The House of Tudor (18 page)

26 Catherine of Aragon in middle age; a portrait by an unknown artist.

27 Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, Henry’s illegitimate son by Bessie Blount.

While Margaret lay helpless at Harbottle, an international storm of accusation and counter-accusation raged over her head. Henry was now noisily publishing his sister’s wrongs to the world and Albany found himself being pilloried as a tyrant and a brute who had torn a mother from her little ones, forced a pregnant lady to flee for her life, insulted and abused an anointed Queen, stolen her jewellery and forged her handwriting.

As for the Duke, he was aghast at the turn events had taken. He had never questioned the sincerity of Margaret’s submission, nor had it ever crossed his mind that a woman within weeks of being confirmed could be contemplating such an escapade - but then nothing in his experience had prepared him for the strong-minded ladies of the Tudor family. His attempts to defend himself and his pathetic pleas to Margaret to be reasonable and come home like a good Scotswoman were disregarded. When the French ambassador tried to put matters in perspective by declaring that the Queen had never been in the slightest danger of her life and had simply run away in a temper when she found she could not have her own way, he was ignored.

The weeks passed and Margaret remained at Harbottle Cattle, suffering acutely from ‘the great and intolerable ache that is in her right leg, nigh to her body’. This may have been sciatica, or possibly a severe attack of phlebitis, and was so painful that the invalid could not bear to sit up while her bed was made and screamed aloud whenever she had to be turned or moved. Lord Dacre was being driven distracted. Although he had repeatedly urged Margaret to seek his protection, he had not reckoned on having to provide for a royal lying-in. His life was not made any easier by the fact that the pain in her leg and reaction after so many months of nervous strain had combined to make the Queen exceedingly querulous. She was demanding comforts and medical attention unobtainable in the primitive Border country, refusing to see the local doctors, and complaining long and bitterly about the miseries of her situation.

At the end of November Dacre managed to transfer his exacting charge to the rather more civilized surroundings of Morpeth Castle, where he did his best to maintain her in the style to which she was accustomed - hanging new tapestries on the walls and displaying as much gold and silver plate as he could lay his hands on. By this time, too, couriers had begun to arrive with affectionate letters from Henry promising his sister and her husband a warm welcome at Court as soon as she was tit enough to travel and, even more important, bringing her a supply of new clothes. Margaret was carried in a chair to see ‘all the stuff which had come from London -gowns of cloth of gold and cloth of tissue, gowns of silk and furred velvet - spread out in the great chamber of Morpeth Castle. Much to Lord Dacre’s relief, the sight cheered her up considerably and she invited the whole household to come and admire-this reassuring evidence of her formidable brother’s regard. ‘You may see’, she exclaimed triumphantly, ‘that the king my brother hath not forgotten me, and that he would not I should die for lack of clothes.’

Her mind at this time seemed to be almost morbidly obsessed with clothes. In spite of the fact that she was still in no condition to wear anything but a nightdress, she was writing ‘in all haste’ to Edinburgh to order more silks, a purple velvet gown lined with cloth of gold, one of crimson velvet furred with ermine, ‘and three gowns more and three kirtles of satin’. She had Henry’s presents brought to her room two or three times a day so that she could gloat over them as she lay in bed; ‘and this five or six days’, wrote Christopher Garnish, Dacre’s second-in-command, with a certain amount of awe, ‘her grace hath had none other mind but ever to see her apparel’.

But although Margaret was able to derive some comfort from the splendours of her wardrobe, there was precious little comfort to be found anywhere else. Still very weak and in considerable pain, and with her whole political future in grave doubt, she was now beginning to have cause for concern about her husband. Angus visited her and the baby dutifully enough, but rumours that he was seeing a good deal of the beautiful Lady Jane Stuart of Traquair (to whom he had once been betrothed) soon filtered through to Morpeth Castle. There were rumours, too, that Angus was thinking of making his peace with Albany and the lords.

Margaret’s year of trial ended in tragedy, with the death of little Prince Alexander after a short illness. Alexander was his mother’s favourite. ‘It hath pleased her to show unto me how goodly a child her younger son is’ Christopher Garnish reported; ‘and her grace praiseth him more than she doth the king her eldest son.’ Both Garnish and Dacre were understandably nervous of the effect the news would have on their sovereign lord’s ‘dearest sister’ and made up their minds to keep it from her for as long as possible. In the end, of course, she had to be told and promptly collapsed with grief and shock. Dacre did not ‘suspect any danger or peril of life’, but his responsibilities weighed heavily on him and he wrote begging Henry to send a physician from London.

It would probably be fair to say that by this time Henry was becoming more than a little tired of both his sisters, whose affairs had demanded so much of his valuable attention during the past year. Margaret had at least been trying to look after his interests in Scotland, but Mary had come dangerously close to incurring his severe displeasure.

Mary’s marriage to King Louis had lasted eighty-two days - an even shorter period than either she or Henry had envisaged - and some unkind persons did not hesitate to say that she had danced the old man into his grave with no thought for anything but her own pleasure. In fact, Mary, who was a kind-hearted girl, spent a lot of her time sitting at her husband’s bedside, helping to keep him amused by singing to him and playing on her lute. The King, surprised and grateful, showed his appreciation by unfailing kindness. ‘The Queen’, he wrote to Henry shortly before his death, ‘has so conducted herself towards me, and continues so to do daily, that I know not how I can sufficiently praise and express my delight in her. More and more I love, honour and hold her dear.’

