The Queen's Exiles

by Barbara Kyle

  He seemed lost for words. “I cannot, Your Grace.”

  She looked triumphant, turning back to Fenella. “It is because your husband has taken up arms against the lawful authority of Spain, something no subject anywhere must ever do. Your husband is therefore a rebel and a traitor, and any connection to such evil rabble I will not abide. Which is why, mistress, since you are now my subject, I hereby annul your marriage.”

  Fenella gasped. Adam gasped.

  “The rest, sir, I leave to you. And now,” said the Queen with impatience, “let us sup.” She beckoned her ladies, a signal that she was leaving.

  Fenella could scarcely bend her knees to curtsy, too buffeted by joy, too caught up in grinning back at Adam’s grinning face.

  The Queen bade her rise. Their eyes met. The Queen stepped close and whispered four words in her ear.

  What did she say to you? Adam had asked Fenella that evening when the Queen had left them alone among the roses and they’d embraced, laughing in joy. Fenella did not tell him then. She did not tell him in the sixteen days that followed, just enough time to publish the banns in church on three successive Sundays. She did not tell him during the whirlwind of wedding preparations with his sister and his daughter and the Dowager Lady Thornleigh. The gowns, the gifts, the jewels, the banquet, the throng of guests, the toasts. The love in Adam’s eyes when he and Fenella exchanged vows as man and wife, making her heart sing. The shy, sweet smile from Kate that made Fenella want to cry.

  Now, as she came to him in bed for the first time at his house, she wanted to tell him, to give him this gift. “Do you want to know what Her Majesty said to me?”

  He was kissing her neck, scarcely listening. “What?”

  “That night in the rose garden, my love. She said four words.”

  He looked at her, curious now.

  She kissed him, more happy than she’d thought it was possible to be. Then she put her lips to his ear and whispered the words. “She said this: Give him a son.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Readers of historical fiction are often keen to know how much of a book is fact and how much is fiction. Regarding The Queen’s Exiles, let me fill you in. First, the facts.

  Spain’s ruthless occupation of the Netherlands, sixteenth-century Europe’s rich mercantile hub, is well documented, as is the brutal governorship over the Dutch by the Spanish Duke of Alba, the “Iron Duke.” In 1567, Alba set up a special court called the Council of Troubles to crush Dutch resistance, and under its authority he executed thousands. The people called it the Council of Blood. Here are Alba’s own words: “It is better that a kingdom be laid waste and ruined through war for God and for the king, than maintained intact for the devil and his heretical horde.”

  The scene of cruelty in Chapter 3 of The Queen’s Exiles after a Dutch boy throws dung at the Duke of Alba’s statue is an invention, but Alba did in fact commission a life-sized statue of himself showing him trampling rebellion. It was made by sculptor Jacques Jonghelinck and in 1571 was erected in the market square of Antwerp. (For the dramatic purposes of my story I set the statue in Brussels, twenty-seven miles from Antwerp.) The people loathed the statue, and it did not long outlive Alba’s regime; his successor pulled it down. However, Jonghelinck also sculpted a bronze bust of the duke and it survives today in the Frick Collection in New York.

  The story of the Sea Beggars, the Dutch rebel privateers, is fascinatingly true. Led by William de La Marck, they were a motley fleet of about thirty vessels who harassed Spanish shipping and raided coastal towns. The origin of their name is intriguing. Before the Duke of Alba’s arrival in 1567, the governor was the king of Spain’s sister, Margaret. In 1566, a delegation of more than two hundred Dutch nobles appeared before her with a petition stating their grievances. She was at first alarmed at the appearance of so large a body, but one of her councillors exclaimed, “What, madam, is Your Highness afraid of these beggars?” The Dutch heard the insult, and after Margaret ignored their petition, they declared that they were ready to become beggars in their country’s cause and adopted the name Beggars with defiant pride. When the Spanish persecution worsened, scores of these rebels took to the sea to harry Spanish shipping and proudly called themselves the Sea Beggars.

