Tag Archives: Wars of Religion

Tudor Thriller: The Queen’s Men

15 Monday Nov 2021

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Review: The Queen’s Men, by Oliver Clements
Atria, 2021. 397 pp. $27

One night in 1577, as Elizabeth I’s royal train proceeds through a forest, masked gunmen empty their arquebuses at her carriage and flee to safety. Miraculously, the queen survives, having providentially moved to a different carriage en route. But one of the ladies-in-waiting dies, and the brazen, nearly successful attempt at regicide — which must have been planned with care and intimate knowledge of Her Majesty’s travel plans — exposes the threat to her security and that of the kingdom.

What’s more, her principal private secretary, Francis Walsingham (not yet knighted), spymaster extraordinaire, has no idea who might have executed this bold deed, though he can guess why. It’s no secret that English Catholics, in league with Spanish and Flemish agents, would welcome Elizabeth’s death and the advent of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the English throne.

Much like the Cold War decades ago, Tudor England provides a vein of thriller ore, and Walsingham is the mother lode. He appears, with varying degrees of importance, in The Locksmith’s Daughter and Lamentation, to name only two examples, and the jacket copy for The Queen’s Men invokes MI6, a bit of a stretch. I think the arquebuses are another, but who am I to stand in the way of a good yarn?

To his credit, Clements offers a twist, refusing to hoe the same row that other authors have. The hero of this caper, the alleged first agent for MI6, isn’t Walsingham but John Dee, alchemist, philosopher, spy, and, apparently, a royal favorite. The anti-Bond, if you will, Dee is poor, badly dressed, less than suave, and more passionate about books than women. (Interestingly, he appears as a minor character in The King at the Edge of the World, as an herbalist.) With the help of Jane Frommond, lady-in-waiting and friend to the murdered young woman in the royal carriage, he provides Walsingham with necessary information, or tries to.

John Dee (1527-1608/9), mathematician, bibliophile, astronomer, alchemist, and a lot else (courtesy Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; public domain in the United States)

Frommond’s role is another anti-Bond quality, for she is more than a match for several of the men around her. Naturally, despite Dee’s and Frommond’s efforts to pass on their intelligence, barriers will keep interposing themselves, as “no — and furthermore” rears its dastardly head, in the tradition of all thrillers.

Dee has a commission from the crown to re-create Greek fire, a weapon known to the Byzantines but lost to history since. Fearing the Spanish fleet, Elizabeth’s advisors want Greek fire as the means to achieve naval parity. However, to obtain the necessary naphtha, the government must treat with the Turks, who now rule from Constantinople, and the diplomacy becomes both rather too easy and overly complicated. Throw in a subplot about a beautiful look-alike to Elizabeth, and you have enough implausibility to warrant an offer to purchase Tower Bridge.

Even so, The Queen’s Men is good fun, and two aspects kept me reading. First, the plot mechanism is so complex, like a Rube Goldberg watch, that you want to see how it manages to keep time. Secondly, Walsingham has his uses, not least the access to the seat of power and the ability to make crucial decisions. He’s also a foil for Dee, who, though an ardent patriot who loves his queen, has much on his mind besides the future of the realm—chiefly, the search for the philosopher’s stone. That eccentricity rounds him out a bit, though character takes second place here.

Walsingham, without that baggage, grounds the story in his political perspective, as with this passage, when the first, false reports reach him that Elizabeth has been assassinated:

He must destroy all trace of the network he has spent ten years creating. He must above all destroy that ledger of names of his secret service: Drake; Raleigh; Marlowe; Frobisher; even John Dee. If those names should fall into the hands of Mary’s agents, or even, God forbid, the Inquisition, then even the most awful days of the first Queen Mary’s reign — when the very air of London bloomed savory with the taste of cooked meat, and Smithfield was spotted black with rings of fatty ash that dogs licked at in the night — that will come to seem like a day in May.

