Game of Queens (16 page)

History has often chosen to see Margaret as a fool for love, seduced by a pretty face, and so it might have been. Or she may, like other women in this story, have been determined to avoid her male relations marrying her off again for their own purposes. But it is also possible that she was trying to bolster her authority.
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Throughout the last century the Douglases had almost rivalled the Scottish crown. But if that were her motive, then she could hardly have chosen more unwisely.

On 26 August the council demanded that Margaret Tudor should summon John Stuart, Duke of Albany, from France to become Governor of Scotland; to take her place, basically. Most councillors were behind a demand that she should surrender the Great Seal and issue no further proclamations. By the middle of September they were questioning whether it were even appropriate that she should remain in charge of her son, the baby king, James V. The provisions of her husband's will had been dependent upon her not remarrying. Now that was forfeit, as Lord Home trenchantly put it:

We have shown heretofore our willingness to honour the Queen contrary to the ancient law and custom of this kingdom. We have suffered and obeyed her authority the whiles she herself kept her right by keeping her widowhood. Now she has quit it by marrying, why should we not choose another to succeed in the place she has voluntarily left?

The Lyon Herald was sent to inform Margaret that she was to be deposed from the regency. He addressed Margaret not as ‘the Queen's Grace' but as ‘My Lady the King's Mother', the title her grandmother and namesake Margaret Beaufort had borne so proudly. Margaret Tudor took it less kindly. And her new husband's grandfather and mentor, old Lord Drummond, boxed the herald's ears, a staggering breach of propriety.

Margaret dismissed Drummond's insult to the Lyon Herald and, more seriously, nominated her husband Angus, whose own uncle called him a callow young fool, as her co-regent. Angus proved the truth of the description by attacking the lord chancellor, who had made clear his disapproval of the match, and seizing the Great Seal. The outraged nobility stopped Margaret's dower rents, while the lord chancellor and his followers rode to Edinburgh and took possession of the city.

This was civil war, or something very like it. Margaret and Angus promptly fled with Margaret's sons to Stirling Castle: ‘my party adversary continues in their malice and proceed in their Parliament usurping the King's authority as I and my lords were of no reputation reputing us as rebels', was how she put it to her brother Henry VIII.

The Scottish lords would have allowed her to keep charge of her sons if she gave up her regent's powers but Margaret Tudor was having none of it. Her sons were ‘right lifelike' (lively) she assured Henry. But she ended her letter: ‘If you send not soon succours in men and money I shall be super extended.' She urged her brother to send an English army to where her husband was trying to relieve the besieged Castle of St Andrews. The army was to be proclaimed a peacekeeping force and the Scots told that ‘their lands and goods shall not be hurt and they shall be recompensed double and treble'. But she was, essentially, inviting an enemy to occupy their country.

‘Brother, all the welfare of me and my children rests in your hands', she wrote. She warned that her adversaries were forging her signature and Henry should take as genuine only those letters signed not just ‘Margaret R' but ‘your loving sister Margaret R'. In late January 1515, Henry VIII sent word that she should flee to the border but Margaret quailed at the practical difficulties, and at the implications for her and her son's power.

‘God send I were such a woman that might go with my bairns in my arms', she wrote back. If that had been so, then ‘I should not be long from you'. But she was a queen, and the death of the old French king, Louis XII, while making her sister Mary a merry widow, had dramatically weakened Margaret's position, depriving her a family connection to the French throne.

The promise King Louis had made to his bride's brother, Henry VIII, to keep the Duke of Albany in France, and away from rivalry with Margaret in Scotland, had died with him. On 2nd April 1515 Albany set out from the French court.

 

From the time Albany arrived in Scotland, in answer to the council's summons, to separate Margaret from her son, the king, it was, as the Venetian ambassador wrote, François I who was likely to be blamed ‘for this cruelty'. The French ambassador in London wrote to François's mother, Louise of Savoy, asking to be recalled and warning that the opinion on the London streets was that Henry VIII should declare war on France to avenge the insult to his sister.

