“What’s to do, Your Grace?” John Drummond says gently. “I take it that there is bad news from England?”
“They dare—” I break off. “They shame themselves . . .” I choke. “And I . . .”
I whirl around and I see the tiniest of hand gestures from the older man to the younger, as a shepherd will make to a working dog, a mere movement of a fingertip to tell the dog to curve around the flock and move it smoothly towards the pen. Ard steps forward, his handsome face filled with sympathy.
“What have they done to you?” he asks intensely. “Who has distressed you like this?”
“My brother!” For a moment rage fights with self-pity and then I pitch towards him and find myself held in his arms, his strong arms around me, and I am crying into the beautiful velvet of his jacket as he sways with me, holding me as if I were a hurt child, stroking my hair, and whispering soothing words.
“Ard, Ard, they have shamed me and thrown me down, and they always, always do. They have made me look a fool and feel a fool and set themselves up above me, and they always do this. And I hoped that I would be safe and that I would be a queen for Scotland and that I would have help . . .”
“My dear, my love, my queen,” he says, and it is like a song as sweet as any from the Isles. He rocks me in his arms, swaying from side to side like a balladeer. “My love, my sweet, my beloved.”
“Am I?” I say. “Oh, that they should do this, in concert, against me!”
Behind me, I hear the door gently close as John Drummond takes himself silently out of the room. I hardly hear the key turn as he locks us in, safe from interruption. Ard rocks me in his arms, kisses my wet eyelashes, my closed eyelids, my trembling mouth, kisses my neck, my breasts, and then gently leans me back on the window seat. His warm mouth is on mine and I taste the sweetness of his tongue, and shiver at his touch, and then, almost amazed at myself, feel myself lean back and pull up my beautiful gown, and whisper “Archibald,” as he takes me, and owns me, and I hear my own sobs of temper turn into repeated gasps and then a cry of joy, and I don’t care any more about my selfish brother, or my vain sister, or Louis of France, or anyone at all.
KINNOULL PARISH CHURCH, PERTH, SCOTLAND, AUGUST 1514
We have to marry, at once. Of course we do. We have to marry at once, because urgent desire has taken hold of me and for the first time in my life I could sing and dance and laugh for the power of it. This is my summer: I have never before had a summer when I felt myself to be a woman, when I felt the blood in my veins and the warmth of my skin. I am in love with myself, my smooth young body, the fullness of my breasts, the warm wetness of my secret parts. This is my moment: I have never been beloved by a man who wants me for myself, and not as the emblem of a treaty between two countries. This is the man I have chosen: this fascinating, engaging, charming, delightful man who gives me such pleasure that I cannot bear to be parted from him, night or day.
As soon as I wake in the morning, tingling with lust, I want to see him at once. The court has learned that now we go to chapel very early and that he must be standing beside the royal chair so that I can see him, even if we cannot speak. As the priest celebrates the Mass before us I close my eyes as if in prayer but actually I am already dreaming of how he will kiss me and how he will touch me the moment that we are alone. I feel as if I am running a fever, I am so hot with desire. At breakfast, he must stand beside me to carve the ham and cold beef and now I eat slice after slice for the pleasure of having him lean towards me and slide the meat onto my plate. Sometimes his arm just brushes my shoulder and I look up at him and see his eyes on my mouth as if he too is longing for a kiss. When we ride out his horse must pace beside mine, and I want to talk only to him. Anyone else who approaches us is an interruption, and I can’t wait for them to leave. We ride our horses shoulder to shoulder, so close that our knees gently brush one against the other, and he can reach over and pat my gloved hand on the reins. I dance only with him; I cannot bear to see him partner anyone else. When the pattern of the dance turns him towards another woman and he takes her hand I feel an instant dislike for her and wonder that she can bear to attend my court and push herself forward. I have no interest in the affairs of state, I don’t even look for letters from Lord Dacre, lecturing me about what would be best for England. I have no interest in Katherine and her pregnancy, Mary and her betrothal. Especially, I don’t want to hear about Mary and her double-dealing betrothal to Louis of France. They are far away and they don’t care about me—why should I trouble myself about them? I forget my council, my country, I am even neglectful of my little boys in this burning constant urgent need to be with him—just to be with him.
