Three Sisters, Three Queens

RICHMOND PALACE, ENGLAND, JANUARY 1502

My prayer is answered, for God always listens to the prayers of the Tudors, and the King of Scotland orders his ambassadors to negotiate with my father’s advisors. They agree a price for my dowry, for my servants, for my allowance, for the lands that will become my own in Scotland, and all through the Christmas feast the letters come and go between Scotland Yard and Richmond Palace until my lady grandmother comes to me and says: “Princess Margaret, I am pleased to say that it is the will of God that you are to be married.”

I rise up from my dutiful curtsey and look as maidenly and surprised as I can. But since I had been told this very morning that my lady grandmother and mother would see me before dinner, and that I was to wear my best gown as befits a great occasion, I am not too amazed. Really, they are quite ridiculous.

“I am?” I say sweetly.

“Yes,” my mother says. She entered the room ahead of my grandmother but somehow managed to be second with the announcement. “You are to marry King James of Scotland.”

“Is it my father’s wish?” I say, as my lady governess has taught me.

“It is,” my lady grandmother speaks out of turn. “My son, the king, has made an agreement. There is to be a lasting peace between ourselves and Scotland; your marriage will seal it. But I have requested that you stay with us, here in England, until you are a woman grown.”

“What?” I am absolutely horrified that my grandmother is going to spoil everything, as she always does. “But when will I go? I have to go now!”

“When you are fourteen years old,” my lady grandmother rules, and when my mother seems about to say something, she raises her hand and goes on: “I know—no one knows better than I—that an early marriage is very dangerous for a young woman. And the Scots king is not . . . He cannot be trusted not to . . . We felt that the King of Scots might . . .”

For once, she seems to be lost for words. This has never happened before in the history of England that runs from Arthur of the Britons to my lady grandmother in a completely unbroken line. My lady grandmother has never failed to finish a sentence; no one has ever interrupted her.

“But when am I to marry? And where?” I ask, thinking of Saint Paul’s Cathedral carpeted with red, and thousands of people crowding to see me, and a crown on my head and a cloth-of-gold train from my shoulders, and gold shoes and jewels, and jousts in my honor, and a masque, and the pretend sailing ship with peach sails and everyone admiring me.

“This very month!” my mother says triumphantly. “The king will send his representative and you will be betrothed by proxy.”

“A proxy? Not the king himself? Not in Saint Paul’s?” I ask. This sounds as if it is hardly worth doing at all. Not to leave for two years? That’s a lifetime to me now. Not in Saint Paul’s Cathedral like Katherine of Arrogant? Why would she get a better wedding than me? No king? Just some old lord?

“In the chapel here,” my mother says, as if the whole point of marriage is not about crowds of thousands and fountains running with wine and everyone watching you.

“But there will be another grand service at Edinburgh when you get there,” my lady grandmother reassures me. “When you are fourteen.” She turns to my mother and remarks: “And they will carry all the expense.”

“But I don’t want to wait, I don’t need to wait!”

She smiles but shakes her head. “We have decided,” she says. She means that she has decided, and there is no point in anyone else having a different opinion.

“But you’ll be called Queen of Scotland.” My mother knows exactly how to console me for my disappointment. “You’ll be called Queen of Scotland this year, as soon as you are betrothed, and then you will take precedence over every lady at court except me.”

I steal a look at my lady grandmother’s flinty face. I will go before her; she won’t like that. Just as I expected, her lips are moving silently. She will be praying that I do not become overly grand, that I do not suffer from the sin of pride. She will be thinking of ways to keep me in a state of grace as a miserable sinner and a granddaughter sworn in obedience to her. She will be thinking how she can be sure that I am a humble handmaiden serving my family, and not an upstart princess—no! a queen!—filled with self-importance. But I am absolutely determined to be a queen full of self-importance and I am going to have the most beautiful clothes and shoes like Katherine of Arrogant.

“Oh, I don’t care about that, all I care about is being called to the state of matrimony by God, and serving the interests of my family,” I say cleverly, and my lady grandmother smiles, truly pleased with me for the first time this afternoon.

