“Out,” he says shortly to my ladies, and they melt as if they are breath on cold air. “I have to ask you to be brave as I need to know something.” He is frowning, just as he is when he listens to someone explaining something mechanical, as if I am a puzzle to be solved, not a wife to be comforted with gifts.
“What?” I say, catching my breath.
“Do you think it possible that you are cursed?”
I sit up in my bed, my sobs silenced, and I stare at him, wordless.
“Your father had three sons and two of them are dead. Your brother never got a bairn, though he died at fifteen. You were barren for nearly three years and now our son has died. It’s a reasonable question.”
I wail out loud, and pitch into my pillow, both furious and heartbroken. This is typical of him, like his interest in what makes the teeth rot in a beggar’s head. He is fascinated by everything, however disgusting. I don’t know why Arthur died of the Sweat that spared Katherine. How should I know? I don’t even think of Edmund, my little brother who died before he was weaned. I don’t know why Arthur did not have a child with Katherine, I don’t like to think what she meant by “Alas, it never happened for us” and I am not going to discuss it now, when I am heartbroken and people should be comforting me, and diverting me, not coming into my room and asking me terrible questions in a cold voice.
“Because Prince Richard himself told me that the Tudors were cursed,” he goes on.
I clap my hands over my ears as if to ensure that I am deaf to these blasphemies. It is incredible to me that a husband so kind, so gentle, should come to me at this time, at the very pinnacle of my grief, and say things that are like the bad spells of his alchemist, which will translate life to death, gold to dross, everything into dark matter.
“Margaret, I need you to answer me,” he says, not raising his voice, as if he knows that I can hear everything through my fists, through my pillow.
“You mean Perkin Warbeck, I suppose,” I say, sullenly lifting my face.
“We all know that was not his name,” he says, as if it is a simple fact. “We all know that is the name that your father pinned on him. But he was Prince Richard, and your uncle. He was one of the two boy princes that Richard III put in the Tower of London, that your father says were happily never seen again. I know it. Richard came here to me before we invaded England. He was my dearest friend; we lived together as brother kings. I gave him my cousin in marriage, your lady-in-waiting Katherine Huntly. I rode out to battle at his side. And he told me that whoever tried to kill him and his brother Edward, was cursed.”
“You don’t know he was a prince at all,” is all I can stammer. “Nobody knows that. My lady grandmother will not allow anyone to say it. It’s treason to say it. And Katherine Huntly never, ever speaks of her husband.”
“I do know it. He told me himself.”
“Well, you shouldn’t tell me!” I burst out.
“No,” he concedes. “Except, I have to know. Richard said that there was a curse placed on the head of whoever killed his brother, the young king. The witch put it on—your mother’s mother, the white-witch queen, Elizabeth Woodville. She swore that whoever had taken the young king to his death would lose his son, and his son’s son, over and over till the line ended with a barren girl.”
I put my hand over my proud belly. I am not a barren girl. “I am with child,” I say defiantly.
“We have just lost our son,” he says, his voice curt and quiet. “And so I am forced to ask you. Do you think we have lost our son because there is a curse on you Tudors?”
“No,” I say furiously. “I think we lost him because your stinking country is dirty and cold, and half the children born will die of cold because they cannot breathe in smoky rooms and they cannot go outside in the killing cold air. It is your filthy country, it is your stupid midwives, it is your sickly wet nurses with their thin milk. It is not my curse.”
He nods as if this is interesting information. “But my other children live,” he observes. “In this filthy country with stupid midwives and sickly wet nurses and thin milk.”
“Not all of them. And anyway, I am carrying one. I am not a barren girl.”
He nods again, as if this is a true observation that he might jot in his notebook and discuss with his alchemist. “You are. I wish you good health. Try not to grieve too much for this one that is lost. You will endanger the one that you carry. And our boy is in heaven. We must know that he is innocent. He was baptized, he was christened. He may have been half yours, from the line of a usurper who killed children, and half mine, son of a regicide and patricide; we are a sinful pair of parents. But he was baptized against sin so we must pray that he is in heaven now.”
“I wish that I was in heaven with him!” I shout at him.
“With the sins of your family, how could you be?” he asks, and he leaves me. Just like that. Without even bowing.
Dear Katherine, I have lost my boy and my husband is most unkind to me. He has said the most dreadful things. The only thing that comforts me is that I am with child and hope that we will have another boy. Mary tells me that you are living very poorly and that there are no plans for your wedding to my brother. I am sorry for you. Now I have been brought very low myself, I understand better. I understand how unhappy you must be, and I think of you all the time. Who ever thought that anything could go so wrong for us who must be the favorites of God? Do you think there is any reason? There could not be a curse, of course? I will pray for you, Margaret the Queen.
HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1508
James rides with me from Stirling Castle to Holyroodhouse while the hilltops are white with snow and the road along the side of the gray river is hard with frost. I have a new steady horse that carries me and my neat round belly safely. We say nothing more about the child we have lost, hoping for the one that is coming this summer.
