by Jeane Westin
Subdued, the boy dug his dirty toe between the cobbles.
John left the lad mumbling and pushed a way clear for Mary, leading her toward the south entrance. “Do not let your heart break, sweet. There will always be such stupid gossipers. She was a woman beyond women, beyond a man’s understanding.”
“Yes, husband,” Mary said, striving for a seldom attained wifely submission. “Though perhaps,” she added, failing the effort, “Elizabeth, being queen, could not be stopped from becoming what she could fully be.”
The noise of the approaching procession rose, and John did not quite hear her. Mary smiled. They were but one week churched, and they had a lifetime to reveal their deepest thoughts slowly by the fire of a winter’s night, or in the warm twilight of a summer’s walk in the extended gardens she was already busy planning for Kelston Manor.
As John pushed their way forward, though still troubled by the hurtful things said against her queen, Mary was warmed by a memory. Lady Katherine Grey always seemed to come to mind to provide her with some intelligence at the right time. “Never underestimate Elizabeth,” she’d told the child Mary many times. Now, watching the queen’s effigy approach, Mary warmed to that thought. Her Majesty would take care of herself and her reputation . . . from heaven if need be. Mary felt Elizabeth’s power and regal dignity still, a part of the queen Mary hoped always to have with her.
They reached the carved high entrance and waited, heads bowed. The coffin’s canopy held up by six knights passed into the abbey, their feet crushing sprays of spring flowers laid by mourners. Then Mary stepped forward to join the queen’s ladies, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had prayed at her bedside as the queen died, and a long procession of marching nobles clothed in black velvet. The crowd shouted their approval as white-clad pauper women followed the procession, the same whose feet the queen had washed on Maundy day in imitation of Christ.
As the canopy covering the coffin disappeared inside the abbey’s great carved entrance, a collective sigh rose from the crowd outside, so loud as to nearly drown the sound of a thousand pairs of boots drumming at once against the abbey’s paving stones.
Inside, John found that thick tapers lit the cavernous apse, fighting the dark through the long sermon and reading of scripture. He smiled in his sadness as he heard the impatient old queen rasping aloud as she had often done of a Sunday morning during an overlong sermon: “Get on with it, good preacher!” Indeed, John thought, had she not been dead this month past, Elizabeth would surely have stalked out at this wordy excess.
At last all ceremonies were ended and Mary joined John as their Faerie Queen, so the poet Edmund Spenser had named her, was laid at the head of her Catholic half sister, Mary Tudor. Near a half century dead, this queen was still reviled as Bloody Mary by Londoners who remembered the smoke and ash of burning heretics rising above Smithfield to drift across the city. If the love of Englishmen had been hers, Mary Tudor would have had Elizabeth’s head on the block, as well. Without that love, she didn’t dare touch young Bess. Yet here lay the sisters, close in death as they never had been in life.
“King James has ordered this,” murmured John, “and is moving his mother, the Queen of Scots, here as well.”
“It is a new reign,” Mary said, speaking softly, accepting that James’s word was now law.
Mourners filed past Elizabeth’s tomb reading the inscription: Consorts both in throne and grave, here we rest two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, in hope of our resurrection.
Robert Cecil approached them and they exchanged courtesies. “What think you of this arrangement, Sir John?”
“My lord, I think I hear a pup! pup! from somewhere.”
Cecil smiled. “His Majesty King James thought this a fitting inscription, and as a new councelor, I could not oppose it.”
They all knelt on both knees by the stone sarcophagus inside which Elizabeth’s coffin lay, gazing on the effigy.
Cecil remarked, “Her Grace would not like this statue of herself from profile.”
Mary nodded. “I think she was displeased with her nose, my lord, and would never allow her portraits to be painted thus.”
She and John turned to smile together, remembering their irascible, fascinating Elizabeth. Then, with final farewells, they backed away from the coffin with all court formality, not daring, even now, to turn their backs on this queen.
They walked together down the vast center aisle and out of the abbey to face the silent people yet waiting, heads uncovered, the sun shining now, wet cobbles steaming.
Cecil straightened his bent back to stand as tall as he could. “You are for the west country, Sir John, with your lady?”
Sir John’s arm went tight about his lady’s shoulders, Mary smiling up at him as the sun lit her face.
“Aye, my lord Cecil, we’re for home. Lady Grey’s younger son, Lord Thomas William, comes in a week to take his mother’s body back to Eltham.” He smiled down at Mary. “And we stay tonight at an inn on the road south from Richmond.”
“If it please you, old friend, I could gain you an apartment at Whitehall Palace for what rest you need.”
John smiled down at Mary. “We thank you, my lord Cecil, but the Blue Boar will be our palace tonight.”
“And forever,” Mary whispered.
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 over a decade. You can reach her at www.jeanewestin.com.
