Three Sisters, Three Queens

STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SEPTEMBER 1513

I move into my beautiful rooms in Stirling Castle and I send to the families of the great lords to come to crown James. Very many of them fail to reply; more than half of them are dead. In all of the kingdom there are only fifteen lords left alive. We have lost half a generation of men. But they send the sons who were too young to fight, and the old fathers who are mourning their heirs. They come from all the corners of the kingdom to swear loyalty to the new king.

He is not yet two years old, only a baby, but destiny has laid a heavy hand on my son James. He sits in the lap of his governess and she opens his shift of linen under the cloth-of-gold gown, and the bishops anoint his little chest with holy oil. He makes a little noise of surprise and looks towards me: “Mama?” I nod that he is to stay still and not cry. They put his tiny hand on the barrel of the scepter and the little fingers close on it, as if he will hold on to power, and they elevate the crown over his head. His eyes look up wonderingly as the trumpets blast, his lip trembles at the noise and he turns his head away.

“God save the king!” the bishops cry out; but there is no triumphant shout from the congregation of lords in reply.

They should shout in answer, something has gone terribly wrong. I am aghast at the silence behind me—what can it mean? Do they not accept him? Are they refusing to swear allegiance? Have they secretly decided to surrender to the English and stand dumb at the oath for James? Fearfully, I turn to look behind me at the crowded chapel where the lords are ranged in their clans and families in complete silence. Their faces are pale as they raise them to where the bishops have shouted their oath of loyalty. Then, one by one, each man’s lips form the reply, “God save the king!” but they have lost their voices. It is not a loyal shout but a whisper of grief; the lords are hoarse with sorrow. At the back of the church someone sobs and these strong, battle-hardened men drop their heads to rub the tears from their eyes.

“God save the king,” they say quietly, one after another, with voices straining to speak. “God bless him,” they say, and someone adds: “God take him to His own.” So I know they are thinking not of my little son and the terrible burden we are laying on him today, but of James the dead king, my husband, and his body stolen far away.

I write to my brother Harry, who is joyously celebrating his triumphs in France. I dip the nib of my pen in honey and I beg him to recall Thomas Howard to London and not order him to invade deep into Scotland. I say that my son is young and tender and Scotland has been knocked into despair. I beg him to remember that I am his sister, that our father would have wanted him to protect me in this difficult situation and not make it worse for me. I say that I am the symbol of peace between England and Scotland, and that I wish we were at peace now.

I grit my teeth and take a second sheet of paper to write to Katherine, who is Regent of England and the sole author of my disaster. I wish I could write the truth: that I hate her, I blame her for the death of my brother Arthur, I believe she tried to seduce my father, I know that she captured my little brother and has turned him against me. I blame her for the war between England and France, between England and Scotland, and, most of all, for the death of my husband. She is the enemy to my peace, and to my country.

Dearest, dearest Sister . . .

A guard opens the door of my privy chamber and one of my ladies comes in and leans over my chair to whisper in my ear. “There is a man come to see you, one of the late king’s servants. He has come from Berwick.”

Her voice chokes when she has to say “late king.” Nobody can say his name.

I put my lying letter to one side. “Send him in.”

Someone has given the man a plaid to throw over his shoulder for warmth but his padded jacket shows he was one of James’s guard. He kneels before me, his bonnet clutched in one dirty hand. I see that his other hand is strapped to his side, a stained bandage at the shoulder. Someone nearly cut off his arm. He is lucky to be alive.

I wait.

“Your Grace, I have to tell you something.”

I glance at the letter to Katherine:

Dearest, dearest Sister . . .

This is her doing.

“The body they sent to England was not the king,” the man says bluntly, and at once he has my full attention.

“What?”

“I was the king’s groom. I followed the English back to Berwick. I thought I should wash the body and prepare it for the coffin.” He swallows on a dry throat as if he is trying to choke down tears. “He was my lord. It was my last duty.”

“And?”

“They let me see the body but they would not let me wash him. They wanted him dirty and bloody. And there was no coffin. They were rolling the body in lead so they could take it to London.” He pauses. “In the heat,” he explains. “The body in the heat . . . the flies . . . they had to . . .”

“I understand. Go on.”

