by Linda Porter
The only picture we have of Margaret Tudor at this point of her life is in the wonderful collection of ink and chalk drawings held in northern France called the Recueil d’Arras. This shows Margaret at the time of her marriage, still slim and modestly dressed, with rather prominent eyes and a full mouth. Although lacking the beauty of her younger sister, the Princess Mary, she is still a personable girl in this picture. A better known later portrait of Margaret with a monkey is from a copy, and shows that she may have begun to put on weight with childbearing, as her mother had done. Later in life she simply looks fat. But in 1503 there is still more of the girl than the woman in the drawing. And James, who must surely by that time have been a good judge of women and their moods, probably realized that, though proud and gracious, she was also uncertain. After a hearty greeting to the earl of Surrey, the king took Margaret aside and they talked together for a long time. Then they sat side by side to dine and watch the entertainment that accompanied the meal. For Margaret, it was the first opportunity to show off her dancing skills, which she did, partnered by the countess of Surrey. ‘This done, the king took licence [leave] of her – it was late – and went to his bed in Edinburgh very well content of so fair a meeting.’19
Over the next two days Margaret and James met again at Dalkeith, amid much festivity. She performed several dances and the king demonstrated his musicianship by playing for her on the clavichord and the lute. This no doubt proved a welcome distraction from the distressing loss of several of Margaret’s favourite horses, killed in a stable fire. James speedily supplied replacements and impressed his young bride by leaping into the saddle of his own mount without using the stirrups when he took his leave of her. A superb horseman of great skill and endurance, these visits to Margaret were merely pleasant jaunts for a man who could ride from Stirling to Aberdeen and on to Elgin in northern Scotland, a staggering distance of 156 miles, in one day.20 He came, of course, superbly dressed, as was Margaret throughout these proceedings, where cloth of gold and richly embroidered velvet were worn to dazzle the assembled company. It was later reported by the chronicler Edward Hall that the English visitors were studiously unaffected by Scottish ceremonial and spectacle, but contemporary accounts suggest otherwise and John Young, in his continuing narrative, showed every sign of being greatly impressed. Proceedings were clearly going well and a rapport had definitely grown between the earl of Surrey and James IV, though Margaret seems to have found this increasingly irritating.
It did not, however, detract from the final act of her arrival in Scotland before the marriage ceremony itself, which was her official entry into Edinburgh, mounted behind James on horseback, in time-honoured Scottish fashion. A more amenable palfrey was a last-minute replacement for the high-spirited courser that James had intended to convey himself and Margaret through the streets of her new capital. Both king and queen were superbly dressed – she in cloth of gold and a magnificent necklace of pearls and precious stones (perhaps not the most comfortable outfit for being perched on a horse behind the king) and James himself regally splendid in a purple velvet jacket edged with fur, a doublet of violet satin, scarlet hose and a shirt edged with a glittering array of jewels, ‘his spurs gilt and long’. Pageants for the queen’s entertainment began with a joust, in which two knights fought for a lady’s love until parted by the king. As the company moved on, an angel in a specially constructed gatehouse delivered the keys of the city of Edinburgh to the queen and wine spouted from fountains, to the delight of the crowds who had gathered to witness the spectacle. Eventually the procession reached the abbey of Holyrood, where the king’s brother and all the Scottish bishops waited to receive their new queen.21
Throughout a long and demanding day, James had deferred constantly to Margaret, insisting that she kiss the holy relics he was offered first and that they kneel down together at the altar. He guided her throughout, his arm around her waist, leaving us a touching image of his sensitivity to her youth and vulnerability, as well as providing an opportunity for her to experience the closer physical contact that awaited her once they were formally united in marriage. The night before their wedding he danced for her at his palace of Holyrood House and then ‘the king took his leave and bade her goodnight joyously.’ The next day would see a Tudor princess married at last to a Stewart king.
