Elizabeth I (126 page)

I wander. The past has a way of welling up and gripping me, especially when there is so much of it.

“Great-Grandmother, tell us about Elizabeth,” says seven-year-old Henry Seymour. As I suspected he would ask.

“Did she really wear armor and lead her troops?” asks Susannah Rich, shaking her copper curls.

“No, stupid!” says her brother Robert. “Everybody knows she sailed ships and sank the Armada.”

I put my arms around them. “It was not quite like that,” I begin. “You see, once upon a time there was a red-haired princess ...”

“Like you?” Susannah giggles. “Like me?”

“A bit like us,” I say. “After all, we are her cousins. Now this princess grew up to be a queen, and this queen was quite remarkable. But she didn’t sail ships or wear armor.”

“Oh!” says Robert, his face falling.

“But she did something better than that. She made her people feel as if they were wearing armor or sinking ships. Only a very special queen can do that. It isn’t easy, you know. It takes a kind of magic.” I look at them. “Do you understand?”

They look blank. Henry shakes his head.

“You will, my children. You will.”

AFTERWORD

E
lizabeth Tudor—the Virgin Queen—is the supreme mystery woman. It is safe to say that no one knew, no one knows, and no one will ever know exactly what went on in her mind, and she wanted it that way. That has not stopped everyone from trying, for over four hundred years, to solve that mystery. “What Her Majesty will determine to do only God ... knoweth,” William Cecil, her principal secretary, said. A master of the rolls of the next generation, Sir Dudley Digges, wrote, “For her own mind, what that really was, I must leave, as a thing doubly inscrutable both as she was a woman and a queen.” She famously said, “I will make no windows into men’s souls,” and that may reflect less her religious tolerance—as is usually assumed—than serve as a warning sign to others about herself.

History collaborates with her to hide her true self. We have almost no private letters of hers, no diary, no memoirs. The poems attributed to her are of doubtful authenticity. She is also a mystery because of the blatant contradictions in her behavior. She was a Virgin Queen who encouraged lovemaking (up to a point) and all the outward signs of rapturous love. Her motto was “
Semper eadem
”—“Always the same”—yet she was famous for changing her mind several times over the same decision. She was known to call her sailors back after they had already set sail. Her image is one of leadership and decisiveness, yet she loved to give “answers answerless.” She was fastidious, hating the smell of scented leather or bad breath, but she swore and spat. She was stingy but loved jewels. She exercised stern control over her public image, permitting only approved portraits to be released to the public—ones that showed her looking quite different from how she really did—yet she could lose her temper and put on a show of fireworks. “When she smiled, it was pure sunshine, that everyone did choose to bask in, if they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike,” John Harington wrote.

The only trait that was consistent throughout her life was a superb ability to judge character and to select exactly the right people to serve in the right capacity, thereby getting the most out of the varied talents that surrounded her. She kept the same ministers throughout her reign. Because she listened to these wise advisers, in some ways her reign was a collaboration. But here again is a contradiction, because she, like all the Tudors, had a sense of majesty and would not allow it to be questioned. At the same time, she was in many ways “the people’s Queen” and famously declared herself to be married to England. She seemed to have no illusions about her own limitations as a human being and had inherited her father’s common touch, but never forsook her majesty—a difficult balancing act.

Although Gloriana, the Faerie Queen, is eternal, each age fashioned her after its own needs. After Elizabeth’s death, people quickly tired of the Stuarts and looked back on her reign as a golden age, pointedly celebrating her Accession Day of November 17 on into the eighteenth century. They rousingly celebrated her as a Protestant heroine. In the next century, the anti-Catholic fervor had died down, and they were more interested in Elizabeth the woman, her private life and (suppressed) passions. They saw the tragedy of unfulfilled love, the suffering woman inside the jeweled gowns. By the 1800s, when England had grown into the British Empire, Elizabeth changed into Good Queen Bess, the embodiment of Merrie England (along with her father, Bluff King Hal).

