The Virgin’s Daughters
In the Court of Elizabeth I
by Jeane Westin

List Price: $16.00
Pages: 416
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780451226679
Publisher: NAL

Jeane Westin began as a journalist, then wrote nonfiction books, and now writes historical novels. She lives in California with her husband, near their daughter, and has been rehabilitating a Tudor cottage.

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Q: You’ve written other novels in the past, but this is your first Tudor historical novel. What inspired you to write it?

A: My love of all things Elizabeth I started with my lifelong inter­est in history, and in particular English history. Though Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine was strong, sensuous and fascinating, she was at best co-ruler with Henry Plantagenet. Later, Queen Vic­toria seems to me a shadowy, grandmotherly figure, evoking pity but not devotion. Only Elizabeth Tudor ruled and gave her name to an age that made a small island nation into a great power. She is such a towering personality that innumerable books and mov­ies about her have been created and in today’s Web­-­connected world, entire Web sites and blogs are devoted to her, producing a steady stream of material, both true and false. And yet, our ap­petite for Elizabeth does not seem to diminish, but grows. With each new portrait of her life we are fascinated again and want to know more, always in search of an answer to: “At heart, who was she?”

Q. How much of The Virgin’s Daughters is based on history and how much did you make up?

A: That’s a tough question to quantify because so much is a mixture. I stay true to what is known about events and what was reported to have been said, but no one knows what the people thought or said in private. A great deal of Elizabethan material, including many of Robert Dudley’s letters, was lost during the English Civil War. I confess, I have sometimes shifted or fused time and place to keep this book from running to a thousand pages.

Q. Lady Katherine Grey and Mistress Mary Rogers handle their love affairs very differently and experience very different fates as a result. Did you find yourself sympathizing with one lady over the other? And can you tell us what happened to some of Elizabeth’s other ladies­-­in­-­waiting?

A: Any reader who has a young daughter will recognize Lady Kate Grey. Her behavior at the time was beyond willful to almost sui­cidal. Nothing can explain it but her needing love so desperately that she could will herself into believing all would be well simply because she needed it to be. Her young life had been so sterile and loveless that she really had no chance to develop a mature view. How many of us can think clearly when we are young and in love? I do not believe that either Kate or Ned wanted the throne, but there is no way that Elizabeth with her troubled life wouldn’t have felt threatened by two people with royal blood having sons so easily.

I am always in sympathy with the character I’m writing at the time. Both Kate and Mary had problems of defiance and de­layed satisfaction that most modern women experience, although modern women rarely delay satisfaction to the extent that these women did.

Historically, Kate was moved around to several country houses, but for my purposes I kept her in one place. She may have won a slight victory after all, since her second son, Thomas or William (depending on the source), is a direct ancestor of Elizabeth II, England’s reigning queen.

As for Mary Rogers, she and John had fifteen children, which, I imagine, kept her busy . . . John, too.

There are good records of one of the queen’s ladies: Lady Saintloe. She married a fourth time to the Earl of Shrewsbury and became the renowned Bess of Hardwick, who tried to manipulate her granddaughter Arbella Stuart onto the throne. Failing that, Bess died the richest woman in England. We may owe Bess for far more than her colorful biography. Shakespeare is reported to have seen his first play at the age of twelve at Hardwick Hall.

Q. So much has been written about Elizabeth I. How did you decide on your particular portrait of her?

A: I knew I wanted to write about Elizabeth and her court and looked for a new way to approach a queen who was so well­-­known and show her in a different light. When I read that she didn’t want her ladies­-­in­-­waiting to marry and had beaten ladies who’d had af­fairs, I knew I had a different approach to viewing both Elizabeth and her court. Who knew the queen better than other women who were with her?

Q. You strongly suggest that Elizabeth was not technically a “virgin” queen. What led you to this conclusion, and what self­-­justification do you think Elizabeth made that allowed her to call herself a virgin queen? Do you think she was intimate with more men than just Robert Dudley?

A: Did she or didn’t she? No one knows the truth. Many guessed and whispered during Elizabeth’s reign. William Cecil, her chief minister, thought she and Robert Dudley were lovers as late as 1572, when she was thirty­-­nine years old. Now, four centuries later, happily for me, we still wonder: What was their true rela­tionship? We do know this: Elizabeth’s love for her Robin and his for her outlasted his life and ended only with her death. Their love triumphed over quarrels, his disastrous marriages, her flirta­tions with handsome courtiers and calculated political marriage contracts and broke them with most of the foreign princes of the time. For thirty of her adult years she never allowed Robin to leave her side except to do what only he could be trusted to do, or with great emotional pain for them both. Robin’s love for her was simply the most important part of his life. Let me ask you: How could such a lifelong, tumultuous, passionate emotional intimacy endure without physical love? The idea defies what we know of human behavior, which has not changed. The answer for me lies in her willing Robin’s body servant, Tamworth, a huge sum when she thought herself dying of smallpox. Why, if not to silence him and retain her virgin image for posterity?

