The King's Daughter (50 page)
CHARACTERS IN THE KING’S DAUGHTER
REAL
JAMES I OF ENGLAND AND VI OF SCOTLAND – King of England after the death of Elizabeth I. Previously King of Scotland from the age of two, after the forced abdication of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots. He accepted the English throne from the woman who had signed his mother’s execution warrant.
ELIZABETH STUART – second child and first daughter of James. Born in Scotland.
HENRY FREDERICK STUART, PRINCE OF WALES – oldest son of James and older brother of Elizabeth. Born in Scotland.
CHARLES, DUKE OF YORK – their younger brother, with the recorded nickname of ‘Baby Charles’ (later Charles I of England). Born in Scotland.
ANNE OF DENMARK – Queen to James, mother of Henry, Charles and Elizabeth.
ROBERT CECIL, LORD SALISBURY – English Secretary of State and chief adviser to James. The ‘secret king'. Also known historically as ‘the King’s Little Beagle’ and ‘the King’s Monkey'. In this book, also called ‘Wee Bobby'.
SIR FRANCIS BACON – cousin to Cecil, and his frustrated political rival.
ROBERT CARR – favourite and likely lover of James. Subsequently replaced by the Duke of Buckingham.
LORD AND LADY HARINGTON – guardians of the young Elizabeth after James’s accession to the English Crown. NB Not to be confused with his cousin, Sir John Harington, godson of Elizabeth I and inventor of the flush toilet (which Elizabeth I did not think had a future).
LADY ANNE DUDLEY SUTTON – childhood companion, then lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth. Niece of Lady Harington.
FREDERICK, ELECTOR PALATINE – German prince, suitor of Elizabeth.
FREDERICK ULRICH OF BRUNSWICK – German prince, suitor of Elizabeth.
MRS HAY – Elizabeth’s former nurse.
OTHERS – real courtiers, ladies-in-waiting, doctors, ambassadors and political figures, including poet and dramatist Ben Jonson, royal architect Inigo Jones, and the suitors for the hand of Elizabeth. Even the put-upon playwright, Samuel Daniel, is real, and I ask his ghost to forgive the liberty I take with his reputation.
And BELLE, BICHETTE and CHERAMI.
FICTIONAL
THALIA BRISTO – ‘Tallie'. With African parents, but raised in Southwark. Bought as a gift for Queen Anne and given by her to Elizabeth. Her presence at court is based on an often-overlooked demographic reality. The number of people of African descent in England at this time was large enough for Elizabeth I to have ordered them to be expelled in 1596. (See Historical Notes.)
PETER BLANK – serving man to Prince Henry. However, his alleged great-grandfather, of African descent, was historically real, one of the official trumpeters, first to Henry VIII, then of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII, who can be seen pictured in a procession on the Great Tournament Roll of Westminster at the Guild Hall in London.
MRS TAFT – and the whores at Fish Pool House in Southwark. They are, however, based on reported reality.
ABEL WHITE – Scottish stable groom to Elizabeth.
FRANCIS QUOYNT – fire master and fireworks expert, formerly employed by Cecil.
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE STORY
SOURCES
Elizabeth Stuart was much observed and described from a respectful, if not star-struck, distance, but almost nothing is known about her emotional life. Her many letters usually conform to the formulae of the period and don’t give away much except her famous high spirits. A gossipy biography written later in the 17th century by one of the court ladies is now thought to be flummery. I have therefore tried to make the historical chronology of events correct as far as I could learn (and sources agreed) while having to imagine almost entirely what Elizabeth thought about almost everything. The challenge has been to imagine the privately plausible from the known public details, portraits, gossip, etc. The same challenge arose with most of my other main historical characters.
A little more helpfully, King James wrote extensively and spoke his mind with no thought of tact – and was much quoted, often in horror or indignation. Sir Francis Bacon left us his
Essays, Apophthegms,
and other treatises, which give glimpses into his formidable, if unhappy, mind. Whilewriting, I sometimes found myself cursing as well as blessing that gossipy old letter writer John Chamberlain for locking in the exact dates of events at the Stuart court while leaving my real questions about the people unanswered.