When Louis’ worn-out body finally gave up its tenuous hold on life on New Year’s Eve 1514, Mary’s position changed abruptly. No longer an old man’s darling, cushioned in luxury and protected from every wind that blew, she had now become a childless dowager, alone in a foreign country and heavily dependent on the goodwill of the reigning monarch. That this could easily turn into an extremely uncomfortable position Mary knew from her sister-in-law, but not even Catherine of Aragon had had to endure the forty days of strict seclusion imposed by French custom on a newly-widowed Queen. This period of mourning or, more accurately, quarantine, was a purely practical measure designed to ensure that if a newly widowed Queen proved to be pregnant, there should be no doubt as to the paternity of her child. In Mary’s case this was important. If by any chance she were carrying Louis’ son, then François might stay plain M. d’Angoulême for the rest of his life.

Mary’s assurances that, to the best of her knowledge, she was not pregnant were not attended to and she was bundled off to the Palace of Cluny to spend six weeks behind drawn curtains in a sturdy, black-draped mourning chamber. It was not an exhilarating prospect for an active, healthy young woman. Added to this, Mary was rather scared of François and even more so of his formidable mother, Louise of Savoy, and immured at Cluny she felt very much in their power. She had been separated from her English ladies and surrounded by a posse of hostile Frenchwomen, handpicked by François’ sister Marguerite. She was suffering acutely from boredom, loneliness and toothache. But all these discomforts were as nothing beside her consuming anxiety that Henry or François might be bargaining her away to the highest bidder while she was cut off from the outside world and helpless to do anything to stop them.

Mary had received a letter from Thomas Wolsey, written during Louis’ last illness, promising that her brother would not abandon her but warning her to do nothing without his advice. Above all, she must be careful to say nothing ‘whereby any person...may have you at any advantage’ and, of course, if any offers of marriage were made to her, she must refuse. ‘And thus doing’, went on Wolsey a shade patronizingly, ‘ye shall not fail to have the King fast and loving to you, to attain your desire and come home again into England with as much honour as Queen ever had’.

This was all very well, but Mary knew she was now once again a first-rate matrimonial prize - and she knew her brother. Terror that he would break his word is apparent in every line of a somewhat incoherent letter written from Cluny early in January 1515, begging Henry to send for her as soon as possible, ‘for as now I am all out of comfort, saving that all my trust is in your grace and so shall be during my life...Sir, I beseech your grace that you will keep all the promises that you promised me when I took my leave of you by the waterside. Sir, your grace knoweth well that I did marry for your pleasure at this time and now I trust that you will suffer me to marry as me liketh for to do...wherefore I beseech your grace for to be a good lord and brother to me.’

Exactly what Henry’s long-term intentions were about his younger sister’s future remain a trifle unclear. In the short term there is no doubt that he wanted her back in England. Neither he nor Wolsey trusted François and they were both afraid that he would use his present advantage to marry off his widowed
belle-mère
to some satellite of his own. Nevertheless, if the King did not intend to honour those promises made ‘by the waterside’, it was a serious mistake in tactics to appoint the Duke of Suffolk as head of the mission charged, among other things, with the task of winding up Mary’s affairs in France and bringing her safely home. But Henry trusted his friend. Indeed he had no reason not to trust him. Like Thomas Wolsey, Charles Brandon was his own creation, dependent on royal favour and royal bounty for his very existence. The King did, however, take the precaution of asking Suffolk for a solemn promise that he would keep his relations with Mary on a strictly formal basis while they were abroad. Henry might trust his friend but he did not altogether trust his sister.

This promise was given at Eltham Palace shortly before the Duke left England. It was given quite freely and there is no reason to suppose that he did not fully intend to keep it - Charles Brandon was emphatically not a man to consider the world well lost for love. There may have been a tacit understanding that if he succeeded in extricating the Queen Dowager on satisfactory financial terms, then the King might be prepared to consider giving them his blessing - certainly rumours of their coming marriage were already circulating - but the putative bridegroom was probably less concerned with thoughts of dalliance than with nervousness over the complex diplomatic chore which lay ahead, by far the most important yet entrusted to him. Suffolk, who was very much more at home in the tiltyard than in the conference chamber, could foresee hours of hard and difficult bargaining over Mary’s plate and jewels and her dower rights. He did not foresee the other and infinitely more alarming complications lying in wait for him.

Henry and Wolsey had been right in their belief that François would attempt to persuade Mary into another marriage and he had already suggested two possible candidates, both of them his kinsmen. There were whispers, too, that he was making other suggestions to the widow ‘in divers matters not according to her honour’, and Mary herself later dropped hints that she had been persecuted by his attentions. Certainly François paid frequent visits to Cluny and may well have amused himself with a little amorous by-play - at twenty-one he was already an experienced and cynical womanizer. All the same, accusations that he was trying to blackmail Mary into becoming his mistress are based on conjecture rather than evidence. He naturally took a close interest in her future, but it was a political interest not a personal one.

The Anglo-French alliance was already showing distinct signs of strain and François was understandably anxious to frustrate any plans Henry might be nursing to use the former Queen of France in a new anti-French alignment with the Spanish Hapsburg bloc. He told Mary he had definite information that her brother intended to revive her betrothal to Charles of Castile, and warned her that if she was foolish enough to insist on going back to England she would find herself being shipped off to Flanders to be married to the prince there. As this was exactly what Mary was most afraid of, such insinuations did nothing to soothe her already overwrought nerves. Embarrassed and affronted by François’ gallantries (in spite of her three months in France she was still almost schoolgirlishly innocent) but not daring to offend him, exhausted by his nagging persistence that she should accept a husband of his choosing, profoundly suspicious of Henry’s good faith and with no one she could trust to advise her, she ‘wot not what for to do’ and was steadily being driven into a course of action which might easily have ruined her.