Queens Fool

Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I discovered that there had been a female Fool who had served both Queen Mary Tudor and Queen Elizabeth. Her name was Thomasina and you can see a portrait of her in the picture which the UK and US publishers put on the end-papers of the hardback novel.

In one doorway behind the reconstructed royal family is Will Somers, the King's merry fool, in the other doorway is Thomasina. It is a 'reconstructed' royal family since the characters were never together, in real life. Jane Seymour who died shortly after her son was born is shown alive with her adolescent son. Historical fiction in a painting!

As an historian interested in hidden lives, the story of a woman Fool was bound to be fascinating to me. As a novelist I found the contrast of a Fool who is the only one who can tell the truth, a Queen who stoops to folly, a girl too foolish to know love when she is offered it, and a wife whose love for her husband drives her to madness, a rich and provocative mix.

A lot of people will have no idea that there were fools serving in the English court.
I had no idea of them myself until I started the research and discovered that there were two types of fools serving in royal and lords' courts all around Europe from the mediaeval to the early modern period. We are all familiar with the Fool in the play King Lear; he is a merry fool: licensed to challenge the pride and arrogance of his master, encouraged to tell jokes and to play practical jokes, allowed to say the unsayable, in riddle and in jest and sometimes directly.

The other sort of fool was the "holy" fool, someone whose appearance and behaviour was so out of the ordinary that he was thought to be especially blessed by God, and therefore deserved the protection of others. Such fools might live as hermits and be fed by the neighbouring village, or their families might "beg" them as a fool to the local lord who was morally and socially obliged to house them and feed them in his household, and who was supposed to gain spiritual insight from their irrational outbursts.

This "begging" as a fool is how Hannah is introduced into the Dudley household as their vassal, and then passed on by them, as a high-quality gift to the King, Edward VII. Like her fellow fool Will Somers she is part of the royal household and passed on from monarch to monarch. If she had stayed in royal service she would have become Elizabeth's court fool, as Will Somers did. He died in her service having served four Tudor monarchs and seen the official religion change four times.

Once in the household the Fool was dressed by the lord or monarch and might wear livery or even special costume for feasts and events. We have wardrobe records of the clothes for Elizabeth's Fools. The 'motley' - the parti-coloured clothes became fashionable for fools around this time, but the great development of fools' clothing with the special hat, the rattle on a stick and the curl-toed shoes were more popular in Europe than in England.

As theatres developed in England the merry fools often made their way from the private appearances at court to public appearances on stage as actors and some of Shakespeare's narrators may have been played by court fools and they may have been encouraged to improvise their jokes.

Some people will have heard of Will Somers, he's been featured in novels before.
Yes, the character of the Fool, Will Somers is based on a real man. The challenge with Will was how to render his recorded jokes for the modern reader. We have a very different sense of humour from the Tudors who were amused by physically hard slapstick comedy, practical jokes, and toilet humour.

Will was also known for his riddles and jests which do not strike the modern reader very well either. I tried to show his role as someone who defused the tension around the Queen, his skill as a commentator, and his discretion with his knowledge. The warmth, charm and generosity of his character is based on the historical record, Will was famously loved by all sorts of people, commoners as well as courtiers.

Will is real, but is Hannah?
Hannah is a created character. I made her a holy fool so her task was to share her insight with her masters. I took some care in the novel not to make her predictions too reliable or too understandable. I think anyone who has experienced any sort of foresight will be aware of the unreliable nature of the gift, and anyone who has read a horoscope or attended a séance will know how ambiguous the pronouncements can be. The experiments she undertook with John Dee of 'scrying' with a special mirror were something that John Dee did with other apprentices.

The brief descriptions of Hannah's childhood were based on the historical records of the persecution of heretics under the Spanish Inquisition in Spain that was firstly designed to root out the heresy of those like Jews and Moslems who had converted to Christianity under the oppressive laws of Spain but practised their own beliefs in secret. As the Inquisition became more corrupt the Inquisitioners targeted the wealthy new Christians in order to confiscate their fortunes and a chapter of terrible cruelty and injustice was opened in Christian Europe.

The surprise for me in this research was to learn that Jews constructed escape routes which helped their kinsmen and co-religionists escape from Spain and conducted them to safer havens all around Europe. There were large semi-hidden jewish settlements in most European towns who were often left alone by the authorities because of their contribution to civic life and the wealth that they brought to the country. They lived in constant danger of persecution and denouncement, but they did nonetheless manage to survive.

