Three Sisters, Three Queens

LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1519

Not until the leaves are turning to bronze and gold in the woods that surround the loch do I receive a reply from my brother, wrapped and sealed by Lord Dacre, whose messengers have carried it, and whose spies will have read it. I don’t care. At last, here is my safe conduct, this is my escape. I knew that my brother would respond to me and that Thomas Wolsey would find a way to make it right. I have no doubt that this is my invitation to return to London, get my accursed marriage dissolved and—if I know Thomas Wolsey—find a brilliant match. Why should he not? It was just what he was begging me to do three years ago, with my brother promising me that it would be the best choice that I ever made.

I take the letter to the little stone-walled room at the very top of the tower where I will not be disturbed and in my haste to open it I actually tear the heavy seal from the page. I see at once that it is not in Harry’s scrawl. He has dictated to a clerk. I imagine him, seated behind a table, sprawled and smiling, a glass of wine in his hand, Thomas Wolsey dealing out papers for signature like a winning hand of cards, as the groom of the ewery serves him dainties to eat. Charles Brandon, my self-seeking brother-in-law, lounges nearby, other men—Thomas Howard, Thomas Boleyn—stand back against the walls, quick to laugh, swift with a word of advice, as Harry dashes off a quick letter to me, one of the many duties that he has left too long, but which really cannot be delayed longer. It is nothing to him—an invitation to me to come to London. To me it is a release from prison.

At first, I cannot understand the words on the page. I have to read and then reread them, they are so far from what I was expecting. Harry is not encouraging. Instead he chooses to be stern, as pompous as a little chorister. He speaks of the divine ordinance of inseparable matrimony, and he tells me that all disagreement between husband and wife is evil, and a sin. I turn the page to be sure that he has signed this farrago. This from a man whose bastard has broken his wife’s heart!

Then I return to reading. Incredibly, he orders me to return to Archibald in thought and word and deed. We must live together as husband and wife or he will regard me as a sinner bound for hell, never more to be his sister. Archibald, his brother-in-law, has written to him, and Harry has listened to my faithless husband rather than to me. Perhaps this is the worst of all the terrible things that he says: that he has listened to Archibald and not to me. He has taken the man’s word for it, and been deaf to his own sister. Helpfully, he tells me that Archibald will take me back without complaint, that only with Archibald at my side can I hope to regain my authority in Scotland. Only with Archibald at my side will he, the king, or his spymaster Lord Dacre, support me. Ignorant as ever, he explains that Archibald has authority over the lords of Scotland, only he can keep me on the throne. I drop my head in my hands: Dacre will have read this. And all his spies.

Then Harry writes more. As if it were not enough to break my heart, he writes more, turning my shock into rage. He tells me that Katherine agrees. Apparently Katherine’s opinion counts heavily in all of this and she has decided that if I intend to defy God and live as a miserable sinner then I can be no sister of hers. I am not to come to England, I am not to divorce my husband, I am not to be happy. Katherine has decreed this, and so it will be. Katherine will not invite me to England: a divorced woman can never be her guest; her court could not be shamed, an adulteress could not come near her.

For ye are yet carnal—Harry quotes Saint Paul at me, as if I did not know by heart every word that the old woman-hater said—for whereof is there among you envying and strife and divisions, are ye not carnal?

I am so shocked by Harry’s tone, by his intent, by his leap from younger brother to preacher, from king to Pope, that I read the letter through several times in silence and then I go in silence down the steep stone stairs. One of my ladies is sitting in the window seat at the bottom. I wave away her exclamation at my white face and red eyes. “I must pray on this,” I say quietly.

“There is an Observant Friar from London,” she warns me. “Sent by the Queen of England to assist you. He is waiting to see you.”

Again? I can hardly believe it. Once again Katherine has sent me a confessor to advise me, just as she did after the death of James, after her orders killed James. She knows then, she knows that she has sent me a deadly blow and she hopes to soften it. “Who is he?”

“Father Bonaventure.”

“Ask him to wait in the chapel,” I say. “I will come in a moment.”

More than anger at Harry’s refusal to allow me to come to England, more than frustration at his misunderstanding my situation here—and how desperate for me that he does not have the wit to see the danger that I, my son, and the whole country are in!—more than all of this is my despair that Katherine should conspire with him, safe in the haven of complacent matrimony, and agree that what matters most—more than I! more than their own sister!—is the will of God. That they should invoke God and His holy laws against my all-too-mortal troubles, that Katherine should not write to me as a sister to offer her help to a woman just like her, publicly humiliated, crushed by neglect, trying to hold up her head in a world that laughs behind its hand—this is the worst thing about these smug joint letters that send me a friar and not a friend, that counsel me to return to my husband and say that I cannot come to them.

How could a woman not say: yes, come, if you are unhappy and lonely? How could Katherine receive Mary who arrived without warning, married in secret to her lover, and yet reject me? How could she be so kind and warm, so hospitable and loving to me for a year and then say later: return to your husband and endure his treatment? How could she say to me: be neglected as I am, be unhappy! Endure desertion! Don’t hope for better? I have no chance of better, there is no chance for you!

Katherine is my sister, my older sister-in-law. She is married to my brother, she is Queen of England. All these should be reasons for her to be kind and loving and sympathetic to me. She should understand my sense of loss, my hurt, my humiliation. She knows what it is to long for a husband, to wonder what he is doing, what his lover is doing with him. She must have visions—as I have visions, of a young and beautiful woman entwined around my husband’s body, sobbing with pleasure against his naked shoulder. She should help to ease my pain in any way she can. What sort of sister says to her husband, we must teach this young woman to behave according to the Word of God, and not do what is the best for her? How can I think of her as a sister? This would be the work of the wickedest rival and enemy.

I have no hope of any influence in the council without the support of Harry. If he disowns me I am nobody, in Scotland or anywhere else in the world. If he sides with Archibald against me then I am nothing more than a deserted wife, without even my rents to call my own. If I am not an English princess then I am a ghost, like my first husband, with nowhere to live and nothing to live on. I did not dream that Harry—the little boy who would not learn his catechism—would grow so devout, would speak with God, would speak as God.

It is Katherine behind every word of this letter, Katherine behind the quotation from Saint Paul, Katherine demanding reconciliation with my husband, Katherine defining marriage as a heavenly sacrament from which there is no escape. Katherine—whose husband has christened and acknowledged a bastard son—is of course determinedly against divorce, against any divorce.

Fool that I am, I should have thought of this. Katherine is never going to let the thought of divorce get anywhere near Harry’s butterfly concentration. Instead, she sends me an Observant Friar to shout at me and bring me, as one did before, to a true sense of my own misery and the belief that all the wrongs that have come to me have been brought down on me by God, and that I had better accept His will.

In the shadowy darkness of the chapel, as the sun sets over the loch outside and the priest lights candles on the altar, Father Bonaventure reproaches me for forgetting my duty as a wife and mother, for going to England and deserting my son and husband in Scotland. He suggests that it is no surprise that a nobleman like Archibald should live in my house and draw my rents in my absence. He is my husband in the eyes of God; everything that I own is his. Why should he not live at Newark Castle and hunt my game? What can I possibly say against Archibald living in our house? He is my husband, suffering my absence without complaint.

I am so humiliated at the thought of Archibald living with Lady Janet Stewart, her sitting at the foot of my table as his wife, and presenting his baby to my tenants, that I cannot even cite this against him. Kneeling beside the altar in the chapel I rest my face in my hands and I just whisper: “But, Father, my husband has broken his marriage vows, and in public. Everyone knows. He loves me not.”

The stern friar interrupts me: “You deserted him, Your Grace,” he says. “You left him to go to England.”

“He said he would come too!” I gasp.

“But did he not welcome you on your return to Scotland? Did he not meet you as your husband at Berwick? Did you not openly go to the bedchamber as husband and wife? Did he not forgive you for leaving him and take you into his keeping again?”

Katherine has told him this. She has betrayed my confidences, perhaps even reading from my letter, of my bliss in his arms, of our hopes of a new baby.

“He will come here to see you,” Friar Bonaventure says. “He has asked me to request that you receive him. The Queen of England requests that you receive him.”

“She said that herself?”

“Receive him as a husband.”

“Father, he has deserted me. Am I to live with a man who cares nothing for me?”

