Three Sisters, Three Queens

HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1525

Nobody can know that Henry Stewart is in love with me. Oh, Davy Lyndsay knows, for he knows everything. My ladies-in-waiting know for they see how he looks at me—he is twenty-eight, he does not know how to hide desire. James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, knows, for he saw me gripped in Henry’s arms in the castle keep; but nobody who might tell England knows that I have a good man to love me and I am not alone against the world any more.

I revel in his attention, it is like salve on a burn. To be loved by a man like Archibald Douglas is to be scorched, to be rejected is to be scarred. I want to heal and forget that I ever knew him. I want to rest in the adoration of Henry Stewart. I want to sleep beside him in the cool Scots nights and never dream of Archibald again.

With Henry I can be peaceful, which is just as well for I have many enemies and no allies. Archibald withdraws to Tantallon Castle and sends a stream of complaints about me to my brother Harry. He says that he has tried to reconcile with me but I am madly dangerous. He says that Harry’s own ambassadors will confirm that I turned the guns on him. Harry and his mouthpiece Cardinal Wolsey urge Archibald to try, and try again. They want the Douglas clan to keep the French out. They say that he must command me, that he may force me to reconcile. Ugly advice, violent words.

They won’t listen to me, they won’t support me. I hear nothing from them for the whole of the Christmas season and then I get a few pretty gifts and a note from my sister Mary. She speaks of one of the best Christmases ever . . . the clothes and the dancing and the masques and the gifts . . . at the very end she tells me why the court headed by an aging queen is making so very merry.

Mary Carey has a rival in her sister, Anne Boleyn—really! these Boleyn girls! She was my little maid-in-waiting in France, and she is very charming, very witty, very clever. I would never have been so kind to her if I had known what she would do with my lessons. I am sorry to say that she and her sister are turning the whole court wild with an unstoppable round of entertainments. Harry is quite dizzy between the two of them. He is cold to our sister Katherine, who cannot please him whatever she does, and distant to me. The Boleyn girls have been queens of the court this Christmas and they devise all the entertainments and games and Anne Boleyn wins them all. She makes her sister, who was so beloved, seem dull beside her, she makes me seem plain, think how she compares to poor Katherine! She is dazzling. God knows where this will end, but this is no pretty little whore; she is hungry for more.

Nothing about me. It is as if I never commanded Holyrood and turned the cannon up the Via Regis and defied my own husband, stared him down and defeated him. Nobody knows that I have left him, I am not a deserted wife, I am mistress of my own destiny. I am the very center of talk for the whole world but for London, where Harry has a new fancy and is making his queen unhappy. That is all that matters to London. It is against this, no doubt, that Archibald struggles to be heard. This is why I am forgotten. I may be fighting for my son’s rights, plotting to keep him safe, desperate for help from England, planning for Scotland, but all that they think about in London is Anne Boleyn’s promising dark eyes and Harry’s doting smile. Thank God that as I receive this letter I can rest my head on Henry Stewart’s shoulder and know that someone loves me. In London they may have all but forgotten me, but now I have someone who loves me for myself.

But there is no escape from Archibald. The English ambassador insists that Clan Douglas be admitted to Edinburgh and the lords who are in English pay must be admitted to the council. In turn they promise to support me as regent, and we all agree that there shall be peace with England and a betrothal between James and his cousin Princess Mary.

“You will bring peace and an alliance with England,” Archdeacon Magnus promises me. “You will serve both your countries. They will both be grateful to you.”

I am in a terror of being near to Archibald again. I feel as if he can cast a spell on me and I will be helpless before him. I know that I am being foolish, but I feel the helpless horror of a mouse in the yard which will freeze to watch a snake coming closer and closer, knowing that death is coming, incapable of running away.

“I don’t really want to walk with Archibald in procession,” I say feebly to Henry Stewart and James Hamilton, Earl of Arran. But how can I tell these two men that I am shaking at the thought of Archibald coming near me?

“He should be ashamed even to come near you,” Henry says hotly. “Why can’t we insist he stays away?”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Hamilton asks.

