Three Sisters, Three Queens

LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1533

It is over then, I think.

It is over, all over, for Katherine. My rival and my sister, my enemy and my friend, is finished with this final blow to her pride, her name, her very being. They move her again, this time to an old, ill-kept bishop’s palace, Buckden in Cambridgeshire, with a reduced household and too small an allowance to maintain her position as queen. She is poor again, just as she was when she was eating old fish. I hear that she still wears a hair shirt under her gowns, and now she patches her sleeves and turns her hems. But this time she cannot draw on her credit and her youthful courage and hope for better days. She is alone. Her confessor, Bishop Fisher, is under house arrest, her daughter kept from her. Lady Mary is not allowed to see her mother; she cannot even go to court unless she curtseys to Anne Boleyn as queen.

She is her mother’s daughter.

She won’t do that.

I am in a better place than both my sisters. I cling to this little joy, as stubborn as when we were girls jockeying for supremacy. I am married to a good man, I am seated in my little stone room at the top of my castle, I can see my country at peace around me, and my son is recognized king. I wish I had said good-bye to Katherine, I did not even know that I should say good-bye to Mary until I got her letter:

Dear Sister,

The pain in my belly is worse; I can feel a growth and I cannot eat, they doubt that I will see Christmas. I was spared the coronation—the wedding was held in secret because her belly was growing—and I doubt that I will see the birth of the Boleyn bastard. God forgive me but I pray that she miscarries and that the swelling of her belly is a stone like mine. I write to Katherine but they read my letters and she cannot reply, so I don’t know how she is. For the first time in my life I don’t know how she is and I have not seen her for nearly two years.

It seems to me now that we were three girls together with so much to hope for, and that it is a hard world that has brought the three of us to this. When men have authority over women, women can be brought very low—and they will be brought very low. We spent our time admiring and envying each other and we should have been guiding and protecting each other. Now I am dying, you are living with a man not your husband, your true husband is your enemy, your daughter is estranged from you, and Katherine has lost her battle against the prince she married for love. What is the point of love if it does not make us kind? What is the point of being sisters if we do not guard each other? M.