Three Sisters, Three Queens

HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1529

We come back to Edinburgh before making a summer progress up the coast, and meet with the English ambassador.

“You have news from London?” I ask him. “Have the cardinals decided on the king’s great matter?”

“The court is adjourned,” he says. “Cardinal Campeggio tells us now that it has to be decided in Rome, by the Pope. He says that the legatine court has no authority to rule.”

I am thunderstruck. “Then why did he come and open it?”

“He gave us to understand that he had authority,” Thomas Magnus says weakly. “But we think now that he came only to persuade the queen to withdraw to an abbey and take her vows. Since she refuses, he has to take the evidence back to Rome for a decision.”

“But the hearing?”

“It was partial,” he concedes. “The queen would not be questioned.”

I cannot believe that Katherine defied the Pope’s court, she has always been so determinedly obedient to Rome. “She never refused to appear before two cardinals?”

“She came, and made a speech, and then she left.”

“A speech? She addressed the court?”

“She spoke to her supposed husband the king.”

I don’t even address the weasel words of “supposed husband.” “Why, what did she say?”

Even James, who is listening to this with half his attention, gently pulling the ears of his deerhound, looks up at this. “What did the queen say?”

“She knelt to the king,” Magnus says, as if it makes it better. “She said that when they first married she was a true maid, without touch of man.”

“She said that in court?” James demands, as riveted as I.

“She said that she had been his true wife for twenty years and had never grudged a word or countenance or shown a spark of discontent.”

James is openly laughing at the thought of this aging woman, on her knees, swearing to her long-ago virginity, but I have a strange, terrible feeling, as if I am going to cry. But why should there be anything in this to bring me to tears?

“Go on! Go on!” says James. “This is as good as a play.”

“She said some more.” Magnus loses the thread. “She knelt to him. She was on her knees, her head bowed.”

“Yes, so you said, but what else?”

“She said that if there be any just cause by the law that anyone could say, dishonesty or impediment, then she would go, but if there was none then she beseeched him to let her remain in her former estate and receive justice.”

“My God,” James said, stunned into admiration at last. “She said all that? Before everyone?”

“Oh, more, and then finally she said that she would be spared the extremity of the court and that she committed her cause to God.”

“Then what?” I clear my throat to ask. My heart is hammering. I cannot think what is the matter with me.

“Then she left.”

“Walked out?”

Magnus nods, unsmiling. “She curtseyed to the king and she walked out. The king said she should be called back into court and they shouted after her, ‘Katherine of Aragon, come into court,’ but she didn’t even turn her head, she just walked out. And outside . . .”

“What outside?”

“Outside the women cried out blessings on her, and the men said that she should never have been made to attend. People shouted that it was a shame, shame on the king, that such a wife should be forced to defend herself.”

I rise up from my seat. My heart thumping so rapidly that I think I must be ill. I think of Katherine, confronting Harry the liar—he has been a little liar all his life—and facing him down, before the two cardinals, before the lords, before the men who rule our world, and then curtseying and walking away. How did she dare! What will he do?

“What will he do?” My voice is like a croak. Why can I not speak?

The ambassador looks at me gravely. “The cardinals will take the cause to the Holy Father for a decision. The king has not advanced his case, but the queen has openly defied him and said that she does not trust his advisors or his court. She has demanded to be treated as Queen of England and said that she is without fault. I don’t know what will happen next. I have no instruction, and nothing like this has ever happened in England before.”

“Where is Harry now?”

“He will be going on progress.” The ambassador looks down and clears his throat. “He is not taking the queen.”

I understand from this that it is a breach, perhaps forever. He is taking Anne Boleyn, the mercer’s great-granddaughter, and she will ride beside him in the place of the Infanta of Spain. Harry has deserted Katherine. I understand also what I am feeling in this swirl of emotions. Triumph: that Harry’s words against me should be quoted back into his face: take that, you little hypocrite! And yet I am sorry, I am so, so sorry that it has come to this, that Katherine should kneel to him before all the lords of England and declare that she does not trust Harry or them. The fairy-tale marriage that caused me such agonies of jealousy is over, the beautiful princess has been abandoned, and I cannot help but be glad of it. At the same time, I cannot help a measureless grief that Katherine was my sister and now she is alone.