The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (55 page)

Will tipped his head to one side, considering. “Maybe the dwarf will win a lady fair, too.”

“With or without a crown?” I challenged. “You know, before I came here, I was a Fairy King.”

“It is a good tale—the dwarf and the giant winning love and glory,” Will said, his voice warming. “Might as well add a chest of pirate gold. A sea monster or two.”

“Shall we go down to the lodgings and see what Boku and the others can add?” I said, knowing I was home at last. “The one thing I am sure of is that the whole world is a menagerie. Every curiosity has a story to tell.”

H
ISTORICAL
N
OTE

What became
The Queen’s Dwarf
began with the seed of an idea: the story of royal intrigues entirely told from the viewpoint of a court fool. It grew into a story of friendship, a brother’s devotion, and the rocky beginnings of one of the most touching royal romances ever recorded: the unexpected love that bloomed between a fatherless French princess and the shy young man who was never supposed to be king. But what amazed me most while researching the real Jeffrey Hudson’s life was that fact was more astonishing than fiction. (Really, if I were going to have my hero kidnapped by pirates, I’d do it once. Jeffrey was seized by pirates twice!)

Jeffrey stood a mere eighteen inches tall during his time at court. A midwife blamed his diminutive size on his mother’s penchant for pickled gherkins. Perhaps the Hudson family seized on that explanation because widely accepted superstition claimed such physical imperfection was caused by the devil. In truth, Jeffrey suffered from a deficient pituitary gland. If he were born today, he could easily be cured with injections of growth hormone.

Jeffrey was the son of the butcher who trained the duke of Buckingham’s bull-baiting dogs, just as I portray in the novel. However, John Hudson’s temperament is a fictional creation, based on my belief that training dogs and sending them into the ring to be savaged would take a certain brutality. Jeffrey’s brother Samuel did not become a Jesuit, nor was anyone plagued by the fictional Uriel Ware. But the deep affection between the two Hudson lads was real. Samuel named his first son after Jeffrey, a rarity in a time when the heir was named for the father of the child. Once Jeffrey escaped his time in North Africa as a pirate’s slave, he returned to England to live with his brother.

As for Jeffrey’s introduction to the queen: Imagine my delight in discovering that Buckingham did present Jeffrey to Queen Henrietta Maria at a banquet at York House by having him pop out of a pie and march up and down the table dressed in armor. Historically, Jeffrey was only eight years old at the time. I beg the reader’s indulgence for having added six years in the interest of the story.

It is little wonder Henrietta Maria, the homesick teenager who was widely hated for being French and Catholic, eased her loneliness by collecting “pets,” however strange it seems to us now that some of them were human ones. Her “Curiosities and Freaks of Nature” included Robert Gibson (Goodfellow), a gifted artist and miniaturist; Little Sara; Pug, the monkey; and Will Evans, the knock-kneed Welsh giant who became Jeffrey’s real-life best friend. The discord-spreading Archie Armstrong came into royal service—as I relate in the story—by stealing a lamb, then pretending to be an old woman in hopes of outwitting the royal hunting party that gave chase. Rattlebones, Dulcinea, and Boku were products of my imagination, but the royal menagerie really existed and had starring roles in the queen’s beloved masques.

The early years of Henrietta Maria’s marriage to Charles I were tempestuous. The duke of Buckingham held first place in Charles’s affections and, with the help of Buckingham’s mistress, the countess of Carlisle, plotted to keep Henrietta Maria’s influence over the king minimal. Though there is no evidence Buckingham or Jeffrey were agents provocateurs in the queen’s disastrous pilgrimage to Tyburn, the damage done to the queen’s reputation was real. It resulted in the heartbreaking but necessary banishing of the queen’s French household, among them Mamie Saint-Georges, Henrietta Maria’s childhood friend.

