Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Angus had not accompanied his wife on her desperate flight to England. He remained in Scotland, ostensibly tending to the business of managing his estates. On December 18, Margaret was still in Northumberland, in Morpeth, gravely ill with swelling in her right leg from sciatica, when her younger boy, Alexander, the little Duke of Ross, died in Albany’s care. Now she had only one surviving son: the future king. Margaret was not given the dreadful news until the end of the month, for fear it would prove fatal to her. With little Alexander dead and the young king only three years old, the Duke of Albany—being the nephew of King James III and the closest surviving relation to James IV—was now the heir presumptive to the throne of Scotland.

  Still determined to visit her brother in London, Margaret arrived with her infant daughter on May 3, 1516, and was welcomed with a month of tournaments and celebrations. It was the first time she’d seen Henry in thirteen years. Angus had not accompanied her, much to Henry’s annoyance. “Done like a Scot,” the English king sneered, when he’d heard that Angus had abandoned his sister and returned to Scotland. And Margaret did feel betrayed, especially after she had sacrificed the pomp and power of the regency in order to be his wife. But Scotland was the earl’s seat of power, money, and influence, and in this era a Scots laird’s first allegiance was to his family, not to his wife.

  Yet Angus had another reason for returning to Scotland without Margaret. He had resumed an affair with his former fiancée, Lady Jane Stewart of Traquair, residing with Jane on Margaret’s estate at Newark and living off the queen’s money. He also took Margaret’s rents from two of her properties, Methven and Ettrick Forest.

  Living off Henry’s largesse, as her dower rents were not forthcoming, Margaret spent a year in England. During this time, her marital separation caused a great deal of speculation. It was rumored that her union with Angus had been dissolved and that she intended to wed the Holy Roman Emperor. In some ways, a divorce was less difficult to obtain than it would become in later eras (for example, papal decrees that permitted cousins to wed each other were often issued in reverse when the same cousins sought a divorce, citing consanguinity!). However, the result of such dissolutions was that children of the marriage were retroactively declared illegitimate. Henry VIII was fond of his niece, little Margaret Douglas, and did not want to see her bastardized. He also had other, more selfish motives: Should the girl ever be delegitimized, her stock on the international marriage market would plummet, destroying Henry’s chances of forging an important political alliance.

  After Margaret returned home and discovered her husband’s infidelity, as well as the baby daughter that was the result of it, she became determined to divorce him. In October 1518, she wrote to Henry, informing him, “I am sore troubled with my Lord of Angus since my last coming into Scotland, and every day more and more, so that we have not been together this half year,” adding that Angus had done her “more evil . . . which is too long to write. . . . I am so minded that, an [if] I may by law of God and to my honour, to part with him, for I wit well he loves me not, as he shows me daily.” She accepted full responsibility for choosing Angus in the first place, and never openly blamed him for taking a mistress, or, more accurately, returning to his former sweetheart, even as she continued to lament, “he loves me not.”

  It wasn’t so much Angus’s adultery that angered Margaret, nor his bastard baby, but that he had seized the rents from her two estates. Even with help from the council, Margaret was able to recover only two thousand of the nine thousand pounds that Angus had appropriated. Her second inglorious marriage had been ignominious indeed. Even though Angus was the adulterer, it was Margaret’s reputation that was tarnished.

  In 1519, she was so impoverished that she was pawning her jewelry and dismissing her household staff because she could not afford to pay them. Miserable over the woeful state of her marriage, her funds, and her inability to see her son, she begged Henry to allow her to revisit England, but he refused, urging her to return to her husband’s arms instead. Ever the hypocrite, Henry, who was in the throes of an extramarital affair with Bessie Blount, lectured his sister on the sanctity of her wedding vows.

  Rebuffed by her own brother, Margaret turned to the regent, Albany. In the mistaken belief that he had connections with the pope, she was now willing to throw her support to the duke, if he’d reach out to the pontiff on her behalf about obtaining a divorce.

