The Spymaster's Daughter

by Jeane Westin

  Sidney did not fall deeply in love with Penelope Devereux until after her forced marriage to Lord Rich in November 1581. He left court and over the next summer wrote 118 beautifully sad sonnets after realizing that he had lost the love of his life.

  I might!—unhappy word—O me, I might

  And then would not, or could not, see my bliss;

  Till now wrapt in a most infernal night

  I find how heav’nly day, wretch! I did miss…

  He never meant them to be published, but, as with so many secrets, they were passed about and eventually printed and handed down to us today.

  Robert Pauley (or Pooley, Poley, or Poole; spelled many ways in records) was a real Walsingham agent and attached to Lady Sidney’s household. He was described as “the very genius of the Elizabethan underworld” and was involved in breaking the Babington plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. His name also appears on a list of prisoners in the Tower. From these few facts, I wove my adventure and Robert and Frances’s love story. Pauley surfaces again in history in 1593 when he is placed at the scene of Christopher Marlowe’s stabbing death at the Bull tavern in Deptford. Since Marlowe was also one of Walsingham’s agents, the men would have known each other. What involvement Robert had in Marlowe’s death, if any, is unknown. During the later 1590s, Pauley served as a spy for Robert Cecil and Elizabeth’s Privy Council in France and in the Netherlands, where he was jailed briefly for spying. After that, he disappears from written history.

  In my story both Dr. Dee and Frances try unsuccessfully to break Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia code, a complex number cipher book written by the German scholar/monk around 1500 that claimed to be a way of delivering messages in a single day. At that time of slow travel, the book seemed to call on demons and was banned by the Catholic Church. There is no shame in Frances’s and Dee’s failure. The code was not broken until the 1990s.

  And, yes, Dee was the original 007 and signed himself so in his communications with Elizabeth. My sense is that he was an internal spy, keeping abreast of what was going on within the court and nobility, for Elizabeth’s eyes only.

  Did Thomas Phelippes really add incriminating lines to Mary, queen of Scots’ secret message to Sir Anthony Babington? No one knows. It was suspected at the time and Mary voiced her suspicions at her trial, but all was denied. There was no doubt that Mary thought herself the true queen of England and longed to claim her rightful place. She even thought that if she could only meet with Elizabeth, she could talk her way free. Since they never met, we’ll never know.

  Mary greatly overestimated her powers of persuasion and underestimated Elizabeth’s determination and sense of her own destiny. She was threatened on all sides during most of her reign, but she was Henry VIII’s daughter and would not be intimidated. Elizabeth was the supremely strong ruler that Henry thought only a son could be and she remains an icon the world round. Anne Boleyn, beheaded because she did not bear the longed-for male heir, had the last laugh. For all things Tudor and Anne Boleyn, try www.theanneboleynfiles.com.

  Although one source claims that the sheriff of Northamptonshire took Mary’s head from Fotheringhay Castle and buried it secretly so that it would not provide a place for Catholic pilgrimage, there are several death masks claiming to be the real one. You can find one here: www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh.../5236154.stm.

  Queen Elizabeth was right to worry about the repercussions of Mary’s execution. Philip of Spain sent his huge armada against England in the following year. It failed spectacularly, thanks to Sir Francis Drake, John Hawkins, Lord Howard, and the God-sent English wind. “God blew and they were scattered” is a phrase used on commemorative medals. But Philip didn’t give up, sending three more armadas during the next decade until he died and Spain was bankrupt.

  Frances Walsingham Sidney did not have a happy marriage with Robert, Earl of Essex, although she bore him five children, three of whom lived. I think Essex was too selfish and involved in his schemes of glory to really love anyone but himself. He thought he was fit to sit on Elizabeth’s throne, a flight of fancy that eventually led him to rebellion and the executioner’s block in the Tower with his enemy Sir Walter Raleigh looking on. He “touched her scepter,” as Elizabeth famously charged, and that was unforgiveable.

  Frances’s life was not over with the loss of her second husband. She married again, to Richard De Burgh, Earl of St. Albans and Clanricarde. They had a son and two daughters; altogether, she had ten children, including two with Sidney. Frances lived out the rest of her life in Ireland and died a Catholic in 1631. What would her father, the great Catholic priest hunter, have made of that?

  Of all my characters, that leaves Stella, Lady Penelope Rich. But she deserves a book of her own.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jeane Westin began her writing life as a freelance journalist, then wrote a number of nonfiction books, and finally came to her first and true love, historical novels. She published two novels, with Simon & Schuster and Scribner, in the late 1980s, and after a long hiatus is once again indulging her passion for history. She lives in California with her husband, Gene, near their daughter, Cara, and has been rehabilitating a two-story Tudor cottage complete with dovecote for more than a decade. You can reach her at www.jeanewestin.com.