The Victorians saw her as the founder of England’s greatness, with its naval prowess, English trading companies, and explorations of exotic locales. She and her “sea dog” adventurers provided wholesome models for the new children’s character-shaping literature.

More recently, Elizabeth has been seen as the ultrasuccessful female CEO (or action heroine, take your pick), as well as the ultimate English celebrity in an age that is fascinated by the mystique of celebrity, of being famous for being famous. Just her outline—with full skirt, ropes of pearls, high ruffed collar—is instantly recognizable as an icon everywhere. Indeed, her brand recognition is such as to make a commercial product weep with envy. Thus
Eliza Triumphans
continues to exercise her power over us.

Although I have tried, as always, to be true to historical facts, some things come from my own imagination; usually they also have some factual basis. I want to sort some of them out here for you. First, the Spanish Armadas. History focuses on the first, and most climactic, Armada of 1588. But there were at least three others after that. As in the novel, for one reason or another (usually weather) they did not reach their objective. However, they caused a great deal of worry in England, their target. By the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, both sides had tired of the fight, and peace was concluded the following year, 1604. So the famous first Armada, the clash that became a national myth, was the beginning of the war, not its end.

Next, Lettice Knollys, Elizabeth’s cousin. Elizabeth’s animosity toward her started when, during one of Elizabeth and Robert Dudley’s spats in 1565—long before the novel opens—Lettice began a flirtation with him. Dudley, never one to pass up a liaison, became her lover. The enraged Elizabeth dismissed Lettice but forgave Dudley. Lettice had much in common with Elizabeth, and this made their rivalry sharper. Both fancied themselves irresistible to men, both were vain and passionate, both were ruthless. But Elizabeth, being the Queen, could quash Lettice whenever she liked. The animosity between the two played out over Lettice’s son Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex.

In her day, Lettice was thought of as a schemer, a social climber, and shared Dudley’s reputation as a poisoner. Her numerous children and grandchildren played active roles in the next reign and on into the Civil War, fighting on both sides of the conflict. Her great-grandson, Gervase Clifton, composed this epitaph for her: “She was in her younger years matched with two great English peers; she that did supply the wars with thunder, and the court with stars.” She retired to Drayton Bassett, and there the former femme fatale redeemed her days with charitable works, dying at the age of ninety-one in 1634. She has many famous descendants, including Diana, Princess of Wales, in whom her allure survived intact.

Several of the men involved in the Essex rebellion were caught up later in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The leader, Guy Fawkes, really did serve in the household of Sir Anthony Browne in the 1590s. However, the episode of Elizabeth meeting and dancing with him was invented by me—although she well could have done so.

There really was an Old Thomas Parr who lived near Shrewsbury. He is buried in Westminster Abbey and his tombstone says that he was born in 1483 and lived through the reigns of ten monarchs, from Edward IV to Charles I. He died in 1635 when he was brought to court to meet Charles I. The change of diet and environment was too much for him at the age of 152. The episode of Elizabeth and Essex going to visit him is fictional, as is their stay with the Devereux relations and Elizabeth’s goddaughter Eurwen. However, Elizabeth did have over one hundred godchildren, and I wanted to show her special ability to relate to them. Usually they were presented to her, and I thought I would show her actively choosing one herself.

Shakespeare really did have a younger brother Edmund who came to London to be an actor and died young.

After Elizabeth’s death, Francis Bacon earned honors in the Stuart court, becoming Viscount St. Alban and lord chancellor. But he fell from power when he was accused of corruption and bribe taking. He reportedly died from his own curiosity, following a scientific experiment using snow to preserve meat. He took cold, got pneumonia, and died—a death oddly in keeping with his character.

Frances Walsingham had an unexpected life after the death of Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. She remarried within two years to Sir Richard de Burgh, the Earl of Clanricarde, an Essex look-alike. Surprisingly, she converted to Catholicism. One can only imagine her staunch Protestant father spinning in his grave over this turn of events.

