Neither Harry nor I are allowed to stay to the end of the feast, the escorting of the princess to bed, and the prayers over the wedding bed. I think it is very wrong and bad mannered to treat us like children. My grandmother sends us to our rooms and though I glance over to my mother, expecting her to say that Harry must go but I can stay up longer, she is blandly looking aside. Always, it is my grandmother’s word that is law: she is the hanging judge, my mother only grants the occasional rare royal pardon. So we make our bows and curtseys to the king and to my mother and to my lady grandmother, and to darling Arthur and Katherine of Arrogant, and then we have to go, dawdling as slowly as we dare, from the bright rooms where the white wax candles are burning down as if they cost no more than tallow, and the musicians are playing as if they are going to go on all night.
“I am going to have a wedding just like this,” Harry says as we go up the stairs.
“Not for years yet,” I say to irritate him. “But I shall be married very soon.”
When I get to my room I kneel at my prie-dieu and, though I had intended to pray for Arthur’s long life and happiness, and remind God of His special debt to the Tudors, I find I can only pray that the Scottish ambassadors tell the king to send for me at once, for I want a marriage feast as grand as this one, and a wardrobe of clothes as good as Katherine of Arrogant’s, and shoes—I will have hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes, I swear it, and every one of them will have embroidered toes and gold laces.
RICHMOND PALACE, ENGLAND, JANUARY 1502
My prayer is answered, for God always listens to the prayers of the Tudors, and the King of Scotland orders his ambassadors to negotiate with my father’s advisors. They agree a price for my dowry, for my servants, for my allowance, for the lands that will become my own in Scotland, and all through the Christmas feast the letters come and go between Scotland Yard and Richmond Palace until my lady grandmother comes to me and says: “Princess Margaret, I am pleased to say that it is the will of God that you are to be married.”
I rise up from my dutiful curtsey and look as maidenly and surprised as I can. But since I had been told this very morning that my lady grandmother and mother would see me before dinner, and that I was to wear my best gown as befits a great occasion, I am not too amazed. Really, they are quite ridiculous.
“I am?” I say sweetly.
“Yes,” my mother says. She entered the room ahead of my grandmother but somehow managed to be second with the announcement. “You are to marry King James of Scotland.”
“Is it my father’s wish?” I say, as my lady governess has taught me.
“It is,” my lady grandmother speaks out of turn. “My son, the king, has made an agreement. There is to be a lasting peace between ourselves and Scotland; your marriage will seal it. But I have requested that you stay with us, here in England, until you are a woman grown.”
“What?” I am absolutely horrified that my grandmother is going to spoil everything, as she always does. “But when will I go? I have to go now!”
“When you are fourteen years old,” my lady grandmother rules, and when my mother seems about to say something, she raises her hand and goes on: “I know—no one knows better than I—that an early marriage is very dangerous for a young woman. And the Scots king is not . . . He cannot be trusted not to . . . We felt that the King of Scots might . . .”
For once, she seems to be lost for words. This has never happened before in the history of England that runs from Arthur of the Britons to my lady grandmother in a completely unbroken line. My lady grandmother has never failed to finish a sentence; no one has ever interrupted her.
“But when am I to marry? And where?” I ask, thinking of Saint Paul’s Cathedral carpeted with red, and thousands of people crowding to see me, and a crown on my head and a cloth-of-gold train from my shoulders, and gold shoes and jewels, and jousts in my honor, and a masque, and the pretend sailing ship with peach sails and everyone admiring me.
“This very month!” my mother says triumphantly. “The king will send his representative and you will be betrothed by proxy.”
“A proxy? Not the king himself? Not in Saint Paul’s?” I ask. This sounds as if it is hardly worth doing at all. Not to leave for two years? That’s a lifetime to me now. Not in Saint Paul’s Cathedral like Katherine of Arrogant? Why would she get a better wedding than me? No king? Just some old lord?
