Still, she was wise enough and overawed enough to know when she should stop, and so she curtsied, kissed the Queen’s elegant hand, and then jumped up and kissed her pink-and-white cheek for good measure. Thomasina took her by the hand and led her out of the room, leaving the Queen still sitting by the fire.
She paused there for a moment, and then took the two pieces of folded paper from her bodice, unfolded them and read them carefully through, her lips moving with the words. With slow deliberation she held each one to the flames, watched as the golden fire caught the corner, held up the papers and saw them consumed utterly to crisp ash which she dropped back in the hearth.
A few minutes later the Queen swept out of her bedchamber like a high black-and-white thundercloud from the wastes of the ocean.
LXXXIV
IF I WERE THE shade of Homer, I might essay to describe the wrath of the Queen when her councillors told her, with great self-satisfaction, that the viper Queen of Scots was dead. She had been bent to it against her will like a damascene steel blade and now, the tension released, she shipped back with devastating effect. She roared, she cursed, she painted bloody and terrifying word pictures, she had Burghley and Davison kneeling and trembling to her, and both of them under arrest by the end of their meeting. Burghley, by reason of his age and long service, she allowed to retire to Theobalds and later received back to Court in March, after a further tongue-lashing.
Davison she shredded publicly and in detail, from the top of his head through his miserable taste in clothes to the soles of his (metaphorically) blood-boltered boots, to his vaunted but shabby learning, his lack of wisdom, his damned, overweening self-righteousness and his prideful lack of respect for her sovereignty. In the course of her diatribe she let him know that she had just burnt his weapon against her.
Davison marched from the Council Chamber for the last time, his face stony with shock, surrounded by four men-at-arms. The ice-floes had stopped passing down the Thames, and so Davison went by boat to Traitor’s Gate, just as the Queen herself had in her sister’s reign. With him went Sir Walter Raleigh, the Captain of her Guard, bearing Her Majesty’s personal warrant releasing David Becket and Simon Ames.
At the Tower this new reversal caused a frightened flurry. They needed a litter for Ames, who was no longer delirious, but was still very ill and weak. While they were waiting for it to come, Raleigh questioned Becket in his cell and learnt more from him than Becket thought he did.
Raleigh had a cynical understanding of how to reward a man coupled with the dramatic talents of a Henslowe. He had Davison brought up from the antechamber where he had been sitting in silence. Becket walked out of his prison cell and watched as Davison marched in and sat on the bed. Ceremoniously, Raleigh gave Becket the keys and Becket slammed the door and locked it on the Queen’s ex-Privy Councillor.
Becket eventually came to trial for the killing of Mr James Ramme and the jury was told to acquit by the judge after barely half the evidence was heard. By that time Simon Ames, well wrapped and bandaged, could watch the proceedings and be amused by them. It was rumoured that Walsingham had also lost his Master of Posts, Mr Hunicutt, who had hanged himself in a sudden fit of brainsickness and no inquest ever found out the truth of that.
Pentecost was made a ward of Thomasina de Paris, to be educated and cared for by her. Robert Carey was released from his father’s ward and given a present of gold from the Treasury, with which he kept himself out of the Fleet by paying a few of his more pressing creditors. He had learnt something unknown about himself in his service to Thomasina: that the Court bored him and that his instinct for gambling required stronger satisfaction than playing primero for high stakes.
When it came time for a brave man to carry a message of condolence to the Queen of Scots’ undutiful son King James, he volunteered for the task. Unfortunately, he never had the chance to explain the Queen’s innocence of her cousin’s blood, because King James would not receive him into his realm since the Scottish nobles were planning to ambush and kill him. However, other things came of the couple of months that he spent kicking his heels around the manor of Widdrington near Berwick.
Davison did not hang, despite the Queen’s determination that he should, thanks to the lawyerly representations of both Cecils, Sir Francis Walsingham and even Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh opined courageously to the Queen that to hang Davison would give him too great an idea of his importance. Raleigh also advised injurious forgiveness and humiliating oblivion. And so Davison eventually stood trial in Star Chamber for his crime of executing the Queen of Scots, was fined ten thousand pounds and lived retired for the rest of his life. Lest he think himself a martyr, the Queen continued to pay his salary until he died.
Historical note This book is set in the period between the death of Sir Philip Sidney in the Netherlands – October 1586 – and the execution of Mary Queen of Scots on February 8, 1587 (modern dating), a year before the Spanish Armada of 1588, and four years after the events in Firedrake’s Eye.
Elizabeth I had reigned since 1558, confounding the confident predictions of most important men of the time that a mere weak and feeble woman could not possibly rule by herself. Her succession had been an accident of genetics and custom. In common with every king of his time, her father Henry VIII had desperately wanted a son to succeed him. His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, had produced one daughter – Mary Tudor – and no sons that lived past babyhood. Henry came to the convenient conclusion that this was because God was angry with him for marrying his dead brother’s wife and accordingly sought a divorce. The pope disagreed (because Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, was controlling Rome at the time) and forbade it. In order to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn, Henry broke from the Roman Catholic Church, made himself Head of the Church of England and gave himself that much-needed divorce.
