Three Sisters, Three Queens

BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, ENGLAND, MAY 1516

Katherine sent me a white palfrey for my state entry into London. She sent me headdresses of gold in the heavy gable style that she prefers. She sent me gowns, and rich materials for more gowns. I think it is she who gave the orders for the great wooden furniture to be installed in every room of the castle, and for fresh rushes with meadowsweet and lavender to be scattered on every floor. She certainly appointed the heads of my household so that it can run as a great palace, and her steward bought the food in the larders. The king pays for my household servants: my carver Sir Thomas Boleyn, my chaplain, all the yeomen of my household—ushers, cellarers, and guards—and for the ladies who attend me. Katherine has loaned me jewels to add to the inheritance which she finally sent to Morpeth, and I have furs from the royal wardrobe and sleeves lined with royal ermine.

And then, finally, she comes herself. One of her ladies, the wife of Sir Thomas Parr, comes in the morning to tell me that the queen will give herself the pleasure of calling on me in the afternoon, if I wish. I say that this will be a pleasure for me, but my assent is nothing but a formality as Maud Parr and I both know. Katherine can come whether it is convenient or not. She is Queen of England; she can do anything she wishes. I grit my teeth when I think that she will come and go as she pleases and I owe her thanks for the attention.

I hear her guard of honor accompanying her down Dower Gate and I hear the cheers that follow her. The English love the Spanish princess who waited and waited for the day when she would finally be queen. I cannot see her from my window, though I press my face against the glass. I have to sit on my throne in my presence chamber to wait for her to arrive.

They throw open the doors. I rise to my feet and advance to greet her, for however I remember her from our girlhood—pale, sorrowful, poor—she is Queen of England now and I am the exiled Queen of Scotland and it is me waiting for my luck to change, not her. I curtsey to her, she curtseys to me, then she opens her arms and we hug. I am surprised by her warmth. She pats my face and says that I have grown into a beauty, what lovely hair I have. How well the gown suits me.

I give her one searching glance, and I could laugh aloud. She has run to fat after five pregnancies, her skin has gone dull and sallow. Her beautiful golden hair is hidden under an unflattering hood, she is loaded with chains around her neck, reaching to her broad waist, a crucifix resting at her throat; her little plump hands have rings on every finger. I note with unworthy triumph that she looks all of her thirty years, she looks tired and disappointed, but I am still a young woman with everything to hope for.

She says at once, “Don’t let’s talk here among everyone. Can we go to your privy chamber?” and I hear once again that familiar, irritating Spanish accent, which she has ostentatiously retained, thinking it makes her special, after fourteen years of speaking English.

“Of course,” I say, and even though I live here, I have to step back and show her into the room that leads off the presence chamber, just before my private rooms.

Informally, she takes a seat in the window and beckons me to join her, seated beside her at the same height, as if we are equals. Her ladies and mine sit on stools out of earshot, though they are all dying to know how we will make friends, when everyone knows there is so much between us, and so much of it bad.

“You are looking so well,” she says warmly. “In such good looks! After all that you have endured.”

“And you too,” I lie. When I last saw her she was a young widow, hoping against all the evidence that my father would let her marry Harry, fragile in black, dainty as a doll. Now, she has achieved her heart’s desire, and found it lacking. They married for love—passionate boyish love on his part—but they have had five pregnancies and only one healthy child, and she is a girl. Harry takes a lover every time Katherine is pregnant, and she is pregnant almost every year. They are not the golden couple of her dreams. I expect she thought that she would be like her mother and father, equally proud, equally beautiful, equally powerful, in love forever.

It has not turned out like that. Harry has grown taller and more handsome, wealthier and more kingly than she could have hoped, and he casts a great shadow over her—over everyone. She is tired, she aches with mysterious pains. She fears that God does not favor their marriage, and she spends half the day on her knees asking Him what is His will. She has none of the radiant confidence of her mother, the crusader. Now she comes to befriend me but even here she brings guilt. She has blood on her hands: her army killed my husband, and I do not forget it.

“I hope that you can stay with us for a long time,” she says. “It would be such a pleasure to have both the king’s sisters at court.”

“Both of us? Is Mary here very much?” I ask. “I didn’t think she could afford to live at court.”

Katherine flushes. “She comes often,” she says with dignity. “As my guest. We have become very good friends. I know that she is longing to see you.”

“I don’t know how long I can stay, I will have to go home as soon as the Scots lords have agreed to my rule,” I say. “It is my duty. I cannot walk away from my husband’s country.”

“Yes, you have been called to a great office,” she says, “in a country that I know is not easy to rule. I was so sorry for the death of your husband the king.”

For a moment I cannot speak. I cannot even glare at her. I cannot imagine how she dares to talk of his death as if it were a distant event, beyond anyone’s control.