James had stretched his exchequer to the limit in his preparations for this historic wedding. There had been a frenzy of building work at Holyrood itself and no expense had been spared on its furnishings. The greatest attention was given to a new chapel and the Queen’s Great Chamber, which was probably constructed of Scandinavian timber. The building work came to about three quarters of a million pounds in today’s money. The wedding celebrations themselves came to just over £1 million, a very great deal of money for such a small country. It has been estimated that the king spent more than a quarter of his annual income on wine alone.
Very little of James IV’s palace remains at Holyrood. His son, James V, would take up the work again in 1528, though much of what we see today was not completed until the latter part of the seventeenth century, by Charles II. Yet one most beautiful artefact does survive from all the splendour and pageantry of the occasion, though sadly it cannot be seen in Scotland. This is the Book of Hours of James IV and Margaret Tudor, a superbly decorated late medieval manuscript now held in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.
We can be certain that this was a gift to Margaret when she became queen of Scotland and though the person who commissioned it cannot be identified conclusively, the probability is that James had it made for his wife, not just as a sign of his religious convictions but also of his commitment to their life together as king and queen of Scotland. Two prominent Flemish artists, Gerard Horenbout and Simon Bening, have been identified as the illuminators and scribes of the work.22 It begins with a monthly calendar depicting landscapes without people, very unusual for a book of hours at the time. The scenes are ones of richness and tranquillity. Yet beyond this pastoral opening, when it came to the all-important pride of two great families joined in marriage, the artists had clearly done their homework. The depiction of the English and Scottish heraldic devices was correct to the last detail. The arms of Scotland, with the motto ‘In my defens God us Defend’, and the initials I and M (for Iacobus and Margaret), tied with love knots around the edge, are superbly executed. There are nineteen full plates in the work, depicting scenes from the life of Jesus, various religious commemorations and, importantly, two showing the king and queen separately, at prayer. James is depicted as clean-shaven (an indication that the book might date from shortly after his wedding), his long, reddish-brown hair and distinctive eyes making him immediately identifiable. Margaret, in her picture, kneels before an altar, dressed in gold, with a blue velvet jacket and train. She looks, as indeed she was, very young. As with her husband, the likeness would appear to be consistent with the few other portraits we have of her.
We cannot be sure of the emotional significance Margaret attached to her Book of Hours. At some point after she became a widow, she gave it to her sister, Princess Mary Tudor, who may, in turn, have passed it on to their niece, later Queen Mary I. By the mid-seventeenth century it had found its way into the hands of Leopold of Austria, Holy Roman Emperor. It remains in Vienna, the tangible and sumptuous witness of sixteenth-century Britain’s most important royal marriage.23
Margaret and James were wed in the beautiful chapel of Holyrood. Now an imposing ruin, it is still possible to gain an impression of what the richly decorated church must have been like that summer’s day more than five hundred years ago when, as the Scottish historian Robert Mackie has written, ‘the sunlight, streaming through the unshattered glass, glittered on the sculptured figures of saint and angel, and added a richer dye to silks and damask, to velvet and cloth of gold.’24 And for descriptions of what took place we have again to thank John Young, whose fulsome prose can sometimes become repetitive but who did not stint in his narrative on this, the most imp
ortant day of Margaret’s life.
The young queen and her party arrived first at the abbey and stood by the font in the north aisle. Margaret was supported by the archbishop of York, Thomas Savage, himself a larger than life figure who loved to hunt and swear great oaths, and the overbearing earl of Surrey. Close by, and perhaps helping to keep up Margaret’s confidence in this company of so many flamboyant males, was her lady mistress, Elizabeth Denton, who was reported as being ‘always nigh her’. Arrayed in white damask, with crimson velvet border to match her husband’s wedding outfit, Margaret wore a crown of gold specially made for her by the Edinburgh goldsmith John Currour. Her hair, caught in a very rich coif, hung loose all the way down her back. A necklace of gold, precious stones and pearls gleamed around her throat. Her train, carried by the countess of Surrey, was so heavy that the countess needed the help of a gentleman usher to handle it. Behind Margaret were the great ladies of England who had journeyed north with her, each one paired, by the earl of Surrey’s order, with a Scottish lady of equal degree.
