Margaret the First

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THE WOMAN HAD EIGHT CHILDREN. THE FIRST, CALLED TOM, IN 1603, the final year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was five daughters and three sons, and she dressed them richly but simply and cleanly to ward off sharkly habits. Margaret was the youngest. She made the world her book, took a piece of coal and marked a blank white wall. Later, she made sixteen smaller books: untitled, sewn with yarn. Her girlhood heroes were Shakespeare, Ovid, Caesar. She wrote them in beside thinking-rocks and humming-shoes and her favorite sister, Catherine, who starred in all but five. Snow fell fast as she sat by the nursery fire; ink to paper, then she sewed. The last book told a tale of hasty gloom, teeming with many shades of green: emerald, viridian, a mossy black. In it we meet a miniature princess who lives in a seashell castle and sleeps in sheets woven from the eyelids of doves.

For all these fertile inner workings, Margaret was thought plain, couldn’t wear yellow, was shy, yes, seemed younger than her years — yet Margaret longed for fame. When grown, she would adorn herself like a peacock. Or so wrote the diarist Samuel Pepys, whose curiosity brought him out one day to stand along a London road and wait for her carriage to pass. It was May Day and the park was like a circus. “The Duchess of Newcastle is all the pageant now discoursed on”—so he’d written in his diary several weeks before. At breakfast tables and dinner parties, over porridge or pike or a gravy made from the brains of a pig, she was all that anyone talked about, as watched for as Queen Catherine herself but a far more thrilling spectacle: those black stars on her cheeks, the scandal at the theater, her hats! One anonymous satirist had dubbed her Welbeck Abbey’s illustrious whore. Others called her simply fantastical.

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