Game of Queens (13 page)

Scotland’s ‘auld alliance’ with France had set it too on a collision course with the ‘holy alliance’ of which England was a part, dragging the two island neighbours into war with each other. Katherine herself – just as had her mother Isabella of Castile – accompanied the country’s army northwards when the Scots took advantage of Henry’s absence and invaded. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, historian and tutor at the Spanish court, heard that ‘in imitation of her mother Isabella’, Katherine gave a moving speech to rally the troops, telling them that ‘they should be ready to defend their territory, that the Lord smiled upon those who stood in defence of their own’.

She wrote to the Netherlands (her letter addressed to that rising man Thomas Wolsey, there with King Henry) that she was busy ‘making standards, banners, and badges’. She also wrote to Margaret of Austria, asking her to send a physician to Henry. And, like her mother Isabella before her, Katherine immersed herself in the most fundamental preparations for war. She organised troops and money to go northwards – artillery, provisions and ships – and told Wolsey also that ‘My heart is very good to it.’

The Earl of Surrey, in the north, was England’s first line of defence and a second wave of troops was stationed across the Midlands. But Katherine herself (who carried in her luggage a light gold helmet with a crown) was prepared if necessary to command a third wave even further to the south, despite the fact that she was perhaps once again in the early stages of pregnancy. Events meant her force was not needed but the possibility was sufficiently realistic for the Venetian ambassador in London to report that, ‘Our queen also took the field against the Scots with a numerous force one hundred miles from here.’

Katherine of Aragon’s fervour was in sharp contrast to the feelings of Margaret Tudor, who Katherine had known a decade before, on her first arrival in England, and with whom, on a personal level, she felt considerable sympathy.

Margaret Tudor had always taken seriously the idea that it was her mission to bring about closer relations between England and Scotland, but that dream had looked fragile almost from the start of her brother’s reign. Her husband, James IV, had been horrified by the anti-French league formed between England and its allies, including Spain, the Empire and the papacy. He wrote – and made Margaret write – to the crowned heads of Europe, beseeching them to keep the peace.

One welcome event in the spring of 1512 was the birth of another son. But Margaret Tudor’s hopes of an Anglo-Scottish alliance seemed far from accomplishment, and further than ever when the French queen Anne of Brittany sent James her glove, with a letter begging him to be her champion. Margaret was horrified that her husband took so seriously a gesture from the games of chivalry. Later stories report that she dreamt of seeing him hurled from a cliff, while her own jewels, under her horrified gaze, changed from diamonds into a widow’s pearls.

A kind of family relationship continued; the ambassador who came north to talk to James also brought a letter from Henry to Margaret. When Margaret had recently been pregnant with her surviving boy, Henry and Katherine had sent the girdle of Our Lady to her from Westminster Abbey. But when, dining with the ambassador, Margaret plied him with questions about the brother she had not seen for a decade – and also about the enthusiasm husband and brother shared for building up their navies – the man assumed she had been told by her husband to gather naval secrets. Small wonder the ambassador reported that she ended the meeting ‘right heavy’.

The collapse of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between England and Scotland – by now clearly inevitable – was all the more strange for the fact that Margaret Tudor and her Scottish son were still Henry VIII’s heirs. Henry was in France when the Scottish herald arrived, bearing a declaration of war. Henry shouted that James IV was a man of no faith and that he himself was, harking back to a claim made centuries before, ‘the very owner’ of Scotland, which James held only by homage. It would ‘become him, being married to the king of England’s sister, to recount the king of England his ally,’ Henry said. ‘I care nothing but for the mistreating of my sister, that would God she were in England on a condition she cost the Scottish king not a penny.’

