The Queen's Dwarf
by Ella March ChaseThomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2014 Outsiders to the world of historical fiction might not fully appreciate Ella March Chase's bravery in jumping from the Tudor world of her previous two novels, The Virgin Queen's Daughter and Three Maids for a Crown to the scene of her latest novel, The Queen's Dwarf, which is set in Stuart times - but not in the ribald world of the libertine Charles II. Rather, Chase's new book is set in the early part of the reign of Charles I, a period notoriously barren of dramatic possibilities, landlocked between the slop and noise of James I and the rotating mistresses of Charles II. The world of Charles I is perhaps unfairly characterized by fustian and sackcloth, Puritan hypocrisy ill-concealed beneath Puritan lace. It makes for a hard stumble after the gigantic ambitions and romances of the Tudor era.It's perhaps for this reason that Chase opts to build in a little drama ahead of time in the person of Jeffrey Hudson, her main character, who's a dwarf. He's rescued from his brutal father and penurious family by the kingdom's resident over-mighty subject, the Duke of Buckingham, who intends to have him charm his way into the 'menagerie' of Queen Henrietta Maria and then spy on her and report her suspected treacheries and sympathies with the kingdom's persecuted Catholics. Jeffrey Hudson is a smart, quick-witted young man, reminiscent of C. J. Sansom's hunchbacked Matthew Shardlake in his matter-of-fact bitterness over both his deformity and society's casual scorn. He's accustomed to hearing things like "You had best teach your monkey manners before you introduce him to the queen, or some kitchen accident will be the least of his worries."Brave as the narrative step may be, it's as far as Chase is willing to go, not the one step more, in which both Jeffrey hates everybody in the full-sized world and everybody in the full-sized world hates him. The idea that a dwarf like Jeffrey Hudson in the 17th century might actually believe himself to be a subhuman object of comedy is beyond the pale, any more than, for instance, Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell might believe himself genuinely inferior to the Tudor noblemen all around him. Instead, the mechanism here is to give the central character a basically 20th century self-conception and let the story unfold from there.So Jeffrey Hudson is sharply aware of his own personal dignity, and very shortly after bursting from a cake to surprise the young queen, he begins to feel first admiration and then affection for Queen Catherine - his attentions deflected quite abruptly from his first sight of the king himself:
My gaze shifted to the man at her side. The queen's husband stood only a little taller than she did. I stared, unable to believe that I was an arm's length from the king. A most disappointing figure of a king. Garbed in sober black, Charles Stuart held himself apart, his shoulders stiff, his legs too thing. Rumor said he had not even learned to walk until he was four years old.
("His overlarge eyes were so aloof," Jeffrey notes, "they made me want to find a brazier to get warm")Our diminutive hero fears disappointing Buckingham, but he comes more and more to admire the lonely bravery the Queen displays in her role on the chessboard of international and religious conflict between France and England. Day by day, Jeffrey watches her and notes her rare and scattered triumphs:
Henrietta Maria would not shrink her faith into the tiny cell the Protestant lords wished to lock her in, celebrating Masses behind closed doors, hastening her priests out of sight, allowing the king to ignore the terms of the marriage contract without voicing her protest. It was an act of youthful rebellion, I believed. But she had shown her tormenters that she would not be silenced. Little wonder her ladies wanted to exult over her triumph. Yet as I watched their skirts whirl, heard their hands clap in rhythm, I wanted to stop my ears.
And in the meanwhile, he becomes acquainted with the other members of the Queen's 'menagerie' of other "freaks of nature" like himself, especially Will Evans, the royal 'giant,' a man as tall as Jeffrey is short - and every bit as deeply philosophical:
"Most of us in the menagerie came here at someone else's pleasure. But we are not as helpless in our fate as it first appears. A man cannot help the place he comes from, only how he chooses to walk once the path becomes his own."
Jeffrey Hudson's growing conflict of loyalties escalates as the plots of The Queen's Dwarf picks up steam, and there's an animating intelligence to the whole thing that feels at times almost magisterial. This is by a wide margin Ella March Chase's best novel, that much more of a triumph for taking place on such ground. Easily possible, having enjoyed this superb book, to hope that Chase might stick with the Stuarts a while longer.