This is love, and I am fascinated by it. I never knew that it felt like this, I never expected to feel this at all. I reread my romances to see if this is what the troubadours are talking about, and I command the musicians to sing songs of love and longing. I wonder if this is what Harry felt for Katherine— Can he possibly have felt like this? Was it this uncritical desire that made him overlook everything about her that grates on me? I wonder if my silly little sister Mary is in this urgent fever for Charles Brandon? Can Mary, young as she is, fool as she is, long for Charles Brandon as I long for Ard? If she does, then I really pity her—not because I have the better man (though I do), but because she is faced with renunciation and loneliness whereas I, in blessed freedom, can marry the man that I love. I could not let him go. If she feels as I do, she will not be able to let Charles Brandon go, and to marry the King of France will break her heart. Thank God, I do not have to walk that terrible path.
Instead, Archibald’s cousin the Dean of Dunblane meets us at dawn and opens the door to his chapel. I walk down the little aisle in my green gown, with my hair spread loose over my shoulders as if I were a virgin bride. Why should I not? This is just as Katherine did at her second wedding. A choirboy sings a psalm, his voice achingly sweet as the sun comes through the arched windows and falls on our feet as if to say that the path before us will be warm and golden. I laugh when I find that Ard has no ring, and I take one of my own off my right hand and he gives it back to me, putting it on my wedding finger. I don’t even think of Charles of Castile and the ruby. The dean celebrates Mass, and we share the bread, the wine, the holiness of the moment, and then we quietly leave the chapel, and I feel filled with thankfulness that he is free and I am free, that we are young and beautiful, that we are healthy and God has blessed us with desire for each other, and that is now a holy desire. I think we will be happy, deeply happy forever, and I will never envy anyone again, for I have married a young man who could have courted any woman in the world and won her favor, but he fell in love with me. He chose me for myself, he loves me for myself, not for my name or my title or my inheritance. I think he is the first person in the world to love me for myself since I lost my brother Arthur.
“God bless you,” says Archibald’s uncle Gavin Douglas, the Dean of Saint Giles, Edinburgh, and one of the greatest makars of my first husband’s court. “I would write a poem but I don’t think I could capture the joy in your face. I only wish you could have been married in a great ceremony and blessed by a bishop.”
I give him my hand and he bows over it and kisses it reverently.
“You bless me, Uncle,” I say impulsively, bowing my head, and he makes the sign of the cross over me. “There!” I say triumphantly. “And so I have been blessed by a bishop, because I will make you Archbishop of Saint Andrews.”
He bows again, hiding his delight. “I am honored, Your Grace. I will serve you, your new husband, and God.”
Archibald and I ride back to the castle and go at once to my rooms, bold as a pair of young lovers who now have nothing to hide. I am still in my first year of mourning, Ard has broken his betrothal to Janet Stewart. But it means nothing. Nothing can stand in our way. We are married, I have his ring on my finger and I may well have his child in my belly. We walk hand in hand past my astonished ladies and we close my bedroom door in their aghast fa
ces. It is done. I have married the man I love, and Katherine of Aragon, who had to wait for years before Harry would condescend to marry her, and my sister Mary, who will be tied to a rotting lecher, can envy me from this day forward. Everything is changed. They will envy me.
HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, AUGUST 1514
My council of lords dares to tell me that I have forfeited the regency. They dare to tell Archibald that they will summon him on a charge of marrying me without their consent. They even dare to say that Gavin Douglas shall not be a bishop and that I cannot make him Archbishop of Saint Andrews, since another bishop is already nominated. As if the Church places are not in my keeping! As if I have not asked Harry to support the Douglas claim! I am regent and can marry and honor whomever I wish! The council summon me—the regent! regent!—to meet with them; and Archibald and I storm south to Edinburgh filled with rage and determination that no one shall ever question me or my rights.
