Three Sisters, Three Queens

LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, AUGUST 1513

I dream terrible dreams: of James sinking beneath the waves and pearls bubbling from his drowning mouth; of walking on a seashore and calling to him, pearls crunching under my feet; of sitting before a mirror and watching him fasten a magnificent necklace of diamonds about my neck which melts into dripping pearls as he ties it. I wake in tears and I say to him: “You will die, I know you will die, and I will never wear diamonds again. I will have to wear pearls for mourning, nothing but pearls, and I will be alone with my son and how will I ever bring him safely to the throne?”

“Hush,” he says gently. “Nothing can stop it going forward.”

He bids me a formal farewell, as if we are a king and queen of a romance. He bows before me and I put my hand on his stubborn red head and give him my blessing. He rises up and kisses my hand. I give him a silk handkerchief embroidered with my initials and he tucks it inside his jacket, as if it were a favor and he was only going jousting. He wears his finest jacket of crimson red embroidered with his name on the collar in gold thread and with his crest of thistles all over the front. I embroidered it myself, it looks very fine. He turns from me and vaults into the saddle of his warhorse, vaults like a boy as if to show me that he is as young and lusty as my brother. He raises his hand, and his personal guard close up behind him and then they move off. The hooves are like thunder, hundreds of big horses moving like one great beast. The dust rises in a cloud. I gesture for the nursemaid to take our boy inside; but I stand and watch till the men are out of sight.

Then we have to wait. I find I keep hoping for a last-minute change of plans. I am a symbol of the perpetual peace; I cannot make myself understand that the peace is broken. They bring me news almost daily. James takes Norham Castle, and then Wark, Etal Castle and others. These are no petty victories; these are great fortresses, engraved on the hearts of the border men, and we are moving the border, pushing it farther and farther south, towards Newcastle. We are taking English castles, we are taking English land. The area that they call the “debatable lands” will be debated no more; it will become Scotland. This is becoming a great expedition: no mere raid, this is a victorious invasion.

Each time the messenger draws close to the castle on the loch, the king’s standard rippling before him, a guard thundering behind him, we become more confident. As we foresaw, Thomas Howard brings all the forces that he can muster, but Thomas Howard is underprovisioned and fearful. He has no reserves, he has no local support. His own English border lords rob his wagon train and steal his horses. His allies are uncertain, and begrudge sending servants to fight at the border when they have already paid fees for a war in France. Harry has taken the flower of his nobility to France to make war for his father-in-law, to oblige his wife. He has left England woefully unprotected. He is a fool. We can win this war against an absent king and halfhearted defenders.

Then James sends a short message to say that they will come to open battle. He will take possession of Branxton Hill. He has outmaneuvered Howard who should, if he had any sense, withdraw to Newcastle. Howard’s soldiers are hungry, thirsty, stealing their own rations, and the borderers—wild men, English and Scots—set upon stragglers, kill them, and strip them naked. James’s army, well fed and well armed, is established on the high ground of Flodden Edge. The English will have to fight uphill against Scots gunners.

I wait for news. A battle must have been joined. Thomas Howard dare not go back to London to face Katherine without a battle to report. If he returns defeated, then the Howard family will be ruined. He has everything to lose. His reputation and the friendship of his king hang in the balance; I know how doggedly, how bitterly he will pursue his only course. But James need not fight, James could withdraw. He and his army could melt away back across our border, and boast of another successful raid on England that frightened them to death in the Northern counties and showed Harry that he cannot treat us with contempt.

I am sure that is what James will do—it is how the Scots have always tormented the English—but then a message comes and tells us that battle has been joined. Half a day later someone comes from Edinburgh with news that we have won the day, and the Scots are marching south. They may march as far as London! What is to stop them if they have defeated the English army? Then another report comes from a runaway soldier that there was a terrible battle, but when he fled it was going against us.

It pours with rain, a wall of water that holds us in the castle as if the sky has decided that no news shall come through. Every morning I wake to the patter of raindrops against the window and hear the gurgle of rainwater in the cisterns and the rush from the stone-carved gargoyle faces splashing down their streams into the stone courtyard. I think of my husband outside in the wind and the storm; I think of his archers with wet bowstrings, his gunners with damp powder. I swear that no one is to believe anything, they are not even to speak, until we hear from James himself. I have to be, as he called on me to be, a true queen, a Queen of Scots, a gallant heart and a proud one. But then they tell me that a messenger has come from the lords’ council in Edinburgh, with definite news, and he is waiting in my presence chamber.