I know someone else who will care about me walking before everyone, the equal of my mother. I know who will care so much that it will all but kill him. My brother Harry, a little peacock of vanity, a little mountebank of false pride, is going to be sick as a sinner with the Sweat when I tell him. I go to find him at the stables, coming in from a lesson of riding at the quintain. He is allowed to ride at the target with a padded lance, and the target is padded too. Everyone wants Harry to be fearless and skilled, but nobody dares to teach him properly. He’s always begging for someone to ride against, but nobody can bear to let him take any risks. He is a Tudor prince, one of only two. We Tudors are unlucky with boys, my mother’s side of the family has too many. My father was an only child and had only three sons, and lost one of them. Neither he nor my grandmother can bear to let Harry experience any danger. Even worse than that, my lady mother cannot say no to him. So he is a completely spoiled second son. Nobody would treat him like this if he were going to be king one day; they are making a tyrant. But it doesn’t matter because he’s going into the Church and will probably be pope. I swear he’ll be a really ridiculous pope.

“What do you want?” he asks disagreeably, leading his horse into the huge yard. I know at once that his lesson has gone badly. Usually he is sunny and smiling; usually he rides extraordinarily well. He is good at all sports, and fiercely clever in the schoolroom too. He is princely in every way, which will make my news so particularly galling to him.

“Did you fall off?”

“Of course not. Stupid horse cast a shoe; she’s got to be shod. I hardly rode at all. It was a complete waste of time. The groom should be turned away. What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I just came to tell you that I am to be betrothed.”

“Finally agreed, did they?” He throws his reins to a groom and slaps his hands together to warm his fingers. “It’s taken forever. I must say, they don’t seem very anxious to have you. When d’you go?”

“I don’t go,” I tell him. He will have been looking forward to being the only young Tudor for the great moments of court, with Arthur gone to Ludlow and Mary still in the nursery, he will have hoped that all eyes would be on him.

“I don’t go for years yet,” I say. “So if you were hoping for that, you will be disappointed.”

“Then you won’t be married,” he says simply. “It will all fall through. He’s not going to marry you to leave you in England. He wants a wife in his freezing cold castles, not one in London buying clothes. He wants to shut you up in confinement and get an heir. What else? Do you think he wanted you for your beauty? For your grace and height?” He laughs rudely, ignoring my flush of irritation at the jibe at my looks.

“I will be married now,” I say, nettled. “You wait and see. I will be married now and I will go to Scotland when I am fourteen, and in the meantime I will be called the Queen of Scotland and live here at court. I will have bigger rooms, my own ladies-in-waiting, and I will take precedence over everyone but my lady mother the queen, and the king my father.” I wait to make sure he fully understands what I am saying, what glories are opening up for me, how he will be thoroughly overshadowed.

“I’ll walk before you,” I emphasize. “Whether I grow any taller or not. Whether you think me beautiful or not. I will precede you. And you will have to bow to me, as to a queen.”

His cheeks flame scarlet, as if they have been slapped. His little rosebud mouth drops open, showing his perfectly white teeth. His blue eyes stare.

“I will never bow to you.”

“Absolutely you will.”

“You will not queen it over me. I am the prince. I am the Duke of York!”

“A duke,” I say as if I am hearing his title for the first time. “Yes. Very good. A royal duke, very grand. But I shall be a queen.”

I am amazed to see he actually trembles with rage. Tears come to his eyes. “You shall not! You shall not! You’re not even married!”

“I shall be,” I say. “I will have a proxy marriage and I shall have all the jewels and the title.”

“Not the jewels!” he howls like a baited wolf. “Not the title.”

“Queen of Scotland!” I taunt him. “Queen of Scotland! And you’re not even Prince of Wales.”

He lets out a bellow of rage and dives away from me, through a little door to the palace. I can hear him screaming with temper as he bounds up the stairs. He will be running to our mother—I can hear his riding boots clattering down the gallery. He will be running to fling himself into her rooms and cry into her lap and beg her not to let me take precedence over him, not to let me be queen when he is nothing but a second son and a duke, begging her to put me in a place below him, to reduce me to the lesser importance of being a girl, to drag me down from being a queen.

I don’t run after him; I don’t even follow him; I let him go. There is nothing my mother could do if she wanted—my lady grandmother has decided it all. I am to be betrothed and to live at court for two dizzy beautiful years, a queen where I was only a princess, preceding everyone but my royal parents, draped in cloth of gold and drowned in jewels. And I really think that the shock to Harry’s vanity will kill him. I cast down my eyes as my grandmother does when she has got her own way and is giving the credit to God, and I smile with her quiet satisfaction. I should think my little brother will cry himself sick.