The Prince and his mother, Anne of Denmark, followed the king to Windsor later in the year, spending a whole month on the journey from Edinburgh. This seems an absurd waste of time to us, who rush through in ten hours and a half by the Limited Mail, breakfasting at Edinburgh, and dining comfortably in London. However these Royal progresses were very slow and stately affairs. All the great lords and gentlemen whose places lay on the route, were honoured by visits. Their grand old castles, their beautiful new Elizabethan houses, such as Bramshill which I have described, or Hatfield, or Hardwicke Hall, were thronged with guests. There were hawking and hunting parties, masques and tourneys, and every sort and kind of amusement for the Royal visitors. And we can well imagine how interested the precocious young prince must have been in the novelty of this journey through the rich kingdom which he hoped to rule over one day. The queen and prince arrived at Windsor during the feast of St. George, the patron saint of the famous order of the Garter. The little boy was made a knight of this most illustrious order; and astonished those present by his "_quick witty answers, princely carriage and reverent obeisance at the altar_,"[64] which seemed extraordinary in one so young and so ignorant of such ceremonies. As the plague was increasing about Windsor, Prince Henry removed to the royal palace of Oatlands on the Thames near Weybridge. Here for a time his sister, Princess Elizabeth, lived with him. Few pages of history are prettier or more interesting than the story of Henry and Elizabeth's affection for each other. She was two years younger than her brother, a gay, sprightly girl, destined to a most troubled after-life, for she is best known to the world as "the unfortunate Queen of Bohemia," grandmother of our English King, George the First. At sixteen she married the Elector Palatine, who was made king of Bohemia by the Protestant party in Germany, and thereby found herself in direct opposition to the Roman Catholic party, who, backed by Spain, supported the claim of Austria to the Bohemian throne. Poor Elizabeth, in spite of trouble and sorrow, poverty and the horrors of war, retained, though a fugitive and an exile, much of her gayety to the very end of her life; and some of her letters, even in her days of sorest need, are most amusing reading. But the letters that are chiefly interesting to us are those which passed between the young brother and sister in their happy youth, while Elizabeth was still a merry, light-hearted girl. The wretched system of which we have already spoken, that of sending royal children away from home to be "boarded out" in the house of some great noble or gentleman, caused no little sorrow to this brother and sister. Prince Henry, as heir to the crown, was given a separate establishment in 1603, and for a time Princess Elizabeth was permitted to share it. When they went to Oatlands the king allowed them seventy servants;