Full bio coming soon.
From The White Princess
‘I’m not disappointed in a girl,’ he assures me as he meets me in the nursery and I find him with the precious baby in his arms. ‘We need another boy, of course, but she is the prettiest daintiest little girl that was ever born.’
I stand at his shoulder and look into her face. She is like a little rosebud, like a petal, hands like little starfish and fingernails like the tiniest shells ever washed up by a tide.
‘Margaret for my mother,’ Henry says, kissing her white-capped little head.
Catalina noticed that the Scots envoys were much in attendance, negotiating the marriage of her new sister-in-law, Princess Margaret. King Henry was using his children as pawns in his game for power, as every king must do. Arthur had made the vital link with Spain, Margaret, though only twelve years old, would make Scotland into a friend, rather than the enemy that it had been for generations.
From The King's Curse
It is encouraging news for us in London; but far graver things are happening at home than the easy progress of the king’s campaign. Almost as soon as Henry’s fleet set sail, and despite the fact that the King of Scotland is sworn to a sacred permanent peace sealed by his marriage to an English princess, our own Princess Margaret, the king’s sister, James IV of Scotland invades, and we have to defend the kingdom with our army in France and our king playing at commander overseas.
From Three Sisters, Three Queens
The messenger sinks to his knees as if the weight of his words is too much for him to bear. He looks up at me and his white face is agonised beneath the dirt.
‘They took it,’ he says. ‘They took his precious body, out of the mud, broken and bleeding as he was. And they sent him to London for her.’
‘What?’
‘The English queen, Katherine: she wanted his body as a trophy. So they turned him over in the mud and took his breastplate and his coat, his beautiful coat, they stripped it off him, and his gloves, and his boots and his spurs. So he was barefoot, like a dead beggar. They took his sword and his crown from his helmet. They stripped him like he was a spoil of war. They threw all his things in a box, and they put his body on a cart and they have taken it away to Berwick.’
My knees give way then and someone pulls me down to sit on a stool. ‘My husband?’
‘Lord Dacre took him from the battlefield in a box. The English queen wanted his dead body for a trophy, and she has him.’
Image: Princess Margaret Tudor of England, 16th century, sketch in the Recueil d'Arras (Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms. 266), British Museum
