Three Sisters, Three Queens

STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1526

I make three attempts to kidnap James from Archibald’s keeping but my husband is too skilled, and his household is loyal to him and determined to keep James. A raid on his men when he and James are riding in the borders is defeated, a kidnap attempt inside Edinburgh Castle fails. But more and more of the Scots lords come to our side, repelled by Archibald’s abuse of his power. Even so it is a bad day for me when Davy Lyndsay walks into my presence chamber and kneels.

“Davy?” I am on my feet in a moment, my hand on my heart. “You here? James is ill? You’ve come for me?”

“I am dismissed from his service,” Davy says, very low. “The Earl of Angus sent me away and I was not allowed to stay though I said I would lie under the same roof as him without pay, without my keep, so that he knew I was there. I said I would sleep in the stables. I said I would lie down with the hounds. But he sent me out. Your son is to have another head of his household. I am not allowed to serve him any longer.”

I am horrified. James has never been parted from Davy before. All through his life of partings and death, he has always had Davy at his side.

“He’s alone? My boy?”

“He has companions.” The twist of the old man’s mouth shows me that he does not think much of them.

“Who is his tutor?”

“George Douglas.” Davy names Archibald’s younger brother, who cares for nothing but the triumph of Clan Douglas.

“My God, what will he teach the boy?”

“Whoring and drinking,” the old man says sourly. “He knows nothing else.”

“My son?”

“They’re spoiling him on purpose. They are taking him to the stews and getting him drunk. They laugh at him when he falls, when a whore takes him. God forgive them for what they are doing to our boy.”

My hands are over my mouth. “I have to fetch him.”

“You must. Before God, you must.”

“And Davy, what will you do?” I ask him. This is as hard on him as it is on me. He has not been apart from James since he was born.

“If I may, I will join your household, and when you send your troop to rescue the king from the Douglas clan, you will send me too, and I can get back to my boy.”

“You—a poet—want to fight for him?”

“God knows, I would gladly die for him.”

I take both his hands in mine, and he puts his palms together in the old gesture of fealty. “I can’t bear to be without him,” he says simply. “Let me fetch him.”

“Yes,” I say without hesitation. “We’ll get him out of there. I promise.”

I write to the lords of the council, I write to Archibald himself, I write to Harry. I write to Katherine:

At your insistence I have publicly lived with the Earl of Angus as his wife since his return to Scotland and though he is now in Edinburgh and I am in Stirling, we are not estranged, nor have I heard anything from the Vatican about the progress of my divorce. For all I know it will be refused and I will live and die Archibald’s wife.

But Archibald is in breach of his agreements with you and with me. He is keeping my son, your nephew the king, under close confinement. James is not allowed out without an armed guard of Douglas men, he can only hunt near to the city, and his people are not allowed to see him or petition him. I beg that you speak to my brother the king and ask him to order the Earl of Angus to set James free as he should be. I have done everything that you asked of me; James should not be punished.

This is not as it seems—a sisterly request for help. This is a test of Katherine’s power. I think she is failing. I think her influence is dwindling. If Katherine still has influence with Harry she can use it to set James free, but I believe that she has lost the great power that she used to wield over him. Harry is advised by the cardinal in matters of state, he discusses religion and philosophy with Thomas More, and he is influenced more and more by the other woman in his life. Certainly, Anne Boleyn won’t be satisfied, as her sister was, with a title for her father in exchange for a bastard baby. I imagine that Anne is a young woman who will want to share Harry’s power as well as his bed. This is no pretty whore, this is a new player for power. She will be uncrowned mistress of the court and the leader of reformist religious thinking. She will bring French ways into London and we will see the king with his old queen on one hand and his lady companion on the other.

My sister Mary confirms this. In a long letter that tells me of her health and the progress of her little boy she adds,

. . . the queen is very quiet and distant while the court becomes more and more boisterous. You would think she was ill when you see her thinness and her fever. It is as if her spirit is the only strong thing in her, burning in her eyes. She has taken to rising at night for Matins and Lauds and so of course she is exhausted in the evening, white as a ghost at dinner. I can do nothing to comfort her. Nobody can comfort her.

