Three Sisters, Three Queens

HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1511

Katherine goes into confinement in January and they send us the news of the triumphant birth on vellum that has been illustrated with Tudor roses and Spanish pomegranates. The letters are illuminated with gold leaf. They obviously had it drawn up for weeks; they had monks hand-painting the borders for months. They must have been very certain of the blessing of God to have such work done, with such brash confidence, on the chancy outcome of childbed. They bring me the letter as I lie on my bed in the afternoon. I find that I cannot stop crying. I trace the words with my fingertip; their joy seems very far away. I don’t know how they dare.

But their hubris goes unpunished, as God smiles on the Tudors. Katherine has a boy. They call him Henry—of course. I think bitterly that it is as if my brother Arthur never was, as if my brother has forgotten that the name of Arthur was to be given to the firstborn Tudor boy, and the name Henry allocated to the second son. But of course Henry thinks of himself as the first son, and proudly gives his name to his boy. So there is no Arthur Tudor at all. Not my brother, not my son.

Katherine does not write of her triumph directly to me. She leaves me to be informed as if I should be grateful to be treated as any other European monarch, as if her good luck does not make me feel worse about the loss of my little boy. She did not even reply to my letter that told her of my grief. All I receive is this gold-enameled boast.

Our ambassador sends us news of the magnificent tournament and feast that they hold to celebrate the birth of a son for Henry and an heir for his throne. The fountains of London flow with wine, so that everyone can drink the health of the new baby. They roast oxen at Smithfield so everyone can share in the royal joy. At the joust—they hold an enormous joust, of course, which goes on for days—for the first time ever, Henry allows himself to fight all comers. He risks himself as if he is a man at last. With a son and heir in the cradle, he can take challenges. He wins convincingly, beating everyone, as if he and Katherine and their son are untouchable.

“Smile,” my husband commands me as we go in to dinner. “It is ungracious to begrudge another man the birth of his child.”

“I am in grief for my own loss,” I say in a sharp undertone. “You ask me to forget my sorrow; but I wasn’t even thinking about them.”

“You’re deep in envy,” he says. “A different thing altogether. And I won’t have a spiteful, envious wife. I will give you another child, don’t doubt it. Be hopeful for the next birth and smile. Or you can’t come in to dinner at all.”

I give him a cold look but I smile as he commands me, and when he raises a cup to toast the Queen of England and her bonny son, I raise my glass and drink as if I can be happy for her, as if the taste of the best wine is not bitter in my mouth.

But Katherine’s triumph is cruelly brief. In March we get the news from London that her baby Henry, the overcelebrated, overpraised new baby, has died. He was not even two months old.

My husband comes to me as I am on my knees in the chapel at Holyroodhouse praying for his little soul. He kneels beside me and is silent for a moment in prayer. He moves and I hear the little chink of his cilice under his shirt.

“And do you think now that your brother cannot have a healthy child?” he asks me, in a completely ordinary tone, as if it is a matter of interest, as if he might be asking me if my horse is going well.

I shift uneasily on the embroidered hassock. “I don’t know anything about it,” I say, determinedly ignorant.

He pulls me from my knees to sit on the altar steps, as if the house of God is our own and we can sit here and chat as if we were in my bedchamber. He is always shamefully informal, and I would rise up and go away but he has tight hold of both my hands. “You do,” he says. “I know you wrote and asked your grandmother if there was anything to fear.”

“She said nothing,” I say stoutly. “And my mother never said anything about a curse to me.”

“That doesn’t prove that there was none,” he says. “No one would speak of it to you, who must be so hurt by it.”

“Why would it hurt me?” I ask, though I don’t want to hear the answer he is going to give.

“If the curse says that the Tudors cannot get a boy and their line will end with a barren girl, then it is you who will be unable to carry a child,” he says gently, as if he is telling me of a death in the family. I realize that he is. He is telling me of several deaths, and more to come. “Neither you, nor Katherine of Aragon, nor your sister Princess Mary, will get a healthy boy. You will all fall under the curse. None of you will be able to birth a prince, or raise him, and the Tudor crown will go onto the head of a girl and she will die childless too.”

I am gripping his hands as tightly as he is holding mine now. “That is a terrible, terrible thing to say,” I whisper.

His face is gaunt. “I know it. We have to expiate our sins,” he says. “I, for killing my father; you, for your father’s sin against your cousins. I have to go on crusade. I can think of no other way that we might save ourselves.”

I drop my head into my hands. “I don’t understand!”

He pulls my hands from my face so that I have to face him, his anguished mouth, his eyes filled with tears. “You do,” he says. “I know you do.”