by Linda Porter
His daughter, Lady Margaret Douglas, fared rather differently. Taken in by Henry VIII, she entered the household of Princess Mary, and the two girls became very close; their friendship endured even the end of the Katherine of Aragon marriage and Mary’s banishment from court for three years. During that time, the adaptable Margaret had served Anne Boleyn but Mary does not seem to have held this against her cousin. The English king was genuinely fond of his niece, whose vivaciousness made a favourable impression at court. A French diplomat described her as ‘beautiful and highly esteemed’. But Margaret was her mother’s daughter in unwise affairs of the heart and when she secretly became engaged to Anne Boleyn’s uncle, Sir Thomas Howard, Henry had them both confined in the Tower of London. Margaret was too close to the Crown of England to be allowed to follow her own inclinations without the king’s permission. Her mother was horrified but far from sympathetic. ‘She shall never have my blessing and she do not all that you command her,’ the queen wrote to Henry VIII in October 1536. Preoccupied with a serious uprising in the north of England that came close to threatening his throne, Margaret Douglas’s misdemeanour could scarcely have come at a worse time for her uncle. Just after Christmas he responded to his sister, noting that her daughter had ‘so lightly used herself, as was both to our dishonour and her own great hindrance.’7 Yet he made it clear that if Margaret Douglas would behave herself, he would continue to favour her. He was as good as his word, though he did not find a husband for his niece until 1544.8 Meanwhile, the ailing and lovestruck girl was released from the Tower into the unwilling custody of the nuns at Sion Abbey, to the west of London, where she recovered rapidly and was soon driving the abbess to desperation by her never-ending stream of visitors.
Margaret was compelled to wait for her independence, but her half-brother, at last, could savour his. In 1528 James V had managed to break free from a guardian who he detested and, having been king for all but the first seventeen months of his life, began to rule for himself. He was considerably younger than his father had been when James IV assumed personal control of Scotland and his upbringing had been even more dysfunctional. But his desires to bring good government and international prestige to his realm were values very much inherited from the father he had never known. His assumption of power also distanced him from his mother, whose third marriage had provided him with important leverage but also diminished his respect for her. From now on, James V was determined to be his own man. He can have had no illusions that his relationship with his Uncle Henry would play a major part in his life, even as an independent monarch. Their rivalry would become more personal as James grew into his role. But for now Henry VIII had troubles of his own.
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IT IS A LITTLE-KNOWN irony that Margaret’s divorce from Angus was pronounced in Rome by the pope within two months of Henry VIII taking the first public steps to annul his marriage of eighteen years with Katherine of Aragon. The king of England, who had taken such a high-minded view of his sister’s attempts to free herself from an unfortunate mésalliance, was even then instructing his ministers and men learned in Church law to find a way for him to put his Spanish wife aside. He had no legitimate male heirs apart from James V and his younger sister’s son, and he would not entertain the idea that either of them should inherit from him before he tried much harder to produce male offspring himself. And while Katherine saw no difficulty in their daughter, Mary, succeeding, the prejudices of the time, fully shared by Henry, made this a disturbing prospect. If the princess married a foreign husband of appropriate rank, as had always been intended, but then inherited the throne of England herself, the country’s independence would most likely be compromised. If, on the other hand, Mary married an English nobleman, would he not assume the powers of king, since women were considered unfit to rule by themselves? Such an eventuality might lead to civil war.
Henry also had a massive ego, wounded by his failure to beget a son, and a conscience troubled by the fact that he had married his brother’s widow. The Bible sent confusing messages on the acceptability of such an act, but the couple’s failure to produce males seemed like an indictment to a troubled king. He was also much taken with one of his wife’s ladies, the alluring and ambitious Anne Boleyn, a diplomat’s daughter who had spent time at the French court and absorbed its style and manners. Henry had probably thought about putting his wife aside before he noticed Anne and he might have been content, in the early stages, to make her his official mistress, while he looked for a bride of suitable rank and diplomatic benefit to replace Katherine. The difficulty here was Anne’s refusal to fulfil such a role.