Next to arrive was Blacader, the archbishop of Glasgow, who would conduct the ceremony, accompanied by all the hierarchy of the Church in Scotland. Finally came the king himself, supported by his brother and followed by his council and his nobility. Though he had given his queen every reverence and would continue to do so, that day it seems that James IV equalled and perhaps outshone his wife in the splendour of his apparel. Beneath his robe of white damask he wore a doublet of cloth of gold and a loose jacket of crimson and black. But he did not wear a crown. Instead, on his head was a bonnet of black velvet, adorned with a large ruby.
James and Margaret passed under the rood screen into the choir of the abbey church, where Blacader joined them as man and wife. The archbishop of York’s role in the ceremony was to read out the papal bulls permitting the marriage. After hearing the Litany and Mass, the queen was anointed and James gave her his sceptre. ‘Te Deum’ was then sung, after which the king took his bride by the right hand and led her out of the church. They returned to their own chambers for a time, before the wedding feast, at which wild boar’s head, hams and many other meats were served. Minstrels played, the king and queen danced and there was much festivity. James heard evensong without his wife and after supper, as the night approached, the company withdrew to their various lodgings.25
Despite her public demeanour, which seems to have been at all times regal, Margaret was not yet fourteen years old and a long way from home. The precise date of her famous letter to her father, showing both childish petulance at Surrey’s treatment of her chamberlain and resentment at her husband’s preference for the crusty old earl’s company over her own, is unknown, but it betrays an insecure and exhausted girl. ‘God send me comfort,’ she wrote desperately to Henry VII, ‘that I and mine that be left here with me be well entreated.’ Then she added in her own, sloping and ill-formed handwriting: ‘For God’s sake, sir, hold me excused that I write not myself to your Grace, for I have no leisure this time, but I wish I were with your Grace now and many times more, when I would answer. As for this that I have written … it is very true, but I pray God I may find it well for my welfare hereafter. No more to your Grace at this time, but our Lord have you in his keeping. Written with the hand of your humble daughter.’ The letter is signed simply ‘Margaret’.26
The Somerset Herald drew a veil over the wedding night. No doubt the queen’s ladies prepared her in the time-honoured way, dressing her in a splendid nightgown and brushing her red-gold hair lovingly. Whether James was led to her bed amid the often ribald merriment that accompanied such proceedings we do not know. All that John Young said is that ‘the king had the queen apart, and they went together.’ The king, of course, knew a great deal about women, though Margaret was probably the youngest high-born lady he had ever had in his bed. Whether the marriage was consummated immediately only James Stewart and Margaret Tudor knew. But both would have been well aware, as they lay beside each other on the night of 8 August 1503, that if something happened to her brother, Margaret would be heir to the throne of England. The prospect of the Stewarts ruling the entire British Isles had moved a significant step closer.
CHAPTER SIX
Brothers in Arms
‘Now we perceive the king of Scots, our brother-in-law and your master, to be the same person whom we ever took him to be, for we never esteemed him to be of any truth.’
Henry VIII’s contemptuous response to James IV’s herald in the summer of 1513
‘The Flowers of the Forest, that fought aye the foremost,
The pride of our land lie cold in the clay.’
Eighteenth-century lyrics describing the battle of Flodden, set to an ancient Scottish lament
THE NEW QUEEN OF SCOTS may have felt herself overlooked but in one thing she immediately got her way. She did not like her husband’s long, untrimmed beard. Her father was clean-shaven and she evidently preferred that fashion. The day after his wedding, James submitted himself good-naturedly to the skills of the countess of Surrey and her daughter, who removed his facial hair and were amply rewarded for their services with costly textiles, cloth of gold and damask. It has been remarked that their combined fee of over £500 (the equivalent of just over £100,000 pounds today) may be the largest barber’s bill on record. James was clearly happy with both the cost and the result. Perhaps he also felt that it was appropriate to make a distinction in his appearance between the days of his bachelorhood and his new status as a married man. He also gave Margaret a ‘morrowing’ gift for the day after their wedding, a tradition for new Scottish queens, of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire to add to her impressive list of lands and properties. The king was committed to treating his wife as befitted her status but there was one aspect of his own life that he would not have shared with her immediately. At the time of their marriage, his mistress, Janet Kennedy, was pregnant with their third child.
