Three Sisters, Three Queens

HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1526

At last I am able to return to Edinburgh and see my son. For more than a year he has been in Archibald’s keeping and I have been able to do nothing but write to him and send him little gifts, and beg him to remember that his mother loves him and would be with him if she could. I can’t forget the coldness in his voice, the irritation in his face. He blames me for our defeat—and he is right. I blame myself.

Amazingly, it is Harry, my brother, who makes my return to court possible. Harry orders Archibald to give me my rents and my fees and not keep them for himself. Harry says that I must be allowed to see my son. Harry tells Archibald that I should have a divorce if it can indeed be proved that the marriage was invalid from the very beginning. Harry has changed his mind completely: he is turn and turn about. He has forgiven me, he wants me to be happy.

I am amazed. I cannot understand this change of heart that has brought me such opportunity. I am so encouraged and so hopeful that I write to him and to Katherine and thank them for their kindness to me, and promise them my gratitude, and my loyalty to the country of my birth. For some reason, the royal favor has returned to me, and I am restored to the family. I don’t know why I am suddenly beloved again, but I am as grateful as a beaten puppy that squirms to lick the hand that held the whip. Harry has all the power, and, suddenly, he bestows his blessing on me.

It is Mary who explains:

You will have heard that the Boleyn girl Mary Carey has given birth to a boy. The king our brother is pleased, as any man is pleased, to have a healthy son to show to the world. His second healthy bastard boy. They are calling him Henry but he will take the husband’s surname of Carey. This spares the queen the humiliation of another bastard named Fitzroy, but that is all that she is spared. Everyone knows that the boy is of the king’s fathering and so everyone knows that it must be the queen’s fault that they only have one child, and that one a frail girl. Katherine is fasting more than ever, she hardly ever eats at dinner, and her hair shirt has scraped her skin raw on her shoulders and her hips. I really think that she will mortify her flesh to death and then Harry will be free. You would be heartbroken to see her, you who love her so well. I, her other sister, can do nothing but watch as she tortures herself. It is unbearable.

The Boleyn girl Mary seems to have lost the attention of our brother who is now publicly at the feet of her sister Anne Boleyn. She queens it around the court as if she were royal born. You would not believe how this girl from next to nowhere behaves at a royal court, at our court. Not even you and I, as princesses of the blood, were ever allowed these freedoms. She takes precedence wherever she can and also where she should not, and Harry leads her in to dinner and out to dance as if she were queen. It is quite extraordinary, she walks before duchesses as if she had a right. Katherine smiles with almost saintly dignity but anyone can see that she is near to despair. I am called upon to admire and accompany the Boleyn girl and I often say that I am unwell or too tired or that I have to go home. I pretend to be sick so that I do not appear to be in her service. Truly, this is how she makes it appear. She decides to do something, and she looks at Harry, and the next moment we are all running to her bidding. It is like a terrible masque of a court, like players trying to enact royalty. There is no grace or laughter or beauty here at all any more, there is just posturing and bitter laughter, the terrible cynicism of the young and the queen’s loneliness.

What makes it worse is that I still don’t think that she is his lover. She acts the part of a frantic tormentor who will not leave him alone and yet will not submit to him. She’s always touching him and touching her lips, caressing him and putting her hands on her own narrow waist, but she does not let him touch her. She seems to love him to damnation but she will not sin. And if she will not be his mistress—what is going to happen? Charles says that if Harry would just swive her it would all be over in a sennight, but Charles always does say things like that, and Mademoiselle Boleyn is not a girl to be simply taken for love.

You remember when we were children and Sir Thomas More brought Erasmus to visit and Harry couldn’t think of anything else until he had composed a poem, and read it aloud to the great philosopher? He’s like that now. He wants her to see him as exceptional. Or when he first saw our sister Katherine? He’s like that again. He can’t seem to be himself unless she is admiring him. He has ordered new jackets, he is writing poetry, he is striving for eminence like a boy in the grip of calf love. Katherine is fasting and praying for his soul. So am I.

