The Queen's Secret (49 page)

Tears filled her eyes and she found she could not speak.

Someone jostled him from behind, and Goodluck drew down his hood, so that all she could see of his face was his unsmiling mouth and the beard below.

‘Farewell then, young mistress.’ His voice was that of the old beggar once more, hoarse and breaking. ‘God bless you!’

Forgetting all Tom’s careful advice, Lucy fumbled and dropped the reins. By the time she recovered them, her impatient horse had squeezed through the palace gates and her own dear Master Goodluck was gone, lost behind her in a blur of faces and waving flags.

She cried out in frustration and despair, her voice swallowed up in a sudden, frantic cheering as Queen Elizabeth, having now reached the grand pillared entrance to Richmond Palace, began to dismount from her horse. The crowd was in a fever of excitement now, and more guards poured out of the palace barracks to contain the thronged masses at the gates.

It was all Lucy could do not to weep openly.

Recovering herself, she sat straight-backed, head high, as stiff in the saddle as the Queen herself. She would not permit any of the courtiers to see her cry and to despise her for such a sign of weakness. This was her chance to rise in the world, to shine, and she must not cast it aside for any man. Besides, she could draw some comfort from the knowledge that Master Goodluck was not dead, as she had feared. There was still the chance that she might see him again, one day.

Author’s Note

It is only half an hour’s drive from my Warwickshire home to Kenilworth Castle, once a great English fortress, now lying in partial ruins. It was on regular visits to the castle, maintained by English Heritage and a favourite outing for our kids, that I first conceived the idea of setting a historical novel there during the time of Elizabeth I’s visit in 1575. Queen Elizabeth liked to escape the stinking cesspits of the city during the summer months and tour the countryside ‘on progress’, with her court in attendance, visiting the grander homes of her subjects. These passing visits were often so lavish, the cost of accommodating and feeding the Queen and her vast entourage falling entirely on the host, they left many courtiers destitute. Even the wealthy Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, spent the rest of his life trying to recover from the nineteen-day extravaganza laid on for his queen in 1575. There can be little doubt he had hoped to recoup his loss that summer in daring style – by finally persuading Elizabeth to marry him.

Gossip during Elizabeth’s reign constantly linked these two, claiming clandestine meetings between the ‘Virgin’ Queen and her ‘Robin’, as she affectionately dubbed Robert Dudley, and even a number of secret children, presumably born and spirited away at dead of night. Despite the frivolous nature of such rumours, a letter from the long-dead Leicester was found in a bedside chest after Elizabeth died, with ‘His last letter’ written across it in her
own
hand, a keepsake which suggests more than mere affection for a favourite courtier.

So why would Queen Elizabeth choose not to marry Robert Dudley if she loved him, particularly after promoting him to the title of earl, so much closer to her own rank? Theories abound, from the pragmatic one of wishing to retain control over her throne to the fascinating suggestion that she was in some way physically abnormal, i.e. incapable either of normal sexual intercourse or reproduction. The simplest explanation may be that Elizabeth, having had ample opportunity in her youth to witness the devastating effect of marriage on women, with both her mother and stepmother executed by a lascivious husband, chose to rule England alone despite the enormous pressure on her to marry. Yet there always remained rumours that the Queen was barren, or suffered from some mysterious gynaecological complaint – though discreet examinations carried out on behalf of foreign suitors appear to have been inconclusive.

Elizabeth’s chief rival for Leicester’s affections in 1575 was the fertile and red-haired Lettice Knollys, another of the Boleyn family from which Elizabeth also sprang on her mother’s side, famed for their charm and beauty. It was whispered that Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary had fallen under Henry VIII’s roving eye, and been married off to the discreet William Carey before her pregnancy was too apparent. If so, her granddaughter Lettice might have considered she had almost as much of a claim to the throne as her cousin Elizabeth, since both Elizabeth and her own mother, Catherine Carey, would have been ‘bastards’ descended from the late King. (Elizabeth was declared illegitimate following her mother’s execution in 1536; that ruling was never lifted, even after she was returned to the line of succession.)

