Upon learning that he might have played a role in his father’s demise, young James took to wearing a heavy iron chain about his waist in an act of perpetual penance.
In theory, James IV looked like a perfect match for Margaret Tudor, even though he was several years older: He was an accomplished musician, interested in the sciences, a patron of the arts, a sportsman who was fond of hunting and hawking, a nimble dancer, and was fluent in ten languages—the last of the Scots monarchs to speak the Scots Gaelic dialect. He even enjoyed embroidery! However, he was also quite the womanizer, juggling a series of mistresses, often simultaneously.
While the negotiations for his marriage to Margaret Tudor continued, James continued to sport with his inamoratas, Janet Kennedy and Margaret Drummond, although he had fewer playmates by the time he got married. Mistress Drummond died of food poisoning a few months after James’s marriage negotiations were concluded in January 1502. According to the terms of the contract, Henry VII promised his daughter a dowry of ten thousand pounds; James pledged an additional thousand pounds Scots annually, plus estates yielding a further income of six thousand pounds.
However, the proxy wedding ceremony in England wasn’t conducted for another year. In the interim, Margaret’s older brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, had died. On January 15, 1503, the Earl of Bothwell represented the thirty-year-old Scots king at the altar, followed by the tolling of church bells, the illumination of bonfires, and much feasting, jousting, and dancing. Margaret, a pretty girl with a cherubic face and the characteristic Tudor red-gold hair, was only thirteen years old, about the average age for a royal bride of the era.
Elizabeth of York died just a month later, nine days after giving birth to a daughter on February 2. Margaret was left to prepare for the marriage in Scotland without her mother’s wisdom and guidance, mourning also her infant sister, who did not live much longer. She finally set off on the thirty-three-day journey north to her new homeland on July 8, arriving in Edinburgh in early August.
Bride and bridegroom saw each other for the first time during a courtly charade on August 3. The custom of the times demanded that James appear to be on a hunting expedition, and, hearing that his bride was near at hand, canter over to pay her a surprise visit. Dressed to impress, the king was attired in crimson and cloth of gold, his long, flowing hair and the length of his beard a thing to behold. Instead of his crossbow, in the manner of lovers, he wore a lyre across his back. James bowed low and kissed Margaret’s hand and she curtsied deeply. After he kissed the hands of each of her attendants, James led Margaret a few steps away for their first private conversation.
A few more days of celebration followed, featuring allegorical pageants and a musical flirtation between the pair as they displayed their respective talents. Finally the Scots king and the English princess were wed at Holyroodhouse on August 8, 1503. As Ishbel C. M. Barnes relates in her biography Janet Kennedy, Royal Mistress: Marriage and Divorce at the Courts of James IV and V, John Young, Somerset Herald, a member of Margaret’s retinue, left a detailed account of her first wedding.
Between eight and nine o’clock everyone was ready, nobly clothed: and the ladies came richly dressed, some in gowns of cloth of gold, others in crimson velvet and black, others in satin or damask with hoods, chains and collars on their necks and accompanied by their gentlewomen, to hold company with the queen. The queen was brought from her chamber to the church crowned with a very rich crown of gold [it was studded with pearls and precious gemstones], led on the right hand by the Archbishop of York and on the left hand by the earl of Surrey, her train was carried by the countess of Surrey. . . .
Thus the queen was . . . placed near to the font . . . and all her noble company being in order on the left side of the church. Then entered the Archbishop of Glasgow and the other clergy. He was followed by the king, accompanied by his household, his nobles, lords, knights, squires and gentlemen who all stood in order on the right side of the church.
Then the king came near the queen and made reverence and she to him, very humbly. The king was in a gown of white damask, figured with gold and lined with sarsenet. He had on a jacket with sleeves of crimson satin and black velvet, under that a doublet of cloth of gold and a pair of scarlet hose, his shirt was embroidered with gold thread, his bonnet was black and he wore his sword. The queen was dressed in a rich robe like the king, with a rich collar of gold and pearls on her neck and the crown upon her head.
The Archbishop of Glasgow then performed the marriage and the Archbishop of York read the papal bulls consenting to the marriage. . . . The mass followed and later a vast dinner was served [the guests dining off golden plates, partaking of a gilded boar’s head, an enormous ham, and a dozen more dishes], the lords and ladies eating in separate halls. Then followed dancing, the king went alone without the queen to evensong and supper followed. After the supper night approached and everyone withdrew to his lodging to rest “and the Kinge had the Qwene aparte, and they went togeder.” The feasting, jousting and dancing continued until Sunday the thirteenth of August. “And that doon, every Man went his Way.”
Throughout the various celebrations James had been quite solicitous of his young bride’s welfare. For most of the wedding ceremony, his arm was protectively encircled about her waist. A short coronation ceremony for Margaret followed the wedding. James himself placed the scepter in her hand.
Scotland’s great contemporary poet William Dunbar soon dubbed the royal couple “the Thistle and the Rose.” Dunbar’s poem of the same title eerily prophesied the union of Scotland and England one hundred years hence, an event that would indeed come to fruition in 1603, when Margaret Tudor’s great-grandson would become James I of England upon the death of Elizabeth I.