As soon as we get to Edinburgh, James goes off to the port of Leith where he is building ships and testing cannon. He wants to build another great port, away from the sandbanks. I say that I don’t know why he would want so many ships; my father also rules a country surrounded by seas and he does not have a fleet at his command. James smiles and chucks me under the chin as if I were an ignorant little sailmaker in one of his lofts, and says that perhaps he has a fancy to rule the seas and how shall I like to be queen of all the oceans?
So he is not at court when an emissary comes from my father, a watchful clerk by the name of Thomas Wolsey, who wants to see James about keeping the peace. This makes it particularly awkward for me to say that the king is not at court but testing the firing of new, bigger guns, and overseeing the building of warships.
But this Wolsey will not be denied, for Scotland has breached the alliance and he has a commission to make sure that James intends to keep the peace. It is all the fault of the bastard boys—causing trouble for me yet again. James Hamilton, the new-made Earl of Arran, who was ennobled on my wedding day, escorted the two of them to Erasmus in Italy and came home through England without a safe conduct and got himself arrested. Once again, we see the evil consequences of my husband’s ridiculous attention to his bastards; now it has caused real trouble.
I may not understand everything, though everyone is always trying to explain to me the endless terms and clauses of the treaty, but even I can see what Thomas Wolsey is talking about as we wait for James to return from Leith. Wolsey says that France is trying to get my husband to renew their traditional alliance, and my father is trying to get him to keep to the Treaty of Perpetual Peace. Since our marriage was part of the treaty, my husband should respect it as he does our marriage. He married a princess of England, so he should be at peace forever: that is what perpetual means. He should not make an alliance with France, and he does not need guns and a fleet of ships and the biggest cannon in the world.
Thomas Wolsey must explain this to my husband, so I send for him at once and tell him he must come home. Wolsey talks and talks and talks t
o me in the hope that I will persuade my husband to brush off the French, and confirm the alliance with England. But my husband is elusive and when he finally returns to court and I manage to speak to him alone he pats me on the cheek and says: “What’s my motto? What will be our son’s motto?”
“ ‘In My Defense,’ ” I say sullenly.
“Exactly,” he says. “I live my life, I make my alliances, I do everything every day in defense of my kingdom; and not even you, peerless princess that you are, will persuade me to endanger my country by insulting the French.”
“The French are no use to us,” I tell him. “The only alliance we need is with England.”
“I am sure you are right, my royal wife,” he says. “And if England becomes a more helpful neighbor than it is at the moment, then our alliance will long continue.”
“I hope you don’t forget that I was born an English princess before I was a Scots queen,” I say to him.
He slaps my bottom gently as if I were one of his sluts. “I never forget your importance,” he says, smiling. “I would never dare.”
“So what will you say to Thomas Wolsey?” I persist.
“I will meet with him, I will talk to him for hours,” he promises. “And at the end I will tell him what I intend to do, what I have always intended to do: to keep the peace with England and keep my friendship with France. Why would I befriend one and not the other? When each is as bad as the other? When all they both want is to swallow me up? And the only reason they care about us at all is to endanger the other.”
Wolsey has brought me a letter from Katherine and while he and James are locked in argument, I read it on my own, in my rooms. She is sympathetic, speaking kindly of the many women who lose a child, especially a first child, and urges me to rest and stay hopeful that God will give me a son and heir. I know of no reason that you should not be fertile and happy, she writes emphatically. I know of nothing against the Tudors. I take it in the spirit that it is meant—kindly sisterhood—and, anyway, I don’t want to think about curses and deaths in childbirth.
As for me, she ends the letter, as if her situation is of little importance,
matters do not go well. My father will not send the rest of my dowry until I am married to the prince, your father will not pay my widow’s jointure until he has my dowry. I am a pawn between two great kings, and I have no money and little company, for though I live at court I am no favorite, and often overlooked. I see your brother so seldom that I wonder if he even remembers we are betrothed; I fear that he has been advised against me. I see your sister Mary only when your father wants to impress the Spanish ambassador. She is growing in beauty and she is so sweet I cannot tell you! She is my only friend at court. I started to teach her Spanish but she is not allowed to come to me often. I am trapped in London, in poverty, and neither a widow nor a bride.
Could you, do you think, speak of me to your lady grandmother who could at least see that my servants are paid? She could loan me gowns from the royal wardrobe. Without gowns I cannot go to dinner and I have to go to bed hungry if the kitchens forget to send anything to my room. Would you help me? I don’t know what to do, and the men who should advise me are determined to use me to their own ends.
HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, JULY 1508
I go into the dark stuffy rooms of my confinement for the weeks of isolation and silence. I swear to myself that I am not going to think of what my husband said about a curse, that I am not going to consider his accusations—they are ridiculous, he is ridiculous. Everyone knows that it was the tyrant Richard III who killed the princes in the Tower so that he could seize his nephew’s throne. Everyone knows that my father came and saved England from this monster. We Tudors are blessed for this; there is no curse.
