The Queen's Fool Read online

  He drew a breath. “Hannah, in all my dreams, I did not dream of this.”

  I pressed against his side. “Daniel, I did not know what I wanted when I was a girl. And then I was a fool in every sense of the word. And now that I am a woman grown, I know that I love you and I want this son of yours, and our other children who will come. I have seen a woman break her heart for love: my Queen Mary. I have seen another break her soul to avoid it: my Princess Elizabeth. I don’t want to be Mary or Elizabeth, I want to be me: Hannah Carpenter.”

  “And we shall live somewhere that we can follow our beliefs without danger,” he insisted.

  “Yes,” I said, “in the England that Elizabeth will make.”

  Author’s Note

  The characters of Hannah and her family are invented, but there were Jewish families concealing their faith in London as elsewhere in Europe, throughout this period. I am indebted to Cecil Roth’s moving history and to the broadcaster and filmmaker Naomi Gryn for giving me a small insight into these courageous lives. Most of the other characters in this novel are real, created by me in this fiction to match the historical record as I understand it. Below is a list of some of my sources, and for the history of Calais I am also indebted to the French historian Georges Fauquet who was generous with his time and his knowledge.

  Billington, Sandra. A Social History of the Fool. London: Macmillan, 1984.

  Braggard, Philippe, Johan Termote, and John Williams, editors. Walking the Walls, Historic Town Defences in Kent, C&frac;te d’Opale and West Flanders. Kent, UK: Kent County Council, 1999.

  Brigden, Susan. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485–1603. London: Allen Lane, 2000.

  Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religions and the Lifecycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  Darby, H.C. A New Historical Geography of England before 1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

  Doran, John. A History of Court Fools. London: Richard Bentley, 1858.

  Fontaine, Raymond. Calais, ville d’histoire et de tourisme. Broché: Syndicat d’initiative de France, 2002.

  Green, Dominic. The Double Life of Doctor Lopez: Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I. London: Century, 2003.

  Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

  Haynes, Alan. Sex in Elizabethan England. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1997.

  Hibbert, Christopher. The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991.

  Loades, David. The Tudor Court. London: B. T. Batsford, 1986.

  Marshall, Peter. The Philosopher’s Stone: A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy. London: Macmillan, 2001.

  Neale, J. E. Queen Elizabeth. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934.

  Plowden, Alison. Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Elizabeth I. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1999.

  — —. The Young Elizabeth: The First Twenty-five Years of Elizabeth I. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1999.

  — —. Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998.

  Ridley, Jasper. Elizabeth I. London: Constable, 1987.

  Roth, Cecil. A History of the Marranos. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932.

  Somerset, Anne. Elizabeth I. London: Orion, 1997.

  Starkey, David. Elizabeth. London: Vintage, 2001.

  Turner, Robert. Elizabethan Magic: The Art and the Magus. Boston: Element Books, 1989.

  Weir, Alison. Children of England. London: Pimlico, 1997.

  — —. Elizabeth the Queen. London: Pimlico, 1999.

  Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. London: Faber and Faber, 1935.

  Woolley, Benjamin. The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Doctor Dee. London: HarperCollins, 2001.

  Yates, Frances. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 9df44801-cddf-4d38-b609-fcdafe6a83c0

  Document version: 2

  Document creation date: 2011-03-15

  Created using: doc2fb, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software

  Document authors :

  kerch64

  About

  This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.

  (This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)

  Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.

  (Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)

  http://www.fb2epub.net

  https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/