I find my heart is thudding fast and I feel sick, as if I am with child again. I put my hand to my throat and feel my pulse race. Everyone who has any business to be in my rooms and anyone who has any excuse to attend has crowded into the great chamber. I walk slowly from the chapel, where I was praying for James to come home, defeated or victorious—I find I don’t care as long as he comes home. The guards throw open the doors and the babble of speculation goes instantly silent as I walk through the massed crowd of strange faces and mount the steps to my throne, turn and stand before them, looking calmly around me. I think, irrelevantly, God help me, I am only twenty-three years old. Someone else should be here listening to this, someone who knows what to do. Katherine would know how to stand, how to listen, how to respond. I feel as if I am like my little sister Mary—too young to be part of important times.

The messenger is standing before me in James’s livery, his writ from the lords’ council in his hand. “What news?” I say, and I try to speak steadily. “Good news, I hope?”

The man is filthy from his ride from Edinburgh, muddy and wet from fording rivers, soaked from his head to his dirty boots. They will have told him to let nothing delay him and to report only to me. He kneels and I realize at once from the anguish in his face that there is no point in my saying “Good news, I hope?” in my stupid little-girl voice. It is not good news and I know it.

“Speak,” I say quietly.

“Defeated,” he chokes, as if he is ready to take my place and weep.

“The king?”

“Dead.”

I sway but the carver of my household holds me upright, as if I have to hear this news on my feet, though my husband is facedown in the mud.

“You’re sure?” I say, thinking of my little son, nearly a year and a half old, and now a fatherless boy; thinking of the baby that I may be carrying. “You’re certain? The Privy Council have confirmed it—there is no doubt?”

“I was there,” he says. “I saw it.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

“It will be a miracle if anyone survived,” he says bleakly. “We went down among them in a charge, and they had billhooks to our pikes and they sheared heads off like they were hedge trimming. Our gunners didn’t have the range, so though the English were bombarded the cannon fired over their heads, they were still in their ranks, unbroken and unhurt. We thought they would all be smashed up but they were fresh. The king led a mighty charge of horse and foot, and the clansmen were all behind him. Nobody failed him—I can’t say a word against any house—they were all there; but the ground gave way under our feet. It looked sound when we viewed it from the top of the hill; but it was treacherous, a green, weedy marsh. We got bogged down and sank, and couldn’t get up, and they let us struggle towards them. They stood in their ranks as we came on, going slower and slower, and then they ripped off heads and ripped out bellies and pulled down horses.”

My ladies gather around me murmuring horrified questions, whispering names. They will have lost sons and husbands, and fathers and brothers.

“How many lost?” I ask.

“Dead,” he insists. “They’re dead. About ten thousand.”

Ten thousand men! I feel myself reel again. “Ten thousand?” I repeat. “It’s not possible. The whole army was thirty thousand. They cannot have killed a third of the Scots army.”

“Yes they can. Because they killed those who surrendered,” he says bitterly. “They killed the dying. They killed the wounded where they lay on the field of battle. They chased after those who had thrown down their weapons and had turned for home. They declared they would take no prisoners and they did not. It was brutal and evil and long-drawn-out. I have never seen the like of it. You would think yourself somewhere barbaric, like Spain. You would think yourself on a crusade among pagans. It was conquistador killing. There were men screaming for their lives and crying out as the billhooks went in their faces all the long afternoon, all the long night. There were wounded men only silenced when someone cut their throat.”

“The king?” I whisper. James cannot have died on a hedging tool. Not James, not with his love of chivalry and the honorable ritual of the joust. He cannot have died bogged down in his beautiful armor with some English peasant’s axe in his face.

“He fought his way through to Thomas Howard himself—it was nearly a single combat, just as he had challenged. But a billhook smashed his head to a pulp just as he reached the English standard, and an arrow opened his side.”

I bow my head. I cannot believe this, and I don’t know what I should say or do. Although I warned him, although I dreamed of widow’s pearls, I never really thought that he would not come home. He always comes home. Again and again he goes off to his mistresses or off to see his children, a pilgrimage, a progress to give judgment, riding off to see a cannon out of the forge or the launch of a ship; but he always comes home. He swore to me that he would never leave me. He knows I am too young to be left alone.

