Three Sisters, Three Queens

STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1523

Amazingly, despite the odds, I find that I am a single woman, in possession of my own fortune, the only regent left in power, and the guardian of my son. I was ill over Christmas but I grow strong again as the days become lighter and then I get a letter, forwarded by Dacre, from my sister Mary. She writes very briefly from her confinement. God has blessed me and I have had another boy, I am calling him Henry.

I know that this is the name of the son that she lost, I know that Mary will be thinking first, before anything else, of the little boy who died so young. But she gives him the name of the Lancaster kings, she gives him our brother’s own name, our father’s name. I am certain that secretly she hopes he will be King of England, Harry’s heir. She must want Harry to pass over me and my son James, and honor her boy. Charles Brandon will be hoping to get his boy on the throne, of course, and there is no one in London who will advocate for me and my son, not my sister nor my sister-in-law.

Of course Mary will listen to scandal against me, and naturally she repeats it. It is wholly in her interest to suggest that I am no true wife, no true Tudor, no true queen. If Harry can be convinced that I am no true mother either then he will disinherit my son. Mary may urge me to a spotless life, but she knows that the real world is not an easy one for a woman with a wicked husband. I have to live as a woman alone; people are bound to gossip. But will Mary let them gossip so much that they turn against my innocent son?

I wonder what Katherine makes of this hidden jostling for inheritance. I wonder how bitter it is for her, whose fault it is that there is no Tudor prince. I wonder if she ever wavers in her loyal love towards my sister, when Mary’s marriage is blessed and she is fertile, and as soon as one Henry dies he is replaced with another? Mary goes on and on having babies, and Katherine has clearly stopped.

England is at peace with Scotland after Albany leaves, and I thought I could make them keep the peace. But Harry sends the son of the Duke of Norfolk, the murderer of Flodden, to arm the North, and there is no doubt that he plans to ruin the country that marched against him. They will do it Dacre’s way—by making a desert of the borderlands. Every building they tear down, every thatch they fire, every castle they destroy. They leave not a sheaf of wheat in the field, not a stook of hay. Not an animal survives the gleaning, not a child is left standing. The poor grab what goods they have left and rush like a tumbling stream of terror north or south, wherever they think they might find help. The soldiers steal their goods and harry them on their way, the women are abused, the children screaming with terror. It is Dacre’s plan to make a desert of the borders so that no army can ever cross them again, and by the start of the summer he has conquered the very land itself—nothing will grow, nothing will ripen, nothing will yield. When I came to Scotland these were fertile wastes where any man could make a living if he did not mind the empty roads and the tiny villages. Any man could seek a night’s rest at any of a thousand little castles where strangers were a rarity and hospitality a law. Now the land is empty. Only the wolves run through the borders and their howls at night are like a lament for the people who once lived here, who have been wiped out by the malice of England.