Tudors Versus Stewarts

by Linda Porter

  * * *

  THE MAN determined to frustrate this ambition was her second husband. The earl of Angus returned from France via England, where he held talks with his brother-in-law and received sufficient assurance of support to enable him to confront his wife. This he did shortly after the opening of a new session of the Scottish parliament in mid-November 1524. Supported by the earls of Lennox and Buccleuch, Angus and a band of four hundred followers scaled the walls of Edinburgh, opened the city gates and, proclaiming themselves the loyal subjects of James V, demanded to be able to take their seats in parliament as was their right. Margaret was no longer minded to trade arguments about precedent with her husband. She ordered guns to be trained on his forces and after a volley killed four innocent bystanders, the earl withdrew at the king’s command. Advised by her brother’s ambassador, the quavering churchman Thomas Magnus, not to do anything so unwifely as shooting at her own husband, Margaret responded by telling him to ‘go home and not meddle with Scottish matters’. Poor Magnus was stymied by his own consciousness of his social inferiority – lecturing a queen was something that came less easily to him than it had to Lord Dacre – and the indecisiveness of Wolsey and Henry VIII. Even before Angus got back to Edinburgh, they were having second thoughts. Wolsey wrote:

  Everything depends now upon one of two points: whether the queen and lords will train their king to the amity of England, or of France. These things are far more material than the sending of ambassadors, pacification of private quarrels, or entertainment of guards. The King thinks that Margaret, notwithstanding her wilfulness towards her husband … should not be sharply dealt with … reconciliation of Angus with the Queen of Scots and Arran is not to be insisted on … no evidence has appeared, since he [Angus] came to Scotland, that he is so well loved there as was reported.15

  The acknowledgement that Angus did not enjoy the sort of support they had been led to believe is typical of the confusions of English policy towards Scotland at this time. The realization that there were two largely pro-English groupings in Scotland, one led by the queen and her allies and one by Angus, was confusing. Henry VIII had favoured his brother-in-law for the simple reason that he did not trust his sister to do his bidding. He was afraid, as a definitive peace between England and Scotland remained elusive, that Margaret might still ally with France. But in 1525 his old rival, Francis I, suffered a catastrophic defeat on the northern plains of Italy at the battle of Pavia and was taken prisoner by Charles V. While he might have been frustrated by Scottish politics, Henry VIII now had every reason to congratulate himself on his alliance with the emperor.

  He would have been less pleased if he had known that Francis I’s doughty mother, the regent Louise of Savoy, was offering Margaret an attractive pension in return for a French alliance. Margaret did not accept but her days as regent were numbered. Parliament recognized Angus’s right to sit alongside Arran, Lennox and Argyll in a new scheme that would see control of the king and the administration of Scottish affairs rotate between these four earls quarterly from July 1525. Quite how anyone genuinely believed that this well-intentioned but totally impractical approach to handling the political tensions of the country would work is a good question. Perhaps the fact that the lords previously responsible for James V’s upbringing had behaved honourably in the execution of their office inspired the hope that this new policy could succeed. Arran had been at least partially reconciled to his old adversary, Angus, and may have believed that he could derive an advantage from acquiescing. Margaret, who remained a member of the council but had effectively lost the regency, was very unhappy but lacked a sufficient power base to impose an alternative.

  Warning bells should have sounded when the first period of guardianship of the king was given to Angus, on the grounds that he was best placed to negotiate a truce with England. The opportunity was too good for Archibald Douglas to miss. We do not know if he planned his coup from the outset but when the time came for his period of authority to end, he simply kept control of the person of the king. On 2 November 1525, he entered Edinburgh with James V firmly under his physical control. He now had the capital and the monarch in his grip. For the teenage James, who had grown closer to his mother in recent years and, through her encouragement, yearned to rule in his own right, the most difficult period of his life was about to begin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Uncle and Nephew

  ‘You are to remind her of her son’s possibility of succession of the Crown of England.’

  Henry VIII’s instructions to the Carlisle Herald prior to a meeting with Queen Margaret in November 1531

  ‘But of his marriage made upon the morn,

  Such solace and solemnization

  Was never seen afore, since Christ was born,

  Nor to Scotland such consolation

  There sealed was the confirmation

  Of the well kept Ancient Alliance,

  Made betwixt Scotland and the realm of France.’

  Sir David Lindsay of the Mount in his poem

  The Deploration of the Death of Queen Magdalene

  HENRY VIII’S SUPPORT for the earl of Angus and his evident preference for the Douglas family as more reliable than his own sister cannot have endeared the English king to his beleaguered nephew. Early adolescence is an impressionable time and James V, though influenced by his mother, was showing clear signs of wanting to make his own decisions. His uncle’s interference was an obstacle, adding to his feeling of resentment and rebellion, and though Margaret would not have wished to drive a wedge between her brother and her son it is unlikely, given her temperament, that she concealed her displeasure at Henry’s stance. If James V did not view his Uncle Henry as an enemy, he was by no means certain of his friendship and a coldness developed between them as the King of Scots grew into adulthood. There were close ties of blood but there was no real affection and, despite repeated efforts, the two men never met. The reluctance was more on James V’s side than Henry’s and it could not be overcome. A relative who has tried to kidnap you as a child does not inspire confidence and this particular fear haunted the Scottish lords and their king throughout his life. James’s proximity to the English throne was equally uncomfortable for his uncle, who did not wish to see Margaret’s heirs assume control of the entire British Isles.

  This possibility seemed a distant one while King James could not govern his own land but must chafe under the restrictions of Douglas rule. The king having been declared of age, it was not possible for Angus to claim the regency but, if he lacked the title, he was determined to exercise a regent’s powers in reality. The simplest way to achieve this, even with the unpredictable earl of Arran temporarily reconciled, was to promote his own family members (and there were many of them) to positions of high office. Queen Margaret and James Beaton were sidelined, though not necessarily silenced, and Angus relied heavily on his younger brother, the energetic and fiercely loyal George Douglas, to ensure that the family’s interests were maintained. Yet it soon became apparent that the earl’s heavy-handed approach would not go unchallenged.

  In the summer of 1526 John Stewart, earl of Lennox, challenged Angus’s control of government and attempted to free the king from the men who were, in reality, little more than his captors. The Lennox Stewarts stood next in line in the succession to the earl of Arran and were less inclined to accommodate the Douglases.1 James V, desperate to assert himself, signed a bond with the earl of Lennox in June. The bond would have made Lennox chief counsellor to the king – effectively taking over Angus’s role – but the notable thing about this unusual document is that the king appears to have agreed to give such sweeping powers to Lennox of his own volition. We cannot be sure how much pressure he was put under and Margaret herself, consumed with hatred for the husband to whom she was still legally married at this point, may have exerted maternal pressure, but the episode underlines James V’s desperation to remove himself from the ‘thralldom’, as he perceived it, of the Douglases.2

  Unhappily for
the king, Lennox’s attempted coup was a failure. A battle took place involving substantial numbers of men (about three thousand on each side) near Linlithgow on 4 September 1526. The king himself was present at the field. This policy of bringing the king into physical danger was a deliberate one on the part of the Douglas brothers, who were basically using him as a hostage. As George Douglas is reputed to have said to the unwilling king during the fighting, ‘Before the enemy shall take thee from us, if thy body should be torn to pieces, we shall have a part.’3 Such bloodthirsty impudence to an anointed monarch illustrates the lengths to which at least one family would go in its hunger for power. Small wonder that James detested the entire Douglas family. Over a decade later, he would have his revenge on one of them in a particularly vindictive and cruel way.

  The young king’s despair when Lennox and his supporters were routed at Linlithgow can only be imagined. The earl himself was killed, in circumstances that have never fully been explained, though later chroniclers claimed that he had tried to surrender and was then murdered in cold blood by Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, the eldest illegitimate son of his rival, the earl of Arran. But whatever the truth of Lennox’s fate, his son, Matthew Stewart, inherited his father’s title, and his ambition to become, in the course of time, a major player in the politics of both England and Scotland. But, for the meantime, James V was compelled to accept Angus’s domination of his country and his life. Angus’s opponents, sensing that he was better in a crisis than in the day-to-day running of government, decided to bide their time and look for a more favourable opportunity. Among them was the king’s half-brother, Janet Kennedy’s son, the earl of Moray, pro-French and much praised by the duke of Albany when he was in office. The twisting, troubled history of the minority of James V suggested that Moray and men like him would not have to wait too long before the tide turned again.

  Throughout the period of his domination, Angus sought to both inhibit and distract the king. When James V appeared in public, the earl was always with him – at justice ayres, at council meetings and when James was moved between residences, as happened quite frequently. Though not literally kept under lock and key, James was easier to control if he was not kept in one place for too long. There was, indirectly, some positive benefit to Angus’s peripatetic approach to his charge’s life, in that it enabled James to get to know his country, meet some of its people and understand how justice and administration worked, much as his father had done before him. And it must have already been apparent to James V that a visible ruler is a popular one. In the years of his personal rule, he was keen to go out and about, sometimes in disguise, to learn more about his subjects. They called him the Red Fox and the epithet captures his appearance and his ability to survive well. Often pursued, even cornered, he nevertheless managed to shake off his tormentors to become a force in his own right.

  Realizing that hunting, chivalric pursuits and travel were insufficient in themselves to quell the king’s resentment, Angus attempted to curb James’s growing appetite for power by awakening his sexuality. In this, it must be admitted, he was spectacularly successful. James had a weakness for the ladies from a very early age. His father had been a great lover of women and whether through encouragement or natural inclination, the son more than matched him. James V had nine known illegitimate children, all by different mothers, and as the majority of those he acknowledged were boys there is the possibility that a considerable number of daughters may have been missed from the overall tally. It does, as has somewhat laconically been remarked, ‘constitute a notable extension of personality on the part of an early modern British ruler.’4 Henry VIII’s extramarital dalliances, not to mention the English king’s fertility, pale into insignificance besides the amours of his nephew. This was an aspect of their rivalry in which James was a clear winner. But as all of the recorded illegitimate children were born after 1529, when James had begun to rule in his own right, we cannot be certain whether any of these very early teenage affairs produced offspring. James was handsome and cultured and he was the king. These were more than sufficient attractions for his many mistresses.

