by Linda Porter
The marriage of Queen Margaret and the earl of Angus has fuelled the imaginations of historical novelists, who have portrayed a woman in her mid-twenties intoxicated by a handsome teenager. In fact, they were the same age and Angus was already a widower himself, though engaged to marry someone else before he wed the queen. He may well have been reasonably presentable in appearance but the flaws in his personality that became so obvious within a short time of his second marriage had already been spotted by an uncle, who called him a callow young fool. He was to prove a difficult and unreliable (as well as unfaithful) husband, keen on expanding his power, a willing tool for Henry VIII, a greedy and incompetent regent and a stepfather much hated by James V as the lad grew. He was the absolute antithesis of James IV and, for Margaret, marriage to him was full of stress and shouting matches.
Henry VIII’s reaction to his sister’s remarriage (which had taken place without his permission) was to wait and see what would transpire. As it happened, he did not have to wait long. In Scotland, the response to Margaret’s union with Angus was swift and unfavourable. Margaret was deposed from the regency on 21 September 1514 when the lords, meeting at Dunfermline, announced that ‘the queen’s grace has forfeited the office of tutrix of the king’s grace our sovereign lord her son and shall cease from using of the same in times coming and shall not interfere with any matters pertaining to the crown … because she has contracted marriage … through which the office of tutory ceases in her, conformable to the laws of the realm.’8 Before this, however, they had required the queen, ‘with the consent of her husband’, to agree to letters being sent immediately requesting that the duke of Albany ‘as governor of Scotland’ should come across from France ‘in all goodly haste’. Margaret had little option but to agree. She clung to the hope that, despite earlier exhortations, there would continue to be no sign of Albany, who remained firmly in France and was likely to stay there under the terms of the new friendship between Henry VIII and Louis XII.
As the autumn of 1514 progressed, it seemed that divisions in Scotland would settle into an uneasy stalemate. Margaret had lost her official position but would not give up without a struggle. Not all the lords wanted Albany and the queen still had physical possession of her two sons. She was not without support but she was becoming increasingly concerned. The queen could not collect her rents and her financial resources were dwindling. Marriage to Angus, far from improving her position, had complicated it. In a letter of November 1514, she poured out all her troubles to her brother, pleading for his assistance, via military intervention if necessary:
I commend me to you with all mine heart. I have received your loving and comfortable writings from a man of Lord Dacre’s … wherein I perceive your fraternal love and kindness. I and my party were in great trouble of mind, till we knew what help you would do to us … My party-adversary continues in their malice and proceeds in their parliament, usurping the king’s authority, as I and my lords were of no reputation, reputing us as rebels, wherefore I beseech that you would make haste with your army by sea and land.
This was, of course, treasonable and it was also unrealistic. Henry VIII was not about to commit forces against Scotland again so soon after Flodden, while he was at peace in Europe and at the start of winter. Margaret also wanted her brother to send money, saying she was ‘at great expense’ and would soon be ‘super-extended’. She implored him to try and prevent Albany’s coming in any way he could. The letter, so typical of Margaret’s rambling style and tendency to accentuate the negative, did, however, end on a more positive note. Her children were both well – ‘right life-like’, she called them – and she would remain in the safety of Stirling Castle.9
Help from Henry VIII, whether financial or military, did not come. As the year 1515 dawned he had other preoccupations, for on New Year’s Day Louis XII of France, worn out, some said, by the attractions of his young wife (though, in reality, he had been in poor health for some time), died. The throne of France passed to his cousin and son-in-law, Francis of Angoulême, who became King Francis I. The new monarch wanted to make a name for himself and reassert France’s role in Europe. He viewed the Auld Alliance with Scotland favourably and was not afraid to put the cat among the pigeons when it came to Anglo–Scottish matters. He authorized Albany’s departure to Scotland and the duke arrived in the land of his forefathers for the first time on 16 May 1515. Ten days later he was in Edinburgh, determined to try to bring stable government to Scotland after nearly two years of dissent and uncertainty among the political class. It was a charge that he laboured to fulfil with dignity and impartiality and which was to cause him immense frustration in its execution. But if he was to have any real effect on Scottish government, he knew from the outset of his tenure of office that he must secure the person of the king.
