d.

The Prince and his mother, Anne of Denmark, followed the king to Windsor
later in the year, spending a whole month on the journey from Edinburgh.
This seems an absurd waste of time to us, who rush through in ten hours
and a half by the Limited Mail, breakfasting at Edinburgh, and dining
comfortably in London. However these Royal progresses were very slow and
stately affairs. All the great lords and gentlemen whose places lay on
the route, were honoured by visits. Their grand old castles, their
beautiful new Elizabethan houses, such as Bramshill which I have
described, or Hatfield, or Hardwicke Hall, were thronged with guests.
There were hawking and hunting parties, masques and tourneys, and every
sort and kind of amusement for the Royal visitors. And we can well
imagine how interested the precocious young prince must have been in the
novelty of this journey through the rich kingdom which he hoped to rule
over one day.

The queen and prince arrived at Windsor during the feast of St. George,
the patron saint of the famous order of the Garter. The little boy was
made a knight of this most illustrious order; and astonished those
present by his "_quick witty answers, princely carriage and reverent
obeisance at the altar_,"[64] which seemed extraordinary in one so
young and so ignorant of such ceremonies.

As the plague was increasing about Windsor, Prince Henry removed to the
royal palace of Oatlands on the Thames near Weybridge. Here for a time
his sister, Princess Elizabeth, lived with him. Few pages of history are
prettier or more interesting than the story of Henry and Elizabeth's
affection for each other. She was two years younger than her brother, a
gay, sprightly girl, destined to a most troubled after-life, for she is
best known to the world as "the unfortunate Queen of Bohemia,"
grandmother of our English King, George the First. At sixteen she
married the Elector Palatine, who was made king of Bohemia by the
Protestant party in Germany, and thereby found herself in direct
opposition to the Roman Catholic party, who, backed by Spain, supported
the claim of Austria to the Bohemian throne. Poor Elizabeth, in spite of
trouble and sorrow, poverty and the horrors of war, retained, though a
fugitive and an exile, much of her gayety to the very end of her life;
and some of her letters, even in her days of sorest need, are most
amusing reading. But the letters that are chiefly interesting to us are
those which passed