The battle at Bosworth shows that God favored the Tudors. My mother married Henry Tudor though she was a Plantagenet herself, the red rose enclosed the white and made the Tudor rose, they conceived Arthur, they had me. This is proof, plain simple proof, of a line that is blessed by God, unstained by sin, free from any curse. It should be enough for anyone; it is certainly enough for me who was raised by my lady grandmother to have a horror of any superstition and heresy, who knows, as she knows, that the Tudors are the favorites of God and the chosen royal line of England. It is God who has called me to my great station, for I am His favorite and hers.
It is enough for me to think also of Katherine who is arrogant no more, but a princess begging to be married to our family, and assuring me that there can be no shadow cast over us. I think of her, reduced to poverty and loneliness in the small rooms allocated to hangers-on at court, while I am in the best rooms in the finest palace of my capital city, and I feel very sweet and tender to her. I write a sympathetic reply:
My dear sister, of course I will write to my lady grandmother and to my father too, I shall do what I can for you. Who would have thought that you would have come to England so grandly—I remember I was so entranced by your gold laces!—and now find yourself reduced so low? I pity you with all my heart and I shall pray for your safe return to Spain if matters cannot be settled in England. Your sister, Margaret the Queen.
I have the pyx in my rooms ready for my time, and my confessor and the good canons of Holyrood Abbey praying for me at all hours. I have no fear, despite what my husband says. I think to myself, scornfully, that he is a man who wears a hair shirt, who belts himself with a cilice, who killed his own father, an ordained king; of course he sees curses and doom everywhere. Really, he should go to Jerusalem as soon as possible. How else can he regain God’s favor if not with a crusade? His sins are not ordinary errors that you can wash away with a few Hail Marys from an absent-minded priest. He is not like me, who was born for greatness with God’s blessing.
I am not afraid of this birth and it is an easy one. The baby is a great disappointment as it is a princess but I think I will call her Margaret and ask my lady grandmother to be her godmother and come to her baptism. The baby goes to the wet nurse’s breast quietly enough but she does not suckle well and I see the woman exchange a glance with one of the rockers as if she is uneasy. They don’t say anything to me and I let them wash me and bind my private parts with moss and herbs, and I go to sleep. When I wake up she is dead.
This time my husband speaks to me kindly. He comes into my confinement chamber though no man is supposed to enter—even the priest prayed with me from the other side of a veiled screen. But James comes in quietly, waving the women aside as they flap and scold him, and he holds my hand as I lie in the bed, even though I have not yet been churched and am still unclean. I am not crying; it is strange that he does not remark on my silence. I don’t feel like crying, I feel like going to sleep. I wish I could sleep and never wake up again.
“My poor love,” he says.
“I am sorry.” I can hardly speak, but I owe him the apology. There must be something wrong with me, to have two babies die one after the other. And now Katherine and Mary in England will hear of my loss and I am sure Katherine will think that there is something wrong with me, something wrong with the Tudors, and “Alas, it never happened for any of us.” Mary is too young and stupid to know that to lose a child is the worst thing a queen can do, but Katherine will be quick to compare me to her fertile mother and her symbol of the pomegranate and press her own case to be married to Harry.
“It’s nothing but bad luck,” James says, as if he has never heard of a curse and never spoken of it to me. “But the main thing is that we know we can make children and that you can carry them. That’s the greatest challenge, believe me, sweetheart. The next one will live, I am certain of it.”
“A boy,” I say quietly.
“I will pray,” he says. “I will make a pilgrimage. And you will rest and get well and strong and when we are old and surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren we will pray for the souls of these little ones. We will remember them only in our prayers, we will forget this sorrow. It will all be well, Margaret.”
br /> “You said about a curse . . .” I begin.
He makes a little gesture of dismissal. “I spoke from anger and grief and fear. I was wrong to speak so to you. You are too young and you were raised to think yourself above fault. Life will teach you differently. You don’t need me to humble you. I would be a poor husband if I were to try to hurry you into the wisdom of despair.”
“I am no fool,” I say with dignity.
He bows his head. “That’s good, for I certainly am,” he says.
I think I will write to my sister Mary, since she is now betrothed to the heir of the greatest of the Christian kings, and warn her not to be overproud, for it may be that she marries a great man but cannot give him an heir. Every report from England goes on and on that she is growing more and more beautiful, but that does not mean she will be fertile or able to raise a strong baby. I think she should know that my grief may be hers; she need not be certain that she will get off scot-free. I think I will tell her it may be that the Tudors are not so high and mighty and blessed by God. I think I will tell her that she may not have as great a destiny as everyone confidently predicts, she should not think that she will be spared just because she has always been everyone’s pet, and always the prettiest child.
But then, something stops me. It’s odd that I should have a pen and paper before me and find that I don’t want to caution her. I don’t want to cast a shadow over her. Of course the thought of her dancing around Richmond Palace, queening it at Greenwich, being the center of fashion and beauty and extravagance at a wealthy court, grates on me, but I don’t want to be the one to tell her that our family may not be as blessed as we imagined. We may not always be lucky. There may be some shadow that hangs over our name: we may have to pay for the death of Edward of Warwick; for the hanging of the boy we called Perkin Warbeck, whoever he was. Without doubt, it was us who won the greatest benefit from the disappearance of the two Plantagenet princes from the Tower. We may have done nothing but we gained the most.