“In the chapel here,” my mother says, as if the whole point of marriage is not about crowds of thousands and fountains running with wine and everyone watching you.
“But there will be another grand service at Edinburgh when you get there,” my lady grandmother reassures me. “When you are fourteen.” She turns to my mother and remarks: “And they will carry all the expense.”
“But I don’t want to wait, I don’t need to wait!”
She smiles but shakes her head. “We have decided,” she says. She means that she has decided, and there is no point in anyone else having a different opinion.
“But you’ll be called Queen of Scotland.” My mother knows exactly how to console me for my disappointment. “You’ll be called Queen of Scotland this year, as soon as you are betrothed, and then you will take precedence over every lady at court except me.”
I steal a look at my lady grandmother’s flinty face. I will go before her; she won’t like that. Just as I expected, her lips are moving silently. She will be praying that I do not become overly grand, that I do not suffer from the sin of pride. She will be thinking of ways to keep me in a state of grace as a miserable sinner and a granddaughter sworn in obedience to her. She will be thinking how she can be sure that I am a humble handmaiden serving my family, and not an upstart princess—no! a queen!—filled with self-importance. But I am absolutely determined to be a queen full of self-importance and I am going to have the most beautiful clothes and shoes like Katherine of Arrogant.
“Oh, I don’t care about that, all I care about is being called to the state of matrimony by God, and serving the interests of my family,” I say cleverly, and my lady grandmother smiles, truly pleased with me for the first time this afternoon.
I know someone else who will care about me walking before everyone, the equal of my mother. I know who will care so much that it will all but kill him. My brother Harry, a little peacock of vanity, a little mountebank of false pride, is going to be sick as a sinner with the Sweat when I tell him. I go to find him at the stables, coming in from a lesson of riding at the quintain. He is allowed to ride at the target with a padded lance, and the target is padded too. Everyone wants Harry to be fearless and skilled, but nobody dares to teach him properly. He’s always begging for someone to ride against, but nobody can bear to let him take any risks. He is a Tudor prince, one of only two. We Tudors are unlucky with boys, my mother’s side of the family has too many. My father was an only child and had only three sons, and lost one of them. Neither he nor my grandmother can bear to let Harry experience any danger. Even worse than that, my lady mother cannot say no to him. So he is a completely spoiled second son. Nobody would treat him like this if he were going to be king one day; they are making a tyrant. But it doesn’t matter because he’s going into the Church and will probably be pope. I swear he’ll be a really ridiculous pope.
“What do you want?” he asks disagreeably, leading his horse into the huge yard. I know at once that his lesson has gone badly. Usually he is sunny and smiling; usually he rides extraordinarily well. He is good at all sports, and fiercely clever in the schoolroom too. He is princely in every way, which will make my news so particularly galling to him.
“Did you fall off?”
“Of course not. Stupid horse cast a shoe; she’s got to be shod. I hardly rode at all. It was a complete waste of time. The groom should be turned away. What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I just came to tell you that I am to be betrothed.”
“Finally agreed, did they?” He throws his reins to a groom and slaps his hands together to warm his fingers. “It?
??s taken forever. I must say, they don’t seem very anxious to have you. When d’you go?”
“I don’t go,” I tell him. He will have been looking forward to being the only young Tudor for the great moments of court, with Arthur gone to Ludlow and Mary still in the nursery, he will have hoped that all eyes would be on him.
“I don’t go for years yet,” I say. “So if you were hoping for that, you will be disappointed.”
“Then you won’t be married,” he says simply. “It will all fall through. He’s not going to marry you to leave you in England. He wants a wife in his freezing cold castles, not one in London buying clothes. He wants to shut you up in confinement and get an heir. What else? Do you think he wanted you for your beauty? For your grace and height?” He laughs rudely, ignoring my flush of irritation at the jibe at my looks.