  Her situation dragged on for years. In 1521, Lord Dacre wrote to Margaret, urging her to re-ally herself with the Douglases, because the connection was more beneficial to England. On the eleventh of March, Margaret sharply replied that if Angus “had desired my company or my love,” he would have been more kindly disposed to her. Instead, “. . . of late, when I came to Edinburgh to him, he took my house without my consent . . . withholding my ferms [rents] from me . . .”

  Poor Margaret: She couldn’t catch a break. Her shifting allegiances, born out of her wish to escape her unhappy marital circumstances, only brought her additional misery. Angus and his adherents spread malicious rumors that Albany was her lover and that he supported the dowager queen’s divorce so he could wed her himself after it was granted. The vicious gossip had made its way to England as well. Henry accused Albany of “the dishonourable and damnable abusing of our sister, inciting and stirring her to be divorced from her lawful husband for what corrupt intent God knoweth.” And in February 1522, Henry sent Margaret a “sharp and unkind letter,” in which he told her that it was assumed she had become Albany’s mistress.

  The duke, supported by the Scottish estates, succeeded in banishing Angus to France. But Albany was merely a fair-weather friend to Margaret. He then prepared to invade England, and only his army’s fear of a repetition of the Battle of Flodden held them back. At least Margaret was able to persuade Albany to sign a truce. Perhaps in retribution, when he appointed a new regency council, he excluded her from it, sailing for France himself on October 27, 1522.

  Placing her son’s interests ahead of everything, Margaret decided to cooperate with her brother the following summer in the hope that Henry would do something to dissolve or disband the regency council and thereby elevate James V to active rule on his own. Obviously this signified her desire to see Albany ousted as regent. But when Albany returned to Scotland on September 23, 1523, with several thousand French troops in tow, Margaret grew nervous. Fearing he might seek reprisals for her turning against him, she petitioned Henry for permission to come to England. Her brother refused her entreaties, sending her money instead, and ordering her to stay put in Scotland. Angus, meanwhile, had fled to France after Albany resumed his regency.

  Albany devised a new system of rotating governorship for the young James V: A quartet of nobles would have custody of him for three months at a time. He also tried, but failed, to negotiate a three-way truce among England, Scotland, and France. Before departing for France again, he sought assurances from Margaret that she would do nothing in his absence to undermine his authority.

  Margaret assented, but as soon as the wind was at Albany’s back, she staged a coup with the aid of the powerful Hamilton family, led by the 2nd Earl of Arran. On July 26, 1524, twelve-year-old James V was invested with full royal authority, even though a Scots king did not attain his majority until the age of fourteen.

  Margaret and Arran now headed the government, while she worked toward a beneficial Anglo-Scottish alliance, well funded by Henry VIII. Meanwhile, she endeavored to keep the adulterous Angus at bay. According to the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, Margaret had reason to put some distance between herself and Angus, beyond being a scorned wife. On September 19, 1524, Norfolk wrote to Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, “The Queen is very unpopular for taking so much on herself, and being ruled only by Arran and Henry Steward [sic]; also for her ungodly living, in keeping Angus out of the realm when he is so beloved.”

  Henry Stewart was Margaret’s treasurer. And Angus was perhaps “beloved” only
to the English. Margaret’s brother was funding the earl, providing him with “power, substance and counsaill” during his diplomatic efforts to destroy the Franco-Scottish alliance. Henry VIII also tried to bully his sister into returning to Angus, threatening to stop payment for her two hundred bodyguards and feigning outrage over her adulterous liaison with Henry Stewart, even though by then he’d sired a royal bastard of his own.

  Unfortunately for Margaret, she was never a strong leader, even when she was finally able to grasp the reins of power. Perhaps she listened to the wrong advisers. Perhaps she was not a born governor. And she was hampered by her circumstances: an Englishwoman in Scotland, disliked by the Parliament and the people because of her gender and her nationality—less the mother of their king than the daughter and sister of an ancient enemy. And yet Henry viewed her as unreliable, flighty, and a complainer: always asking for more money and never delivering the goods. When she finally was able to topple Albany as regent, all she could manage to secure for England was a two-month truce.