Some historians consider Elizabeth to have been unaware of Leicester’s rekindled interest in the beautiful Countess of Essex, but this seems unlikely. The two had enjoyed a brief fling ten years before, at which time Elizabeth had angrily warned Leicester away from her younger cousin, and in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the court, with its many observers and informants, the Queen could hardly have remained ignorant of their renewed affair for long. After all, it was only just prior to
this
that Leicester may have married one of her other ladies-in-waiting, Lady Douglas Sheffield, in a secret ceremony which he later vehemently denied – though Lady Sheffield produced a son in 1574 whom Dudley acknowledged in his will.

In 1575, Lettice Knollys was wife to the Earl of Essex, a strict military man who was away subduing the Irish, and mother to his children. The earl openly quarrelled with his wife on his return in November of that year, presumably over her affair with Leicester, and died soon after going back to Ireland during what may have been an outbreak of dysentery. There is no hard evidence that Essex was poisoned, but there was open enmity between the two men, not least thanks to the gleeful rumour that Lettice had already borne several children to the indefatigable Leicester, whose illegitimate offspring must by now have been littering the back streets of England. Whatever caused it, Essex’s death cleared the way for Robert Dudley to marry his widow in a secret ceremony at Kenilworth in 1578. One can only imagine Elizabeth’s reaction, first on discovering this betrayal, and later, when Lettice gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

In this retelling of Elizabeth’s visit to Kenilworth, I have drawn extensively on
Robert Laneham’s Letter
, a document published soon after the royal visit in 1575, perhaps as a paid exercise in propaganda. In this journal, Laneham describes both Kenilworth Castle and Leicester’s extravagant festivities in meticulous detail, including the many hunting expeditions enjoyed by the Queen whenever the weather was favourable. But Robert Laneham would not, of course, have been privy to intimate goings-on in the fabulously furnished state apartments, built specially for Elizabeth’s visit. My own frequent visits to Kenilworth Castle, though it is much changed since Tudor times, have aided me in imagining the carnivalesque atmosphere it must have possessed that scorching hot summer, with as many as 300 cartloads of workers and courtly hangers-on housed about the castle and its environs, plus a steady stream of local visitors to the ‘spectacles’ laid on as entertainment. And in common with many historians and literary commentators, I have envisioned the young Will Shakespeare, then a boy of eleven, travelling from the small market town of Stratford
to
see the Queen and her glamorous court at Kenilworth.

Which brings me to Lucy Morgan. That such a person existed, and may have been one of Queen Elizabeth’s small army of attendants in the years following the festivities at Kenilworth, is attested by court records. The name Lucy Morgan appears several times between 1579 and 1581 in both the Egerton Manuscript
¹
and the Public Records Office. She is noted chiefly as having received gifts of clothing from the Queen’s ‘Great Wardrobe’ – on one notable occasion, ‘six yards of russet Satin and two yards of black velvet’, a lavish gift at a court where ladies-in-waiting dressed in black and white, and were not supposed to outshine their queen. There is also mention of a generous six shillings eight pence in Sir Thomas Heneage’s office book in 1582, given as a traditional New Year’s Day gift to a ‘Mistress Morgan’s servant’, a sure sign that Lucy Morgan herself enjoyed ‘bouge of court’ or free board and lodging courtesy of the Queen, most probably in the capacity of lady-in-waiting to Her Majesty.

As for Lucy Morgan’s African descent, some historians have linked this privileged Elizabethan lady-in-waiting with a later ‘Black Luce’ or ‘Negra Lucia’ living in Clerkenwell, courtesy of informal letters and reports written at the time. The Lay Subsidy Roll would seem to support this conjecture, showing a ‘Lucy Morgan’ living in that area in 1600, and Leslie Hotson makes an interesting case for these being one and the same person in his Shakespearean study,
Mr W.H
. But the character of Lucy Morgan as drawn in this book remains my own creation, albeit with links to her shadowy namesakes in the past.