When he instructed Wolsey, in the spring of 1527, to find a way out of his marriage, Henry had no idea of the difficulties he would encounter and the momentous events that would follow. He had just signed a new agreement with Francis I, the Treaty of Westminster, which seemed to assure peace with France for the foreseeable future. It was unlikely that Francis would tackle him over his divorce. The French king, who married his second wife, Eleanor, sister of Charles V, in 1530 might, however, have raised an eyebrow at the idea of a king wedding his mistress. But the emperor, Katherine of Aragon’s nephew, was unlikely to take kindly to his aunt’s removal as Henry’s consort. And since the Sack of Rome by the imperial army in 1526, the freedom of decision that the pope could exercise was severely compromised. This was an obstacle not fully appreciated by Henry when he started proceedings, known in England as ‘The King’s Great Matter’, in the summer of 1527. By the following year, the battle between King Henry and Queen Katherine was well and truly joined and the impact spread far and wide. In July 1528, even as young James V was finally throwing off his restrictions, Henry was finding that marital liberty was hard to obtain.
Katherine appealed directly to the pope via the imperial ambassador in Rome. In her statement, Katherine asked that Clement VII ‘forbid the suit, and impose perpetual silence’, as the marriage was ‘contracted in accordance with an apostolic ordinance, and consummated by the cohabitation of many years and the birth of children.’ She foresaw a grim outcome if Henry VIII persisted: ‘Wars between Christian princes will be the result. It is intended to separate what God has joined, mutual will has confirmed, and the Holy See has ratified; to impugn the decrees of the Roman church, and restrain the pope’s power.’ Here Katherine was cleverly ratcheting up the pressure on the pope, at a time when new religious ideas were spreading across Europe.
The enemy of man will profit much from this seed of wickedness and discord. No marriages will be secure if this is dissolved. The cause should on no account be decided, except at the court of Rome, because of its importance and because it turns upon the interpretation of a papal dispensation. Least of all should it be determined in England, where the Queen fears the powers of the King, and there will be no security for her defence.9
The divorce would leave many casualties in its wake but its first major victim was Cardinal Wolsey, who had feared all along that he could not make things happen with anything like the speed or simplicity that his king desired. Anne Boleyn turned against him, believing that he stood in the way of the king ever obtaining a divorce. It was necessary to find some excuse to bring about his downfall and the means were soon found. Accused of the offence of praemunire (obeying the jurisdiction of a foreign, in this case papal, court over that of the royal courts of England), Wolsey was forced to hand over his great wealth and fine palaces to the king. But his enemies were not content to stop at anything short of his utter destruction. Wolsey may have considered plotting with France and Charles V against Henry, though these stories were put around by his opponents and cannot be verified. But he was never put on trial, dying at Leicester on the way to London to answer charges of treason. His death removed someone who had given Henry unmatched service over many years and though Katherine of Aragon had never liked him and considered him an opponent, her cause was not helped by his passing.
For nearly six years, Henry clung to the hope that a legal solution t
o his difficulties, acceptable to both God and man, could be found. He certainly did not give up easily, to the frustration of the woman waiting to be his true and proper wife. But while Anne Boleyn saw her twenties disappear, and with them perhaps the most fruitful years in which she could bear children, Katherine of Aragon refused to budge. She would not go quietly; even the option of entering a nunnery was spurned. The English queen’s defiance forced Princess Mary to take her mother’s side in the dispute, with devastating consequences for the seventeen-year-old. Henry, ever the stickler for propriety, invested considerable sums of money in trying to get a consensus among the great European universities that his marriage was unlawful. Charles V made threatening noises but never seriously contemplated going to war on his aunt’s behalf. And eventually it dawned on Henry VIII that there could only be one way out. He would have to break with Rome and establish his own authority as Head of the Church in England. The proud defender of the old faith now found his salvation in the new religious ideas, where anticlericalism and denial of papal authority were becoming increasingly vocal. Henry’s will would be done, whatever the consequences, and those who opposed him would feel his wrath.