“Where is his body?” I ask.

We will have to have a grand funeral; I will have to arrange it. My boy James will have to be declared king; he will have to be taken to Scone Abbey for a great coronation. I don’t know how to do it without my husband, who has always done everything for me, everything for his country.

“Where is his body? It must lie in state in the chapel. They must bring it to Edinburgh.”

He shall lie in state in the chapel at Holyroodhouse, where we married, where he crowned me queen; and the country—everyone, even his bastards and their mothers—will come and pay their respects to the greatest King of Scotland since Malcolm, since Robert de Brus. The chieftains shall come in their tartans and the lords will come and their standards will fly over the coffin, and the swell of a Scots lament will sound out for their great king, and we will all always remember him. We will bury him in a coffin of Scots pine under a pall of black velvet with a cross of gold thread, we will fly the flag of a crusader, for he would have been a crusader, the bells will toll for every one of his forty years. The cannon that he commissioned will roar as if they too are heartbroken. We will honor our king, we will never forget him.

The messenger sinks to his knees as if the weight of his words is too much for him to bear. He looks up at me and his white face is agonized beneath the dirt.

“They took his body,” he says. “The English. They took his precious body, out of the mud, broken and bleeding as he was. And they sent him to London for her.”

“What?”

“The English queen, Katherine, said she wanted his body as a trophy. So they turned him over in the mud and took his breastplate and his coat, his beautiful coat, they stripped it off him, and his gloves, and his boots and his spurs. So he was barefoot, like a dead beggar. They took his sword, they levered off the crown from his helmet. They stripped him like he was a spoil of war. They threw all his things in a box, and they put his body on a cart and they have taken it away to Berwick.”

My knees give way then and someone helps me down to sit on a stool.

“My husband?”

“Dragged from the battlefield like a carcass on a wagon. The English queen wanted his dead body for a trophy, and now she has him.”

I will never forgive her this. I will never forget this. In France, Harry wins a battle at somewhere called Thérouanne, and in reply to his triumph Katherine writes to him that she has won a battle just as good as his. She boasts that she wanted to send him my husband’s severed head but that her English advisors prevented her. She wanted to pickle James in brine and send him as a gift. But Thomas Howard had already had the body encased in lead and sent on a wagon to London. Deprived of her corpse, Katherine sends instead the royal standard, and James’s own coat. His red coat, with the gold thread, that I embroidered myself. Now it is stained with his blood, and dirty with the mud of the battlefield, and stinking of smoke. His brains were spilled on the embossed collar where I had sewn golden thistles. But she sends it to Harry, triumphantly, as if such a thing can be a gift, as if such a thing should be anywhere but reverently buried in the king’s own chapel.

She is a barbarian, worse than a barbarian. This is the body of her brother-in-law, the sacred body of a king. This is the widow who saw her own husband taken out in the most solemn procession to be buried, traveling in the night with burning torches, a woman who wore black and begged me to be kind to her in her grief—but when I am widowed, she has my husband’s body tumbled into a cart and brought like a butcher’s carcass to Smithfield. What savages are these? Only a brute would not return a king’s body to his people for an honorable burial. Only a beast would feed off it, as she wants to do. I will never forgive her this. I will never forget it. She is no sister to me, she is a harpy—a monster who tears at flesh.

I will never speak of it either. I cannot put it out of my mind. But they must never know how I hate them for this and how I will never forgive her. I am going to make peace with this thief, with this grave robber. I am going to have to claim sisterhood with this wolf that feasts off the dead. I am going to have to send ambassadors and write letters and perhaps even meet the man who was once my brother and the vulture that is his wife. If I am to be queen and get my son on the throne, I am going to need their support and their help. I am going to beg for it and never let them see the contempt in my eyes. I am going to have to be what my husband commanded me to be: a great woman and not a silly girl. But she is a demon, a woman who besmirches the honor of her place, who has smeared my mother’s throne with blood. She is a woman who wants to be equal to a king, a woman who sat beside my brother’s deathbed, and ordered the killing of my husband. She is a Lilith. I hate her.