Apart from the disastrous fictional masque,
‘Niger in Albion’
I have not made up any major court events. (Mind you, all word of such a disaster would undoubtedly have been suppressed.) I have, however, compressed the time frame once or twice to avoid an endless sequence of masques, hunts, feasts, and other recreations. Frustratingly, Elizabeth is largely left out of historical reports while hindsight often includes Charles (at the time a minor figure not expected to survive into adulthood) because he later became king, led England into civil war, and had his head chopped off. I have occasionally inserted Elizabeth into occasions when, though not noted, she could well have been present.
If Henry had lived to become Henry IX, he would very likely have changed the course of English history by avoiding the Civil War. He might, however, have become embroiled in the religious wars on the Continent. He is oddly absent from most general history books, even though he was widely popular and his death in 1612 caused a nationwide outpouring of popular hysteria and grief similar to that following the death of Princess Diana. The reasons for this absence from official history should be apparent in the story.
Elizabeth’s early life, treated in this book, held two peaks of interest – the time of the Gunpowder Plot and the time leading up to and including her marriage. Her greatest melodramatic adventures were still to come, very soon. To compare my imagined Elizabeth with what is known of the historical one, you will find a time line on my web site, www.christiedickason.com.
HISTORICAL REALITIES
The love of Henry’s life was indeed his sister, Elizabeth. But, given his strict morals, stern temperament, and open distaste for his father’s loose living, I did not rise to baited hints that their relationship was incestuous. In that dysfunctional family, it did not need to be sexual to explain their closeness. Henry may or may not have had an affair with Frances Howard (later famous for the Overbury murder case). But most sources, and his own character, suggest that he was still a virgin when he died at the age of eighteen.
Queen Anne was indeed furiously opposed to the Palatine marriage for Elizabeth, on religious, financial and status grounds. Her mocking of Elizabeth as ‘Goody Palsgrave’ is documented. Elizabeth did defy both parents to secure her marriage to Frederick. The scene of his first arrival in London is closely based on factual reports, as is the about-face that Frederick somehow produced in James after the (documented) near debacle of the betrothal ceremony.
Henry was deeply involved in and committed to settling the New World. However, one source reports that his interest was largely kept secret because of the political and commercial sensitivity of European interest in the Americas. In the book, I have suggested one particular reason for his secrecy. James did fear both of his older children and envy their wide popularity among the English. This was not paranoia. He himself had been used to depose his own mother while he was still a toddler. Later, he had tacitly acquiesced to the execution of his mother and accepted the English throne from her executioner. As a child, he had been kidnapped and manipulated by powerful Scottish lords who wanted to rule Scotland through him. He had every reason to fear a palace revolution that would put his son on the throne in his place – or his daughter.
Though Tallie is fictional, the presence in early 17th century England of people of African descent is well documented,although, until recently, scholarship has tended to focus on the development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade later in the century. A 1617 portrait of Anne of Denmark shows a barely visible, unremarked, groom of African descent holding her horse. Titania’s ‘Indian boy’ in
A Midsummer’s Night Dream,
Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus,
and other literary references (including the queen’s ‘noble blackamoor’ who pulled a masque chariot in place of a lion) are further examples. Londoners would almost certainly have seen African envoys, merchants, scholars, and sailors. And, without doubt, their explorations, exploitations, piracy and commerce brought the 16th and early 17th c. English into contact with a wide range of peoples, from those (in the Americas) whom they considered ‘savages’ to the ‘noble moor’ like Shakespeare’s
Othello.
Queen Elizabeth herself bought a white taffeta coat for a favourite ‘lytle Blackamoor’ – which did not stop her, in 1596, from ordering the removal of all blacks from England, ‘of which kinde of people,’ she wrote, ‘there are already here too manie…’
There was undoubtedly fear and suspicion among the English of anyone who looked ‘strange'. But one challenge in writing Tallie was to try to set aside our modern attitudes towards racism and the legacy of the slave trade, to guess what attitudes might have predated ‘scientific racism'. The slave trade with the West Indies had only just begun and was still on a very small scale. In a period when you could also buy the guardianship of a wealthy orphan, apprentices and indentured labour, slaves,
per se,
were still most often thought of as captives of war, like Aaron the Moor. In the early 17th c. on the written evidence they left behind, the English seemed to be fairly xenophobic towards most foreigners, the French and Italians in particular. In that hierarchical society, wealth, status and education would have defined a person as much as colour of skin.
The Firemaster’s Mistress
HARPER
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers.
THE KING’S DAUGHTER.
Copyright © 2010 by Christie Dickason.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-39664-1
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-06-197627-8
10 11 12 13 14
OV
/
RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland,
New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk