by Linda Porter
As Queen of Scots, Margaret’s main responsibility, apart from producing heirs, was to preside over James IV’s court. The king spared no expense in ensuring that his wife was regally dressed to fulfil her role. A master of the wardrobe was appointed for her after her arrival in Scotland and soon she was being equipped for her first winter in her new land.1 Six packages of furs, each containing forty skins of calabar (furred grey squirrel) are recorded in her accounts. The sleeves of her winter dresses were in miniver, the white fur from the winter coat of the red squirrel. And as the temperature dropped, the queen took heart from her surroundings, and her homesickness receded.
She would have discovered that her husband’s ambition for his country, his determination to put it on an equal footing with other European states, meant that she had arrived in Scotland at a time when there was a great flowering of court life. This was a golden age of Scottish literature, steeped in the Celtic traditions of poetry and storytelling. The culture was both aural and visible; James IV himself participated in plays and masques staged for court entertainment. There was nothing fusty or restrained about the life into which Margaret Tudor had stepped. Clad in the splendid gowns, furs and glittering jewels with which he so liberally provided her, the young queen watched as her husband took to the stage himself. They shared a love of dancing and music and Scotland had been long without a queen. Her presence added an extra dimension to the splendour that James was encouraging.
Few direct descriptions of James IV’s court survive, but one of the greatest Scottish poets, or makars, of the period, William Dunbar, has left us a wonderful, if somewhat jaundiced, account of those who served the king honestly (such as himself) and their much less desirable counterparts, the army of hangers-on. It reads better in the original Scots but for ease of understanding has been rendered into modern English as follows:
Sir, you have many servants
And officials with different responsibilities:
Churchmen, lawyers and fine craftsmen,
Doctors in law and medicine,
Soothsayers, rhetoricians and philosophers,
Astrologists, artists and orators,
Men of arms and valiant knights
And many other excellent people,
Musicians, minstrels and merry singers,
All kinds of soldiers,
Makers of coins, carvers and carpenters,
Builders of barques and small ships,
Masons dwelling on the land,
Shipwrights cutting wood on the shore,
Makers of glass, goldsmiths and jewellers,
Printers, painters and apothecaries;
And all skilled in their craft,
And all at once together laboring
Who pleasing are an honourable
And to your highness profitable,
And most fitting to be
With your high regal majesty,
Deserving of your grace most worthy
Gratitude, reward and support
But what of the ne’er do wells?
But you so gracious are and meek
That on your highness follows also
Another company more miserable,
Though they be not so profitable:
Dissemblers, hypocrites and flatterers,
Shouters, clamourers and chatterers,
Parasites and gunners,
Monsieurs of France, good claret tasters,
Inopportune beggars of Irish race
And stealers of foods, as if out of their wits,
Scroungers and spongers in the corner
And hall hunters of drakes and ducks,
Pushers and thrusters, as they were mad,
Rogues not known to any respectable man,
Shoulderers and shovers without shame
And no skill can claim,
And know no other craft or duties,
But to crowd, sir, your doors.2
Dunbar was angling for a larger annual stipend. It is not clear whether this memorable evocation of the court of James IV and Margaret Tudor produced the desired result. No doubt it came close to describing the reality of many European courts at the time.
James IV marked his wife’s first pregnancy with a great musical celebration at Christmas 1506, summoning sixty-nine different musicians to play for the court. In the summer after the prince’s birth a great tournament, one of the best documented of the period, was arranged. At its centre was a chivalric theme but with a new twist: ‘the jousting of the wild knight for the black lady’. There were two women described as Moorish ladies at the court by 1507, living at Edinburgh Castle in the household of Lady Margaret Stewart. One of these, ‘my lady with the mekle [large] lips’, was the centre of the tournament organized by Janet Kennedy’s husband. A large crowd watched as the king, dressed as a ‘wild knight’, his followers decked out as ‘wild men’, enacted a story whose symbolism is lost to us now, defending the honour of an exotic lady. James liked novelty and scored a notable triumph in the arranging of this joust, ensuring that the ‘Moor lass’, as she was known, had her place in history. Clad in ‘a gown of damask flowered with gold and trimmed with green and yellow taffeta’, the lady rode to the tournament in Edinburgh in a ‘chair triumphal’, with two female attendants and two squires. Whether she enjoyed being the centre of attention we do not know. The king, of course, had added to his reputation as ‘the very pattern of a Paladin of chivalry’.3
Pageantry was important to James IV, as it was to his rivals, but there was much more to the mature king that Margaret Tudor had married than a mere love of show. James embraced the times in which he lived. Though he would probably not have thought of himself as ‘a Renaissance man’, he could lay claim to being a polymath. He was certainly interested in new ideas and new developments, while never questioning the role of religion in his own daily life or that of his subjects. He prayed, heard Mass diligently, was strict in his annual visits to various shrines and sites of pilgrimage, some of which he went to on foot. All of this clearly meant a great deal to him, but it was not enough. He was fascinated by science, studying both medicine and dentistry. There are records of his having extracted teeth from his subjects while on his travels throughout his kingdom and he was keen to attract medical practitioners to his court. Several came from outside Scotland and are known either by their place of origin (‘the Ireland leech’) or their appearance (‘the leech with the curly hair’ and ‘the leech with the yellow hair’). But, above all, the king was fascinated by military matters.
Though James was keen to follow all the latest developments in artillery and military strategy, his great love, perhaps more than any woman, was the navy. Ever since he had been taken to Leith shortly after his accession, the desire to build up his naval defences had burned within him. The Scottish historian Norman Macdougall has called it his obsession. In the summer of 1506 he wrote to Louis XII of France telling him of his determination to develop a fleet that would be the key to defending Scotland from her enemies. He was as good as his word and by the second decade of the sixteenth century expenditure on ships was the largest item on the royal accounts. James moved the centre of Scottish shipbuilding from its traditional home at Dumbarton in the west of Scotland to two newly created dockyards in the Firth of Forth, on the east coast. This may have been prompted by the disastrous expedition to Denmark just a year before the marriage to Margaret Tudor, when an attempt to aid his Uncle Hans, the Danish monarch, went disastrously wrong. Smarting and embarrassed by this failure, James did not waste time. He realized that his existing fleet was not fit for purpose and that he needed skilled labour to build more ships. In pursuing the ideal of a navy that would rival any in Europe, a remarkable aim in itself for a small country, the king imported French shipwrights (the best, it was believed, were to be found in England but there were obvious difficulties in trying to entice his father-in-law’s subjects to assist) and came close to denuding the royal forests of Scotland, whose trees were liberally felled to meet the requirements
of the shipbuilding programme.
By 1505, the first great warship was completed. She was named the Margaret, after the queen, a pleasing gesture to his then sixteen-year-old wife. In size and armaments she rivalled the English Mary Rose of 1509 and had cost James the equivalent of over a million pounds. But six years later, in October 1511, an even larger and more formidable vessel, the Michael, was launched. The English referred to this as ‘the great ship’ and the chronicler Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie described her as ‘the greatest ship that ever sailed in England or France’. Contemporaries were overawed by the size of the Michael. The French ambassador de la Mothe must have described it in superlatives to Louis XII, for the French king was keen to avail himself of its services in support of his struggle with England and Spain in 1513. Louis called it a ship ‘so powerful that none other like it is to be found in Christendom’. Boasting a crew of 300, weighing 1,000 tons and probably about 180 feet long, the Michael carried twenty-seven bronze cannon, a slightly larger number than Henry VIII’s Great Harry, a ship which modelled itself on this crowning achievement of James IV’s ship-building programme. During his reign, James ‘built, hired, received as gifts or seized as prizes a total of at least thirty-eight ships’. He was justly proud of all this and the huge boost it gave to Scottish prestige in the eyes of the world and of his own subjects.
Yet while the Scottish nation may have basked in the reflected glory of their energetic and determined monarch, his poorer subjects relishing the opportunity to come face to face with him as he travelled his realm and his lords vying with each other for a place at court, there was a price to be paid – often literally – for his style of kingship. There was much that was endearing about James, but he could be ruthless when needed. Queen Margaret’s dowry gave a welcome boost to Scottish finances and encouraged James to live beyond his means but it was all spent by 1508. The king looked for other sources of income and found, like Henry VII in England, that his better-off subjects could be squeezed for much more. In his pursuit of feudal dues the king and his advisers showed no mercy. The dispute with the elderly earl of Angus, viewed romantically as a quarrel over the lovely Janet Kennedy, may have been given an extra edge by their rivalry for the lady’s affections but was essentially a tussle over land and money. Extensive searches were made to discover tenants of the Crown who had failed to obtain legal title for their estates, sometimes going back centuries. James did not spare anybody in his quest for financial security. Eleven earls, sixteen lords, sixteen knights, two clergy and one royal burgh were pursued for being unable to show legal title to lands that they claimed. Nor was the Church, for all James’s piety, exempt. The king already had control of the revenues of the archbishopric of St Andrews, first through his brother and then, when he died in 1504, through his own illegitimate son, Alexander Stewart, who was speedily nominated as a replacement at the age of eleven. Alexander was too young to be consecrated, so the moneys from his diocese, as well as those from the wealthy abbeys of Holyrood, Arbroath and Dunfermline, all went to the Crown. James IV’s financial exactions are less well known than those of Henry VII but they caused considerable hardship and anxiety to a significant number of his subjects. Most accepted the situation, being powerless to fight against the king’s will, but there was a further rebellion in the Western Isles in 1506, put down by the earl of Huntly.
Neither was James overly fond of summoning parliament. Between 1496 and 1504 it did not meet at all, nor did it sit for the last four years of the reign. The favoured method of government for most of his personal reign was the general council, a body similar in size and composition to a parliament, but usually summoned at much shorter notice to deal with specific issues that had arisen. There appears to have been little opposition to this style of government and James was not inclined to support a forum that might encourage more organized opposition to his policies. As in Tudor England until the Reformation, parliament was a tool to be used at the king’s pleasure and not to serve the ends of its constituent members. But James was certainly more profligate with money than his father-in-law. The relationship with England, though subject to the inevitable tensions in the Borders, remained quiet in the main while the first Henry Tudor lived. He had never been an aggressive king and, besides, he had other preoccupations as his reign was drawing to a close.
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IT IS CUSTOMARY to think of the last years of Henry VII’s reign, certainly from 1503 onwards, when personal tragedy brought him to his knees, as a period of almost unrelieved gloom for the king and his subjects. A recent work has underlined this view of Henry as a ‘dark prince’, an embittered, unloved, avaricious monarch, marked by the scars of years of insecurity, a mistrustful man who found comfort only in the collection of punitive exactions from a terrified aristocracy and a resentful commercial class.4 Everyone, from dukes to City of London merchants, dreaded the assaults on their purses, and sometimes their liberty, carried out with increasing callousness by a new group of men around the king. In this reading, in which Henry is portrayed as ill and withdrawn from the world, it seems as if the first Tudor is struggling to come to terms with what he has achieved, as if survival, peace, international recognition and the establishment, however shakily, of his own dynasty were not enough. His only pleasure is derived from putting his heel on the necks of his subjects, reducing them to penury and fear. England was a police state, rife with spies and informers, presided over by a miser ill in body and spirit. There is, of course, much truth in the detail of this terrifying vision of early sixteenth-century England, but it is not the whole story and to focus on it, without taking a more measured view of what Henry achieved, is to do him an injustice. None of us today would have liked to live in Tudor times. Good Queen Bess ran a better oiled, more hideous regime than her grandfather but little enough mention is made of this in the biographies of Elizabeth that continue to appear with predictable frequency.5
While his elder daughter was adapting to life as Queen of Scots, Henry VII was not just sitting in his counting house. His style of government, like his son-in-law’s, was intensely personal and though the mechanics of it were carried out by men despised by the aristocracy (or what had survived of it after the Wars of the Roses) he was, in this respect, following a trend begun by Edward IV. There were few executions of opponents because there was no need. Like James IV, Henry knew how to hit his subjects where it hurt but he had a similar sense of theatre. He had built his public image on processions, triumphal entries, receptions, tournaments and a lively, cultured court. Despite the absence of a queen, all that did not suddenly disappear. He could put on a splendid show when he felt the occasion warranted it, as he did when a violent tempest delivered an extremely reluctant Philip of Burgundy and his hapless wife, Queen Juana of Castile, to English shores in February 1506. Philip was essentially Henry’s prisoner, but the king was determined to take full advantage of the diplomatic opportunities so unexpectedly opened up and to finally scotch the threat posed by the rebel Edmund de la Pole, then skulking in exile in the Low Countries, by inducing his visitor to return the earl to England. Henry entertained Philip with very public displays of extravagance at Windsor, housing him in his own recently refurbished apartments. A carefully orchestrated programme of entertainment, of wining, dining, hunting and tennis (Henry had himself been a keen player of the game but his worsening eyesight meant that he was more often a spectator now), produced the desired result. There was even a role for the overlooked Katherine of Aragon, who was enduring the creeping years of her widowhood in England and abandonment by her father with a mixture of ill grace and desperation. Philip’s boorish refusal to dance with Katherine only added to her humiliation.
Henry VII was also fortunate in Princess Mary, Margaret’s younger sister, who was frequently at court with her father. An attractive and gracious child, she was better looking than Margaret and seems to have inherited their mother’s social skills as well as her beauty. As she grew, Mary took a much more active role in court life. She was defi
nitely the star of Henry’s reception for Philip of Burgundy and the king was determined not to lose the opportunity of concluding a splendid marriage alliance for her with the archduke’s son, Charles. Henry was always a skilled opportunist and had not lost his touch. Philip was powerless to resist him. This match, had it ever come about, would have seen Mary occupy a place on the European stage far greater than that of her sister, but Mary’s fate lay elsewhere.
The king, meanwhile, had certainly not ruled himself out of the marriage market, no doubt mindful of the fact that other heirs would be a welcome insurance for the future. Yet though several ladies – Margaret of Austria, Margaret of Angoulême and Joanna of Naples – were considered, the king’s heart does not seem to have been too deeply engaged in the process. The diplomatic possibilities opened up were useful but nothing came of any of these discussions. Henry had grown more particular with age and his detailed instructions in respect of Joanna were so fastidious as to be ungallant: he wanted to know whether she had any hair on her lips and whether her breath was bad. His diplomats’ valiant attempts to make Joanna sound reasonably presentable, when she clearly was not, make amusing reading.6