Lucy Hay, Lady Carlisle, was known as “the killing beauty of the age.” She was the daughter of the Wizard Earl, Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland, who was friend to Sir Walter Raleigh and Christopher Marlowe and a member of the freethinking cadre of alchemists, dabblers in occult matters, and scientists called the School of Night. She spent two years imprisoned in the Tower of London at her father’s command. The earl was determined she should not mingle noble Percy blood with that of one of the king’s Scots hangers-on. Lucy escaped and wed. How did her passion for James Hay fade? That remains to be explored.

My most delightful discovery about Lucy was that she was Alexander Dumas’s model for his famed villainess Milady de Winter. Lucy really did steal the diamond studs Queen Anne of Austria gave Buckingham as a love token. Buckingham, as Lord Admiral, closed the English ports until he could get replacements made. Sadly, the Three Musketeers did not take part in foiling Richelieu’s plot.

Buckingham’s military disasters made him as widely hated as his arrogance, yet King Charles never forsook the man who was kind to him when he was an awkward prince and never expected to rule. After the disaster at the Citadel, Charles welcomed Buckingham back to England, though not in so public a manner as described here. The message to Buckingham’s detractors was the same: Only death would end the duke’s hold over the king. John Felton was heralded as a hero when he assassinated the duke, much as I have portrayed it in
The Queen’s Dwarf.

Jeffrey’s life was filled with marvels. He fought in skirmishes during the Civil War, barely escaping Parliamentarian troops with the queen. He carried out secret missions on Henrietta Maria’s behalf and he was sold into slavery by Barbary pirates. He adored the queen and followed her to France, grieving with her when she learned of her husband’s execution. Only after he killed a man in a duel and faced execution did he leave the queen’s side. Henrietta Maria ordered him into exile to save his life.

Jeffrey’s tale is that of an England on the brink of revolution, a time when the old hierarchy of fealty to nobility was crumbling, a never-before-seen group of enterprising merchants and businessmen having made a fortune by their own labor and daring. Yet this daring was often set in contrast to an increasingly harsh religious zealotry that would lead to the closing of theaters, the abolishment of dancing, and the banning of Christmas under the rule of Parliamentarian Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.

Three books of nonfiction have been a great help in fashioning
The Queen’s Dwarf. Lord Minimus: The Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Smallest Man,
by Nick Page;
A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of King Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria of France,
by Katie Whitaker; and
Court Lady and Country Wife,
by Lita-Rose Betcherman, a biography of Lucy Hay and her sister. These fabulous writers made researching pure delight. To see the full glory of Stuart England, I recommend browsing through the works of Van Dyck, paintings in which he captured the fleeting happiness Charles and Henrietta Maria would share. Some of these paintings include Jeffrey Hudson. One particularly famous portrait shows him standing beside the queen, Pug, the monkey, sitting upon his shoulder. I wonder what he was thinking at that moment, this butcher’s son from a tiny village in Rutland. Was he thinking of his brother Samuel? The court intrigues forever brewing in the Stuart court? Did he realize revolution was going to shake the very foundations of the England he knew? I doubt very much he was imagining being captured by pirates. But that is another story.

ALSO BY ELLA MARCH CHASE

Three Maids for a Crown

The Virgin Queen’s Daughter

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

ELLA MARCH CHASE cannot remember a time that she did not want to write historical fiction. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. She lives in a house filled with books and music and is lovingly herded by a loyal Shetland sheepdog named Oliver (following in the footsteps of the great Cavalier spaniel Sailor). Chase is the author of
The Virgin Queen’s Daughter
and
Three Maids for a Crown,
a story of the Grey Sisters. She invites you to visit her Web site: at
www.ellamarchchase.com
.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

THE QUEEN’S DWARF.
Copyright © 2014 by Ella March Chase. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Steve Snider

Cover painting of Queen Henrietta Maria (1609–1669), oil on canvas © Dyck, Sir Anthony van (1599–1641)/Bridgeman Art Library

e-ISBN 9781250038524

First Edition: January 2014