I shake my head to clear the vivid picture of Ard, so tall on his black horse, and the sulfurous smoke all around him. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“There has to be a procession,” James Hamilton says. “You don’t have to go handclasped; but you will have to walk in procession. The world has to see that you will work together with the council.”

Henry spits out an oath and goes from the fireside in my privy chamber to stand at the window and look out at the swirling snow. “How can they ask it of you?” he demands. “How can your brother ask it of his innocent sister?”

“They do ask it,” James Hamilton says to me, looking worried. “You have to show that all the lords are united in the council, that the council is as one. The people have to see the council all together. But it’s as bad for him: he has to kneel to you and give you an oath of fealty.”

“You should spit in his face!” Henry swears. He turns to me in sudden despair. “You don’t mean to do it? You’re not going back to him?”

“No! Never! And he can’t kiss me,” I say in sudden panic. “He can’t take my hands.”

“He has to swear fealty,” Hamilton repeats patiently. “He can’t hurt you. We’ll all be beside you. He will kneel to you and put his hands together, you will take his hands in yours. Then he will bow and kiss your hand. That’s all.”

“All!” Henry explodes. “Everyone will think that they are husband and wife once more.”

“They won’t,” I say, finding my courage at his despair. “It means his fealty to me. It means I have won. Thirty paces—we have to take little more than thirty paces. Don’t think that it means anything, don’t think that I don’t love you, don’t think that I take him as my husband again for I swear that I do not. I never will. But I have to walk beside him, and I have to hold his hand, and we have to be dowager queen and the Earl of Angus, her husband, to lead all the lords into the council.”

“I can’t bear it!” He is wild, like an angry child.

“Bear it for me,” I say steadily. “For I have to bear it for my son James.”

At once his gaze softens. “For James,” he says.

“I have to do this for him.”

“It’s only a public oath of fealty,” James Hamilton reminds us both.

I hold myself still so I don’t shiver.

I walk beside my son James dressed in cloth of gold, both of us wearing our crowns as we enter the Tollbooth at Edinburgh. Archibald leads the procession carrying the crown, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, follows him carrying the scepter, and the Earl of Argyll comes behind him with James’s ceremonial sword. Behind the three of them come James and I, walking side by side, with the cloth of estate carried over our heads. It is bitingly cold—we can see our breath in the air as we walk along—and little snowflakes swirl around us. I am paying a high price for peace between England and Scotland, a high price for the safety of my son. At dinner tonight in Holyroodhouse I will have to share a loving cup with my husband and send him the choicest dishes. He will smile and take the best cuts of meat just as he is legally collecting the rents from my lands once again. I will not look across the room at Henry Stewart where he sits, white-faced, among James’s household, eating nothing.

It is this evening that the English ambassador Archdeacon Thomas Magnus gives me a letter from Katherine herself.

“She sent it to you? Why not directly to me?”

“She wanted me to give it to you on this day, the day that you and your husband led the council.”

“Oh, did the earl dictate it? Just as he decided the procession?” I ask bitterly.

The archdeacon holds it up to show me. “Her Grace wrote it,” he says. “See, here is her seal unbroken. I don’t know what she writes to you, nor does anyone else. But she said you should have it when the Earl of Angus joined the council and swore loyalty to your son.”

“She knew it would happen?”

“She prayed for it as God’s will on earth.”

I take it from him, and he bows and goes from the room so I can read it alone.

My dear Sister,

Harry has told me that he has commanded your husband, the earl, to support you and your son in the council of lords and that he is satisfied that the earl will honor his duty to you and his vows as your husband. I am so glad and so thankful that your troubles are at an end, your husband returned to you, your son accepted as king, and you in power as regent. Your courage has been rewarded, and I thank God for it.

Knowing you as I do, I have begged Harry to urge your husband to be generous to you and patient, and he has promised me that you need not return to Archibald and live as man and wife until Whitsuntide so that you have time to become accustomed to him again and perhaps so that you have time to grow in love for him who has been so true—in exile and in England—to you. I have watched him and he has convinced me that he is your true and loving husband. You have no reason not to return to him.

I have sworn to Harry on my own honor that the rumors we have heard about you are false. I have pledged my word that you are a good woman and that you would not make your own child a bastard nor make a mockery of your royal name by seeking a divorce, especially from a husband who is seeking your forgiveness.

