Margaret Douglas Read online

  To my darling daughters, Lorna and Kirsty.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My deepest thanks to all those who have helped me with the book, including: Roy Summers for his beautiful photographs of the Scottish castles known to Lady Margaret in her day; Michael and Charlotte Wemyss; my godson, Adrian Gibbs, Deputy CEO at the Bridgeman Art Library Ltd; Elizabeth L. Taylor, Rights and Images Officer at the National Portrait Gallery; Ryan Clee, Photography and Licensing Assistant at the National Galleries of Scotland and Manju Nair, Finance Assistant of the gallery. Thanks also to Agata Rutkowska, Picture Library Assistant, Royal Collection Trust; Brigadier Henry Wilson; Sophie Bradshaw, General History Publisher, and Juanita Zoë Hall, Managing Editor, at The History Press. I am indepted to Archie Mackenzie for his valuable advice.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Genealogy

  Prologue: The Beginning

  1 The Refugee

  2 ‘My Niece Marget’

  3 Wild as a Tantallon Hawk

  4 The Battle for the King

  5 Hunted as an Outlaw

  6 The Cousins

  7 ‘The King’s Wicked Intention’

  8 So Much Destroyed by Death

  9 ‘The Faithfullest Lover that Ever was Born’

  10 Bargaining Counters of the King

  11 The Second Lady in the Land

  12 The Flemish Wife

  13 The Rose with Many Thorns

  14 The Fall from Grace

  15 The Lennox Earldom Restored

  16 The Price Paid for a Bride

  17 ‘Every Day like Sunday’

  18 Sadness Unforeseen

  19 ‘Let a Trumpet be Blown on the Marches’

  20 The Hostages

  21 ‘My Derrest Douchter’

  22 The Falconer Messengers

  23 The Golden Boy

  24 ‘A Most Victorious and Triumphant Princesse’

  25 A Conspirator’s Smile

  26 Disputed Inheritance

  27 From England’s Court to France

  28 ‘The Great Revenge that Ye might have of your Enemies’

  29 Of Soothsayers and Spies

  30 Arrest

  31 ‘A Very Wise and Discreet Matron’

  32 In Poverty and Splendour

  33 A Diarist at Court

  34 The Bitter Bite of Triumph

  35 The Price Paid for a Marriage

  36 ‘For Want of Good Counsel’

  37 Broken Down with Grief

  38 The Father’s Story

  39 ‘My Ears have been so Astounded’

  40 Memorial for a Son

  41 Regent of Scotland

  42 The Sniper’s Bullet

  43 The Lennox Jewel

  44 A Boy Unrestrained

  45 Connivance of Mothers

  46 Once More Imprisoned for Love

  47 My Jewel Arbella

  48 Poison?

  49 Disputed Inheritance

  Bibliography

  Plates

  Copyright

  GENEALOGY

  PROLOGUE

  THE BEGINNING

  Late one evening in August 1515, darkness was falling on Linlithgow Palace, shading the sides of the courtyard from the naked eye. Within it a small group was gathered, a party of well-armed men and several women. One of the women was obviously with child, evident despite the cloak she wore. The party moved quietly from the courtyard barely visible in the deepening dusk. Outside horses were waiting, one with a pillion behind the saddle onto which the pregnant woman was lifted. A tall young man stood beside her as she was helped from the ground, then quickly mounted himself to lead the party from the castle. The sentries stood aside to let him pass, well briefed on what was about to happen.

  Riding hard, they had covered a scant 3 miles towards the City of Edinburgh when the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Home, met them with a party Queen Margaret later described as ‘hardy, well-striking fellows’. The men were to escort her to her husband, the Earl of Angus’ castle of Tantallon, who was waiting for her on the east coast of Scotland, near what was then the ferry port of North Berwick.

  Twenty-six-year-old Margaret, the daughter of Henry VII of England, had married nineteen-year-old Angus just a year after her first husband, King James IV, had died in the dreadful scrimmage of Flodden. The marriage in itself had been one reason why the leaders of the Scottish nobility had summoned John, Duke of Albany, to come to Scotland as regent.

