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.
Books dealing with the personalities who loom so large include Benjamin Woolley’s The Queen’s Conjurer (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), a biography of John Dee, Elizabeth’s astrologer; Robert Lacey’s Robert, Earl of Essex: An Elizabethan Icarus (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971); and Robert Lacey’s Sir Walter Ralegh (London: History Book Club, 1973). Francis Bacon’s Complete Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 2008), allows us to experience firsthand his dazzling intelligence and observations about life, as relevant now as when he wrote them. Neville Williams’s All the Queen’s Men: Elizabeth I and Her Courtiers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1972), is a good overview and includes portraits of many people, allowing us to picture them more easily. Lacey Baldwin Smith’s Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), throws light into the murky—and foreign to us—depths of the Tudor-era mind. Finally, for details about the personal lives and situations of the men who sat in the House of Commons, there is P. W. Hasler’s The House of Commons 1558-1603, 3 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1981). This series was commissioned by the History of Parliament Trust.
Lettice Knollys is due a biography, and no doubt one will appear soon, as her story is important and absorbing. At the moment, a novel by Victoria Holt, My Enemy the Queen (New York: Doubleday, 1978), fills the void.
Books on the women who served Elizabeth include the newly published biography by Ruth Elizabeth Richardson, Mistress Blanche, Queen Elizabeth’s Confidante (Great Britain: Logaston Press, 2007), along with Dulcie M. Ashdown’s Ladies in Waiting (London: Arthur Barker, 1976) and Anne Somerset’s Ladies in Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984).
Books about Shakespeare abound. I found James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008); and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), good at reminding me that Shakespeare was a man before he turned into the Bard.
Statesmen deserve their own studies, and Conyers Read’s Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955) and Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960) give the great man his due in exhaustive detail.
Studies about the Armada have been undergoing a new popularity. The original analysis of what happened was Garrett Mattingly’s brilliant The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959). But newer works, adding to this, are Patrick Williams’s Armada (Great Britain: History Press, 2000); John Barratt’s Armada 1588: The Spanish Assault on England (Great Britain: Pen & Sword Military, 2005); and Neil Hanson’s The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the Spanish Armada (New York: Knopf, 2003). The latter has an unfavorable view of the English, particularly Elizabeth.
People are fascinated by espionage in the Elizabethan era. I found Stephen Budiansky’s Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005); Alan Haynes’s The Elizabethan Secret Services (Great Britain: Sutton, 1992); and Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992) to be very instructive.
Finally, there are books examining the perception of Elizabeth through the ages. These sociological/popular culture books remind us that history is not a static thing but constantly changes—or at least the interpretation of it changes—as the mind-set of a society changes. Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson’s England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), is particularly recommended for this.
ALSO BY MARGARET GEORGE
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The Autobiography of Henry VIII
Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles
The Memoirs of Cleopatra
Mary, Called Magdalene
Helen of Troy
Lucille Lost (children’s book)
Elizabeth I Page 83