What Anne thought of the situation is not on record. She had seen little of the world, outside the coarse boorishness of a petty low-German court; she was neither educated nor naturally refined, and she probably looked upon the lumpishness of her lover as an ordinary thing. In any case, she bated none of her state and apparent contentment, as she rode gorgeously bedight with her great train towards Greenwich. At the foot of Shooter's Hill there had been erected an imposing pavilion of cloth of gold, and divers other tents warmed with fires of perfumed wood; and here a company of ladies awaited the coming of the Queen on Saturday, 3rd January 1540. A broad way was cleared from the pavilion, across Woolwich Common and Blackheath, for over two miles, to the gates of Greenwich Park; and the merchants and Corporation of London joined with the King's retinue in lining each side of this long lane. Cromwell had recently gained the goodwill of foreigners settled in London by granting them exemption from special taxation for a term of years, and he had claimed, as some return, that they should make the most of this day of triumph. Accordingly, the German merchants of the Steelyard, the Venetians, the Spaniards, the French, and the rest of them, donned new velvet coats and jaunty crimson caps with white feathers, each master with a smartly clad servant behind him, and so stood each side of the way to do honour to the bride at the Greenwich end of the route. Then came the English merchants, the Corporation of London, the knights and gentlemen who had been bidden from the country to do honour to their new Queen, the gentlemen pensioners, the halberdiers, and, around the tent, the nobler courtiers and Queen's household, all brave in velvet and gold chains.[201] Behind the ranks of gentlemen and servitors there was ample room and verge enough upon the wide heath for the multitudes who came to gape and cheer King Harry's new wife; more than a little perplexed in many cases as to the minimum amount of enthusiasm which would be accepted as seemly. Cromwell himself marshalled the ranks on either side, "running up and down with a staff in his hand, for all the world as if he had been a running postman," as an eye-witness tells us.