Presciently, James IV had not waited to hear Henry VIII’s reply before he began to muster his armies. On his way to join them, he called at Linlithgow to see Margaret, now (like Katherine) in the early throes of another pregnancy. He dismissed her dreams of his death, her pleas that he should not go: ‘It is no dream. Ye are to fight a mighty people.’ If she really spoke those words, they could have been in pride as well as terror, since they had been her people too. There is a tower in Linlithgow from which, yet another romantic story says, Margaret strained her eyes southwards to watch for James’s return. But they also say that, so certain had she been of what would happen that day, she did not send to search the battlefield at Flodden where, on 9 September, the armies met.

The loss of Scottish life was appalling; perhaps as many as ten thousand men. Katherine, in England, described the victory in triumphant terms to Henry, sending her husband the coat of the slain Scottish king, James IV. She would have sent the king himself (as a prisoner, or as a corpse?), she wrote, ‘but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it’.

When the news of her husband’s death, 140 rugged miles away, reached Margaret Tudor at Linlithgow, the 23-year-old pregnant widow acted both swiftly and decisively. Though the battle had been fought well south of the border, the English armies might yet advance into Scotland. Margaret took her eighteen-month-old son, the new James V, further inland, to her castle of Stirling, where the rocky crags below made the castle at least feel invulnerable. There, James V was crowned on 21 September, just twelve days after his father’s death, in what became known as the Mourning Coronation.

After the catastrophe of Flodden, only fifteen temporal lords and a handful of bishops were left alive to help Margaret govern the country. A reeling council, a mere twenty-three men, hastily read and approved the will James had made before he left Linlithgow, which appointed Margaret as regent for their son. Just half a century earlier, after all, Scotland had seen another queen consort, Mary of Guelders, act as regent for her son, the nine-year-old James III. Margaret was to be ‘testamentary tutrix’ to the new James V, though she was not to act without a quorum of lords that would be permanently on hand to advise her.

In their wreck of a country, Margaret Tudor and the Scottish council acted swiftly to try to restore order. As September turned to October, royal proclamations were sent out forbidding the looting of houses and the molesting of women left (as so very many were) without a male protector. Stirling, and other fortresses, were strengthened, for all that there were hardly enough men left to garrison them.

Very quickly, however, cracks began to appear in the Scottish command. When Margaret wrote to the pope, suggesting her candidates for several bishoprics left vacant when their incumbents died at Flodden, there was anger that she had failed to consult the lords about her choices. More seriously, there was division over what line to pursue with England, whose troops were still, as a punitive measure, burning crops and raiding villages along the Scottish border. A number of younger lords wanted to continue the war and avenge their kinsmen. To do so, they wanted the help of their traditional ally, France. And they wanted a military leader, the obvious candidate being the man who was now (since the infant James V had as yet no siblings) Scotland’s heir.

John Stuart, Duke of Albany, cousin of James IV, had spent his whole life in exile in France, his father having been exiled after trying to seize the Scottish throne. Now, many lords thought he should be recalled. On 26 November the council wrote to the French king, asking him to send Albany home to Scotland ‘for its defence’. Margaret was to continue her role as regent and tutrix of the young king, whose person was to be ‘kept as devised in the late King’s will’. Henry VIII for one was horrified, convinced that Albany might easily depose a vulnerable baby monarch; might spirit him away to the Outer Isles and thence who knew where, much as his great-uncle Richard III was widely believed to have spirited away his nephews, the ‘Princes in the Tower’. Henry saw himself as his Scottish nephew’s natural protector. But that was not how the situation appeared to the Scots.

For Margaret Tudor, there must have been a clash of loyalties; a clash familiar to many royal consorts but surely in this case worse than most, since her husband had actually been killed by her brother’s troops. Yet in the task that now came upon her so suddenly, Henry was the closest natural advisor she had left for the protection of herself and her son. For their part the Scottish lords must have looked at Margaret with double vision. On the one hand she was their queen, wife of one beloved Scottish king and mother of their present ruler. On the other, she was the sister of the man, Henry VIII, who had caused that same king’s death and brought them defeat and disgrace. The message Henry sent north was tactfully mediated – that Margaret’s sister-in-law, Katherine of Aragon, sent her love – but the more Margaret Tudor seemed to turn towards her brother for help, the more divided the perception of her grew.