To be a good wife is to forgive. A queen like you, like me, and like our sister Mary, is especially obliged to show the world that there is no end to marriage, no end to our forgiveness.

So I have agreed with Harry that you will take Archibald back as your husband at Whitsun, and I hope that you will be happy again. As I hope to be too, some day soon.

Your sister the queen,

Katherine

I am not even angry with her for delivering me into the arms of an unfaithful traitor who brought his army against me. I think this is her master stroke.

Archibald is to live at Holyrood with our daughter, my son, and me, and we are to show the world that we are a family reconciled. We are to prove to Harry that there can be no divorce, that a husband always returns to his wife, that marriage is truly till death. To the common people, coming in to see us dine seated side by side, overlooking the magnificent hall, we look like a lord and his wife and his son. The cloth of estate extends over James and me, our chairs are set a little higher than Archibald’s, but it is he who sends the dishes around the hall and walks around and chats to his friends, and commands the music like a great man at his own table.

The kitchens send out feasts with many dishes, as if they revel in cooking for the lord himself again. The musicians play dance tunes, and Archibald teaches everyone the new steps from London, which Anne Boleyn has made fashionable. The players perform the new masques—choosing one of the court and drawing them out to dance and play their part in the drama. Often they select Archibald, and he dances at the center of a swirling circle, his dark eyes smiling at me, a shrug of his shoulders as if to say that he does not seek this praise, it just comes to him. He is the constant center of attention.

He is pleasant to James—not overwhelming him with attention which would make my cautious twelve-year-old son suspicious, but speaking to him of hair’s-breadth escapes, battles, strategies, the wars of Christendom, the plans of the King of England, and the constant adjustment and power plays of the courts of Europe. He has not wasted his time in France, nor in England. He knows all that is happening, and he tells James little stories to teach him statecraft, and claps him on the shoulder and praises his understanding. He takes him into the library, spreads out the maps on the great round table and shows him how the Habsburg family have grown great and greater, and that their lands are spreading across the face of Europe. “This is why we have to have an alliance with England and with France,” he says. “The Habsburgs are a monster that will gobble us up.”

He is loving and easy with Margaret, and she adores him as a father miraculously restored to her. He praises her prettiness and he takes her with him everywhere, buying her ribbons for her hair every time they pass a market. To me he is as charming and as graceful as when he was my carver and could not do enough for me. He throws me a warm smile over James’s head as if to praise me for raising such a boy, he laughs when I make a remark, his arm is always ready to escort me into court. When the court dances, the musicians play, the cards are set out, everything is entirely according to my wish. He knows me so well, he guesses what I want before I have time to command it. He asks after the old pain in my hip, he reminds me of our breakneck ride to safety; our history is a love story that he retells from time to time in little reminiscences, always asking me do I remember the time . . . ? Do I recall the night . . . ? Day by day he draws me to him with a gentle weave of shared interests and shared memories.

Often he turns to James and praises my courage and tells my boy that he is lucky to have a mother who is such a heroine. He tells Margaret about the dozens of gowns that my kingly brother sent me as a reward for my bravery. Always, he suggests that he himself was fighting for my cause, for James’s safety. It is as if he sings a ballad of the story that we know, but it is set to a strange new tune.

Behind Archibald’s cocked attentive head, I see Henry Stewart glowering but powerless. There is nothing I can do to prove to him that I am not soothed and comforted by this new gentle Archibald, for he can see—everyone can see—that I am. I have had so little affection in my life that I am hungry for attention, even from a man who has been my enemy.

I am in love with Henry Stewart, my heart leaps when he comes into court and bows to me, his tawny hair shining in the light of the candles, his hazel gaze direct and honest; but when Archibald stands behind my chair, his hand resting on my shoulder, I know that I am safe: the only man in Scotland who could challenge my power is on my side, my brother’s friend and ally stands beside me, the husband that I married for love, who betrayed me so painfully, has come home.

“This is our happy ending,” he bends over me and whispers, and I cannot find the courage to contradict him.