I was fascinated to learn that such groups had made their homes in England, with hundreds of people in London, Bristol and York. Some of them were known to be converted jews and rose to the highest places of the land, like Dr Lopez, Elizabeth's doctor. As the doctor's unjust accusation and execution shows, even the most successful converted jews could not escape suspicion and the danger of denunciation. Others - like Hannah's family- tried to survive by denying their religion altogether and to pass as baptised and confirmed Christians.

While there was no formal Inquisition in England, the Roman Catholic Bishops under Mary were responsible for rooting out heresy and they would have burned jews and Protestants alike. The terrifying Bishop Bonner did hold prisoners, torture them, and burn them just as I show in the novel. Hannah was lucky to escape as were a few others. There are records of a number of heretics that he released on a whim. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this scene is the presence, that I report in fiction but it happened in fact, of John Dee as curate to the burning Bishop.

Was John Dee really curate to Bishop Bonner?
This indeed was the case and the explanation may be that Dee was an Elizabethan spy in the court of the Bishop, and saved others as he saved the fictional Hannah. Perhaps he was there to ensure that no Protestants involved in pro-Elizabeth plots betrayed others in their circle.

Certainly in the first book of Foxe's Martyrs - the near-contemporary record of the persecutions - Dee is named as Bonner's curate and thus shares his blame. By the second edition Dee's name has been left out, one of very few alterations. It is thought that perhaps someone explained to Foxe that John Dee was at the cruel Bishop's court as a 'sleeper' and should not be blamed for his actions while under cover.

The character of John Dee is another fascinating character in this novel.
The great danger in basing historical fiction on such extraordinary characters is that both in research and in writing I am tremendously tempted to wander off into their lives and not stick to the main story! John Dee was a great mathematician and scientist and spiritualist. We have records of some of his early experiments that we still cannot fully understand. He was known and highly regarded among the scientists of renaissance Europe, he was friends with Gerard Mercator - the map-maker and the model of the globes that Hannah sees in his house was made with Mercator.

He was an astronomer and a map-maker and came into his own under the reign of Elizabeth - he set the date of her coronation on an auspicious day. He was a European thinker as much as an English one, lecturing on mathematics in Paris, teaching in Venice where Daniel hears him, and finally moving on to Prague in his search for the 'philosopher's stone' the stone that turns ordinary metal to gold and provides eternal life.

So he was mistaken? An alchemist rather than a scientist?
In the context of the novel it's really important for me as the writer not to bring to bear my modern perceptions and prejudices (at least as far as I can exclude them). So I wouldn't make the distinction between alchemy and science at this stage. Modern scientists recognise Francis Bacon as the founder of their work but he regarded himself as an alchemist. John Dee produced the first accurate map of the British coastline, he invented a device like a periscope, he lectured on Greek mathematics, he devised an incredibly complex code for sending secret messages, he certainly wasn't some kind of confused mystic.

But, it has to be said, some of his work is incomprehensible to us now. He gave up most of his more scientific work because he believed that he was discovering the language of angels and hoped that they would give him the recipe for the philosopher's stone. Theology suggested that God spoke to the angels in the language of the prophet Enoch, and John Dee believed that he and his apprentice had tapped into celestial conversations and were learning the language of angels.

I know this sounds very flaky - but he recorded large amounts of writing. These have been examined by experts they confirm that they are constructed very like a language - but they do not resemble any language we know. It is generally thought that language cannot be created, it has to evolve over time. It is not yet possible to explain what John Dee was doing. We simple don't have the key yet to know; but he believed it was more important and significant than his more 'scientific' work.

You take us to the siege of Calais, which is not featured in many of the history accounts. Why did you think it was important?
It's important for lots of reasons. In the novel I wanted to get on with the narrative and so Hannah and Daniel had to re-unite and tackle the problems of their relationship. (Sometimes I'm very brisk with my characters!) Also it is the start of the re-habilitation of Robert Dudley, so it was important for that strand.

It got Hannah away from England as the persecutions were getting worse, logically she would have seen the writing on the wall and left, and finally I believe it was a very important historic moment - it was the loss of England's European territories - it really committed the country under Elizabeth to expansion in the new world since clearly England could not hold lands in Europe.