We have to get my baby James to Stirling Castle—the fortress that his father promised me was the safest in the kingdom. He will have to be crowned there. I dare not take him farther north to Scone Abbey; the danger is too great. Thomas Howard, no great friend before and my deadly enemy now, is almost certain to follow up his victory by invading my poor country. With all our cannons on our ships at sea or stuck in the mud of Flodden, how can we defend our capital city? What will prevent Thomas Howard’s victorious army from marching on to my palace at Linlithgow? Or coming farther north to Stirling? Thomas Howard—who knows the traditions of Scotland as well as I do—may be coming now, as fast as he can, on a forced march to snatch my little King of Scotland before he is crowned.

We set out before dawn the next day, while the moon is low and only a line of gray, like tailor’s chalk on mourning cloth, marks the sky in the east. Ahead of us goes the royal standard and the guards shoulder to shoulder around it. In the center rides my husband’s makar, the poet Davy Lyndsay, on a strong horse with James, not yet two years old, on the saddle bow before him. A standard bearer rides beside them with the prince’s own coat of arms rippling over their heads. Nobody can attack us and leave the prince down on the ground with a spear through his heart and then pretend that they did not know who it was. James sits up straight, confident in Davy’s grip. They have ridden together dozens of times, but never before pursued by an enemy at breakneck speed. Davy sees my white face and gives me his lopsided smile.

I ride just behind them, certain now that I am with child, my belly tight with the baby that James has left me, my eyes on the son that I have to guard. I don’t think of anything; I just watch my son, and the windswept road ahead of us. If I took a moment to think, then I would pull up my horse and lean forward on his neck and cry for fear, like a girl. I dare not think. I can only ride and hope that we get to Stirling before the English come after us.

As soon as we are north of Linlithgow the open countryside gets wilder and bigger and the skies get higher. The rounded hills of Lothian, great bowls of valleys and wide ranges of uplands, become grander still as we go north into Stirlingshire. As the sun comes up and we ride onward we enter the thick forests of the valley floors. There is just a trace of the road through the forest, skirting a boggy patch, winding around a long-fallen tree, disappearing altogether where a stream has burst its banks and swept the track away. We have to keep the rising sun behind us, but we can hardly see it through thickness of the canopy. We ride blind, hoping that we are going west. James knew the way very well. He made this journey often, riding between Linlithgow and Stirling and then onward to the north to keep the peace and sit in judgment. But James will never ride in these high hills again. I don’t think of this. I look to his son and see that he has fallen asleep in the saddle, in Davy’s careful grip. I won’t think that my son’s father will never ride with him like this, that his father will never ride again.

No one has planted these woods, no one manages them. No one fells them, not for firewood or charcoal, not for beams for the shipyards or houses. There are no shipyards or houses anywhere near, there are no charcoal burners’ cottages, there are no woodsmen making a living from little shanties. There are not even poachers for there is scant game, nor brigands for there are not enough people for them to prey on, there are so few travelers. The woods are empty of anyone but elusive deer and the beasts that we cannot see: foxes, boar, and wolves. The guards close up, riding knee to knee around Davy Lyndsay and my precious boy, and they lower the royal standard and hold it like a lance, so that it does not catch on the low, sweeping boughs of trees.

This is not like England, not even like the great royal parks of England where no one is allowed to cut trees or hunt game. These are thick forests like the ones before the making of man, and we are like ghosts riding silently through them. We don’t belong here. These trees are older than the time of Christ; these are not Christian forests, they are the land of the little people, the old people that James used to tell me about in stories.

I shiver in the cool gloom, though the sun is high in the sky outside. We cannot feel the heat, we cannot even see the noonday light. The trees and even the air seem to press against us.

It is a relief when the land starts to rise up and we can see a little brightness ahead as the forest grows thinner and there are shrubs and plants at the side of the track, growing towards the light, and then we are going through glades of silver birches and slowly, almost leaf by leaf, we leave the shadows. Now we can see the sky, and we are climbing higher and higher and come out on the flank of a hill that still stretches high above us. The horses blow out and we lean forward as they lower their heads and start to climb up and up, following the faintest of tracks that skirts the cliffs, which fall away on the far side, and takes us over the rounded top. But all we can see are more hills, stretching on and onward before us, as if they were towering waves in an unending sea, before we have to wind down again to the valley floor, now going north, always looking behind us for any sign of the glint of sun on metal, or the distant rumble of Howard’s army.