How and when the subject of James’s illegitimate family was broached with Margaret Tudor is not known. Janet had been at Stirling Castle until a matter of weeks before her lover’s marriage, when she was moved to Darnaway in northern Scotland, where a daughter was born towards the end of 1503. The name of this child is never revealed in the accounts but her father provided for her and visited her as she grew up. Janet’s second child with James, also a daughter, died at Stirling shortly after her mother left the castle. James had made no secret of his children, but given Margaret Tudor’s age and, one must suppose, innocence of such matters, the discovery that Stirling had been used for years as a nursery for her husband’s children by various women must have been at least disconcerting. The only indirect evidence for her displeasure is that Lady Margaret Stewart, the daughter of Margaret Drummond, was moved at about this time to take up residence at Edinburgh Castle. If the queen was angry, she seems to have known better than to make a fuss in public.
For despite the difference in their ages and the continued philandering of James, the marriage was apparently a successful one. James was indulgent and attentive as a husband, ensuring that his wife wanted for nothing. Soon after their wedding he and Margaret left Edinburgh so that she could see something of her new country and he could continue the roving lifestyle that he so loved and that was a vital component of his kingship. They were not, of course, always together and he managed to fit in a visit to Janet in Darnaway during the latter stages of her pregnancy, while still being back in Edinburgh in time for Margaret’s fourteenth birthday celebrations at the end of November. Carefully, he eased his little queen into her role, ensuring that she was secure in the knowledge that she was his lawful wife and anointed consort and that she would always be respected as such.
His affair with Janet Kennedy was brought to a close two years after his wedding, when a marriage was arranged between ‘the lady’, as the Scottish treasurer’s accounts always called her, and John Ramsay. This was the same John Ramsay who had been one of the closest companions of James III and the traitor who sold himself (or, at least, his infor
mation) to Henry VII in the 1490s. James, however, like Henry, knew that loyalties were fickle and the aggrieved needed to be encouraged as well as constrained. By the beginning of the new century, with most of his forfeit lands restored, Ramsay was back at court and close to the king. James may well have thought that having a former enemy married to a discarded mistress was a neat way to bind them both to him, allowing them to be at court without scandal. The fact that Janet was still, in the eyes of the Church, married to Alexander Gordon was irrelevant. But Janet’s new marital arrangement did not last more than a few years. By 1508 Ramsay was recorded as the spouse of another lady. Janet herself lived on for many years, perhaps as late as 1545, careful of her property and in genteel retirement. She saw her son, the earl of Moray, become a loyal and competent adviser to his younger half-brother, King James V.
Margaret, for her part, put her homesickness behind her and set herself to learning the language of her new realm. She would eventually become fluent in Scots, dictating her correspondence in it, albeit in her characteristic jerky rather than elegant style. James responded well to her efforts to adapt. She had arrived in Scotland basically as a child, and he formed her into a woman. If they did not exactly come to love one another, there does appear to have been a deepening fondness. James and Margaret were both strong-willed and proud, but they knew what was expected of kings and queens. And James was a hard man to dislike. The measure of his consideration for his wife can be seen in his restraint when it came to the procreation of their own children. Like all monarchs at the time, James wanted a legitimate heir. But he was mindful of Margaret’s age (and, no doubt, her proximity to the English Crown) and he did not rush things, even though both his brothers died within a year of one another in 1503–4. It was not until the beginning of 1507, when she was seventeen, that the queen gave birth to her first child, a son. The king was delighted, though concerned by his wife’s health after a difficult birth and lengthy recovery. Sadly, the prince lived for only a year. Margaret’s pregnancies were hazardous affairs but from this time onwards she did her duty valiantly. Babies arrived at regular intervals: a daughter, who was born and died the same day in 1508; Prince Arthur in 1509, who died the following summer; another daughter, born prematurely in late 1512. Only the child who would become James V, born at Linlithgow, Margaret’s favourite palace, in April 1512, was strong enough to survive.
