A few days later, while staying at the abbot’s house at Westminster, Margaret became ill. The cygnet she had eaten had upset her stomach. It was only two months since her son had died and Margaret did not have either the emotional or physical strength to recover. Fisher was present at her death, a mere five days after her grandson and his wife were anointed king and queen.6 Margaret Beaufort was buried in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey where her son had so recently been interred. She had decreed in her will that her Book of Hours, in which she had marked such key events as her son’s victory at Bosworth and Henry VIII’s birth, should be kept on display there.7 Her black marble tomb was to be surmounted with a bronze effigy created by the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano. The face he cast expresses her forceful personality.
Margaret had survived the dangers of her son’s birth. She had helped protect him during the years that followed, and risked her own life to conspire on his behalf against Richard III. In promoting her son as king, she had sacrificed her own superior claim to the throne. But although she accepted male authority she had wielded considerable influence. Margaret had used her experience of English court ceremony to place the Tudors firmly within royal tradition, drawing up the orders for future royal christenings and funerals. Her best servants became the king’s, and he had continued to trust her judgement to the end. No wonder she came to sign herself in the regal style, Margaret R.
The obituary sermon Fisher gave her noted that Margaret would be greatly missed. Her female friends and relations, ‘whom she had loved so tenderly’, her priests and servants, ‘to whom she was full dear’, indeed, ‘all England for her death had cause for weeping’. Margaret had been an important patroness to the universities, especially Cambridge; she had also been generous to the poor, while her passion for chivalric virtues had, Fisher said, made her an ‘example of honour’ to the nobility. It was her spirituality that he admired most, later commenting that although ‘she chose me as her director . . . I gladly confess that I learnt more from her great virtue than I ever taught her.’ If Henry VII had had a good death, reconciled to God, Fisher believed Margaret had led a good life. In later generations, however, Margaret’s reputation would fall victim to religious and sexual prejudice.
In the post-Reformation England of the seventeenth century Margaret’s spirituality came to be judged mere superstition and her intelligence and toughness of character were regarded with equal suspicion. The antiquarian Sir George Buck condemned Margaret Beaufort as a ‘politic and subtle lady’ who had killed the princes in the Tower with sorcery and poison to clear the way for her son. That Margaret was responsible for the princes’ deaths is a theory becoming fashionable again and remains linked to cultural prejudices. Margaret’s support for her son had been construed as those of an obsessively ambitious mother, yet for her generation she was fulfilling a duty. She was honour bound to help him regain his rightful inheritance, and later to help him restore the House of Lancaster, into which she had been born. Her strict religious devotions are, to modern sensibilities, strange, even fanatical, but amongst royal and noble women of her time they were commonplace: an effort to look beyond the vicious and ruthless political culture into which they were born, to understand humility, and the nobility of Christ’s example.
The absence of portraits of Margaret Beaufort as an attractive young woman to counterbalance the images of her in old age have helped give credit to the sinister reputation she has gained. But the face that stands out from her story is not that of the widow with the hooded eyes, praying amidst the riches of a royal chapel and seen in her portraits, but a young girl, riding in the biting wet of a Welsh winter, to Pembroke Castle where she must deliver her child. Now it was for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to continue the Tudor story.
Part Two
INHERITANCE: THE LEGACY OF ARTHUR
Avarice is expelled from the country. Liberality scatters wealth with bounteous hand. Our king does not desire gold of gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality.
WILLIAM BLOUNT, LORD MOUNTJOY, TO ERASMUS ON THE ACCESSION OF HENRY VIII
15
THE ELDER SISTER: MARGARET, QUEEN OF SCOTS
QUEEN MARGARET BID HER HUSBAND, JAMES IV, FAREWELL AT Linlithgow, the palace in West Lothian he had given her as a wedding present.1 It was here, in this towering palace by the loch, that their son James had been born on Easter Saturday the previous year. He was ‘a right fair child and large for his age’, and by that summer of 1513 she was pregnant again.2 Legend has it that she had begged her husband not to leave her, for he intended to go to war with her brother and she wished to prevent it. In reality, her chief concern was for James’ life. It was only four years since Henry VII’s death, but the twenty-three-year-old Tudor princess was now a ‘Scotswoman’, as she often asserted. Under the blue painted ceiling of the Linlithgow Palace chapel, she would pray for James’ victory, as well as for his safe return.