There is a lot of speculation about Christopher Marlowe and his espionage activities. Was he murdered to silence him? It seems the standard explanation of his being “killed during a tavern brawl” is far from the truth. But at four centuries’ remove we may never know the truth. Apparently Christopher Blount was involved, at least peripherally, in some espionage, especially around the time of the Babington Plot of 1586, involving Mary Queen of Scots.

I have allowed myself a little leeway in some of the timing of events. Jesuit father John Gerard’s escape from the Tower (which really did occur in the swashbuckling way it is described in the novel) took place in October 1597, a few months later than in the novel. John Donne’s poetry was not published in his lifetime. No one knows what Shakespeare spoke at Edmund Spenser’s funeral, so I used a passage from the funeral in
Cymbeline
. It is true that the poets threw their pens, and possibly their writings, into the grave. In 1938 the grave was opened in hopes of finding them (and possibly an unknown Shakespeare work), but the attempt ended in failure. There really was a “black pillow of death” at Ely, made by a nun and handed down through the centuries, used to ease the passage between life and death. It was burned in 1902 by the son of the last woman who owned it. In the novel I had it in the keeping of the Bishop of Ely, who had a house in London. Catherine Carey requesting it on her deathbed was my idea.

So many books have been written about Elizabeth I and her reign that I can only list the ones I have personally found most helpful in writing this novel.

Certain biographies of Elizabeth herself I kept going back to. J. E. Neale’s
Queen Elizabeth I
(Great Britain: Jonathan Cape, 1934), is the granddaddy of all basic biographies, elegant, concise, and definitive. More modern ones are Alison Weir,
The Life of Elizabeth I
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1998); Alison Plowden,
Elizabeth Regina
(London: Macmillan, 1980); Paul Johnson,
Elizabeth: A Study of Power and Intellect
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988); and Lacey Baldwin Smith,
Elizabeth Tudor: Portrait of a Queen
(London: Hutchinson, 1976). Editors Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, in
Elizabeth I: Collected Works
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), let Elizabeth speak in her own words.

Books with a wider range, encompassing the age, include the very helpful Edward P. Cheney,
A History of England: From the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth,
vols. 1 and 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1914 and 1926). Although almost a hundred years old, it has details missing in newer accounts that favor broader analysis. Others are Wallace T. MacCaffrey’s
Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588-1603
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Susan Brigden’s
New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603
(London: Penguin Press, 2000). John Guy, ed.,
The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and J. E. Neale,
Elizabeth and Her Parliaments,
vol. 1,
1559-1581
, and vol. 2,
1584-1601
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958), add to the picture. There is also Lacey Baldwin Smith,
The Elizabethan World
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), which captures the exuberant spirit of the era.

The Folger Guides to the Age of Shakespeare, a series of pamphlets, cover many subjects. Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor’s
The A to Z of Elizabethan London
(London: London Topographical Society, 1979), enabled me to walk the streets of London as if I were there. Other books that take you to London are Liza Picard’s
Elizabeth’s London
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), and C. Paul Christianson’s lovely
Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London
(London: Yale University Press, 2005). Roy Strong’s
The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), is a pioneering study in the evolving symbolism in her portraiture.

More specifically, palaces and places are described in the following books. Hampton Court has three: Roy Nash,
Hampton Court: The Palace and the People
(London: Macdonald, 1983); R. J. Minney,
Hampton Court
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972); and Walter Jerrold,
Hampton Court
(London: Blackie and Son, no date). This last one is quite old and has delightful watercolors by E. W. Haslehust. Ian Dunlop’s
Palaces and Progresses of Elizabeth I
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1962) supplies many details of architecture and setting. June Osborne’s
Entertaining Elizabeth I: The Progresses and Great Houses of Her Time
(Great Britain: Bishopsgate Press, 1989), provides additional information.