  John was the son of Alexander, brother of James III, who had become domiciled in France after his exile from Scotland. When Alexander was killed in an accident, his French wife Anne de la Tour d’Auvergne raised their only child alone. More French than Scottish, John was nonetheless heir to the throne of Scotland after James IV’s two sons.

  Albany, as he was always entitled, landed at Dumbarton in May 1515. He was at first on good terms with Margaret but held the opinion that her husband was an incompetent youth. Having immured herself with the two little princes of her previous marriage, Margaret surrendered them to the care of Albany before publicly announcing that she was ‘taking her chamber’ and entering confinement until the birth of her child by Angus was born.

  The subterfuge had been clever. Playing on the fact that she was known to have suffered greatly during the births of her previous children, she had managed to convince her attendants that she was now so ill that Angus had to be summoned to her side. It was he who had asked Lord Home to help them, knowing as he did that Albany, having accused Home of being responsible for the death of James IV at Flodden, was now an avowed enemy.

  Escorted by Lord Home and his men, Margaret and Angus reached Tantallon, the red sandstone fortress of the Red Douglasses, dominating the cliffs above the North Sea opposite the Bass Rock.

  There they waited with ever increasing impatience for a rider bringing a summons from King Henry VIII, Margaret’s brother, to come to his court in England.

  The summons never came. Home, seizing the chance to raid some of Albany’s property in the Queen’s name, was declared an outlaw. He too fled to Tantallon, joining Margaret and Angus until they all fled for his own land on 23 September. There, in Coldstream Nunnery, Home’s mother came to Margaret’s aid for she was now genuinely exhausted and seriously ill.

  At last King Henry’s invitation arrived. A message was sent to Lord Dacre who at once sent an escort to take Margaret across the Border to his family home of Morpeth Castle. Fires were lit and comforts of every kind prepared by members of the household who were told of her imminent arrival. The distance to Morpeth was some 50 miles. Margaret was carried in a litter, which although most carefully handled, jolted her arthritic hip. Towards the end of their journey, when they were only 14 miles from the town of Rothbury, Margaret felt a familiar pain. Her bearers, hearing her cry out that she could go no farther, turned to their mounted escort for advice. It was plain they could not reach Morpeth, another 20 miles on from Rothbury. In such a state of emergency there was only one alternative: Lord Dacre owned the outlying fortress of Harbottle, a medieval castle strategically built on a mound overlooking the River Coquet. A stark stone building, used primarily as a prison, it had long needed repair. The roof leaked above walls running with damp. It was certainly no place for any woman, particularly one of royal blood, to give birth.

  But it was at least shelter from the wind and the driving rain. In the present situation there was no alternative other than to carry Margaret, now shrieking in agony, into the cold bare tower.

  1

  THE REFUGEE

  ‘Women! A plague to mankind and the royal ones the worst of the lot.’ Thomas, Lord Dacre, Warden of the Marches on the English side and terror of all those in his thrall,
was driven to desperation by the screaming within his castle walls. Queen Margaret was bad enough. The agony of her long labour combined with the pain in her hip had kept her yelling for three days or more; now, on top of Margaret’s screams, the furious bawling of a hungry infant was driving him out of his mind.

  ‘For God’s sake find a wet-nurse,’ he roared at his terrified servants, one of whom had the temerity to remind him that the commotion upstairs in the draughty, mouse-infested castle with its leaking roof, was partly his own fault. On the fugitive queen’s arrival, he had forbidden her ladies to come within its walls.

  Lord Dacre was at his wits’ end, faced with an unexpected emergency such as he had never met before. War had just broken out again between England and Scotland and now, in early October, taking advantage of the ensuing confusion, rustlers were lifting cattle, fat on summer grass. He had just come in from a hard day’s riding trying to track them down, and had been looking forward to an evening’s rest before the fire in his castle of Morpeth when a man on a horse, streaked with sweat from hard galloping, had appeared with the news that the Queen of Scots had arrived at the Border fort of Harbottle. Obviously in labour, she seemed on the point of death.

  She had remained thus for forty-eight hours until, to the intense relief of every man and woman within the castle, she had given birth to an infant, which (with hair the colour of the Red Douglasses) had proved to be a girl. Named after her mother, she had been baptised the very next day, the usual custom at a time when infant mortality was so great as to be expected rather than merely feared. Her godfather was Cardinal Wolsey, for whom one of the men in the castle had stood proxy.

