THE BLOG
Extra material for Alys Twist
Charged with conspiracy and about to be escorted to the Tower of London, Elizabeth begged to be allowed to write to the Queen. In what has become known as the ‘Tide Letter’, she protested her innocence and implored her half-sister to hear her out in person. In this, she was ultimately unsuccessful, but the letter-writing did buy her a little time. The tide had turned before she had finished, so she couldn’t be taken to the Tower until the following day.
Elizabeth’s prospects were bleak. From the day of the Tide Letter, and for the rest of her sister’s reign, staying alive would be pretty much all that she could do. Throughout England, too, it seems to me, there was a collective holding of breath, a praying for the tide of history to turn.
Mere months earlier, it had all started so well. Mary had come unexpectedly to the throne on a wave of popular goodwill. It is said that England likes an underdog, and Mary Tudor had taken a couple of decades of very public kickings. Now, against all the odds, this persecuted and disparaged middle-aged spinster ascended the throne that was, in the eyes of the people, rightfully hers as Henry VIII’s elder daughter. All was right with the world after twenty years of strife, it seemed, and England rejoiced. Mary’s fundamental mistake was to interpret this goodwill as a mandate to turn back time twenty years and return England to Catholicism.
It has always baffled me that Mary’s catastrophic five-year reign and her relentless persecution of the half-sister who then became Elizabeth I has barely stirred the public imagination. It strikes me as a tale ripe for telling. Mary Tudor was England’s first-ever ruling queen; and her heir, too, was an unmarried woman. There were conspiracies and rebellions, and the burning of ‘heretics’ on a scale unprecedented in England. Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower, then – when the charge couldn’t be made to stick – held in rather bizarre circumstances under house arrest in Oxfordshire. Then came Mary’s pitifully protracted delusion that she was pregnant, and the widespread complicity in what could never have been other than a doomed deception. Yet for all the high drama, there is a sense in which time stopped during Mary’s reign, and England was suspended – hanging on by her fingernails, is how I think of it – because all anyone could do, in the end, was wait for Mary Tudor to die. It seems to me that what Elizabeth endured in this peculiar period, and how she endured it, made her the queen she then became.
The main character in my novel is a fiction, as are her companions and the situation in which they become involved. The sequence and much of the substance of the events depicted in the book, though, are a matter of historical record. Elizabeth did retreat to Ashridge for Christmas 1553; she was ordered back down to Whitehall in February 1554 and then taken to the Tower; from there she was taken to Woodstock and held in a gatehouse under the supervision of the hapless Sir Henry Bedingfield, while her own household, directed by wily Thomas Parry, commandeered the nearby Bull Inn.
As regards the working life of my fictional heroine, it was from Janet Arnold’s seminal Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d that I gleaned the following, although of course any errors or inaccuracies are my own: the Pigeons – father and son – kept the Wardrobe of Robe’s records during Mary’s reign; the Yeoman of the Wardrobe of Robes at this time was a Mr Hobbes; Mary’s tailor was a Mr Jones, and her silkwoman a Mrs Wilkinson, and fine Spanish needles were indeed made by a black man in Cheapside; Elizabeth at the time of her coronation had a laundress named Elizabeth Smith in her service, and later in her reign employed a laundress named Mistress Twist.
From the same work I learned about the location and organisation of the Wardrobe. The site remains tucked away in the City of London as the enchanting ‘Wardrobe Place’, although the original buildings were lost in the Great Fire. For other topographical details of London and Whitehall Palace I consulted the Agas map, which is believed to have been created in the early 1560s, just a few years after the period covered in this novel. Huggin Lane, Maidenhead Lane, Blunderbuss Alley, Budge Row and Pissing Alley or Lane are all gone from the City of London but the other streets mentioned in the novel still exist, although all are now lined by twentieth-century office blocks. The churches featuring in the novel still stand, with the exception of All Hallows on Bread Street, which was demolished in the nineteenth century.
Laurence/Lawrence Saunders did work for a while at All Hallows on Bread Street although in actuality he had moved on from there before his death and he was burned in Coventry. His wife and son are my invention. Coincidentally, he was brother to Sabine Johnson of Barbara Winchester’s Tudor Family Portrait (1955). What happens to Ollie in this novel is based closely on the case of nineteen-year-old apprentice William Hunter as detailed in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
My invention of Alys and her story arose in part from several intriguing details and comments that I came across during my reading. First, the often-quoted claim by the Venetian ambassador at Mary’s court: ‘No one comes or goes and nothing is spoken or done [in Elizabeth’s household] without the Queen’s knowledge.’ Then Janet Arnold’s observation, in Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d: ‘Tailors might be employed in espionage.’ She cites a confession regarding the stitching of notes into hosiery, although she states there is no evidence that any tailors working in Mary’s Wardrobe of Robes were involved in any such subterfuge. Next, David Starkey’s remark in Elizabeth: Apprenticeship, his vivid account of Elizabeth’s life before her ascent to the throne: ‘Women [of Elizabeth’s household] schemed and plotted with the best, and the ones who took the most risks were those who had already thrown over the restraints of marriage and family respectability.’ He quotes, too, Sir Henry Bedingfield, despairing of Francis Verney that ‘if there be a practice of ill, within all England, this Verney is privy to it’. And Starkey is one of several historians to make reference to the mysterious visit(s) of one of Elizabeth’s ladies to the French ambassador (in 1556, a little later than I have it); he suggests that these clandestine meetings were to explore the possibility of Elizabeth’s escape to France. England’s history would no doubt have been very different had she gone.
In the writing of this novel, I found the following publications particularly valuable, although any errors and inaccuracies are my own:
Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d by Janet Arnold (Leeds, 1988)
‘Of Crymsen Tissue: The Construction of a Queen. Identity, Legitimacy and the Wardrobe of Mary Tudor’ By Hilary Doda (MA thesis, Dalhousie University, 2011)
‘“Ye Shall Have It Clene”: Textile cleaning techniques in Renaissance Europe’ by Drea Leed, in Medieval Clothing and Textiles 2, edited by Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Woodbridge, 2006)
Tudor London Visited by Norman Lloyd Williams (London, 1991)
The A to Z of Elizabethan London, compiled by Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor with introductory notes by John Fisher (Lympne and London, 1979)
Elizabeth: Apprenticeship by David Starkey (London, 2000)