Sixteen years her senior, James treated his pretty, redheaded child bride generously, giving her gowns and jewels and spending money as she desired. But the largesse never quite made up for the initial shock that met her at Stirling Castle, one of her dower properties, when she saw that it had been turned into a nursery for his numerous illegitimate children. As it was a badge of honor in Scotland, instead of a blight on one’s character, to beget a bastard with the king, James couldn’t understand Margaret’s distaste for the semiroyal bairns, whom she ordered banished from her new property with all due haste.
Nor did James’s generosity, which included naming a ship in his wife’s honor and presenting her with a jeweled “serpent’s tongue” one New Year’s as a safeguard against poisoning, compensate for the fact that he continued to pay regular visits to Janet Kennedy, his mistress since 1498. For some reason, James couldn’t understand why his young wife had a problem with his behavior. Before and after his marriage, James enjoyed the favors of several lovers, siring a total of eight royal bastards with four of them. He also had six legitimate children (four sons and two daughters) with Margaret over the course of what was said to be an affectionate marriage, despite his rampant infidelity. She did not become pregnant until she was sixteen, which still seems quite young to twenty-first-century sensibilities; yet in her era tongues wagged, wondering what was taking her so long to conceive. Unfortunately, of all her children only their third son (also named James after their firstborn James lived only one year) survived to adulthood. Margaret’s childbirths were very difficult and she often remained very ill for weeks afterward.
During his reign James IV increased Scotland’s navy and was a great patron of architecture for beauty’s sake, as well as for military purposes, renovating his palaces and building castles in the west of the country to bolster his authority there. His court was also a seat of literary culture, where homegrown poets, clowns, and musicians flourished. Other patrons of the arts were frequent visitors. And in 1507, James licensed the first printing press in the realm to publish statutes, chronicles, laws, and Scottish liturgical works. His fascination with the sciences and medicine, particularly dentistry, purportedly led him to extract one of his courtier’s teeth h
imself. He also sponsored an alchemist’s quest for the elixir of life. James was a superb jouster and enjoyed hosting tournaments and other displays of chivalric culture. In the summer of 1508, he staged the “counterfutting of the round tabill of King Arthour of Ingland” in Edinburgh.
The following year, Margaret’s father died and her only surviving brother ascended the throne as Henry VIII. Much as she hoped the two men would treat each other as family, things between Henry and Margaret’s husband were bound to come to a head when Scotland sought to remain an ally of France, while England regarded the French as an enemy.
In the spring of 1513, Margaret asked the English ambassador to secure for her the significant bequest that her late brother Arthur had left her in his will, as well as the plate and jewels left to her by their paternal grandmother, Margaret Beaufort. But Henry VIII refused to hand over these treasures— which were described as “silverwork, goldenwork, rings, chains, precious stones and the other habillements pertaining to a prince”—unless Margaret extracted a promise from her husband to remain on peaceful terms with England. The queen begged James not to attack her homeland. And if her urging wasn’t enough to put the fear of God (or at least Henry) in him, Pope Julius II issued letters from Rome ordering James’s excommunication should he invade England. However, James’s reasons for invasion were to redress specific wrongs perpetrated by the English: their border raids on the Scots, the slaying of the king’s good friend (a sea captain whom the English claimed was a pirate), the taking of Scots prisoners and chaining them by their necks, and finally, the matter of Margaret’s legacy, which Henry had often made written promises to deliver.
Confident that the Scots king would at least fear his maker, Henry sailed to France on June 30, preparing to invade. Yet north of his borders, war was popular; only two members of James’s council spoke out against it.
The Scottish armies had mustered by August 22. After a prophetic nightmare in which she saw her husband dead on the battlefield, Margaret, now pregnant with her sixth child, warned James, Calpurnia-like, not to leave home. He dismissed her fears as folly, but the queen insisted, “It is no dream. Ye are to fight a mighty people.”
In the English county of Northumberland, on September 9, 1513, the Scots and English forces met at the Battle of Flodden—a disaster for James’s army. Some ten thousand Scots soldiers were killed, along with their forty-year-old king, who died excommunicate. As proof of James IV’s demise, Henry VIII’s queen, Katherine of Aragon, sent the king’s bloodstained coat to Henry in France with the words, “In this your grace shall see how I can keep my promys, sending you for your banners a king’s coat. I thought to send himself unto you, but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it.”
Margaret was so certain her dream had come to fruition that she didn’t even send a party to search the bloody battlefield. Lord Dacre, Henry VIII’s chief representative in the Borders, who had known the Scots king well, identified James’s body, which had been stripped naked like all the other fallen enemy soldiers; yet many were convinced it could not be his, because there was no metal chain about the waist. The corpse that was believed to be James’s was brought to Berwick-upon-Tweed for embalming, and Henry VIII obtained a breve from the pope, permitting his late brother-in-law to be buried in consecrated ground at St. Paul’s. However, for some reason, the body lay unburied for years at Sheen Priory in Surrey, and was eventually lost after the Reformation.
