Roses Have Thorns: A Novel of Elizabeth I

AFTERWORD

Did Elizabeth really hate other women?

I don’t believe she did, though some still think so. I started this series wanting to know more about the hearts and innermost thoughts of the queens I was writing about, and I approached each story through their closest friends, those who principally served them, their ladies. It was a much different task to write about a queen consort than a queen regnant, though, and not only a queen regnant but perhaps the most famous queen regnant of all. Would I find a woman who was a true, lifelong friend to Elizabeth Tudor?

Indeed, I found more than one.

Because of her sovereign position, she was never really able to be an “equal” with anyone, and while she clearly enjoyed her power, I think she keenly felt the loss of the kind of intimacy that we all desire. Elizabeth adored Katherine Knollys, her cousin and perhaps half sister, as well Kat Ashley and Blanche Parry, who were like mothers to her. Catherine Carey, the Countess of Nottingham, was also a cousin; she died shortly before Elizabeth did and it was said that her death was the loss Elizabeth was unable to bear.

The author Antonia Fraser said, “Her [Elizabeth’s] household resembled a large family, often on the move between residences, and as a family it had its feuds when factions formed around strong personalities. It was not out of malice that Elizabeth opposed her maids of honor’s plans to marry, but because marriages broke up her own family circle.” Happy marriages and babies born did remind Elizabeth of her loss, but perhaps the greater loss was the breaking up of the “family” she’d built, and rebuilt, for herself, having been denied a family of her own.

Elizabeth liked bold friends. The story is told of Sir Walter Raleigh writing on a window where the queen would see it, “Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.” She responded, underneath it, “If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.” I also believe that Elizabeth chose her closest friends from among those who were a foil and balance to her personality, those who were softer, and perhaps motherly. And in truth, who among us can count more than a handful of very close friends over the course of a lifetime?

While Elizabeth did not allow her women—or anyone!—to meddle directly in her kingdom, she took counsel from those she trusted, among them Cecil, Walsingham, Lord Howard of Effingham, and, I believe, the women she relied upon. Cecil, who loved and admired her so much that he dedicated his whole life to her service, once said the queen was “more than a man and, in truth, something less than a woman.” She had to be able to rule like a man and relate like a woman, often at the same time. No easy task, and I think she might have communicated more overtly with the men in her council and more subtly with the women in her chambers.

Then in 1566 came Helena von Snakenborg.

How had I missed her in a lifetime of reading the Tudors? I stumbled across Helena’s tale while writing the second book in this series, focusing on Kateryn Parr. I have had to infer some into the friendship between Helena and Elizabeth, but I did try to keep all known facts. The queen did intervene, unusually, with another monarch in order to allow Helena to remain in England, and she who was as famous for counting her pennies as was her grandfather Henry VII, awarded, unusually, rooms, a servant, and a horse to Helena within months of her arriving in England. Helena was known as never being able to be bribed for access to the queen. According to several sound sources, Elizabeth did allow Helena and Thomas to keep the silver and gold from the wrecked Spanish ship, though she’d had Thomas count every last yard of silk and pound of spice from Drake’s voyage. Although parsimonious, Elizabeth could be generous with those she loved.

Elin von Snakenborg’s journey to England is even more fantastic than I described in the book. It took ten months, mostly over frozen land, as they tried to dodge the Danes. For a heavily pregnant princess and her mostly young female attendants, it was a bold journey. It does seem that, once Elin arrived in England, Parr fell immediately in love with her. I believe that he came to love her for her person, though he may have been instantly attracted to her physically, as she looked like his second wife, who had not been dead for long.

I do not know why Helena decided to stay in England, but she did. She didn’t seem to have a gold-digging personality, so although Parr’s title was attractive, I’m sure there had to be a bit more behind it. Her sister Karin did marry Philip Bonde, and as much of the story was about personal betrayal, the motivation of a fiancé who loved her sister, who loved him back, seemed to fit.

It is uncertain whether Gorges and Helena married in 1576 or 1577; I chose 1577 to fall in line with my story and also because I believe that a punishment of months was more in line with Elizabeth’s treatment of favorites who irritated her (Lord Robert, Cecil, even perhaps Mary Shelton) rather than years or forever for people who threatened her crown or whom she simply did not like (Katherine Grey Seymour, Lettice Knollys, Bess Throckmorton). Thomas was imprisoned, though, and Helena banished, and Sussex really did have to intervene for them.

Thomas’s role in the arrest of Mary, Queen of Scots, is absolutely true, though I do not know if he feigned his faith; I do not know the story behind the other Gorges and the Poyntz who were arrested in the Babington plot, either, but there was one of each, according to records that can still be accessed. And, of course, Thomas’s mother was a Poyntz and his father a Gorges.

Helena did name her first child Elizabeth, and the child she bore just after Robert Dudley died, Robert. And there was a long gap between the children she “brought every year” that can be explained by physical and emotional estrangement, which was resolved before the conception of baby Robert Gorges. It’s interesting to know that Thomas and Helena’s daughter Elizabeth eventually married the man who would be the first governor of the state of Maine; the current Duchess of Norfolk is also one of Helena’s descendants. Thinking upon Helena’s encounters with Norfolk in this book only makes that more satisfying! The current princes William and Harry are descended through their mother from Amias Paulet, the stern Puritan guard finally in charge of Mary, Queen of Scots. I’m sure there are many other connections; it would be fun to find them all.