Everyone is saying that the birth of the Carey bastard proves the king is fertile and he could get a son and legitimate heir if our sister were to step aside and he remarry. But how can she do this? God called her to be Queen of England and she believes that she would fail Him if she retired. Having been once married to Arthur, losing him, and then winning the throne through Harry by the direct intervention of God, she cannot now abandon it. I cannot think that it is God’s will, and Bishop Fisher says that there are no possible grounds for naming the marriage as invalid.

It is terribly painful to her, and to me, that you continue with your application for your divorce at the Vatican. Since they have taken so long to reply surely it would be better to withdraw it and announce that you are reconciled with your husband? Then you could make sure that your son is treated well instead of asking us to help? If you do this all your troubles are over at once. Dear Sister, I must tell you that Katherine the queen thinks as I do. We both of us think that you should return to your husband and safeguard your son. We are both certain that would be the right thing to do—we do not see that you can do anything else.

A party of the lords who support me demands to meet James at Edinburgh Castle and Archibald takes him there in state. Publicly they ask him if he is truly free and my boy answers that no one, not even his mother, need fear for him, and that he could not live a more pleasant and cheerful life than he does with Archibald—he calls him his good cousin.

“Can this be true?” Henry Stewart is with me, with Archbishop Beaton, and the Earl of Lennox, as one of the friendly lords comes to report. Davy Lyndsay stands in a doorway, listening like a faithful hound missing his master. “Has Archibald turned the boy’s head by giving him nothing but amusement, by allowing him to be corrupted?”

We turn to the messenger. “The young king spoke without coercion,” the lord says. “The Earl of Angus was with him all the time, but the boy could have spoken out, he could have taken three steps across the great hall and joined us. He did not do so. He specifically said that his mother need not fear for him.”

“But I do!” I burst out.

Henry puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. “We all do,” he says.

There is a clatter in the presence chamber and a murmur of sound from the people waiting out there to see me. I notice Henry’s hand go to where his sword would be. “Are you expecting anyone?” he asks.

I shake my head as the guards swing open the door and a young man comes in wearing royal livery. I recognize one of James’s grooms. He comes straight to my feet and kneels.

“I come from His Grace the king,” he says.

Davy Lyndsay steps forward. “I know this lad,” he says. “Is the king well, Alec?”

“Aye, he is in good health.”

“You may stand,” I say.

He gets to his feet and says: “I bring a message. He didn’t want to write it down. His Grace says that he was forced to speak to the lords as he did, that he is a prisoner of the Earl of Angus, and that he begs you to save him. He says that you promised to come for him. He says that you must come.”

I put my hand to my heart as it thuds at the appeal from my son. The youth realizes, as he speaks, that he should not address a queen like this, and his color flames up into his face and he drops to one knee and bows his head. “I am speaking His Grace’s words,” he mutters. “He taught them to me just like that.”

“I understand.” I touch his bowed head lightly with my hand. “Are you to go back with an answer?”

“Yes. Nobody saw me leave and no one knows where I am.”

“You hope,” Lennox says dourly.

The boy shows a swift brave grin. “I hope,” he agrees.

“Tell him we will come for him,” I say. “Tell him I will not fail him. Tell him I am putting together an army that will march against the Earl of Angus and that we will free him.”

The boy nods. “You know that George Douglas, brother to the Earl of Angus, is now master of the king’s household?”

“Master?” Davy Lyndsay asks.

There is an aghast silence. “Then the king is in danger of his life,” the Earl of Lennox says soberly. “There is no one around him who loves him. There is no one around him who would not benefit from his death.”

“Archibald wouldn’t kill him,” I protest disbelievingly. “You can’t say that.”

Lennox turns on me. “Archibald has royal blood, and he has taken all the power of the king. He has the keeping of the king and no one can free him. What is this but the step before imprisoning the king and then declaring him sick or mad? And that is one little step before declaring him dead, and Archibald as king himself.”

I shrink back and sink into my chair. “He would not. I know him. He would never hurt my son. He loves him.” I nearly say: “And he loves me.”

“Not if we stop him,” Henry Stewart says.