“I saw the body as they got the lead ready to roll him up. It wasn’t him.”

Wearily, I look at the man. I don’t think he is lying; but equally this cannot be the truth. “Why don’t you think it was him?”

“It didn’t look like him.”

“Wasn’t his head smashed by a billhook?” I ask harshly. “Wasn’t his face cut off?”

“Yes. But it wasn’t that. There was no cilice.”

“What?”

“The body they rolled in lead and shipped to England had no cilice around the waist.”

This is incomprehensible. James would never have taken off the cilice before battle. Surely nobody could be so wicked as to cut it off for a trophy? Can he have escaped from the battle? Can someone have stolen his body from Katherine? My thoughts are whirling but nothing helps me. I look down at my begging letter to the sister-in-law I despise. “What difference does it make to me?” I ask despairingly. “If he was coming home he would be here by now. If he wasn’t dead he would still be fighting. It makes no difference at all.”

We convene a council of the lords that have survived and they recognize me as regent according to the king’s will. I am to rule with their advice. I am to have my son in my keeping. I am to have a council of lords to assist me. Head of them will be the Earl of Angus, whom they call “Bell the Cat” from an old triumph. He stands before me now with his face grooved with grief. Two of his sons rode with my husband at Flodden, and they won’t come home either. I know that he is untrustworthy. He has sided with England and Scotland one after the other through a long life of border warfare, and James once imprisoned him over a woman, the mother of one of the bastards. But he looks at me and his dark eyes are sharp. “You can trust me,” he says.

I can tell by the glances between the lords that they can hardly believe themselves, sitting in unity under the command of an English woman. I can hardly believe it myself. But everything is unexpected, everything is wrong. There is not a man at the table who has not lost a beloved son or brother or father or friend. We have all lost our king, and we still don’t know what can be saved.

We agree to reinforce Stirling. This will be the new center of government, the focus of our defense. We agree to build a new wall at Edinburgh Castle, but we know that if Howard comes with his army in force, the castle will fall. I tell them that I have written to my brother and sister-in-law to beg for peace and they greet this news with unfriendly silence. “We have to make peace with them,” I say. “Whatever we feel.”

I tell them that my brother Henry, King of England, has commanded me to send my baby into his keeping in London to be raised as King of Scotland far from his home. He says I must not let the lords of Scotland lay hands on my little boy and take him off to the Isles where he will be “in danger and hard for the king to attain.” They laugh shortly at that, though there is little real mirth among us all. We agree, without discussion, that James V, the new King of Scotland, will stay in his country and with his mother. Katherine has stolen the body of the father; she is not getting the son as well.

The law of the land has ceased to run. There are too many fatherless sons and they are not being given their inheritance. There are too many widows with no one to protect them. The borderlands are in a constant state of warfare, as the Warden of the Marches, Thomas, Lord Dacre, under Katherine’s orders, rides out every day to burn crops, destroy homes, and keep the debatable lands in a state of constant danger and distress. No man trusts his neighbor. They arm against one another. Without my husband James to hold the kingdom together it is breaking down into lordships and tribal lands, warring against each other.

We pass laws, we issue commands. Soldiers returning from Flodden must be supported, but they must not steal and rape. Orphans must be provided for. But there are not enough lords to enforce the laws and the good men who rode with them are dead.

It is a dark council. But I have one piece of good news for them. “I must inform you, my lords, that I am with child,” I say quietly, my eyes on the table. Of course this should be done by an announcement by herald, from a queen to her royal husband: but nothing is as it should be.

There is an embarrassed murmur of sympathy and congratulation from the lords but old Bell the Cat does not respond as a lord but as a father. He puts his hand over mine, though he should not touch a royal person, and he looks at me with rough sympathy. “God bless you, poor little bairn,” he says shockingly. “And God bless you that James has left us something to remember him by. And are you due in the spring?”

I gasp at his familiarity, and the three ladies seated behind my chair rise to their feet and come forward as if to shield me from rudeness. Someone’s head goes up and someone says a short angry word, but then I see that there are tears in the earl’s eyes and I realize that he is not thinking of me as a queen, or an untouchable English princess, but like one of his own, one of the many Scots widows who will have children in the cradle and babies in the womb and no husband coming home to help them ever again.