Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  I said out loud what everyone thinks: that you don’t make a queen by putting a silk gown on a farmhand’s granddaughter. You can put a gold chain on a pig and it still makes nothing but hams. Of course, everyone in our household repeated it and there was some sort of brawl with the Howard servants—as there have been dozens of brawls. And this is not my fault because I only said what everyone says.

  Anyway, our man Sir William Pennington was getting bested and ran from the fight and took sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, and those brutes of the House of Norfolk ran after him and killed him, killed him before the altar, with his hand on the sacred stone and his blood on the chancery steps. Charles arrested them, and threw them into jail for breach of sanctuary and murder, but the Howards ran to tell the king that their men were defending the honor of the woman Anne—as if she had any. They have Harry’s ear and his attention, they are the new favorites, and now Harry is furious with Charles and me, and I don’t know what we’re going to do.

  We’ve had to leave court—one of our household killed before an altar but it is us who have to leave! We have to wait till it blows over but we have simply no money, we never have enough money, and if Charles is not at court with Harry giving him fees all the time I don’t know how we will manage. And anyway, how can I go to court if she is taking precedence and behaving like a queen? I can’t give way to her. I can hardly bear to curtsey to her. What if she demands me to attend her in her rooms? Will Harry make me her lady-in-waiting? How terrible does it have to be before he sees that he is breaking my heart and Katherine’s spirit, and destroying everything we have ever achieved?

  They tell me that Christmas was very quiet, the court was at Greenwich, and for the first time ever Katherine was not at court but alone at Wolsey’s old house, the More. That’s where she lives now. They have sent her away. The Anne woman showered gifts upon Harry but he sent back the gold cup that Katherine gave him. Sent it back, as if she were an enemy.

  I don’t feel well at all but I suppose it is just worry about all this. Your life, so far away from England and with a good son and a loving husband, seems better than mine. Who would have thought that I would ever envy you? Who would have thought that we would both be happier than Katherine? Pray for us, your unhappy sisters.

  Mary

  And . . . they say that Thomas More will have to resign as Lord Chancellor for he cannot bring himself to swear that Harry is true head of the Church. Harry is tender for Thomas’s conscience and says that he can leave high office and live privately. How many of us are going to have to leave court and live privately when that woman comes in as queen?

  JEDBURGH, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1532

  I ride south to the borders, to join James. He is holding courts, executing sheep stealers and cattle rustlers, regardless of whether they come from the south or the north of the border, promising war with England.

  “I will have peace in the borderlands,” he says tersely. “I will not stop till I get the English out of our sheepfolds and our towers.”

  “This isn’t the way to do it,” I say gently. “You cannot frighten people into peace.”

  “That was the Douglas way,” he observes.

  “It was.”

  “Do you ever think of him?”

  I smile and shake my head, as if I am deeply uninterested in Ard: “Hardly ever.”

  “You know I have to make the borders safe.”

  “I do, and I think you are the king that will do it. But don’t threaten Harry with war. He will only bluster back. He has more troubles in his life than he can solve. If he continues to declare against the Pope, to insult the aunt of the emperor, he will find himself named a heretic king and all the Catholic kings will be authorized to make war on him. That is when you should declare against him. Not before. And now, while he is getting a reputation so terrible that kings will shrink from him—this is the time that you should negotiate with him for whatever you want.”

  “I thought you were an English princess and the Tudors would always come first,” James remarks. “You’ve changed your tune.”

  “I came here to bring peace between England and Scotland, but Harry has made it impossible,” I say frankly. “Again and again I have been loyal to him, but he has not been loyal to me, nor to my sister, nor to my sister-in-law, his wife. I think he has become a man that no one can trust.”

  “That’s true,” James nods.

  “He has moved my sister-in-law to a little house at Bishop’s Hatfield and forbidden her daughter from seeing her. He has put a whore in my mother’s rooms. He has gone too far. I cannot support my brother, I have to cleave to my sisters. I cannot be on his side.”

  James looks at me, measuring my intent. “Yet when he calls for you, you’ll go running to him.”

  “Not this time,” I say. “Not ever again.”

  WESTHORPE HALL, ENGLAND, AUTUMN 1532

  Harry is preparing another state visit to France and is spending a fortune on gowns and jewels, horses and jousts to impress Francis of France (ransomed home but proud as ever). I have said I am too ill to go, I cannot bear the thought of it and I have such a heaviness in my belly and my bowels that I truly am too ill to face it. I couldn’t dance at such a feast, my feet would not lift. When I think of the Field of the Cloth of Gold when we were so young and so happy! I could not sail to France again with a shameless woman in the place of the true queen.

  Harry does not think of taking Katherine, he has not even seen her this year. He sends her the coldest of messages and she has to move house again and go to Enfield, because so many people are visiting her that Harry is shamed. I write to her, but Charles says that I may not go. It would displease Harry too much and I have to show loyalty to him, my brother and king, before anyone else. I have to greet the Boleyn woman with the respect due to the greatest woman in the land. I don’t dare say a word against her. I do it. I do everything that Harry and Charles ask of me, with a heart like stone, and when she sends out a dish to me I pretend to eat while my stomach turns over.

  She is all smiles. All smiles and glitter in Katherine’s jewels. She shines like poison.

  I have not seen Katherine for ten months, not for all this year, and I used to see her almost every day. She does not write to me often, she says that there is nothing for her to say. There is this terrible gulf in my life where she used to be. It is as if she were dead, as if my brother had wiped her from the face of the earth. You will think I am exaggerating but I truly feel that Harry has killed her—as if a king could execute a queen!

  At any rate, I shall not go to France with the woman Anne. None of us will. And I hear that none of the royal ladies of France will greet her. How can they? She is Harry’s mistress and her father has a title so new that no one can remember it and everyone still calls him Sir Thomas out of habit. The only companions she can command are those who support her ambition: her sister, her sister-in-law, and her mother—and the gossips say that Harry has had all three of them. They are hated all round England. She and Harry had to come home early from this year’s progress because she was booed whenever she was seen.

  I swear that sometimes I wake in the morning and I forget that all this has happened. I think Harry is a handsome king new-come to his throne, Katherine a beloved queen and his most trusted advisor, and I am a girl again, and for a moment I am happy, and then I remember and I am filled with such a terrible sickness that I retch up bile as green as envy. Thank God that our dear mother died before seeing this woman sitting in her place and bringing such shame on our sister, on us and on our name.

  Mary

  HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, WINTER 1532

  Davy Lyndsay comes to court for a poetry joust. We hold a “flyting,” when one poet laughingly abuses another in a stream of extempore insults. James is witty and he has the court roaring at his abuse of his companion, complaining of everything from his terrible snoring to outrageous claims that he gets his rhymes from a book. Davy replies with a strong complaint about James