The relationship between the royal brothers-in-law had broken down in January 1512, when the English Parliament had reasserted the Crown’s ancient claim to overlordship of Scotland. A furious King James had retaliated by signing a treaty with Henry’s French enemy, Louis XII, in which each agreed to come to the aid of the other, were they ever to be attacked. Henry VIII was certain, however, that James would not honour it. He had joined a Holy League against Louis, inspired by the Pope’s desire to see the French out of Italy, and James was threatened with excommunication if he came to Louis’ defence. Confident that James would heed the papal warning, Henry had led his army in person into France, landing at Calais on 30 June 1513.
Henry’s only real concern in leaving England had been the potential threat posed by his white-rose cousins. Edward IV’s nephew, Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, had been in the Tower since Henry VII’s reign, but if Henry were to lose a major battle in France – where Suffolk’s younger brother, Richard de la Pole, was allied with Louis XII – it was possible he would be sprung from the Tower and crowned in Henry’s place. Henry had therefore had the duke executed before his departure and his queen, Katherine of Aragon, had been left as regent of England and captain general of his armies during his absence, to deal with any unforeseen difficulties.
Henry intended the campaign in France to mark the beginning of an English reconquest of its former territories. His almoner, the priest Thomas Wolsey, who held the post concerned with the king’s charitable alms-giving, had the task of ensuring the king was provided with a well fed, disciplined and equipped army. A handsome and efficient tradesman’s son, Wolsey had achieved this in spades, and Henry was eager for the task ahead. ‘Our king does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality’, a courtier told Erasmus proudly. Shakespeare’s Henry V would later voice the same sentiment: ‘By Jove I am not covetous for gold . . . But if it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.’3
On 1 August, Henry began the siege of the small town of Thérouanne in Artois, hoping to make history. In pouring rain at three in the morning, Henry had walked around the camp comforting his watch by assuring them ‘Well, comrades, now we have suffered in the beginning, fortune promises us better things.’4 Henry’s first victory was granted on the morning of 16 August when a small French cavalry force misjudged the position of the English army. Under artillery fire they turned and fled, pursued by cavalry. Six standards were captured, as well as a duke, a marquis and an admiral. It was called ‘the Battle of the Spurs’, and was quickly capped by the fall of Thérouanne.
But on 24 August, as Henry set off looking for further glory and more valuable towns, James IV crossed the border into Northumberland with the largest army ever assembled in Scotland. Within a week James had captured Norham Castle. Other lesser fortresses followed before the Scottish invader took up a high position on the Northumberland hill of Flodden Edge to await the English army. Katherine of Aragon wrote to reassure her husband that she had prepared for the coming battle and ‘My heart
is very good to it.’5 For the previous fortnight she had been busy organising artillery and gunners, while also calmly sewing standards, banners and badges for the English army. Henry had no doubt this daughter of the warrior queen Isabella of Castile, who had thrown the Moors out of Spain, would prove a match for the Scot, but James was a formidable foe. He had attacked England in the past and this time the French had trained part of his huge army in the effective use of the Swiss pike. These weapons, eighteen to twenty-two feet long, had broken Richard III’s cavalry charge at Bosworth, as Katherine’s battlefield commander well remembered (the seventy-year-old Earl of Surrey had fought at Bosworth alongside his father ‘Jack’ of Norfolk, who had died in Richard’s cause).
