rfolk,
receiving the attendance of numerous troops of gentry, and making visits
in her way to all who felt themselves entitled, or called, to solicit
with due humility the costly honor of entertaining her. Her train was
numerous and brilliant, and the French ambassadors constantly attended
her motions. About the middle of August she arrived at Norwich.

This ancient city, then one of the most considerable in the kingdom,
yielded to none in a zealous attachment to protestant principles and to
the queen's person; and as its remote situation had rendered the arrival
of a royal visitant within its walls an extremely rare occurrence, the
magistrates resolved to spare nothing which could contribute to the
splendor of her reception.

At the furthest limits of the city she was met by the mayor, who
addressed her in a long and very abject Latin oration, in which he was
not ashamed to pronounce that the city enjoyed its charters and
privileges "by her only clemency." At the conclusion he produced a large
silver cup filled with gold pieces, saying, "Sunt hic centum librae puri
auri:" Welcome sounds, which failed not to reach the ear of her gracious
majesty, who, lifting up the cover with alacrity, said audibly to the
footman to whose care it was delivered, "Look to it, there is a hundred
pound." Pageants were set up in the principal streets, of which one had
at least the merit of appropriateness, since it accurately represented
the various processes employed in those woollen manufactures for which
Norwich was already famous.

Two days after her majesty's arrival, Mercury, in a blue satin doublet
lined with cloth of gold, with a hat of the same garnished with wings,
and wings at his feet, appeared under her chamber window in an
extraordinarily fine painted coach, and invited her to go abroad and
see more shows; and a kind of mask, in which Venus and Cupid with
Wantonness and Riot were discomfited by the Goddess of Chastity and her
attendants, was performed in the open air. A troop of nymphs and fairies
lay in ambush for her return from dining with the earl of Surry; and in
the midst of these Heathenish exhibitions, the minister of the Dutch
church watched his opportunity to offer to her the grateful homage of
his flock. To these deserving strangers, protestant refugees from
Spanish oppression, the policy of Elizabeth, in this instance equally
generous and discerning, had granted every privilege capable of inducing
them to make h