“I will be married now,” I say, nettled. “You wait and see. I will be married now and I will go to Scotland when I am fourteen, and in the meantime I will be called the Queen of Scotland and live here at court. I will have bigger rooms, my own ladies-in-waiting, and I will take precedence over everyone but my lady mother the queen, and the king my father.” I wait to make sure he fully understands what I am saying, what glories are opening up for me, how he will be thoroughly overshadowed.
“I’ll walk before you,” I emphasize. “Whether I grow any taller or not. Whether you think me beautiful or not. I will precede you. And you will have to bow to me, as to a queen.”
His cheeks flame scarlet, as if they have been slapped. His little rosebud mouth drops open, showing his perfectly white teeth. His blue eyes stare.
“I will never bow to you.”
“Absolutely you will.”
“You will not queen it over me. I am the prince. I am the Duke of York!”
“A duke,” I say as if I am hearing his title for the first time. “Yes. Very good. A royal duke, very grand. But I shall be a queen.”
I am amazed to see he actually trembles with rage. Tears come to his eyes. “You shall not! You shall not! You’re not even married!”
“I shall be,” I say. “I will have a proxy marriage and I shall have all the jewels and the title.”
“Not the jewels!” he howls like a baited wolf. “Not the title.”
“Queen of Scotland!” I taunt him. “Queen of Scotland! And you’re not even Prince of Wales.”
He lets out a bellow of rage and dives away from me, through a little door to the palace. I can hear him screaming with temper as he bounds up the stairs. He will be running to our mother—I can hear his riding boots clattering down the gallery. He will be running to fling himself into her rooms and cry into her lap and beg her not to let me take precedence over him, not to let me be queen when he is nothing but a second son and a duke, begging her to put me in a place below him, to reduce me to the lesser importance of being a girl, to drag me down from being a queen.
I don’t run after him; I don’t even follow him; I let him go. There is nothing my mother could do if she wanted—my lady grandmother has decided it all. I am to be betrothed and to live at court for two dizzy beautiful years, a queen where I was only a princess, preceding everyone but my royal parents, draped in cloth of gold and drowned in jewels. And I really think that the shock to Harry’s vanity will kill him. I cast down my eyes as my grandmother does when she has got her own way and is giving the credit to God, and I smile with her quiet satisfaction. I should think my little brother will cry himself sick.
GREENWICH PALACE, ENGLAND, SPRING 1502
I write to my brother the Prince of Wales, to tell him of my proxy wedding and to ask him when he is going to come back home. I tell him that the day was a great state occasion, the signing of the treaty, a wedding mass, and then an exchange of vows in my mother’s great chamber before hundreds of admiring people. I wore white, I tell him, with cloth-of-gold sleeves and white leather shoes with gold laces. My husband’s kinsman, James Hamilton, was kind to me, he was at my side all day. Then I dined at the same table as my mother and we ate from the same plate because we are both queens.
I remind him, rather plaintively, that they are planning that I shall go to Scotland the summer before I turn fourteen, and I want to see him before I leave. Surely he wants to see me before I go to be Queen of Scotland in person as well as in name? Surely he will want to see my new gowns? I am making a list of everything I shall need and I will have to have a baggage train of a hundred carts. Also, I think but don’t tell him, now I outrank his wife and she can follow behind me and see how she likes it now that I am the newly made queen and she still a mere princess. If she comes to court she will find that she has to curtsey to me, and follow me when we go in to dinner. There will be no more carefully judged equal curtseys; she has to sink down as low as a princess goes to a queen. I long to see her do that to me. I really wish he would bring her just so that I could see her pride humbled.
I tell him that Harry cannot recover from the shock that I go before him on every state occasion, that I am served on bended knee, that I am a queen as great as our lady mother. I tell Arthur that we all miss him at court, though Christmas was merry. I tell him my father is spending a small fortune on the clothes that I shall take to Scotland, while making a note of every penny. I have to have everything new, red bed curtains made of sarsenet, everything embroidered with gold thread. Even so, they think it will all be ready by next summer and I will set off as soon as the King of Scotland confirms the marriage by transferring my dower lands to me. But Arthur must come home to say good-bye. Arthur must come home to see me leave. If not—when will I see him again? “I miss you,” I write.
