He smiles at me, very charming, and he shakes his head. “You would suggest a sisterhood of queens, a sisterhood of women,” he says. “You would suggest that a woman can rise from the place where God has put her—below her husband in every way. You would overthrow the God-given order.”
“I don’t believe that God wants me ill-educated and poor,” I say staunchly. “I don’t believe that God wants any woman in poverty and stupidity. I believe that God wants me in His image, thinking with the brain that He has given me, earning my fortune with the skills that He has given me, and loving with the heart that He has given me.”
The earl’s chaplain says grace and we bow our heads for the long prayer.
“I won’t argue with you,” the papal ambassador says diplomatically. “For you speak with the beautiful logic of a beautiful woman, and no man can understand it.”
“And I won’t argue with you, for you think that you are paying me a compliment,” I reply. “I will hold my peace, but I know what I know.”
We stay in the palace of green trees for three days, and every day James and the earl and the ambassador go out hunting. Some days they fish; one day it is so hot that James strips down naked and he and the earl and the court go swimming in the river. I watch them from the window of my bower, terrified that James will be swept away by the water. He is the hope of Scotland, he is the future of the country—I don’t like him to be in any danger at all.
On the third day we thank them and say that we have to move on. James kisses the earl and the countess and gives them a gold chain from his own neck. I give her one of my rings. It is not one of my favorites: a ruby from my inheritance.
As we ride away the papal ambassador looks back and exclaims: “Mother of God!”
We all turn. Where the palace had been tall and turreted there are plumes of smoke from the greenwood and the crackle of fire. Little cracks of gunpowder going off under the walls tell us that the fire has been set to destroy the summer palace. James reins in so that we can watch as the yellow flames greedily run up the dried leaves and little twigs and set the bracken roof alight in moments. Then there is a great roar as the walls catch fire and a crash as the first tower collapses into the heart of the blaze.
“We should go back! We could soak it from the moat!” the papal ambassador cries. “We could save it.”
James lifts a hand. “No, it has been fired on purpose. It is the tradition,” he says grandly. “It’s a great sight.”
“A tradition?”
“When a Highland chief gives a great feast he builds the dining hall and when the feast is done he burns everything, tables, chairs, and hall. It will never be used again: it was a singular experience.”
“But the tapestries? The silverware?”
James shrugs, a king to his fingertips. “All gone. That is the beauty of Highland hospitality: it is total. We were guests of a great lord; he gave us everything. You are in a wealthy kingdom, a kingdom like a fairy tale.”
I think James is going a bit far, but the ambassador crosses himself as if he has just seen a miracle. “That was a mighty sight,” he says.
“My son is a great king,” I remind him. “This shows you the esteem of his people.”
I don’t doubt for a moment that the countess took down the tapestries and all the valuables. They probably took the windows out before they fired the wooden walls. But it is a great sight, and it has done its work. The papal ambassador will go home to Rome and tell the Pope that my son James can look higher and farther than his cousin Princess Mary. Scotland is a great country, it can ally with whom it chooses. He can tell him also that I will not side with my brother against my sister-in-law. We are fellow queens, we are sisters, that means something.
STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, WINTER 1530
James is paying a great deal of attention to Margaret Erskine, a pretty twenty-year-old young woman, the wife of Sir Robert Douglas of Lochleven. I cannot like it. She is undoubtedly the loveliest girl at court and there is a spark about her that sets her apart from all the other young women that James dances with and rides with, and—I suppose—meets in secret for lovemaking. But certainly, she’s no commoner to bed and to leave. She is the daughter of Baron Erskine and they are not a family to be trifled with.
“Who says I am trifling?” James asks me with his sideways smile.
“You cannot be doing anything else when you ride into Stirling disguised and kiss the merchants’ wives and then tell them you are the king.”
James laughs. “Oh, I don’t stop at kissing.”
“You should stop at kissing, James; you should see, from England, the trouble that a king can get himself into with a woman.”
“I don’t get into trouble,” he says. “I adore Margaret, but also I have a great liking for Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth who?”
He smiles at me, quite unrepentant. “Several Elizabeths, actually. But I never forget that I have to marry an ally to the kingdom. And I don’t think it will be my cousin Princess Mary.”
“Harry will never put Mary aside, whatever the Pope rules about Katherine. He loves Mary. And see, my marriage was set aside and yet my daughter is not named as a bastard. Margaret is known as Lady Margaret Douglas and received with every respect in London. Princess Mary could keep her title even if her mother is not queen. And her father loves her.”
“He says that he loves Katherine—that won’t save her.”
I look blankly at my son. “I can’t think it. I can’t imagine England without her as queen.”
“Because for so long you have thought of Queen Katherine as your rival and your model,” he says astutely. “You have lived in her shadow, but it is all changed now.”
I am struck by my son’s perception. “It was that there were the three of us, all fated to be queens. Sisters and rivals.”
“I know, I see that. But Katherine is not the queen that she was when she sent an army to destroy Scotland. Time has beaten her when the flower of Scotland could not.”
