Three Sisters, Three Queens

STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1503

I write to my lady grandmother that my husband is mired in sin. I spend hours on my knees in the chapel puzzling over what I can tell her to ensure that she is as outraged as I am. I am very careful what I say about the certainty of his damnation because I don’t want to mention his rebellion and the death of his father. Rebellion is an awkward topic for us Tudors since we took the throne from the Plantagenets and they were ordained kings and every Englishman had sworn fealty to them. I am pretty sure that my lady grandmother crafted the rebellion against King Richard after swearing an unbreakable oath of loyalty to him. Certainly she was the great friend of his wife and carried her train at her coronation.

So I don’t speak of my husband’s rebellion against his father, but I stress to my lady grandmother that he is deep in sin and I am surprised and unhappy to encounter these bastard children. I don’t know what to make of the oldest boy, Alexander, who is placed next to his father at dinner, where they sit as family in descending order from ten-year-old Alexander right down to the baby on her nurse’s lap, who bangs on the table with her own silver spoon—with a thistle on the handle! The royal emblem! James behaves as if I should be happy to have them all at the royal table, as if these handsome children are a credit to us both.

This is a sin, I write. And also, it is an insult to me, the queen. If my father knew anything of them before my marriage, he should have ruled that these children could not stay in my castle. They should live far away from my dower lands. Surely I cannot be expected to house them? Really, they should never have been born. But I don’t know what I can do to dismiss them.

At least I can keep them out of my rooms. Their nursery and schoolroom are in one tower, the philosopher—as if it were not bad enough that I have to house him—is in the other. I have the queen’s interconnected rooms, presence chamber, privy chamber, and bedchamber, the most beautiful that I have ever seen. I make it clear to my ladies and to the king’s steward that only my ladies are to attend my rooms. There are to be no “bairns” of any age or description, regardless of their parentage, running in and out as if I wanted their company.

I have to know more and I have to know what I can do. While I wait for advice from my lady grandmother I consult my lady-in-waiting Lady Katherine Huntly. She is from the Gordon clan and is a kinswoman to my husband. She can speak Erse as he does—as they all do—and she knows these people; she probably knows the mothers of the children. I suppose that half of them are related to her. This is not a nobility, it is a tribe—and these are little bastard savages.

I wait till my musicians are playing and we are seated at our sewing. We are working on an altar cloth that shows Saint Margaret as she confronts the dragon. I think that I too am forced to confront a dragon of sin, and Katherine can tell me how to defeat it.

“Lady Katherine, you may sit beside me,” I say, and she comes and takes a stool beside me and starts to work on my corner of the embroidery.

“You can leave that,” I say and, pleasant as ever, she puts it down and unthreads her needle and stores it safely in its silver case.

“I wanted to talk to you about the king,” I say.

She turns her calm face to listen.

“About these children.”

She is silent.

“These very many children.”

She nods.

“They have to go!” I exclaim suddenly.

She looks at me consideringly. “Your Grace, this is a matter for the king and yourself.”

“Yes, but I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know what is usual. I can’t command him.”

“No, you cannot command him. But I think that you could ask.”

“Who are they anyway?”

She thinks for a moment. “Are you sure that you want to know?”

Tightly, I nod, and she looks at me with a gentle sympathy. “As you wish, Your Grace. The king is a man of little more than thirty years, remember. He has been King of Scotland since he was a boy. He came to his throne in violence, and he is a man of high passions and power, a lusty man of appetites. Of course he has fathered children. He is unusual only in that he keeps them together in his finest castle, and loves them so dearly. Most men have children outside their marriage and leave them to be raised by their mothers, or sometimes they are farmed out and neglected. The king should perhaps be honored for recognizing his own.”

“No, he shouldn’t be,” I say flatly. “My father has only us. He never took a mistress.”

She looks down at her hands as if she knows better. I have always hated that about Katherine Huntly; she always looks as if she is carrying a secret.

“Your father was very blessed in his wife, your mother,” she says. “Perhaps King James will never take another mistress, now that he has you.”

I feel a rush of anger at the thought of anyone in my place, anyone preferred to me. I don’t even like the thought of anyone making comparisons between me and another girl. Part of my relief in leaving England was that no one could again look from dainty Katherine to me, that no one can compare me to my sister Mary. I hate being compared—and now I discover my husband has half a dozen lovers. “Who was this Marion Boyd, the mother of Alexander, the oldest boy, who is allowed to be so forward?” I ask.

Her raised eyebrows ask me am I sure that I want to know all this?

“Who is she? Is she dead too?”

“No, Your Grace. She is a kinswoman of the Earl of Angus. A very important family, the Douglas clan, you know.”

“Was she my husband’s mistress for long?”

Katherine considers. “I believe so. Alexander Stewart is a little more than ten years old is he not?”

“How would I know?” I demand sharply. “I don’t look at him.”

“Yes,” she says and stops speaking.

“Go on,” I say crossly. “Is he the only bastard the king has got on her?”

“No, she had three children by the king, a boy died. But her daughter Catherine is here with her older brother.”

“The little girl with fair hair? About six years old?”

“No, that’s Margaret, she is the daughter of Margaret Drummond.”

“Margaret!” I exclaim. “He gave his bastard my name?”

She bows her head and is silent. My ladies glance across at her as if they are sorry she is trapped in the window bay with me. I am known for my temper and none of them ever want to tell me bad news.

“He gave them all his name,” she says quietly. “They are all called Stewart.”

