It is Katherine behind every word of this letter, Katherine behind the quotation from Saint Paul, Katherine demanding reconciliation with my husband, Katherine defining marriage as a heavenly sacrament from which there is no escape. Katherine—whose husband has christened and acknowledged a bastard son—is of course determinedly against divorce, against any divorce.
Fool that I am, I should have thought of this. Katherine is never going to let the thought of divorce get anywhere near Harry’s butterfly concentration. Instead, she sends me an Observant Friar to shout at me and bring me, as one did before, to a true sense of my own misery and the belief that all the wrongs that have come to me have been brought down on me by God, and that I had better accept His will.
In the shadowy darkness of the chapel, as the sun sets over the loch outside and the priest lights candles on the altar, Father Bonaventure reproaches me for forgetting my duty as a wife and mother, for going to England and deserting my son and husband in Scotland. He suggests that it is no surprise that a nobleman like Archibald should live in my house and draw my rents in my absence. He is my husband in the eyes of God; everything that I own is his. Why should he not live at Newark Castle and hunt my game? What can I possibly say against Archibald living in our house? He is my husband, suffering my absence without complaint.
I am so humiliated at the thought of Archibald living with Lady Janet Stewart, her sitting at the foot of my table as his wife, and presenting his baby to my tenants, that I cannot even cite this against him. Kneeling beside the altar in the chapel I rest my face in my hands and I just whisper: “But, Father, my husband has broken his marriage vows, and in public. Everyone knows. He loves me not.”
The stern friar interrupts me: “You deserted him, Your Grace,” he says. “You left him to go to England.”
“He said he would come too!” I gasp.
“But did he not welcome you on your return to Scotland? Did he not meet you as your husband at Berwick? Did you not openly go to the bedchamber as husband and wife? Did he not forgive you for leaving him and take you into his keeping again?”
Katherine has told him this. She has betrayed my confidences, perhaps even reading from my letter, of my bliss in his arms, of our hopes of a new baby.
“He will come here to see you,” Friar Bonaventure says. “He has asked me to request that you receive him. The Queen of England requests that you receive him.”
“She said that herself?”
“Receive him as a husband.”
“Father, he has deserted me. Am I to live with a man who cares nothing for me?”
“God loves you,” he says. “If you treat your husband with the love and respect that is due to him, God will kindle love for you in his heart again. Many marriages have difficult times. But it is God’s will that you live together in harmony.” He hesitates. “It is the king’s will also. And the queen’s sisterly advice.”
I have no choice. Katherine’s sisterly advice will rule my life. I shall live as she wishes, I am to demonstrate to Harry, to the world, that marriage is indissoluble, that it lasts to death. She will have no mercy, she will make no allowances. All Tudor marriages have to last till death. I have become her example.
Father Bonaventure comes and goes, his words falling on the stony ground of my despair. Archibald does not risk a visit. But I am not spared Katherine’s unending supply of spiritual advisors, for Father Bonaventure’s place is taken by another. As reliable as automata, as one little figure goes by—tick-tock—another takes his place and a new Observant Friar arrives at my palace of Linlithgow, wound up and sent on his way, as soon as Katherine hears that I refused to meet Archibald, and Harry hears that I am writing to the French. Katherine is anguished about my immortal soul and determined that no marriage shall ever be escaped, Harry thinks only about his alliance with France. He does not see that if he will not support me, I have to turn again to the absent French regent and try to work with him. Now they send me Friar Henry Chadworth, minister general of the Observant Friars, a domineering, highly educated man, who has rarely spoken with a woman since his mother sent him off to the monastery.
He has no patience with any woman, none at all with me. They have tasked him to break my willful spirit and reduce me into loving communion with God, with my husband, and with my brother’s plans.
“They don’t understand,” I say to Friar Chadworth, with as much patience as I can muster. “Father, it is no good telling me to reconcile with my husband. He does not stay at home with me. He does not care for my interests or the interests of my son. He steals from me. Are you saying that I should let him take my lands?”
“These are his lands. And he is a faithful servant of the king,” Friar Chadworth says.
“He is certainly a well-paid servant of the king,” I say smartly. “Thomas Dacre throws a fortune at him and at all the border lords who cause trouble and infect the whole of Scotland with anger and division.”
Now that I am estranged from Archibald and all the Douglases, a few of the lords of the council trust me with the truth. They show me that Thomas Dacre brings distrust and disunity to Scotland as if he is determined that we should tear ourselves apart and save him the trouble of invading.
“God made you an English princess,” Friar Chadworth says, his voice raised over mine. “Your duty is to God and to England.”
I look at him as mutinously as if I were still a princess in the schoolroom. “I owe a duty to me, myself,” I say. “I want to be happy. I want to see my son grow to be a man. I want to be wife to a good man. I won’t give up on these ambitions for the good of my country or the good of the Church, and I certainly won’t give them up only because my sister-in-law the queen would prefer it. She wants to prove that an unfaithful husband is still married. But I don’t.”
“That is a sin,” he says flatly. “And God and the king will punish it.”
The friar gives me letters from my sisters, Mary and Katherine. Mary says that she has taken a long time to recover from the birth of little Eleanor but her husband has been attentive and the king sent his own physician. She says that she has had a little velvet cape made so that she can sit up in bed and receive well-wishers in her great bed of state. She says how funny it is that the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, whom I might have married, has died, and that his grandson, whom she might have married, is the new emperor. Just think! she writes joyously. You might be dowager empress now, and I your heiress. Empress! Both of us! How very funny! Of course, there is nothing funny about this. It is the very reason that I decided against the Holy Roman Emperor and only came to my senses too late. This is not funny at all. She says that Harry is irritated that he was not offered the royal diadem of emperor and that Katherine seems very low.
It’s not surprising. She is finding the blessing of Bessie Blount with a boy quite mystifying. We all went to Walsingham hoping that God would give a boy to Katherine; but He gave one to Bessie instead—His ways are mysterious indeed.
Then she says that they will all go to France to celebrate a new treaty with the French next year. She says that she can hardly wait to visit France again and that it is to be a great event. Charles is to have new jousting armor, she is to have a dozen new gowns.