Three Sisters, Three Queens

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As the book list shows, there are few biographies about Margaret, Dowager Queen of Scotland. Many accounts of her are frankly hostile. She suffers (as do so many women in history) from being so slightly recorded that we often don’t know what she was doing and we almost never know what she was thinking. The jigsaw of history gives a picture of abrupt changes of course and loyalties, and so many historians have assumed that she must have been either incompetent or irrational. They explain this by suggesting that she was in the grip of megalomania or lust, or more simply (and traditionally) a typical changeable woman.

Of course, I reject the concept of a “nature” of women (especially if it is said to be morally and intellectually weak), and in the case of Margaret, I think she was, without doubt, more thoughtful and strategic than the she-wolf/dolt model of female behavior. This novel suggests that Margaret probably did the best she could in circumstances which were beyond many people—male and female. Everyone seeking power in Europe in the late medieval period changed loyalties with remarkable speed and lack of honor. For Margaret, like her male enemies and friends, the only way to survive was to change her allies, plot against her enemies, and move as swiftly and as unexpectedly as she could.

She was born in 1489 as the second-oldest child of the arranged marriage of Elizabeth of York—a Plantagenet of the former royal family—and Henry Tudor, the victor of the Battle of Bosworth, and I believe that this sense of being the first generation born to a new dynasty was as powerful for her as for her better-known brother Henry VIII, giving them both a sense of self-importance and insecurity. I think she may always have had a sense of her own significance, as the oldest Tudor girl, and of inferiority: as a female and not one of the important Tudor male heirs. She was the plainer older sister to a child who was to become a famous beauty, and then a young wife to a much older husband in a marriage arranged for political gain.

I wrote her story in a fictional form, in first person present tense, because I wanted to be able to draw on this psychological explanation and show it in her character. I wanted to describe her inner experience of three marriages, of which only the outward show is recorded. There is no account of what she felt when she lost the custody of her daughter Margaret, nor how she felt leaving her son James, nor her grief at the death of Alexander. The rules of writing history mean that a historian can only speculate about her emotions; but a novelist is allowed, indeed obliged, to re-create a version of them. This is where historical fiction—the hybrid form—does something that I find profoundly interesting—takes the historical record and turns it inside out; the inner world explains the outer record.

Some scenes in this novel are history. Margaret’s arrival at Stirling Castle with her husband’s bastards bouncing out to greet her is directly drawn from Maria Perry’s biography:

Margaret, who must have heard stories of her husband’s “past,” was taken aback to find her dower castle was used as a nursery for the King’s illegitimate children. There were seven in all. (Perry, p. 45)

Margaret’s husband’s devout religious observance, sense of guilt, and zestful promiscuity were reported too. It was the tragedy of her young life when he was killed at Flodden, and the theft of his body as a trophy is true, and was indeed ordered by Margaret’s sister-in-law, Katherine of Aragon.

It’s a tragic piece of history but completely inspiring for a novelist! Thinking of Katherine issuing an order of no prisoners—in effect, an order to murder the wounded and men trying to surrender—against her sister-in-law’s husband inspired me to tell this novel as the story of three sisters: the beautiful and indulged Dowager Queen of France; the well-known Katherine of Aragon, whose reign started with such hopes and ended in sorrow; and the almost-unknown Margaret, whose life was a struggle for political power and personal happiness.

With this in mind I was struck by how their histories intertwined and reflected each other. They all three experienced arranged marriages, were widowed, and remarried the men of their choice. They all three lost children in infancy. They all three depended on the goodwill of Henry VIII, they all three fell from his favor, all three were threatened by the rise of Anne Boleyn. They were all born princesses, but experienced debt and even poverty. They met as three girls before Katherine’s marriage, and then again as women who had been widowed when Margaret returned to London; they worked together when they pleaded for the apprentices.

It is an unusual Tudor woman who hoped for love in marriage. Social historians would say that elite marriages were almost all arranged contracts until the eighteenth century. But in Margaret and her sister Mary we see two Tudor women—indeed Tudor princesses—with powerful romantic ambitions acting independently, even defying their male guardians. Margaret was a strikingly modern woman in her desire to marry for love, to divorce an unsatisfactory husband and marry again, and still hope to retain political power and the custody of her children. That she managed to do any of this in a world where the law and the Church were designed to serve men, in a country which was violent and dangerous, at a time when neither Scotland nor England had ever had a ruling queen, is a testament not to irrationality but to determination, ability, and passion.

Margaret’s feelings towards her three husbands can only be a matter of speculation in the absence of any personal record. I suggest that she came to love the husband who made her queen and perhaps grieved deeply for his loss. Certainly, it is said that she never spoke of him publicly after his death. That she was deeply and disastrously in love with Archibald Douglas is demonstrated by her recorded actions—the private marriage, the attempt to promote him to the council, and their reconciliations. Their nightmare flight to England was as I describe, but why he stayed in Scotland and whether he intended to be unfaithful to her from the very beginning of their married life is something that historians don’t yet know, and may never discover. We know that he called Janet Stewart his wife, and that they had a daughter who took his name; but he returned more than once to Margaret. In the novel I suggest that she was always drawn to him, despite his infidelity and disloyalty; certainly we know that she was thinking of him on her deathbed:

I desire you . . . to beseech the King to be gracious to the Earl of Angus. I beg God for mercy that I have so offended the Earl. (Henry VIII, Letters and Papers, vol. 16, October 1541, 1307)

My thanks go to the historians who have explored this wonderful character and her times; following is a list of the books that I studied in order to write this fictional portrayal of Margaret. I also visited her principal houses and I highly recommend a visit to the castles and palaces of Scotland. Ruined or restored, they are truly beautiful, a fitting backdrop to the story of such a complex and interesting woman.