In the autumn of the following year (1564) the Queen in her progress was splendidly entertained at the University. Upon Cecil as Chancellor, as well as Secretary of State, fell the responsibility of making the arrangements; and the letters which relate to the visit, as usual exhibit his perfect mastery of detail. From the avoidance of contagion of plague (which had devastated London in the previous year) to the supply of lodgings for the visitors, everything seems to have been settled with him. He was specially anxious, he said, that the University he loved should make a good figure before the Queen; he himself would lodge “with my olde nurse in St. John’s College,” but the rest of the University was to be turned inside out for the entertainment of the court. The choristers’ school was made into a buttery, the pantry and ewery were at King’s, Gonville and Caius was sacred to the Maids of Honour, rushes strewed the roadways, the houses were hung with arras; the scholars were drilled to kneel as the Queen passed and cry _Vivat Regina_, “and after that quietly and orderly to depart home to their colleges, and in no wise to come to the court.” Sir William Cecil with his wife arrived the day before the Queen (4th August 1564). “I am in great anxiety,” he wrote a few days previously, “for the well-doing of things there; and I find myself much troubled with other business, and with an unhappy grief in my foote.” But notwithstanding his gout, he was received with great ceremony and a Latin oration, and was presented with two pairs of gloves, a marchpain, and two sugar loaves. His great anxiety, expressed to the authorities, was that “uniformity should be shown in apparel and religion, and especially in the setting of the communion table.”
Of the endless orations, the presents, and pedantry with which the Queen was received, of her own coyness about her Latin, of the solemn disputations and entertainments, this is no place to speak; but the official accounts[191] represent the Queen as being agreeably surprised at her reception. After the first service at King’s she “thanked God that had sent her to this University, where she, altogether against her expectation, was so received that she thought could not be better.” This was the first day; but a Catholic friend of the new Spanish Ambassador[192] told him that the Queen’s commendations had so elated the authorities that they besought her to witness one more entertainment. As she was unable to delay her departure, the actors followed her to the first stopping-place, where the proposed comedy was represented before her. “The actors came in,” writes Guzman, “dressed as some of the imprisoned bishops. First came the Bishop of London (_i.e._ Bonner), carrying a lamb in his hands as if he were eating it, … and then others with different devices, one being in the figure of a dog with the Host in his mouth. They write that the Queen was so angry that she at once entered her chamber, using strong language, and the men who held the torches, it being night, left them in the dark, and so ended this thoughtless and scandalous representation.”[193]