Review: Nature is a part of Jean’s world, her grandmother from Orkney, one of the Scottish Renaissance writers. ‘An owl in the desert dinna smile, they behold the Almighty,’ says one character. There is range in this novel of <William of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare’s players, inherited from Elisabeth I, who James I admires and continues sponsoring in spite of debts. The word and culture come first and as we know the Edinburgh Hospital, painted by an awed William Turner.
We know when Queen Anna remarks before giving birth for her husband, James, in Chapter 4(-page22): ‘Creation of children is god-like’ we are in the presence of genius. The simplicity of the remark is such that we barely take in the importance, in the novel, for a woman, defending her central role in governance and faith. Do men govern, or do women truly? Orlando shows women can become men.
Page 23 is an example of profound involvement with the space and time of the novel; referring to: ‘the mound of Arthur’s Seat rises behind them as daunting to Christian as her own round form, but they do not climb it as they have done before…’*which as lines go is wholy original and instantly relatable. What better way for a woman writer to give a context to Edinburgh’s natural proturbance, that no man could have dreamt up, the Mound has always struck me as almost ‘pregnant’, yet I could never find those distinctive words. It continues: ‘He points to St Anthony’s Chapel,
‘Under it in a crag tae the left is a cave where ye can bide but still see Edinburgh. Dry and warm, ye’ll see boats docking in Leith, see the Kingdom o’ Fife-and even right intae Holyrood Palace.’ These lines transport us to a world of intrigue, as though the author lived in that time, and knew Elsinore and Hamlet himself. She gently finishes the paragraph, bold and female embodying the times: ‘A man in that cave can see us here in the gairdens.’ A shiver runs up and down my spine.
A form of historical psychogeography has for me become a sort of new way of writing, feeling the psychological, social impulse of the time, through a social perspective as Jean does with George Heriot. Such a form of perspective has evolved slowly with profound scholarship, traceable to ‘Orwell’s Roses’ where those he planted are found alive, as well as Ruth Scurr, in her ‘Napoleon in Gardens and Shadows’.
The Queens and hidden histories of women are really hot topics of conversation this year, as we approach the extraordinary seventieth year of Elisabeth II’s reign, her platinum Jubilee. So also then is the story of her namesake, Elisabeth I, and the next in line as Monarchs: Anne and James I and VI of Scotland.
Through a multitude of vibrant voices Jean Findlay guides a majestically detailed narrative account of prominent women, Anna of Denmark, Christian, wife of George Heriot, a highly diplomatic jeweller, James I and his subtle responses to the spying of Elisabeth I’s Court, which binds two nations hence creating the Union Jack-named after him, yet the book wanders like Baudelaire might into free associations of kinship and the realms of profound psychogeography. The book pays homage to the various confused dogmas, suspicious and absurd supersitious belief in ‘storms being created by witches’ to prevent Anna of Denmark’s arrival. Like Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, it fears factions, skirts skilfully, as sympathetically round the outrages of those like Bothwell, who was banished after abducting Mary Stuart, and shows how humanistic common sense guides Heriot away from pitfalls, often harmful misunderstandings, while enjoyably picking up on evolving aesthetics, poetry and art forging judgments that are beyond religion. The merry Court finds George Heriot, Queen Anna and James alive with singing and poetry of forgiveness and forgetting utterly contradictory mumbojumbo about witchcraft, irrational fears of death, deleterious differences of opinion. Actually Jean who is an expert on French literature has a touch of Baudelaire and suddenly are we not twenty thousand leagues under the sea of a psychogeographer, showing us how modern humanity is born of kindness? At a time when the world is in confusion this book has sincere relevance, the selflessness of women and a wish to partake in creating beauty, against the barely concealed lust and greed of god-botherers, also acting as a warning to the modern Downing Street.
Is our Queen a symbol of women’s empowerment? ‘Seeing is believing’ is a quote that she is known for. The wish to meet everyone actually has a strange parallel in Quentin Crisp, “I want to meet everyone” he told me-others-while he described himself as the ‘alternate Queen’ with a yearly ‘Queen’s Speech’. I met him in New York for tea, which was bizarre as he seemed a little too keen! I see evidence of a parallel with a good writer, ‘seeing is believing’ inviting us to join her on a walk through Edinburgh’s past: a woman who has worked for charity, with homeless and adicts..who now believe.
