay in Canterbury. At the end of the main part of the article, the author explained that "royal receptions were held differently depending on who organized them," etc., why, in comparison with "receptions that emphasized the military and naval glory of Kent, the events arranged for Elizabeth in Canterbury had a completely different content," etc. The article contains minor typos, such as: "Of course", "monarchies", "royal entertainment", etc. The conclusions do not allow us to evaluate the scientific achievements of the author within the framework of his research. The conclusions do not reflect the results of the research conducted by the author in full. In the final paragraph of the article, the author unexpectedly reported that "the summer travels of the English royal court in 1573 are of undoubted interest in the context of studying the political history of England in the XVI century," explained that "special interest in this particular trip is due to the fact that this is a rare case when a long reception of the queen was organized by a bishop," etc. The author stated that "on Elizabeth's part" it was "a way to indicate her support for the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England in general." The author unexpectedly summarized that this "incident confirms how important religious policy was for the English kings of the XVI century." etc. The final paragraphs of the article do not clarify the purpose of the study. In the reviewer's opinion, the potential purpose of the study has been partially achieved by the author. The publication may arouse the interest of the magazine's audience. The article requires significant revision, first of all, in terms of formulating the key elements of the research program and their corresponding conclusions.

Second Peer Review

Peer reviewers' evaluations remain confidential and are not disclosed to the public. Only external reviews, authorized for publication by the article's author(s), are made public. Typically, these final reviews are conducted after the manuscript's revision. Adhering to our double-blind review policy, the reviewer's identity is kept confidential.
The list of publisher reviewers can be found here.

English history and culture has long attracted the attention of not only professional historians, but also lovers of the country's past, which gave a lot to democracy, literature, theater, industry and trade, navigation, etc. What is worth only the era of the War of the White and Scarlet Roses, the period of industrial revolution, the formation of the British Colonial Empire, over whose possessions never The sun did not set. And of course, the institution of the monarchy has been a landmark for the United Kingdom for more than one century. In this regard, it is important to study various aspects of the formation of English monarchism. These circumstances determine the relevance of the article submitted for review, the subject of which is royal travels in early Modern times. The author sets out to analyze the literature on the summer travels of the Elizabethan court, as well as to show the royal visit to Kent in 1573. The work is based on the principles of analysis and synthesis, reliability, objectivity, the methodological basis of the research is a systematic approach, which is based on the consideration of the object as an integral complex of interrelated elements. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the very formulation of the topic: the author seeks to characterize the practically unexplored summer trip of Queen Elizabeth to Kent in 1573. Considering the bibliographic list of the article, as a positive moment, it will make it possible to note its scale and versatility: in total, the list of literature includes over 20 different sources and studies. The undoubted advantage of the reviewed article is the involvement of foreign English-language literature, which is determined by the very formulation of the topic. Among the works attracted by the author, we will point to the works of V.A. Tauber, A.Y. Seregina and other authors, whose focus is on various aspects of English history of the XVI century. Note that the bibliography is important both from a scientific and educational point of view: after reading the text of the article, readers can turn to other materials on its topic. In general, in our opinion, the integrated use of various sources and research contributed to the solution of the tasks facing the author. The style of writing the article can be attributed to a scientific one, at the same time understandable not only to specialists, but also to a wide range of readers, to anyone interested in both the history of England in general and the institution of monarchism in this country in particular. The appeal to the opponents is presented at the level of the collected information received by the author during the work on the topic of the article. The structure of the work is characterized by a certain logic and consistency, it can be distinguished by an introduction, the main part, and a conclusion. At the beginning, the author defines the relevance of the topic, shows that Elizabeth "went on summer trips much more often than her predecessors: twenty-three times during the forty-four years of her reign." As the author rightly notes, "each such trip was not just an entertainment event, but an important political act and a means of communication between the queen and her subjects": "in fact, for a very significant proportion of the British, it was the only chance to see the monarch firsthand." The author shows the differences in the receptions of the queen in the cities of Kent, appealing to military and naval glory, and in Canterbury, where the reception had a greater religious significance. The article reveals in many ways the daily life of the English society of the early Modern period. The main conclusion of the article is that "the summer journey of the court could become a tool for the implementation of the royal religious policy, and also demonstrates how important such visits were for the bishops who hosted them." The article submitted for review is devoted to an urgent topic, will arouse readers' interest, and its materials can be used both in lecture courses on the history of Modern times and in various special courses. In general, in our opinion, the article can be recommended for publication in the journal Genesis: Historical Research.
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