* * *
THERE WAS A high level of attendance at the first council meetings following Albany’s arrival and a good turnout for the parliament called for July 1515. Much of this may have been prompted by a mixture of curiosity and a desire to be noted in the first months of the new governor’s regime. Even Margaret was, on a personal level, favourably surprised. Albany’s courtly French manners and personal deference to her rank appealed to the status-conscious queen. But Albany was also determined to reinforce his own standing, knowing that his effectiveness would in large part depend on his success in gaining acceptance of the executive powers of his role and his right to govern. He knew he must be given the right to exercise the powers of an adult king or he would get nowhere. The ceremonial surrounding his own entry to parliament was of crucial importance and he made a duly impressive entrance on 11 July, noted by Dacre in his report to the council of Henry VIII: ‘At the beginning of the Scotch parliament … the sword was borne before Albany to and from the Parliament by the earl of Arran, and a coronet set on his head by Angus and Argyll, and he was appointed protector till the king came to the age of eighteen.’10
The arrival of Albany did not please Henry VIII and the English king was already taking steps to destabilize the duke before he could grasp the sceptre of Scotland too firmly in his hand. At the beginning of his report, Dacre noted that his instructions from London were ‘to foment quarrels between Albany and Angus and between Albany and the Chamberlain [Beaton] so as to drive the duke out of Scotland’. This kind of stirring had long been a feature of English policy towards Scotland – Dacre boasted that he had had spies in Scotland for the last three years – but it did not necessarily bring about instant results. Albany’s move to seize James V came swiftly and could not be pre-empted.
At the end of July, the Scottish parliament approved a scheme which would remove the king and his brother from their mother and place them in the care of a group of eight lords, four of whom could be chosen by Margaret. Angus appears to have been willing to give up the children immediately. He was then at Stirling with the queen and was apparently more concerned about what might happen to his estates if there was a confrontation. The future of his stepsons was of secondary importance. Margaret was not prepared to give in so easily. She countered with the nomination of four lords of her own choosing (one of whom was her husband) but they were unacceptable to Albany. The duke had learned quickly who his opponents were. Nor was he inclined to prolong debate on this issue. He wanted control of James V and the little duke of Ross. When Margaret defied the lords sent to remove her sons by lowering the portcullis of Stirling Castle in their faces as she stood with the king by her side and the duke in his nurse’s arms, Albany had had enough. He sent an army to besiege the queen and compel her to hand over her sons.11
Angus had, by now, slipped out of the castle and returned to the south-east, the beginning of a pattern of his seldom being there when his wife needed him. Dacre, supported by Lord Hume, who resented not being given a prominent role by Albany, cooked up a desperate scheme to kidnap the King of Scots and his brother and spirit them across the border to England but Hume’s small force was trounced by the besieging army and the pl
ot failed. It must surely have had at least the tacit support of Henry VIII.
On 4 August, Albany arrived in person in Stirling with a large artillery train that included the famous cannon Mons Meg. Margaret realized that she could not hold out against such odds. Although ‘left desolate’, she behaved with great dignity and demonstrated a considerable flair for the public occasion, a strong Tudor trait. She gave the keys of the castle to her three-year-old son and told James V to hand them to Albany, thus reinforcing that the child was king and only he had the authority to dispose of the castle itself. She then begged Albany to ‘show favour to the king and his brother and her husband Angus’. The duke reassured her that he would honour her and the children but pointedly refrained from making any reference to Angus, saying that ‘he would not do with no traitors’. But it was to be more than a year, with considerably more treasonable activity in between, that justice finally caught up with the Hume family. Lord Hume and his brother William were executed in October 1516 and their heads displayed on the walls of Edinburgh Castle. Margaret herself had given up the fight much earlier.