Unfortunately, Anne then made the mistake of giving birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, on September 7, 1533. After she miscarried of a boy a little later, Henry had her executed on a trumped-up charge of adultery.
By the time Henry died, his ferocious marrying had given him only one more child, Edward. According to the rules of succession in England, and Henry’s will, the Protestant Edward VI became king first, although still a child; after he died, Mary (a Catholic) followed him, and when she too died without issue, Elizabeth became queen.
It was assumed that Elizabeth would marry as soon as she could. She had a wide variety of suitors, whom she seems to have greatly enjoyed teasing, and married none of them – almost certainly because she had no intention of handing any power over to any man. By the middle-eighties, it was clear that she was no longer able to produce an heir of her body and so the choice of her successor became as constant a source of anxiety to her councillors as her potential husband had been earlier.
By right of descent, Mary, Queen of Scots was clearly her successor. Unfortunately, Mary, Queen of Scots was a Catholic, related to the ultra-Catholic Guise family of France, and she had been kicked out of Scotland thanks to a spectacular series of blunders, including being implicated in the murder of her husband Darnley and marrying Bothwell, the nobleman who, she claimed, abducted and raped her and who was also implicated in Darnley’s murder. She had been Elizabeth’s prisoner since May 1568, a perpetual source of trouble. The ten-month-old son she abandoned when she fled Scotland became James VI of Scotland and was brought up a Protestant. Eventually he would succeed Elizabeth as James I of England and Scotland, but until the very end of her life, Elizabeth saw no reason to be pinned down on the subject.
In the sixteenth century, religion was as rancid a provoker of hatred and killing as politics have been in this century. This is the greatest difference between us and our ancestors. In modern agnostic Western culture, religion has become a matter of private personal choice and faith in God is often regarded as, at best, a quaint form of self-deception. In the sixteenth century, religion mattered enormously. Catholics and Protestants were alike convinced that they knew the only
True Road to Salvation and that everyone who disagreed would end in Hell for eternity. Queen Elizabeth herself seems to have been more sane on the matter than many of her subjects, insisting that she would not attempt to make windows into men’s souls. However, not even she could avoid the ratchet-effect of contending extremists. The Catholics and Protestants of Elizabeth’s reign probably had more in common with modern Islamic zealots than we might like to think.
Elizabeth’s head of the secret service (although there was officially no such thing at the time) was Sir Francis Walsingham. An extreme Protestant, he had been quietly stalking the Queen of Scots for years. In the summer of 1586 he had finally managed to get her completely tangled in a thoroughly infiltrated plot against the queen’s life, headed by a Catholic gentleman named Sir Anthony Babington, who was executed. After what can only be called a show trial in the autumn of 1586, Mary, Queen of Scots was condemned to death. However, Elizabeth refused for months to sign the warrant for her execution – for which she has been heavily criticised, both at the time and since by self-righteous and patronising males. Finally, Walsingham’s protégé, William Davison, managed to get her to sign the warrant, and Mary, Queen of Scots had the martyr’s death she had probably come to desire by then. Queen Elizabeth has been heavily criticised for this too, often by the same men.
Elizabeth’s actions around this time were so extraordinary, even for a highly strung woman under heavy pressure and in genuine fear of her life, that I began to wonder how she might have been manoeuvred into executing her cousin queen. A connection with the vague mutterings of scandal around her liaison with Thomas Seymour, admiral of England in her fifteenth year, became part of the answer – and so the plot of this book was born. I would like to emphasise here that there is no evidence whatever that the central thesis of my book is historically true – there are hints and suggestive circumstantial evidence, but nothing stronger.
۩
I do not intend even to try and supply a bibliography – I have used so many sources of information, I’ve forgotten half of them myself, and three house moves in the past four years have buried some of my notes deeper than the lost cities of Troy. Who, for instance, was the author of a wonderful unpublished thesis about the Elizabethan prisons of London, on which I based my picture of the Fleet? Whoever he was, I’d like to thank him for his scholarship and vivid writing. Janet Arnold and Jean Hunnisett’s books gave me the fantastic architecture of Elizabeth’s clothes; David Starkey, Robert Lacey and Simon Thurley have provided productive quarries of information about court life in their books, and Simon Thurley’s restoration of the Tudor parts of Hampton Court Palace should be visited by anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of royal life. Marina Warner’s book Alone of All Her Sex on the subject of the Virgin Mary gave me my figure of the Madonna.
As before, Stowe’s Survey of London and the Topographical Society’s A to Z of Elizabethan London, compiled by Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor, have guided me and my characters around that strange and familiar city.
