Three Sisters, Three Queens

PITLOCHRY, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1530

Just as my brother is waiting for the Vatican to rule on his application for an annulment, the Holy Father chooses this very moment to send a papal ambassador to visit us. This can be no coincidence I tell James, as we ride through the wild country north of Scone, the ambassador’s big horse laboring behind us, as his excellency admires scenery that is, he tells us, as wild as the Apennine Mountains that shield Rome. The Holy Father must be wanting reassurance that whatever heretical books my brother is consulting, whatever challenges he makes to the rule of Rome, that I am, at least, the true child of our sainted grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort, remaining obedient to papal authority. James, my son, is genuinely devout and opposes the heresies of Luther and even the milder questioning of the German and Swiss reformers. Like many children raised in difficult circumstances, he clings to the certainties of the old world. Having lost an earthly father in infancy and defied a stepfather, he’s not going to deny the Pope.

We love these summers, when we ride into the Northern lands that become more rugged and more and more empty the farther we travel. Sometimes at sunset the skies are filled with strange rainbows in wild colors, it does not get dark till late, and dawn comes very early. In midsummer there is hardly any nighttime at all; the Northern lands are the realms of the white nights and the people revel in summertime and drink and dance and hardly sleep at all for joy in the sunshine.

James—just like his father—takes justice with him wherever we go and holds summary courts and tries and sentences offenders. He is emphatic that the king’s peace must run from the lawless Lowland borders to the lawless Highlands. He brings a dream to the Northern clans of a king whose justice will go from the rough Northern seas, where a gale is always blowing, to the troubled countries of the Tyne and the Eden. The papal ambassador admires him and says he had no idea of the richness and power of these Northern lands. I have to admit that until I came to Scotland I too knew little of the men and women of these remote places, but I have learned to love and respect them.

“I did not know, for instance,” the ambassador begins in his careful French—then he breaks off for we have come out of a forest and into a meadow beside a wide, deep river and before us is a complete palace of wood, planted in the meadow like a dream house. It is an extraordinary sight, three stories high with a great turret at each corner, flags flying at each one, and even a gatehouse and a drawbridge that is a tree trunk. As we rein in our horses to exclaim, the drawbridge is lowered over the moat—a diversion of the river which runs, sparkling, all around the castle—and John Stewart, the Earl of Atholl, comes riding out and, on her palfrey beside him, his lady Grizel Rattray wearing a crown of flowers.

“What is this?” the ambassador asks me in bewilderment.

“This,” says James, grandly, hiding his own surprise, “this is a summer palace that my loyal friend John Stewart has prepared for us. Please come this way.”

He greets John and the two men laugh together. James slaps him on the back and praises the extraordinary building as her ladyship greets me, and I congratulate her on the creation of such a treasure.

We dismount before the tree-trunk drawbridge, the horses are taken away to the fields and the earl and his countess show us into their pleasure house.

Inside it is more dreamlike than ever, for the ground floors are nothing but the meadow, richly planted with flowers. Upstairs there are bedrooms in each of the four corners of the palace, and each bed is built into the wall and planted with chamomile, like a scented bower, and thrown with furs. The great hall for dining is heated in the old way with a fire in the center, and the floor is beaten mud swept to perfect cleanness and polished with the passage of many feet. The high table is on a platform, a few carved wooden steps leading up to it, and the interior glows green with the light of the best wax candles.

I look around me with delight. “Come and see your room,” the countess says and guides me up the wooden stairs to the chamber that overlooks the river and the hills beyond. Every wall is hung with a tapestry of silk, and every tapestry is a woodland or meadow or riverside scene so it is as if every wall is a window to the countryside beyond. The windows themselves are wooden-framed and made of perfectly clear Venetian glass so that I can look out at the river and see my horse grazing in the water meadows, or close the shutters for warmth.

“This is a wonder!” I say to the countess.

She laughs with pleasure and tosses her head with the crown of flowers and says: “My lord and I were so honored that you should come to stay with us that we wanted you to have a palace as good as Holyroodhouse.”

We go down to dine. The fire is lit and the smell of woodsmoke mingles with the scent of roasted meat. They are cooking every sort of bird and three kinds of venison. As we enter the room the household stand to salute us and they raise their shining pewter cups. I sit with James on one side and the ambassador on the other, the Earl of Atholl is on James’s far side and his countess at the head of the table of ladies. “This is truly very fine,” the ambassador says to me in an undertone. “Very unexpected. What a treasure house in the middle of nowhere. This Earl of Atholl must be very, very wealthy?”

“Yes,” I say. “But he has not built this palace from wood to prevent James stealing it from him. We are not as they are in England. A great subject may keep his wealth and lands, however grandly he builds.”

“Ah, you mean the poor Cardinal Wolsey,” the ambassador says, shaking his head. “He made the mistake of living more grandly than the king himself and now the king has taken everything away from him.”

“I don’t think it is my brother who is jealous,” I say mildly. “Harry always said that Wolsey should be rewarded for his work in serving the kingdom. I think you will find it is the lady who now lives in Wolsey’s beautiful house of York Place who is behind his downfall.”

The ambassador nods and does not answer. “The Holy Father is very troubled by this,” he says quietly.

