Three Sisters, Three Queens

GREENWICH PALACE, ENGLAND, SPRING 1502

I write to my brother the Prince of Wales, to tell him of my proxy wedding and to ask him when he is going to come back home. I tell him that the day was a great state occasion, the signing of the treaty, a wedding mass, and then an exchange of vows in my mother’s great chamber before hundreds of admiring people. I wore white, I tell him, with cloth-of-gold sleeves and white leather shoes with gold laces. My husband’s kinsman, James Hamilton, was kind to me, he was at my side all day. Then I dined at the same table as my mother and we ate from the same plate because we are both queens.

I remind him, rather plaintively, that they are planning that I shall go to Scotland the summer before I turn fourteen, and I want to see him before I leave. Surely he wants to see me before I go to be Queen of Scotland in person as well as in name? Surely he will want to see my new gowns? I am making a list of everything I shall need and I will have to have a baggage train of a hundred carts. Also, I think but don’t tell him, now I outrank his wife and she can follow behind me and see how she likes it now that I am the newly made queen and she still a mere princess. If she comes to court she will find that she has to curtsey to me, and follow me when we go in to dinner. There will be no more carefully judged equal curtseys; she has to sink down as low as a princess goes to a queen. I long to see her do that to me. I really wish he would bring her just so that I could see her pride humbled.

I tell him that Harry cannot recover from the shock that I go before him on every state occasion, that I am served on bended knee, that I am a queen as great as our lady mother. I tell Arthur that we all miss him at court, though Christmas was merry. I tell him my father is spending a small fortune on the clothes that I shall take to Scotland, while making a note of every penny. I have to have everything new, red bed curtains made of sarsenet, everything embroidered with gold thread. Even so, they think it will all be ready by next summer and I will set off as soon as the King of Scotland confirms the marriage by transferring my dower lands to me. But Arthur must come home to say good-bye. Arthur must come home to see me leave. If not—when will I see him again? “I miss you,” I write.

I send my letter to Ludlow in a bundle with my mother and lady grandmother’s letters. The messenger will take days to get to Arthur’s court. The roads to the west are crumbling and in disrepair; my father says there is no money to spend on them. The messenger will have to lead his own change of horses for fear that there are none available for hire on the way. He will have to spend the nights in abbeys and monasteries along the route, or if he finds himself snowed in or benighted he will have to beg for hospitality in a manor or farmhouse. Everyone is obliged to assist the king’s messenger; but if the road is a quagmire, or a bridge swept away by a flood, there is little anyone can do but advise him to take the long way round, and find his way as best he can.

So I don’t expect a swift reply and I don’t think much of it when, early one morning in April, walking to my room with a candle after attending Prime with my lady grandmother, I see a king’s messenger step from a barge and walk quickly across the quay and through the private door to the royal quarters. He looks exhausted, leaning against the carved column as he says something quietly to a yeoman of the guard that leads the man to throw down his pike and gallop indoors.

I guess that he’s going to my father the king’s private rooms so I leave my post at the window and walk along the gallery to see what is so urgent that the messenger has arrived at first light and the guards are downing their arms and running. But even before I get to the door, I can see the yeoman and two or three of my father’s counselors going quickly down the privy stairs to the courtyard below. Curiously, I watch as they huddle together, and then someone breaks away, runs up the stairs, and goes to the chapel to fetch my father’s confessor. The priest comes hurrying out. Now, I step forward. “What’s the matter?” I ask.

Friar Peter’s face is sallow as if all the blood has gone from his cheeks, as if he has turned to parchment. “Forgive me, Your Grace,” he says with a little bow. “I am on your father’s business and can’t stop.”

And with that he walks past me! Scuttles past me! As if I am not Queen of Scotland and taking up my throne next summer! I wait for a moment, wondering if it would be too undignified to run after him and insist that he wait until dismissed; but then I hear him returning, coming up the stairs so slowly that I don’t understand why he rushed down. Now, there is no hurry; he is dragging his feet, looking as if he wishes he were not going towards my father’s rooms at all. The advisors trail behind him, looking as sick as if they are poisoned. He sees me waiting; but it is as if he does not see me, for he does not bow—he does not even acknowledge me. He walks past me as if his eyes are fixed on a ghost and he cannot see mere mortals, not even royals.

That’s when I know for sure. I think I knew before. I think I knew as soon as I saw the messenger slumped against the column, as if he wished he had died before bringing this news to us. I step before the priest, and I say: “It’s Arthur, isn’t it?”

My beloved brother’s name makes him see me but he says only, “Go to your lady mother,” as if he can give me orders, and he turns away and slips into my father’s rooms, without knocking, without announcement, one hand on the door, the other clutching the crucifix which hangs from his belt, as if it might give him strength.

