Three Sisters, Three Queens

HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, JULY 1508

I go into the dark stuffy rooms of my confinement for the weeks of isolation and silence. I swear to myself that I am not going to think of what my husband said about a curse, that I am not going to consider his accusations—they are ridiculous, he is ridiculous. Everyone knows that it was the tyrant Richard III who killed the princes in the Tower so that he could seize his nephew’s throne. Everyone knows that my father came and saved England from this monster. We Tudors are blessed for this; there is no curse.

The battle at Bosworth shows that God favored the Tudors. My mother married Henry Tudor though she was a Plantagenet herself, the red rose enclosed the white and made the Tudor rose, they conceived Arthur, they had me. This is proof, plain simple proof, of a line that is blessed by God, unstained by sin, free from any curse. It should be enough for anyone; it is certainly enough for me who was raised by my lady grandmother to have a horror of any superstition and heresy, who knows, as she knows, that the Tudors are the favorites of God and the chosen royal line of England. It is God who has called me to my great station, for I am His favorite and hers.

It is enough for me to think also of Katherine who is arrogant no more, but a princess begging to be married to our family, and assuring me that there can be no shadow cast over us. I think of her, reduced to poverty and loneliness in the small rooms allocated to hangers-on at court, while I am in the best rooms in the finest palace of my capital city, and I feel very sweet and tender to her. I write a sympathetic reply:

My dear sister, of course I will write to my lady grandmother and to my father too, I shall do what I can for you. Who would have thought that you would have come to England so grandly—I remember I was so entranced by your gold laces!—and now find yourself reduced so low? I pity you with all my heart and I shall pray for your safe return to Spain if matters cannot be settled in England. Your sister, Margaret the Queen.

I have the pyx in my rooms ready for my time, and my confessor and the good canons of Holyrood Abbey praying for me at all hours. I have no fear, despite what my husband says. I think to myself, scornfully, that he is a man who wears a hair shirt, who belts himself with a cilice, who killed his own father, an ordained king; of course he sees curses and doom everywhere. Really, he should go to Jerusalem as soon as possible. How else can he regain God’s favor if not with a crusade? His sins are not ordinary errors that you can wash away with a few Hail Marys from an absent-minded priest. He is not like me, who was born for greatness with God’s blessing.

I am not afraid of this birth and it is an easy one. The baby is a great disappointment as it is a princess but I think I will call her Margaret and ask my lady grandmother to be her godmother and come to her baptism. The baby goes to the wet nurse’s breast quietly enough but she does not suckle well and I see the woman exchange a glance with one of the rockers as if she is uneasy. They don’t say anything to me and I let them wash me and bind my private parts with moss and herbs, and I go to sleep. When I wake up she is dead.

This time my husband speaks to me kindly. He comes into my confinement chamber though no man is supposed to enter—even the priest prayed with me from the other side of a veiled screen. But James comes in quietly, waving the women aside as they flap and scold him, and he holds my hand as I lie in the bed, even though I have not yet been churched and am still unclean. I am not crying; it is strange that he does not remark on my silence. I don’t feel like crying, I feel like going to sleep. I wish I could sleep and never wake up again.

“My poor love,” he says.

“I am sorry.” I can hardly speak, but I owe him the apology. There must be something wrong with me, to have two babies die one after the other. And now Katherine and Mary in England will hear of my loss and I am sure Katherine will think that there is something wrong with me, something wrong with the Tudors, and “Alas, it never happened for any of us.” Mary is too young and stupid to know that to lose a child is the worst thing a queen can do, but Katherine will be quick to compare me to her fertile mother and her symbol of the pomegranate and press her own case to be married to Harry.

“It’s nothing but bad luck,” James says, as if he has never heard of a curse and never spoken of it to me. “But the main thing is that we know we can make children and that you can carry them. That’s the greatest challenge, believe me, sweetheart. The next one will live, I am certain of it.”

“A boy,” I say quietly.

“I will pray,” he says. “I will make a pilgrimage. And you will rest and get well and strong and when we are old and surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren we will pray for the souls of these little ones. We will remember them only in our prayers, we will forget this sorrow. It will all be well, Margaret.”

“You said about a curse . . .” I begin.

He makes a little gesture of dismissal. “I spoke from anger and grief and fear. I was wrong to speak so to you. You are too young and you were raised to think yourself above fault. Life will teach you differently. You don’t need me to humble you. I would be a poor husband if I were to try to hurry you into the wisdom of despair.”

“I am no fool,” I say with dignity.

He bows his head. “That’s good, for I certainly am,” he says.

I think I will write to my sister Mary, since she is now betrothed to the heir of the greatest of the Christian kings, and warn her not to be overproud, for it may be that she marries a great man but cannot give him an heir. Every report from England goes on and on that she is growing more and more beautiful, but that does not mean she will be fertile or able to raise a strong baby. I think she should know that my grief may be hers; she need not be certain that she will get off scot-free. I think I will tell her it may be that the Tudors are not so high and mighty and blessed by God. I think I will tell her that she may not have as great a destiny as everyone confidently predicts, she should not think that she will be spared just because she has always been everyone’s pet, and always the prettiest child.

But then, something stops me. It’s odd that I should have a pen and paper before me and find that I don’t want to caution her. I don’t want to cast a shadow over her. Of course the thought of her dancing around Richmond Palace, queening it at Greenwich, being the center of fashion and beauty and extravagance at a wealthy court, grates on me, but I don’t want to be the one to tell her that our family may not be as blessed as we imagined. We may not always be lucky. There may be some shadow that hangs over our name: we may have to pay for the death of Edward of Warwick; for the hanging of the boy we called Perkin Warbeck, whoever he was. Without doubt, it was us who won the greatest benefit from the disappearance of the two Plantagenet princes from the Tower. We may have done nothing but we gained the most.

So I write instead to my lady grandmother and tell her of my disappointment and sorrow, and I ask her—for perhaps she knows—if there is any reason why God would turn His face from me and not bless me with a son? Why would a Tudor princess not be able to get and keep a boy? I don’t say anything about a curse on the Tudors, or about Katherine in poverty at court—for why would she listen to me?—but I ask her if she knows of any reason that our line should not be strong. I do wonder what she will reply. I wonder if she will tell me the truth.