  Two days later, on 10 October, Queen Margaret, still extremely weak, had dictated a letter to the Duke of Albany saying that ‘she had been forced, for fear and danger of her life, to depart from Scotland to the realm of England’.1

  Lord Dacre was afterwards accused of failing to report the birth of his niece to Henry VIII; had he done so, the messenger would surely have been either killed or captured as soon as the portcullis was raised. Raiding parties from just over the border in Scotland were seen by the sentries from the battlements, and rumours had already reached the castle that the Regent Albany, who had seized all the queen’s clothes and jewellery as well as anything worth lifting from her husband’s castle of Tantallon, was advancing on Harbottle with 40,000 men.

  As sentries reported that men on horseback could be seen coming from the north, mounting to the battlements, Lord Dacre recognised to his great relief, the standard of the queen’s husband, the Earl of Angus, riding at the head of them. Beside him was Lord Home, together with several other so-called ‘rebel lords’.

  Despite having little on which to feed them after living in a virtual state of siege, Lord Dacre allowed them to enter the fortress. Once within its walls, they signed a covenant binding them to free Margaret’s two little sons, James V and his brother Alexander Duke of Ross, from the regent, whose power would then be given to the queen. The signatures of her husband Angus, Earl of Douglas; the Earl of Arran, head of the house of Hamilton; and Lord Hume, are all appended to this document, called a bond, which is dated 15 October 1515. 2

  Despite the discomfort of Harbottle, where the wind found its way through every crack in the uncovered walls, Queen Margaret was too ill to travel until the beginning of November. Then with a strong escort, she moved on to the Castle of Morpeth, Lord Dacre’s family home.

  No greater contrast could be found than that between the castles of Harbottle, comfortless in every aspect, and Morpeth. The latter fortress, although built a mere hundred years later than the former, on a hill overlooking the River Wansbeck, was nonetheless as luxurious as any building of its day. A curtain wall contained the gatehouse beyond which, in the centre of the courtyard, rose the Great Tower. The rooms, so unlike the damp cold chambers of Harbottle, were hung with tapestries and warmed with fires. In the dining hall on the first floor, the table gleamed with silverware, which sparkled in the light thrown by candles from sconces on the walls.

  Revelling in the newfound comfort, Margaret was further overjoyed by presents of lengths of velvet and cloth of gold sent by her brother Henry with an envoy, Sir Christopher Gargrave. Delighted, she summoned seamstresses: Margaret was inordinately fond of new gowns. The gifts included baby clothes, thoughtfully provided by Queen Catherine of Aragon, now pregnant with what she and the king hoped most fervently would prove to be a son.

  The winter went by at Morpeth as Queen Margaret gradually regained her strength. In February news came from England that Queen Catherine had borne a daughter, so far her one surviving child.

  Slowly the days lengthened, and the roads, in a spell of dry weather, became open to travel; at the beginning of April a cavalcade from England arrived. This time it included William Blackwall, a gentleman of the bedchamber and the clerk of the King’s Spicery. He came with silver vessels for use on her journey. There were drinking cups and probably some pots and a kettle that could be heated on a wood or charcoal fire. In addition, Queen Catherine sent her equerry, Sir Thomas Parr, with her own favourite white pony, carrying a specially padded pillion on which her sister-in-law, riding behind a groom, would have almost as much comfort as had she been carried in a litter. Her baby Margaret, together with her nurse, travelled in the latter way.

  When preparations for the journey were complete, Angus, whom King Henry had specifically included in his sister’s invitation to his court, suddenly disappeared to Scotland. He claimed that he had gone to make his peace with the regent, but most people knew, some tittering behind their hands, that he was returning to his mistress, Janet Stewart, daughter of the Laird of Traquair.