READERS GUIDE
The Virgin’s Daughters
JEANE WESTIN
A CONVERSATION WITH JEANE WESTIN
Q. You’ve written other novels in the past, but this is your first Tudor historical novel. What inspired you to write it?
A. My love of all things Elizabeth I started with my lifelong interest in history, and in particular English history. Though Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine was strong, sensuous and fascinating, she was at best coruler with Henry Plantagenet. Later, Queen Victoria seems to me a shadowy, grandmotherly figure, evoking pity but not devotion. Only Elizabeth Tudor ruled and gave her name to an age that made a small island nation into a great power. She is such a towering personality that innumerable books and movies about her have been created and in today’s Web-connected world, entire Web sites and blogs are devoted to her, producing a steady stream of material, both true and false. And yet, our appetite for Elizabeth does not seem to diminish, but grows. With each new portrait of her life we are fascinated again and want to know more, always in search of an answer to: “At heart, who was she?”
Q. How much of The Virgin’s Daughters is based on history and how much did you make up?
A. That’s a tough question to quantify because so much is a mixture. I stay true to what is known about events and what was reported to have been said, but no one knows what the people thought or said in private. A great deal of Elizabethan material, including many of Robert Dudley’s letters, was lost during the English Civil War. I confess, I have sometimes shifted or fused time and place to keep this book from running to a thousand pages.
Q. Lady Katherine Grey and Mistress Mary Rogers handle their love affairs very differently and experience very different fates as a result. Did you find yourself sympathizing with one lady over the other? And can you tell us what happened to some of Elizabeth’s other ladies-in-waiting?
A. Any reader who has a young daughter will recognize Lady Kate Grey. Her behavior at the time was beyond willful to almost suicidal. Nothing can explain it but her needing love so desperately that she could will herself into believing all would be well simply because she needed it to be. Her young life had been so sterile and loveles
s that she really had no chance to develop a mature view. How many of us can think clearly when we are young and in love? I do not believe that either Kate or Ned wanted the throne, but there is no way that Elizabeth with her troubled life wouldn’t have felt threatened by two people with royal blood having sons so easily.
I am always in sympathy with the character I’m writing at the time. Both Kate and Mary had problems of defiance and delayed satisfaction that most modern women experience, although modern women rarely delay satisfaction to the extent that these women did.
Historically, Kate was moved around to several country houses, but for my purposes I kept her in one place. She may have won a slight victory after all, since her second son, Thomas or William (depending on the source), is a direct ancestor of Elizabeth II, England’s reigning queen.
As for Mary Rogers, she and John had fifteen children, which, I imagine, kept her busy . . . John, too.
There are good records of one of the queen’s ladies: Lady Saintloe. She married a fourth time to the Earl of Shrewsbury and became the renowned Bess of Hardwick, who tried to manipulate her granddaughter Arbella Stuart onto the throne. Failing that, Bess died the richest woman in England. We may owe Bess for far more than her colorful biography. Shakespeare is reported to have seen his first play at the age of twelve at Hardwick Hall.
Q. So much has been written about Elizabeth I. How did you decide on your particular portrait of her?
A. I knew I wanted to write about Elizabeth and her court and looked for a new way to approach a queen who was so well-known and show her in a different light. When I read that she didn’t want her ladies-in-waiting to marry and had beaten ladies who’d had affairs, I knew I had a different approach to viewing both Elizabeth and her court. Who knew the queen better than other women who were with her?
Q. You strongly suggest that Elizabeth was not technically a “virgin” queen. What led you to this conclusion, and what self-justification do you think Elizabeth made that allowed her to call herself a virgin queen? Do you think she was intimate with more men than just Robert Dudley?
A. Did she or didn’t she? No one knows the truth. Many guessed and whispered during Elizabeth’s reign. William Cecil, her chief minister, thought she and Robert Dudley were lovers as late as 1572, when she was thirty-nine years old. Now, four centuries later, happily for me, we still wonder: What was their true relationship? We do know this: Elizabeth’s love for her Robin and his for her outlasted his life and ended only with her death. Their love triumphed over quarrels, his disastrous marriages, her flirtations with handsome courtiers and calculated political marriage contracts and broke them with most of the foreign princes of the time. For thirty of her adult years she never allowed Robin to leave her side except to do what only he could be trusted to do, or with great emotional pain for them both. Robin’s love for her was simply the most important part of his life. Let me ask you: How could such a lifelong, tumultuous, passionate emotional intimacy endure without physical love? The idea defies what we know of human behavior, which has not changed. The answer for me lies in her willing Robin’s body servant, Tamworth, a huge sum when she thought herself dying of smallpox. Why, if not to silence him and retain her virgin image for posterity?
Elizabeth could not risk pregnancy and contraception was primitive, so physical satisfaction would have been somewhat less than Church authorized. I’ll leave the idea of what that could have involved to your imagination. I think for a queen, as for a recent American president, that was justification for considering her physical contact to be nonsexual, technically leaving her a virgin. In other words: The queen has spoken and wills it to be so.
