“She came, and made a speech, and then she left.”
“A speech? She addressed the court?”
“She spoke to her supposed husband the king.”
I don’t even address the weasel words of “supposed husband.” “Why, what did she say?”
Even James, who is listening to this with half his attention, gently pulling the ears of his deerhound, looks up at this. “What did the queen say?”
“She knelt to the king,” Magnus says, as if it makes it better. “She said that when they first married she was a true maid, without touch of man.”
“She said that in court?” James demands, as riveted as I.
“She said that she had been his true wife for twenty years and had never grudged a word or countenance or shown a spark of discontent.”
James is openly laughing at the thought of this aging woman, on her knees, swearing to her long-ago virginity, but I have a strange, terrible feeling, as if I am going to cry. But why should there be anything in this to bring me to tears?
“Go on! Go on!” says James. “This is as good as a play.”
“She said some more.” Magnus loses the thread. “She knelt to him. She was on her knees, her head bowed.”
“Yes, so you said, but what else?”
“She said that if there be any just cause by the law that anyone could say, dishonesty or impediment, then she would go, but if there was none then she beseeched him to let her remain in her former estate and receive justice.”
“My God,” James said, stunned into admiration at last. “She said all that? Before everyone?”
“Oh, more, and then finally she said that she would be spared the extremity of the court and that she committed her cause to God.”
“Then what?” I clear my throat to ask. My heart is hammering. I cannot think what is the matter with me.
“Then she left.”
“Walked out?”
Magnus nods, unsmiling. “She curtseyed to the king and she walked out. The king said she should be called back into court and they shouted after her, ‘Katherine of Aragon, come into court,’ but she didn’t even turn her head, she just walked out. And outside . . .”
“What outside?”
“Outside the women cried out blessings on her, and the men said that she should never have been made to attend. People shouted that it was a shame, shame on the king, that such a wife should be forced to defend herself.”
I rise up from my seat. My heart thumping so rapidly that I think I must be ill. I think of Katherine, confronting Harry the liar—he has been a little liar all his life—and facing him down, before the two cardinals, before the lords, before the men who rule our world, and then curtseying and walking away. How did she dare! What will he do?
“What will he do?” My voice is like a croak. Why can I not speak?
The ambassador looks at me gravely. “The cardinals will take the cause to the Holy Father for a decision. The king has not advanced his case, but the queen has openly defied him and said that she does not trust his advisors or his court. She has demanded to be treated as Queen of England and said that she is without fault. I don’t know what will happen next. I have no instruction, and nothing like this has ever happened in England before.”
“Where is Harry now?”
“He will be going on progress.” The ambassador looks down and clears his throat. “He is not taking the queen.”
I understand from this that it is a breach, perhaps forever. He is taking Anne Boleyn, the mercer’s great-granddaughter, and she will ride beside him in the place of the Infanta of Spain. Harry has deserted Katherine. I understand also what I am feeling in this swirl of emotions. Triumph: that Harry’s words against me should be quoted back into his face: take that, you little hypocrite! And yet I am sorry, I am so, so sorry that it has come to this, that Katherine should kneel to him before all the lords of England and declare that she does not trust Harry or them. The fairy-tale marriage that caused me such agonies of jealousy is over, the beautiful princess has been abandoned, and I cannot help but be glad of it. At the same time, I cannot help a measureless grief that Katherine was my sister and now she is alone.
HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, WINTER 1529
Our court is as bright and as cultured as any in Europe. We bring in the greenwood tree in the old Christmas tradition and we have a piper every night and we dance the wild, fast reels of Scotland as well as the courtly dances of France. We have poetry every dinnertime from the great makars, reciting in their booming Scots, poems about freedom and the beauty of the mountains and the stormy seas of the North. We have ballads from the lowland country and love songs and troubadour poems in French and Latin. James loves music as much as his father did, and he will play on his lute for the court and dance all the night. He is a lover of women and drink—just as his father was—and I say nothing against this during the season of Christmas, for every young man goes roistering and whoring at this time of year and every young man is drunk. I did not bring him up to be a saint but to be a king, and I would rather have a son who was an open bawdy lover of women than the tortured secretive man that my brother has become.
James honors the members of his court who have served him well this year, and gives rich gifts to all his favorites. Davy Lyndsay, still in royal service, never failing in his love and loyalty to the baby that I put in his keeping, is knighted and made Lyon King of Arms—a herald of great importance. This is an especially good choice for Davy, who has spent his life studying chivalry and poetry. Who better to represent James with messages to other kings or emperors? James invests the new herald himself and embraces him in public. “You have been a father to me,” he whispers to him. “I will never forget it.”
The old man is greatly moved. I kiss his cheeks and find them damp with his tears. “Our boy is going to be a great king, thanks to your training,” I tell him.
“He is a great king for he is the son of a great queen,” he tells me.