While Katherine set off northwards to prepare a defensive line, Margaret, at Linlithgow, could only await news from Flodden. The tranquillity and crystal air at Linlithgow had made this the pleasure palace of the Stuarts, and Margaret led a pampered life there. Outside King James’ private chambers, the waiting room had a board game cut into the floor for people to pass the time, and a spear used to take fish from the loch is still kept at the palace. A room in the north-west tower, which has sweeping views across the open countryside, is that from which, in romantic tradition, Margaret scanned the horizon for the expected messengers. On 10 September rumours reached Edinburgh of mass casualties and a crushing defeat for the Scots, and it was not long after that Margaret learned the full, and terrible, story.
After days of appalling weather and an exchange of challenges, the battle had begun on 9 September and five phalanxes of Scottish pikemen advanced down Branxton Hill. The wind and rain battered them and the soft ground broke up their formation as men stumbled. Yet, as they continued forward in eerie silence, they had remained in good order. The English described them as ‘Germanic’.
A cavalry charge against the pike was impossible and so the English had counter-attacked on foot. They used the polearm, curve-bladed weapons called bills to strike at the Scots at close quarters, but the Scots fought back ferociously. One Englishman complained they were ‘such large and strong men, they would not fall when four or five bills struck them’.
A desperate struggle had been fought ‘with many muckle slaughter, sweating and travail’ on both sides before the battle ended in the defeat of the Scots and the death of the flower of their nobility. They included nine earls, fourteen lords, the Archbishop of St Andrews and the Bishop of the Isles.6 This was ‘The prime o’ our land . . . cauld in the clay’ who are still remembered in the haunting lament ‘The Flowers of the Forest’.7 But the most significant casualty was James IV.
Queen Margaret’s husband was found lying near the royal banner of the red lion rampant, only a spear’s length from where the English commander, Surrey, had fought.8 James’ left hand was almost severed, his throat gashed, and an arrow was shot through his lower jaw.9 Surrey would be rewarded for the victory at Flodden with the restoration of the family title of Duke of Norfolk and an augmentation to the ducal arms, still used today, and which recalls the spectacle of James’ corpse: a red lion rampant, with an arrow though its head.
With their king fallen, the survivors of James’ army were chased for three miles. If the ‘English had been horsed’, it was boasted, ‘10,000 more would have been slain.’10 That night the English toasted their victory with Scottish beer, which they commented was surprisingly good.11 Henry claimed the horses of the Scottish dead and for weeks afterwards their loose animals were still being rounded up: ‘a bay trotting horse’, ‘a grey mare with one eye’, ‘a nag with a cloudy face’, all living reminders of their former riders.12
Katherine wrote to her sister-in-law assuring her that ‘The Queen of England for the love she bears the Queen of Scots would gladly send a servant to comfort her’ in her widowhood. But if she pitied Margaret, Katherine admitted in a letter to Wolsey that she regarded it as the greatest honour to have killed a king. She told Henry that she would have sent him James’ head, ‘but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it’.13 Instead, Katherine sent him the chequered surcoat taken from James’ body, which she suggested he have as his banner. Henry, then in the midst of besieging the town of Tournai, showed it ‘rent’ and ‘stained with blood’ to his ally, the emperor Maximilian.14 His brother king had ‘paid a heavier penalty for his perfidy than we would have wished’, Henry commented. He would remember what Katherine was capable of in years to come, even expressing fear of her ability to ‘carry on a war . . . as fiercely as Queen Isabella, her mother, had done in Spain’.15
Under the terms of James’ will, his ‘most dearest spouse’ was now regent of Scotland, making Queen Margaret the first Tudor woman to rule a kingdom. She had no experience of government, but she was determined to protect her son. A general council was called at the great Parliament Hall of Stirling Castle, and the coronation of the seventeen-month-old James V took place there in the royal chapel on 21 September. Robert Carver’s moving Mass for ten voices, Dum Sacrum Mysterium, was sung at what became known as the ‘mourning coronation’ because of the outpouring of grief for those who had died.
