“No need for them to meddle,” Davy asserts. “She comes to be his wife, she’s not a regent. And we need the money she would bring. You won’t get a dowry like hers from Scots girls like Margaret Erskine!”
“Princess Madeleine of France it is then,” I say. “Unless we hear good news from England.”
Davy Lyndsay looks at me with a wry smile. “You hope for good news from England?”
“Not really, not any more. I never have good news from England any more.”
HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1533
We don’t have good news. Harry himself writes to me in the New Year: Sister,
It is with great pleasure that I write to tell you that I am married to the Marquess of Pembroke, Lady Anne Boleyn, a lady of unimpeachable virtue and reputation, who has consented to be my wife, as my previous alliance was no marriage—as every scholar now agrees. Queen Anne will be crowned in June. The Dowager Princess of Wales will live quietly in the country. Her daughter, Lady Mary, will be a respected lady and serve in the queen’s rooms.
LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1533
It is over then, I think.
It is over, all over, for Katherine. My rival and my sister, my enemy and my friend, is finished with this final blow to her pride, her name, her very being. They move her again, this time to an old, ill-kept bishop’s palace, Buckden in Cambridgeshire, with a reduced household and too small an allowance to maintain her position as queen. She is poor again, just as she was when she was eating old fish. I hear that she still wears a hair shirt under her gowns, and now she patches her sleeves and turns her hems. But this time she cannot draw on her credit and her youthful courage and hope for better days. She is alone. Her confessor, Bishop Fisher, is under house arrest, her daughter kept from her. Lady Mary is not allowed to see her mother; she cannot even go to court unless she curtseys to Anne Boleyn as queen.
She is her mother’s daughter.
She won’t do that.
I am in a better place than both my sisters. I cling to this little joy, as stubborn as when we were girls jockeying for supremacy. I am married to a good man, I am seated in my little stone room at the top of my castle, I can see my country at peace around me, and my son is recognized king. I wish I had said good-bye to Katherine, I did not even know that I should say good-bye to Mary until I got her letter: Dear Sister, The pain in my belly is worse; I can feel a growth and I cannot eat, they doubt that I will see Christmas. I was spared the coronation—the wedding was held in secret because her belly was growing—and I doubt that I will see the birth of the Boleyn bastard. God forgive me but I pray that she miscarries and that the swelling of her belly is a stone like mine. I write to Katherine but they read my letters and she cannot reply, so I don’t know how she is. For the first time in my life I don’t know how she is and I have not seen her for nearly two years.
It seems to me now that we were three girls together with so much to hope for, and that it is a hard world that has brought the three of us to this. When men have authority over women, women can be brought very low—and they will be brought very low. We spent our time admiring and envying each other and we should have been guiding and protecting each other. Now I am dying, you are living with a man not your husband, your true husband is your enemy, your daughter is estranged from you, and Katherine has lost her battle against the prince she married for love. What is the point of love if it does not make us kind? What is the point of being sisters if we do not guard each other? M.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As the book list shows, there are few biographies about Margaret, Dowager Queen of Scotland. Many accounts of her are frankly hostile. She suffers (as do so many women in history) from being so slightly recorded that we often don’t know what she was doing and we almost never know what she was thinking. The jigsaw of history gives a picture of abrupt changes of course and loyalties, and so many historians have assumed that she must have been either incompetent or irrational. They explain this by suggesting that she was in the grip of megalomania or lust, or more simply (and traditionally) a typical changeable woman.
Of course, I reject the concept of a “nature” of women (especially if it is said to be morally and intellectually weak), and in the case of Margaret, I think she was, without doubt, more thoughtful and strategic than the she-wolf/dolt model of female behavior. This novel suggests that Margaret probably did the best she could in circumstances which were beyond many people—male and female. Everyone seeking power in Europe in the late medieval period changed loyalties with remarkable speed and lack of honor. For Margaret, like her male enemies and friends, the only way to survive was to change her allies, plot against her enemies, and move as swiftly and as unexpectedly as she could.
She was born in 1489 as the second-oldest child of the arranged marriage of Elizabeth of York—a Plantagenet of the former royal family—and Henry Tudor, the victor of the Battle of Bosworth, and I believe that this sense of being the first generation born to a new dynasty was as powerful for her as for her better-known brother Henry VIII, giving them both a sense of self-importance and insecurity. I think she may always have had a sense of her own significance, as the oldest Tudor girl, and of inferiority: as a female and not one of the important Tudor male heirs. She was the plainer older sister to a child who was to become a famous beauty, and then a young wife to a much older husband in a marriage arranged for political gain.
I wrote her story in a fictional form, in first person present tense, because I wanted to be able to draw on this psychological explanation and show it in her character. I wanted to describe her inner experience of three marriages, of which only the outward show is recorded. There is no account of what she felt when she lost the custody of her daughter Margaret, nor how she felt leaving her son James, nor her grief at the death of Alexander. The rules of writing history mean that a historian can only speculate about her emotions; but a novelist is allowed, indeed obliged, to re-create a version of them. This is where historical fiction—the hybrid form—does something that I find profoundly interesting—takes the historical record and turns it inside out; the inner world explains the outer record.
Some scenes in this novel are history. Margaret’s arrival at Stirling Castle with her husband’s bastards bouncing out to greet her is directly drawn from Maria Perry’s biography:
Margaret, who must have heard stories of her husband’s “past,” was taken aback to find her dower castle was used as a nursery for the King’s illegitimate children. There were seven in all. (Perry, p. 45)
Margaret’s husband’s devout religious observance, sense of guilt, and zestful promiscuity were reported too. It was the tragedy of her young life when he was killed at Flodden, and the theft of his body as a trophy is true, and was indeed ordered by Margaret’s sister-in-law, Katherine of Aragon.