* * *
THE WORLD COLLAPSED around Margaret Tudor when her sons were officially removed from her care. In the space of two fraught years she seemed to have lost everything that mattered to her. She had been unwilling or unable, perhaps both, to think coherently about how she might turn the position of queen mother to her advantage merely by biding her time. As Catherine de Medici was to discover half a century later, it was not necessarily an empty role and a more cunning person than Margaret might have realized the advantages of staying aloof from Scottish politics. Yet against that it must be acknowledged that her Englishness was always going to be perceived as a problem by some of her son’s leading subjects and her brother was determined to interfere whenever an opportunity presented itself. But the arrival of Albany in Scotland really was a hammer blow, determined as he was to have control of the king. The autumn of 1515 was a dismal time for the queen, who was further hampered by being in the final stages of what would prove to be her last pregnancy. She was carrying Angus’s child but he had already demonstrated that his primary loyalty was to himself.
In England, disconcerting parallels were now being drawn with the fate of the sons of Edward IV more than thirty years earlier. The disappearance of Edward V and his brother, Richard, duke of York, had taken place after the seizure of power by an older male relative. Could the duke of Albany be another Richard III? Whether Henry VIII believed that his nephews were genuinely at risk or not is uncertain but it clearly suited his purpose to spread such rumours abroad.12 This merely added to Margaret’s agony of mind. In these circumstances, she was increasingly dependent on Dacre, the conduit to her brother, who became her chief adviser. He seems to have had more influence on the queen than her husband, but that impression may have been precisely the one that this hard-nosed Border magnate wanted to convey in his dealings with London. The weakness of the Queen of Scots provided Dacre with an opportunity to take centre stage in Anglo–Scottish affairs. It was a part he relished.
Then aged fifty, Dacre was the most formidable of all the northern English lords. No one else could match his knowledge of Scotland and its chief men, or his experience of Border government, in which he played such an active role. It was second nature to him to act as Margaret’s Tudor’s mentor and sometimes to foist on the queen schemes that were as much his own as London’s. Kidnap and raiding were in his blood and he had abducted his own wife, a notable heiress and royal ward, in order to secure her hand in marriage. Small wonder, then, that he felt it completely feasible to bundle the royal children of Scotland across into England, though he had wisely left it to Lord Hume to try and achieve this. Not a sentimental man, like all aristocrats in England and Scotland at the time he was determined to promote the interests of his own family. He does appear to have had some genuine sympathy for Margaret, though reading between the lines of his voluminous correspondence he seems always to have thought of her as a woman to be directed rather than a monarch to be respected. And at this point, as the queen considered her future and the safety of her unborn child, he persuaded her into a course of action that would embarrass Albany and inadvertently bring about an irreparable breach in the queen’s second marriage, already under strain after barely a year. Encouraged by Dacre, Margaret resolved to flee from Scotland and place herself squarely under the protection of Henry VIII.
By early September, a plan was in place, agreed by the queen, who accepted that its actual success would depend on her own resourcefulness. Accompanied only by Angus and a few servants, she slipped away from Linlithgow where, as custom dictated, her lying-in before giving birth was to take place. At first she went to Tantallon Castle, the great Douglas family fortress high above the sea on the east coast. But Albany learned of her being there and made moves to intercept her, so she left hurriedly, abandoning her baggage and much-prized jewels. By 16 September she was safe in Blackadder Castle, the Hume stronghold. Just over a week later she had managed to cross the border into England at Coldstream, where the nuns of the priory gave her shelter. Angus was now proscribed as a traitor.