“Indeed, it is the worst thing that might happen,” I reply. “And I hear that Lady Anne is a Lutheran?”

He looks grave but is too careful to name the favorite as a heretic. “Do you write to your sister-in-law the queen?”

“I write to my sister Mary, but the queen has been so distressed and so troubled that I have not added to her worries.”

“She has a new ambassador come from Spain to advise her.”

“She should not need a Spanish ambassador. She is Queen of England,” I say shortly. “She should be able to trust to English advice.”

He bows. “Indeed. But since Spain supports her, the Holy Father must support her too. And there is no certain evidence against her marriage with your brother. If she would only be persuaded to retire. If perhaps you could suggest to her that she might become an abbess, pursue a life of holiness . . . ? Would she listen to you?”

The musicians from the gallery, the chink of glassware, the rumble of talk all suddenly become dim to me, and the brightness of the hall, the tapestries, the carved wood, the flicker and leap of firelight, suddenly fade. I think for a moment what I would say to Katherine, if I were called to advise her. I think how pleasing it would be to me, how smug I would feel if she were to step from public life into the seclusion of an abbey and there were just Mary and me, us two dowager queens, and no Katherine dominating the court. I think how much better my life would have been if she had never leapt up so high, if she had not been Regent of England, if she had not sent the English army to Flodden with orders to take no prisoners but to kill all that they could, if she had never advised Harry against me.

And then I think again. I think of her as Princess of Wales when Arthur died and left her with nothing. I think of my lady grandmother’s terrible envy and enmity towards her. I think of how she endured poverty and hardship, living on the fringe of court, turning her dresses and darning her hems, eating badly, served worse, holding onto the calling that she believed came from God—to be Queen of England.

“I would not advise her to give up her crown,” I say simply to the ambassador. “I would advise no woman to give up anything that she has managed to win. I would advise every woman to work as she can, and gain what she can, and keep it. No woman should be made to surrender her goods or herself. A wise woman will enrich herself as if she were the equal of a man, and a good law would protect her rights, not rob her like an envious husband.”

He smiles at me, very charming, and he shakes his head. “You would suggest a sisterhood of queens, a sisterhood of women,” he says. “You would suggest that a woman can rise from the place where God has put her—below her husband in every way. You would overthrow the God-given order.”

“I don’t believe that God wants me ill-educated and poor,” I say staunchly. “I don’t believe that God wants any woman in poverty and stupidity. I believe that God wants me in His image, thinking with the brain that He has given me, earning my fortune with the skills that He has given me, and loving with the heart that He has given me.”

The earl’s chaplain says grace and we bow our heads for the long prayer.

“I won’t argue with you,” the papal ambassador says diplomatically. “For you speak with the beautiful logic of a beautiful woman, and no man can understand it.”

“And I won’t argue with you, for you think that you are paying me a compliment,” I reply. “I will hold my peace, but I know what I know.”

We stay in the palace of green trees for three days, and every day James and the earl and the ambassador go out hunting. Some days they fish; one day it is so hot that James strips down naked and he and the earl and the court go swimming in the river. I watch them from the window of my bower, terrified that James will be swept away by the water. He is the hope of Scotland, he is the future of the country—I don’t like him to be in any danger at all.

On the third day we thank them and say that we have to move on. James kisses the earl and the countess and gives them a gold chain from his own neck. I give her one of my rings. It is not one of my favorites: a ruby from my inheritance.

As we ride away the papal ambassador looks back and exclaims: “Mother of God!”

We all turn. Where the palace had been tall and turreted there are plumes of smoke from the greenwood and the crackle of fire. Little cracks of gunpowder going off under the walls tell us that the fire has been set to destroy the summer palace. James reins in so that we can watch as the yellow flames greedily run up the dried leaves and little twigs and set the bracken roof alight in moments. Then there is a great roar as the walls catch fire and a crash as the first tower collapses into the heart of the blaze.

“We should go back! We could soak it from the moat!” the papal ambassador cries. “We could save it.”

James lifts a hand. “No, it has been fired on purpose. It is the tradition,” he says grandly. “It’s a great sight.”

“A tradition?”

“When a Highland chief gives a great feast he builds the dining hall and when the feast is done he burns everything, tables, chairs, and hall. It will never be used again: it was a singular experience.”

“But the tapestries? The silverware?”

James shrugs, a king to his fingertips. “All gone. That is the beauty of Highland hospitality: it is total. We were guests of a great lord; he gave us everything. You are in a wealthy kingdom, a kingdom like a fairy tale.”

I think James is going a bit far, but the ambassador crosses himself as if he has just seen a miracle. “That was a mighty sight,” he says.

“My son is a great king,” I remind him. “This shows you the esteem of his people.”

I don’t doubt for a moment that the countess took down the tapestries and all the valuables. They probably took the windows out before they fired the wooden walls. But it is a great sight, and it has done its work. The papal ambassador will go home to Rome and tell the Pope that my son James can look higher and farther than his cousin Princess Mary. Scotland is a great country, it can ally with whom it chooses. He can tell him also that I will not side with my brother against my sister-in-law. We are fellow queens, we are sisters, that means something.