  The English were convinced that Margaret was willfully scheming to prolong her marital conflict. Angus returned to England, and Henry was eager to see him head north to rejoin Margaret. She still believed the earl to be as duplicitous in love as he was in politics, and made it clear to her brother and his advisers that Angus was unwelcome across the border. But Henry was less interested in what was good for Margaret than in what was good for Henry. Angus was useful to him.

  Shortly after the opening of Scotland’s Parliament, Angus scaled the stone walls of Edinburgh with four hundred followers in tow. They marched to Market Cross on the High Street and announced that they had come in peace as faithful subjects of King James and desired only as their forebears had done—to take their seats in Parliament.

  In response, Margaret, who was at Holyroodhouse with her son, ordered four or five light cannons to be turned on Angus. Two of the lairds were shocked that she should attack her lawful husband in such a manner. One of the cannons was fired, killing a priest, a woman, and two merchants.

  Margaret’s regency was confirmed by Parliament, and Angus retreated to his fortified castle at Tantallon. Henry, not to mention the rest of Europe, was scandalized by his sister’s behavior.

  In February 1525, when Angus was able to secure a leading role in Scotland’s government, his brother-in-law also agreed that he should take control of Margaret’s property. But later that year, Angus showed his true colors to Henry as well. When his turn came and went in the rotation to take charge of James V, he refused to relinquish the thirteen-year-old king to the next group of governors, retaining custody of his stepson for three years, until 1528.

  Throughout that time, Margaret endeavored to prize her son from her estranged husband’s clutches. An attempt to free James, led by the 3rd Earl of Lennox, ended in disaster when the earl was killed during the effort. Margaret was also determined never to reconcile with Angus, but to obtain a divorce so that she could wed Henry Stewart. She was sure she’d found true love at last. To assuage her conscience for choosing the wrong guy the second time around, Margaret sought to sunder her marriage to Angus on the grounds that she had wed him when James IV might have still been alive. After the Battle of Flodden, numerous rumors of the king’s survival had sprung up, because many people were convinced that James’s corpse hadn’t conclusively been identified. There were stories of sightings in the Holy Land, or in Kelso, where, three days after the battle, James had purportedly been seen staggering about. His Holiness, however, didn’t buy into any of the folklore. The pope’s basis for dissolving Margaret’s second marriage was that Angus’s previous relationship with his former fiancée (and current mistress), Lady Jane Stewart of Traquair, was tantamount to a precontract of marriage with Jane.

  Margaret did not learn of Pope Clement VII’s March 11, 1527, granting of her divorce petition until December of that year. That spring, unaware of the decree, Henry, who believed that his sister had disgraced the family by cohabiting with Henry Stewart while she was still married to Angus, confided in the French ambassador that it was “impossible for anyone to live a more shameful life than she did.”

  Margaret secretly married Stewart on March 3, 1528, and by the beginning of April was openly acknowledging him as her third husband. Stewart, a son of the 1st Lord Avondale, was a fourth cousin, twice removed, of Margaret’s first husband, King James IV.

  An enraged Angus ordered Stewart arrested and taken prisoner, on the grounds that he had wed the dowager queen without royal approval. Because the earl was controlling the king, who was still a minor, if Margaret wanted to reside with her new husband, she would have to remove her ex, Angus, from power. Finally, on May 28, 1528, after telling his minders that he intended to go hunting, James V escaped from Angus’s aegis disguised as a yeoman, announced that he had attained his majority, and proclaimed himself king in his own right. On June 19, at his mother’s urging, James ordered Angus and his relations, except for James’s half sister, Margaret Douglas, not to come within seven miles of his person. He then created his new stepfather, Henry Stewart, Lord Methven, “for the great love he bore to his dearest mother.” In September, James sentenced Angus and his associates to death for treason, albeit in absentia, because Angus had gotten the better of him—and Margaret—once again, having fled with their daughter to England. Angus remained under Henry VIII’s protection, working as an informer, for the next thirteen years. Margaret Douglas was raised at the English court with the Princess Mary, despite her mother’s wishes to be reunited with her.