  Angus might have encouraged such liaisons but, in the end, he could not hold on to his pre-eminent position in Scottish politics. His financial management was poor, his much vaunted acceptability with the English had not stopped raiding across the Borders, where law and order seemed once more to be breaking down, and the Douglas stranglehold on high office had caused widespread disquiet. Nor had he, a man without any male heirs of his own, given any thought to planning a strategy for the future. In the early summer of 1528, the sixteen-year-old king, exhibiting a winning combination of bravery, cunning and determination, was finally able to break free of his hated stepfather.

  It was not easy to throw off the Angus yoke but a combination of factors played into James V’s hands. The precise timing of the king’s physical escape from the Douglases, and his whereabouts at the time, made a fine tale for the chroniclers but there is much that remains uncertain about his movements in the early spring of 1528 because the Treasurer’s Accounts for the years 1527–9 are lost. What seems much more certain is that a series of events, some foreseen and some not, enabled the king and his supporters to develop the elements of a plan, the final success of which would have to wait on circumstances.

  On 12 April, James celebrated his sixteenth birthday, which happened to coincide that year with Easter. At a meeting of the council held in Edinburgh a disagreement arose between the king and Angus. The young king gave a clear enough description of this to English diplomats subsequently, saying that he had summoned Angus to answer for various governmental abuses and that the Douglas brothers had then gone away to plan a series of raids in the Borders during which their enemies on the council would meet untimely deaths. It looks, however, as if this explanation was fabricated as a convenient way to discredit the Douglases in the eyes of their English backers and to underline James’s own responsible attitude to government. But although a raid had been planned for June, and was subsequently cancelled by the king in one of his first independent acts, it seems unlikely that the course of events was exactly as James described retrospectively. Angus would not have waited two months to move against his critics. There was another, more significant development that worked in James’s favour. His mother’s divorce from Angus had finally come through at the beginning of April and James now devised an effective way of turning it to his advantage.

  Margaret had fallen in love with Henry Stewart, a member of her household, and may have married him secretly before the official pronouncement of her divorce reached Scotland. Now she was free to make this union public, with the permission of her son. Angus’s reaction to news of Margaret’s remarriage was to deprive Henry Stewart of his freedom (to ‘ward’ him, as this type of confinement was known) but James had other ideas. He would give his blessing to his mother’s new marital arrangements if she would sign over to him her rights in the important, strongly defensible castle of Stirling, her chief dower property. Given Margaret’s sensitivities about her lands, it says something about the extent of her passion for her third husband and her love of her son that she agreed to this proposal. In so doing, she gave the king a stronghold from which he could, if necessary, take the fight to Angus.

  By the end of May, James had somehow managed to escape from the Douglases. Pitscottie’s romantic tale of a daring night ride from Falkland Palace to Stirling, prompted by the king’s being left temporarily unguarded, has no known basis in fact and it seems more likely that James was in Edinburgh when he managed to get away.5 He then raised the royal standard at Stirling and prepared for what would be his final confrontation with the earl of Angus. Success was not a foregone conclusion – Angus still held the capital, Edinburgh – nor was it achieved without hard work and persuasion. During the next month, the king and his mother managed to gain sufficient support for him to declare that he would now rule in his own right, free of guardians or regents. On 6 July 1528, James returned t
o Edinburgh and a week later he felt confident enough about his own position to write to Henry VIII with details of the wrongs Angus had done him and the earl’s mismanagement of Scottish government. He reminded his uncle that Angus had been ‘put in high authority at Henry’s request’ and had then proceeded to apply ‘all the commodities of the realm to his own use’. He had used the king’s authority to make war on those who opposed him in the Borders ‘to make him more powerful than the Crown’ and now he and his brother were refusing to obey orders that they enter into house arrest.6

  For, in truth, James might now be fully in charge of Scotland but he was not quite done with the Douglases. They refused to ward themselves and were declared traitors but the royal army’s efforts to besiege them in their seaside fortress of Tantallon failed. They were never subdued by military might, despite the Scottish lords vowing to pursue them to their ‘utter destruction’, and it was a diplomatic agreement between Henry VIII and his nephew, the Treaty of Berwick of December 1528, that gave James the Douglas lands while allowing Angus and his brother refuge in England. The treaty was ratified three months later and only then, in April 1529, did the earl of Angus cross into England. There he remained, living mostly in Berwick-upon-Tweed, just across the border from Scotland, using his extensive network of informants and carrying out various bloody border raids on behalf of his patron, Henry VIII. He did not return to Scotland until 1543, by which time James V and Queen Margaret were both dead and another royal minority had just begun. Whatever one thinks of him – and it is mostly his enemies that have had the strongest say – he was a doughty survivor.