  For several years England’s Queen Elizabeth gave safe conduct to the Sea Beggars, allowing La Marck and his rebel mariners to make Dover and the creeks and bays along England’s south coast their home as they continued their raids on Spanish shipping. England was far weaker than mighty Spain, so Elizabeth was playing “a game of cat and mouse” with King Philip, says historian Susan Ronald in her fascinating book The Pirate Queen: Helping the Sea Beggars was “the only course open to her to show her defiance of Spain.” But Philip’s fury grew dangerous, and in March 1572, Elizabeth ordered the expulsion of the Sea Beggars from her realm, an act that people assumed was to placate Philip. It turned out, however, that Elizabeth had struck a lethal blow at Spain: By expelling the Sea Beggars she had unleashed these fierce privateers’ latent power. For a month they wandered the sea, homeless and hungry, until, on the first of April, they made a desperate attack on the Dutch port city of Brielle, which had been left unattended by the Spanish garrison, and they astounded everyone, even themselves, by capturing the city, just as depicted in the novel. Their victory provided the Dutch opposition’s first foothold on land and launched a revolution: the Dutch War of Independence. The capture of Brielle gave heart to other Dutch cities suffering under Spain’s harsh rule, and when the Sea Beggars pushed on inland they rejoiced to see town after town open their gates to them. The exiled prince of Orange now sent troops to support them. But Spain ferociously struck back. Taking the rebel-held cities of Mechelen and Zutphen, the Duke of Alba’s troops massacred the inhabitants; in Mechelen the atrocities went on for four days. The town of Haarlem bravely resisted during a long siege, but finally surrendered. Alba’s troops methodically cut the throats of the entire garrison, some two thousand men, in cold blood.

  By 1585, Elizabeth could no longer tolerate Spain’s tyranny in the Netherlands and she openly supported the Dutch revolution, sending an army under the Earl of Leicester to fight alongside the Dutch resistance. Nevertheless, it took almost six more decades until the people of the Netherlands won their freedom, in 1648. To this day, on the first of April every year the Dutch people still exuberantly celebrate the Sea Beggars’ capture of Brielle. (In writing about these ragtag but committed rebels I often thought of the French Resistance fighters in World War II who stood up to the Nazi occupation of France.)

  Here are a few notes on the fate of four real people who appear in The Queen’s Exiles:

  The Duke of Alba was a military legend in his own time, a stupendously successful general in Spain’s many European wars, but after six years as governor of the Netherlands even his master, King Philip, felt Alba had been too hard on the Dutch and he was recalled to Spain in 1573 at the age of sixty-six. His glory days, however, were not over. In 1580 the seventy-two-year-old duke led a force of forty thousand across the Spanish-Portuguese border and defeated the Portuguese army. He triumphantly entered Lisbon, making his king, Philip II of Spain, also Philip I of Portugal. Alba died in Lisbon in 1582 at the age of seventy-four. For information about him I am indebted to Henry Kamen’s fine biography The Duke of Alba.

  William, Prince of Orange, the popular Protestant leader of the Dutch resistance, does not make an appearance in The Queen’s Exiles, but the Sea Beggars fought in his name, and after their victory at Brielle he openly supported them. He led the resistance movement until 1584, when he was assassinated, shot in his house by a Catholic Frenchman, Balthasar Gérard.

  Elizabeth I was in the fourteenth year of her reign in The Queen’s Exiles: 1572. She went on to rule England for the next thirty-one years, an extraordinary age of peace and prosperity for her people, and of bold exploration and an unprecedented flowering of the arts. Elizabeth’s intervention in the Netherlands was a feature of her foreign policy of support
ing Protestant rebellions to destabilize the Catholic regimes that were her adversaries: Spain and France. Working with her ever-loyal first minister, William Cecil, whom she elevated to the peerage in 1571 as Baron Burghley, Elizabeth forged this successful policy, eloquently described by historian Conyers Read, of “keeping England safe by making fires in her neighbors’ houses.” In 1603 Elizabeth died peacefully in her bed at the age of seventy.

