The Queen's Fool

Author’s Note

The characters of Hannah and her family are invented, but there were Jewish families concealing their faith in London as elsewhere in Europe, throughout this period. I am indebted to Cecil Roth’s moving history and to the broadcaster and filmmaker Naomi Gryn for giving me a small insight into these courageous lives. Most of the other characters in this novel are real, created by me in this fiction to match the historical record as I understand it. Below is a list of some of my sources, and for the history of Calais I am also indebted to the French historian Georges Fauquet who was generous with his time and his knowledge.

Billington, Sandra. A Social History of the Fool. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Braggard, Philippe, Johan Termote, and John Williams, editors. Walking the Walls, Historic Town Defences in Kent, C &frac;te d’Opale and West Flanders. Kent, UK: Kent County Council, 1999.

Brigden, Susan. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1603. London: Allen Lane, 2000.

Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religions and the Lifecycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Darby, H.C. A New Historical Geography of England before 1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Doran, John. A History of Court Fools. London: Richard Bentley, 1858.

Fontaine, Raymond. Calais, ville d’histoire et de tourisme. Broché: Syndicat d’initiative de France, 2002.

Green, Dominic. The Double Life of Doctor Lopez: Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I. London: Century, 2003.

Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Haynes, Alan. Sex in Elizabethan England. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1997.

Hibbert, Christopher. The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991.

Loades, David. The Tudor Court. London: B. T. Batsford, 1986.

Marshall, Peter. The Philosopher’s Stone: A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy. London: Macmillan, 2001.

Neale, J. E. Queen Elizabeth. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934.

Plowden, Alison. Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Elizabeth I. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1999.

– – -. The Young Elizabeth: The First Twenty-five Years of Elizabeth I. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1999.

– – -. Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998.

Ridley, Jasper. Elizabeth I. London: Constable, 1987.

Roth, Cecil. A History of the Marranos. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932.

Somerset, Anne. Elizabeth I. London: Orion, 1997.

Starkey, David. Elizabeth . London: Vintage, 2001.

Turner, Robert. Elizabethan Magic: The Art and the Magus. Boston: Element Books, 1989.

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– – -. Elizabeth the Queen. London: Pimlico, 1999.

Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. London: Faber and Faber, 1935.

Woolley, Benjamin. The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Doctor Dee. London: HarperCollins, 2001.

Yates, Frances. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.