“It’s not time,” I say with sudden irritation. “Time comes against every woman, and every man too. She has not been defeated by time but by the allure of a common rival, the selfishness of my brother, and the weakness of her family, who should have sent an armada the minute that she was exiled from court.”
“But they didn’t,” James observes. “Because she was a woman, and though she was a queen she had no power.”
“Is that all that defends a woman?” I demand. “Power? What about chivalry? What about the law?”
“Chivalry and the law are what the powerful give to the powerless if they wish,” James replies, a king who was captive for all his childhood. “No one of any sense would depend on chivalry. You never did.”
“That’s because my husband was my enemy,” I say.
“So is Katherine’s.”
James sets me thinking about my daughter Margaret, about little Princess Mary, and about her mother Katherine, my rival, my sister, my other self. If Harry names his daughter as illegitimate then he will have sacrificed his last surviving legitimate child for the Boleyn woman’s promises; he will have no legitimate direct heirs at all. I think of Katherine threatening me with hell if I let Margaret be named as illegitimate—I think once again we go hand in hand into danger together: her life is mine, her horrors are mine.
If Harry puts Katherine aside and denies their daughter then my son becomes his heir, and he could be the greatest king that has ever been: the first Tudor–Stewart monarch to rule the united kingdoms, from the westernmost point of Ireland to the northernmost point of Scotland. What a king my son will be! What a kingdom he will rule! Of course my ambition leaps at the thought of it; of course I pray that the Boleyn woman never has a legitimate son to Harry. When the messenger from England brings me a sealed letter from my sister Mary, I don’t expect good news, I don’t even know what I hope to read.
You will have heard that Thomas Wolsey has died under arrest, an example of how far she is pr
epared to go against a great man of the realm and Harry’s former favorite. Now you see her power, can any of us be safe? She designed a masque, a dance, the most terrible thing ever seen at court, any court, I don’t care what anyone says. That infamous brother of hers and his friends blacked their faces to look like Moors and danced wildly, indecently. Another player was dressed like the cardinal—poor Thomas Wolsey—and the title was “Dragging the Cardinal Down to Hell.” It was commissioned and designed by her father and brother for the amusement of the French ambassador. Thank God that they did not perform it before me or our brother. Harry is anguished at the loss of his old friend the cardinal and I think that he has lost the one man in the kingdom who dared to tell him the truth. Certainly, nobody has ever managed the kingdom like Wolsey. There is no one who can take his place.
The queen will hold Christmas at Greenwich and Anne Boleyn is to be there too, with her rival court. Harry will go from one to the other and receive double gifts. It would be a nightmare except that it has gone on so long that we have become accustomed to two warring courts and now it feels normal. The kings of Europe must laugh to see us.
Katherine is ill with anxiety and I am sick too. I have some sort of weight in my belly which I am sure is caused by worry about Harry and what is to happen next. Charles says it is a stone and that the Boleyn woman has one where her heart should be. We hear that you are happy and your son safe on his throne. I am glad of it. Pray for us, Maggie, for nothing is good in England this year.
STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1531
I learn what happens next in England from the ambassador, though he is almost struck dumb by the circumstances he should report.
He comes to me in my privy chamber, hoping to avoid any public audience for what he has to say. He bows and says that he will speak to my son presently; he thought he would speak to me first. He almost asks me how he is to broach the subject with James. First he has to consider what he will say to me.
“I have grave news from England,” he begins.
At once, my hand goes to my mouth as I think: Is Katherine dead? It is easy to think of her fasting herself to the point of starvation, her hair shirt rubbing her fine skin into infected sores, dying of a broken heart. But then I think—not her: she would never leave her daughter Mary without a protector. She will never retire to a convent or surrender to death. She will never give up on herself or her cause. Harry would have to drag her from the throne, God would have to drag her to heaven; she will never willingly go. Then I think: is Archibald safe? This is a man who has spent his life on the borders between safety and danger, Scotland and England. Where is he now, and what is he doing? These are questions I am never going to ask aloud.
“What news?” I ask levelly. The musicians choose that moment to fall silent and all my ladies, and the pages at my side, and the servants at the cupboard and the doors, wait for his answer. He has to speak out into the quiet room.
“I am sorry to say that the Holy Father has overstepped his authority and made a mistake,” he tells me.
“The Holy Father is in error?” I repeat his heresy.
“Exactly so.”
He had better not try this tack with James. The Pope is guided by God, he cannot make a mistake. But the archdeacon serves a king who says that he too hears God’s voice, and that the king hears more clearly than any other; the king knows better than the Pope.
“The Holy Father has finally ruled on the matter of my brother’s marriage?” I ask.
He bows. “No ruling yet, the Holy Father is still considering; but in the meantime, before the ruling is published, he has demanded that the king take up residence with the dowager princess.”
“What? With who?”
The archdeacon all but winks at me to convey his meaning. “The dowager princess, Katherine of Aragon.”
“The Pope calls her that? Not queen?”
“No, no, it is the king who has said that we must all call the lady by that title. I speak so in obedience to him. He himself calls her his sister.”
“She has lost her title?”
“Yes.”
I absorb this. “So what does the Holy Father say?”
“That the king must avoid the company of a certain lady.”
