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 prepared 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?”