That said, readers looking for historical accuracy or realism on any level will find them only intermittently. And well plotted though the novel is, a few circumstances fall by the wayside, tossed into the gutter as the story barrels along, unwilling to halt even one second for logic or common sense. But Clements is attempting to graft his tale onto a modern-day genre, and he’s willing to let the seams show. For readers who can accept that, The Queen’s Men makes worthy entertainment.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

Heresies: The King at the Edge of the World

28 Monday Dec 2020

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Review: The King at the Edge of the World, by Arthur Phillips
Random House, 2020. 265 pp. $27

In 1591, Mahmoud Ezzedine lives a fulfilling life. As court physician to the Sultan Murad in Constantinople, Mahmoud is highly respected, and his general practice gives him a deserved reputation as a skilled, empathic healer. He has a comfortable house, a beautiful, loving wife, and a son whom he dotes on. Truly, Allah has blessed him.

But a diplomatic mission to London, of all places, is setting forth, and Mahmoud, who’d rather not go anywhere, is dragged along. He has little choice, really, for Murad the Great’s command is law. However, the official who gives the Caliph of Caliphs the idea to send the doctor with the diplomats lusts after Mahmoud’s wife. As a kind, honest person who prefers directness to invasion or suggestion, Mahmoud’s no match for that particular courtier, or any other, for that matter. And you just know, even if you haven’t read the jacket flap — don’t — that the good doctor will make an innocent mistake, for which he’ll pay dearly.

If you’re like me and get upset when you read about decent people suffering for their virtues while the evil triumph, The King at the Edge of the World will make you ache. For that reason, short as the novel is, and recounting as riveting a story as you could want, the threats to our hero kept me from plowing through. Do read the book, though — but not, repeat, the jacket flap, about as potent a spoiler as you’ll ever find.

Sultan Murad III (d. 1595) by an unknown Spanish artist (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain). As his first act upon accession to the throne, Murad had his five younger brothers strangled.

Phillips excels at re-creating historical attitudes, prejudices, and ways of reasoning. Mahmoud’s adventures in England also resemble a thriller’s in their ever-increasing intensity; combined, these elements make a strong, thought-provoking narrative. At its center, Phillips puts the England riven by conflict between Protestant and Catholic and imagines how a Muslim would view that. It will be recalled that Elizabethan politics and diplomacy revolved around who prayed where, and in what way, and how many people died, often in hideous fashion, for doing it wrong or attempting to make everyone else do it their way. Hard to imagine that all this idiocy happened during an age blessed with cultural triumph — and Mahmoud, the observant Muslim, remains unimpressed:

He was there, he reminded himself, to be a figure of strength and confidence in the face of endless strangeness, of threats to health and mental stamina. He must fortify the bodies of the embassy’s men (himself included) and fortify their minds against all that was wrong here: the half-naked women, the food, the fog, the filth, the intoxicating drink, the intellectual softness, the islanders’ several varieties of devoted and violent false faith.

The physician, if he weren’t a member of a diplomatic mission, would be called a heretic and a savage to his face (as some English folk manage to imply even as they think they’re being polite). But who’s the person who embodies religious virtue, and who are the real heretics? Who’s the savage, and who’s the civilized, cultured man? This is how Phillips casts the sceptered isle in its glory. To be sure, he also creates an English narrator who insists that Catholic plots against the realm do exist and, if not crushed, would cause widespread bloodshed. Since he’s utterly credible, the question then becomes how to square the civilization and the savagery; and of course, there is no real answer.

My only objections to this novel — have I mentioned the too-revealing jacket flap? — concern Mahmoud’s role as a political actor. How could such a guileless innocent occupy any court position, let alone that of a physician, with the power to kill as well as heal? After all, history records how Ottoman crown princes, on attaining the throne, might have their brothers strangled with a silken cord, as Murad did. Only the politically adept would survive such an atmosphere, or even be invited into it.

Similarly, as the narrative progresses, Mahmoud learns a thing or two about survival — not easily, mind you, and requiring excruciating mental gymnastics, which Phillips ably portrays. For that reason I don’t entirely accept the end, which the author fudges somewhat, unwelcome in itself.

Nevertheless, I invite you to read The King at the Edge of the World and be amazed at Mahmoud’s ingenuity — and his creator’s.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

What a Family: Médicis Daughter

18 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: Médicis Daughter, by Sophie Perinot
St. Martin’s, 2015. 374 pp. $27

James Thurber once wrote about a vicious, ill-tempered Airedale, of which he observed that there was a slight advantage living in the same house, because Muggs didn’t bite the family as often as he bit strangers.