We live with a monarch, a sure symbol of tradition, grace, presence and persistence in a world changing faster than we might be able to cope with. So too, ‘The Queen’s Lender’, comes along with insightful detail at a time when our present Queen is about to reach her platinum anniversary and Alistair Campbell is even a fan of her ‘extraordinary’ abilities; in her novel, Jean has recreated Queenly women, married to power, but who as women are independent-minded and break tradition, Anne wanting to be able to stay with her first-born, even if it means treking across stony scrubland paths, woodlands and risking her reputation.
She has an ally in George Heriot, whose name is one of those in history that reigns supreme. Although a rich jeweller, he shows himself interested more in art and culture, and when successful enough starts a school in his name; apart from which ‘Heriot-Watt University’ is also known to all who live in Edinburgh. He is in this most refreshing and realistic book willing to bend to Anna’s wishes, unafraid even. Under the radar women dare to speak their minds and Jean has magically unmasked the boundaries of non-court life and grasped exactly the subtle manipulation of how that helped the women’s cause.
From birth Anna is exposed, unable to defend herself: the decision comes at the birth of Anna’s child, Henry, to invite all the court to watch..as proof of his legitimacy, which is actually standard for the time. On George’s wife: ‘There’ll no be the same crowd. Only the midwife and ourselves.’
Excellently researched, Jean won grants to spend time learning of the era Anna and George lived in; Jean’s detailed description in this scene allows us a unique look at the whole drudgery, hypocrisy of monarchy. The mirroring of George Heriot’s poor wife, expecting a child without a midwife, with Queen Anna’s in the story of the start of James I’s reign, illuminates snobbery and elicits frightening images-hurling us into the world underpinning the humiliations of poverty, deference, high office and war.
‘Gem watching is his pleasure;not the acquisition, but the working of stone.’ He watches jewels but also court and learns how to invade it. Vanadium and chromium of emeralds is the chemistry, in his day, a wonder: ‘When you cut in a stone, it is not really a cut, more a graze, a filing, and it has to land on the right place, so a minute flat face can be shown which twinkles in the right light and the right light is either sunlight, the best, or a single candle flame which gives a dark, deep insight into the stone itself.’ The ‘cursed ships’ and the necessarily supersitious nature at Danish and Scottish courts terrifies, especially when a ‘sage’ woman, Agnes Sampson, still known today to history and us, infamously, burned at the stake, when she is an ‘essential worker’-a midwife: Jean lets that last fact drop gently, almost casually quietly and so doubly appalls us, after showing in a previous scene how a midwife can save Danish Anna’s life. Without spoilers it would be inappropriate to venture further, but I figure George has some of the peaceful nature I recently found appealing researching Aristophanes, who wrote multiple plays that contain much about peace in ‘Lysistrata’, particularly from a woman’s perspective. As Anna says, ‘Creation o’ children is god-like-‘ bluntly and like George III’s wife displays intellect: ‘a woman could make much of herself if educated’; she is the mother of Charles I-a patron of the arts, after his mother’s example.’George’s love is not possessive and in that sense it is true love; he wants the best cut for the best stone, he knows the best cut, like a wise woman advising her grandchildren on the future.’
The historical novel can elucidate and enlighten us about what we know of the times, we live after: so it is with references to a ‘rumour of the translating’ of a text about ‘I am like a pelican o’ the wilderness I am like an owl o’ the desert-‘being by James himself. We learn to see his nature with all its faults, in a broad light.
About Jean Findlay
Jean Findlay was born in Edinburgh. She studied Law and French at Edinburgh University under Peter France and Theatre under Tadeusz Kantor in Kracow, Poland. She co-founded an award winning theatre company and wrote and produced plays which toured to London, Berlin, Bonn, Rotterdam, Dublin, Glasgow and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. She spent years in London writing drama and book reviews for the Scotsman, and has written for the Independent, Time Out and the Guardian. In 2014 she published Chasing Lost Time: The Life of CK Scott Moncrieff, Soldier, Spy and Translator with Chatto and Windus, now in Vintage paperback and with FSG in New York. She founded Scotland Street Press in Edinburgh in 2014 and now runs this small, award-winning publishing house. For writing The Hat Jewel she won a Hawthornden Fellowship 2018 and a Lavigny International Writer’s Fellowship 2019.
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