So now I know why Harry is so tolerant of me. Now I know why Katherine’s rules no longer apply to us all. I taste triumph on my tongue, I dance a jig to the song in my head. At last Katherine’s power over Harry is waning. He has a boy that she could not give him and he is thinking of that boy as his heir. Now another woman has given him a second boy and it is blindingly obvious that it is Katherine’s fault that Harry has no legitimate son and heir to inherit our newly won Tudor crown. For years, Katherine’s disappointment and sorrow have been Harry’s disappointment and sorrow, her refusal to question the ways of God has been a model for him, her cleaving to the laws of unending marriage has been her only answer to their disappointment. But it is not his way any longer. Now he can see for himself that God does not intend him to die without a son and heir. Now he has a second boy in the cradle—as if God is saying to the world: Harry can get a boy, Harry shall have sons—it was Katherine all along who could not bear and birth one. This is not a sorrow from God mortifying the golden couple who seemed to have everything, this is a sorrow from God on Katherine, on her alone. Their marriage is not the spar that they must cling to in the wreckage of their hopes, it is their marriage itself that is the wreckage, Katherine’s wreckage. Without her, Harry can make a son.

So I doubt very much that Katherine will command me again to return to my husband, and I doubt that my brother will insist on marriage until death. Now I understand why he has told Archibald that if there is good evidence for a divorce, then even a royal Tudor divorce may go ahead. Now I know that Harry, nominated Defender of the Faith, who swore that marriage must continue until death, does not think like this any more.

And Katherine, the sister who threatened me that I would be no sister to her, may find instead that she is no wife. And I would have to be an angel in heaven not to think that her hard-heartedness to me is justly repaid.

I am to see my son in his privy chamber, with no one present but my former husband, Archibald, and James’s trusted guardian Davy Lyndsay. I am to have no companions; I am to come alone. There is no point objecting to the presence of Archibald since he has power as great as a king himself; he rules the council, he guards James. Everything is in his gift.

I dress carefully for this meeting in a gown of Tudor green with lighter green sleeves and a necklace of emeralds, and emeralds on my hood. I wonder if James will find me much changed. I am thirty-six years old, no longer a young woman, and I am finding a few silver hairs at my temples. I pluck them out and wonder if Mary has silver among the gold yet? Sometimes I think I look as if I have had a hard life, a life of continual struggle, and then at other times I catch a glimpse of myself in a looking glass laughing and I think that I am still a beautiful woman, and if I could only marry the man that I love and see my son on the throne of Scotland then I could be a happy woman and a good wife.

The double doors of the privy chamber—once my privy chamber—swing open, and I go in. As Archibald promised, the room is empty but for him, Davy, and my son, who is seated on the throne, his legs just reaching the floor. I forget the speech that I have prepared and I run towards him. “James! Oh, James!” I say. Abruptly, I stop and drop into a curtsey, but he is already off the throne and tumbling down the steps and into my arms.

He is my love, he is my boy, he is different and yet completely unchanged. I hold him tightly to me and feel his warm head under my chin; he has grown since I last saw him. He has filled out too, and his arms around my waist are strong. He says, “Lady Mother,” and I hear the adorable croak of a boy whose voice is breaking. He will lose his childish treble and I will never hear it again. The thought of that makes me sob and he looks up into my face and his honest hazel eyes gaze straight at me, and I know that I have him back, just as he was. He has forgiven me, he has missed me. I am so sorry to have failed him, but I am so flooded with delight to be holding him again. He is smiling and I brush the tears from my eyes and smile back at him.

“Lady Mother . . .” is all he can say.

“I am happy . . .” I cannot finish the sentence, I cannot catch my breath. “I am so happy, so happy.”

My delight in seeing James makes me grateful to Archibald for allowing me back to Edinburgh. Margaret is my daughter once more, she comes to my rooms every day, I supervise her education and she lives under my guidance. Archibald has complete power over the council of lords; no one dares to oppose him. If he had wanted to ban me from the city he could have done so, and no one would have defended me. He is generous to me—I cannot deny it. He is serving Harry, he is following the wishes of England: really, he has no choice, but still he is being kind to me.

