And then I bow my head lower and whisper to Saint Margaret who was swallowed by a dragon and must have known, as I know, the secret leap of joy of being rescued from the worst thing that can happen. Margaret came out of the dragon’s belly unscathed, and I came through labor and childbirth with a son and heir—the only Tudor son and heir. I would never wish ill to Katherine, nor to Harry or Mary—indeed, I truly pity her loss—but my son, Arthur, is heir to Scotland and England and will be so, until she has a boy. Her son, when he comes, will displace mine. Who could blame me for a little secret joy that I have a son and she does not?
The ambassador to England writes to say that although Katherine lost one child, a girl, she was—praise God—carrying twins and she still has a baby.
“That’s unusual,” my husband remarks to me as he reads the letter aloud by the fireside in my bedroom after all my ladies have been sent away. “She’s lucky.”
I feel a rush of understandable irritation at the thought of Katherine keeping a boy in her belly when I have been on my knees praying for her to find comfort in her loss. How ridiculous that she should write me such a tragic letter when she was still carrying a child. What a fuss she makes over nothing!
“What d’you mean, unusual?” I ask stiffly, irritated that my husband takes such an interest in the work of physicians, reading their horrid books himself and looking at disgusting drawings of diseased hearts and swollen entrails.
“It’s surprising that she did not lose both children when she lost one,” he says, rereading the letter. “God bless her, I hope it is the case; but it is very unusual to lose one twin and keep the other. I wonder how she knows. It’s a great pity that she cannot be examined by a physician. It may be only that her courses have not returned, but that she is not with child.”
I clap my hands over my ears. “You cannot speak of the Queen of England’s courses!” I protest.
He laughs at me, pulling my hands away. “I know you think that, but she is a woman like any other.”
“I would never admit a physician, even if I was dying in childbirth!” I swear. “How should a man come near a queen at such a time? My own grandmother specifically wrote that the queen shall go into confinement and be served only by women, in darkness in one shuttered and locked room. She cannot even see the priest who comes to give her the Mass—he has to pass the Host through a screen.”
“But what if a woman in confinement needs a physician’s knowledge?” my husband counters. “What if something goes wrong? Didn’t your grandmother nearly die in childbirth herself? Wouldn’t it have been better for her if she had a physician to advise her?”
“How should a man know anything about such things?”
“Oh, Margaret, don’t be a fool! These are not mysteries. The cow is in calf, the pig is in farrow. Do you think a queen births a child unlike any other female beast?”
I give a little scream. “I won’t hear this. It is heresy. Or treason. Or both.”
He pulls my hands down from my appalled face, and kisses each palm gently. “You need not hear any of it,” he says. “I’m not like the soothsayers at the mercat cross. I can know something without shouting about it.”
“At any rate, she must be the most lucky woman in the world,” I say resentfully. “To have everyone’s sympathy for losing a daughter and then carry a twin son.”
“Perhaps she is,” he concedes. “I certainly hope so.” He turns away from me and strips off his shirt. The cilice at his waist makes a little chinking noise.
“Oh, take that horrid thing off,” I say.
He looks at me. “As you wish,” he says. “Anything to please the second luckiest woman in the world—if she can be pleased being, as she is, forever in second place, a second-rate queen, in a second-rate kingdom, waiting for her newborn boy to be forced into second place.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I protest.
He takes me in his arms and does not trouble himself to answer.
LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1510
In May, when we are at our lakeside palace, I get a short handwritten letter from Katherine saying that, after all, there does not seem to be another baby. She writes in a tiny crabbed hand, as if she wishes she were not writing at all.
I have begged my father not to reproach me. I did nothing that was careless or wrong. They told me that I had lost a baby but kept her twin, and I did not know that there was nothing there until my belly went down again as if from a bloat, and my courses started. How should I know? Nobody told me. How should I know?
She says that her husband has been kindness itself, but that she cannot stop herself crying all the time. I push the letter away and I cannot bring myself to reply for irritation at them both. The idea of Harry being kind to his wife—my little brother who never had a thought in his head but for himself!—and the idea of Katherine of Arrogant humbling herself to apologize for something that she could not help sends me into a little fury. The idea of her unable to stop crying fills me with disdain. How would I be if I could not stop crying when I lost a child? I would never have made another. Why should Katherine revel in grief and publish it to the world? Should she not show queenly courage, as I did?
I have to concede, also, that my husband may have been right about her seeing a physician. How could people have told her that she was with child when she had just miscarried a baby? How could the wise women be so foolish? How could she have been so stupid as to listen?
I suppose it is just everyone trying to please Harry as usual. People cannot bear to tell him bad news, as he has no tolerance for anything that denies his own will. Just like my lady grandmother, he has an idea of how things should be, and he will not listen when someone says that the world is not like that. He has always been completely spoiled. I suppose that when they told him Katherine had lost a baby girl, he looked at them as if such a disappointment was simply impossible, and then they all felt they must assure him that she was still pregnant, probably with a boy. Now that lie has been revealed and Katherine will feel worse than ever. But who is to blame?
