The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

  Elizabeth, it seems, finally turned against Essex when he seemed to threaten her sovereignty. Nonetheless she had, until this point, indulged him to an extraordinary degree. In 1928 Lytton Strachey suggested that the queen half liked Essex’s arrogance, his apparent hostility. The fashionably Freudian analysis seems a little too easy now, but it is true that though Elizabeth early declared that ‘it was fit that some one or other should take him down and teach him better manners’, she nonetheless never brought herself to be that somebody. But then Strachey described an Elizabeth whose ‘sexual organisation was seriously warped’; filled with ‘a deep seated repugnance to the crucial act of intercourse’ but nonetheless, ‘filled with delicious agitation by the glorious figures of men’.

  At the centre of her being, Strachey wrote, ‘desire had turned to repulsion’: her decision to execute Essex he sees as the final resolution of a lifelong trauma. ‘The wheel had come full circle. Manhood – the fascinating, detestable entity, which had first come upon her concealed in yellow magnificence in her father’s lap – manhood was overthrown at last, and in the person of the traitor it should be rooted out.’ Strachey’s book attracted some dissent even in his own day. His friend Virginia Woolf – whose own Orlando, the extraordinary story of the young man-woman embraced by the ageing queen, was in some ways a companion piece – disliked it: and with some reason, Elizabeth’s admirers might say. But has the picture Strachey painted been altogether superseded today? It is true, as he points out, that Elizabeth was a woman who had vacillated over all the most important decisions in her life, from the question of her marriage to the executions of her cousins Norfolk and Mary. Yet she ordered Essex’s execution without apparent doubt, as if instinctively – unless, as she later claimed, it was her council who pushed her to the act. It is certainly true that in what one might call her professional capacity she did mistrust that militaristic aspect of masculinity Essex represented: one field in which a female ruler was seriously disadvantaged, in the sixteenth century.

  In the personal sphere, Essex’s feelings are even harder to gauge than those of the queen – if, that is, one is to assume that he was anything other than wholly cynical in his relations with her. Strachey wrote that he was lavish in the protestations of his love: ‘That convenient monosyllable, so intense and so ambiguous, was for ever on his lips.’ ‘Affection – admiration – exasperation – mockery – he felt them all by turns, and sometimes, so it seemed, simultaneously.’ Bewitched, bothered and bewildered by Elizabeth, in other words, as so many had been: but Strachey saw Essex suffering under the conviction that Fate had reversed the ordained gender roles, ‘and the natural master was the servant’.

  Perhaps his feelings changed over the fifteen or so years in which they knew each other. The Elizabeth Essex first knew was, after all, the Elizabeth of Tilbury: he was there as she rode, in her breastplate and finery, to make the great speech that is still remembered today. By the end of those years, foreign visitors were describing a queen with yellowed teeth and red wig, who felt it necessary to stuff a perfumed silk handkerchief in her mouth before greeting them, pulling open the front of her dress to display a ‘somewhat wrinkled’ bosom.

  It is a picture that haunts – that lends a sour note to Essex’s lavish claims that he had been ‘conquered by beauty’. True, this was a rhetoric still commonplace among Elizabeth’s courtiers and borrowed from the older tradition of courtly love poetry. But if you read the letters Leicester or Hatton wrote to Elizabeth you feel, rightly or wrongly, that under the hyperbole you see genuine feeling. Read Essex’s letters to the queen and they seem redolent only of fantasy.

  It might be argued that the role Essex fulfilled for Elizabeth was less that of lover than of surrogate son. The son she never had with Leicester … (Or, in some eyes, did have: several narratives around the dawn of the twentieth century saw both Essex and Francis Bacon as Elizabeth and Leicester’s secret offspring.) There may be an element of truth in this picture of frustrated maternity – it would help to explain just why, before the last unforgiveable denouement of their story, she had already forgiven him so frequently. There was Elizabeth’s own remark that his conduct in Ireland was something she would not have overlooked even in her own son: there was the undeniable echo in his furies of a toddler’s tantrums.

  To me the picture does not ring entirely true – or not when stated so crudely. If this was indeed a mother/son relationship, there was surely an element of the incestuous in it. I do indeed believe that Elizabeth’s indulgence of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was the fruit of her long love for the dead Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester – but in many ways I see a doomed attempt to recreate the earlier relationship (as, with rather more success, the queen used Robert Cecil to replace Lord Burghley). But with Elizabeth – as her contemporaries knew – it is never safe to explain anything simplistically. That ‘deep and inscrutable centre of the court, which is her Majesty’s mind’, as Francis Bacon put it, still retains its mystery.

