Contact with the great is not ordinarily, for the plain man, a bed of roses; and there is no reason to suppose that it was otherwise in the spacious times of Elizabeth. You probably got knighted, if you were not a knight already, which cost you some fees, and you received some sugared royal compliments on the excellence of your entertainment and the appropriateness of your 'devices'. But you had wrestled for a month with poulterers and with poets. You had 'avoided' your house, and made yourself uncomfortable in a neighbouring lodge. You had seen your trim gardens and terraces encamped upon by a locust-swarm of all the tag-rag and bobtail that follows a court. And with your knowledge of that queer streak in the Tudor blood, you had been on tenterhooks all the time lest at some real or fancied dislike the royal countenance might become clouded, and the compliments give way to a bitter jest or to open railing. 'I have had hitherto a troublesome progress,' writes Cecil to Parker in 1561, 'to stay the Queen's majesty from daily offence conceived against the clergy, by reason of the undiscreet behaviour of the readers and ministers in these countries of Suffolk and Essex.'[383] Parker himself was something of a favourite with Elizabeth, yet John Harington can record an incredible insult to his wife on the doorstep of Lambeth.[384] And Richard Topcliffe, hunter of recusants, describes with indecent glee how the hospitality of Edward Rookwood in 1578 was rewarded with a committal to prison and a public obloquy on his religion.[385] The arrogance of the royal train had always to be reckoned with. As far back as 1526 Henry VIII had issued a formal household order against the spoliation of houses in progress.[386] In 1574 Leicester instigated a surprise visit to Berkeley Castle, which was not in the 'gestes', and so ruined the head of deer by killing twenty-seven in one day that Lord Berkeley in a passion disparked the estate. This appears to have been a deliberate scheme by Leicester to bring Berkeley into disfavour and secure the castle himself.[387] The Stuart households were probably just as bad. After Anne's visit in 1603, the Leicester corporation had to pursue the court 'aboute lynnyns and pewter that was myssinge'.[388]