Elizabeth could not risk pregnancy and contraception was primitive, so physical satisfaction would have been somewhat less than Church authorized. I’ll leave the idea of what that could have involved to your imagination. I think for a queen, as for a recent American president, that was justification for considering her physical contact to be nonsexual, technically leaving her a virgin. In other words: The queen has spoken and wills it to be so.

It is possible that Elizabeth was intimate with other men who caught her eye, and there were several. The most likely candidate is Sir Christopher Hatton. His existing letters to her are wonder­fully passionate. Again, we will never know. I prefer to think that her love for Robin was so strong that she was intimate only with him. However, I’m a romantic, not a realist.

Q. You seem to enjoy writing about the Tudor period. What about this time particularly fascinates you?

A: Elizabeth!

Henry VIII gets a huge amount of historical attention, but to me he was a woman hater. If you look deep into his behavior ­toward women, he used them, politically and physically, but he did not know the meaning of love. He destroyed women when they did not fulfill his plans. His daughter Elizabeth, while having his strength and intelligence, had more humanity. She built Eng­land into a world power and kept the love of her people. To this day she is their most popular monarch.

Q. Can you explain more fully what Elizabethans thought of roman­tic love? The general population seems to sympathize with Kate and Ned, lovers separated by Elizabeth and imprisoned in the Tower, yet much of the court seems to treat romantic love as easily expendable in pursuit of wealth and power. Does either represent the prevailing attitude?

A: Attitudes prevail when they serve. Courtiers and the upper class used marriage to add to their property and titles and to create heirs for both, although neither precludes falling in love. The common people, who had neither property nor titles, were able to be more purely romantic. Since they were largely uneducated they rarely left diaries or letters expressing these feelings. However, they did flock to the Globe Theatre to see Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Love ballads were sold on the streets, and Elizabethan love poetry is some of the most beautiful in the English language. For exam­ples of love poetry of the time, read Sir Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella,” in particular sonnet 71, “Desire,” Edmund Spenser’s “One Day I Wrote Her Name” or any of Christopher Marlowe’s poems and, of course, Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sir Walter Raleigh didn’t spend all his time sailing to the New World or fighting the Spanish. He wrote love poems, too, some to Elizabeth.

Q. I never knew before reading this novel that the Tudor court moved from palace to palace as each place began to stink from too many bodies living in too close quarters without good plumbing and with an aversion to bathing. Can you expand on your description of living conditions, and what small improvements began to be made over time? Was the flush toilet really invented during Elizabeth’s reign?

A: With our modern plumbing and endless products to make bod­ies odorless, it is almost impossible for people today to imagine a time when there were no bathrooms, toilets or running water except at public wells. A close-stool, which was actually just a chamber pot in the seat of a chair with a lid, served even affluent people. It was screened from the rest of the chamber. Try to imagine a Porta-Potti sitting in the corner of your bedroom without its outer shell and you’ll get the idea, although the close-stool was emptied more often.

Outdoor privies called closets­-­of­-­ease were common, but chamber pots were poured into the street, and strangers in Lon­don were warned to walk under eaves lest a housewife dump night soil on their heads. In some more affluent areas the night­-­soil man came by each morning to collect. A century later, post­-­1660, Samuel Pepys in his diary describes the contents of his close-stools and privies being funneled to a receptacle in his cellar, which was emptied periodically by people who did that work . . . which must be high up on the list of the worst jobs in history.

Sir John Harington really did invent the first flush toilet and installed it for Elizabeth, although it was three centuries later be­fore a newer version came into widespread use.

Elizabeth I had no mistress of the stool, but I created the posi­tion for Mary Rogers so that very often she would be near John Harington. I admit the situation is unusual for a novel, but I could not resist it.

Elizabeth was ahead of her time in her habit of cleanliness. She hated foul odors and was clean about her person and clothing and not reluctant to wrinkle her nose at others who were not. She also had a habit of ignoring the advice of her doctors, who at that time believed that bathing was harmful.

Bathrooms as we know them are a fairly recent invention, be­coming common only in the early twentieth century.