  Select Bibliography

  The two non-fiction books I have written about the Elizabethan era – Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester – included more extensive lists of sources and suggestions for further reading. The fifteen books below, however, are ones I found particularly helpful in researching this story.

  Borman, Tracy, Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen (Jonathan Cape 2009)

  Guy, John (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge University Press 1995)

  Jardine, Lisa and Stewart, Alan, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (Victor Gollancz 1998)

  Kenny, Robert, Elizabeth’s Admiral: The Political Career of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, 1536–1624 (Johns Hopkins Press 1970)

  Marcus, Leah S., Mueller, Janet, and Rose, Mary Beth (eds.), Elizabeth I: Collected Works (University of Chicago Press 2000)

  Martin, Trea, Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry and Spectacular Design (Faber and Faber 2008)

  Pavord, Anna, Searching for Order: The History of the Alchemists, Herbalists and Philosophers who Unlocked the Secrets of the Plant World (Bloomsbury 2009)

  Smith, Lacey Baldwin, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (1986, new edition Pimlico 2006)

  Weir, Alison, Elizabeth the Queen (Jonathan Cape 1998)

  (on Essex)

  Devereux, W. B., Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Essex, in the Reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I 1540–1646 (John Murray 1853)

  Hammer, Paul E. J., The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: the Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex 1585–1597 (Cambridge University Press 1999)

  Harrison, G. B., The Life and Death of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (Cassell & Co. 1937)

  Lacey, Robert, Robert, Earl of Essex: An Elizabethan Icarus (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1970)

  (on Cecil)

  Handover, P. M., The Second Cecil: The Rise to Power 1563–1604 of Sir Robert Cecil, later first Earl of Salisbury (Eyre & Spottiswoode 1959)

  Loades, David, The Cecils: Privilege and Power Behind the Throne (The National Archives 2007)

  Five related gardens

  Hatfield House (Hertfordshire)

  The notable garden created for Robert Cecil in the early seventeenth century may not itself have survived the years – but even without the collection of rare plants built up by John Tradescant, the beds of roses and iris, the clipped low hedges of box and aromatics, still cast a powerful spell.

  Burghley House: The Garden of Surprise (Lincolnshire)

  At once thoroughly modern and robustly Elizabethan in spirit, this new water garden was inspired by descriptions of the garden at Theobalds; with statues, grottoes and other ‘conceits’ – like hidden jets of water to soak unwary passers-by.

  Kenilworth Castle (Warwickshire)

  A recent re-creation, based on contemporary descriptions and complete with fountain and aviary, of the garden the Earl of Le
icester built for Queen Elizabeth’s visit in 1575. Impressive for its painstaking accuracy.

  Lyveden New Bield (Northamptonshire)

  House and garden were left unfinished when Sir Thomas Tresham died in 1605 (and his widow sold the trees in the orchard to Cecil for Hatfield). What remains is a wonderfully evocative landscape of ruins and waterways, now under restoration by the National Trust.

  Penshurst Place (Kent)

  Eleven acres of enclosed garden, much as it was originally laid out by Essex’s connection Sir Henry Sidney. Within easy reach of Hever, with its hedge and water mazes, and of Sissinghurst, where Vita Sackville-West’s famous twentieth-century garden was nonetheless a great source of inspiration for me.

  Fact and Fiction

  The idea for The Girl in the Mirror came to me on the M25 – junctions 7 to 9, if you want to be precise. I can’t quite say that it came to me in a flash (though we were in a spring lightning storm) but it came fully formed, all the same, as if someone had just handed me a kicking, breathing baby.

  After what felt like years experimenting with one historical novel, I’d come to the conclusion that it was unlikely to happen, or, at least, not immediately, so I suppose I was actively looking for a story. Cursing the fact that in the late-Tudor period (which I knew better than any other) all the best tales had already been told. Brooding on the fact that while (as Virginia Woolf said) ‘it is the stories of women that fire my imagination’, there was only a prohibitively limited sphere of action open to most women in the sixteenth century. Reflecting that a ruling queen was the great exception but I’d already written about Elizabeth and Leicester from a factual standpoint, and the problem with Elizabeth and Essex is that you don’t really want to stick around that relationship for the space of a whole book …

  And there it was. A background of Elizabeth and Essex, but the protagonist an invented character, a girl who gets to operate with the freedom of a boy. She had in some way to be cut off from the society around her, and history provided the answer to that – she’d be a Protestant refugee. The name (Musset, from de Musset, like the poet; a clan of eccentric Essex fishermen and sailors) was there in my own Huguenot ancestry.

  It really was that simple, or that serendipitous; the first idea, anyway. I was on the way to Hampton Court to see their new recreation of a Tudor garden: was it coincidence that I decided shortly after, that gardens should be an important subtext to my story? Over the next few days, as I was walking or driving, other understandings about the major characters came to me just as easily.