The secret departures and constant need to evade capture took a heavy toll on Margaret. The intention had been for her to ride as far as Morpeth but the advanced stage of her pregnancy made further travel on horseback impossible. On 8 October, worn out and anxious, she survived a difficult labour to produce a healthy daughter. The arrival of the child, Lady Margaret Douglas, was splendidly announced by the queen in a letter to Albany in which she said she had given birth to ‘a Christian soul, being a young lady’. This particular young lady would have her own significant part to play in the drama of the Tudors and the Stewarts but, for now, her mother lay desperately ill at Harbottle Castle in Northumberland. It took Margaret many weeks to make a full recovery from the birth, in a castle ill-equipped for a queen or a newborn. Dacre’s residence at Morpeth had been prepared for the birth and Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon sent a complete wardrobe of beautiful dresses for Margaret and clothing for the baby there, but the queen was not strong enough to appreciate their gifts until mid-November when she was moved by litter. And though she had not forgotten her ambitions for Scotland or her claims to her sons, writing to Albany soon after giving birth to Lady Margaret Douglas that she still claimed ‘the whole rule and governance of my children’, it seems to have been the sight of the twenty-two gowns sent by her brother that caught her imagination at this emotional time. The courtier Sir Christopher Garneys, sent by the king to deliver all these fine things, reported her reaction: ‘Her grace was borne in a chair out of her bedchamber into the great chamber … When she had seen everything, she bid the Lord Chamberlain and the other gentlemen come in and look at it, saying, “So, my lord, here ye may see that the king my brother hath not forgotten me and that he would not that I should die for lack of clothes.”13 Given Margaret’s circumstances, this sounds frivolous and has contributed to negative depictions of the queen as a woman who was more concerned with her own personal appearance than matters of state. Yet she was still badly affected with sciatica brought on by riding when heavily pregnant. ‘Her grace hath such a pain in her right leg’, reported Garneys, ‘that this three weeks she may not endure to sit up while her bed is a-making, and when her grace is removed it would pity any man’s heart to hear the shrieks and cries that her grace giveth.’14 Margaret was not one to suffer in silence but the pain of sciatica can be excruciating and she was generally in very weak health. As for her clothing, she had left everything behind in Scotland and Margaret Tudor (and, indeed, other members of her family) did not expect to be taken seriously as a queen without the trappings that went with majesty.
Amidst all the cloth of gold, silk, satins and crimson and purple velvets, Margaret passed Christmas at Dacre’s home, where ‘a great house’ was kept for the festive season. Garneys commented that he ‘never saw a baron’s house better trimmed in all my life’. Dacre and his wife had spared no ex
pense for their royal guest, her husband and small entourage. But even as it seemed that she might eventually recover from the prolonged stresses of flight and childbirth, fate dealt Margaret another blow. Her younger son, Alexander, on whom she seems to have doted, speaking with great maternal pride of his achievements, proved sadly less ‘life-like’ than she had reported to Henry VIII the previous autumn. The little duke died in December and the news was kept from Margaret for a while because it was feared that the shock might kill her.
It was not until early spring that Margaret was ready to move south to London, for a reunion with the brother she had not seen for thirteen years. As she recovered, she began, with prompting from Dacre, to put together a catalogue of her complaints against Albany, who was still hoping that she could be induced to return to Scotland, since her presence in England, though it removed her as an obstacle on one level, raised serious problems of its own. He feared that the queen’s sense of grievance would be nurtured at her brother’s court and that if she determined to return on her own terms, it might be with an English army at her back. The duke urged Margaret to ‘be a good Scottish woman, as it accords her to do’. The queen did not rise to this bait.
Margaret travelled slowly down to London, arriving at the beginning of May 1516. She was accompanied by the charming Sir Thomas Parr (father of Katherine, who would later become her brother’s last wife) and if the journey was not as memorable as her progress to Scotland years before, there was still a triumphal entry into London, the sort of occasion Margaret loved. The reunion with Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, as well as her sister Mary, always known since her brief time in France as ‘the French Queen’ and now married to the duke of Suffolk, was a joyful time for the children of Henry VII. Mary’s marriage was, however, a sharp reminder to Margaret that her own marital affairs were not so happy. Angus had not accompanied her to London. His duty to his wife had been done in Northumberland. Now he felt that he must safeguard his own and his family’s interests in Scotland. He needed to preserve a degree of detachment, which would give him more room for manoeuvre if Albany’s position weakened or the duke was compelled to return to France. Angus’s quest for independence would cause pain to his wife, complications for Henry VIII and long-lasting resentment from his stepson, James V, as he grew.