Authors: Victoria Lamb

Her Last Assassin (49 page)

Lucy Morgan, as I discussed in my notes for the previous two books in this trilogy,
The Queen’s Secret
and
His Dark Lady
, is a semi-fictional character. That is, she exists as a repeated name on official records of the time, as a paid lady in Queen Elizabeth’s service, and also possibly as Black Luce of Clerkenwell, who was imprisoned at one stage for being a ‘bawd’, or woman of loose morals. But her depiction as Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ is mere conjecture on my part, and we have no hard evidence for who or what she was, beyond a name on a few official rolls. However, her later imprisonment in the Tower of London for lack of chastity is entirely in keeping with the Queen’s hardline policy towards her ladies-in-waiting. When one of her favourites, the sailor and adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh, was found to have secretly married Bess Throckmorton, a young maid of honour, Elizabeth ordered both to be imprisoned in the Tower of London in the summer of 1592. Required for state duties, Raleigh was soon released. But poor Bess, whose baby son died during her imprisonment, was left to languish in the Tower long into that harsh winter.

In connection with Shakespeare’s work with James Burbage at the Rose, I have taken various liberties with dates here to fit the structure of my story.
Venus and Adonis
, his epic poem, was published in 1593, four years later than I have it here. However, as a work of great length and complexity, based on a passage from Ovid’s famous
Metamorphoses
, it is likely to have been a work in progress for several years prior to publication. Both
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
, which followed it, were epic poems dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, who was evidently his patron by the time the second poem appeared at least. As for Shakespeare’s reception by his theatrical peers, Robert Greene actually criticized Shakespeare three years later than this scene, in 1592:

for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

The chances of an embryo-playwright, freshly arrived from the country, provoking that amount of ire from an established writer is unlikely, all of which points to Shakespeare having been in London some time before this outburst. It should be noted, however, that, to my knowledge, we have no official record of the companies playing at the Rose in 1589. So it is merely speculation that Shakespeare might have worked there around this time, and indeed some authorities would suggest he was still at home in Stratford during these early years. Since our knowledge of Shakespeare’s life is scanty at best, it seems acceptable to make such leaps of interpretation in a work of fiction.

Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, the twin of Judith, died in the summer of 1596 at the age of eleven, possibly while Shakespeare was on tour with his company. There is no record of what caused the boy’s death, but it may have been the plague. Although he left behind no record of any personal grief for his only son, we have testimony of his feelings in the plays, notably
King John
, written around this time, where a mother is driven to distraction by the memory of her dead son, imagining him talking to her and filling out his ‘vacant garments’ as though still alive. In
Her Last Assassin
, I stop just short of Hamnet’s death, leaving my fictional Shakespeare perpetually suspended at a time when his son was still alive and all things were possible.

Christopher Marlowe: playwright and spy

Christopher Marlowe was probably the most noted Elizabethan playwright of his generation after Shakespeare, who was born in the same year. It is likely, from what little we know of his life and movements just before his death, that he worked as a spy for the English. But he may also have been a ‘double agent’, trading information with the Spanish in return for money or favours. The truth of his loyalties may never be known, nor the circumstances behind his sudden death, but I feel it unlikely that he would have betrayed his country. For a start, his patron was cousin to Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster and probably the man who first recruited him to spy for England. And though Marlowe was arrested for blasphemy and heresy – possibly on a charge of atheism – just prior to his death, he was questioned by the Privy Council, which seems extreme, and no record was kept of those proceedings. That Marlowe was in fact giving them a secret report, following his recent activities abroad, is more likely.

Shortly after this Privy Council summoning, however, Christopher Marlowe – or Kit as he was known in theatrical circles – was murdered. He was stabbed to death on 30 May 1593, in a quarrel that apparently blew up out of nowhere in a private house in Deptford, where he was drinking with a number of underworld acquaintances in an upper room. His self-confessed killer, Ingram Frizer, a well-known ‘fixer’ and confidence trickster, was later pardoned on the grounds of self-defence. My account of Marlowe’s murder is loosely based on the legal testimony given by those witnesses present, most of whom appear to have had connections to espionage, a situation highly suggestive of a pre-arranged ‘hit’. Precisely why this talented young playwright was murdered is an Elizabethan puzzle that many have tried to solve since. But whatever information Christopher Marlowe held that was so important, he took it with him to his grave.

