Of course Mary will listen to scandal against me, and naturally she repeats it. It is wholly in her interest to suggest that I am no true wife, no true Tudor, no true queen. If Harry can be convinced that I am no true mother either then he will disinherit my son. Mary may urge me to a spotless life, but she knows that the real world is not an easy one for a woman with a wicked husband. I have to live as a woman alone; people are bound to gossip. But will Mary let them gossip so much that they turn against my innocent son?
I wonder what Katherine makes of this hidden jostling for inheritance. I wonder how bitter it is for her, whose fault it is that there is no Tudor prince. I wonder if she ever wavers in her loyal love towards my sister, when Mary’s marriage is blessed and she is fertile, and as soon as one Henry dies he is replaced with another? Mary goes on and on having babies, and Katherine has clearly stopped.
England is at peace with Scotland after Albany leaves, and I thought I could make them keep the peace. But Harry sends the son of the Duke of Norfolk, the murderer of Flodden, to arm the North, and there is no doubt that he plans to ruin the country that marched against him. They will do it Dacre’s way—by making a desert of the borderlands. Every building they tear down, every thatch they fire, every castle they destroy. They leave not a sheaf of wheat in the field, not a stook of hay. Not an animal survives the gleaning, not a child is left standing. The poor grab what goods they have left and rush like a tumbling stream of terror north or south, wherever they think they might find help. The soldiers steal their goods and harry them on their way, the women are abused, the children screaming with terror. It is Dacre’s plan to make a desert of the borders so that no army can ever cross them again, and by the start of the summer he has conquered the very land itself—nothing will grow, nothing will ripen, nothing will yield. When I came to Scotland these were fertile wastes where any man could make a living if he did not mind the empty roads and the tiny villages. Any man could seek a night’s rest at any of a thousand little castles where strangers were a rarity and hospitality a law. Now the land is empty. Only the wolves run through the borders and their howls at night are like a lament for the people who once lived here, who have been wiped out by the malice of England.
LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1523
My son James and daughter Margaret and I have a summer together as a true royal family at the beautiful palace beside the loch where I have spent so much time—happy times and mourning times. James rides out every day, his master of horse offering him bigger and stronger horses as he grows in confidence and strength. His carver, Henry Stewart, rides with him. He’s a young man in his midtwenties and he has a natural grace and charm that James admires and that I am eager he should copy. Unusually for a Scot, Henry has light brown hair, which curls around his head and tumbles down the nape of his neck, like a statue of a Greek god. He is no pretty boy; he is hard, as all these young men are, from families accustomed to war, but he is always merry. He has the most enchanting smile and his brown eyes dance when he is laughing. Together with the other young men of the court, he teaches James all the games of mounted skill: throwing a lance, shooting an arrow from the saddle, picking up rings on his lance from the ground, and—we all laugh at this—catching a thrown handkerchief on the tip of his lance, as if a lady were offering him her favor.
“Throw for me, Lady Mother!” James demands, and I lean over the tilt yard royal box and drop a handkerchief down for him, and he spurs forward and misses it over and over again until he catches it, and his companions and I applaud.
The Scots lords beg the Duke of Albany to return, but I don’t. In his absence Harry writes to me about a lasting peace treaty between England and Scotland, and peace for the borderlands. He writes a long, thoughtful letter, as if his insults had never been. He writes about the care of his nephew, my son, acknowledging that James is the heir of both England and Scotland. He writes that God has not yet blessed him and the queen with a boy, no one can say why—God’s will cannot be questioned—but it may be that one day James will be called to be king of a united island. Dizzy with ambition, I think that there will never have been a king like James since Arthur of Britain. Cardinal Wolsey writes to me with his customary respect—I can hardly believe that he dines nightly with my estranged husband’s uncle and hears nothing but ill of me. Even Lord Dacre changes his tone, now I am acknowledged once again as a princess of England and Dowager Queen of Scotland—and with Albany back in France, I am the only regent.
There is no reason that my son should not be crowned king next spring, when he will be twelve. Why not? He has been raised to be king, he knows it is his destiny, he has been tutored as a king and guarded faithfully and constantly by Davy Lyndsay and served all his life on bended knee. Nobody meeting him for the first time and seeing him gracious and cautious could doubt for a moment that this is a boy coming into manhood, coming into majesty. Twelve is a good age for a boy to come into his own—old enough for a marriage, so why not old enough for a coronation? What better way to unify the kingdom than the coronation of the king?
Just as I have decided to push this through, against the lords who would rather wait, the Duke of Albany returns without warning, determined on war with England, and Norfolk’s son, the Earl of Surrey—a cruel commander and the son of a cruel commander—destroys the town of Jedburgh and blows up the abbey to show English power over defenseless Scots.
I write to Harry in despair. This is not the way to persuade the Scots lords to accept my son as king! If he wants to command Scotland through James and me he has to give me money to bribe the council, he has to show me as a peacemaker. If he wants to do it by force he had better bring an army to Edinburgh, and impose a rule of law; torturing the poor people of the borders does nothing but make them more furiously opposed to England and the lords more suspicious of me.
Of course, Albany has to respond to the challenge and he brings his fresh troops from France against England with heavy cannon and thousands of mercenaries. This time he brings with him a great army. I am completely torn. Of course I want to further the power and influence of Scotland, of course I am thrilled at the thought of a new border for a new king—if Albany could push the border south and take Carlisle and Newcastle into Scotland then my son would have the great inheritance that his father dreamed for him.
“And the White Rose our ally will invade from the south at the same time,” Albany promises me, confident of my support.
I put a hand on the cool stone of the chimney breast. It steadies me. The great terror of our childhood, as Tudor children, was the coming of the other—the other royal family, our mother’s side of the family—the Plantagenets. Always fertile, always ambitious, my mother’s many sisters and their many children were always on the edge of our kingdom looking for a chance to return. The White Rose—as they call him—is the last of the very many. Richard de la Pole, my mother’s first cousin, has seen one brother after another die in battle against my father or on my father’s scaffold. My father swore an oath that no one from the old royal family would ever take back what the Tudors won at Bosworth, and I have been raised to think of any pretender as a nightmare enemy to our safety and our power.
They were the terrors of my childhood; nothing was as bad as learning that one of our cousins had disappeared from court into open enmity. I can remember even now my mother’s aghast expression when she realized that yet another of her kin had turned against us. Whatever the benefits for my son, I could never join with a Plantagenet cousin against my Tudor brother. Albany cannot have known this when he sought such an ally. I cannot tolerate a Plantagenet. I cannot imagine friendship with this enemy. I could have considered an invasion of England—I would have supported it as an addition to my son’s power and the breadth of his kingdom—I could tolerate an alliance with France; but never, never, never with one of my cursed cousins.