started for England with her eldest son on 2 June 1603. It is curious to find Cecil protesting to the queen that had he been consulted by her in these ‘accidents of Scotland,’ he would have supported her cause, her interest being with him paramount over all others (Calendar of State Papers, May 1603). In the sequel Salisbury, though on one occasion he felt constrained to disoblige, and received very hard words from her in consequence (Goodman's Court of King James I, i. 37–8), on the whole contrived to render her so many services that she could not ignore her indebtedness to him (Viscount Lisle to Salisbury, Calendar of State Papers, 19 Aug. 1611).
Queen Anne's journey was conducted with considerable pomp, the warrant of charges for her lords and ladies alone amounting to 2,000l. At Berwick there had been some difficulties about the household, and the intended meeting between king and queen at York had not taken place there. But at Althorpe (near Northampton) Ben Jonson's charming ‘Mask of the Fairies’ appropriately welcomed Oriana, while the observant Lady Anne Clifford noted that the queen ‘shewed no favoure to the elderly Las, but to my La. Rich, and such like companie’ (Nichols, i. 174). At Easton Neston the courts joined, and king and queen met; and on 2 July Windsor was reached. It was here that the curious incident of the quarrel between Lords Southampton and Grey of Wilton occurred in the queen's presence, and led to a very hot-tempered letter to the king on the part of the queen herself. On 24 July both were crowned, ‘it being then very bad weather and the pestilence mightily raging.’ It was noted that the queen declined to receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England (Birch's State Papers, cited by Miss Strickland, p. 409), but whether from Lutheran dogmatic considerations, or, as was suspected, from Roman catholic leanings, cannot be decided. The entry through the city of London was deferred till 15 March, for which occasion Dekker devised the solemnity. An unusually liberal jointure (5,000l. a year in land) was settled upon her, the chief offices of her household were filled up, and the day of her splendour had begun.
The serious business of Queen Anne's life might almost seem to have consisted in its pleasures. Of these the chief was her participation in the entertainments which, especially of course at court, absorbed so large a share of the time and of the intellectual activity of her generation, and which exercised no inconsiderable influence upon the progress of English literature and art. If the name of Queen Elizabeth is traditionally associated with the greatest period of our drama, that of Queen Anne—Ben Jonson's Oriana, or, as he afterwards preferred to name her, Bel-Anna—links itself in its turn with the history of the English mask, and of cognate entertainments. The details of her patronage of these must be read in Nichols's elaborate volumes; among the authors whose masks were produced by her orders or for her entertainment were, besides Jonson, Daniel and Campion; among the pieces in which she personally appeared were Jonson's ‘Mask of Blackness’ (1604), his ‘Mask of Queens’ (1609), and Daniel's ‘Tethys' Festival’ (1610). As late as the year 1617 we find her dancing in a mask at Twelfth-night with the newly-made Earl of Buckingham and the Earl of Montgomery. By that time it may be supposed that she had begun to eschew apparel for herself, if not for her ladies, which in 1604–5 had struck Sir Dudley Carleton as ‘too light and curtezan-like for such great ones,’ though another observer, about the same time, was enchanted by ‘her seemely hayre downe trailing on her princely-bearing shoulders.’ She was fond of progresses through the country, starting on her first with the king almost immediately after their coronation (in August 1603); that which seems to have given her the greatest satisfaction was her progress in 1613 to Bath, where the Queen's Bath was named in her honour with an inscription in bad Latin, and to Bristol, whence she departed with tears, saying that ‘she never knew she was a queen till she came to Bristol.’ This journey (as to which see Nichols, ii. 640 seqq.) was estimated by Chamberlain as likely to cost 30,000l. A theatrical company of youths was not long afterwards licensed, at the mediation of the queen on behalf of Samuel Daniel, to perform tragedies and comedies at Bristol under the name of the Youths of her Majesty's Chamber there (Calendar of State Papers, 10 July 1615). In addition to her passion for these entertainments and for the extravagance which they entailed in dress and such-like matters (Chamberlain to Carleton, 8 Jan. 1608), in addition to her expensive dealings with her silkman, with purveyors of ‘physical and odoriferous parcels,’ and, above all, with the court jewellers, Herriot and Van Lore—of which the State Papers contain frequent notices—she indulged the taste for building which she had already gratified in Scotland. We hear of her in 1617 ‘building at Greenwich, after a plan of Inigo Jones,’ and she was continually making architectural changes in her London