Henry Stewart comes to my privy chamber in the hour before dinner while everyone is getting dressed. My lady comes and tells me that he is waiting, and I send them away and go out to him, dressed like a queen in green velvet with silver sleeves. He bows and waits for me to sit, but I go towards him, and I look up into his sulky face and I feel a pulse of such desire that I cannot stop myself putting a hand on his chest and whispering: “Henry?”

“I have come to ask permission to leave court,” he says stiffly.

“No!”

“You must see that I can hardly live under the same roof as you and your husband.”

“I can’t bear for you to go. You can’t leave me here with him!”

He clasps my hand to his beautifully embroidered jacket. “I don’t want to go,” he says. “You know that I don’t. But I cannot live in his house as if I were his man.”

“It’s my house! Your loyalty is to me!”

“If he is your husband then everything is his,” he says miserably. “Me as well. I feel ashamed.”

“You’re ashamed of me?”

“No, never. I know you have to share power with him, I know you have to have him here. I understand. It is the agreement with the English, I understand this. But I cannot do it.”

“My love, my darling, you know that my divorce will come and I will be free of him!”

“When?”

I check at his gloomy tone. “Any day now, any day it might come.”

“Or it might never come. In the meantime I cannot wait for you in your husband’s house.”

“Don’t go back to Avondale.” I tighten my grip on his jacket. “If you can’t stay here, don’t go back there.”

“Where else?”

“Go to Stirling,” I say rapidly. “It’s mine—nobody can deny that—go to Stirling and muster the castle guard. Check the reinforcements and make it a safe refuge for us, if it ever goes wrong here.”

I am making work for him, giving him a task that will make him feel important. “Please,” I say. “Though you can’t protect me here, you can give me somewhere safe to go, if we ever need it. Who knows what the Douglas clan will do?”

“They will do whatever the English command,” he says drily. “And you will too.”

“I will for now,” I agree. “I have to, for now. But you know that I am working for my freedom and for the freedom of my son to be a true king of a free country.”

“But still you keep Douglas and his clan on your side,” he says astutely.

I hesitate before telling him the truth. My feelings are so contradictory I can hardly explain them to myself. “I am afraid of him,” I admit. “I know he is ruthless, I don’t know how far he will go. And because of that, when he is on my side I know that I am safe.” I give an unhappy laugh. “I have no enemy outside the castle when he is inside. When he is good to me I know that nothing can hurt me.”

“Don’t you see that you must get free of him?” he demands with the impatient clarity of youth. “You are living with him for fear.”

“My sisters insist,” I say. “My brother insists. I am doing it for James.”

“You will not become his wife in deed as well as in name?”

He is a young man, he cannot tell when I am lying. “Never,” I tell him, thinking that Katherine has promised just that, at Whitsun. “Don’t ever think it.”

“You don’t love him?”

He does not yet know how a woman can love and fear and hate all at the same time. “No,” I say carefully. “It is not love like that.”

He softens, as he bends his head and kisses my clinging hands. “Very well,” he says. “I will go to Stirling and wait for you to send for me. You know that I only want to serve you.”

I endure the spring without my young lover, though I miss his sulky presence and jealous looks from the back of the hall. Every day I grow more anxious as Archibald’s ambition becomes clearer, as he increases his influence on the council of lords, and his determination to rule Scotland becomes more obvious. His connection with England is so strong, his fortune (my fortune) is so great, his authority as a man dominates them all. He remains tender and attentive and easy with me but I am dreading Easter and then Whitsun when he will return to my bed and I can see no way to refuse him. What makes it worse is that he speaks of it as an agreement that we have both entered freely, as if we wanted to wait for the season of summer to mark our reconciliation, as if we hope for another child like a pair of pretty blackbirds nesting in an apple tree. Katherine’s plan—to give me time to become accustomed to him—has become a courtship leading, inexorably, back to our marriage.

He’s too clever to say any of this openly, but he orders new hangings for my bed and new linen, and tells the sempstress that it must be ready for Whitsun. He speaks confidently of the summer and says that we will go to Linlithgow, and farther north, that we must take James around his country on a royal tour, as his father used to do. He says that he will teach Margaret to ride astride, like a boy, so that she can enjoy hunting and riding out. There is never any doubt in his voice that we will be together, man and wife, this summer and every summer thereafter.