For all her triumphalism, Katherine expressed herself personally sympathetic to Margaret. ‘The Queen of England for the love she bears the Queen of Scots would gladly send a servant to comfort her.’ Margaret wrote back asking Katherine to put her in Henry’s remembrance. In the weeks after Flodden Katherine did indeed send Friar Bonaventure Langley to Stirling to discuss a truce. As can be seen time and again, the personal, the feminine, was a cover for the political. One story had Margaret claiming war might have been averted had she only been able to meet with the sister-in-law she had known at the English court: ‘If we shall meet, who knows what God by our means may bring to pass?’ But any closeness to the Queen of England could still be one strike against the Queen of Scotland.

Margaret Tudor suffered other disadvantages. Unlike her European contemporaries, or Katherine, she had been raised by a woman, Elizabeth of York, who had been kept away from power by her husband Henry VII. Margaret struggled to occupy a position to which, Tudor-like, she laid claim but for which nothing in her life had prepared her.

In the years ahead she would find herself caught in a different trap; the trap that lay in wait for powerful women. The trap that had entangled Marguerite of Navarre and Margaret of Austria and the trap that (not at the courts of France or the Netherlands but at that of England) would have one last deadly game to play. Meanwhile, the protagonist of that legendary drama was soon to move from the orbit of Margaret of Austria to that of Marguerite of Navarre, as the shifting landscape of the European scene sent the young Anne Boleyn her way.

PART II

1514–1521

When it comes to the government of their affairs, [widowed women] must depend only on themselves; when it comes to sovereignty, they must not cede power to anyone. And then, you must protect yourself from deceitful and presumptuous followers, especially those with whom you conduct business often, because of the suspicions that can arise . . .

Lessons for my Daughter,
Anne of France (Anne de Beaujeu), published 1517–1521

9

Wheel of Fortune

France, the Netherlands, 1514–1515

Machiavelli envisaged Fortune as a woman. But the events immediately following the traumatic year of 1513 made it clear no spirit of sisterhood would move Fortune to give her fellow women an easy ride. Louise of Savoy in France, and Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands, were both to find themselves spinning on her wheel.

On 9 January 1514, just before her thirty-seventh birthday, Anne of Brittany, Louis XII’s queen, died. Her funeral saw an extended parade of ceremony suitable not just for a queen but for a king, as well as an outpouring of public grief; both recognising, perhaps, the doughty part she had played in trying against the odds to preserve the independence of her duchy.

But Anne of Brittany’s death was like a stone dropped in a pond. And the ripples spreading from this stone would reach to touch Margaret of Austria, as well as Louise of Savoy’s family.

Anne de Beaujeu played a prominent part in the funeral cere-monies, as did Louise of Savoy and her children. Louise’s daughter Marguerite would assume an older sister’s role towards the two daughters Anne of Brittany left: fourteen-year-old Claude (now Duchess of Brittany in her own right, thanks to the marriage agreement Anne had made with Louis XII before their marriage) and little Renée, who would come to absorb some of Marguerite’s ideas. Louise noted in her
Journal
:

Anne, queen of France, passing from life to death, left me the administration of her goods, her fortune and her daughters . . . a charge of which I have acquitted myself honourably and kindly; this is known to all, a recognised and demonstrable truth and confirmed by public opinion.

Plans were carried out as arranged. On 14 May François underwent a binding marriage ceremony with Claude; a marriage that made him Duke of Brittany. François’s friend Fleuranges wrote that Claude had inherited her mother Anne of Brittany’s disapproval of François and his clan: ‘never a day but those two houses were bickering’. Personal compatibility was not the point, however, and François must have felt confident as he went hunting the next day.

But the hopes of Louise and her family had been founded on the inability of the pair on the French throne to produce a son. Anne of Brittany’s death – paving the way for a younger bride for King Louis XII – could yet prove worrying for them.