Three Sisters, Three Queens

EDINBURGH CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1520

Finally accepted by the lords as Regent of Scotland and head of the council, I am allowed to enter Edinburgh Castle to see my son. I can even stay in the castle if I wish. They no longer fear that I will run away with him to England: they no longer think that I will give the Douglas clan the keys to the castle. They start to trust me, they start to understand my determination to see my son become king of a country with a chance of survival. Together we are starting to agree that England is an awkward neighbor, the nearest and the most dangerous. I acknowledge to them my disappointment that the greatest English influence in Scotland is not me, working for peace, but Thomas Dacre, working for uproar. Carefully, I convince them that Archibald does not speak for me, is not my husband in anything but name, cannot be trusted with my interests. We are publicly estranged. Carefully, they tell me that he must be charged with treason, for his actions against Scotland, for his spying for my brother. I nod. They need say no more. I know that Archibald has betrayed his country as well as his wife.

“Do you consent that we issue a warrant for his arrest for treason?” they ask me.

I hesitate. The penalty for treason is death, unless a man can win a pardon. With a sudden pulse of desire I think that Ard might beg me for pardon, I might have the upper hand. I might forgive him.

“Arrest him,” I say.

To my delight, I am allowed into my son’s apartments and I sit with him to hear him at his lessons and I play with him when he is at leisure. We meet early in the morning, before breakfast, on the battlements of the castle, to rehearse a comical play that Davy Lyndsay has written, in three parts. James and Davy and I have become actors in our own little masque. We are going to perform for the court at dinnertime, and as the sun comes up and melts the frost on the slates of the roof, we start to rehearse.

It is based on the old fable of the fox and the grapes. One after another Davy and then James and then I sit on the battlement and recite a poem to the imaginary grapes dangling, far too high, quite unreachable, over our heads, and then invent our own reason why the grapes are not really desirable. Davy is particularly funny as he declaims that the grapes are English and come at too high a price. You have to buy the grapes but you also have to pay for the wall, the earth that the vine is growing in, the rain that fell on the vine to make it grow, and the sun that shone to ripen the grapes. And then the English expect you to be grateful for the taste of them, and tip the gardener. James laughs and laughs and then does his own little play in French, when he says that the grapes are very fine, but not as fine as we might get in Bordeaux, that nothing is as good as the Bordeaux grape and that if we had any sense we would chop down the vine altogether and use the wood to make a boat to sail to Bordeaux and buy grapes there.

Now it is my turn, and I swagger along the wall in a fair mimicry of Thomas Dacre’s bluster when something below catches my eye, a glint of bright metal in the spring sunlight, and I say: “What’s that?”

Davy follows my gaze, and the humor drains from his face. “Soldiers,” he says. “In Douglas colors.”

Without another word he turns and yells at the guard who stands on sentry duty by the portcullis. “Are you blind?” He bellows a string of curses. “Drop the gate!”

I clutch James’s cold hand in mine as we hear the portcullis slam down, chain screaming on the wheel, and the groan and creak as the drawbridge is raised and bolted up. All around the castle we can hear the shout of trumpets as men are called to their muster stations, and the rumble as the cannons are rolled out, and the bellowed orders as men run from one post to another and everyone turns and looks down into the narrow streets.

“What’s happening?” I demand of Davy Lyndsay.

“James Hamilton is arresting your husband Archibald Douglas, for treason,” he says quietly. “Looks like he is not going quietly.”

“Archibald is in the city? I didn’t know.” I glance down and see that James, my son, is watching me, his eyes narrowed, as if he would understand what he is seeing, as if he would see through me, see through the words I say to the truth. “I didn’t know,” I tell him. “I swear I knew nothing of this. Not that the council had summoned him, not that he was here.”

“No, they wouldn’t tell you,” Davy Lyndsay says. “A wife may not keep a secret from her husband by law. If he asked you anything, you would be honor-bound to answer. They would want to spare you that—they wouldn’t want you to know.”

