Three Sisters, Three Queens

LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1523

My son James and daughter Margaret and I have a summer together as a true royal family at the beautiful palace beside the loch where I have spent so much time—happy times and mourning times. James rides out every day, his master of horse offering him bigger and stronger horses as he grows in confidence and strength. His carver, Henry Stewart, rides with him. He’s a young man in his midtwenties and he has a natural grace and charm that James admires and that I am eager he should copy. Unusually for a Scot, Henry has light brown hair, which curls around his head and tumbles down the nape of his neck, like a statue of a Greek god. He is no pretty boy; he is hard, as all these young men are, from families accustomed to war, but he is always merry. He has the most enchanting smile and his brown eyes dance when he is laughing. Together with the other young men of the court, he teaches James all the games of mounted skill: throwing a lance, shooting an arrow from the saddle, picking up rings on his lance from the ground, and—we all laugh at this—catching a thrown handkerchief on the tip of his lance, as if a lady were offering him her favor.

“Throw for me, Lady Mother!” James demands, and I lean over the tilt yard royal box and drop a handkerchief down for him, and he spurs forward and misses it over and over again until he catches it, and his companions and I applaud.

The Scots lords beg the Duke of Albany to return, but I don’t. In his absence Harry writes to me about a lasting peace treaty between England and Scotland, and peace for the borderlands. He writes a long, thoughtful letter, as if his insults had never been. He writes about the care of his nephew, my son, acknowledging that James is the heir of both England and Scotland. He writes that God has not yet blessed him and the queen with a boy, no one can say why—God’s will cannot be questioned—but it may be that one day James will be called to be king of a united island. Dizzy with ambition, I think that there will never have been a king like James since Arthur of Britain. Cardinal Wolsey writes to me with his customary respect—I can hardly believe that he dines nightly with my estranged husband’s uncle and hears nothing but ill of me. Even Lord Dacre changes his tone, now I am acknowledged once again as a princess of England and Dowager Queen of Scotland—and with Albany back in France, I am the only regent.

There is no reason that my son should not be crowned king next spring, when he will be twelve. Why not? He has been raised to be king, he knows it is his destiny, he has been tutored as a king and guarded faithfully and constantly by Davy Lyndsay and served all his life on bended knee. Nobody meeting him for the first time and seeing him gracious and cautious could doubt for a moment that this is a boy coming into manhood, coming into majesty. Twelve is a good age for a boy to come into his own—old enough for a marriage, so why not old enough for a coronation? What better way to unify the kingdom than the coronation of the king?

Just as I have decided to push this through, against the lords who would rather wait, the Duke of Albany returns without warning, determined on war with England, and Norfolk’s son, the Earl of Surrey—a cruel commander and the son of a cruel commander—destroys the town of Jedburgh and blows up the abbey to show English power over defenseless Scots.

I write to Harry in despair. This is not the way to persuade the Scots lords to accept my son as king! If he wants to command Scotland through James and me he has to give me money to bribe the council, he has to show me as a peacemaker. If he wants to do it by force he had better bring an army to Edinburgh, and impose a rule of law; torturing the poor people of the borders does nothing but make them more furiously opposed to England and the lords more suspicious of me.

Of course, Albany has to respond to the challenge and he brings his fresh troops from France against England with heavy cannon and thousands of mercenaries. This time he brings with him a great army. I am completely torn. Of course I want to further the power and influence of Scotland, of course I am thrilled at the thought of a new border for a new king—if Albany could push the border south and take Carlisle and Newcastle into Scotland then my son would have the great inheritance that his father dreamed for him.

“And the White Rose our ally will invade from the south at the same time,” Albany promises me, confident of my support.

I put a hand on the cool stone of the chimney breast. It steadies me. The great terror of our childhood, as Tudor children, was the coming of the other—the other royal family, our mother’s side of the family—the Plantagenets. Always fertile, always ambitious, my mother’s many sisters and their many children were always on the edge of our kingdom looking for a chance to return. The White Rose—as they call him—is the last of the very many. Richard de la Pole, my mother’s first cousin, has seen one brother after another die in battle against my father or on my father’s scaffold. My father swore an oath that no one from the old royal family would ever take back what the Tudors won at Bosworth, and I have been raised to think of any pretender as a nightmare enemy to our safety and our power.

They were the terrors of my childhood; nothing was as bad as learning that one of our cousins had disappeared from court into open enmity. I can remember even now my mother’s aghast expression when she realized that yet another of her kin had turned against us. Whatever the benefits for my son, I could never join with a Plantagenet cousin against my Tudor brother. Albany cannot have known this when he sought such an ally. I cannot tolerate a Plantagenet. I cannot imagine friendship with this enemy. I could have considered an invasion of England—I would have supported it as an addition to my son’s power and the breadth of his kingdom—I could tolerate an alliance with France; but never, never, never with one of my cursed cousins.

That night I betray the Duke of Albany and—called by my childhood loyalty to the Tudors—I write to my brother:

Albany has German mercenaries and French soldiers but he cannot keep them here in winter. If you can hold him long enough at Wark Castle then the weather will do the work for you. Defend us all against the White Rose. If Richard de la Pole comes to Scotland I will come to you and bring James. We Tudors will stand together against the White Rose forever. Your sister—M.