Three Sisters, Three Queens

HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1519

We make a triumphant entry into Edinburgh. Archibald’s men escort me with bagpipes and drums and all the people come out of their houses and from their stables and shops and trades to watch the dowager queen and her handsome husband ride back into Holyrood. They call out that I am welcome in my capital once again, and that I must show them my boy, the little king. Some shout that Archibald is a traitor, that I have a traitor at my side. I turn my head away. There are many ways of being a loyal Scot, and Archibald’s way has not been the way of the Hamiltons. Some of them lift up their purses and wave them above their heads. I flush, and glance at Archibald; his expression is furious. They mean that he takes an English pension, that he has been bought by Thomas Dacre, with Thomas Wolsey’s money, to be a servant of my brother the king. They mean that he is cheaply bought and cheaply sold: an English slave and not a free Scot.

“I will have every one of them arrested,” Archibald says through his teeth.

“Don’t,” I say urgently. “Let people remember this as the day we came home and there was no trouble.”

“I will not be insulted.”

“It means nothing, nothing.”

The palace is warm and welcoming; there is a household fit for a dowager queen once more, horses in the stables and cooks in the kitchen. Archibald is paying for everything: he says I am to buy what I want. He dances me around the rooms and makes me laugh, saying I must send for the sempstresses and get new gowns for myself and for our daughter little Lady Margaret who crows and claps her hands to see her dada again, following in his footsteps like his puppy. He says we will dine in state and everyone will come to visit us. We must appear great, we are great.

“But the cost . . .” I object.

“Leave business to me,” he says. He is lordly. “I have your brother’s trust and he has sent me money to support your claims. I have your rents, and I have my own fortune. It is all for you. You are the queen of everything you see. Especially, you are my queen, and I am still your most humble servant.” He laughs. “You will see, when they bring your roast meat I shall carve it for you tonight.”

I cannot help but laugh with him. “That was a long time ago.”

“It was the happiest time of my life,” he tells me. “I fell in love with you so instantly, so deeply, and then I began to see that you might love me too. It’s not a long time ago, it is just yesterday.”

I want to believe it. Of course I do. It is like a dream that he should come back to me. I think that if Katherine was right and it is God’s will that a husband and wife should never be parted then his return is an act of God. Archibald and I are together again, our marriage is blessed, Scotland will come under my rule, and find peace. I don’t want to wonder where his wealth comes from, I don’t consider Dacre forgiving me my debts. I don’t think where Janet Stewart is sleeping tonight.

I visit my son. He is shy with me; we have not lived together since Craigmillar Castle. “They won’t let me be with you,” I tell him. “I try and try to come to you. They will not allow me.”

I cannot believe he is only seven; he is so careful as he chooses his words to reply. “I tell them that I would like to see you, but I cannot yet command,” he says. “But the Earl of Arran is courteous to me, and kind. He says that the Duke of Albany will return soon and then we shall have peace. He says that then you will be able to live with me as my lady mother and we will be happy.”

“No, no, Scotland must be free of the French,” I say to him earnestly. “You are the son of an Englishwoman, you are the heir to the English throne. We don’t want a French advisor. Never forget that.”

David Lyndsay, my son’s constant companion and friend, steps forward and bows to me. “His Grace is proud of his inheritance,” he says carefully. “But he knows that his French guardians are his friends and kinsmen too.”

“Oh, Davy!” I protest. “When James Hamilton takes a French pension and calls my husband a troublemaker! He can be no friend of ours!”

“His Grace has to be a friend to everyone,” Davy reminds me steadily. “He cannot be seen to favor one side over another.”

The little boy is looking from one to the other of us, as if he is trying to decide who to believe, who he can trust. He is a boy who has had no boyhood, a child without a childhood. “I wish to God your father had raised you,” I say bitterly.

He looks back, his big dark eyes luminous with tears. “I do too,” he says.