Sixteenth-century England was a century of religious turmoil. I used the words Protestant and Catholic in this book simply to make it easier on the modern reader, although other words and terms were in play during that era. Thirty years after taking the throne, Elizabeth said, “When I first came to the scepter and crown of this realm, I did think more of God who gave it to me than of the title, and therefore my first care was to set in order those things which did concern the Church of God, and this religion in which I was born, in which I was bred, and in which I trust to die not being ignorant how dangerous a thing it was to work in a kingdom a sudden alteration of religion.”

Her father had wrested his realm back and forth between religious approaches, and her brother had been far to the end of the Protestant spectrum and her sister far to the end of the Catholic one. She wisely chose to steer her nation down the via media, the middle way. Elizabeth was a uniter. She did not let Catholics take over her realm, nor the far wings of Protestantism—Puritans and Calvinists—though she had beloved friends and councilors amongst all three.

She was a woman of quiet faith; Elizabeth’s prayers are rich, detailed, humble, and submissive. She refers to herself repeatedly as a “handmaid,” she is abject and penitent, she is personal. She asks for help, she offers praise. She—amazingly—writes her prayers out in many languages: English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Her prayers reveal the fact that she, like others in the sixteenth century, clearly recognized a firmly established hierarchy. She understood that she was to be abject and humble before God, and that she was dependent upon His mercies and grace. But she also understood that her courtiers were to be humble and, when required, likewise abject before her, and their subordinates to them, all the way down the ladder. There is no democracy in the kingdom of heaven, nor was there in this one on earth.

Elizabeth was very fond of bawdy jokes; I think she and her whole court enjoyed the wit and the wordplay and the teasing repartee they brought—it was a kind of flirty intellectual jousting. In fact, those kinds of jokes are replete throughout the literature of the time. Shakespeare himself was the master of them and they are as much a part of this multidimensional queen as her faith, her temper, her affections, and her strength.

I tried to use actual poems and plays from the sixteenth century; I attributed them in the book where it would naturally fit in, but that wasn’t always possible.

I’m not one who thinks Elizabeth was having a daily melodramatic meltdown. Biographer Alison Plowden says, “Elizabeth had learnt to conceal her innermost feelings before she grew out of her teens, and as she grew older she either ‘patiently endured or politely dissembled’ her greatest griefs of mind and body.” I think she had a temper and she used and lost it from time to time, but she had an amazing ability to control herself, too—when she was in the Tower, when she faced the Spanish with only a little blink, and with the restraint of her physical passions.

Was Elizabeth a virgin?

Of course, this has been debated for centuries and I’m sure will continue to be throughout the ages. For me, it comes down to personal integrity. She insisted throughout her life that she was a virgin; to believe that she was not a virgin would be to believe that she lied, regularly and consistently, to her people, her courtiers, her friends, and to God. Should she have dallied with someone and then later reclaimed celibacy, she was smart enough to figure out a way to have stated that without lying. She said, to her Parliamentary delegation, “It would please me best if, at the last, a marble stone shall record that this Queen having lived such and such a time, lived and died a virgin.” I’m just going to take her at her word. It makes her sacrifice more poignant as well.

Some of the stories herein may be apocryphal. It’s not certain that Raleigh brought the potatoes or not, but it’s plausible and makes for a good story. No one (thus far!) knows where the famous locket ring came from, but I like to think it came from someone who loved her and knew of her desire to keep her mother close to her heart, and the timing was right. Some say that both faces in the locket are of Elizabeth, but lockets, then and now, are known for keeping a portrait of oneself and a loved one close by; it was unlikely that anyone would keep two portraits of themselves in a locket. It’s clear that Elizabeth kept mementos of her mother about, but subtly, and this would have fit right in. It was fun to invent a provenance. The girdle prayer book I described was most likely to be owned by Elizabeth Tyrwhitt; it exists still in the British Museum and you can see it online. However, all highborn women had highly decorated prayer books attached to their girdles. I have tried throughout to keep the integrity of the dates as much as possible, but births, marriages, and deaths are not always clear nearly five hundred years on, so there may be some unintentional variations.

I don’t know the whole story of poor Eleanor Brydges; I do know that her aunt was accused of poisoning her husband, that Eleanor appeared at court with her sister but then disappears from the record, and that her husband was caught fleeing to the Jesuits in the year that Mary, Queen of Scots, was apprehended. I built upon that for those truths, with apologies for any wrongly taken liberties in her story.

I do not know if Helena retired from more active service, or if the queen would have allowed for that, for certain. But I do know that her ladies wished for it to be so; evidence remains of the letter quoted in the book from Francis Knollys to his wife, the queen’s beloved Lady Knollys. The Earl of Leicester reported that Lady Cobham wished to visit her husband at his country home “to rest her weary bones awhile, if she could get leave,” but he didn’t think it was likely that the queen would allow her to go. So it was certainly an issue among her ladies. Elizabeth had a firm will but always was willing to bend when it made sense, especially for those she loved; and because I wanted to explore this angle of ladies in waiting, the storyline made sense to me.

Although James I had Tudor blood, of course, his reign was the beginning of the English Stuart years and Elizabeth’s is considered to be the concluding reign of the Tudor era. In a Renaissance century rich with intelligence, intrigue, faith, factions, passion, and drama, nearly five hundred years on, she truly stands out, the marvelous daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

To quote Elizabeth herself, though she was not speaking of herself at the time, “The end crowneth the work.”