VICE REGAL PROGRESSES.
Reading edition
“Les ambassadeurs envoyés en France par les princes étrangers, faisoient à Paris une entrée pompeuse et solemnelle. Cet usage a subsisté jusque vers le milieu du dernier siècle: on ignore pourquoi il a été aboli.”[14]
Dict. des Etiquettes, par M. de Genlis.
I think however one may guess! The age of pompous and solemn ceremonies, like the age of chivalry, is over, and for ever; both belonged to times of ignorance and barbarism: and long before the great explosion from the revolutionary crater took place, public opinion and private comfort were undermining that mass of cumbrous forms, which weighed upon the feelings, tastes and enjoyments of the victims whose rank obliged them to submit to their galling infliction. If any now submit to the gêne of gorgeous state, it must be in the irremediable dulness which produces the lowest order of pride, and which is more gratified by figuring in a procession, than in the page of history, to illustrate the records of their country.
The Irish Lord Lieutenants of the olden times were subjected to all the pageantry, privation and display which then distinguished the majesty they represented. From the very starting post of official initiation, they were called on to abandon all the personal ease and independence of private life. They left England, and returned to it, according to certain rules and forms, which it would have been leze-majesté to have neglected. The interval of the commonwealth, had caused some of the forms of the vice-regal progress to be forgotten; yet in Charles the Second’s time, we find Lord Essex writing to a friend, to find out, if he is to return in the same state with which he departed, and to prepare him a black suit trimmed with black ribbons, to make his grand entry into London; even though he returned in a sort of disgrace. Sir John Perrot’s departure for the Lord Deputyship, as described by his quaint biographer, is a scene for a melodrame! He had received the queen’s orders to sail with, and command the fleet, sent to intercept the Spanish invaders directed against the Irish coasts, and “to interrupt the King of Spayne, and his Navie.”
“Then did Sir John Perrot prepare for that voiage, (to Ireland, by Waterford), with all convenient speede. He had with him fiftie men in orange tawny cloaks,” (think of that, ye Brunswickers; a Lord Lieutenant arriving in Ireland with fifty men in orange!!) “whereof divers were gentlemen of good birth and qualitie. Also he had a Noyce of musicians with hym, being his own servants. He was served all in silver plate, with all things else suitable; and soe being royally furnished in all respects, he departed from London, about August, and going from thence, by barge, he had with him divers noblemen and gentlemen, who did accompany hym unto the shipps. As they lay in this barge, against Greenwich, where the Queene kept her court, Sir John Perrot sent one of his gentlemen on shore, with a diamond, in a token unto Mistres Blanche Parry, willing hym to tell her, that a diamond coming unlooked for, did alwais bring goode looke along with it: which the Queene hearing of, sent Sir John Perrot a fair jewell, hanged by a white cypresse; signifying withall that as longe as he wore that for her sake, she did believe, with God’s healpe, he should have no harme; which message and jewell Sir John Perrot received joyfully; and he returned answer to the Queene, that he would weare that for his soveraigne’s sake; and doubted not, with God’s favour, to returne her shipps in safetie; and either to bring the Spaniards if they came in his way, as prisoners, or else to sink them in the sea. Soe as Sir John Perrot passed bye in his barge, the Queen looking out at the window, shaked her fan, and put out her hand towards him; who making a low obeysance, put the scarfe and jewell about his necke, which the queen sent him. Being arrived at Gyllingham, where the queen’s shipps rode, Sir John feasted on shipboard such noblemen and gentlemen, as came with him thither.”
After enduring every misery and vicissitude, and “storms and contrary winds,” that the tyranny and caprice of the elements could inflict, after being obliged to put in by stress of weather, at Falmouth, Plymouth, and “soe sett sea to Ireland, and touched at Baltimore, and Waterford, and thereabouts, upon the Irish coast;” and having missed the Spanish ships, encountered pirates and chased corsairs “to the Coste of Flaunders,” and his ship striking ground on the Kentish Knocks, and being all but lost, the unhappy Lord Deputy found himself, one fine day, driven near Harwich, and so sailed back into the Thames, after a three months unprosperous voyage.
His second descent upon Ireland, though more successful, was scarcely less tedious. Contrast this vice-regal progress, when the wisdom of our ancestors was wisest, with the progress of a Lord Lieutenant in these degenerate times, when setting aside all precedents, and discarding all time-honoured authorities, the new viceroy steps into his carriage for Ireland, as if he were stepping into his chaise for a visit to Kew, skims along the macadamized roads at ten miles an hour, and mounting his steam-boat, crosses St. George’s Channel, without touching at Falmouth, Plymouth, Baltimore, or Waterford; and instead of finding himself at the end of three months in the mouth of the Thames, is in six hours comfortably seated at dinner in Dublin Castle, in an easy chair, cushioned with eider or iron, as the innovations of the day, for which our ancestors were wise in vain, may suggest.
I do not defend this levelling principle of accommodation and comfort, that spares so many risks of life, of health, and of time, incurred when men on leaving Dublin for London, made their will, and invoked the prayers of the church in crossing to Park Gate. I do not presume to doubt the superiority of the times, which Madame de Genlis so fondly regrets: I merely state the fact of the vice-regal progress in the older and wiser times, as compared with the same journey at the present epoch, when we have fallen upon evil men who make good roads, and upon evil times, which have produced steam engines, and steam boats, without reference or respect to the immutable order of things established either at, or before 1688.