Meantime, as St. George’s Day was approaching, and as the Earl was fond of banquets and ceremonies, it was thought desirable to hold a great triumphal feast at Utrecht.  His journey to that city from the Hague was a triumphal procession.  In all the towns through which he passed he was entertained with military display, pompous harangues, interludes, dumb shows, and allegories.  At Amsterdam—­a city which he compared to Venice for situation and splendour, and where one thousand ships were constantly lying—­he was received with “sundry great whales and other fishes of hugeness,” that gambolled about his vessel, and convoyed him to the shore.  These monsters of the deep presented him to the burgomaster and magistrates who were awaiting him on the quay.  The burgomaster made him a Latin oration, to which Dr. Bartholomew Clerk responded, and then the Earl was ushered to the grand square, upon which, in his honour, a magnificent living picture was exhibited, in which he figured as Moses, at the head of the Israelites, smiting the Philistines hip and thigh.  After much mighty banqueting in Amsterdam, as in the other cities, the governor-general came to Utrecht.  Through the streets of this antique and most picturesque city flows the palsied current of the Rhine, and every barge and bridge were decorated with the flowers of spring.  Upon this spot, where, eight centuries before the Anglo-Saxon, Willebrod had first astonished the wild Frisians with the pacific doctrines of Jesus, and had been stoned to death as his reward, stood now a more arrogant representative of English piety.  The balconies were crowded with fair women, and decorated with scarves and banners.  From the Earl’s residence—­the ancient palace of the Knights of Rhodes—­to the cathedral, the way was lined with a double row of burgher guards, wearing red roses on their arms, and apparelled in the splendid uniforms for which the Netherlanders were celebrated.  Trumpeters in scarlet and silver, barons, knights, and great officers, in cloth of gold and silks of all colours; the young Earl of Essex, whose career was to be so romantic, and whose fate so tragic; those two ominous personages, the deposed little archbishop-elector of Cologne, with his melancholy face, and the unlucky Don Antonio, Pretender of Portugal, for whom, dead or alive, thirty thousand crowns and a dukedom were perpetually offered by Philip ii.; young Maurice of Nassau, the future controller of European destinies; great counsellors of state, gentlemen, guardsmen, and portcullis-herald, with the coat of arms of Elizabeth, rode in solemn procession along.  Then great Leicester himself, “most princelike in the robes of his order,” guarded by a troop of burghers, and by his own fifty halberd-men in scarlet cloaks trimmed with white and purple velvet, pranced gorgeously by.

The ancient cathedral, built on the spot where Saint Willebrod had once ministered, with its light, tapering, brick tower, three hundred and sixty feet in height, its exquisitely mullioned windows, and its elegantly foliaged columns, soon received the glittering throng.  Hence, after due religious ceremonies, and an English sermon from Master Knewstubs, Leicester’s chaplain, was a solemn march back again to the palace, where a stupendous banquet was already laid in the great hall.