  Jane, the English-born Duchess of Feria, was a real person (though her friendship with the fictional Frances Thornleigh is my invention). Born Jane Dormer, the daughter of a prosperous Catholic Buckinghamshire landowner, she was at the age of sixteen a maid of honor to England’s Queen Mary, and when the Spanish Count of Feria came to Mary’s court as Spain’s envoy he fell in love with Jane and married her. They settled in Estremadura, Spain. In 1567 he was created Duke of Feria, which made Jane a duchess. After her husband died in 1571 she moved to the Netherlands, where she was a champion of the English Catholic exiles, many of whom, including the Countess of Northumberland, enjoyed pensions from the pope.

  Novelists do wide research to mine the “telling details” of everyday life that ground our fiction in reality, and one such detail I unearthed is rather fun. In The Queen’s Exiles Fenella visits a Brussels shop owned by a French Huguenot couple who sell headdresses and perukes (wigs). I based this scene on information in historian Charles Nicholl’s delightful book The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street. Nicholl describes the “head tyre” shop on Silver Street in London owned by a French family from whom Shakespeare rented a room in 1612. That was forty years after the events of The Queen’s Exiles, but according to Nicholl the kind of fanciful headgear I describe in the novel was popular decades earlier as well. Clearly, the whimsy of women’s fashion is ageless.

  A note regarding geography: In Elizabeth’s time, people used the terms “the Low Countries” and “Flanders” to refer to an area that included modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. I have called this area the Netherlands throughout The Queen’s Exiles to avoid confusion for the reader.

  Now, the fiction.

  Fenella Doorn, the Scottish-born heroine of the novel, is my invention. She made her first appearance in a small but crucial role in The Queen’s Gamble, a previous book in my Thornleigh Saga, and her spirited character stayed with me when I began planning The Queen’s Exiles, set eleven years after The Queen’s Gamble. I was delighted to give Fenella the starring role as an entrepreneur, owner of a ship-refitting business on the island of Sark. The Channel Islands, including Sark, were in fact notorious havens for pirates and privateers throughout the Tudor/Elizabethan period. Sark was a possession of England, and in 1565 Elizabeth granted Helier de Carteret the fief, naming him the Seigneur of Sark.

  The seafaring Adam Thornleigh and his embittered wife, Frances, are fictional, as are former mercenary soldier Carlos Valverde and his intrepid wife, Isabel. They all feature in my five previous Thornleigh Saga books. Each book is a stand-alone story. Many readers have written me to ask the order in which the novels were written, so I give it here:

  The Thornleigh Saga begins with The Queen’s Lady, featuring Honor Larke, a fictional lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife, and follows Honor’s stormy love affair with Richard Thornleigh as she works to rescue heretics from the Church’s fires. The King’s Daughter introduces their daughter, Isabel, who joins the Wyatt Rebellion against Queen Mary, a true event, and hires mercenary Carlos Valverde to help her rescue her father from prison. The Queen’s Captive brings Honor and Richard back from exile with their seafaring son, Adam, to help the young Princess Elizabeth, who has been imprisoned by her half sister, Queen Mary, another true event. The Queen’s Gamble is set during the fledgling reign of Elizabeth, who, fearing that the massive buildup of French troops on her Scottish border will lead to an invasion, entrusts Isabel to take money to aid the Scottish rebellion, led by firebrand preacher John Knox, to oust the French. Blood Between Queens begins with the arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots, in England in 1568, fleeing her enemies who have usurped her, and follows the Thornleighs’ ward, Justine, in her dangerous mission to spy on Mary for Elizabeth. I hope you’ll enjoy the adventures of all these characters, who live in that best of all possible worlds, the reader’s imagination.

  Readers have sent me wonderfully astute comments and questions about the characters, real and invented, in my books and I always enjoy replying. This partnership with you, the reader, makes my work a joy. If you’d like to write to me, I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at bkyle@barbarakyle.com and follow me on Twitter @BKyleAuthor. And, if you’d like to receive my occasional newsletters, do sign up via my Web site at www.barbarakyle.com.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The team I work with at Kensington Publishing is truly a dream team. Foremost among these dedicated experts is my editor, Esi Sogah. The Queen’s Exiles is my sixth book with Kensington and my first with Esi. Her keen talent and solid professionalism are deeply appreciated. I could not ask for a more enthusiastic advocate or a happier working relationship.

