INTRODUCTION

1. In 1797 appeared a volume with the title Paul Hentzner’s Travels in England During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Translated by Horace Late Earl of Orford and first printed by him at Strawberry Hill, to Which is Now Added Sir Robert Naunton’s Fragmenta Regalia, or Observations on Queen Elizabeth’s Times and Favourites; with Portraits and Views. The late Earl of Orford (Horace Walpole) was more candid in his prefatory Advertisement (p. vi) in acknowledging that “The translation was the production of the idle hours of another gentleman,” who has been identified as Richard Bentley, son of the famous Cambridge philologist. It may be assumed that, with the exception of a couple of obvious translator’s notes, the annotations provided on the text are by Walpole himself. Walpole (unlike his good friend Thomas Gray) appears to have been ignorant of Latin, since in his notes he fails to comment on some of Hentzner’s obvious howlers silently corrected by Bentley.
2. The Fragmenta Regalia by Sir Robert Naunton (1563 - 1635) (despite the title, it was written in English) was originally published in 1641 and had been reprinted repeatedly (1642, 1650, 1653, 1694, 1743, 1745). For the English reader, Hentzner’s travelogue would have come as a novelty. Paulus Hentzner’s Itinerarium Germaniae, Galliae, Angliae, Italiae had been printed at Nuremberg, in 1612 (an electronic copy may be obtained here). Hentzner (1558 - 1623) was a Brandenburg-born lawyer who had served as tutor to a son of Duke Karl of Silesia, and in that capacity had accompanied the lordling on a Grand Tour of Germany, France, England, and Italy spanning the years 1596 - 1600 (the English portion of these travels, described on pp. 113 - 162, occupied August and September of 1598).
3. The volume Hentzner published clearly has its origin in a diary he kept along the way, carefully recording dates, times of day, and distances travelled. For the instruction of his German readers, he subsequent added a lot of background information taken from his readings. For England, he borrowed liberally from William Camden’s Britannia. This is acknowledged for London and Dover , and is no less true for other places he visited (Nonesuch, Cambridge, Oxford, Windsor, and Canterbury). Other sources are also cited, including Paulus Jovius (Paolo Giovio) and Polydore Virgil. Despite relying on such a trustworthy source as Camden, he managed to include a remarkable amount of misinformation: that Mary died after one year on the throne (§ 18), that Lady Margaret Beaufort died in 1460 (§ 19) , that Cardinal Wolsey had been beheaded (§ 50), and so forth. His German ear had a hard time with English names and he frequently made a hash of them (even though he must have seen a number of them written in Camden). Then too, a number of his transcriptions of funeral inscriptions and similar texts are seriously wrong. Nevertheless, for all his obvious shortcomings, when he describes what he saw with his own eyes he is a valuable and interesting witness to details of Elizabethan life, and so his English travelogue can be read with profit.
4. Hentzner’s Latin text poses special editorial problems because of his propensity for making mistakes. Although is conceivable that some mangling of English names (and possibly even some more serious blunders) are printer’s errors, I have let all of them stand on the grounds that they are likelier his own, because English was unfamiliar to his ear. Then too, some of the mistakes in his roster of the English Peerage (§ 62) suggest some of his errors may have their origin in his misreading of his own handwriting when it came time for him to decipher his original travel notes: I mean such mistakes as Subton for Sutton and Lalimer for Latimer. And at times I have refrained from changing other things that an editor would normally correct. Take, by way of illustration, this sentence in § 56 (among a list of things worth seeing at Hampton Court): Vera Mariae Stuartae Scotiae reginae securi percussae, eiusdemque filiae imago. Mary Queen of Scots of course had no daughter, and in another author’s text one would not hesitate to identify this as a printing mistake for filii. But how likely is it that Elizabeth would have suffered a portrait of Mary to remain on display after her execution? It seems more probable that Hentzner misidentified (or had misidentified for him by an incompetent cicerone) a portrait of some other woman.