AUTHOR’S NOTE

Marguerite Yourcenar, the author of Memoirs of Hadrian, one of the greatest historical novels ever written, once said, “Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.”

The historical novelist is like a camera trying to focus on the distant scene of the past. Sometimes the image can become blurred because it is too remote, the historical facts too alien to our own time; sometimes because it is too close, the characters too contemporary for them to be true to their own era. The trick is to find that sweet spot between fact and fiction that will bring the image into sharp relief. Consequently, I have mingled documented facts and real historical figures with fictional characters and events. Even the language my characters speak is a blend of period diction and a more contemporary rendering in order to make Elizabethan speech more familiar to the modern ear.

Wherever possible, I have maintained the Elizabethan spelling for place names (although spelling was not yet standardized in the sixteenth century). For example, the modern Covent Garden was originally Convent Garden, because the open fields in the sixteenth century were originally the grounds of an abbey and nunnery, seized by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries. Over time, the word convent became covent, most likely due to the way the original name was pronounced by Londoners.

One change I have made to the historical record concerns Robert Devereaux, second Earl of Essex. At the time of the events described in this novel, which takes place during the spring of 1586, he was in the Netherlands with his stepfather, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Essex participated in the Battle of Zutphen in September 1586 (where Sir Philip Sidney was killed) and was knighted on the field by Leicester, returning to England in late 1586 covered in glory.

I have invented a fictitious reason to get him back to England. It is entirely plausible that Leicester could have sent him to the Queen with personal dispatches, although there is no historical record of this. What is documented is that he and his entourage spent the months abroad feasting and quarreling and generally causing trouble; it is not a stretch to imagine that the ailing Leicester must have found this very wearing on his nerves and longed to get rid of his stepson for a few months.

Essex’s turbulent and changeable temperament is well documented, so much so that historians have speculated that he had some kind of personality disorder. He was certainly capable of rash, not to say, suicidal, actions; for example, in 1598, he deliberately turned his back on Elizabeth after they had argued; when the Queen slapped him for his gross insult, he almost drew his sword on her in anger. The action that eventually brought him to the scaffold in 1601 was a bungled attempt at an uprising in the city of London. He was arrested before he could force his way into an audience with the Queen at Whitehall with an armed posse.

The historical record holds that Elizabeth shows particular favoritism to Essex only after his return from the Netherlands in 1586. For plot purposes, I have made him the Queen’s favorite a bit earlier in the year.

Essex did not form his own spy network until 1592, but I have chosen to make this earlier, also for plot purposes.

The reason for these changes is the huge, looming shadow that is the Babington Plot—second only to the infamous Gunpowder Plot as the most sensational assassination attempt in all of British history.

Led by Anthony Babington, a recusant Catholic, this was a plan to assassinate Elizabeth and put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne. Walsingham got wind of the plan thanks in part to a double agent working for him called Gilbert Gifford, a Catholic deacon who was one of Mary’s agents. It was Gifford who passed on the letters written by Babington to Mary at Chartley Castle, where she was being held, and the single reply from Mary to the conspirators that sealed her fate. It is almost certain that Elizabeth knew Walsingham was intercepting Mary’s letters, but, again, for plot purposes, I have chosen to keep her in the dark.

I have substituted a fictitious Spaniard, del Toro, for Gifford. After Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to England, was expelled in 1584 for his complicity in the Throckmorton Plot, Spanish agents originated in Paris.

Annie O’Neill is also fictitious, although the history of the O’Neill clan is historically accurate.

A brief word about spy networks: Unlike the CIA, they were not financially or operationally supported by a government but by private individuals who had bought a network of informers who would channel information back to a central hub. Sir Francis Walsingham paid his informers out of his own pocket (which was why he was notoriously broke) and was only infrequently reimbursed by the Crown. All the information passed through his central office, in a house he owned at Thirty-Five Seething Lane. The location of the house within the city of London made it easier for informers to bring their information to him anonymously.

Informers, or spies, could be as diverse as chamber maids, diplomats at foreign embassies, merchants, valets, tradesmen—virtually anyone who had some connection to courtiers in a foreign or domestic court or government. The success of a spy network depended almost entirely on the central hub, where the thousands of scraps of information could be pieced together into a single narrative.

Unlike Essex, Walsingham was a genius at collating and interpreting disparate pieces of information, and he surrounded himself with similarly clever men. One such man was Thomas Phelippes, who was an expert code cracker and multilinguist. In July 1586, it was Phelippes who famously drew a gallows in the margin of his copy of a letter from Mary, Queen of Scots, to Babington. This drawing was made next to Mary’s treasonous statement that she condoned the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I. It was this statement that led to her trial in the fall of 1586, and her death in February 1587 at Fotheringhay Castle.

Contemporary readers may feel that many of the courtiers who surround Elizabeth in the series seem excessively young (Essex is twenty-one; Sir Robert Cecil is twenty-two). However, in the sixteenth century, when disease was rampant and the average life expectancy was forty, people were considered mature at a much earlier age than in modern times. So it is no wonder that people not only married very young (some as young as fourteen) but also held court positions in their early twenties.

Finally, the fragment of the play-within-the-novel, The Ghost, is almost entirely fictitious, though it is, of course, based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (written between 1599 and 1602). The only line I steal verbatim is, “Or such ambiguous giving out, to note you know aught of me,” and the word, “Swear.”