We muster an army, and a number of lords join us with their armed retainers. Some are Archibald’s sworn enemies and would join any venture against him, some hope for the profit and opportunity of a battle, but some—a good number—want to see my son freed. We plan to attack Archibald’s new ally, my former friend the turncoat, James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran, at the village of Linlithgow Bridge, before Archibald can bring up his army from Edinburgh. The Earl of Arran and the Hamilton clan hold the bridge and so Lennox takes his army through the river and through boggy ground to attack their flank. They wheel to meet him, and then the Douglas army comes up in a rush from the south. My lords are horrified to see the royal standard at the rear of Archibald’s forces. The wicked man, my husband, has brought James to his first battle. He has brought James to watch his mother’s men dying in the fight to free him.

Of course, this is not just spite, it is a brilliant tactic. He is using James just as I did when I sent him out, a boy of just three years old, to surrender the keys of Stirling Castle. This child has been hauled about like an icon before the people since he was born, and now Archibald is putting James and the royal standard at the heart of a treasonous army. Half of our men will not raise arms against the royal standard; it is like blasphemy for them. The Earl of Lennox looks around helplessly as his allies hang back, but the men at the front of both armies are bitterly engaged, shouting insults, stabbing with pikes, hacking with axes and swinging great battle swords. It is bloody and dreadful, and James, trapped at the back, can hear the cries of men mad with rage and those screaming as they go down. He thinks he sees a chance to get away and spurs his horse forward to weave through the armies, and it is then that the new master of the king’s household, George Douglas, my husband’s brother, snatches my boy by the arm, and holds him in a cruel grip in his metaled fist. George yells into my boy’s face that he had better stay with them for the Douglas clan will never let him go.

“Bide where you are, sir, for if they get hold of one of your arms, we will pull you in pieces rather than part with you.”

James, terrorized, turns his head away from the man who sits so high on his horse and holds him so hard, but he obeys. He does not dare try to get to the Earl of Lennox any more. The struggle breaks off—it was doomed as soon as they raised the royal standard—and our men fall away and scatter. One leader fails to retreat; we have to leave the Earl of Lennox injured on the field, and when we recover his body it has been stabbed over and over again. Our forces fall back to Stirling Castle and Archibald pursues us, coming behind us on the dirty tracks as we wind through the hills and splash through the fords, and climb up and up the rocky road to the castle where we scuttle inside, raise the bridge, drop the portcullis, and set the siege.

Just as James promised me, all those years ago, Stirling Castle is strong. Archibald cannot take the castle until he brings the cannons, but there is nobody to rescue us.

“We have to go,” Henry says to me and to Archbishop Beaton. “We’ll have to surrender the castle, and it will be better if he does not find us here.”

I look at him miserably. “We surrender?”

“We lost,” he says shortly. “You’d better go back to Linlithgow and hope that Archibald will come to terms with you. You can’t stay here and wait for him to capture you.”

The archbishop does not need telling twice. He is throwing off his good cloak and his thickly padded jacket. “I’ll go out of the sally port,” he says. “I’ll get a crook off one of the shepherds and his jacket too. I won’t be taken by the Douglas clan. They’ll behead me like they did the chevalier. I don’t want my head nailed on the mercat cross.”

I look from the man I love to the man I trust. They are both desperate to get away from my castle, to hide from my husband. They are in terror of the man who is coming for them, coming for me. I realize, once again, that no one is going to help me. I am going to have to save myself.

I ride cross-country with just a handful of men to guard me. It rains and the torrential water blots out the signs of our passing, and muffles the sound of the horses. Archibald, riding his men hard through the storm towards Stirling Castle, does not know that I pass within a mile of him. I know his army is there, on the road, headed north, but I cannot see him nor hear the splash and clatter of his cavalry. The country is so empty and so wild that there is no one to tell him of our hard ride over the twenty miles from Stirling to Linlithgow. No one sees us go by, not even the rain-soaked fishermen, not even the herdboys. When the castle at Stirling lowers the drawbridge and opens the gates in a shameful surrender Archibald learns that, once again, he does not have me, he cannot hold me, I am gone.