  That was utterly different from the way my earlier attempt at a novel had behaved. There, if I’m honest, I’d been chipping away at a lump of intriguing historical fact, unable to let go for long enough to find my actual story. A commissioning editor once told me that it’s harder for someone who has written factual history to move over to fiction than it is to go the other way. I’d already made one major change in my writing career, from showbusiness journalism to historical biography, and found the two spheres weren’t as different as people claimed. The skills you need to make readers accept the gaps in our historical knowledge are the same as the ones that turn a fifteen-minute interview with Michael Douglas into a double-page story in the Guardian. You call up the cuttings, you draw on your own past encounters with the star – you write around it, basically. But there is no writing around in fiction. It’s another matter entirely.

  I had the situation for my novel, and we all know ‘what happened next’ – not just historians, but anyone who’s seen Helen Mirren or Glenda Jackson playing Elizabeth on TV. Essex leads a rebellion against the queen and she orders his head be cut off … But that didn’t tell me where my refugee was going to be left – the emotional journey of the story. There is, heaven knows, a kind of historical fiction that consists largely of drama-tising real-life events, adding and embroidering only where necessary. But I seemed to have landed myself instead with the kind that uses those as a jumping off point, leaving me with the power and responsibility of invention as surely as if I’d been writing a piece of modern chick lit, or a detective story. Leaving me to understand the real nature of what was going on in my tale – what I was writing about. About a girl unable – like so many of us, like other characters around her – to shake free of the demons of her past. About finding the courage to become the person you are meant to be.

  Slowly, I had to learn to trust the novel-writing process itself. A cliché, I know, but it did often feel as though I were taking down dictation, one episode at a time – disconcerting in a way, but reassuring in another, since I found one scene was actively showing me the way to the next. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t scary. Writing factual history, there is always a great deal of sheer donkey work. You can ease yourself into the book each day by research or simple transcription of events, and that does cushion you. It stops you from having to feel – to commit. Fiction, it seems, has no equivalent – you’re 100% there or you’re wasting your time. Or, worse, doing actual damage by forcing the story along a path it would not have taken naturally.

  My non-fiction had been about Elizabeth and her day, so I already knew my background. That meant I could start writing fairly quickly, though there would be a million places where I’d have to go back and do more work – in many ways you need a more detailed understanding of a period for fiction than for factual history.

  Those details would be as accurate as I could make them. That’s one of the deals I made between fiction and history. So too would be my picture of the big public events … though that taps into the question of whether you believe there is one inalienable historical truth and I’m not sure I do, actually. But that doesn’t lessen your responsibility to tell the truth as you see it – and you’d better be sure of what that truth is going to be. You don’t have the luxury of giving the evidence for and against, and then leaving an open verdict as you do when you’re writing a biography. Different characters may see different versions of the same event, but you can’t put footnotes in a story.

  There are the deals you make with history – and then there are the deals history makes with you. Something strange happened to me, towards the very end of the time I spent writing this novel. I’d long before found a name for Jeanne’s actor acquaintance – Martin Slaughter – when I’d read a brief mention of two actors charged, as rogues and vagabonds, with having falsely claimed to be members of a licensed troupe. Borrowing the bare name, I’d made ‘my’ Martin Slaughter what I needed him to be: present in London on certain dates; attached, then not attached, to an established company. I was actually revising when I decided more colour was needed for the theatre scenes. I knew actors well enough from my journalism days – spent more hours than I care to remember backstage at the RSC – but I’d never been a student of theatrical history. So I raided a friend’s bookcase, came up with the Documents of the Rose Playhouse – and as I read it, the hairs on the back of my neck began to rise, just slightly.

  The history of the real Martin Slaughter, in so far as it is known, fitted my invention precisely. Joining the right company – the one under the protection of the countess’s husband – and leaving at the right moment exactly. Of course there is the obvious psychological explanation – I’d read this information before and forgotten the details, until my subconscious reproduced it when necessary. Except that the book (edited by Carol Chillington Rutter, published by Manchester University Press in 1999) is not one you pick up at any airport bookstall, and until now I’d barely had occasion to register the location of the Rose, let alone hunt out the details of its company. As Charles Kingsley wrote in The Water Babies, this is all a story and you shouldn’t believe a word of it, even if it is true. But sometimes – even for the person who’s written both – it can be hard to keep an eye on the dividing line between fact and fantasy.

  Copyright

  Copyright © Sarah Gristwood 2011

  Sarah Gristwood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

/>   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN 978-0-00-737904-0

  EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007412464

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