Early in 1533, impatient and infuriated by Rome’s intransigence, he married the pregnant Anne Boleyn. Just two months earlier he had paraded her as queen in all but name, in front of Francis I at his second and last meeting with the king of France, in Calais. The new archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, a reformer, finally found for the king (as he was expected to do) at the end of May 1533, allowing just enough time to complete the arrangements for Anne’s coronation in June. She gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, in September. The long wait had not produced a male heir but Henry was now on a course that he saw no reason to reverse. The dispute with the papacy had brought home to him the advantages of bringing the Church in England directly under his own control. The Act of Succession in 1533, which declared Mary illegitimate and replaced her with her half-sister, was swiftly followed by the Act of Supremacy of 1534, declaring Henry Supreme Head of the Church. Henry was ruthless with those whose consciences could not accommodate themselves to the changes. His chancellor, Thomas More, and the bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, were two of the most famous names to lose their lives for opposing the king. Many others less well known, including members of the religious orders such as the Carthusians, who could not accept the break with Rome, also suffered and would continue to be persecuted throughout the 1530s and beyond.
In pursuit of an heir, Henry VIII had unleashed a force that could not be contained. Towards the end of his reign, he acknowledged what he believed to be the negative effects of this great revolution in belief and its impact on society as a whole. Yet despite the assistance of an army of civil servants, the support of parliament, the collusion of an aristocracy and rising gentry who grew rich on the profits of former monastic lands when Henry decided to dismantle monasticism in England, this was always the King’s Reformation. Though the king was advised by councillors, who by no means always agreed among themselves, until 1540 there was one man above all others who helped Henry transform England. His name was Thomas Cromwell and he would try to influence affairs in Scotland as well as England as the tumultuous decade of the 1530s progressed.
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NORTH OF THE BORDER, James V watched as his uncle was branded a heretic and became the pariah of Europe. Henry’s preoccupations allowed James to establish himself in Scotland and to forge his own style of kingship, though the two monarchs were ever conscious of their geographical proximity and their ties of blood. But James was determined to demonstrate that, despite the vicissitudes of his long minority, Renaissance monarchy had survived in Scotland and would flourish again. He also realized from very early in the period of his personal rule that his relationship with the Church in Scotland would be a vital element in the success he was so keen to achieve. But he did not follow his uncle’s path, no matter how much Henry VIII urged him to do so. In fact, Henry’s break with Rome worked largely to James’s advantage. The King of Scots could present himself as a good son of Rome while simultaneously working towards a greater fusion of Crown and Church, as James IV had intended. Many clerics were also trained lawyers and diplomats and the king was able to use their expertise to underpin a new, more cohesive approach to the exercise of justice in Scotland, so essential for effective government. In 1532 he created the College of Justice, in which lawyer-clerics played a crucial role. And while this was intended to work to monarchical advantage on the domestic front, it also earned James V approval from both Clement VII and Charles V at the very time that Henry VIII’s troubles with the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor appeared more and more intractable.
This success, in which James’s chancellor, Dunbar, and the king’s secretary, Sir Thomas Erskine, played a significant part, was more than just a feather in the king’s cap. It meant that he had very much arrived on the European stage. The pope authorized taxation of the Scottish clergy to pay for the new legal set-up in Scotland, giving James access to Church finances without the more brutal methods employed by Henry VIII. Charles V, meanwhile, in a move that signalled a notable improvement to Scottish–Imperial relations, admitted James to the Order of the Golden Fleece. Founded in 1430 by Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, this knightly order was highly regarded in Europe. Henry VIII and Francis I were already members and James was joining an illustrious company. More than that, he and Charles V were both mindful that, despite Scotland’s long history of diplomatic alliance with France, the trading routes across the North Sea to Flanders were important for Scotland’s economic well-being.