“God loves you,” he says. “If you treat your husband with the love and respect that is due to him, God will kindle love for you in his heart again. Many marriages have difficult times. But it is God’s will that you live together in harmony.” He hesitates. “It is the king’s will also. And the queen’s sisterly advice.”

I have no choice. Katherine’s sisterly advice will rule my life. I shall live as she wishes, I am to demonstrate to Harry, to the world, that marriage is indissoluble, that it lasts to death. She will have no mercy, she will make no allowances. All Tudor marriages have to last till death. I have become her example.

Father Bonaventure comes and goes, his words falling on the stony ground of my despair. Archibald does not risk a visit. But I am not spared Katherine’s unending supply of spiritual advisors, for Father Bonaventure’s place is taken by another. As reliable as automata, as one little figure goes by—tick-tock—another takes his place and a new Observant Friar arrives at my palace of Linlithgow, wound up and sent on his way, as soon as Katherine hears that I refused to meet Archibald, and Harry hears that I am writing to the French. Katherine is anguished about my immortal soul and determined that no marriage shall ever be escaped, Harry thinks only about his alliance with France. He does not see that if he will not support me, I have to turn again to the absent French regent and try to work with him. Now they send me Friar Henry Chadworth, minister general of the Observant Friars, a domineering, highly educated man, who has rarely spoken with a woman since his mother sent him off to the monastery.

He has no patience with any woman, none at all with me. They have tasked him to break my willful spirit and reduce me into loving communion with God, with my husband, and with my brother’s plans.

“They don’t understand,” I say to Friar Chadworth, with as much patience as I can muster. “Father, it is no good telling me to reconcile with my husband. He does not stay at home with me. He does not care for my interests or the interests of my son. He steals from me. Are you saying that I should let him take my lands?”

“These are his lands. And he is a faithful servant of the king,” Friar Chadworth says.

“He is certainly a well-paid servant of the king,” I say smartly. “Thomas Dacre throws a fortune at him and at all the border lords who cause trouble and infect the whole of Scotland with anger and division.”

Now that I am estranged from Archibald and all the Douglases, a few of the lords of the council trust me with the truth. They show me that Thomas Dacre brings distrust and disunity to Scotland as if he is determined that we should tear ourselves apart and save him the trouble of invading.

“God made you an English princess,” Friar Chadworth says, his voice raised over mine. “Your duty is to God and to England.”

I look at him as mutinously as if I were still a princess in the schoolroom. “I owe a duty to me, myself,” I say. “I want to be happy. I want to see my son grow to be a man. I want to be wife to a good man. I won’t give up on these ambitions for the good of my country or the good of the Church, and I certainly won’t give them up only because my sister-in-law the queen would prefer it. She wants to prove that an unfaithful husband is still married. But I don’t.”

“That is a sin,” he says flatly. “And God and the king will punish it.”

The friar gives me letters from my sisters, Mary and Katherine. Mary says that she has taken a long time to recover from the birth of little Eleanor but her husband has been attentive and the king sent his own physician. She says that she has had a little velvet cape made so that she can sit up in bed and receive well-wishers in her great bed of state. She says how funny it is that the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, whom I might have married, has died, and that his grandson, whom she might have married, is the new emperor. Just think! she writes joyously. You might be dowager empress now, and I your heiress. Empress! Both of us! How very funny! Of course, there is nothing funny about this. It is the very reason that I decided against the Holy Roman Emperor and only came to my senses too late. This is not funny at all. She says that Harry is irritated that he was not offered the royal diadem of emperor and that Katherine seems very low.

It’s not surprising. She is finding the blessing of Bessie Blount with a boy quite mystifying. We all went to Walsingham hoping that God would give a boy to Katherine; but He gave one to Bessie instead—His ways are mysterious indeed.

Then she says that they will all go to France to celebrate a new treaty with the French next year. She says that she can hardly wait to visit France again and that it is to be a great event. Charles is to have new jousting armor, she is to have a dozen new gowns.

They call me “la reine blanche” and say that there has never been a more beautiful Queen of France. It is so silly, but so dear of them. It is lovely to be beloved in two countries, a princess in one, a queen of another, and applauded in both!