We wait for the council in the throne room. Deliberately, I stand before the throne with my handsome husband on my right and his grandfather John Drummond on my left. They can see the power that I have to support me now: Clan Douglas on one side, Clan Drummond on the other. But they are mutinous. They send the herald Sir William Comyn, Lyon King of Arms, to announce that they are rejecting me as regent and taking my sons away from my keeping. At the first moment that he is announced with the weighty respect commanded by all heralds, and he comes in, his standard above him, I feel a sudden pang of dread. I am in far more trouble than I dreamed possible. I knew that the council would not like my marriage, but I did not think that they would turn on me. I did not think that they would take my title, my sons, everything. I thought this was my triumph; now, suddenly, it is my ruin.
The herald addresses me: “My lady Dowager Queen, mother to His Grace our king . . .”
There! It is said. He should be addressing me as queen regent but he denies me. Archibald’s grandfather, blazing with rage, steps forward and punches him full in the mouth before he can say another treasonous word.
It is the most terrible act. A herald’s body has to be sacred. He is the untouchable go-between from one warring party to another. Chivalry itself defends him. Sir William stumbles and nearly goes down but one of the lords catches and steadies him as Archibald cries out: “No, sir! No! Not a herald!”
The herald is terribly shaken. They help him to his feet and he confronts Lord Drummond. “This is dishonorable,” he chokes. “Shame on you!”
Archibald leaps in to support his grandfather, as if he is going to push the Lord Lyon down again. “You don’t cry shame on us!”
I scream, “Archibald, no!” and grab him by the arm. Lord Drummond yells “Angus!” like a battle cry, and flings open the door to my inner chamber and the three of us scramble from the room, leaving the lords and the herald and the Lord Chancellor completely aghast. We pitch into my private room and I fall into Ard’s arms and the two of us cling to each other, crying and laughing at the same time at the terrible thing that has just happened, at the truly terrible thing that his grandfather has just done.
“His face!” Archibald still whoops with laughter, but I am steadying and it does not seem so funny any more. I turn and see the black anger in John Drummond, as he flexes his hand where he hit the Lord Lyon. Ard is still laughing.
“My lord,” I say cautiously.
Drummond looks at me. “They will arrest me for that,” he says. “My temper got the better of me.”
“When you hit him!” Archibald crows.
“Hush,” his grandfather says irritably. “That was wrong of me. It’s no laughing matter.”
Ard tries to look serious but an irrepressible giggle bursts out of him. I am not laughing now. I am afraid. The lords will raise this as a serious complaint against us, and I will have to write to Harry with some kind of account of this that smooths the roughness over, and makes us look less like rash fools, brawling in our very first council, as my lords turn against me and defy my authority.
My young husband and I attend the council meeting like two children called before angry guardians, and then there is a meeting of the parliament. Everyone is furious, the lords are angry and divided, the parliament of lesser men is outraged at my behavior. They were already furious with Ard for aspiring to marry me, and disgusted with me for marrying him, but now they are filled with complaints about the history of the Douglas clan.
Old legends that I never heard before are invoked against my young husband as if centuries-old crimes are all his fault. I am as calm and as thoughtful as I can be, meeting many of them individually, trying to explain to them that Archibald will be a force for unity in this troubled country, that he will help me be a good queen for all the clans. We will not favor Clan Douglas; the throne has not been captured by Clan Drummond. But they swear that the Douglas family has made attempts on the throne before, that my own husband the late king made it his life’s work to keep them humble. They say things about the family and about John Drummond that I cannot believe. They say he sold his own daughter to my royal husband. They tell me that Archibald’s other grandfather, Bell the Cat, fought James for the favors of Janet Kennedy and James threw him into prison indefinitely, only releasing him because he needed his sons to lead their men at Flodden.
“Don’t say that,” I interrupt. I can’t bear to think of Archibald’s bright young honor sullied with any of these old lusts. Ard and I are a groom and bride new-come to each other, fresh to happiness. We have no connection with my husband’s lovers, nothing to do with the messy feuds and quarrels of the Scots lords. We are young and clean; this is old, dirty history. “The Earl of Angus is devoted to me. Nothing that his grandfather or his father did matters now.”
They disagree. They say he is the head of the Red Douglases, a family even worse than the Black Douglases, and that they have been a danger to the throne from the time of James II.