Unfortunately for Marguerite de Valois, the heroine of this novel, there’s little advantage in being Cathérine de Médicis’ youngest daughter, and no humor, however dark, to comfort her. The Queen Mother, the real power in late sixteenth-century France behind her weak-willed, ineffectual son, Charles (portrayed here with symptoms of manic depression), spares no one. Though an able, decisive leader, not for nothing is Cathérine known as La Serpente, and nobody feels the venom more than Marguerite, a beautiful, curious, intelligent child.

Marguerite, who can’t believe that maman cares about her only to the extent that she can marry the girl off for political advantage, redoubles her efforts to please. Naturally, too, this gets her nowhere, because she can never be pleasing enough, and any sign of hesitation to obey, let alone have her own mind, dooms her to punishment, which of course Marguerite turns against herself. She must be wrong. Maybe she even harbors sinful desires that prevent her from being properly dutiful. Otherwise, why would her family, who love her, treat her like that?

Trouble is, though Marguerite readily accepts her position as a diplomatic pawn and yearns to have a royal husband and a crown, her carefully tutored notions of morality and sin clash with what she sees at court. When she happens on her elder brother, Henri, having sex with a lady-in-waiting, Marguerite asks her mother whether she intends to stop it. Of course not, Madame says.

It is to your advantage to permit and ignore those women who are least dangerous–those less clever than you, lacking connections, or with personal attributes which presage a short tenure. A woman who a man will soon tire of is no serious threat.

Cathérine speaks from experience; when she first came to France from Italy, she had to put up with Diane de Poitiers, her late husband’s mistress. Nevertheless, “Had I arrived and found His Majesty without a mistress, I would have made it my business to steer him toward a woman loyal to myself. One must be clever where there is a husband to be managed.” Her daughter is appalled, though she doesn’t say so.

But there’s more pressing business. Catholic and Protestant are at each others’ throats, and the conflict, occasionally breaking out into open warfare, divides the kingdom. The Valois monarchy, caught between the need for internal order and the wish to wipe out the Protestants–a project that many French subjects are itching to carry out–leads to twisting, double-edged alliances and a deep insecurity. Marguerite vaults herself into the hurricane by conducting a torrid, clandestine affair with the duc de Guise, a Catholic champion from Lorraine viewed as an upstart by the Valois.

St. Bartholomew Massacre of Protestants, 1572, as reconstructed by Francois Dubois, a Protestant painter. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

St. Bartholomew Massacre, 1572, a key event in the Wars of Religion, as reconstructed by Francois Dubois, a Protestant painter. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

I like how Perinot handles the Valois family dynamics. The way Cathérine coddles her eldest son while essentially emasculating him seems real, as does her blind preference for Marguerite’s older brother, Henri, a narcissistic jackass of the highest order. The affair with de Guise gradually reveals sides of Marguerite’s lover that she’d rather not have seen, yet he can rightfully protest that she also values him for those qualities, or once did. Best of all, I like how Perinot portrays Marguerite’s early married days with a husband she detests; those familiar with the history will recognize how mistaken Marguerite is, and how he’s worth ten of anyone else.

That said, there are serious flaws in Médicis Daughter, chief of which is that the first eighty pages are largely irrelevant and slow the pace. The later narrative repeats what you need to know about the characters anyway, whereas the ending feels somewhat abrupt and could have used more space. The writing, though often fluid, occasionally stumbles because of a heavy hand, as when Marguerite’s first-person narration underlines a point already made. At times, Perinot explains when she should show, and the racing pulse and sharp inhalations are formulaic expressions of emotion, curiously so when the author has drawn her characters so astutely. One oddity is the random French word or phrase dropped into dialogue, which seems to have no purpose; another is the use of current colloquialisms, like call out, impact, or according to her script. No doubt sixteenth-century royalty used idioms like the rest of us, just not the same ones.

Still, there’s much to like about Médicis Daughter, and I think readers who stay with it will be rewarded.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.