“The fortunes of war,” she says.

“An unusually cruel war,” I remark. “I have never heard before of English troops being ordered to take no prisoners.”

She has the decency to look abashed. “These border wars are always cruel,” she says. “As when neighbors fight. Lord Dacre tells me—”

“It was he who found my husband’s body.”

“So sad,” she whispers. “I am so sorry.” She turns her face and, hidden by the enormous headdress, wipes her eyes. “Forgive me. I have recently lost my father and I—”

“They told me that after Flodden you were triumphant,” I interrupt, suddenly finding the courage to speak out.

She bows her head but she does not shrink from the truth. “I was. Of course I was glad to keep England safe while the king was far away, and fighting himself. It was my duty as his queen. They said that the King of Scots was planning to march on London. You would not believe how afraid we all were of his coming. Of course I was glad that we won. But I was very sorry for you.”

“You sent his coat to Harry. His bloodstained coat.”

There is a long silence. Then she gets to her feet with a dignity I have never seen in her before. “I did,” she says quietly. Behind her, all her ladies rise too, and mine. They cannot be seated when the Queen of England stands, but nobody knows what to do. Awkwardly, I stand too. Are they leaving already? Is the queen offended? Have I dared to quarrel with the Queen of England while I perch in a house that she has loaned me, the first decent roof I have had over my head in months?

“I did,” she says quietly. “So that the King of England, fighting for his country, should know that his Northern border was safe. So that he should know that I had done my duty to him, my husband, even though it cost you your husband. So that he should know that English soldiers had triumphed. Because I was glad that we had triumphed. I am sorry for this, my dear sister, but this is the world that we live in. My first duty is always to my husband; God has put us together, no man can put us asunder. Even the love that I bear for you and yours cannot come between me and my husband the king.”

She is so dignified that I feel foolish and rude beside her poise. I never thought I would see Katherine rise to her queenship like this. I remember snubbing her when she was a poor hanger-on at court, I never knew that she had this righteous pride in her. Now I see that she is truly a queen, and has been a queen for seven years, while I have lost my throne and married a lord, who does not even live with me.

“I see,” I say weakly. “I understand.”

She hesitates, as if she sees herself for the first time, on her dignity, on her feet, ready to walk out of my chamber. “May I sit down again?” she asks with a little smile.

It is gracious of her, as she does not have to ask.

“Please.” We sit together.

“We buried him with honor,” she says quietly. “In the Church of the Observant Friars. You can visit his grave.”

“I didn’t know.” I choke on a sob. I am more embarrassed than anything else. “I didn’t even know that.”

“Of course,” she said. “And I had Masses said for him. I am sorry. It must have been a terrible time for you. And then you had worse times to follow your grief.”

“They say that it is not his body,” I whisper. “They say that he was seen after the battle. That the body you brought to England did not wear the cilice.”

“People always make up stories,” she replies, steady as a rock. “But we buried him as a king with honor, Your Grace.”

I cannot bully her, and I cannot shake her. “You can call me Margaret,” I say. “You always used to.”

“And you can call me Katherine,” she says. “And perhaps we can be friends as well as sisters. Perhaps you can forgive me.”

“I thank you for the gowns, and for everything,” I say awkwardly. “I was glad to get my inheritance.”

She puts her hand over my own. “All this is no more than you should have,” she says gently. “You should have your throne again, and the wealth of Scotland. My husband the king has sworn that you will have all that is yours again, and he will make sure that it is so, and I will speak in your favor.”

“I am grateful,” I say, though it costs me to say such a thing to her.

Her palm is warm, the rings are heavy on her little fingers. “We were not good sisters to each other before,” she says quietly. “I was very afraid that I would never be married to your brother, and I was homesick, and terribly poor. You don’t know what I went through in the years that I waited. I was never happy after your mother died. When she had gone it was as if I lost my only friend in the family.”

“My grandmother . . .” I begin.

She shrugs her shoulders. Rubies gleam at her throat. “My Lady the King’s Mother never cared for me,” she says shortly. “She would have sent me home if she could have done so. She tried to say—” She breaks off. “Oh! All sorts of things. She tried to prevent my marriage to the prince. She advised him against me. But when he came to the throne he took me, despite everything.”

“She was always ambitious for him,” I say quietly. And she was right, I think to myself—he could have done better than a widow who cannot bear a son.

“So I understand what it is to be far from home, and to think that no one cares for you, that you are in danger and no one will help you. I was very, very sorry when I learned that you were widowed and had lost the guardianship of your son. I swore then that I would do what I could to help you, and to be a good sister to you. We are both Tudors. We should help each other.”

