Sixteenth-century England was a century of religious turmoil. I used the words Protestant and Catholic in this book simply to make it easier on the modern reader, although other words and terms were in play during that era. Thirty years after taking the throne, Elizabeth said, “When I first came to the scepter and crown of this realm, I did think more of God who gave it to me than of the title, and therefore my first care was to set in order those things which did concern the Church of God, and this religion in which I was born, in which I was bred, and in which I trust to die not being ignorant how dangerous a thing it was to work in a kingdom a sudden alteration of religion.”
Her father had wrested his realm back and forth between religious approaches, and her brother had been far to the end of the Protestant spectrum and her sister far to the end of the Catholic one. She wisely chose to steer her nation down the via media, the middle way. Elizabeth was a uniter. She did not let Catholics take over her realm, nor the far wings of Protestantism—Puritans and Calvinists—though she had beloved friends and councilors amongst all three.
She was a woman of quiet faith; Elizabeth’s prayers are rich, detailed, humble, and submissive. She refers to herself repeatedly as a “handmaid,” she is abject and penitent, she is personal. She asks for help, she offers praise. She—amazingly—writes her prayers out in many languages: English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Her prayers reveal the fact that she, like others in the sixteenth century, clearly recognized a firmly established hierarchy. She understood that she was to be abject and humble before God, and that she was dependent upon His mercies and grace. But she also understood that her courtiers were to be humble and, when required, likewise abject before her, and their subordinates to them, all the way down the ladder. There is no democracy in the kingdom of heaven, nor was there in this one on earth.
Elizabeth was very fond of bawdy jokes; I think she and her whole court enjoyed the wit and the wordplay and the teasing repartee they brought—it was a kind of flirty intellectual jousting. In fact, those kinds of jokes are replete throughout the literature of the time. Shakespeare himself was the master of them and they are as much a part of this multidimensional queen as her faith, her temper, her affections, and her strength.
I tried to use actual poems and plays from the sixteenth century; I attributed them in the book where it would naturally fit in, but that wasn’t always possible.
I’m not one who thinks Elizabeth was having a daily melodramatic meltdown. Biographer Alison Plowden says, “Elizabeth had learnt to conceal her innermost feelings before she grew out of her teens, and as she grew older she either ‘patiently endured or politely dissembled’ her greatest griefs of mind and body.” I think she had a temper and she used and lost it from time to time, but she had an amazing ability to control herself, too—when she was in the Tower, when she faced the Spanish with only a little blink, and with the restraint of her physical passions.
Was Elizabeth a virgin?
Of course, this has been debated for centuries and I’m sure will continue to be throughout the ages. For me, it comes down to personal integrity. She insisted throughout her life that she was a virgin; to believe that she was not a virgin would be to believe that she lied, regularly and consistently, to her people, her courtiers, her friends, and to God. Should she have dallied with someone and then later reclaimed celibacy, she was smart enough to figure out a way to have stated that without lying. She said, to her Parliamentary delegation, “It would please me best if, at the last, a marble stone shall record that this Queen having lived such and such a time, lived and died a virgin.” I’m just going to take her at her word. It makes her sacrifice more poignant as well.
Some of the stories herein may be apocryphal. It’s not certain that Raleigh brought the potatoes or not, but it’s plausible and makes for a good story. No one (thus far!) knows where the famous locket ring came from, but I like to think it came from someone who loved her and knew of her desire to keep her mother close to her heart, and the timing was right. Some say that both faces in the locket are of Elizabeth, but lockets, then and now, are known for keeping a portrait of oneself and a loved one close by; it was unlikely that anyone would keep two portraits of themselves in a locket. It’s clear that Elizabeth kept mementos of her mother about, but subtly, and this would have fit right in. It was fun to invent a provenance. The girdle prayer book I described was most likely to be owned by Elizabeth Tyrwhitt; it exists still in the British Museum and you can see it online. However, all highborn women had highly decorated prayer books attached to their girdles. I have tried throughout to keep the integrity of the dates as much as possible, but births, marriages, and deaths are not always clear nearly five hundred years on, so there may be some unintentional variations.
I don’t know the whole story of poor Eleanor Brydges; I do know that her aunt was accused of poisoning her husband, that Eleanor appeared at court with her sister but then disappears from the record, and that her husband was caught fleeing to the Jesuits in the year that Mary, Queen of Scots, was apprehended. I built upon that for those truths, with apologies for any wrongly taken liberties in her story.
I do not know if Helena retired from more active service, or if the queen would have allowed for that, for certain. But I do know that her ladies wished for it to be so; evidence remains of the letter quoted in the book from Francis Knollys to his wife, the queen’s beloved Lady Knollys. The Earl of Leicester reported that Lady Cobham wished to visit her husband at his country home “to rest her weary bones awhile, if she could get leave,” but he didn’t think it was likely that the queen would allow her to go. So it was certainly an issue among her ladies. Elizabeth had a firm will but always was willing to bend when it made sense, especially for those she loved; and because I wanted to explore this angle of ladies in waiting, the storyline made sense to me.
Although James I had Tudor blood, of course, his reign was the beginning of the English Stuart years and Elizabeth’s is considered to be the concluding reign of the Tudor era. In a Renaissance century rich with intelligence, intrigue, faith, factions, passion, and drama, nearly five hundred years on, she truly stands out, the marvelous daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
To quote Elizabeth herself, though she was not speaking of herself at the time, “The end crowneth the work.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is truly a team sport, and I feel thankful and blessed to have a number of wonderful people who graciously contributed their many talents.
As with each of the Ladies in Waiting books, I relied on the magnificent gifts of Lauren Mackay, historical research assistant and an author in her own right. She always knows exactly where to put her hands on the right material, trims overwrought language, and can dig through a heap of history five hundred years old to suggest the exact fact the book requires. This time around, Jessica Barnes, a talented longtime friend and trusted, gifted editor with Story-Driven Editorial, also stepped in to assist with her invaluable story-depth and character-development insights. The exceptional Jenny Q of Historical Editorial brought her knowledge base and amazing, intuitive plot analysis to the completed manuscript. Laura A. Wideburg, PhD, lead teacher at the Swedish Cultural Center in Seattle, Washington, was an invaluable resource of all things Swedish Renaissance. Thanks very much to Susan Hageman and the Royal Horseguards Hotel, a beautiful property located in the Whitehall district, near and dear to all British history lovers.