“Why don’t they take the husbands’ names, if they are all cuckolds’ brats?” I am furious now. “Why doesn’t the king demand that the husbands house their wives and children all together? Keep these women in their place at home?”

She says nothing.

“But he called one James. Which one is James?”

“He is the son of Janet Kennedy,” she says quietly.

“Janet Kennedy?” I recognize the name. “And where is she? Not here?”

“Oh no,” Katherine says quickly, as if that would be impossible. “She lives at Darnaway Castle, far away. You will never meet her.”

I can be glad of this, at least. “The king does not see her any more?”

Katherine picks up the corner of the tapestry as if she wishes she were working on it. “I don’t know, Your Grace.”

“So he does see her?”

“I could not say.”

“And what about the others?” I continue with my interrogation.

“The others?”

“All the other children. By Saint Margaret there must be half a dozen of them!”

She ticks them off on her fingers: “There are Alexander and Catherine, the children of Marion Boyd; and Margaret, the daughter of Margaret Drummond; and Janet Kennedy’s boy James; and the three youngest who are still so small that they usually live with their mother Isabel Stewart, not here at court: Jean, Catherine, and Janet.”

“How many are there altogether?”

I can see her calculating. “There are seven of them here. There may be more of course, unacknowledged.”

I look at her blankly. “I won’t have any of them under the same roof as me,” I say. “Do you understand me? You’ll have to tell him.”

“I?” She shakes her head, perfectly calm. “I could not tell the King of Scotland that his children are not welcome here in Stirling Castle, Your Grace.”

“Well, my chamberlain will have to do it. Or my confessor, or someone has to tell him. I won’t bear it.”

Lady Huntly does not flinch at my raised voice. “You will have to tell him yourself, Your Grace,” she says respectfully. “He’s your husband. But if I were you—”

“You could not be me,” I say flatly. “I am a Tudor princess, the oldest Tudor princess. There is no one like me.”

“If I were so blessed as to be in your position,” she corrects herself smoothly.

“You were the wife of a pretender,” I say meanly. “Obviously, you did not achieve my position.”

She bows her head. “I merely say that if I were a new wife of a great king I would ask it of him as a favor, not demand it as a right. He is kind to you, and he loves his children very deeply. He is capable of great love and affection. You could ask it as a favor. Although . . .”

“Although what?” I snap.

“He will be saddened,” she says. “He loves his children.”

A Tudor does not ask for favors. As a Tudor princess I expect my due. Katherine of Arrogant did not share Ludlow Castle with anyone but our Plantagenet cousin Margaret Pole and her husband, Arthur’s guardian. Nobody would have asked such a thing of her. When my little sister, Princess Mary, is married—probably to a Spanish prince—she will go to her new country with honor. She will not meet bastards or half bloods or whores. I shall not be treated less well than these princesses, who are inferior to me either by birth or age.

I wait till the next day when we have observed Mass in the chapel, and before we leave the hallowed ground I put a hand on my husband’s arm to hold him at the chancel steps and say: “My lord husband, I do not think it right that your bastard children should be housed in my castle. This is my dower castle, my own property, and I don’t want them here.”

He takes my hand and he holds it, looking into my eyes as if we were plighting our troth before the altar. “Little wife, these are the children of my begetting and of my heart. I was hoping that you might be kind to them and that you might give them the company of a little brother.”

“My son will be born in wedlock to two royal parents,” I say stiffly. “He will not share a nursery with bastards. He will be raised with noble companions.”

“Margaret,” he says even more softly, “these little bairns take nothing from you; their mothers are not your rivals. You are queen above all others, my one and only wife. Your son when he comes will be a prince of Scotland, and heir to England. They can live here and be no trouble to you. We will only be here a few times in the year; you will barely see them. It will be nothing to you; but I will know that they are in the safest place in the country.”

I don’t smile, though he is swinging my hand gently. I don’t melt, though his touch is warm. I have seen my father terrorized by the sons and cousins and bastards of my grandfather. The Plantagenets are named for a weed that grows unstoppably and, through them, we Tudors are entwined with children of the blood and children of half blood, boys who claim kinship and boys who are ghosts, boys who are no kin at all. I won’t have my castle filled with boys from nowhere. My father put the neck of his wife’s cousin under the axe, so that there should be no doubt about who was the son and heir to the English throne. Katherine’s parents demanded that he was dead before she came to England from Spain. I won’t have less than her. I won’t allow rival heirs to my son before he is even born. I won’t have rivals to me.

“No,” I say flatly, though my pulse is drumming in my ears and I am afraid of defying him.

He bows his head for a moment and I think that I have won, but then I see that he is silent, not humbled at all, but mastering himself and curbing his anger. When he looks up again his eyes are very cold. “Very well,” he says. “But this is small of you, Your Grace. Small and mean, and—worst of all—stupid.”

“Don’t you dare.” I drag my hand from his and I round on him with a blaze of temper, but he just bows his head slightly to me, and makes a deep obeisance to the altar and walks away just as I am about to treat him to the full blast of a Tudor rage. He goes as if he has no interest in my tantrum and leaves me shaking with fury but with nothing to say and no one to hear.

I write again to my lady grandmother. How dare he call me stupid? How dare he—with a castle full of bastards, and the murder of his own father on his conscience—dream of calling me stupid? Who is more stupid? A Tudor princess who defends her rights as queen? Or a man who meets with philosophers by day and whores by night?