Glossary
aqua fortis - nitric acid
aqua vitae - brandy
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . . “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee” - beginning of the traditional Catholic prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary
Babington plot - see historical note
bale of dice - thieves’ cant for a pair of dice, often false
biggin - close-fitting cap worn by babies and young children
billament – jewelled headdress
Board of Greencloth – department of state dealing with the administration of the court, especially practical services such as heating and food
bodkin – small, thin dagger used for opening letters
booze – traditional English slang word meaning alcoholic drink
boozing ken – worst kind of pub
Bouge of Court – prestigious state-subsidised board and lodging at court
canions – loose breeches
chamberers – court servants doing the menial work for Elizabeth
cinnabar – red oxide of mercury, highly poisonous, used as blusher
Island of Cipangu – Japan, at this time still in contact with Europe through the Portuguese
Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord – January 1
cloth-of-gold – cloth literally woven from very fine wires of gold.
cloth-of-silver – the same, only silver
Cloth of State – a kind of square awning over the queen’s seat, wherever it happened to be, to show she was the queen.
collops – chops of meat
comfit – any kind of nonsticky sweet
complected – the balance of one’s humours
coney-catcher – (thieves’ cant) Elizabethan con artist
cramp-rings – (thieves’ cant) leg irons
cuisse – armour thigh piece
distemper – illness, mysteriously caused – or a hangover
domus providenciae – generic term for all that part of the Court that dealt with practicalities like laundry and food – the service department, under the authority of the Clerk of the Board of Greencloth
ego te absolvo – “I absolve you,” beginning of the prayer of absolution said by the priest during the Sacrament of Confession
Egyptians – gypsies
esses – two linked capital-letter S’s, Elizabethan symbol of sovereignty
the Falcon – well-known bawdy-house on the South Bank of the Thames
false-front – a highly elaborate decorated triangle of cloth attached like an apron to the front of the top petticoat, so it could be revealed by the drawn-back sides of the kirtle
farthingale – hooped petticoat like a crinoline that held the skirts out in a fashionable shape
farthingale-sleeves – very full sleeves held out by hoops in the same way
Fleet prison – a notorious debtors and criminal prison near Fleet bridge in London, known for its riots
footpad – mugger
gard – wide strip of material used to trim the hems of kirtles to protect them from wear and mud
garnish – (prison slang) a bribe
halberd – a spearhaft with a blade like a cross between an axe and an old-fashioned tin-opener – still carried by Yeomen of the Guard
hard sauce – like brandy butter, only made with sherry (delicious)
Hermes Trismegistus – neo-Platonic writer much respected as a purveyor of ancient and prophetic wisdom – the Hermetic knowledge – until revealed in the early seventeenth century to be a post-Christian fake
homunculus – (Latin – “little man”) the inner self
humour – basic to Elizabethan medicine: four humours combined to make a man: blood (sanguine h.); phlegm (phlegmatic h.); yellow bile (choleric h.) and black bile (melancholic h.)
Infirmerar – nun (or monk) in charge of the sick bay of the convent
jakes – toilet
jointure – income, usually from land, given to a gentlewoman on marriage as part of her dowry but inalienably hers rather than her husband’s or her children’s, to provide her support in case the husband died
kinchin-mort – (thieves’ cant) a girlchild
Knight’s Commons – the better class-and more expensive-ward of the Fleet prison
Liberties of Whitefriars – area of London where ecclesiastical rather than common law applied, and so generally a haunt of thieves and debtors
Little Ease – notorious dungeon in the Tower of London, deliberately built too small for a man to stand, sit or lie full length
Marrano – Portuguese Sephardic Jew
morion helmet – curved-brim Spanish-style helmet
muliercula – (Latin – “little woman”) a midget or dwarf
orangeado – a Seville orange, partly hollowed and stuffed with sugar
paten – the flat dish used to put the Host on, during Mass
patten – wooden overshoe like a clog to keep expensive leather out of the mud
partlet – elaborately pleated and embroidered linen garment, covering only the shoulders and upper chest and fastening under the arms
peascod-bellied – the lower half of a doublet padded so it stuck out like a paunch – very fashionable
penner – leather pouch worn on the belt and used by clerks to carry pens, penknife and ink
petard – an explosive charge – the traditional ball full of gunpowder with a fuse sticking out of the top
physic – medicine
pike – very long, thick spear used against cavalry by men standing in close ranks
posset – warming or medicinal drink
Presence Chamber – throne room
primero – card game, quite similar to poker
pursuivant – general term for Elizabeth’s counterintelligence men
rebato-veil – very fine cobweb linen veil held with wires in a high heart shape around the face and shoulders
recusant – someone who broke the law by refusing to go to church on a Sunday, usually Catholic
red sanders – Elizabethan food dye
screever – one who reads and writes for the illiterate, later a pavement artist
stays – Elizabethan corset
Saint Stephen’s Day – now called Boxing Day
stomacher – boned triangular piece of cloth, often embroidered, pinned to the front of the bodice
the Stool – close stool – a silver chamberpot in an enclosed velvet-covered seat
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