Archibald leaves me at Holyrood and says that he has work to do on his estates.

“Oh, shall I come with you?” I ask. “I’ll ride with you. Where will we go?”

A tiny hesitation, a flick of his glance sideways, gives me a second’s pause. “Are you going hunting?” I ask. “Archibald, where are you going?”

He comes close so that the people around us cannot hear him. “I am meeting Thomas Dacre,” he says in my ear. “I am about your business, my love. I will ride in the night to our meeting, get news of your brother and his plans, and come home quickly.”

“Tell Lord Dacre that we have to come to terms with the French regent,” I say. “We cannot oppose James Hamilton as acting regent, and the Duke of Albany will come back sooner or later. We have to work with them both, we have to make me regent and get custody of James.”

“Albany will never return,” Archibald promises me. “He will never come back. It is your brother’s wish—and it is my preference—that we never see him again. Your brother has served us well. He has trapped Albany in France, he has made his exile from Scotland as part of the treaty with France, he has done so much for us! And without him, Hamilton is no more than the leader of another clan. He can call himself deputy regent—he can call himself whatever he likes!—but the French will not support Hamilton against the English. We can destroy him, as soon as we are ready.”

“No, no,” I say. “No more fighting. We have to do all we can to hold the peace till James is old enough to take the throne. Hamilton or Albany, the regent or the deputy regent has to run the council and keep the lords at peace. I must work with them.”

“I’ll tell Dacre that’s what you think,” Archibald promises me. “You know that I want Scotland kept at peace for your son. I want nothing else.”

We walk down to the stable yard with our arms around each other’s waists, entwined like young lovers. I kiss him good-bye in a turn of the stairs where no one can see how he holds me, how I cling to him.

“Will you be back tomorrow night?” I ask longingly.

“The night after,” he says. “It’s not safe in the borders after dark.”

“Don’t take risks. Stay another night rather than ride after sunset.”

“I’ll come back safe to you.”

“Two nights,” I whisper.

“No more.”

“You do know where he is?” James Hamilton, the deputy regent, asks me. “It is a matter of common knowledge.”

I feel cold at his tone, as if he had put an icy hand on the nape of my neck. “What is a matter of common knowledge?” I return.

I have ridden out from Holyrood, through the Canongate, around the great looming mountain that people call Arthur’s Seat, knowing that James Hamilton and the lords who favor France are hunting in the wild fields and marshes south of the city. Hamilton, the Earl of Arran, sent me a private message, telling me that he wanted to talk with me beyond the listening walls and spying windows of the city, and I need to know what he will say. I cannot help but trust him, I have known him for years. Of course, I want to hear his plans for Scotland, what the word is from France; but I don’t want to hear gossip about my husband.

“Archibald is visiting his estates in the borders,” I say flatly. My horse, held too tightly as my hands grip the pommel, sidles and shifts his head. “Our estates. He cares for my lands. He will be away for only two nights.”

“I am sorry to tell you, Your Grace, but he is lying to you again. He has gone to Lady Janet Stewart at Newark Castle,” he says bluntly. “I thought that you did not know.”

“Certainly, it is not for you to tell me,” I say sharply. I speak very grandly but I have a sense of foreboding, almost a premonition. I don’t want this old friend to tell me any more. I don’t want this man who saw me as a princess at my father’s court and judged me fit to marry a king to judge me now as a fool who clings to an unfaithful husband and lets him shame her before the world.

“Who else would tell you?” he asks. “Who is on your side? All his clan are sworn to secrecy and loyal only to him. Dacre defends him because he has bought your husband lock, stock, and barrel with English gold. Will your sisters not advise you?”

Unwillingly, I shake my head. “They will not speak against lawful marriage.”

“Then you have no counsellors.”

Around us my ladies are chatting with his men. They are hunting with falcons, the sleek birds waiting on the falconers’ fists to be released as soon as his lordship gives the word. The beaters will drive the game upwards, the falconers will release their birds and they will soar in the sky above us and look down. From that height, we are as nothing, a scattering of figures on a vast unmapped country.