It is possible that Elizabeth was intimate with other men who caught her eye, and there were several. The most likely candidate is Sir Christopher Hatton. His existing letters to her are wonderfully passionate. Again, we will never know. I prefer to think that her love for Robin was so strong that she was intimate only with him. However, I’m a romantic, not a realist.
Q. You seem to enjoy writing about the Tudor period. What about this time particularly fascinates you?
A. Elizabeth!
Henry VIII gets a huge amount of historical attention, but to me he was a woman hater. If you look deep into his behavior toward women, he used them, politically and physically, but he did not know the meaning of love. He destroyed women when they did not fulfill his plans. His daughter Elizabeth, while having his strength and intelligence, had more humanity. She built England into a world power and kept the love of her people. To this day she is their most popular monarch.
Q. Can you explain more fully what Elizabethans thought of romantic love? The general population seems to sympathize with Kate and Ned, lovers separated by Elizabeth and imprisoned in the Tower, yet much of the court seems to treat romantic love as easily expendable in pursuit of wealth and power. Does either represent the prevailing attitude?
A. Attitudes prevail when they serve. Courtiers and the upper class used marriage to add to their property and titles and to create heirs for both, although neither precludes falling in love. The common people, who had neither property nor titles, were able to be more purely romantic. Since they were largely uneducated they rarely left diaries or letters expressing these feelings. However, they did flock to the Globe Theatre to see Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Love ballads were sold on the streets, and Elizabethan love poetry is some of the most beautiful in the English language. For examples of love poetry of the time, read Sir Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella,” in particular sonnet 71, “Desire,” Edmund Spenser’s “One Day I Wrote Her Name” or any of Christopher Marlowe’s poems and, of course, Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sir Walter Raleigh didn’t spend all his time sailing to the New World or fighting the Spanish. He wrote love poems, too, some to Elizabeth.
Q. I never knew before reading this novel that the Tudor court moved from palace to palace as each place began to stink from too many bodies living in too close quarters without good plumbing and with an aversion to bathing. Can you expand on your description of living conditions, and what small improvements began to be made over time? Was the flush toilet really invented during Elizabeth’s reign?
A. With our modern plumbing and endless products to make bodies odorless, it is almost impossible for people today to imagine a time when there were no bathrooms, toilets or running water except at public wells. A closestool, which was actually just a chamber pot in the seat of a chair with a lid, served even affluent people. It was screened from the rest of the chamber. Try to imagine a Porta-Potti sitting in the corner of your bedroom without its outer shell and you’ll get the idea, although the closestool was emptied more often.
Outdoor privies called closets-of-ease were common, but chamber pots were poured into the street, and strangers in London were warned to walk under eaves lest a housewife dump night soil on their heads. In some more affluent areas the night-soil man came by each morning to collect. A century later, post-1660, Samuel Pepys in his diary describes the contents of his closestools and privies being funneled to a receptacle in his cellar, which was emptied periodically by people who did that work . . . which must be high up on the list of the worst jobs in history.
Sir John Harington really did invent the first flush toilet and installed it for Elizabeth, although it was three centuries later before a newer version came into widespread use.
Elizabeth I had no mistress of the stool, but I created the position for Mary Rogers so that very often she would be near John Harington. I admit the situation is unusual for a novel, but I could not resist it.
Elizabeth was ahead of her time in her habit of cleanliness. She hated foul odors and was clean about her person and clothing and not reluctant to wrinkle her nose at others who were not. She also had a habit of ignoring the advice of her doctors, who at that time believed that bathing was harmful.
Bathrooms as we know them are a fairly recent invention, becoming common only in the early twentieth century.
Q.
Medicine was also in such a primitive state during this period, with horoscopes and bloodletting as poor tools against scourges such as smallpox and the plague. Can you expand on the medical misconceptions of the era?
A. Bloodletting was a medical tool until the early nineteenth century, and horoscopes have never gone out of fashion. Very little was known about the body in Elizabeth’s time, mostly because religious laws made dissection rare. Early in the 1600s, after Elizabeth,William Harvey discovered how blood circulates, and that began the slow progress toward modern medicine.
A common medical misconception during Elizabeth’s time was that the properties of animals could be transferred to humans. One instance I mention in the book is that the powdered heart of a bull would make a human heart stronger. That makes sense if you believe in the transfer of animal essences. A decayed tooth was thought to have a worm in it, and there were many medicines to kill the worm without pulling the tooth, although since the tooth continued to decay, the tooth pullers eventually had to be called. Swallowing gold pills was thought to cure many ills. They were expensive and that made their powers even more believable. For a fun romp through the medicine of the time read Quacks of Old London by C. J. S. Thompson. For plant remedies consult Culpeper’s Complete Herbal.
