Time travel to the past has always intrigued me. If I could choose only one set of
coordinates for a temporal ride in a theoretical time machine, I would set the dials for Tudor England. Specifically, I would like to step from the present through a portal into the court of Elizabeth I just as that introverted island nation cultivated the tendrils of its language in the leaves of its books, plays and poems, and prepared to send them into the world. Today, English is spoken by more humans than any other language on the planet. The story of how that linguistic renaissance came about and who was responsible for it lies at the heart of Elizabeth’s court. In a time of deeply divisive politics, foreign and domestic perils, and power struggles, strong willed and contentious individuals sometimes made decisions and took actions for highly personal reasons that most history books never discuss.
It is these highly personal relationships and the secrets behind them that I will focus on in this blog, because in the end, all politics are to a degree personal. We all sometimes do what we do for reasons we do not want to make public. Elizabethans were no different.
The sugar sprinkles of “merry old England-ness” and “good Queen Bess-iness” do not do justice to the Elizabethan era. It was a far more complex, more human and interesting a time than the trope of the golden haze of renaissance festival days overseen by a painted female idol, the benevolent “Virgin Queen” (as though that were either a good thing or believable). Without the darker and personal truths - the intrigues, the spies, the love affairs, the bastards, the treacheries, the poisonings, the untold compromises and the daily violence - Elizabethans become one dimensional paragons of boring virtue.
Not to mention that the best parts of the story would be missing.
When an artist sketches a portrait, say of an Elizabethan court lady in a high lace ruff, by only outlining the figure, omitting the shadows on her face, failing to work through the full range of darks, lights and gradations that give her body weight and dimension, the figure will look flat and cartoonish. Likewise, if you do not know who was related to whom by blood but not by name, who had the affair with whom and when, who was whose bastard, who was jealous of whom, why a certain individual died strangely and unexpectedly, who owed whom
immense amounts of money, who knew whose ruinous secrets, who wanted revenge, and why the Queen snapped at her Lord High Treasurer and then shied her slipper at him, Elizabeth and her court will remain flat and cartoonish in your mind.
In researching my historical novels about the women without any one of whom there would be no Shakespeare, I read histories, scholarly papers, biographies, historical novels, contemporary diplomatic and court correspondence, legal proceedings, wills, letters, period books, poems, plays and songs, and that curated re-documentation of history to protect the Cecil family known as the Cecil Papers. My original purpose was to truthfully and accurately depict the historical events and the individuals I have come to know well as characters in my books. But as I read, I began to love the detective work of teasing out personal secrets and motivations from the data. I became driven to find out what really happened and to answer the “but why” questions that always puzzled me and no one seemed to answer.
I am stitching some of those secrets and half-hidden stories into my novels. But there are many more that distract from the plot line or are merely backstory. They deserve a place of their own.
Some truths of the time are only whispered. I hope that you are intrigued and will come explore with me.
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