Q. Medicine was also in such a primitive state during this period, with horoscopes and bloodletting as poor tools against scourges such as smallpox and the plague. Can you expand on the medical miscon­ceptions of the era?

A: Bloodletting was a medical tool until the early nineteenth cen­tury, and horoscopes have never gone out of fashion. Very little was known about the body in Elizabeth’s time, mostly because religious laws made dissection rare. Early in the 1600s, after Elizabeth, William Harvey discovered how blood circulates, and that began the slow progress toward modern medicine.

A common medical misconception during Elizabeth’s time was that the properties of animals could be transferred to hu­mans. One instance I mention in the book is that the powdered heart of a bull would make a human heart stronger. That makes sense if you believe in the transfer of animal essences. A decayed tooth was thought to have a worm in it, and there were many medicines to kill the worm without pulling the tooth, although since the tooth continued to decay, the tooth pullers eventually had to be called.

Swallowing gold pills was thought to cure many ills. They were expensive and that made their powers even more believable. For a fun romp through the medicine of the time read Quacks of Old London by C. J. S. Thompson. For plant remedies consult Culpeper’s Complete Herbal.

Q. You suggest that as soon as Elizabeth died, her palaces were ran­sacked of valuable items and people scrambled to either leave the court or form alliances with the somewhat questionably appointed successor, King James of Scotland. Why was the succession so hap­hazard and chaotic, and was that true every time a king or queen died? When did the succession become more orderly, and how was that brought about?

A: Until modern times successions were often problematic. Brother killed brother, the little princes in the Tower disappeared after their uncle took the throne as Richard III, only to be killed later by Henry Tudor at Bosworth Field. Nobles chose sides and changed sides.

Though Elizabeth I was hounded to name a successor, she never would name one. Her young life had taught her how dan­gerous it was for a ruler to have a named successor. Plots and rebellions formed over and over with any disaffected or ambitious group. As Elizabeth grew older, many courtiers began to look north to James of Scotland, hoping for a place in his government. Robert Cecil even wrote to James offering his support. Remem­ber, these were government people who depended on a grateful monarch for power and wealth.

Looting was really minimal, but ongoing. The palace was full of people who took what they could steal, whether the queen was there or not. Early in her reign Elizabeth charged William Cecil with reducing expenses and he achieved better control of expen­ditures, although graft never ceased.

Q. Can you recommend other books, fiction or nonfiction, about the Tudors?

A: There are so many that this must be a very select list:

I, Elizabeth by Rosalind Miles, a stunning, blow­-­you­-­away first­­-­person novel, and Elizabeth I by Anne Somerset are two of my many favorites, as are any of Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels. Nonfiction works are almost numberless. I have a bookcase of titles I have read and continue to consult: Besant’s History of Lon­don: The Tudors by Sir Walter Besant; Dissing Elizabeth edited by Julia M. Walker; Elizabeth’s London by Liza Picard; Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works by Steven W. May; The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth by Frederick Chamberlin, and many out­-­of­-­print earlier works.

Q. Can you tell us a little more about your long career as a writer?

A: At thirteen, I wrote a class play and sat in the audience soaking up the laughter; and later a teacher gave me encouragement. It didn’t take much more than that to set me on the path of writ­ing. As an adult, I had a job that allowed me to write speeches and work on a magazine, which led me to professional magazine and newspaper article writing. I quickly transitioned to nonfiction books and then, in the greatest leap of faith, to novels. I always read fiction, sometimes several novels at a time, and I determined to write one. After one, I couldn’t stop. Writing historical nov­els is a great escape into the past. I can get through deaths, fam­ily illnesses and disappointments by simply going deep into the people and places of another time. It’s the best therapy, writing or reading.

Q. You live in a Tudor­-­style home in California, which you’ve been refurbishing for many years. Can you share something about that project? Do you secretly wish you lived in England?

A: I love Tudor architecture and gardens and have many books on the subject. My husband and I have enjoyed adding Tudor character to our home. Our latest project was a large leaded­-­glass window. I picked each hand­-­blown glass pane, looking for just the right imperfections to age it. I’m searching now for Tudor chimney pots.

I’m happy to be an American, but I’d love to go to England more often and stay longer.

Q. What’s next for you as a writer?

A: There are two books I’d like to write about more obscure areas of Elizabeth’s life. The first: the duration and power of her ageless, emotional love for Robert Dudley in their middle years and her amazing reaction to his death. She took his last letter and locked herself in her rooms alone for three days without food or drink, until her chief minister, fearing suicide, finally had her doors bro­ken down. What did that letter say, and what did she remember during those hours?

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