When Albany reached Scotland there came the inevitable tussle for control of the young king. A cultivated man, wealthy from his marriage to a great French heiress, Albany spoke little English, and less of the Scottish idiom than Margaret herself, but nonetheless, he set conscientiously and ably about his responsibilities.

Albany was to appoint four guardians from a selection of peers made by the council, and Margaret was to vet his choice. It was a dramatic public scene when the child was handed over to his new mentors. In the forecourt of Stirling Castle, Margaret Tudor stood, holding the young king by the hand, Angus by her side, her younger son in a nurse's arms. But as the representatives of the council approached, Margaret formally called on them to declare the cause of their coming, and ordered the portcullis dropped in their faces. Requesting six days to consider parliament's plan, ignoring her husband's urging that she should comply, she retreated into to the formidable and easily defensible bulk of Stirling, while her rattled husband Angus withdrew to his own lands.

Albany of course followed her, determined to take Stirling by siege, however long it took. When Margaret saw the forces and the heavy artillery Albany had assembled against her, she was frightened enough to comply. Even then she caused the little king to be the one who handed over the castle's keys; a defeat with dignity. While Albany set off after Angus and his family, Margaret was taken back to Edinburgh under guard. On 2 August she signed a statement declaring her wish that Albany should indeed ‘have the charge and keeping' of both her sons; forced to do so, she later declared, by Albany's ‘crafty and subtle ways'.

Once again her brother Henry VIII's representative urged her to flee south, to withdraw from Edinburgh ‘with all the politic ways and wisdom you can use'. This time Margaret agreed. She was heavily pregnant with Angus's child and had told Albany that she proposed to ‘take her chamber' for the child's birth at Linlithgow. Arriving there she claimed to be ill, so that Angus would be allowed to visit her. When darkness came, they slipped away with a handful of servants, riding hard despite Margaret's pregnancy. Before dawn they reached the Douglas's Tantallon Castle, close to the border.

With Albany in pursuit, the queen and her party had to flee so speedily that Margaret's clothes, even her precious jewels, were left behind. As Berwick Castle, in England, came into sight, adventure descended into bathos as its governor refused to admit them without orders. Finally Henry VIII's representative, Lord Dacre, arrived to escort Margaret instead to his headquarters, Harbottle Castle.

This was a military stronghold, and no place for a royal confinement. It was difficult even to get a midwife through the rough and bandit-infested country. But there, having arrived in a state of collapse, after an extended labour, Margaret gave birth to a daughter.
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Margaret would later charge Albany that she had been forced ‘for fear and jeopardy of my life' to flee into England ‘great with child and nigh my deliverance', so that eight days after crossing the border ‘I was delivered of child fourteen days afore my time to my great spoil and extreme danger.' It was certainly ten days before she could sit up long enough to read letters from her brother Henry, and from Katherine of Aragon, and November before, at an agonisingly slow pace, she could be moved to the more comfortable castle of Morpeth.

At Morpeth, as the household began to prepare for Christmas, Margaret was at last shown the array of gifts Henry and Katherine had tried to send to her at Harbottle: dresses, bed-hangings, everything to deck her as a queen again. When she was carried in a chair from her room to see the dresses laid out in the great hall, she cried: ‘ye may see the King my brother hath not forgotten me and that he would not that I should die for lack of clothes'. Clothes were of course an important signifier of status, regardless of any question of pleasure or practicality.

Margaret was still suffering from what seems to have been sciatica, unable to enjoy the resplendent Christmas festivities. Lady Dacre's cook prepared invalid's almond milk and broths alongside the Christmas baked meats, game and jellies but (wrote Sir Christopher Garnyshe, the man Henry had sent north with his gifts), ‘Her grace hath such pain in her right leg 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.' Nevertheless, he added, Margaret ‘hath a wonderful love of apparel', making her attendants display the dresses Henry had sent once or twice a day.

