To his surprise, Jack laughed. ‘What? It makes what?’
She shrugged. ‘Something my mam used to say. Let’s get out of here tomorrow.’
‘To where?’
‘Calais. Put the pins down where those people were murdered. To remind us who the real monsters are.’
They laced their fingers together and kissed, grave-dirt flaking, as the calm, glassy surface of the canal bathed them in reflected moonlight.
Author’s Note
Anne Percy, nee Somerset, the countess of Northumberland, has long been credited as a driving force behind her husband and the earl of Westmorland’s Northern Rebellion of 1569. She fled to Scotland in the wake of the rebellion and thereafter had a chequered stay in that kingdom, eventually giving birth to her daughter, Mary, and leaving for Bruges in August 1570 ‘with neither penny nor halfpenny’. The ship was called The Port of Leith, as depicted, but having it taking shelter in Bridlington Bay is my own invention (this being a regular retreat for ships hoping to ride out North Sea storms in the period). Also fictional is the portrayal of the flight from Old Aberdeen taking place against a backdrop of an assault by Morton’s soldiers. All we know is that the journey is recorded as having taken place from the 23rd of August to the 31st. Morton’s men certainly had her husband, the earl of Northumberland, and would undoubtedly have liked to get their hands on Anne; yet escape with Lord Seton she did. Her husband, imprisoned at Lochleven (a castle on an island from which Mary Queen of Scots once made a daring escape), would be less fortunate. He was sold to the English government in 1572, taken to York, and beheaded.
Anne remained in exile in Europe for the rest of her life, attracting much interest from Catholic sympathisers and Protestant enemies. In the English state papers, she is reported as having called Elizabeth a ‘supposed’ queen, and, on arriving in Bruges, engaging with one John Prestall, a shadowy necromancer (and chancer) who sought to place Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne. Anne was in Malines by 1572, Brussels in 1574, and at Liège from 1575. She died in 1596. What became of her last child, variously identified as Mary, Maria, and Marie, is something of a mystery.
Astonishingly, no full-length biographical study of Anne Percy exists. However, I am deeply indebted to Dr Jade Scott for providing me with her ODNB entry and the biographical chapter of her doctoral thesis, ‘The letters of Lady Anne Percy, countess of Northumberland (1536-91): gender, exile and early modern cultures of correspondence’ (2017: University of Glasgow). It is to be hoped that this excellent piece of work is available to a wider readership soon. In a similar vein, I discovered John Prestall through Michael Devine’s ‘John Prestall: A Complex Relationship with the Elizabethan Regime’ (2012: University of Victoria). Although he only appears fleetingly in the novel, readers might be interested in learning more about a man the thesis describes as ‘an unsavoury, nefarious, spendthrift, Catholic gentleman from Elizabethan England. A conspirator, opportunist informer, occult conjurer, conman and alchemist’.
Although he became king of France in 1560, Charles IX (born in 1550) did not reach his majority until much later, and he lived very much under the influence of his mother, Catherine de Medici. The first decade of his reign was plagued by the wars of religion fought between Huguenots and Catholics, which were temporarily halted by the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a treaty concluded in early August 1570. In November of that year, the king married Elisabeth of Austria, and the queen-mother busily raised money for and set the Parisian aldermen to plan his much-delayed royal entry. These royal entries were fabulous spectacles designed to introduce monarchs to the cities over which (and, in this case, from which) they would rule. A description of the tableaux and decorations used in Charles IX’s entry can be found in Francis A. Yates’ Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (1975: Routledge and Kegan Paul) and Epic Arts in Renaissance France by Phillip John Usher (2014: Oxford University Press).
The most enjoyable and informative biography of Catherine de Medici is Leonie Frieda’s Catherine de Medici: A Biography (2005: W&N). The queen-mother’s reputation has suffered over the centuries, with the image of a malignant, calculating murderess holding sway. Frieda does not sugar-coat or gloss over the famous ‘Madame le Serpent’s’ occasionally sinister behaviours (such as her very necessary skill in political intrigue), but she does present a more realistic, rounded woman. Catherine was not a scheming poisoner, and her much-criticised interest in horoscopes and the occult was entirely normal for people of her class (of either gender). For an enthralling overview of the structure and dramas of Catherine’s household, Dr Una McIlvenna’s Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici (2016: Routledge) is a must-read.
In researching the effects of poisons, both ingested and cutaneous, I was continually delighted by Eleanor Herman’s The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul (2018: St Martin’s Press). Of especial interest is the section on remedies and amulets used at royal courts in the period to ward off poisons: from disgusting-sounding theriac mixtures to jewels with supposedly magical properties to the much-famed unicorn horns. These were actually narwhal tusks found washed up on beaches in the northern hemisphere and sold at eye-watering prices thanks to the belief that they belonged to unicorns and could reveal the presence of poison. Interestingly, the French royal physician Ambroise Paré rejected the power of these horns in the 1570s (though certainly not because one was used in a murder).
Catherine de Medici ordered construction of the Tuileries Palace begun in 1564. This palace stood at the west side of an as-yet unconnected range that included the existing Louvre on the east. Between them stood a courtyard filled with gardens. The two buildings would be connected later in the century by the Seine-facing Great Gallery, which today forms part of the magnificent art gallery. Construction was still underway during the period of the novel. Sadly, the Tuileries was destroyed in 1871.