“I have advisors,” I say coldly. “They would warn me.”

“You have no one. Thomas Lord Dacre is your husband’s master. He won’t warn you against him. He works for the King of England and not for you. They have bought your husband; they’re not going to tell you that.”

This is so near to my fears that I cannot reply at first. I give a little laugh. “If Dacre has bought him he will command him to be faithful to me and mine. James, you do wrong to warn me. Archibald and I are reconciled. There’s no division between us. He will come home to me. You do wrong to speak against a husband to his wife.”

“Oh, is he your husband? I thought he was precontracted? And Dacre couldn’t care less. All Dacre does is pay him to keep him on the side of the English. He doesn’t care where he gets his bed and board. Thomas Dacre looks the other way when Douglas steals your rents and is unfaithful to you. Thomas Dacre may tell the king that your husband is not the best husband in Scotland, but he does not warn him that the Red Douglas clan will destroy the council of the lords. For Dacre the only thing that matters is English influence in Scotland, and he believes the safest way to secure that is to keep Archibald married to you and you in his thrall.”

“I will not be used!” I exclaim. “I will not be abused. I am not enthralled.”

“You must judge for yourself,” he says quietly. “But I tell you that the man you call your husband is snug in another woman’s bed tonight. And he calls her his wife. He suborns the council and he courts you to serve his paymaster: England.”

“I am queen regent.”

“So take your own power. Deal with me and with the Duke of Albany, and keep that traitor out of our business.”

“What if Albany never comes back?”

“He will come back. He knows his duty is to see your son safely to the throne. It is in your interest that he returns.”

“I am an English princess. Your master the king knew it when he married me. You knew it when you came to London to see me and I was just a little girl. I was married to bring an alliance between England and Scotland. I came here to break the French alliance, not to keep it.”

“King James said that he would make you a Scot, and that your son would be a true Scot, born and bred,” Hamilton says to me gently. “D’you think he was at peace with your kinsmen when he rode to Flodden? He knew that there is no agreeing with the English. And for all your kinship, the English have not proved so loving to you. It is not just the peace of the Scots that they destroy. Your peace and happiness do not matter to them, not to any of them.”

I run my fingers through my horse’s mane. It is true what James Hamilton says. Nobody cares for my peace or happiness; not even my sisters. All they want is to ensure that I do not reflect badly on them. “Do you swear that I would be safe if the Duke of Albany returned? Would I be able to see my son? Would I sit in council?”

“He would share the regency with you,” he assures me. “Not with the Earl of Angus. Never with him. None of us trusts him. But with you, on your own. You could have a joint regency with the duke, you could have your power back, and your son in your keeping, and the wealth and power of France behind you.”

“I’ll write to him,” I decide. My mistrust of Archibald, my sense that my sisters have betrayed me for their own ends, Katherine’s hardness of heart, Mary’s ignorance of everything that matters—these prompt me to work for myself, against them all. “I will write to the duke and invite him to come home.”

Of course, Thomas Dacre, with his spies everywhere, knows what I am doing the moment I do it. He writes that he knows I rode in secret to meet James Hamilton and his men. He says, anxious as Katherine about the reputation of a marriage, that I went alone, under cover of darkness, that my honor is stained. He knows for a fact that I was out at night in secret when my husband was away from home. My behavior is shocking. He has been forced to tell my brother the king that I am now widely known to be the lover of James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran.

Defiantly, I reply, I am furious that Dacre should insult my name. Hear this! I say: I have written to the Duke of Albany and asked him to come home to Scotland and rule as regent, since the country is falling into a state of brutal savagery with one lord against another, half of them paid by England to tear Scotland apart. I say that I was forced to write by the council of the lords because neither Dacre nor my husband protects me against the council. I have to live in Scotland and come to terms with the lords and see my son. Is Dacre going to help me or not?