  Production Editor Paula Reedy guides my books through the production process with skill and grace. Copy Editor Sandra Ogle brought her eagle eye to the manuscript. Kensington’s fine Sales and Marketing teams are a collective powerhouse, and Alexandra Nicolajsen brings her special flair to digital marketing. The savvy and indefatigable Vida Engstrand expertly manages my books’ publicity. I sincerely appreciate the work of all these dedicated professionals. In addition, I’ll be forever grateful to Audrey LaFehr, who first championed my books, and I wish her joy in her new home in a new state. To Martin Biro, kudos and thanks.

  A huge thank-you to John Rosenberg, whose tremendous book-business expertise has made my books such a success in Canada, and to the lovely, ever helpful Jeannine Rosenberg.

  In Al Zuckerman of Writers House I’m blessed with a literary agent whose achievements are celebrated. To me, Al is a valued friend and long-time mentor. I’m also indebted to Al’s assistant, the hardworking and unflappable Mickey Novak, and to Writers House’s able foreign rights specialists Maja Nikolic and Caitlin Ellis.

  A happy nod to my fellow authors in the Historical Novel Society, who are a fount of support and knowledge and fun.

  My husband, Stephen Best, is my creative partner in art and in life. My gratitude to him knows no bounds.

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  THE QUEEN’S EXILES

  Barbara Kyle

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  The suggested questions are included to

  enhance your group’s reading of Barbara Kyle’s

  The Queen’s Exiles.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  Fenella’s troubles all spring from her moment of fury when she rashly shoots the Spanish don who years ago massacred the people of her village. Did you think she was justified in killing him? Can murder ever be right?

  Adam sails to Spanish-occupied Antwerp to hunt down his wife, Frances, and take back his young son and daughter. But there’s a price on his head in Antwerp. Did you feel Adam was right to risk everything, even his life, to get his children away from Frances? What other options might he have explored?

  Carlos and Isabel argue heatedly about staying in Antwerp. He says he must remain loyal to the governor to secure a needed reward for his family. She says they must get out before Alba’s regime leads to bloodshed that endangers them and their children. How did you respond to their fiercely opposing views?

  Frances is so frightened of Adam coming for her she hires a gunman to kill him. Were you disgusted by her act, or do you think she had to do it to save herself and the children?

  Fenella makes a hard decision to give up future happiness with Adam in order to stay with her husband and help his work with the rebels. How did you feel about Fenella’s personal sacrifice?

  Fenella, held captive by the Duke of Alba, won’t betray Adam by telling Alba where Adam is, though she knows her silence may cost her her life.
Do you think you could muster that kind of courage to protect someone you love?

  Carlos risks everything by rescuing Fenella and Claes from hanging by the Duke of Alba. Do you think this makes up for Carlos’s previous allegiance to the brutal duke?

  Adam casts his lot with the rebel Sea Beggars despite the edict of his own queen, Elizabeth, expelling them from England. Was Adam foolish or justified in joining the rebels’ desperate fight?

  The Queen’s Exiles explores three marriages in crisis: of Adam and Frances, Fenella and Claes, and Carlos and Isabel. All three couples face life-and-death challenges. Which person in each marriage do you sympathize with most? Do you agree with the choices they make?

  Copyright © 2011 Stephen Best

  BARBARA KYLE, a classically trained actor, enjoyed a successful career in Canadian television and theater before turning her hand to writing fiction. She and her husband live in Ontario, where she teaches popular writing workshops and gives lectures on Tudor history, most recently for the University of Toronto Lecture Series and the world-renowned Stratford Festival. She welcomes visitors at her Web site: www.barbarakyle.com.

  The Queen’s Lady

  Abducted as a child heiress, Honor Larke escapes to London seeking justice from the only lawyer whose name she knows: the brilliant Sir Thomas More. As his ward, Honor grows to womanhood, and the glitter of the royal court lures her to attend Her Majesty, Queen Catherine of Aragon. But life at Henry VIII’s court holds more than artifice for an intelligent observer, and Honor knows how to watch—and when to act....