Henry VIII was irritated by his nephew’s international success. It had been reported to Henry, admittedly by the unreliable earl of Bothwell, that the emperor had told James V that he should style himself ‘Prince of England and duke of York’. This was calculated to meet the same rebuff from Henry as Queen Margaret’s earlier suggestion that her son should be acknowledged as the English heir and made Prince of Wales. For his part, Henry had not given up his claim of overlordship of Scotland that had so rankled with James IV in 1513. Now England’s Habsburg ally seemed to be stirring up further trouble between the two countries. Henry was angered and decided to test his nephew by ordering raids in the Borders.
Some of James’s first actions as king had been to try to bring better order to this continuously lawless region. Between 1529 and 1536 he personally led seven military campaigns in the Borders to try and contain, if not permanently annihilate, the threat posed by recalcitrant families like the Armstrongs, who were either local heroes or murderous brigands depending on your standpoint. Like his father, James was not afraid to face danger and he acted with determination. In 1530, he summoned the notorious John Armstrong to appear before him in Teviotdale and promptly ordered the Border ruffian’s execution, as well as that of many of Armstrong’s gang.10 Nor was he going to be bested by a peevish uncle. The Scottish host, under the command of his half-brother, the earl of Moray, was summoned in the spring of 1533, while the earl of Bothwell and the archbishop of St Andrews, both suspected of treasonable contact with the English, were placed under house arrest. James also decided to mount an attack on the English in Ireland and raid the Isle of Man. Finally, an end to these hostilities was brokered by the French and a peace treaty signed in 1534. It has been said that ‘the costly war of 1532–33 exemplified the short-sighted and unpredictable nature of Henry VIII’s Scottish policy.’11 One man who was certainly troubled by this episode was Thomas Cromwell, who now committed himself, over the next three years, to improving Anglo–Scottish relations.
Cromwell had risen to power in the service of Wolsey and had managed to come through the difficult period of his master’s fall from grace unscathed. A lawyer with a remarkable talent for administration and a shrewd head for business, his initial reputation had been that of a ‘fixer’ rather than a politician, but he certainly aspired to statesmanship and while his role in the Reformation in England may have been
overstated in the past, he was a man of great ability and energy, as well as being increasingly and genuinely interested in religious reform. A prodigious worker, Cromwell is not especially known for his interest in foreign policy at this time and yet his dealings with the imperial envoy to England, Eustace Chapuys, show a man at pains to be viewed as having unparalleled access to Henry VIII, with his finger absolutely on the pulse of affairs of state. He had also, much earlier in his career, provided an interesting insight into his own views by stating his support for unification with Scotland, though via military invasion rather than diplomatic means: ‘who that intendeth France to win,’ he wrote in a speech for parliament as early as 1523, ‘with Scotland let him begin.’ He went on to point out that Scotland was ‘joined unto us in nature all in one island, into which we may have recourse at all times when we will.’12
In the autumn of 1532, as Henry VIII’s views on the divorce and his own relationship with the English Church were hardening, letters concerning the financial management of the Scottish war were being regularly addressed to Thomas Cromwell. He had become master of the jewels in the spring of that year, a post that sounds ceremonial but gave access to the management of royal finances. Cromwell was also developing a spy network in Scotland so that he could make his own judgements on what was going on there. Favouring a diplomatic solution over a military one, and mindful of the likelihood that Scotland would be used by continental powers in the event of war with England, there was a sudden flurry of diplomatic activity. Sir Adam Otterburn arrived from Scotland as the new resident ambassador and Cromwell cultivated his company, as he did that of other foreign diplomats in London. As the Act of Succession was being prepared in 1533, tempting promises were held out by Cromwell and Henry VIII. James V might be named heir if Anne Boleyn’s children did not survive. Yet when the legislation finally went through parliament, James was not named. The Scots would have been dismayed, but not entirely surprised, if they had seen the notes which Cromwell wrote for himself, his ‘Remembrances’, in which he observed that ‘the King of Scots should in no wise be named, for it might give him courage or else cause him to take unkindness.’13