“James Hamilton is arresting Archibald?”

“Looks as if the Douglas clan are resisting. Shall I go and discover what’s amiss?”

“Go! Go!”

He is back in a moment.

“What is happening?” James asks, and I smile to hear him take command like the little king he is. Davy does not smile but answers us both, as his equal masters.

“It’s as I thought. The council locked the city gates to keep Archibald and his household inside but then found they are outnumbered. There are five hundred of the Douglas clan in the city and they are armed and ready for a fight.”

Below us, I can see the Netherbow Gate closed tight, and all the houses beside it with barred doors and closed shutters. As I watch, every house down the Via Regis is hurriedly slamming doors, men and women are vanishing inside and bolting their shutters closed. The tradesmen who were bringing out their trestle tables to display their goods are quickly dismantling them, the hospitable windows and doors, open to the morning for business, are quickly secured. Everyone knows there is going to be trouble.

“The earl broke out and led his men towards the castle, as if to take it and you and the king,” Davy says, his face dark with worry.

“Shouldn’t the captain of the castle take the guards into the city and keep order?” I ask Lyndsay.

He shakes his head. “They had better stay here and guard the king.”

Again James looks at me with that dark, calculating gaze.

“Let’s go indoors,” I say nervously.

“I want to see” is the first thing that James says. “Look.”

We can see now that as the first rays of the sunlight come over the hill there are men running silently and quickly like sleek rats, into every blind alleyway, every courtyard between the houses, every cobbled street and every wynd and back.

“Douglas men,” says Davy Lyndsay. “Early risers. As if it was planned.”

“What’s going to happen?” my son asks. He does not speak in fear but in a sort of detached curiosity. This is not how an eight-year-old boy should be. This is not a sight for him.

“We had better go inside,” I say.

“Stay,” he replies, and I, too, am fascinated by the drama that is being acted out below us.

I can see one of the guards from the city gate throw open the door of a guardhouse and bellow a warning. At once all the doors are thrown open as the Hamiltons spill out. The first man has run into a knot of fighters armed with pikes and axes. He goes down in a moment under a hail of blows, but all the men who heard his warning are struggling out of their houses, clapping on their helmets and shouting for help. There is the crack of arquebus and the scream of injury, and then we see the billow of flame and the darkness of smoke and hear more screams of people burning alive inside buildings.

“Oh, God help them!” I exclaim. “Davy, we must send out the guard to stop this.”

He shakes his head, looking down into the town, his big face quivering with distress, his eyes filled with tears. “There’s not enough of us to stop it,” he says. “There’s just enough of us to be butchered. This is Scot against Scot and we shouldn’t throw more Scots to their deaths.”

James is silently watching.

“Come away,” I say to him.

The glance he throws up at me is of burning resentment. “These are Douglas men?” he asks me. “Your husband’s men? Killing our men? Hamilton’s men?”

“This is not my doing,” I say desperately.

Down below we can see that the Douglas men have taken all the major lanes and alleys and are waiting, like rat catchers, for the Hamilton men to burst from the burning houses and desperately fight for their lives against an enemy better armed and better prepared than them. We see the puffs of smoke from the handguns. We can even hear the screams from the dying men. There is horrible fighting, hand-to-hand in the narrow streets with no quarter given, never a moment of mercy even when a man falls to his knees and screams his surrender. The Douglas men are drunk on a wave of violence and victory; they stab and chase and tumble over Hamiltons, running and slipping on bloody cobblestones. The whole of the Via Regis, from the castle at the head to Holyroodhouse, my home at the foot, is filled with tussling, stabbing murderers, one hand against another, and Edinburgh is a city no more, it is a shambles, a killing ground.

“Let’s go to the chapel,” I burst out to Davy Lyndsay and my son. “For God’s sake, let us go and pray that this stops.” The two of them, their faces bleached, turn with me. We almost run down the steps of the walls, push past men who are aiming the cannons down the approaches from the town in case the Douglas men come up here, for us, and we fall through the tiny doorway to Saint Margaret’s Chapel and the three of us kneel, shoulder to shoulder, before the little altar.