I go to the royal nursery and see my own baby, the heir of Scotland and England, plump and strong, in the arms of his rocker. “He is well?” I ask. They smile and tell me he is very well, eating well and growing daily.
I go back to my rooms and write to Katherine:
Praise God, my son is strong and very healthy. We are blessed indeed to have him. I am so sorry to hear of your mistake. I pray for you in your sorrow and your embarrassment.
“Don’t write that,” my husband says, looking over my shoulder and rudely reading my private letter.
I scatter it with sand to dry the ink, and I wave it in the air so he cannot read my sympathetic words. “It’s just a sisterly letter,” I say.
“Don’t send it. She has enough trouble without you adding your sympathy to her burdens.”
“Sympathy is hardly a burden.”
“It’s one of the worst.”
“Anyway, what is a woman like her troubled with?” I demand. “She has everything that she ever dreamed of but a child, and surely one will come.”
I see him look away as if he has a secret. “James! Tell me! What have you heard?”
He pulls forward a stool and sits on it, smiling up at me. “You must not rejoice in the misfortune of others,” he instructs me.
I cannot hide my smile. “You know that I would not be so unkind. Is it Katherine’s misfortune?”
“You will rewrite the letter.”
“I will. If you will tell me what you know.”
“Well, for all his gentle upbringing, your sainted brother Harry is no better than a mere sinner like me,” he says. “For all that you reproach me for the bairns and send them away from their little nursery, your brother Harry is no better a husband than I; he is no better than the rest of us. While his wife was in confinement he was caught in bed with one of her ladies-in-waiting.”
“Oh! No! Which one? Who?” I gasp. “Actually in bed with her??
??
“Anne Hastings,” he says. “So now there is a great row between her brother the Duke of Buckingham, the whole Stafford family, and the king.”
I sigh as if he has just given me a rich gift. “How very dreadful,” I say delightedly. “How unfortunate. I am very shocked.”
“And the Staffords are very great,” he reminds me. “And of royal blood from Edward III. They won’t like to be held up for shame, nor to have Henry dallying with one of theirs. He’s a fool to make enemies of his lords.”
“I suppose you never do.”
“I don’t,” he says with quiet pride. “If I make an enemy, then I kill him or imprison him, I don’t upset him and let him go off to his own lands to cause trouble against me. I know what I have to do to hold this kingdom together. Your brother is new to the throne and careless.”
“Anne Hastings,” I say lingeringly. “Katherine’s own lady-in-waiting. She must be absolutely furious. She must be spitting with rage. She must be sick with disappointment. After her great wedding! After her marriage for love! All those ridiculous madrigals!”
He lifts a finger as if to warn me. “Never again scold me for having a mistress,” he says. “You always say that your father never looked at another woman and that your brother married for love. Now you see. It is perfectly normal for a man to take a mistress, especially when his wife is confined. It is perfectly normal for a king to have his pick of the court. Never reproach me again.”
“It is neither normal nor moral,” I retort. “It is against the laws of God and of man.” I can’t maintain my grandmother’s tone. “Oh, James, tell me more! Is Katherine going to have to keep Lady Anne as her lady-in-waiting? Is she going to have to turn a blind eye to it all? Will Harry keep Anne as his whore?” I gasp. “He’ll never set her up as his mistress, like a French king, will he? He’ll never let her run his court and send Katherine away?”
“I don’t know,” he says, chucking me under the chin. “What a very vulgar child you are to want to know all the details! Shall I tell my ambassador to report at once?”
“Oh yes,” I say. “I want to know everything!”
EDINBURGH CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1510
But the next news we have from England is not amusing scandal but good news: the best. Katherine is with child again. I cross myself when they tell me, for I am worried about my son, Arthur. Katherine and I have been so turn and turn about for good fortune—my betrothal coinciding with her widowhood, the death of my father meant her marriage and coronation—that I fear that the birth of an heir to the Tudor throne in England will be the death of the present heir in Scotland.
James does not laugh at my fears, but sends for his best physician to come to Edinburgh Castle and go to the nursery where everyone is on tiptoe around the rocker who strips the little linen shirt off my son and swears that he is getting hotter and hotter every hour, that he is burning up.
He is only nine months old, he is tiny. It does not seem as if there is enough baby to fight the fever that makes his skin so hot to the touch and makes his eyes sink into his face. They soak his sheets in cold water, they close the shutters against the sun, but they cannot make the fever break. And though they cup him, draining blood from his rosy little heel, and purge him so that he vomits and cries in pain, nothing makes him better. While I am kneeling on the floor beside his chief nursemaid, watching her pat his sweating skin with a cool towel, he closes his eyes and he stops crying. He turns his head away as if he just wants to sleep and then he is still, and she says, her voice filled with horror: “He’s gone.”
