Three Sisters, Three Queens

LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1520

The council of the lords is dominated by the Clan Douglas, led by my triumphant husband, Archibald. He makes it clear that he has captured the city, and captured me. He demands that we live together as a royal family, I at his side as his wife, in his bed at night, at his right hand during the day, my son and daughter in his keeping: he is their father and head of the royal household.

I won’t surrender to him. I won’t let him take me, like the spoils of battle. I won’t allow this murderer into my bed. I won’t let him touch me. I shudder with horror at the thought of him hiding his men in my city, and calling them out for massacre. I think of the people of Edinburgh, my people, washing blood from the cobbles, and I leave Edinburgh to live alone at Linlithgow.

Once again, I am parted from my son, I have to leave him behind as a prisoner at Edinburgh Castle. Once again I have no money. Archibald has my rents, he has ownership of all my lands, and the council of lords don’t dare to complain. I don’t expect help from Lord Dacre, who is Archibald’s friend and paymaster. I don’t expect help from Harry, who commanded that I should return to this husband and said that I was lucky that he received me. I have no sisters to advise me: they don’t write. I am very alone. It is a cold, wet summer, there is much illness in the city of Edinburgh and even in the country people are terrified of plague. I don’t write to Katherine, for what will she reply? I know what she thinks, and I know why she says it. I know she cannot hear the word “divorce” without thinking that her own life as Harry’s aging barren wife is guttering away like a candle clock. But then, in midsummer, I get a package of letters from London.

The first is from my sister Mary. She writes that she was ill in spring but that she was well enough, thank God, to go with the king and queen to France. She bubbles with delight, her letter filled with misspellings and blots of excitable ink. Through the scrawl I make out that the visit was to sign a great treaty to confirm the peace between England and France, and that they made a masque every day. Harry took a hundred tents, a thousand tents, to the field outside Calais and all the nobility of England took their households and their horses and their hawks and their servants and built their own summer palaces out of canvas and wood and showed off their wealth and their joy. Harry summoned a city for a summer’s day and at the center of it a fountain flowing with wine with silver cups for anyone to drink.

Mary has thirty-three gowns, she lists her shoes, she had a cloth-of-gold canopy held over her head when she walked out in the brilliant sunshine. She rode the most beautiful horses, everyone cheered her as she went by.

I so wish you had come! You would have loved it so!

I daresay that I would. It is a long long time since anyone cheered me, or the Scots had anything to cheer about. I open a small package from Katherine.

My dear Sister,

The king, my husband, was much surprised to learn from His Grace King Francis of France that you have been writing to the Duc of Albany and urging his return to Scotland. I was ashamed to hear also that the duc has spoken to the Holy Father and urged that you should be released from your marriage on the grounds that King James IV was not killed at Flodden—you know this is not true. You know that I was obliged to take his body so that this lie should never be spoken. They are saying that you and the Duc of Albany are plotting his return to Scotland so that you can marry should his wife die.

Margaret, please! This is horrifying scandal to attach to you. Write at once to your brother and say that it is not so, and then publicly return to your husband so that there can be no doubt that you have not become the French duc’s whore. God forgive you if you have forgotten what you owe to your family and your name. Write at once and assure me that you are in a state of heavenly grace and married to the good Earl of Angus. My love to your dear son—Margaret, think of him! How can he inherit the throne if there is any question of your honor? And what of your daughter? A divorce will name her as a bastard. How can you bear this? How can you be my royal sister and declare yourself as a whore?

Katherine

I walk across the courtyard and go out of the little sally port to walk down the hill to the loch. The water meadows stretch before me to the side of the water, the short-legged cattle graze on the rich grass, the swallows weave in and out of them. A dozen milkmaids go past me with their buckets swinging from the yokes laid across their shoulders, carrying their milking stools in their hands. They call the cows in, and the animals lift their heads when they hear their names sung out in the high, sweet voices. James used to like to go out with the milkmaids and they would take a ladle and let him drink from the bucket. It would leave a little creamy moustache on his upper lip, and I would wipe his round face with my sleeve and kiss him.

I have not seen my boy, since the battle between Angus and Hamilton that they are calling “the cleansing of the causeway” after the scrubbing of the blood from the cobbles. I have not seen Archibald since he marched into the castle and I withdrew to Linlithgow, riding out through his army in silence. I have not seen James Hamilton since he galloped away to save his life. I have no daughter: she must live with her father. I have no son; he is all but imprisoned. I have no ally. I have no husband and now Katherine tells me I have sisters only upon impossible conditions.

Mary is not the fool that she pretends to be. She is desperate to avoid being caught in a quarrel between Katherine and me. She will write to me forever about gowns and lutes and hunting, always avoiding the knowledge that I am alone and unhappy and in danger. She won’t speak for me to Harry—she is too fearful for her own status at court. She will be the very model of an English princess, a radiant beauty, a wife beyond reproach. She will not risk her position at court by saying one word in my favor.

I know that I am lost to Katherine. This is a woman who left home at fifteen and endured years of loneliness and poverty in order to marry the king and become Queen of England. She will never contemplate anything that might threaten her place. She may love me, but she cannot bear me to challenge the vows of marriage. She may love me, but her whole life depends on there being no end to marriage but death.