When she grew stronger, in the first months of the new year, it was only to hear dreadful news. Her second son, the Duke of Ross, had died in Scotland, while in Albany's charge, of a childhood illness. Her hosts had known since Christmas but decided to spare her while she herself was so ill; the more so since, Sir Christopher recorded, she loved to speak of this little boy, praising him ‘even more than she doth her elder son the King.' Sir Christopher added: ‘I think her one of the lowest-brought ladies'.

Her spirits would not be raised by the fact that her husband Angus, on returning to his own lands in Scotland, had decided to remain there. He preferred to make an accommodation with Albany rather than become a penniless exile by accompanying Margaret as she prepared to go south to the English court.

‘When it comes to the government of their lands and affairs, [widows] must depend only on themselves', Anne de Beaujeu had written. Margaret Tudor – unlike Louise of Savoy and Margaret of Austria – had not lived up to that wise advice. But then she, unlike them, had not had the benefit of Anne's example.

 

In ‘much heaviness', as Dacre put it, Margaret Tudor set out southwards on 8 April. Ambassadors from Scotland reached London before her but Henry VIII refused to see them until he had met his sister. From Stony Stratford she wrote to him that she was ‘in right good health and as joyous of my said journey towards you as any woman may be in coming to her brother', and that she was ‘most desirous now to come to your presence and to have a sight of your person'. She reached London on 3 May, entering the city in triumphal procession, riding a white palfrey sent by Queen Katherine.

There were now, with Henry VIII's sister Mary Tudor, the dowager of France, three queens at the English court. It was the first time the Tudor siblings had been together since 1503 and whatever Margaret's recent experiences, the news from the other two meant that this was a time of celebration. In March, at their London house, Mary Tudor gave birth to Brandon's son and in February Katherine of Aragon, for the first time, bore Henry a living child, ‘a lively little daughter', as an Italian correspondent wrote to Erasmus: the Princess Mary.

The Venetian ambassador Giustinian wrote home bluntly that the birth of a mere girl ‘has proved vexatious, for never had this entire kingdom ever so anxiously desired anything as it did a prince, it appearing to everyone that the state would be safe should his majesty leave an heir male, whereas, without a prince, they are of a contrary opinion'.

But Katherine of Aragon was triumphant and Henry convinced that a living daughter was at least a promise of better to come. As he told Giustinian: ‘We are both young.' Although Katherine wanted to look after the child herself, Henry insisted that instead the whole panoply ratified by his grandmother Margaret Beaufort should swing into place, with a lady governess to take care of the baby from her christening and everything in accordance with tradition, down to the ermine quilt on the baby's ‘cradle of estate'.

All of May was a party time, with a tournament at which Henry and men were decked in purple velvet embroidered with golden roses. But behind the scenes there were stresses. Both the Tudor sisters were alarmingly short of money. Mary Tudor and her husband Charles Brandon had worked out that the only way to cope with the expectations of the state a dowager queen of France should keep in public was for Mary to live largely in private on their country estates. Pending some arrangement about the receipt of income from her Scottish lands, Margaret Tudor was dependent on her brother's goodwill. There were rumours that her life in Scotland was over forever. Giustinian heard that Henry was to find a pretext to have her marriage to Angus annulled and marry her to the Emperor Maximilian.

In fact, Henry VIII was in negotiation with Albany and the Scottish authorities and as a first point in the bargaining, Margaret's wardrobe and jewels were returned to her, including pieces of crimson satin set with diamonds, white taffeta sewn with pearls, gold collars, and a red silk hat set with a diamond, given to her by the King of France. The Scottish lords even promised to retrieve from storage in Stirling the ‘furrings' her late husband James had given her. They also promised to help Margaret's commissioners look into the matter of her rents. But somehow, no money arrived. By Christmas 1516 Margaret wrote that she had no money to give presents to the servants on New Year's Day, to the detriment of her brother's honour and her own.