HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, WINTER 1532
Davy Lyndsay comes to court for a poetry joust. We hold a “flyting,” when one poet laughingly abuses another in a stream of extempore insults. James is witty and he has the court roaring at his abuse of his companion, complaining of everything from his terrible snoring to outrageous claims that he gets his rhymes from a book. Davy replies with a strong complaint about James’s promiscuity. I clap my hands over my ears and say that I will hear no more, but James laughs and says that Davy says no worse than the truth and that he must be married or he will repopulate the barren Marches with little Jameses.
When the laughter and poetry have finished there is dancing and Davy comes to kiss my hand and watch the dancers at my side. “He’s no worse than any young man,” I say.
“I am sorry to disagree with you,” Davy says. “But he is. Every night he rides out to visit a woman in the town or outside it, and when he doesn’t go beyond the palace walls he’s with one of the serving maids or even with one of the ladies. He’s a coney, Your Grace.”
“He’s very handsome,” I say indulgently. “And he’s a young man. I know my ladies flirt with him, how should he refuse them?”
“He should be married,” Davy says.
I nod. “I know. It’s true.”
“The Princess Mary will never do for him,” Davy says determinedly. “I am sorry to pass a comment on your family, Your Grace, but your niece will not do. Her title cannot be relied upon. Her position is not certain.”
I cannot disagree any more. Harry did not take his own legitimate daughter with him on a state visit to France; he took his bastard boy, Henry Fitzroy, and left him there on a visit with the King of France’s own children, as if he were a born prince. Nobody can be sure what title Henry Fitzroy will be given next, but Harry looks as if he is preparing him to be royal. Nobody can be sure that Princess Mary will keep her title; nobody even knows if you can take a title from a princess. No king, in the history of the world, has tried to do such a thing before.
“She was born with royal blood. Nobody can deny that.”
“Alas,” is all he says.
We are silent for a minute.
“Do you hear of your own daughter, Lady Margaret?” Davy asks gently.
“Archibald will not let her come to me. He’s put her in service to Lady Anne Boleyn.” I feel my mouth twist with contempt, and I smooth out my expression. “She is high in favor with the king her uncle. It is said to be an enviable position.”
“Young James wants to marry the French king’s daughter,” Davy remarks. “It’s been considered for years, she has a handsome dowry and it is the Auld Alliance.”
“Harry won’t like it,” I predict. “He won’t want France meddling in the affairs of Scotland.”
“No need for them to meddle,” Davy asserts. “She comes to be his wife, she’s not a regent. And we need the money she would bring. You won’t get a dowry like hers from Scots girls like Margaret Erskine!”
“Princess Madeleine of France it is then,” I say. “Unless we hear good news from England.”
Davy Lyndsay looks at me with a wry smile. “You hope for good news from England?”
“Not really, not any more. I never have good news from England any more.”
HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1533
We don’t have good news. Harry himself writes to me in the New Year:
Sister,
It is with great pleasure that I write to tell you that I am married to the Marquess of Pembroke, Lady Anne Boleyn, a lady of unimpeachable virtue and reputation, who has consented to be my wife, as my previous alliance was no marriage—as every scholar now agrees. Queen Anne will be crowned in June. The Dowager Princess of Wales will live quietly in the country. Her daughter, Lady Mary, will be a respected lady and serve in the queen’s rooms.
LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1533
It is over then, I think.
It is over, all over, for Katherine. My rival and my sister, my enemy and my friend, is finished with this final blow to her pride, her name, her very being. They move her again, this time to an old, ill-kept bishop’s palace, Buckden in Cambridgeshire, with a reduced household and too small an allowance to maintain her position as queen. She is poor again, just as she was when she was eating old fish. I hear that she still wears a hair shirt under her gowns, and now she patches her sleeves and turns her hems. But this time she cannot draw on her credit and her youthful courage and hope for better days. She is alone. Her confessor, Bishop Fisher, is under house arrest, her daughter kept from her. Lady Mary is not allowed to see her mother; she cannot even go to court unless she curtseys to Anne Boleyn as queen.
She is her mother’s daughter.
She won’t do that.
I am in a better place than both my sisters. I cling to this little joy, as stubborn as when we were girls jockeying for supremacy. I am married to a good man, I am seated in my little stone room at the top of my castle, I can see my country at peace around me, and my son is recognized king. I wish I had said good-bye to Katherine, I did not even know that I should say good-bye to Mary until I got her letter:
Dear Sister,
The pain in my belly is worse; I can feel a growth and I cannot eat, they doubt that I will see Christmas. I was spared the coronation—the wedding was held in secret because her belly was growing—and I doubt that I will see the birth of the Boleyn bastard. God forgive me but I pray that she miscarries and that the swelling of her belly is a stone like mine. I write to Katherine but they read my letters and she cannot reply, so I don’t know how she is. For the first time in my life I don’t know how she is and I have not seen her for nearly two years.
It seems to me now that we were three girls together with so much to hope for, and that it is a hard world that has brought the three of us to this. When men have authority over women, women can be brought very low—and they will be brought very low. We spent our time admiring and envying each other and we should have been guiding and protecting each other. Now I am dying, you are living with a man not your husband, your true husband is your enemy, your daughter is estranged from you, and Katherine has lost her battle against the prince she married for love. What is the point of love if it does not make us kind? What is the point of being sisters if we do not guard each other? M.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As the book list shows, there are few biographies about Margaret, Dowager Queen of Scotland. Many accounts of her are frankly hostile. She suffers (as do so many women in history) from being so slightly recorded that we often don’t know what she was doing and we almost never know what she was thinking. The jigsaw of history gives a picture of abrupt changes of course and loyalties, and so many historians have assumed that she must have been either incompetent or irrational. They explain this by suggesting that she was in the grip of megalomania or lust, or more simply (and traditionally) a typical changeable woman.
Of course, I reject the concept of a “nature” of women (especially if it is said to be morally and intellectually weak), and in the case of Margaret, I think she was, without doubt, more thoughtful and strategic than the she-wolf/dolt model of female behavior. This novel suggests that Margaret probably did the best she could in circumstances which were beyond many people—male and female. Everyone seeking power in Europe in the late medieval period changed loyalties with remarkable speed and lack of honor. For Margaret, like her male enemies and friends, the only way to survive was to change her allies, plot against her enemies, and move as swiftly and as unexpectedly as she could.