This is how women are treated: when they act on their own account they are named as sinners, when they enjoy success they are named as whores. Thomas Dacre never lifted a hand to help me get my rents from Archibald or make him be a good husband to me. But James Hamilton and the lords of the council have agreed that I shall have the money from my dower lands. Has Thomas Dacre ever done so much? His silence is the most eloquent reply.

Silence too from Archibald. So I know that Dacre will have told him, as well as my brother, as well as my sisters, that he thinks I have taken James Hamilton as a lover, that I am enticing the Duke of Albany back to Scotland. I don’t even know where to find Archibald. I will not send a messenger to Newark Castle, I will not believe for one moment that he is there, with Janet Stewart. But if he is not there, then where is he? And why did he not come home after two nights as he promised? And why has he not sent for me?

After many nights when I sleep alone in our big bed between the cool sheets I realize that he may not come back at all. Dacre will have warned him that I know that he went to Newark Castle, Janet Stewart will have begged him to stay with her. He is a border lord accustomed to swift changes of fortune. He will not care that he is caught out. He will not care that I know where he is. He does not come back to Edinburgh and I do not look for him in the palace. I think he is like the migrating flocks of ducks that darken the sky in the autumnal days. He comes and he goes and nobody knows why. Certainly, I don’t know why.

But as it starts to grow cold, and the leaves of the silver birches turn yellow and shiver in the cold winds, and the oak leaves whirl around us as we ride beside the silvery waters of the lake, I receive a travel-stained package from France and inside is a letter from the duke himself, the absent regent, and he says that he thinks he will stay away for longer still (he does not say, but I guess he is all but a prisoner of the agreement between my brother and Francis of France). In the meantime, he proposes smoothly, I should go to the council of lords as his nominated deputy. I should be regent again; I may take his place.

I cannot believe he has written so kindly. At last, someone who thinks of the good of the country; at last someone who thinks of me. Of course, it is the right solution. It is the regency that the late king wanted, it is the regency that I want. Who better to be regent than the king’s mother? Anyone who had seen my lady grandmother’s care of England would know that the best person to rule a country is the mother of the king. Albany makes it clear that Archibald is to have no place in the council. He makes it clear that he thinks of Archibald as Dacre’s spy—his little bleached talbot, his puppy. Archibald has taken the English shilling and will never be trusted in Scotland again. Oddly enough, I—an English princess—am known to be more independent.

I will accept. It is the right solution for me even though it puts me in firm alliance with the French. But there is more. Albany offers to do me a service in return for my taking up the duties. He tells me that he is going to Rome, that he has much influence with the Vatican. As regent, all the Scots Church benefices are in his keeping. He is powerful in the Church, can meet with the Holy Father himself—and he offers to urge the matter of my divorce from Archibald. If I wish it. If I believe that my husband has deserted me for another woman and I want to be free of him.

It is as if I am at the top of my tower in my little stone lookout and finally I can breathe the clean air. I can be free. I can defy Katherine, and I can punish Archibald for his open adultery. Katherine may have to endure an unfaithful husband and pretend that his bonny boy was never born; but I do not. She can be more of a wife than I am—accepting everything that her husband does—but I can be more of a queen than she—taking my independent power. We shall see whose reputation is the greatest in the end.

Recklessly, delightedly, I rush on in my mind. Archibald can be Janet Stewart’s husband; she can have him. I will not be his step to the regency, his drawbridge to my son, his entry to power. He can keep Janet Stewart and her insipid daughter, and his little life, and I will be Regent of Scotland without him. I will be Regent of Scotland with the support of the French, not the English. I will forget my hopes of my brother just as he forgets me. I will not yearn for the love of my sisters. Katherine can disown me and Mary can think only of her hoods, and if I have no sisters at all, then so be it. I am My Lady the King’s Mother and regent. That is better than being a sister, that is better than being a wife.