We receive gifts from England, nothing that shows the loving care that Katherine used to put into the yards of silk that she chose for me, or the embroidered shirts she would give James. These courtesy gifts from one court to another come from the master of ceremonies, as part of his duties, not from a woman who loves her sister. I wonder what sort of Christmas Katherine will have now she is still a wife but no longer beloved; still a queen, but badly served. I have a letter from Mary after the twelve days which starts with the most important thing to her. I would laugh if I did not understand that she is describing the unraveling of Harry’s court. This is the end of order, the order that my lady grandmother encoded in her great book. This is the end of everything:
He let her go before me.
Mary writes with painful simplicity. Almost, I can see her shaking her golden head, seeing again before her Mademoiselle Anne overthrowing the sacred rules of precedence, the order of the nobles, hitching up her skirt and dancing into line before my sister, the sister of the King of England, the Dowager Queen of France.
Maggie, she went before me. It was the ennobling of her father, a perfectly nice man, I have nothing against him; he served as Cousin Margaret’s steward, and he was carver for you—you will remember him. Thomas Boleyn is a good servant of the Crown, I know.
I can hear Mary retracing her thinking, her unending puzzlement.
Harry has made him Earl of Ormond, not only that, but also Earl of Wiltshire, which is no honor to Wiltshire I am sure. His son is to be called Viscount Rochford.
I rest the pages so that I can think. Is this to be her price? Is Harry ennobling the father to buy his daughter’s honor? If this is so, then we may be at the end of our ordeal. Her father straps on the order of a double earldom, her mother becomes a bawd and a countess in the same moment, and the brother a viscount and a pimp. Why not? If Anne Boleyn will accept these honors in return for her own much-vaunted maidenhead then we can all be happy again.
Harry gave them a great dinner to celebr
ate their ennoblement. Of course the queen could not attend so I took her place and led in the ladies and the Duchess of Norfolk came behind me, and we were all about to go to our usual seats when I saw that the queen’s chair was behind the table, beside Harry’s, and while I paused, the master of ceremonies led me to a table beside Harry’s, and Anne Boleyn (Lady Anne as she is now) walked past me, walked up the steps to the dais and sat beside Harry on his right hand, as if she were queen crowned.
The old Duchess of Norfolk and I looked at each other agape like peasants seeing a two-headed pig at a fair. I didn’t know what to do or say. Maggie, I have never been so unhappy. I have never been so insulted. I looked across at Charles and he gestured to me to sit and eat and pretend to notice nothing. And so I sat, and SHE SENT OUT A DISH TO ME! She did. She favored me as if I should be grateful. Harry was watching, he said nothing: neither to stop her, nor to encourage her. She taunted me. I served myself and pretended to eat. I thought that I should be sick of shame. Harry must be mad to treat me so, his own sister. He has put his whore ahead of his wife, he has put her ahead of me—she was my own maid-in-waiting. I think I will die of the dishonor.
I wish you a happier Christmas than we will have. Katherine says that she thinks that Anne Boleyn is determined to convert Harry to the reformed religion and then he will not need to consult the Pope or the laws of the Church but only what his conscience tells him. That’s all they believe in, these Lutherans. But what conscience can he have?
PITLOCHRY, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1530
Just as my brother is waiting for the Vatican to rule on his application for an annulment, the Holy Father chooses this very moment to send a papal ambassador to visit us. This can be no coincidence I tell James, as we ride through the wild country north of Scone, the ambassador’s big horse laboring behind us, as his excellency admires scenery that is, he tells us, as wild as the Apennine Mountains that shield Rome. The Holy Father must be wanting reassurance that whatever heretical books my brother is consulting, whatever challenges he makes to the rule of Rome, that I am, at least, the true child of our sainted grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort, remaining obedient to papal authority. James, my son, is genuinely devout and opposes the heresies of Luther and even the milder questioning of the German and Swiss reformers. Like many children raised in difficult circumstances, he clings to the certainties of the old world. Having lost an earthly father in infancy and defied a stepfather, he’s not going to deny the Pope.
We love these summers, when we ride into the Northern lands that become more rugged and more and more empty the farther we travel. Sometimes at sunset the skies are filled with strange rainbows in wild colors, it does not get dark till late, and dawn comes very early. In midsummer there is hardly any nighttime at all; the Northern lands are the realms of the white nights and the people revel in summertime and drink and dance and hardly sleep at all for joy in the sunshine.
James—just like his father—takes justice with him wherever we go and holds summary courts and tries and sentences offenders. He is emphatic that the king’s peace must run from the lawless Lowland borders to the lawless Highlands. He brings a dream to the Northern clans of a king whose justice will go from the rough Northern seas, where a gale is always blowing, to the troubled countries of the Tyne and the Eden. The papal ambassador admires him and says he had no idea of the richness and power of these Northern lands. I have to admit that until I came to Scotland I too knew little of the men and women of these remote places, but I have learned to love and respect them.
“I did not know, for instance,” the ambassador begins in his careful French—then he breaks off for we have come out of a forest and into a meadow beside a wide, deep river and before us is a complete palace of wood, planted in the meadow like a dream house. It is an extraordinary sight, three stories high with a great turret at each corner, flags flying at each one, and even a gatehouse and a drawbridge that is a tree trunk. As we rein in our horses to exclaim, the drawbridge is lowered over the moat—a diversion of the river which runs, sparkling, all around the castle—and John Stewart, the Earl of Atholl, comes riding out and, on her palfrey beside him, his lady Grizel Rattray wearing a crown of flowers.