We ride all day, stopping before noon for something to eat, and then riding on all of the afternoon. As the sun begins to sink towards the tops of the hills and the shadows lengthen over the track, almost obscuring it so that we begin to fear we will lose the way, James cries in a little whiney voice that he is tired, and Davy reaches into his pocket for a piece of bread and gives him a flask filled with milk. James eats, held steady on the saddle, and then leans back against his guardian and sleeps as we keep the steady pace.

Still we go north, now with the setting sun on our left, and I say softly to Davy, “Is it much farther? It will be dark within a few hours.”

“We’ll be in before dark, God willing,” he says. “And if they are following us, they won’t dare to come on in the dark. They’ll camp for the night. They’ll be afraid of ambush and they don’t know the country at all. They can’t find their way in the dark.”

I nod. I am aching in every bone in my body and fearful for the new baby that I am carrying.

“You’ll have a grand dinner and a good night in a soft bed,” Davy says quietly to me. “Behind strong walls.”

I nod; but I think, what if he is wrong and darkness falls and we are still traveling? Will we have to camp out and sleep on the cold hillside? Or what if we have missed the road and gone past the town? What if we are riding onward and onward north, and Stirling is now behind us and we won’t know till tomorrow morning? Then I think: I had better not think like this or I will break down and not be able to ride at all. I have to think, for now and for always, of only one thing at a time, the next thing that I have to do. I have to see these small tasks laid out like matched pearls strung on a necklace with a knot between each one—and not worry that they are the symbols of mourning, as I knew when I dreamed that my husband, my charming, playful husband, tied a string of diamonds around my neck and I watched them melt and drip into widow’s pearls.

Finally, we see a few lights, high up on a hill above us.

“That’s Stirling now, Your Grace,” the standard bearer reins back to tell me, and the horses prick their ears and go forward more briskly, as if they know there are stables with hay and water waiting for them.

I think—pray God there is no trap. Pray God that Thomas Howard has not done a forced march around us and we are not coming in towards him, expecting refuge but finding a battle. There is no way to tell what is hiding in the shadowy hedges at the side of the road as we wind our way towards the little town. The curfew has been sounded and the town gates are bolted shut. My trumpeters sound the royal salute, then we have to wait while the royal burghers rush to the gate and the town guard fling themselves at the bolts and then the great gates creak open, and we can ride inside.

The burghers come towards me, uncovering their heads, some of them shrugging on their jackets and wiping their mouths, called from their dinner. “Your Grace,” they say and they kneel before me as if I am a triumphant Queen of Scots with a victorious husband at war.

Wearily, I make a gesture that tells them everything: the defeat, the death of James, the end of everything. “This is your king,” I say, showing them the little boy, fast asleep in his guardian’s arms on the big horse. “King James V.”

They understand at once that his father is dead. Heavily, they drop to their knees on the cold cobbles. They bow their heads; I see one man put his hands over his eyes to hide that he is weeping, and another buries his face in his bonnet.

We are the first people of authority in Stirling since the battle. Nobody has heard anything but rumors, no soldiers have yet made it back to their homes. The deserters who left before the outcome are certain to have kept their cowardice quiet, and few have got so far north. So now the people come into the streets, their doors banging behind, or they throw open their overhanging windows, hoping that this is a victory progress and that I have come to tell them the king is halfway to London, his army richer every day. Then they see my downturned face and note that I don’t wave or smile, and they stop cheering and fall silent. Someone calls out with sudden sharp urgency:

“The king?”

Everyone looks at me; but I can’t say anything. I can’t pull up my horse and make a grand speech in which I declare that defeat does not mean despair, death is not the end of everything, Scotland has a great future. It would not be true. We are despairing, it is the end of everything, and I cannot see how to make a future.

I raise my voice. “The king is dead. God save the king.”

Slowly, understanding spreads through the silenced crowd. Men pull off their hats, women put their hands to their eyes. “God save the king,” they whisper back to me, as if they cannot bear to say the words. “God save the king.”

They have lost one of the greatest warrior-kings that Scotland has ever had. They have lost a musician, a physician, an engineer, an educator, a gunner, a poet, a shipwright, a deeply convinced Christian anxious about his own soul and theirs. They have lost a great prince, a man among men. His coat and banners have been sent to France, his body is rumbling south, a trophy wrapped in lead in a wagon. In his place, all I can offer them is a baby-king, a helpless baby-king, with Scotland’s greatest enemy on our doorstep. They kiss their hands blow the kisses to me as if to say: God bless you. God help you. And I look back at them grimly and think: I can’t do this.