“Smile,” my husband commands me as we go in to dinner. “It is ungracious to begrudge another man the birth of his child.”
“I am in grief for my own loss,” I say in a sharp undertone. “You ask me to forget my sorrow; but I wasn’t even thinking about them.”
“You’re deep in envy,” he says. “A different thing altogether. And I won’t have a spiteful, envious wife. I will give you another child, don’t doubt it. Be hopeful for the next birth and smile. Or you can’t come in to dinner at all.”
I give him a cold look but I smile as he commands me, and when he raises a cup to toast the Queen of England and her bonny son, I raise my glass and drink as if I can be happy for her, as if the taste of the best wine is not bitter in my mouth.
But Katherine’s triumph is cruelly brief. In March we get the news from London that her baby Henry, the overcelebrated, overpraised new baby, has died. He was not even two months old.
My husband comes to me as I am on my knees in the chapel at Holyroodhouse praying for his little soul. He kneels beside me and is silent for a moment in prayer. He moves and I hear the little chink of his cilice under his shirt.
“And do you think now that your brother cannot have a healthy child?” he asks me, in a completely ordinary tone, as if it is a matter of interest, as if he might be asking me if my horse is going well.
I shift uneasily on the embroidered hassock. “I don’t know anything about it,” I say, determinedly ignorant.
He pulls me from my knees to sit on the altar steps, as if the house of God is our own and we can sit here and chat as if we were in my bedchamber. He is always shamefully informal, and I would rise up and go away but he has tight hold of both my hands. “You do,” he says. “I know you wrote and asked your grandmother if there was anything to fear.”
“She said nothing,” I say stoutly. “And my mother never said anything about a curse to me.”
“That doesn’t prove that there was none,” he says. “No one would speak of it to you, who must be so hurt by it.”
“Why would it hurt me?” I ask, though I don’t want to hear the answer he is going to give.
“If the curse says that the Tudors cannot get a boy and their line will end with a barren girl, then it is you who will be unable to carry a child,” he says gently, as if he is telling me of a death in the family. I realize that he is. He is telling me of several deaths, and more to come. “Neither you, nor Katherine of Aragon, nor your sister Princess Mary, will get a healthy boy. You will all fall under the curse. None of you will be able to birth a prince, or raise him, and the Tudor crown will go onto the head of a girl and she will die childless too.”
I am gripping his hands as tightly as he is holding mine now. “That is a terrible, terrible thing to say,” I whisper.
His face is gaunt. “I know it. We have to expiate our sins,” he says. “I, for killing my father; you, for your father’s sin against your cousins. I have to go on crusade. I can think of no other way that we might save ourselves.”
I drop my head into my hands. “I don’t understand!”
He pulls my hands from my face so that I have to face him, his anguished mouth, his eyes filled with tears. “You do,” he says. “I know you do.”
LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1512
The king cannot possibly go on crusade without an heir to succeed him. Even his religious advisors know that, but as I am with child again, and getting near my time, he goes on constant pilgrimages to holy shrines in his own country, dispensing justice and praying for mercy for himself at the same time. He has done all he can to prepare for a crusade as soon as a son is born to us; so we, a little country, have one of the greatest fleets in Europe. He has ideas about the way ships can be used in battle—no one has ever waged a sea battle as my husband thinks it should be done. He designs a mighty, beautiful ship, the Great Michael; and he oversees the building of it himself, stripped down to his shirt, working alongside the artisans: the blacksmiths and the carpenters, the shipwrights and the sailmakers. He tries, constantly, to persuade the Pope to make an alliance with the King of France, Louis XII, so that all the princes of Europe can unite in one powerful attack against the infidels who have captured the holy places and defiled the birthplace of Christ.
But the Pope has other plans and makes an alliance between Spain and the Venetians, and then my foolish young brother—completely under the sway of his Spanish wife, Katherine of Arrogant—joins what they are calling the Holy League, which will break the unity of the Christian kings. She makes Harry serve his Spanish father-in-law and drags him into war against France, just as James was hoping that all of Europe would go on crusade.
Everything that James hoped for is overthrown, Europe is divided again, and all so that my brother can pursue his dream of winning Aquitaine back for England, as if he were the heroic Henry V and not a king from a quite different family in a quite different time. I blame Harry for vanity and a foolish young man’s lust for war, but I know that he is under the influence of Katherine and I think of her as absolutely wicked to lead Harry—and England—into a war that we cannot possibly win, which will plunge all of Christendom into an internal battle when we should be fighting the infidel.
How is my husband going to organize his crusade if the Christian kings are fighting among themselves? But all that Katherine thinks of is pleasing her father and giving him an English army for his use. My brother is completely ruled by his cunning wife. I see again the boy who was my mother’s pet, a slave to our grandmother. Once again, he has found a woman who will tell him what to think. She should be ashamed of herself—rescued from poverty by the King of England, but encouraging him to endanger himself. She is thinking only of her own importance. Her mother was a queen who ruled in her own right; Katherine wants to do the same. She hopes to be a royal partner, a queen who is equal to a king. She wants to send Harry to war on a wild goose chase and be regent in his place. I know her. I know her secret ambition is to be like her mother: the greatest woman in Christendom. That is why she married Arthur, so that she could rule England through him. This is why she married Harry, and now she is getting her way.
I think I will write to Katherine and tell her how wrong she is to advise Harry to go to war in alliance with his father-in-law. But before I start my letter, a messenger comes from England with a package for me. When I open it I find inside, carefully wrapped in silk and parchment, a sacred relic: the holy girdle of the Virgin Herself, and a short letter from Katherine.
Dear Sister,
Knowing that your time is at hand I send you this, the most precious thing that I own, that helped me both in my time and in my loss. It is the sacred girdle of Our Lady, which she wore when she gave birth to Our Lord. It comes to you with Her sanctity and my deep affection and hopes for you and your new child. I pray that it is a strong boy. God bless you,
Katherine