“And she is?” As if I don’t know.
“Lady Anne Boleyn. The Pope says that the king must renounce her and live with the qu . . . qu—” He bites off the banned word. “The dowager princess.”
“The Pope is ordering my brother to live with Katherine, though my brother swears that she is not his wife?”
“Quite so. That is why we are considering that the Holy Father has been misinformed and made a mistake.”
“We?”
“England,” he says. “You too, Your Grace, as an English princess. You are required to call Katherine of Aragon the dowager princess. You are required to say that the Holy Father has made a mistake.”
Levelly, I look at him, as he presumes to tell me what I am to think, what Harry wants me to say.
“His Grace the King of England has decided that the Holy Father cannot rule the Church in England,” the archdeacon goes on, his smooth voice dropping lower on this outrageous news. “Since the king is ruler in his kingdoms there can be no other ruler. The king is therefore going to be Supreme Head of the Church of England. The Pope is understood to be a bishop, a spiritual ruler, not a worldly one: the Bishop of Rome.”
This is incomprehensible to me. I look quite blankly at him. “Would you repeat that?”
He does.
“Harry has asked you to tell me this? He is announcing it to all the foreign courts? He is telling the Pope that the Pope does not rule the Church?”
The archdeacon nods as if words fail him too.
“And he has told the Church itself? The clergy?”
“They agree with him.”
“They can’t do,” I contradict him. I think of my lady grandmother’s confessor. “Bishop Fisher will never agree. He took his oath to be obedient to the Pope. He won’t change that because Harry does not want the Pope’s opinion.” I think of the great churchman, scourge of heretics, Thomas More. “And others. The Church cannot possibly agree.”
“It is not a question of the Pope’s opinion, but of his traditional right,” the archdeacon parrots at me.
“Apparently he had the right to rule when Harry asked him to send a cardinal.”
“Not now, not now,” the archdeacon says.
I look at him with horror. “This is heresy,” I whisper. “Worse, it is madness.”
He shakes his head. “It is the new law,” he says. “I am hoping to explain to your son the advantages . . .”
“Like what?”
“Tithes,” he mutters. “The Church’s fruits. Pilgrimages, the great riches of the Church. They now belong to the crown in England. If your son came to the same holy decision he too could rule his own Church, he too could be Supreme Head, and then he would receive the Church’s wealth. I know the taxes of Scotland are insufficient . . .”
“You want the King of Scotland to deny the Pope too?”
“He would find it an advantage, I feel sure.”
“James is not going to steal from the Church,” I snap. “James is devout. He’s not going to set himself up as a Scottish pope.”
“The king is not setting himself up,” the archdeacon tries to correct me. “He is restoring the traditional rights of the kings of England.”
“What next?” I demand. “What other traditional rights? The rule over women? The subjection of Scotland?”
The flicker of his eye as the archdeacon bows in silence tells me that Harry will claim these too if he ever can. That woman has inspired him to be the spoiled boy that he was born to be. I believe she is making a terrible mistake. She is showing Harry his power. Will she also show him where he must stop?
The archdeacon is as unsuccessful with James as I knew he would be.
“He dared to suggest to me that we might reform the Chur
ch in Scotland,” my son rages. He comes storming into my privy chamber before dinner when I am alone but for a couple of ladies, one of whom I know for a fact is James’s lover. She takes herself off to the window seat and out of hearing. Anything he wants her to know he will tell her later. Now he wants to talk to me.
“The Pope has been a good friend to Scotland,” he says. “And your brother had no complaint about the rule of Rome until he wanted them to declare his marriage invalid. He is so obvious! He’s so shamefully obvious! He’s tearing the Church apart so that he can marry his whore.”
I can’t argue with my son when he is angry like this.
“And what is going to happen to the Church? Not every clergyman will consent. What is your brother going to do to those who refuse to accept him as Supreme Head? What is going to happen to the monasteries? To the abbeys? What if they don’t bow to his rule?”
I find I am trembling. “Perhaps they will be allowed to retire,” I say. “The archdeacon said there would be an oath. Everyone will have to take an oath. Perhaps those that don’t agree will be allowed to retire.”
James looks at me. “All of them? You know that can’t happen,” he says scornfully. “Either there’s an oath or there isn’t. If they won’t take the oath then he’ll have to call it treason, or heresy to his Church, or both. You know the punishment for treason and heresy.”
“Bishop Fisher will have to leave England,” I whisper. “He’ll have to go away. But he would never leave Katherine without a confessor, without a spiritual advisor.”
“He won’t go,” James predicts grimly. “He’s a dead man.”
SUFFOLK PALACE, LONDON, ENGLAND, SUMMER 1532
Dear Sister,
The supporters of Anne Boleyn—her family who have done so well from her rise and her kinsmen the Howards—have become increasingly unbearable. She has taken up residence in the queen’s rooms and she is served like a royal. You can imagine how I feel, seeing her in Katherine’s chair, sleeping in Katherine’s bed. Now she has ordered that Katherine’s jewels be brought from the royal treasure house for her to wear on state occasions. The crown jewels—as if she were a queen crowned.