  READERS GUIDE

  The

  SPYMASTER’S

  DAUGHTER

  JEANE WESTIN

  READERS GUIDE

  READERS GUIDE

  A CONVERSATION WITH

  JEANE WESTIN

  Q. What intrigued you about Frances Sidney and made you want to write a book about her?

  A. The intrigue lies in what might have been. The personal details of Frances’s life are little known. We do know that she was the daughter of Francis Walsingham, the mastermind of the greatest spy network of the Tudor age; that she married the wildly popular poet of love Sir Philip Sidney; and that she was the wife of Elizabeth I’s last love, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. But who was she apart from these towering male figures?

  Frances has been most often cast by historians as a shadow behind these men and little worthy of note. Since I was a cryptographer at the Pentagon during wartime, I put myself in Frances’s slippers: She must have overheard plotting, been aware of important secrets, seen the supreme urgency of her father’s work. It is unimaginable to me that she would not have been caught up in that excitement and wanted to be part of the spy business…just to prove she could. This kernel of an idea eventually became The Spymaster’s Daughter.

  Q. In your last three novels, you’ve combined historical and fictional characters. How do you decide which historical figures to include and which characters you need to make up?

  A. Choosing historical characters is determined by the story I’m writing and the people actually involved. The choice of new characters depends a great deal on the evolving story’s needs. I did not imagine Lady Stanley until I thought that Frances Sidney, who so obviously had Queen Elizabeth’s favor and the interest of the handsome young Earl of Essex, would have aroused jealousy among the other court ladies. Aunt Jennet served to illustrate how serious it was to have Catholic sympathies in Elizabeth’s England. Meg and Will, Frances’s servants, also evolved from the story’s need for minor characters that had roles to play in her adventures.

  The animals who inspired Quint and Claudius, the Percheron horses who pull the dray to Chartley, are currently living at my daughter’s Percheron farm in California.

  Q. Can you describe the international espionage network set up by Frances’s father, Francis Walsingham? How did it compare to royal spy networks from earlier and later periods?

  A. We know that spies and secret writing were used from earliest history. There is evidence that cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia disguised city names to confuse the enemy. Egyptian hieroglyphs were altered, and a Greek commander coated his message with wax so that it looked like an empty tablet ready for the stylus. Later, the Romans had twenty
different kinds of secret writing, as it was known then. Individual legion commanders even had their own codes. There was cryptography of every kind, using colored beads and pebbles, and messages wrapped about cylinders that could only be read by wrapping them around the same size cylinder. Alphabet reversal and disappearing ink have been in use since writing began. In every time, we have needed covert forms of communication for state, military, and even private purposes.

  For its time, Walsingham’s network was a marvel, so extensive that it reached into Asia, every European court, and even into the Vatican. It set a high bar for subsequent spying operations. The breaking of the German Enigma code by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, England, during World War II marked the beginning of modern code breaking and led to the complex computer codes of today.

  Q. How do the codes that Frances cracks compare to codes used at other times in history?

  A. Frances’s ciphers were complex for the time, but many systems were still based on earlier substitution systems: one letter standing for another. Double substitution was also in use and agreed-upon nulls—meaningless letters meant to confuse—made messages more difficult to break. Some systems were based on ciphers known to both sender and receiver. There was danger of discovery in having an agreed-upon code in two or more places. Mary, queen of Scots was actually trapped by one and lost her head.

  Spies in the field might also use disappearing messages, quite often written in their own urine, which became legible when held close to a candle’s flame.

  Q. You make it sound as if popular poet Philip Sidney was the equivalent of a modern-day rock star—a celebrity of the Tudor period who incited a frenzy of emotion among readers. Is that a fair comparison?

  A. He was a rock star! After his death in 1586 from a leg wound suffered at the Battle of Zutphen in Holland, during which he gave up his leg armor to a friend, he was celebrated as the perfect English knight. The popularity of his love sonnets to Stella and his brave death at the age of thirty-one inspired a cult following that lasted until 1700. It then diminished only to roar back during Queen Victoria’s reign, at which time he returned to even greater cult status.

  For a fascinating flash reenactment of Sidney’s funeral procession, go to http://wiki.umd.edu/psidney/index.php?title=Main_Page.

  Q. The novel suggests that well-born women had almost no say in whom they married. Was that uniformly true or were some parents more lenient with their daughters? How did this compare to marriages made between members of lower classes?

  A. Children were legal property. The purpose of marriage for the well-born was to increase the family’s property or title. This held true for sons as well as daughters. The lower classes had less to gain from marriage, but the primacy of a father as head of the family was still the rule. I can easily imagine that a farmer with a pretty daughter wishing to add to his property would have his eye on the son in line to inherit the neighboring farm.

  Of course, there were favored daughters and sons for whom the rules were set aside.

  Q. You depict Elizabeth I as a notorious skinflint. Did her efforts to keep government spending within what it could afford have any long-lasting impact on the country? When she died, was England a wealthier or poorer country?

  A. Elizabeth watched her purse and spent nothing without good reason. What about her extravagant dress and jewels? These were necessary to reinforce her regal position, both at home and abroad. True, when she died in 1603, England was poorer in its treasury. There had been years of too much rain and poor harvests in the 1590s; Spain had sent four armadas against the country; and Irish uprisings were continuous and ruinously expensive. But England had a foothold in the New World and Elizabeth had signed the charter forming the East India Company. The island nation was about to become a world power, while Spain was bankrupt.