That’s all she writes. That is all my little sister writes to me when she knows that her letter will be carried by a friar who is coming to me to urge me to act against my own interests and serve those of my country, to return me to a marriage with a man who has betrayed me; when she knows that I am alone in a difficult country, trying to see my son, trying to escape from a marriage that has become an insult to me. All she writes about are the thirty new gowns and the adorable little crown that Harry is commissioning especially for her. She remembers, almost too late to find any space on the page, that the French ladies are wearing their capes very short and their hoods pushed back on their heads. Nobody, she tells me, underlining it three times, Nobody is wearing a gable hood any more at all.

I put her letter down. She feels very far away. I am so far from her thoughts she does not even recall me while she is writing. If Harry goes to France and renews his treaty with King Francis, and persuades him never to send the Duke of Albany back to Scotland as regent, then the lords and I will struggle on, not really at peace, on the edge of rebellion for another year. I don’t even know if we can manage another month. I don’t know if Mary knows this, or if she is just not interested. Clearly, she does not think much about my worries. I doubt she thinks of me at all, other than as someone who might be interested in how to wear a French hood.

I open the letter from Katherine. Unlike Mary’s scrawl, it is very short. She says that she sent me Friar Chadworth to tell me the will of God. She says that to even think of leaving a husband is to condemn my soul to eternal damnation. She says that she will do anything in her power to help me if I will step back from this terrible plan. She says that she and Harry were appalled to hear that I have written to the Duke of Albany for his help. She says I have held up my shame to the world, that I have no cause for divorce and no cause to even speak of such a sin. She says that she cannot bear that I should rush to hell like this. That it would be better for my son James if I had died with his father than for him to know that he has a whore for a mother.

Can she really think that I would be better dead than shamed?

I read her letter in silence and I step to the fireplace where a little fire keeps the evening chill away, and I put the letter on the flames. It flares up, the red seal twists and writhes in the heat, the ribbon makes a little popping noise, and then it is just a blanket of ash over the logs.

Can my own sister really think that I would be better dead than shamed?

Surely she can never have loved me at all if she thinks only of the Word of God and not of the words she says to me. She can never have cared for me as a true sister if she thinks of the sin of divorce and not of the sinner—me—a woman alone and unhappy. Does she not understand that I am heartbroken at the loss of my husband, publicly humiliated, fearful of sin and far from the grace of God?

I think of her watching Mary trying on crowns, the most beautiful young woman in two kingdoms, who effortlessly, constantly, casts Katherine into a shadow. I think of her knowing that Bessie’s baby boy is named Henry Fitzroy, so that everyone knows the king has acknowledged him as his own. I think of how a proud woman like Katherine must feel when she is second at her own court, with no son in her belly nor in her cradle, and less and less chance with every year that goes by. And then I think—well, she need not take it out on me.

Friar Chadworth watches in silence as the letters burn. “Well?” he asks. “Do they persuade you to repent your sins?”

“No,” I say. “They say nothing to comfort me, and they give me no reason to think that they will help me.”

“They will not,” he confirms. “There will be no help for you unless you reconcile with your husband. You have no choice. I am here to tell you that you have no choice. Without your husband at your side you will get no support from England. Without support from England you will never command your council. Without your council you cannot rule your kingdom and you will never see your son again. He will be raised without a mother or a father. He will be an orphan.”

There is a long silence. I wonder that he can be so cruel.

I bow my head. “Very well,” is all I say. “You win.”

I cannot bear to meet with Archibald in public. I am mortified, as if it is I who has stolen and lived as an adulterous thief. I know that my ladies will think the less of me for taking him back, my son will hear of it and think that I have no pride, that I am a beaten dog. Everyone who saw us at Berwick when I was a lovesick fool will think that I am drunk on desire again. So I say that he must come to the top of the tower, where I have my little eyrie, the tiny stone-built room where—such a long time ago—James my husband said good-bye to me, and told me not to watch for him. My lady sends Archibald up the winding stairs, I can hear his boots ring on the stone, and she closes the door at the bottom, so that no one can hear what we say to each other. She will think that she is concealing a tryst, she will think that the door will silence the noise of lovemaking.

I am so angry and so distressed that I am shaking by the time he walks around to the little doorway of the tower and ducks his head to come under the stone lintel. He kneels at my feet, drops down like a penitent pilgrim without a word. He takes my hands, he feels me tremble and exclaims at the coldness of my fingers.

