Travels in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth; with Fragmenta regalia or, Observations on Queen Elizabeth, her times and favourites

From the opening

QUEEN ELIZABETH herself, and London as it was in her time, with sketches of Elizabethan England, and of its great men in the way of social dignity, are here brought home to us by Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton.

Paul Hentzner was a German lawyer, born at Crossen, in Brandenburg, on the 29th of January, 1558. He died on the 1st January, 1623. In 1596, when his age was thirty-eight, he became tutor to a young Silesian nobleman, with whom he set out in 1597 on a three years’ tour through Switzerland, France, England, and Italy. After his return to Germany in 1600, he published, at Nuremberg, in 1612, a description of what he had seen and thought worth record, written in Latin, as “Itinerarium Germaniæ, Galliæ, Angliæ, Italiæ, cum Indice Locorum, Rerum atque Verborum.”

Horace Walpole caused that part of Hentzner’s Itinerary which tells what he saw in England to be translated by Richard Bentley, son of the famous scholar, and he printed at Strawberry Hill two hundred and twenty copies. In 1797 “Hentzner’s Travels in England” were edited, together with Sir Robert Naunton’s “Fragmenta Regalia,” in the volume from which they are here reprinted, with notes by the translator and the editor.

Sir Robert Naunton was of an old family with large estates, settled at Alderton, in Suffolk. He was at Cambridge in the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign, having entered as Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, and obtained a Fellowship at Trinity Hall. Naunton went to Scotland in 1589 with an uncle, William Ashby, whom Queen Elizabeth sent thither as Ambassador, and was despatched to Elizabeth’s court from Scotland as a trusty messenger. In 1596–7 he was in France, and corresponded with the Earl of Essex, who was his friend. After the fall of Essex he returned to Cambridge, and was made Proctor of the University in 1601, three years after Paul Hentzner’s visit to England.

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