At once, the peace of the chapel envelops us. Distantly, outside, we can hear the sound of gunfire and screams, we can hear the sound of the fortress readying itself for attack. I put my hands together and realize that I don’t know what to pray for. Outside, my husband, my former helpmeet, my lover and the father of my daughter, is fighting against the only hope for Scotland, my friend and my ally James Hamilton. A thousand of their followers are running up and down the narrow alleys, bursting out of doorways, fighting like cornered rats to get out of the traps of the dark courtyards. They have brought hand-to-hand warfare into the streets of Edinburgh; the disorder of the borders has come into the heart of the capital. This is the end of Scotland, this is the end of my hopes, this is the end of peace.

“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. Pray for us,” I add. “Pray for us.”

My son raises his bowed head and looks up at me. “He’s coming, isn’t he?” he asks simply. “Archibald Douglas, your husband. When he has killed everyone out there, he will come for us.”

The fighting goes on most of the day, but James and I stay inside the little chapel praying for peace. In the afternoon the captain of the guard comes to report, and I tell him to kneel beside me and tell me the news, as if the holy silence will soften the horror of his words.

“The Red Douglases have taken the city,” he says. “There are nearly a hundred dead in the streets. They are clearing the bodies from the causeway with the plague carts. It’s been a war out there while we have locked ourselves in here and done nothing.”

“You had to defend the castle and the king,” I insist.

“But the deputy regent, James Hamilton, was nearly killed,” he says. “We didn’t defend him. We didn’t defend the king’s peace.”

“James Hamilton has escaped?”

“He got away on a coalman’s packhorse,” the captain says tightly. “Ran from the field of battle and had to swim to safety across the loch. The archbishop, James Beaton, was dragged out from his hiding place behind the high altar in Blackfriars. They would have torn him to pieces but Gavin Douglas said it was a sin to kill a bishop.”

“My husband’s uncle was there, commanding the mob?”

“He is all Douglas, and no churchman,” he says surlily.

“It was a Douglas mob?”

“It was the Red Douglases against the Hamiltons. It was a clan war in the streets of the city though one is deputy regent and the other is the representative of England.”

“But they spared Archbishop Beaton?”

“They did, and they called on all Hamiltons and their kinsmen, their affinity and their friends, to leave the city. All the Hamiltons are going now.”

“They can’t go. Edinburgh cannot be in the power of one family.”

“The gates are open and the Hamiltons are leaving. The Douglas clan holds the city. Soon, your husband will order that we open the castle gates to him.”

I see my son’s gaze turn on me. He has said nothing while the captain tells us this terrible news. I wonder what he is thinking behind that expressionless mask. I take his cold hand.

“Can we hold out?” I ask.

“Till when?” the captain says sharply. “Yes, we can hold a siege, but what if he brings in the English army against us?”

“Can’t we hold a siege until it is relieved?” I ask.

“Who is going to relieve the siege?” He asks the key question. “The deputy regent has just run away disguised as a coalman and hidden himself in the marshes of the Nor’ Loch. The regent is far away in France. You have no army and your brother is not going to send one against his own man—your husband. Who is going to save you and the king?”

I feel very cold. I put my hand on my son’s shoulder and feel that his muscles are tight as a bowstring. “Are you saying that we have to admit the Douglas clan to the castle?”

The captain bows, his expression grim. “I regret that is my advice.”

“Led by my husband?”

He nods.

I look at Davy Lyndsay. “I am not afraid,” I lie.

James sits on the throne in the presence chamber, I sit beside him as dowager queen. James Hamilton is hiding in the marshes with the coalman’s horse, we have no defense against Archibald who walks into the room, drops to his knee before James, and lifts his head to wink at me.

“I’ve returned,” is all he says.