Catherine was much credited with helping broker the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, but it was unlikely that she thought it would last. One of the obvious losers from it was Henry, duke of Guise, later known as ‘Le Balafré’, or ‘Scarface’. Guise enjoyed a love affair with Catherine’s daughter, Margaret, in 1570, and was drawn rather unwillingly into the peace and all but forced to marry Catherine of Cleves in order to restore his good name. Peace never sat well with him. In 1572 he became a suspect in the assassination of the Huguenot Admiral Gaspard Coligny, whom Guise held responsible for his father’s death. The result of Coligny’s death was the eruption of hideous violence known to history as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The kind of widespread bloodshed the villains of this novel hoped to spark really did happen. Although it was not for the reasons they hoped, the result was the same: the massacre became a stain on Catholicism, and it led to the fourth war of religion in France (1572-3). Those interested in the Guises will enjoy Stuart Carroll’s Martyrs & Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (2009: Oxford University Press).
Guise did not gift the royal family an African hyena, but such creatures were known in Europe. Menageries existed, although the word itself was not coined until the seventeenth century, and exotic animals were housed in royal courts from Scotland (which boasted a lion and, under James VI, a camel) to England (where the Tower of London was, over the centuries, home to jackals, tigers, pumas, leopards, and a polar bear). The idea of a nobleman owning a vicious hyena is borrowed from a later chapter in France’s history. In the 1700s, the French countryside was the hunting ground of the mysterious ‘beast of Gevaudan’. This animal supposedly slaughtered dozens, favouring women and children. Its reign of terror ended when it was shot dead by one Jean Chastel, Rumours have since grown that the monstrous creature was trained by Chastel, who was said to be able to control its behaviour. Though unverified, eighteenth-century museum records supposedly show that the animal shot, skinned, and then publicly displayed as the beast was a striped hyena – one of which Chastel’s father is said
to have housed in his private menagerie. It is a story so intriguing it has been made into a film: Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001: Dir: Christophe Gans). In the picture, ‘La Bête’ is depicted as a trained, armoured lion. Other theories hold that it was a deformed wolf, or a wolf-dog hybrid.
If Guise was unhappy with peace in France, Francis Walsingham was rightly proud of his work in helping to achieve it. In the autumn of 1570, he was sent as a special ambassador to France to help consolidate it after the previous ambassador, Sir Henry Norris, was recalled. Walsingham returned briefly to England before being dispatched to Paris as the new resident ambassador in January 1571. He had the unenviable task during this second sojourn, which lasted until 1573, of negotiating marriage between Elizabeth and the duke of Anjou. During his time in Paris, he lived at a modest house in Saint-Marceau, and at this period he was years away from acquiring the reputation of the all-powerful spymaster that he would enjoy in later years. He was, if anything, far too trusting and eager to prove his worth, as evidenced by the fact that he trusted in the Florentine agent, Roberto Ridolfi, who would later be found to be behind a plot to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. I thoroughly enjoyed John Cooper’s The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (2012: Faber & Faber); Stephen Budiansky’s Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (2006: Penguin); and Robert Hutchinson’s Elizabeth's Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (2007: W&N). Useful as ever was Stephen Alford’s The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (2013: Penguin), and critical in providing a perspective on the role of women as early modern spies was Nadine Akkerman’s Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (2018: Oxford University Press).
France was far from alone in suffering religious tensions in the late sixteenth century. The failure of the northern rebellion saw the north of England hideously scarred by a wave of brutal punishments for those found guilty of having been part of it. As it was the first (and would be the only) major rebellion against Elizabeth’s government, the reprisals were swift and brutal. Hundreds of men were hanged. Although the clergyman killed in East Gilling was fictional, the death toll for rebels in that town is recorded as 225. When combined with Pope Pius V’s infamous bull, Regnans in Excelsis, which declared Elizabeth a heretic and released all English Catholics from their allegiance to her, the government crackdown on the north ensured that it was an unsettled place throughout the period. It was from 1570 onwards that the English government really began to treat Catholics as enemies of the state rather than nuisances who could be ignored or cowed with the occasional show of barbarity. Similarly, Catholics were suddenly empowered to dispatch Elizabeth with any means that came to them. Jack’s experiences in the north were supported by Krista Kesselring’s The Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith, Politics, and Protest in Elizabethan England (2007: Palgrave Macmillan) and George Thornton’s The Rising in the North (2010: Ergo Press).
The Jesuit college at Douai, then in the Spanish Netherlands, was founded by William Allen in 1568, and became a production factory for Jesuits: missionary priests, usually called seminary priests, whose goal it was to infiltrate England and build support for a return to the Roman religion. Allen would go on to be a vituperative opponent of the Elizabethan regime and would pen a number of tracts and treatises condemning Protestant England and its leaders. The old 1909 biography, William Cardinal Allen: Founder of the Seminaries, by Bede Camm, has been recently reissued and paints an interesting picture of one of Elizabeth I’s bêtes noires.
Although it is only visited briefly in this outing, London will always be an interesting place to write about. I strongly recommend Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England (2013: Vintage Books) and Liza Picard’s Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London (2004: Phoenix). The latter contains the finest modern map of Elizabethan London that I’ve ever come across.
Jack and Amy Cole are reluctant spies. Whether or not they will be dragged into any other plots remains to be seen. Yet the times in which they lived were fast-moving, complex, and endlessly involving for people possessed of intimate knowledge of events and public figures – even if they would rather forget them. As Jack seeks a greater sense of absolution, Rome would seem the natural choice. Amy will go where Jack goes, because he might need rescuing. In 1572, the eternal city would be the site of one of Europe’s most splendid spectacles, and one which drew together any number of diplomats, watchers, and cunning cardinals: a papal conclave…
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Whether you enjoyed this book or threw it aside with great force, Dorothy Parker-style, feel free to let me know on Twitter @ScrutinEye or on Instagram: steven.veerapen.3
Divided Loyalties: An Elizabethan Spy Thriller Page 25