Dear Sister, I am so unhappy at his loss. I cannot write more. Pray for his little soul and pray for me, your sister, in this time of my trouble. I have been guilty of pride and envy but surely this terrible blow cannot be to teach me humility? I am so sorry if I have ever sinned against you. I pray you to forgive me for anything that I have ever said or done against you. Forgive my unkind and unsisterly thoughts that I have never even voiced. Give Mary my love, I miss you both so much. I am brought so very low. I have never known pain like this. Margaret.
HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1511
Katherine goes into confinement in January and they send us the news of the triumphant birth on vellum that has been illustrated with Tudor roses and Spanish pomegranates. The letters are illuminated with gold leaf. They obviously had it drawn up for weeks; they had monks hand-painting the borders for months. They must have been very certain of the blessing of God to have such work done, with such brash confidence, on the chancy outcome of childbed. They bring me the letter as I lie on my bed in the afternoon. I find that I cannot stop crying. I trace the words with my fingertip; their joy seems very far away. I don’t know how they dare.
But their hubris goes unpunished, as God smiles on the Tudors. Katherine has a boy. They call him Henry—of course. I think bitterly that it is as if my brother Arthur never was, as if my brother has forgotten that the name of Arthur was to be given to the firstborn Tudor boy, and the name Henry allocated to the second son. But of course Henry thinks of himself as the first son, and proudly gives his name to his boy. So there is no Arthur Tudor at all. Not my brother, not my son.
Katherine does not write of her triumph directly to me. She leaves me to be informed as if I should be grateful to be treated as any other European monarch, as if her good luck does not make me feel worse about the loss of my little boy. She did not even reply to my letter that told her of my grief. All I receive is this gold-enameled boast.
Our ambassador sends us news of the magnificent tournament and feast that they hold to celebrate the birth of a son for Henry and an heir for his throne. The fountains of London flow with wine, so that everyone can drink the health of the new baby. They roast oxen at Smithfield so everyone can share in the royal joy. At the joust—they hold an enormous joust, of course, which goes on for days—for the first time ever, Henry allows himself to fight all comers. He risks himself as if he is a man at last. With a son and heir in the cradle, he can take challenges. He wins convincingly, beating everyone, as if he and Katherine and their son are untouchable.
“Smile,” my husband commands me as we go in to dinner. “It is ungracious to begrudge another man the birth of his child.”
“I am in grief for my own loss,” I say in a sharp undertone. “You ask me to forget my sorrow; but I wasn’t even thinking about them.”
“You’re deep in envy,” he says. “A different thing altogether. And I won’t have a spiteful, envious wife. I will give you another child, don’t doubt it. Be hopeful for the next birth and smile. Or you can’t come in to dinner at all.”
I give him a cold look but I smile as he commands me, and when he raises a cup to toast the Queen of England and her bonny son, I raise my glass and drink as if I can be happy for her, as if the taste of the best wine is not bitter in my mouth.
But Katherine’s triumph is cruelly brief. In March we get the news from London that her baby Henry, the overcelebrated, overpraised new baby, has died. He was not even two months old.
My husband comes to me as I am on my knees in the chapel at Holyroodhouse praying for his little soul. He kneels beside me and is silent for a moment in prayer. He moves and I hear the little chink of his cilice under his shirt.
“And do you think now that your brother cannot have a healthy child?” he asks me, in a completely ordinary tone, as if it is a matter of interest, as if he might be asking me if my horse is going well.
I shift uneasily on the embroidered hassock. “I don’t know anything about it,” I say, determinedly ignorant.
He pulls me from my knees to sit on the altar steps, as if the house of God is our own and we can sit here and chat as if we were in my bedchamber. He is always shamefully informal, and I would rise up and go away but he has tight hold of both my hands. “You do,” he says. “I know you wrote and asked your grandmother if there was anything to fear.”
“She said nothing,” I say stoutly. “And my mother
never said anything about a curse to me.”
“That doesn’t prove that there was none,” he says. “No one would speak of it to you, who must be so hurt by it.”
“Why would it hurt me?” I ask, though I don’t want to hear the answer he is going to give.
“If the curse says that the Tudors cannot get a boy and their line will end with a barren girl, then it is you who will be unable to carry a child,” he says gently, as if he is telling me of a death in the family. I realize that he is. He is telling me of several deaths, and more to come. “Neither you, nor Katherine of Aragon, nor your sister Princess Mary, will get a healthy boy. You will all fall under the curse. None of you will be able to birth a prince, or raise him, and the Tudor crown will go onto the head of a girl and she will die childless too.”
I am gripping his hands as tightly as he is holding mine now. “That is a terrible, terrible thing to say,” I whisper.
His face is gaunt. “I know it. We have to expiate our sins,” he says. “I, for killing my father; you, for your father’s sin against your cousins. I have to go on crusade. I can think of no other way that we might save ourselves.”
I drop my head into my hands. “I don’t understand!”
He pulls my hands from my face so that I have to face him, his anguished mouth, his eyes filled with tears. “You do,” he says. “I know you do.”