I send my letter to Ludlow in a bundle with my mother and lady grandmother’s letters. The messenger will take days to get to Arthur’s court. The roads to the west are crumbling and in disrepair; my father says there is no money to spend on them. The messenger will have to lead his own change of horses for fear that there are none available for hire on the way. He will have to spend the nights in abbeys and monasteries along the route, or if he finds himself snowed in or benighted he will have to beg for hospitality in a manor or farmhouse. Everyone is obliged to assist the king’s messenger; but if the road is a quagmire, or a bridge swept away by a flood, there is little anyone can do but advise him to take the long way round, and find his way as best he can.
So I don’t expect a swift reply and I don’t think much of it when, early one morning in April, walking to my room with a candle after attending Prime with my lady grandmother, I see a king’s messenger step from a barge and walk quickly across the quay and through the private door to the royal quarters. He looks exhausted, leaning against the carved column as he says something quietly to a yeoman of the guard that leads the man to throw down his pike and gallop indoors.
I guess that he’s going to my father the king’s private rooms so I leave my post at the window and walk along the gallery to see what is so urgent that the messenger has arrived at first light and the guards are downing their arms and running. But even before I get to the door, I can see the yeoman and two or three of my father’s counselors going quickly down the privy stairs to the courtyard below. Curiously, I watch as they huddle together, and then someone breaks away, runs up the stairs, and goes to the chapel to fetch my father’s confessor. The priest comes hurrying out. Now, I step forward. “What’s the matter?” I ask.
Friar Peter’s face is sallow as if all the blood has gone from his cheeks, as if he has turned to parchment. “Forgive me, Your Grace,” he says with a little bow. “I am on your father’s business and can’t stop.”
And with that he walks past me! Scuttles past me! As if I am not Queen of Scotland and taking up my throne next summer! I wait for a moment, wondering if it would be too undignified to run after him and insist that he wait until dismissed; but then I hear him returning, coming up the stairs so slowly that I don’t understand why he rushed down. Now, there is no hurry; he is dragging his feet, looking as if he wishes he were not going towards my
father’s rooms at all. The advisors trail behind him, looking as sick as if they are poisoned. He sees me waiting; but it is as if he does not see me, for he does not bow—he does not even acknowledge me. He walks past me as if his eyes are fixed on a ghost and he cannot see mere mortals, not even royals.
That’s when I know for sure. I think I knew before. I think I knew as soon as I saw the messenger slumped against the column, as if he wished he had died before bringing this news to us. I step before the priest, and I say: “It’s Arthur, isn’t it?”
My beloved brother’s name makes him see me but he says only, “Go to your lady mother,” as if he can give me orders, and he turns away and slips into my father’s rooms, without knocking, without announcement, one hand on the door, the other clutching the crucifix which hangs from his belt, as if it might give him strength.
I go, not because I have to do as my father’s confessor tells me, for I am a queen now and I have to obey only my parents and my husband; but because I am afraid that they will come to my mother and tell her something terrible. I almost think that I will bar her door so that they cannot come in. If we don’t know, perhaps it hasn’t happened. If nobody tells us that there is something terribly wrong with Arthur then perhaps he is still well in Ludlow, hunting, enjoying the spring weather, traveling into Wales to show the people their prince, learning how to rule his principality. Perhaps he is happy with Katherine of Arrogant; I would be glad even if she was the cause of his happiness. Perhaps she is with child and they have brought us good news. I would even like good news of her. I keep thinking of all the wonderful news that the messenger might have brought, in such a hurry. I keep thinking that Arthur is such a darling, beloved of everyone, so dear to me, that nothing can have gone wrong. The news cannot be bad.