“I always thought you looked down on me,” I confess. “You always seemed so very grand.”

Her ripple of laughter makes her ladies look up and smile. “I ate day-old fish that we bought cheap from the market,” she says. “I pawned my plate to pay my household. I was a princess in rags.”

I clasp her hand in my own. “I too have been a princess in rags,” I say quietly.

“I know,” she says. “That is why I have urged Harry to send an army to put you back on your throne.”

“Will he listen to you?” I ask curiously, thinking of how James would chuck me under the chin and go and fulfill his own plans, ignoring anything I said. “Does he take your advice?”

A shadow crosses her face. “He used to,” she says. “But Thomas Wolsey has grown very great recently. You know that he advises the king on everything? He is Lord Chancellor, he is very able, a very able man. But he thinks only of how to do what the king wishes. He doesn’t consider God’s will as well as the king’s desire. Indeed, it has become very rare for anyone to advise the king against his desire.”

“He is the king,” I say flatly. Really, I don’t understand her at all; why should anyone advise him against his wishes?

“But not infallible,” she says with a ghost of a smile.

“Is Thomas Wolsey in favor of my return to Scotland? He must want the best for my daughter, as her godfather?”

She hesitates. “I think he has greater plans for you than just your return,” she says. “He knows that the Scots must accept you and that your boy must be in your keeping, but I think he hopes . . .”

“He hopes what?” I ask.

She bows her head for a moment as if in prayer, as if she has to think what she says next: “I believe that he hopes that your present marriage can be annulled and you shall marry the emperor.”

I am so shocked that I say nothing. I just look at her, my mouth agape.

“What?” I say, when I find my voice. “What?”

She nods. “I thought you did not know of this. Thomas Wolsey is playing for high stakes in Europe. He would be very pleased to have an ally bound by marriage to England, to hold against France. Especially now that he is trying to get the French out of Scotland.”

“But I am married already! What is he thinking of?”

“The Lord Chancellor thinks that your marriage could be annulled,” she says quietly. “And then Harry observed that your husband did not accompany you, though he had a safe conduct. Harry thought that you might be estranged. He thought that you might welcome a separation.”

“Archibald has duties in Scotland! I told the king myself. He is obliged, by his honor . . .”

“You would be empress,” she remarks.

That silences me again. As the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor I would be queen of enormous lands, half of Europe. I would outrank Katherine. Indeed I would be married to her kinsman. Mary, the wife of a nonentity like Charles Brandon, would be nothing beside me, she would have to serve me on bended knee. I would never see either of them again, and I would be wealthier than my brother Harry. This is the destiny that slipped away from me when I considered the emperor and the King of France as husbands, and then found that the King of France had jilted me for my little sister. When I married Archibald I lost my chance of being one of the great rulers of Europe. Now, once again, the possibility of greatness opens before me.

“How could it be done?”

Katherine is no longer smiling. She withdraws her hands from mine as if the touch of an unfaithful wife might contaminate her. “I am sure that if you consent, the Lord Chancellor will find a way,” she says coolly. “I have performed my task in asking you if you would consider it. The king says that Scotland was under excommunication when you married the Earl of Angus. The Lord Chancellor argues that no marriage during that time could be valid. And also, your husband was betrothed to marry another woman, was he not? The Lord Chancellor will argue that it was a full marriage, not merely a betrothal. That your husband was married to Janet Stewart, a marriage that took place before yours, and while Scotland was in communion with Rome. His marriage to her predates yours, and yours was not valid.”

“He was not. He never sees her!” I say fiercely. “He does not care for her. He married me. He was free to marry me. He is faithful to me.”

Katherine looks at me and I see that it is not just the loss of her four babies that has put the darkness in her gaze. She has been disappointed by Harry too.

“It doesn’t matter if a husband is faithful or not,” she says quietly. “It doesn’t matter if he loves you or another. What matters is that you swore to be together before God. The priest was a witness to your vows but you made them to God. A marriage cannot be dissolved because great men wish that a woman is free. A marriage cannot be dissolved because a husband has been so foolish and so weak as to fall in love with another woman. A genuine marriage, made before God, cannot be dissolved, ever.” Her gaze drifts from me to her companions, her ladies-in-waiting, chattering together, whiling away the time until they can go back to Greenwich Palace and dine with the men. One or more of them will have caught the eye of the king, one or more will already have been in his bed, one or more will be hoping.

“I know that,” I say. “I know that nothing matters more than the marriage vows. Archibald and I made those vows. He is my husband and will be until death.”

She bows her head. “That’s what I believe to be true,” she says quietly. “If Harry asks me for my opinion I will tell him that you are married in the sight of God and that neither the Lord Chancellor nor the Holy Roman Emperor nor the King of England himself can change that.”