ABSTRACT
One of the last stages, or ‘gesses’, of Queen Elizabeth’s late summer progress in 1591 was a three-night visit to Elvetham, a modest estate in the north-east corner of Hampshire that belonged to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. It was not until 20 September, however, that the queen eventually arrived there, already high time for her and her itinerant court to return to the royal palaces. Furthermore, we should realize that had our Gregorian calendar then been in operation the visit would have crossed the threshold into what is now regarded as October; and the full implications of that ought to be taken into account when we consider the viability of outdoor entertainments commissioned by a host anxious to demonstrate, in every available way, both his nobility and the strength of his allegiance. More than three centuries later, and after the mid-eighteenth-century adjustment of the British calendar, the poet John Keats (who was enjoying ‘chaste weather – Dian skies’ in Hampshire) was already noting on 21 September a ‘temperate sharpness’ in the Hampshire air, and feeling the need for a parlour fire in the evening. Yet Keats’s 21 September was effectively ten days earlier than an Elizabethan 21 September and, appropriately enough, the Winchester poem he had been inspired to compose just two days before was an ode ‘To Autumn’ in which ‘gathering swallows’ prepare for migration to warmer climes.1 So, at the end of the royal visit, with the rain bucketing down onto the queen’s coach as Elizabeth left Elvetham, a poet attired in black to betoken mourning, and presumably dripping wet and soaked to the skin, addressed her majesty with words to which the weather added the commiserations of the pathetic fallacy:
O see sweete Cynthia, how the watery Gods, Which ioy’d of late to view thy glorious beames, At this retire doe waile, and wring their hands, Distilling from their eies salt showers of teares; To bring in Winter with their wet lament: For how can Summer stay when Sunne departs?2