“You cannot really have been frightened of me?” he asks in his low caressing tone. “When I think of the queen that you were when we first met, you were frightened of nothing, and I was so lowly a server in your household, you didn’t even see me. And when you faced me behind the cannon and I saw you smile through the smoke! I didn’t believe it for a moment when they said that you were frightened of me. You cannot be frightened of me, Margaret.”

“I am not,” I say, instantly defiant.

“Of course not. You have been in my life like a moon on my horizon—not like an ordinary woman at all.”

“I didn’t know you felt like that,” I say cautiously.

“Of course. We have been lovers, we have been husband and wife, we have been parents to a beautiful daughter, we have been either side of a cannon, but we have always been the most important person to the other. Isn’t it true? Who do you think of most of the day? Who do you think of every day? Who do you think that I think of, all the time? All the time!”

“It’s not the same as loving someone,” I protest. “I won’t hear any words of love. I know that you have another woman; you know that I love Henry Stewart. I will marry him if the Pope grants my divorce.”

He gives a little laugh and makes a gesture with his hand as if to say that Henry Stewart means nothing to him. “No, God no, it’s not the same as loving, it’s more,” he says. “Much more. Love comes and goes; if it lasts the length of a ballad or a story it is long enough. Everyone knows that now, the Queen of England, God bless her, among them. Love has ended for her. But belonging goes on. You are more than one of the loves of my life. I am more than a favorite. You will always be the first star at twilight for me.”

“You speak of a moon and you speak of stars,” I say a little breathlessly. “Are you setting up as a poet?”

He gives me a slow, seductive smile. “Because it is in the nights that I think of you. It is the nights with you that I miss the most,” he whispers.

Archibald’s tenderness to me and his generosity to my son continues, for he persuades the council to declare James as king in the summer, at the age of fourteen. Now, at last, the officers who make up James’s household and rule in his name are dismissed. The French guardians are gone, the lords of the council lose their posts, James and I can choose our own household and take command. Exultantly, we start to draw up lists of men that we will choose to serve us, but it does not happen as it should. Instead of letting us appoint our choices, Archibald takes all the work upon himself. He nominates his own people to the royal household and we see that James is still going to be king only in name.

All the letters go out under James’s seal, but they are dictated by Archibald and copied by his clerks. All the wealth is audited and kept by Archibald’s lord treasurer, guarded by the soldiers of the castle. Once again, Archibald has all the money. The royal guard answer to Archibald’s captains and to Archibald himself; they are all of the Douglas clan. To the outside world James is king, but behind the high walls he is nothing more than Archibald’s stepson. I am dowager queen, but first and foremost I am Archibald’s wife.

I am in no doubt that Archibald means this to continue forever: James will never be allowed to take his power, I will never name my household officers, I will never be free of Archibald’s rule. The Archbishop of Saint Andrews, James Beaton, who has been such a bitter enemy of mine in the past, is smarting from losing his office as Lord Chancellor, and he manages to meet me in the chapel at Holyroodhouse when I am praying alone and offers me his support. He says that others will follow any lead that I give. He says that they will help me free James from his overbearing stepfather.

But first, I must get away. Every day that I sit at Archibald’s table with James at my side reinforces the belief that we are reconciled. Every time he presents me with the best cut of meat or the first taste of the finest wine it looks as if he is serving his wife with love and honor. Even James glances at me as if to confirm that I am not falling under the spell of the Archibald charm. I think of the moon on the horizon and the first star at twilight and I tell James that I have to go.

He goes pale. “And leave me here? With him? Again?”

“I have to,” I say. “I cannot gather supporters while I am under the same roof as Archibald. He watches me day and night. And I cannot write to London for help while he pays the messenger and breaks the seal.”

“When will you come back?” my son asks coolly. I feel my heart twist with pain at the way that he hides his fear behind a clipped tone.

“I hope to come back within months, perhaps even at the head of an army,” I promise him. “I will not be idle, you can be sure of that. I’ll get you away from him, James. I will get you free.”

He looks so unhappy that I say: “Francis of France got free, and no one thought that he ever would.”

“You are going to raise an army?” he whispers.

“Yes.”

“You swear on your honor?”

We hold each other very tightly for a moment.

“Come back for me,” he says. “Lady Mother, come back.”