“This is ancient, ancient history,” I say. “Who cares about all this now?”
But they are determined never to forget old injuries. Nobody is newborn in Scotland; everyone is an heir to injustice, plotting revenge. When I say that Ard will sit beside me and share the regency, they swear this will never happen. Despite all that I say, though I remind them of their oaths of loyalty to me, to my son, they will not hear another thing but declare they will send for the Duke of Albany to take my place and be governor.
This is the French-raised duke, an heir to the Scottish throne, the very man that my brother Harry said I should keep out of Scotland. “He may not come,” I tell them.
“We forbid it,” Ard says.
Lord Hume declares that I have lost the regency by losing my widowhood. The Earl of Arran says that as a Hamilton he should have a higher place in government than a Douglas. Ard says simply in my ear, “We’re not safe here, we must go back to Stirling,” and I cannot control my delight at the thought of running away from all this anger and unhappiness. So that very night we take our horses and a small guard and we get away from my capital city as if we were a pair of vagabonds and not the ruling regent and her consort—or co-regent as I swear Ard shall be when we return.
STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1514
My sister Mary writes her last letter from England, her last letter as an English princess. She says that when she next writes it will be as a French queen. I grit my teeth at this and remind myself that at least I have chosen my husband and I could not be happier. Really, I could not be happier. I have married for love and I care nothing for the disapproval of the council.
As I read her letter, my natural envy—eighteen wagons sealed with the royal French fleur-de-lys, a more elegant symbol than my Scots thistle—fades away and I start to feel sorry for my little sister. In some parts the letters are smudged into illegibility and I think that she was crying as she wrote and her tears blotted her words. She tells me that she is in love, deeply and truly in love, with a gentleman, a nobleman, the most handsome in the court, probabl
y in the world. She has struck a bargain with Harry, one that she swears he must honor. They have agreed that when the King of France dies she shall be free to marry the man of her choice. Coyly, she does not say who it is, but judging from her childish infatuation for Charles Brandon I guess it must be the newly made duke.
Will you support me? Oh, Margaret, will you be a good sister to me? Will you remind Harry of his solemn promise? The day must come that I am a widow, for the old king cannot live long, I am sure that he cannot. Will you help me to follow your example and marry once for the benefit of my family, and the second time for love?
Her hand wobbly with emotion, she writes that she cannot bear to go to France and marry the old French king without being certain that she has to endure only a short while, that she will one day be happy.
I could not do this without hope of the future. I hear that your husband, the Earl of Angus, is young and handsome—I am so glad of this for you, dear Margaret. Will you be a true sister to me, and help me to be as happy as you are, with the man that I love?
I think: how ridiculous she is—there is no comparison. Ard is the great love of my life, from the noblest family in Scotland. He was raised to lead one of the greatest houses, his kinsmen are members of the lords’ council, his grandfather was Lord Justice, his father died nobly at Flodden, he has royal blood. Charles Brandon is an adventurer who was married for money and then betrothed for profit. He kidnapped a wife and she died in childbirth. He married an old lady for her fortune and abandoned her. He has wended his way upwards by charm, sporting skill, and by being one of Harry’s uncritical cronies. My Archibald is a nobleman, Brandon a stable boy.
But I reply to her kindly, my silly little sister, smiling as I write. I say that I am sending her a book of hours as a wedding gift and that she should pray and think on God’s will; He will take her husband in His own good time. If that day comes I will gladly remind our brother that she wishes to choose her next husband, and I think, but I do not say, that she is a fool to hope to ruin herself, demean herself for love. I say that she must do her best as a Queen of France and as the wife of Louis—I think of him as the old lecher but I do not say that either. I write that I hope she is able to give him a child, though my lip curls even as I write it. How shall such a diseased old man get a son? I say that I hope that she will find happiness in her new country with her husband and I mean it—this is my dear little sister, as pretty as a doll and as brainless. From my pinnacle of experience and happiness I promise to pray for her. I am afraid of what he will do to her, I am afraid for her. I will pray, as she will, that the old monster dies quickly and sets her free.