It was very hard to find accounts of the battle and I had to go to Calais to meet a French historian before I understood exactly what had gone on. (please link here to the article in other writing section)

And what about Robert Dudley and his wife Amy? She hardly features in The Queen's Fool and she is central The Virgin's Lover.
This was a difficulty for me. I wrote the Amy of The Queen's Fool from the perspective of Hannah, and Robert. I knew that Amy was a betrayed wife and that she was partially estranged from her husband and I imagined her in this book as hysterical and possessive. When I came, two years later, to write The Virgin's Lover and I thought much more about Amy and how she might be I found a much more complicated and sympathetic character came to mind.

I tied the two books together - in that when Hannah returns from Calais with Robert we see her on his ship in The Virgin's Lover, and she is mentioned once or twice, but these are little more than continuity issues. The difference between the Amy of The Queen's Fool, and The Virgin's Lover is partly perspective - we see Amy's jealousy from the viewpoint of a rather detached Hannah who has never felt jealousy in that way.

But also it is a case of an author having second thoughts about a character. We see Amy in violent and furious rages in The Virgin's Lover but we also see her in moments of forgiveness, in growth and in despair. The Virgin's Lover is about Amy as part of a triangle of adultery, it takes her seriously as a rounded character. In The Queen's Fool she is not as deep. If I were rewriting The Queen's Fool having written The Virgin's Lover I would deal with her as a more complex character.

You take a very sympathetic view of Mary Tudor and her religious persecution.
I do. I think it is important that my sense of religious tolerance is not transposed to a time when there was very little religious tolerance. Mary was doing what we would now regard as wrong: persecuting people for their religious beliefs; but at the time this was common practice not only in England but throughout Christian Europe. Henry executed people for heresy and so did Elizabeth.

When James came to the throne there were executions of innocent women for witchcraft. These were hard times and I didn't want to either deny their cruelty or suggest that people should somehow have known that hundreds of years later we would disapprove! Mary Tudor burned heretics in their hundreds because she thought it was absolutely the right thing to do. In her view they had already condemned their souls to eternal death because they were heretics who refused to recant. In her view they were all-but dead already.

I admire her conviction even if I don't share it and deplore the results.

What is the truth about Mary Tudor's miscarriages?
This is a million-dollar question. Nobody knows the answer for sure. It is possible that she was certain on the two occasions that she had conceived a child and that she had a phantom pregnancy, with all the symptoms of pregnancy but no foetus. When the day of the birth passed and the time went on - the dates in the novel follow the historical record - she had to come out of confinement and let it be seen that there was no baby.

It is possible that she had a gynaecological condition that seemed like pregnancy, a hydatiform mole, which came away and she did not tell anyone who kept a record.

It's possible that she had a tumour and that this was a precursor of a cancer that she may have had.

It is possible that she thought it wise to simply pretend to be pregnant in order to keep Philip of Spain at home with her in England when he wanted to leave.

I don't think she would have done this. A confinement lasted for six weeks which is a dangerously long time for a ruling monarch to be excluded from power. She could see no-one but her ladies in her chamber at this time and I think a possessive and passionate wife would not have wanted to leave Philip of Spain alone and unsupervised at court, among all those pretty women, for all that long time. Also, it's a foolish lie - it's clearly going to be found out and then she will look like a failure having prepared for a child and not having one.

The hydatiform mole, a tumour, or a miscarriage are all possibilities. Obstetric science at the time was very basic, and because of the sanctity of the royal body nobody ever physically examined the Queen. At the most she would have reported to a physician or a midwife her symptoms. It is possible that she did not even do that. Certainly there is no record of any medical opinion.

I think it possible that her desire for a child, with perhaps the irregular menstruation typical of the early stages of menopause made her think that she was pregnant, and indeed may have given her pregnancy-like symptoms. It doesn't look from the records of her gradual return to court that there was ever a day when she realised she was mistaken and declared the confinement over.

She went into confinement certain that she was pregnant and she seems to have waited and waited and then gradually emerged. It is an absolutely tragic episode in her life, if she had been pregnant and had given birth to her son the history of England, Britain, and the world would have been very different indeed.

If you have any other questions or issues you want to raise about this novel, or others, please post a message on the reader's group site and I will read it and reply.