Three Sisters, Three Queens

EDINBURGH CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1528

We enter Edinburgh in triumph, and it is a greater triumph than ever before. The lords meet us at the Tollbooth, the people throw flowers and scented water from the upper windows and crowd the narrow streets to see James and me together, smiling and acknowledging the cheers. James, their king, is finally the ruling king and Archibald is nowhere to be seen.

We keep the castle armed, victualed, and ready for a siege because I am constantly afraid that Archibald will return with the Douglas clan at his back. James has guards on his bedroom door and sleeps with an armed man on a pallet bed beside him. My brother Harry writes to me that I will be damned for all eternity for breaking my marriage vows and living in adultery. I don’t even reply. It is a terrible thing for a brother to write such words of condemnation to his sister, but a brother who is leaving his wife every day in order to pursue another woman, and is chaste only because his mistress is playing a long game, has no right to speak so to me. Never again will I think that morality is different for men.

The city buzzes with rumors of a Douglas army massed in the hills outside and preparing to set a siege. The citizens and the merchants support their young king but they are afraid of the Douglas power. Only six years ago the Douglas clan spilled blood in the streets of Edinburgh, and it is less than four years since I opened fire on them from Holyroodhouse. The people don’t want to be trapped in their own city between two warring powers; there is nothing in the world worse than a civil war.

The lords agree that the Douglas clan have been treasonous. The declaration is put to the horn—the herald goes to the mercat cross and, after three blasts of the trumpet, announces the names of traitors. My former husband, Archibald, is under sentence of death. Our enmity has finally brought us to this point. I have not just divorced him and married another man, I have ordered his death. I may have to watch him executed. This must be the end of everything between us.

“We should go to Stirling,” Henry advises. We are in James’s privy chamber. I am seated on the throne as James strides up and down, looking out of the windows. Some of the older lords are with us. Most have chosen the king against his stepfather. Nearly all of them say that they were loyal all along but were bribed by English gold and afraid of Archibald.

“Back to Stirling?” James asks. “I won’t look as if I am afraid. I won’t run away.”

“Stirling to regroup,” I advise. “Archibald cannot take Stirling Castle, and if he sets a siege before it, against the royal standard, then he is a self-declared traitor and no one should support him. Let’s go there, till we know if he is going to surrender to you and hand over his castles.”

James turns to the other lords. “Would this be your advice?” he asks with careful courtesy.

“Aye,” one of them says. “And we need to know what Harry of England is going to do for us, now we have put his nephew on the throne and his sister is married to another lord.”

They all turn to look at me, and I am ashamed that I cannot promise that I have my brother’s support.

“The King of England has always favored the Earl of Angus,” someone says bluntly.

“He cannot do so now!”

“Over his own sister?” someone else asks.

I turn my head away so they cannot see my grimace. He might.