As for me, she ends the letter, as if her situation is of little importance,
matters do not go well. My father will not send the rest of my dowry until I am married to the prince, your father will not pay my widow’s jointure until he has my dowry. I am a pawn between two great kings, and I have no money and little company, for though I live at court I am no favorite, and often overlooked. I see your brother so seldom that I wonder if he even remembers we are betrothed; I fear that he has been advised against me. I see your sister Mary only when your father wants to impress the Spanish ambassador. She is growing in beauty and she is so sweet I cannot tell you! She is my only friend at court. I started to teach her Spanish but she is not allowed to come to me often. I am trapped in London, in poverty, and neither a widow nor a bride.
Could you, do you think, speak of me to your lady grandmother who could at least see that my servants are paid? She could loan me gowns from the royal wardrobe. Without gowns I cannot go to dinner and I have to go to bed hungry if the kitchens forget to send anything to my room. Would you help me? I don’t know what to do, and the men who should advise me are determined to use me to their own ends.
HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, JULY 1508
I go into the dark stuffy rooms of my confinement for the weeks of isolation and silence. I swear to myself that I am not going to think of what my husband said about a curse, that I am not going to consider his accusations—they are ridiculous, he is ridiculous. Everyone knows that it was the tyrant Richard III who killed the princes in the Tower so that he could seize his nephew’s throne. Everyone knows that my father came and saved England from this monster. We Tudors are blessed for this; there is no curse.
The battle at Bosworth shows that God favored the Tudors. My mother married Henry Tudor though she was a Plantagenet herself, the red rose enclosed the white and made the Tudor rose, they conceived Arthur, they had me. This is proof, plain simple proof, of a line that is blessed by God, unstained by sin, free from any curse. It should be enough for anyone; it is certainly enough for me who was raised by my lady grandmother to have a horror of any superstition and heresy, who knows, as she knows, that the Tudors are the favorites of God and the chosen royal line of England. It is God who has called me to my great station, for I am His favorite and hers.
It is enough for me to think also of Katherine who is arrogant no more, but a princess begging to be married to our family, and assuring me that there can be no shadow cast over us. I think of her, reduced to poverty and loneliness in the small rooms allocated to hangers-on at court, while I am in the best rooms in the finest palace of my capital city, and I feel very sweet and tender to her. I write a sympathetic reply:
My dear sister, of course I will write to my lady grandmother and to my father too, I shall do what I can for you. Who would have thought that you would have come to England so grandly—I remember I was so entranced by your gold laces!—and now find yourself reduced so low? I pity you with all my heart and I shall pray for your safe return to Spain if matters cannot be settled in England. Your sister, Margaret the Queen.
I have the pyx in my rooms ready for my time, and my confessor and the good canons of Holyrood Abbey praying for me at all hours. I have no fear, despite what my husband says. I think to myself, scornfully, that he is a man who wears a hair shirt, who belts himself with a cilice, who killed his own father, an ordained king; of course he sees curses and doom everywhere. Really, he should go to Jerusalem as soon as possible. How else can he regain God’s favor if not with a crusade? His sins are not ordinary errors that you can wash away with a few Hail Marys from an absent-minded priest. He is not like me, who was born for greatness with God’s blessing.
I am not afraid of this birth and it is an easy one. The baby is a great disappointment as it is a princess but I think I will call her Margaret and ask my lady grandmother to be her godmother and come to her baptism. The baby goes to the wet nurse’s breast quietly enough but she does not suckle well and I see the woman exchange a glance with one of the rockers as if she is uneasy. They don’t say anything to me and I let them wash me and bind my private parts with moss and herbs, and I go to sleep. When I wake up she is dead.
This time my husband speaks to me kindly. He comes into my confinement chamber though no man is supposed to enter—even the priest prayed with me from the other side of a veiled screen. But James comes in quietly, waving the women aside as they flap and scold him, and he holds my hand as I lie in the bed, even though I have not yet been churched and am still unclean. I am not crying; it is strange that he does not remark on my silence. I don’t feel like crying, I feel like going to sleep. I wish I could sleep and never wake up again.
“My poor love,” he says.
“I am sorry.” I can hardly speak, but I owe him the apology. There must be something wrong with me, to have two babies die one after the other. And now Katherine and Mary in England will hear of my loss and I am sure Katherine will think that there is something wrong with me, something wrong with the Tudors, and “Alas, it never happened for any of us.” Mary is too young and stupid to know that to lose a child is the worst thing a queen can do, but Katherine will be quick to compare me to her fertile mother and her symbol of the pomegranate and press her own case to be married to Harry.
“It’s nothing but bad luck,” James says, as if he has never heard of a curse and never spoken of it to me. “But the main thing is that we know we can make children and that you can carry them. That’s the greatest challenge, believe me, sweetheart. The next one will live, I am certain of it.”
“A boy,” I say quietly.
“I will pray,” he says. “I will make a pilgrimage. And you will rest and get well and strong and when we are old and surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren we will pray for the souls of these little ones. We will remember them only in our prayers, we will forget this sorrow. It will all be well, Margaret.”
“You said about a curse . . .” I begin.
He makes a little gesture of dismissal. “I spoke from anger and grief and fear. I was wrong to speak so to you. You are too young and you were raised to think yourself above fault. Life will teach you differently. You don’t need me to humble you. I would be a poor husband if I were to try to hurry you into the wisdom of despair.”
“I am no fool,” I say with dignity.
He bows his head. “That’s good, for I certainly am,” he says.