I go, not because I have to do as my father’s confessor tells me, for I am a queen now and I have to obey only my parents and my husband; but because I am afraid that they will come to my mother and tell her something terrible. I almost think that I will bar her door so that they cannot come in. If we don’t know, perhaps it hasn’t happened. If nobody tells us that there is something terribly wrong with Arthur then perhaps he is still well in Ludlow, hunting, enjoying the spring weather, traveling into Wales to show the people their prince, learning how to rule his principality. Perhaps he is happy with Katherine of Arrogant; I would be glad even if she was the cause of his happiness. Perhaps she is with child and they have brought us good news. I would even like good news of her. I keep thinking of all the wonderful news that the messenger might have brought, in such a hurry. I keep thinking that Arthur is such a darling, beloved of everyone, so dear to me, that nothing can have gone wrong. The news cannot be bad.

My mother is still in bed, her bedroom fire just flickering into life. Her lady is bringing gowns for her to choose for the day, the heavy headdresses are laid out on the table. She looks up as I dawdle into her bedroom. I think I should say something, but I don’t know what.

“You’re up early, Margaret,” she remarks.

“I went to Prime with my lady grandmother.”

“Is she joining us for breakfast?”

“Yes.” And I think: my lady grandmother will know what to do when the confessor comes in with his face the color of a manuscript and grief written all over it.

“Is everything all right, little queen?” she asks me tenderly.

I can’t bear to answer her. I take a seat at the window and look out at the garden, and listen for the footsteps that soon come heavily along the corridor. Then, at last, after what seems like a long long time, I hear the outer doors to her presence chamber open, the sound of footsteps, the inner doors to the privy chamber open and then finally, unstoppably, the door to her bedroom is opened, and my father’s confessor comes into my mother’s rooms, his head bowed as low as the poorest drudge pulling a plow. I jump to my feet when he comes in, and I put out my hand as if I can stop him from speaking. I say suddenly: “No! No!” but he says quietly, “Your Grace, the king bids you come to his rooms at once.”

Terribly, my mother turns to me. “What is it? You know, don’t you?”

Terribly, I reply: “It’s Arthur. He’s dead.”

They say that he died of the Sweat—and this only makes it worse for us Tudors. The disease came in from the jails of France with my father’s convict army. Wherever he marched, from Wales, through Bosworth to London, people died in an instant. England had never known such a disease. My father won the battle against Richard III with his sickly force, but he had to delay his coronation because of the horror that they brought with them. They called it the Tudor curse and said that the reign that had begun in sweat would end in tears. And now here we are, not anywhere near the end of our reign, but deep in sweat and tears, and the curse of the invading army has fallen on my innocent brother.

My father and my mother take the loss of their elder son very hard. They don’t just lose their boy—and he was not yet sixteen—they lose their heir, the boy they trained to be the next king, the Tudor who was to come to the throne with acclaim, a Tudor that the people wanted, not one that was forced on them. My father had to fight for his throne and then defend it. He has to defend it still, even now, against the older royal family who would take it if they could, the Plantagenet cousins who are in open enmity in Europe, or those who stay uncertainly at court. Arthur was going to be the first Tudor that all of England welcomed to the throne, the son of both the old royal family and the new. They called him the sweet briar, the Tudor rose, the bush that was the union of two roses, the Lancaster red and the York white.

This is the end of my childhood. Arthur was my brother, my darling, my friend. I looked up to him as my senior, I acknowledged him as my prince, I thought I would see him come to the throne as king. I imagined him ruling in England and I as Queen of Scotland with a Treaty of Perpetual Peace and a regular exchange of visits and letters, loving each other as brother and sister and neighboring monarchs. And now that he is dead I realize how bitterly I resent the days that we did not spend together, the months when he was with Katherine in the Welsh Marches and I did not see him, nor write often enough. I think of the days of our childhood when we were taught by different tutors, when they kept us apart so that I might learn needlework and he Greek, and how few days I had with him, my brother. I don’t know how I can bear it without him. We were four Tudor children, and now we are only three, and the firstborn and the finest has gone.

I am walking down the gallery away from my mother’s rooms when I see Harry, his face all puffed and his eyes red from crying, coming the opposite way. When he sees me his little mouth goes downturned as if he is about to wail, and all my anger and my grief turns on him, this worthless boy, this brat, who presumes to cry as if he were the only person in the world to lose a brother.

“Shut up,” I say fiercely. “What have you got to cry about?”

“My brother!” he gulps. “Our brother, Margaret.”

“You weren’t fit to polish his boots.” I am choking with resentment. “You weren’t fit to groom his horse. There will never be another like him. There will never be another prince like him.”

Amazingly, this stops his tears. He goes white and almost stern. His head rears up, his shoulders go back, he sticks out his thin little-boy chest, he plants his fists on his hips, he almost manages to swagger. “There will be another prince like him,” he swears. “Better than him. Me. I am the new Prince of Wales and I shall be King of England in his place, and you can get used to it.”