Henry returned home from France in late October, after taking Tournai, and rode hard to Richmond to see Katherine. The victorious husband and wife were reunited, and ‘there was such a loving meeting as everyone rejoiced’. Margaret had hoped to build on Katherine’s letter of sympathy, and asked her sister-in-law to put her in her brother’s remembrance, ‘that his kindness may be known to our lieges and realm’.16 But as Henry took charge of the follow-up to Flodden, Scotland’s agony continued. His captains were ordered to strike again and again north of the border, burning corn and destroying villages.
As the desperate, starving Scots began to turn on each other, Henry was sent the chilling assessment that ‘there is neither law, nor reason, nor justice at this day, either used or kept in Scotland, but get what you can’.17 It was February 1514 before he decided they had been punished enough. A treaty was signed shortly before Margaret retreated into her chamber for the period of her confinement and the delivery of her husband’s posthumous child. In April Alexander, Duke of Ross was born, but Margaret had little time to recover. The Scottish council wanted a military leader, not a female regent, and there were calls for the return from exile of James IV’s cousin, John Stuart, Duke of Albany. The duke’s father had left Scotland following an attempt to seize the throne from James III, and the duke had been raised in France, unable even to speak Scots. The council nevertheless viewed Albany as an appropriate choice, because he was the heir to James IV’s sons. Margaret, however, feared that meant he might dispose of her sons, just as Richard III had disposed of the princes in the Tower.
Margaret needed powerful backing to oppose Albany’s return and planned to marry to get it. Choosing a foreign prince would mean her leaving Scotland and her children, so she looked for a suitable Scot, but the choice was limited. There was the Earl of Arran, who was middle-aged and had a dubious divorce behind him, and there was the man she did marry: the titular head of the powerful and pro-English House of Douglas: Archibald, Earl of Angus. Aged twenty-four, he had been made a member of Margaret’s council in March and had a strong following of ‘dependers’.18 He was very handsome as well, and since it was believed women had difficulties controlling their sex drive it was also assumed she was marrying Angus ‘for her plesour’.19 When the news emerged of Margaret’s marriage on 6 August she lost her popularity as the king’s widow, and under the terms of her late husband’s will her remarriage meant she also lost the regency.
It seemed Margaret had made a disastrous error, but when, just three weeks after her wedding, she agreed to Albany’s return ‘as governor of Scotland’, she knew her brother would block the move. Following his victories in France, Henry had made peace with Louis XII, who would not wish to anger Henry by giving Albany a passport to Scotland – and it would anger Henry, as he also feared for his nephews’ lives if Albany was to return.
The treaty with France was the brainchil
d of Thomas Wolsey, who was becoming an indispensable servant to Henry. Wolsey understood that the king’s dream of becoming a new Henry V had no realistic chance of success, for he was not fighting the same kingdom his predecessors had. At the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, France had been a geographical expression rather than a political entity. The King of France had been, at best, the greatest of the feudal lords. But the fifteenth century had seen the steady erosion of feudal independence. The greatest success was when French-speaking regions of Burgundy had been brought under the French crown on the death in battle of Charles the Bold in 1477. Louis XII’s kingdom now had a population six times greater than that of England, and an income sevenfold that of Henry VIII. If Louis had not been distracted by his ambitions in Italy in 1513, Henry would never have achieved his modest victories. On the other hand, Wolsey persuaded Henry that a peace, sealed by a marriage between Louis and Henry’s younger sister, Mary, could gain him great rewards. The sickly fifty-two-year-old French monarch had no sons and if he were now to father one with the beautiful young Mary, and then die, there would be a long royal minority. This could give Henry huge influence in France through his sister.
The betrothal between Mary and the emperor’s son, Charles, was duly cancelled, and just a week after her elder sister Margaret had married the dashing Earl of Angus, the eighteen-year-old Mary prepared miserably for her nuptials to the decrepit Louis. Margaret sent Mary a valuable Book of Hours as her wedding gift and inscribed it affectionately, ‘Madam, I pray your grace, remember on me, when you look upon this book, your loving sister, Margaret.’20 The teenage Mary hadn’t seen her sister since she was eight, but she envied Margaret’s marriage to a handsome young nobleman. It hardly seemed fair.
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