  Notes

  1 Strickland, A., Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses, Vol.II, p.125

  2 Ibid. p.127

  2

  ‘MY NIECE MARGET’

  Smothering her anger at his desertion (she is claimed never to have forgiven him), Queen Margaret made her journey to London in slow stages. Mortified as she was by her husband’s behaviour, it was at least some consolation that at each and all of her resting places she found herself royally received. She is known to have stopped at Stony Stratford in North Buckinghamshire, the ancient market town where the ford of the Roman road of Watling Street crosses the Great Ouse. From there, on 27 April, she wrote to her brother, sending the letter with a fast rider to warn him of her approach.

  Two days later she reached Enfield, almost within sight of London. Here she stayed in Enfield Palace, the palatial Middlesex home of Sir William Lovell, speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Treasurer of the Household under Cardinal Wolsey’s administration. Her brother King Henry, himself a frequent visitor, drawn by the luxury of the house as well as the political importance of Lovell, had requested him to receive his sister for a visit of four days.

  Queen Margaret reached Tottenham Cross on 3 May, which by the Gregorian calendar would have been 12 May, on a reputedly beautiful morning. This was then the station to which all processions from the north gates in London and elsewhere in the British Isles converged. There, as was pre-arranged, she waited until a gorgeous concord appeared to the sound of trumpets and a great clattering of horses’ hooves.

  Preceded only by his standard bearer, the flag with the arms of England unfurling in the breeze against the sky, Henry headed the procession. Distinguished by his height and his spectacular apparel (a velvet cloak falling from his shoulders above the intricately worked steel breastplate he always wore for safety, even on such occasions), Henry was still the handsome prince on that day of his reunion with his eldest sister. He would, however, have been stouter than when she had last seen him, as chroniclers on his succession so rapturously described.

  Having embraced her, his first words to Margaret were reputedly, ‘Where is my Lord Angus?’ Whereupon, told of his sudden, unexplained disappearance, he slapped his thigh exclaiming, ‘Done like a Scot!’

  Instantly, his anger vanished
as his sister held out the baby, by now six months old. Raising her high in his arms, he called her his little Marget, his special name for her which he would always continue to use.

  Queen Margaret rode into the city of London on a pillion behind Sir Thomas Parr, while behind, in the following procession, came her baby in the horse litter, held securely by her nurse. It was six in the evening before they reached Baynard’s Castle, made ready for her by her brother. This was the mansion built on land reclaimed from the Thames, on a site just east of what is now Blackfriar’s Station. It was reconstructed as a royal palace by Henry and Margaret’s grandfather, Henry VII, and had been given to Catherine of Aragon. However, despite the splendour of her surroundings, Margaret was eager to leave. Within days she was boarding a barge from the wharf that took her, with her attendants and tiny daughter, down the Thames to Greenwich Palace.

  Rebuilt by her father, Henry VII, using no less than 600,000 bricks fired by his own brickmakers in Greenwich, this was now not only the largest but also the most modern palace in Europe. It was here only three months earlier on 18 February that the little Princess Mary, Margaret’s niece and her brother’s only surviving child, had been born.

  His sister Margaret and her baby daughter were warmly welcomed by Queen Catherine, now grown stout and matronly but still possessing a soft voice with a charming Spanish inflection. Catherine cried out with delight at sight of little Margaret, now crowned with the small tight curls of glorious red-gold hair so indicative of her Tudor descent. Catherine’s own daughter, Mary, five months younger than Margaret, was small in comparison and as dark as she was fair. The two infants shared a nursery, thus beginning, although neither was aware of it at the time, a friendship which would last throughout their lives.

  In the palace was yet another infant, this time a little boy named Henry, born only on 11 March. He was the son of Henry’s youngest and favourite sister, the Princess Mary; despite his fondness for Mary, he had used her as a political pawn, sending her to France to marry Louis XII, a man thirty-four years older than herself. Before leaving, however, she had made her brother promise that in the event of her husband’s death (which in fact happened after only eighty-two days, supposedly after consummating his marriage with his young bride) she might marry whom she chose. Subsequently, while still in France, she had secretly married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk with whom, although he was again much older than herself, she had long been in love. Henry, who in fact had sent Suffolk to fetch her, although officially protesting, had forgiven them; a formal marriage ceremony had taken place in Greenwich Palace only a few days before her elder sister, Margaret, the former Queen of Scotland, had arrived.