It’s a tragic piece of history but completely inspiring for a novelist! Thinking of Katherine issuing an order of no prisoners—in effect, an order to murder the wounded and men trying to surrender—against her sister-in-law’s husband inspired me to tell this novel as the story of three sisters: the beautiful and indulged Dowager Queen of France; the well-known Katherine of Aragon, whose reign started with such hopes and ended in sorrow; and the almost-unknown Margaret, whose life was a struggle for political power and personal happiness.
With this in mind I was struck by how their histories intertwined and reflected each other. They all three experienced arranged marriages, were widowed, and remarried the men of their choice. They all three lost children in infancy. They all three depended on the goodwill of Henry VIII, they all three fell from his favor, all three were threatened by the rise of Anne Boleyn. They were all born princesses, but experienced debt and even poverty. They met as three girls before Katherine’s marriage, and then again as women who had been widowed when Margaret returned to London; they worked together when they pleaded for the apprentices.
It is an unusual Tudor woman who hoped for love in marriage. Social historians would say that elite marriages were almost all arranged contracts until the eighteenth century. But in Margaret and her sister Mary we see two Tudor women—indeed Tudor princesses—with powerful romantic ambitions acting independently, even defying their male guardians. Margaret was a strikingly modern woman in her desire to marry for love, to divorce an unsatisfactory husband and marry again, and still hope to retain political power and the custody of her children. That she managed to do any of this in a world where the law and the Church were designed to serve men, in a country which was violent and dangerous, at a time when neither Scotland nor England had ever had a ruling queen, is a testament not to irrationality but to determination, ability, and passion.
Margaret’s feelings towards her three husbands can only be a matter of speculation in the absence of any personal record. I suggest that she came to love the husband who made her queen and perhaps grieved deeply for his loss. Certainly, it is said that she never spoke of him publicly after his death. That she was deeply and disastrously in love with Archibald Douglas is demonstrated by her recorded actions—the private marriage, the attempt to promote him to the council, and their reconciliations. Their nightmare flight to England was as I describe, but why he stayed in Scotland and whether he intended to be unfaithful to her from the very beginning of their married life is something that historians don’t yet know, and may never discover. We know that he called Janet Stewart his wife, and that they had a daughter who took his name; but he returned more than once to Margaret. In the novel I suggest that she was always drawn to him, despite his infidelity and disloyalty; certainly we know that she was thinking of him on her deathbed:
I desire you . . . to beseech the King to be gracious to the Earl of Angus. I beg God for mercy that I have so offended the Earl. (Henry VIII, Letters and Papers, vol. 16, October 1541, 1307)
My thanks go to the historians who have explored this wonderful character and her times; following is a list of the books that I studied in order to write this fictional portrayal of Margaret. I also visited her principal houses and I highly recommend a visit to the castles and palaces of Scotland. Ruined or restored, they are truly beautiful, a fitting backdrop to the story of such a complex and interesting woman.