Were there black performers at the court of Elizabeth I? Absolutely, and a painting by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder from 1575 proves it, depicting black musicians and entertainers performing before the Queen. Indeed, due in part to the newly flourishing slave trade, there was a growing black population in England during the later Elizabethan era. Religious belief was a vital element in determining how easy life would be for these early black settlers. A rapid conversion to Christianity, which enforced the adoption of a Christian name, eased integration and enabled immigrants to avoid cruel penalties – including imprisonment and execution – for religious non-observance. These converts would not have retained their original names after baptism, making it hard to tell from official records just how many settled here in Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their social status was also uncertain, following a famous test case in 1569 which apparently gave us the following judgement on slavery: that ‘England was too pure an Air for slaves to breathe in’. To add to this confusion, parish records of the time either simply noted their colour – as if this alone was an indication of status – or intriguingly described black people as ‘servants’ rather than slaves. So the fictional Tom Black in this story loses his African name to become ‘English’ and reinvent himself as one of Leicester’s head grooms – a free man, if still in service – and such a radical change of identity was by no means unusual.
²

The character of Master Goodluck is based on the model of the Tudor theatrical spy, familiar to us from the story of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who may have been secretly working for the government at the time of his murder in 1593. The best of these spies were probably intelligent, highly educated and inventive men, gifted in languages, yet also mavericks and loners, choosing to lead dangerous and unconventional lives. Masters of disguise, trained in the ways of codes and ciphers, such men would have moved regularly between a dubious existence on the fringes of the court and the dangerous back streets of Europe. Although the name Goodluck appears in parish records of Tudor London, my character here is entirely fictional, the younger son of a disgraced gentleman, forced to make a living from his wits under an assumed name. The need for such versatile men in and around the English court was a daily reality during Elizabeth’s reign.

Indeed, it is likely there were far more plots against the Protestant Queen’s life than we have evidence for. Some of these, like the 1577 conspiracy planned by Don John of Austria, would have been thwarted at an early stage by the ever-watchful Francis Walsingham, not only Elizabeth’s principal secretary by this stage but her spymaster too. Walsingham ran a comprehensive network of spies both at home and abroad, their covert activities often funded out of his own pocket. The reason for such a network is clear. Catholic nations like Italy provided no end of zealous would-be assassins and plotters, the most famous of whom was Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine double agent whose daring 1571 plot to overthrow Elizabeth led to the execution for treason of her cousin, the popular Duke of Norfolk, and would have done nothing for Elizabeth’s sense of security.

The plot against Elizabeth during her stay at Kenilworth is, of course, pure invention. It was inspired in part by Robert Laneham’s mention of a travelling Italian acrobat so flexible he seemed to have no backbone but ‘a line like a Lute string’. This gave me my troupe of Florentine acrobats. There is also a curiously detailed account in Laneham’s letter of the Queen’s horse being startled in the woods by a Savage Man – another of Leicester’s play-actors – a minor incident which seemed to alarm everyone present to a surprising degree. This is suggestive of a general uneasiness around Elizabeth’s personal safety when out in public, and indicates that assassination was still considered a real and present danger. So it is not unlikely that there were a number of plots against the Queen during the mid-years of her reign, and that some were hushed up to prevent what might now be termed ‘copy-cat’ conspiracies.

In imagining the particulars of my Italian plot, I have taken certain liberties with the geography of the castle and its environs. The castle was reduced to ruins during the later civil war, to prevent it being used as a stronghold, so what we know of its infrastructure is based on a combination of old maps and drawings, a few preserved documents, and architectural conjecture. Many of the places mentioned can still be seen today, including the strongroom below the Queen’s apartments where her most precious possessions would have been stored, which now stands open to the elements. Others are based on guesswork and imagination, such as the medieval roof hatch used by the acrobats to gain access to the Queen. The room itself exists, but the ceiling
is
long gone. Equally, some events mentioned in Robert Laneham’s letter have shifted to other locations about the castle, for the exigencies of the plot. I have also, in consultation with experts at Kenilworth Castle, used a pinch of imagination when describing the duties of some of Leicester’s staff, such as the fictional Caradoc, one of the steward’s assistants, and Tom Black himself.