I was thinking:
A five day journey bu ship to the royal capital?! How can you run a medieval nation if it's that far away?!
And then I realized I knew nothing about sailing distances.
So I checked!
Yeah... that's about the distance from Southampton to Gibraltar.
And the British managed to colonize somebody else's land on every single continent (and a whole bunch of islands!) before the first engine was ever even successfully tested.
Never thought I'd underestimate how insane humans can be, but there ya go...