  Margaret’s allegiances were torn between her native England and Scotland—which was not only a perpetual enemy of her homeland, but was often allied with England’s other perennial nemesis, France. At this stage in her life, she harbored high hopes of brokering a grand meeting between her brother and her son similar to France’s spectacular Field of Cloth of Gold summit in 1520 between Henry and François I, spending a fortune to plan an opulent event that never materialized. Margaret also hoped to forge a marriage between James and Henry’s daughter Mary Tudor, another nonstarter. After years of being micromanaged by regents and committees of governors, James V had no intentions of listening to anyone’s advice but his own, even if it came from his mother.

  By the mid-1530s, Margaret must have felt she couldn’t win. She’d done everything within her power for a son who had no use for her. Her only child by Lord Methven, their daughter Dorothea Stewart, had died in infancy; and now he was stepping out on her as well, repeating the pattern her second husband had traced—taking a mistress, Lady Janet Stewart, and impregnating her. The adulterous pair was living off of Margaret’s lands and revenues so irresponsibly that she was now eight thousand merks in debt.

  In 1537, Margaret attempted to divorce Methven on the grounds that he had squandered her income, appealing to her son to sunder her marriage. Yet Methven somehow managed to lay the blame for their connubial woes on his wife, persuading James V that the real reason Margaret sought to dissolve their union was her desire to remarry Angus—who remained in self-imposed exile in England, with that pernicious death sentence still over his head. James, therefore, refused to give his consent to a divorce. In early October, Margaret tried to escape over the border to Berwick, but James had her intercepted, in case she really did plan to join her second husband. Beleaguered, Margaret wrote a pathetic letter to her brother, threatening to enter a convent if he didn’t intercede for her. “[W]yth owt I get remedy, I wol pas to some relygeous place, and byde wyth them. . . .”

  For the remainder of her years, Margaret continued to beg Henry for funds for one thing or another, as her now-detested third husband remained in control of her revenues. It was Henry who begrudged her the cost of lavish garments for James V’s marriages (to Madeleine of France in 1537, and the French-born Mary of Guise in 1538), so that she could appear at the weddings in style, every inch the dowager queen, as well as the mother of the bridegroom.

&n
bsp; At the age of fifty-one, Margaret Tudor died of a stroke at Methven Castle on October 18, 1541—bitter, unloved, and unappreciated. After all, in three marriages, two of which had ostensibly been love, or at least lust, matches, she’d never had a faithful husband. In her final hours, Margaret sent for her son, who was at Falkland Palace, but James didn’t arrive at his mother’s deathbed in time. Among her last words to her confessors was a request that the king “. . . be good and gracous unto the Erell of Anguyshe, and [she] dyd extremely lament, and aske God mercy, that She had afendet unto the sayd Erell as She hade.” As poorly as he had treated her, perhaps the Earl of Angus had been Margaret’s grand passion after all. And maybe she regretted turning those cannons on him.

  Margaret had not made a will, because she expected to recover from the attack of palsy that she had suffered four days prior to her death. But when she realized that the end was near, she had asked that her valuables be given to her only surviving daughter, Margaret Douglas. However, because his mother died intestate, James peevishly did not honor this bequest, and all of her property reverted to the crown. Margaret Tudor was buried at the Carthusian Priory of St. John in Perth, among the Scots kings. The abbey was destroyed during the Reformation.

  The Earl of Angus remained in England until 1542 and was one of the first to hear of the December 14 death of James V of Scotland. James’s infant daughter, Mary, was now queen, and her governor, the 2nd Earl of Arran, invited Angus to return home, promising to restore his forfeited estates.

  Still loyal to Henry VIII, Angus spent the next couple of years in Scotland as the head of a pro-Anglo, pro-Protestant party. On April 9, 1543, he wed his third wife, another Margaret, the daughter of Lord Maxwell. The earl became a renowned military commander as well, but by 1545, he had switched allegiances and was staunchly pro-Scotland. His victory at Drumlanrig in 1548 began the death knell of England’s ambition to conquer Scotland, and by 1550, the wild land to the north was completely lost to them.