“Beloved,” he says.

“You have no right!” I say, choked.

Vehemently, he shakes his head. “No right at all.”

“You have stolen my rents!”

“God forgive me. But I have kept your lands in good heart, and protected your tenants and your good name as a landlord.”

“You put another woman in my place!”

“My love, my love, no woman could take your place. Forgive me.”

“I never will.”

He bows his head. “You should not. I have been like a madman. You are good, you are kinder than I deserve, just to let me come to you, and beg your pardon. I would not want to die with this on my conscience. My will and my happiness have been destroyed by our troubles, both public and private. I have seen terrible things in your service, I have had to contemplate terrible crimes to bring you to your rightful place. In defending your throne I have sinned against God. It’s not surprising that my will broke, my determination failed me.”

He glances up at me. “I couldn’t go on. I didn’t have the strength to continue,” he says. “For a mad month or two I thought I might escape. I thought for a moment that I could be a private man, a man with a wife and little daughter in a little house. When de la Bastie died and you failed to seize power and blamed me, I just wanted to run away. I felt that I had failed you so badly—I had done so much and still failed. My love, my wife, I was wrong to go. I am called to greater things, I am called to be your husband. Forgive me for failing you this once. I will never fail you again.”

“You wanted to be free of all these troubles?”

He bows his head. “It is the only time my courage has failed me. In all these five years. I could see no way to bring you to victory. It was my mistake. I thought if I could not restore your son to you, and you to your place, then I had better do nothing, go right away. I even thought that I should kill myself, that it would be better for you if I were dead.”

He feels at once the quick clutch of my hands and he raises his eyes and smiles at me. It is as if he has touched me—that smile, that sweet boyish smile, is like a caress, a deep secret pulse. He knows this. He knows I cannot bear the thought of his death. His voice is warm, confiding.

“Can you understand, you who are so brave, that I wanted to be less? Can you imagine that I might want a smaller life, an ordinary woman, a nobody in a little world? That for a moment, for just a moment, I could not be the man that I am with you, the wife of my passion?”

“You went to her from me,” I whisper. Even now, it pains me to think that he would prefer another woman.

“Oh, Margaret, have you never wished you could run away from all this and go to England? Return to your girlhood?”

“Oh yes. Yes, of course.” I don’t tell him that I begged to go back and that they rejected me.

“That’s what it was for me. I had a dream that I might live with the girl that I once promised to marry, in a little castle like we might have had. I thought that I should retreat from the council of lords, go far from you and the court. I felt that you didn’t need me, that you would do better without me, that you might work with James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran; you might write to the Duke of Albany. I thought you would be free to speak with these great men as the great woman that you are without me holding you back, and embarrassing you. I know I am an obstacle to your regaining your son. I thought you would be better off without me. The council hates and fears me—I wanted them to be able to see you without me. I thought that the last thing, the finest and most loving thing, I could do for you would be to free you from me. I thought I should give you the excuse to deny our marriage, if you wanted to be rid of me. I thought that the best and kindest thing I could do for you would be to let you go.”

“I can’t be free of you,” I say flatly. “They won’t allow it. Katherine won’t allow it.”

“Neither can I,” he says. “Not in the eyes of God, nor in my love for you. So here I am, at your feet. I am yours till death. We have been parted—not for the first time—and I have come back to you. Take me back. Take me back, beloved, or I am a dead man.”

“I have to take you back,” I say. “My sisters insist. Harry insists.”

He bows his head and he gives a little choked sob. “Thank God.”

“You can get up,” I say uncertainly. I don’t know whether to believe him or not.

He does not get to his feet and stand before me as a supplicant. He rises up to his full height and he keeps hold of my hands and draws me up as well so that I am close to him, and the whole length of his body is against mine, and his arm is around my waist and his hand is under my chin and he is lifting my face to his and he kisses me. At once I feel desire rush through me like a new wave on an incoming tide, a mixture of relief and triumph and jealousy. I had forgotten the joy of it, the taste of him, the scent of him, and now I know it again. And I think that I have taken him from Janet Stewart; I have taken him from her for the second time. I am first with him, as I should be.

“You cannot be free of me,” he says, his mouth on mine. “You will never be free of me. We will never be free of each other.”