  Q. You suggest that the Earl of Essex pursues Frances because she rejects his overtures. Do you think he had any genuine affection for her or were his reasons for marrying her as self-serving as one might expect?

  A. Essex was very young and, though strong-willed, he was emotionally needy. I believe he had to have constant reinforcement of his self-image. He may have married Frances to defy the queen, who objected to all her handsome young courtiers marrying. When one took another woman, it destroyed the romantic attachment for the queen they all pretended to. It is also rumored that Sidney left his sword and his wife to Essex, passing the torch, as it were, to the next perfect English knight. Nobody really knows. Essex did reject a last meeting with her and his children before he went to the block, as I have noted in the epilogue.

  Q. You portray Mary, queen of Scots as a woman who did, indeed, plot to assassinate her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. Is that how you really see her or did that portrait simply fit the needs of this story?

  A. Yes, I think she plotted to escape every minute of the eighteen-plus years she was imprisoned in England by Elizabeth. Mary always considered herself the rightful queen, even quartering her arms with the English coat of arms. By 1586, after so many years of foiled attempts, in ill health and growing old, she must have become desperate to escape, and agreed to Elizabeth’s death, thinking to take the throne. This was the one plot that could and did condemn her.

  Q. In your novels, Elizabeth I’s ladies-in-waiting almost always fall in love with someone they meet at court, yet they feel estranged from most people there, unable to trust the people around them and beset by traps and trickery. Yet the court was supposed to be a place where top-notch entertainments were available to be enjoyed. Did anyone have any fun there?

  A. Many families sent their sons and daughters to court to gain an advantageous marriage, hoping that Elizabeth would arrange or at least allow one. The costs of court life were huge, so sacrifices had to be made.

  Of course, the court was full of traps and trickery. Follow the money and the power was as true then as now. Think of it as Washington, D.C., only with better clothes.

  Q. Do you ever wish you could have lived during the Tudor period?

  A. Absolutely, although I would hope to bypass the odors of open sewers and unwashed bodies and clothes. When I’m walking along the Strand in London, I’m not seeing the double-decker buses and modern shops; I’m seeing York House and Leicester House, the Thames with a winter frost fair and boys on bone skates and Whitehall sprawling on the opposite riverbank. Not a one exists now except in my mind’s eye. When I’m in London, I always stay at the Royal Horseguards Hotel, which sits atop the site of Elizabeth’s palace.

  Q. Are your own interests still firmly fixed in the Tudor period or do you find yourself reading about other eras? If so, what books have recently captivated you?

  A. I read in many historical periods. I’ve recently finished all of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman Britain trilogy, starting with The Eagle of the Ninth, and am beginning her Saxon period novels. I read many new Tudor period novels and nonfiction books, especially the work of Karen Harper. The Queen’s Governess and Mistress Shakespeare are on my keeper shelf, along with all the nonfiction written by Anne Somerset. I like World War I novels and am reading The Somme Stations by Andrew Martin, short-listed for the CWA Dagger Award, while also listening to Margaret George’s Elizabeth (in my car). George captures that queen’s droll wit to perfection. I’m also reading Jeri Westerson’s Crispin Guest novels about a disgraced medieval knight turned “tracker.” For a change of period, I recently finished The Paris Wife, which is about 1920s Paris and Hemingway’s first marriage.

  Usually, I have about four novels ongoing, not including three or more nonfiction research books. One novel rests by every TV set. I’m a frequent user of the mute button. Unfortunately, life is too short to write about every historical period I’d like to explore.

  Q. Last we heard, you were renovating your Tudor-style home. Have you made any noteworthy changes?

  A. I’m always changing or adding details for authenticity. Last year, I adapted an iron courtyard gate based on famous designer Gertrude Jekyll’s design. M
y most recent and most delightful addition is chimney pots on both chimneys, just like the ones you see in old English villages. My husband and I spent three years searching for them and finally found them in Ohio. A mason with an assistant in a cherry picker drew a sizable neighborhood crowd while installing the 350-pound pots. They are a delight to see from a distance when I return from my daily walk in the park. You can see them at www.jeanewestin.com/bio.

  Q. What would you love to write about next?

  A. I have several ideas, but Stella, Lady Penelope Rich, continues to intrigue me. There’s more to tell about that lady…much more.

  READERS GUIDE

  READERS GUIDE

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What did you most enjoy about The Spymaster’s Daughter?

  2. What character did you like the most? The least?

  3. Are there any details about Queen Elizabeth that you find particularly intriguing?

  4. Would you have liked to live during the Tudor period? What about it would you have liked the most? The least?

  5. If you’d been part of a family that Queen Elizabeth intended to visit on her “progress,” would you have gone all-out to host her, even to the extent of bankrupting yourself, or would you have quickly left town and pretended to know nothing of her impending visit?