This Passage, The Most Used
And The Shortest, Is Of Thirty Miles, Which, With A Favourable Wind,
May Be Run
Over in five or six hours' time, as we ourselves
experienced; some reckon it only eighteen to Calais, and to
Boulogne
sixteen English miles, which, as Ortelius says in his "Theatrum,"
are longer than the Italian.
Here was a church dedicated to St. Martin by Victred, King of Kent,
and a house belonging to the Knights Templars; of either there are
now no remains. It is the seat of a suffragan to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, who, when the Archbishop is employed upon business of
more consequence, manages the ordinary affairs, but does not
interfere with the archiepiscopal jurisdiction. Upon a hill, or
rather rock, which on its right side is almost everywhere a
precipice, a very extensive castle rises to a surprising height, in
size like a little city, extremely well fortified, and thick-set
with towers, and seems to threaten the sea beneath. Matthew Paris
calls it the door and key of England; the ordinary people have taken
into their heads that it was built by Julius Caesar; it is likely it
might by the Romans, from those British bricks in the chapel which
they made use of in their foundations. See Camden's "Britannia."
After we had dined, we took leave of England.
FRAGMENTA REGALIA
OR, OBSERVATIONS ON THE LATE QUEEN ELIZABETH, HER TIMES, AND
FAVOURITES. WRITTEN BY Sir Robert Naunton, MASTER OF THE COURT OF
WARDS. A.D. 1641.
To take her in the original, she was the daughter of King Henry
VIII. by Anne Boleyn, the second of six wives which he had, and one
of the maids of honour to the divorced Queen, Katharine of Austria
(or, as the now styled, Infanta of Spain), and from thence taken to
the royal bed.
That she was of a most noble and royal extract by her father will
not fall into question, for on that side was disembogued into her
veins, by a confluency of blood, the very abstract of all the
greatest houses in Christendom: and remarkable it is, considering
that violent desertion of the Royal House of the Britons by the
intrusion of the Saxons, and afterwards by the conquest of the
Normans, that, through vicissitude of times, and after a
discontinuance almost of a thousand years, the sceptre should fall
again and be brought back into the old regal line and true current
of the British blood, in the person of her renowned grandfather,
King Henry VII., together with whatsoever the German, Norman,
Burgundian, Castilian, and French achievements, with their
intermarriages, which eight hundred years had acquired, could add of
glory thereunto.
By her mother she was of no sovereign descent, yet noble and very
ancient in the family of Boleyn; though some erroneously brand them
with a citizen's rise or original, which was yet but of a second
brother, who (as it was divine in the greatness and lustre to come
to his house) was sent into the city to acquire wealth, AD
AEDIFICANDAM ANTIQUAM DOMUM, unto whose achievements (for he was
Lord Mayor of London) fell in, as it is averred, both the blood and
inheritance of the eldest brother for want of issue males, by which
accumulation the house within few descents mounted, IN CULMEN
HONORIS, and was suddenly dilated in the best families of England
and Ireland:
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