Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  Again? I can hardly believe it. Once again Katherine has sent me a confessor to advise me, just as she did after the death of James, after her orders killed James. She knows then, she knows that she has sent me a deadly blow and she hopes to soften it. “Who is he?”

  “Father Bonaventure.”

  “Ask him to wait in the chapel,” I say. “I will come in a moment.”

  More than anger at Harry’s refusal to allow me to come to England, more than frustration at his misunderstanding my situation here—and how desperate for me that he does not have the wit to see the danger that I, my son, and the whole country are in!—more than all of this is my despair that Katherine should conspire with him, safe in the haven of complacent matrimony, and agree that what matters most—more than I! more than their own sister!—is the will of God. That they should invoke God and His holy laws against my all-too-mortal troubles, that Katherine should not write to me as a sister to offer her help to a woman just like her, publicly humiliated, crushed by neglect, trying to hold up her head in a world that laughs behind its hand—this is the worst thing about these smug joint letters that send me a friar and not a friend, that counsel me to return to my husband and say that I cannot come to them.

  How could a woman not say: yes, come, if you are unhappy and lonely? How could Katherine receive Mary who arrived without warning, married in secret to her lover, and yet reject me? How could she be so kind and warm, so hospitable and loving to me for a year and then say later: return to your husband and endure his treatment? How could she say to me: be neglected as I am, be unhappy! Endure desertion! Don’t hope for better? I have no chance of better, there is no chance for you!

  Katherine is my sister, my older sister-in-law. She is married to my brother, she is Queen of England. All these should be reasons for her to be kind and loving and sympathetic to me. She should understand my sense of loss, my hurt, my humiliation. She knows what it is to long for a husband, to wonder what he is doing, what his lover is doing with him. She must have visions—as I have visions, of a young and beautiful woman entwined around my husband’s body, sobbing with pleasure against his naked shoulder. She should help to ease my pain in any way she can. What sort of sister says to her husband, we must teach this young woman to behave according to the Word of God, and not do what is the best for her? How can I think of her as a sister? This would be the work of the wickedest rival and enemy.

  I have no hope of any influence in the council without the support of Harry. If he disowns me I am nobody, in Scotland or anywhere else in the world. If he sides with Archibald against me then I am nothing more than a deserted wife, without even my rents to call my own. If I am not an English princess then I am a ghost, like my first husband, with nowhere to live and nothing to live on. I did not dream that Harry—the little boy who would not learn his catechism—would grow so devout, would speak with God, would speak as God.

  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 dis