Confidently, he applies to Cardinal Wolsey for the full use of my lands: all my rents and all my fees and all the produce will go to him as my acknowledged husband. I can get no news of the woman that he once called his wife, Janet Stewart of Traquair. I don’t know if she is living at Tantallon Castle in state as its lady or in one of my properties, and no one dares to tell me. I don’t even know if she is discarded and he has abandoned her and she is somewhere, perhaps Traquair House on a knife edge of hope that he might come back to her and fear that he will. He never mentions her, and a terrible awkwardness stops my tongue too. I have lost the courage to challenge him.

By singing the song of our happiness, of our marriage against the odds, of our struggle to be together, he has painted a new picture. I can see how he must have done this so well in London, as he does it here too, in Edinburgh. He convinces my son, almost he convinces me that he and I were deeply in love, separated by accident, true through so many difficulties, and are now restored to each other. I cannot cling on to my own sense of myself. I start to think that he is right, that he loves me, that he is my only safety. His view of the world, his opinion of me, his account of our lives together, slowly overwhelms me.

One day, he even dares to say: “The smoke of the cannons cleared and I saw you behind the guns, and I thought then—my God, that is the only woman I have ever wanted. It’s always been a great passion with us, Margaret, hatred and love all at once.”

“I gave them the order to prepare to fire. I knew it was you,” I tell him.

He smiles, his confidence is quite unshaken. “I know you did, and you saw me look at you, and you knew what I was thinking.”

I remember his silhouette on his horse, as he stood at the height of the Via Regis as if he were daring me to fire on him again.

“No, I didn’t know what you were thinking,” I say stubbornly. “All I wanted was for you to go away.”

“Oh, I’ll never do that.”

He represents my brother, the great king, he has the God-given certainty of my sister-in-law, the Queen of England, he is endorsed by the power of man and of God. He has me in his thrall. I am not in love—God save me from such grief—but he dominates the court and he masters James and he lords it over me and I feel as if there is nothing that I can say or do to claim my freedom. He tells me what I think as if my own mind is subject to him. I can only wait for news from Rome that my divorce has been approved, and only then will I be able to say to him that I am free and that he is a lord of the council and nothing more to me. On that day I will be able to tell him that he is not my husband, he is not stepfather to the king. He is father to my daughter but he does not command me. He may be an ally of the King of England but he is no longer his kinsman. Every night I kneel before my crucifix and pray that the Holy Father’s clerks will write at once and free me from this strange half life where I live with a husband that I dare not defy, and long for a man that I may not even see.

It is unbearable. I have to get away this summer. I cannot ride with Archibald every day and watch him dance every night. I cannot kneel beside him in the chapel and take the Mass beside him, as if we were sharing a loving cup. I know that soon, sometime after Easter, he will come to my bedroom and my ladies will open the door and let him in, curtsey, and leave us alone together. I am so ruled by him and dominated by him and overpowered by him that I know I will not resist. Legally, I know that I cannot resist. Increasingly, I fear that I will have forgotten how to resist: I will not resist.

I must break the engagement that my brother has made for me, break the spell that Katherine has woven. The two of them decided, for their own private reasons, that Archibald and I should honor our marriage vows and reconcile. My marriage with Archibald allows Harry’s passion for Mary Boleyn, for I demonstrate that no betrayal can destroy a marriage. I am to prove this. The two of them—Katherine and Harry—have worked upon the two of us to come to agreement. Harry pays for James’s guard, buys the council of the lords, supports Archibald, on the condition that Archibald represents the interests of England and is true to his marriage to me, the English princess. Harry writes to me, Katherine writes to me, even my sister Mary writes to me, and they all say that my future and the future of my country and of my boy rest in the hands of my good husband. He will be true to me, I must take him back. We will be happy.

Secretly, disguising my hand and sending the letter by the back ways to the port and from there on a French merchant ship to France, I write to the absent Duke of Albany. I say that I will do anything—anything—to obtain my divorce from the Pope. I say that I know he can prevail upon the Vatican for me. I say that I will deliver the council of lords into his keeping, that I will hand over Scotland to the French, if he will only free me of Archibald and this terrible dreamy half life that is drowning me, even as I write for help.