Select Bibliography

Among these books, I am particularly indebted to Lytton Strachey’s entertaining old volume on
Elizabeth and Essex
, from which I took much of my inspiration for the uncovering of the ‘Lopez Plot’.

Ackroyd, Peter,
Shakespeare
, Vintage, 2005

Borman, Tracy,
Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen
, Jonathan Cape, 2009

Cook, Judith,
Roaring Boys: Playwrights and Players in Elizabethan and Jacobean England
, Sutton Publishing, 2004

Cooper, John,
The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I
, Faber, 2011

Clark, John and Ross, Cathy (eds), London:
The Illustrated History
, Penguin, 2011

Glasheen, Joan,
The Secret People of the Palaces: The Royal Household from the Plantagenets to Queen Victoria
, BT Batsford, 1998

Gristwood, Sarah
, Elizabeth and Leicester
, Bantam Press, 2007

Haynes, Alan,
Sex in Elizabethan England
, The History Press, 2010

Hutchinson, Robert,
Elizabeth’s Spy Master
, Orion, 2007

Knutson, Roslyn Lander,
Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time
, Cambridge University Press, 2001

Sim, Alison,
Pleasures & Pastimes in Tudor England
, The History Press, 2009

Southworth, John,
Shakespeare the Player
, Sutton Publishing, 2000

Strachey, Lytton,
Elizabeth and Essex
, Chatto & Windus, 1928

Trow, M. J., and Trow, Taliesin,
Who Killed Kit Marlow? A Contract to Murder in Elizabethan England
, The History Press, 2001

Now is the Month of Maying
was written by Thomas Morley, 1557/8–1602. A popular composer of Tudor secular music, this is one of his better-known pieces, still performed today.

Acknowledgements

My grateful thanks must go first to my agent Luigi Bonomi, as always, and his wife Alison, who are beside me every step of the way. The writing of historical fiction can be a laborious process, undertaken alone or in the hushed surroundings of academic libraries, and the pleasure of an occasional working lunch with one’s agent cannot be overstated.

My thanks are also due to the marvellous and professional team at Transworld, especially my editor Emma Buckley, whose thoughtful insights and patience have made this a far better book, and to Lynsey Dalladay for being such a brilliant publicist.

Nearer to home, I am eternally grateful to my husband Steve, to whom this novel is dedicated, for having made endless cups of tea and ferried children about while I sat struggling with Elizabethan plotters. I was only very haphazardly a writer when he married me, so he did not sign up for being Mr Lamb. Yet there he still is, happy to take on the often problematic mantle of novelist’s spouse. Equally, my long-suffering children have learned to tiptoe about in the evenings and fetch snacks to keep me at my desk: my thanks to Kate, Becki, Dylan, Morris and Indigo for being indispensable members of the team.

Thanks, finally, to all those librarians, writers and researchers who have helped along the way, and to my friends and readers online, whose daily encouragement continues to nudge me towards exciting new writing projects.

About the Author

While studying Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights at Oxford University,
Victoria Lamb
had a desire to write a series of novels about Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’. Now a busy mother of five, she has finally achieved that ambition. Along the way, she has published five books of poetry under the name Jane Holland and edited the arts journal
Horizon Review
. She is also the author of a series of Tudor novels for teens. Victoria lives in a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse on the fringe of Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, with her husband and young family.
Her Last Assassin
is her third novel featuring Lucy Morgan.

Also by Victoria Lamb

The Queen’s Secret

His Dark Lady

For young adults:

Witchstruck

Witchfall

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First published in Great Britain
in 2014 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Victoria Lamb has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446463031
ISBNs 9780593068021 (hb)
9780593068038 (tpb)

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