In his will, James had named his widow the regent for their seventeen-month-old son, who was now King James V. However, there was one major provision to Margaret’s regency: She could not remarry.
Margaret now had a delicate path to tread. Although she was the mother of Scotland’s infant king, she remained the sister of an enemy sovereign. Soon, a council comprised of a quartet of pro-French nobles was assigned to “help” her govern, even as Henry VIII was attempting to pressure her from the south to be as pro-England as possible. Desperately seeking allies of her own, she made the fatal error of turning to the powerful Douglas clan, finding herself passionately drawn to the handsome and charismatic Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus. The same age as Margaret, Angus was the greatest Scottish magnate at the time, but even his own uncle, the poet and bishop Gavin Douglas, referred to Angus as a “young witless fool.”
Angus, too, had been widowed in 1513; his first wife, Margaret Hepburn, daughter of the Earl of Bothwell, died in childbirth. Angus’s father, George Douglas, oldest son of the 5th Earl of Angus, had also fallen at Flodden. Ironically, the 5th earl and Margaret’s first husband, James IV, had shared a mistress, the old earl enjoying Janet Kennedy’s favors before she became the king’s lover.
It was an accepted tradition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that a noblewoman’s first marriage should be for dynastic or monetary reasons, but that her second union could be a love match. Margaret seemed to be following this convention, but it wasn’t intended to apply to queens, who were always expected to make politically advantageous marriages. However, at the time she fell in love with Angus, Margaret was particularly vulnerable—probably hormonal, being postpartum—lonely, possibly even a bit frightened. Aware of the Douglases’ power, she was also in need of a strong ally to help her push back against the nobles.
Angus took his seat on the council in March 1514, when Margaret was in her final trimester of pregnancy. According to Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, whose History and Chronicles of Scotland were published in the early nineteenth century, Angus “haunted the court and was very lusty in the sight of the Queen,” who loved him, “and thought him most able.”
One can’t imagine Margaret was placing the interests of her son first and foremost when she secretly wed the russet-bearded Angus in the parish church of Kinnoull on August 6, 1514, just a few months after the April 30 birth of her youngest child by James IV, Alexander, Duke of Ross.
Naturally, the word got out and soon spread. By remarrying, Margaret was viewed by the council as voluntarily forfeiting her regency. She had played right into the hands of the nobles, who wanted nothing more than to topple her from power. The council even demoted her with an insulting new title. Margaret, who was technically the dowager queen, was no longer to be styled “the Queen’s Grace,” but “My Lady the King’s mother.” Angus’s maternal grandfather, old Lord Drummond, was so incensed the first time he heard the Lyon herald address the dowager queen by her new title that he boxed the man on his ears.
By marrying a scion of Scotland’s most powerful family and then nominating him as her coregent, Margaret had angered her brother. Henry had automatically assumed the prerogative of choosing her next husband so he could forge a beneficial alliance for England. And by selecting one of their rivals, Margaret also alienated many of Scotland’s other aristocratic houses. In reprisal, the nobility took up arms against Angus’s family, the Red Douglases, and to pressure Margaret further, they stopped payment of her dower rents, which were her due as James IV’s widow. Margaret and Angus retreated to Stirling Castle with her sons.
The Privy Council offered Margaret a deal: She could retain custody of the young king and his infant brother if she voluntarily relinquished the title of regent. However, unwilling to trust the dowager queen or her new husband, the council invited a cousin of James IV, John Stewart, Duke of Albany, who had grown up in France, to return to Scotland and act as regent until James V came of age. This would ensure a Francophilic, rather than a pro-Anglo, alliance. The Privy Council was convinced that Albany was the best man to defend the country against English aggression. In September 1514, Margaret was compelled to consent to his appointment.
The duke arrived in Scotland in May 1515, and was installed as regent in July. His first order of business was to separate Margaret from her sons, claiming it was politically necessary—to safeguard them from being kidnapped by their English uncle, Henry VIII. Pregnant at the time with Angus’s child, Margaret at first refused to surrender her boys to Alban
y. On August 20, she did so under coercion, although her sworn statement was made to appear as if she had relented of her own volition. Much later, she would angrily reveal the truth.
[Albany] by reason of his might and power did take from me the King and Duke my said tender children. He removed and put me from out of my said castle [of Stirling] being my enfeoffment paid for by the King my father of most blessed memory . . . and by his crafty and subtle ways made me signify in writing to the Pope’s Holiness and to my dearest brother the King of England and the King of France that I of my own mooting and free will did renounce my said office of tutrix and governess.
Having lost her sons, her regency, and her revenues, and heavily pregnant with Angus’s child, Margaret obtained permission to travel to Linlithgow Palace. From there she escaped without Angus across the border into England, arriving on the verge of collapse in the wild and dangerous Northumberland countryside around Harbottle Castle.
Henry then sent men to stage a coup and seize his nephews at Stirling Castle, but lost sixteen soldiers in the attempt. Soon afterward, on October 7, at Harbottle, Margaret gave birth two weeks prematurely to Angus’s daughter, Margaret Douglas. Despite having only one parent of royal blood, because little Margaret was also a niece of Henry VIII, she was often styled Princess of Scotland.
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