“What is this?” the ambassador asks me in bewilderment.
“This,” says James, grandly, hiding his own surprise, “this is a summer palace that my loyal friend John Stewart has prepared for us. Please come this way.”
He greets John and the two men laugh together. James slaps him on the back and praises the extraordinary building as her ladyship greets me, and I congratulate her on the creation of such a treasure.
We dismount before the tree-trunk drawbridge, the horses are taken away to the fields and the earl and his countess show us into their pleasure house.
Inside it is more dreamlike than ever, for the ground floors are nothing but the meadow, richly planted with flowers. Upstairs there are bedrooms in each of the four corners of the palace, and each bed is built into the wall and planted with chamomile, like a scented bower, and thrown with furs. The great hall for dining is heated in the old way with a fire in the center, and the floor is beaten mud swept to perfect cleanness and polished with the passage of many feet. The high table is on a platform, a few carved wooden steps leading up to it, and the interior glows green with the light of the best wax candles.
I look around me with delight. “Come and see your room,” the countess says and guides me up the wooden stairs to the chamber that overlooks the river and the hills beyond. Every wall is hung with a tapestry of silk, and every tapestry is a woodland or meadow or riverside scene so it is as if every wall is a window to the countryside beyond. The windows themselves are wooden-framed and made of perfectly clear Venetian glass so that I can look out at the river and see my horse grazing in the water meadows, or close the shutters for warmth.
“This is a wonder!” I say to the countess.
She laughs with pleasure and tosses her head with the crown of flowers and says: “My lord and I were so honored that you should come to stay with us that we wanted you to have a palace as good as Holyroodhouse.”
We go down to dine. The fire is lit and the smell of woodsmoke mingles with the scent of roasted meat. They are cooking every sort of bird and three kinds of venison. As we enter the room the household stand to salute us and they raise their shining pewter cups. I sit with James on one side and the ambassador on the other, the Earl of Atholl is on James’s far side and his countess at the head of the table of ladies. “This is truly very fine,” the ambassador says to me in an undertone. “Very unexpected. What a treasure house in the middle of nowhere. This Earl of Atholl must be very, very wealthy?”
“Yes,” I say. “But he has not built this palace from wood to prevent James stealing it from him. We are not as they are in England. A great subject may keep his wealth and lands, however grandly he builds.”
“Ah, you mean the poor Cardinal Wolsey,” the ambassador says, shaking his head. “He made the mistake of living more grandly than the king himself and now the king has taken everything away from him.”
“I don’t think it is my brother who is jealous,” I say mildly. “Harry always said that Wolsey should be rewarded for his work in serving the kingdom. I think you will find it is the lady who now lives in Wolsey’s beautiful house of York Place who is behind his downfall.”
The ambassador nods and does not answer. “The Holy Father is very troubled by this,” he says quietly.
“Indeed, it is the worst thing that might happen,” I reply. “And I hear that Lady Anne is a Lutheran?”
He looks grave but is too careful to name the favorite as a heretic. “Do you write to your sister-in-law the queen?”
“I write to my sister Mary, but the queen has been so distressed and so troubled that I have not added to her worries.”
“She has a new ambassador come from Spain to advise her.”
“She should not need a Spanish ambassador. She is Queen of England,” I say shortly. “S
he should be able to trust to English advice.”
He bows. “Indeed. But since Spain supports her, the Holy Father must support her too. And there is no certain evidence against her marriage with your brother. If she would only be persuaded to retire. If perhaps you could suggest to her that she might become an abbess, pursue a life of holiness . . . ? Would she listen to you?”
The musicians from the gallery, the chink of glassware, the rumble of talk all suddenly become dim to me, and the brightness of the hall, the tapestries, the carved wood, the flicker and leap of firelight, suddenly fade. I think for a moment what I would say to Katherine, if I were called to advise her. I think how pleasing it would be to me, how smug I would feel if she were to step from public life into the seclusion of an abbey and there were just Mary and me, us two dowager queens, and no Katherine dominating the court. I think how much better my life would have been if she had never leapt up so high, if she had not been Regent of England, if she had not sent the English army to Flodden with orders to take no prisoners but to kill all that they could, if she had never advised Harry against me.
And then I think again. I think of her as Princess of Wales when Arthur died and left her with nothing. I think of my lady grandmother’s terrible envy and enmity towards her. I think of how she endured poverty and hardship, living on the fringe of court, turning her dresses and darning her hems, eating badly, served worse, holding onto the calling that she believed came from God—to be Queen of England.
“I would not advise her to give up her crown,” I say simply to the ambassador. “I would advise no woman to give up anything that she has managed to win. I would advise every woman to work as she can, and gain what she can, and keep it. No woman should be made to surrender her goods or herself. A wise woman will enrich herself as if she were the equal of a man, and a good law would protect her rights, not rob her like an envious husband.”