by Linda Porter
The king also spent freely on tapestries and hangings, though his tapestry collection, French-influenced and depicting a variety of classical, chivalric and biblical themes, was one area where James V simply could not compete with his uncle. Henry VIII owned over two thousand tapestries and James about two hundred. The Scottish king did, however, have hangings in rich materials such as cloth of gold and damask, as well as rugs to cover the tiled floors of his homes. There were thick curtains for beds and even a Turkish carpet.
James also found a way to compensate for dark nights and dreary weather in the decoration of his palaces and the patronage of a rich literary and musical tradition. Everywhere there was brightness and colour. The window frames at Linlithgow, long since without glass, were painted in red lead and vermilion. And though the wind now blows cold through the roofless great hall and private apartments of this splendid ruin, during the reign of James V they would have echoed with the sound of music and song. For although the classical and linguistic aspects of James’s education may have been truncated, his musical abilities were outstanding. Music was an essential part of Renaissance court life in Europe and James inherited his passion and his talent from both his parents. Accomplished on the lute (the instrument his father had used to woo Margaret Tudor during their early meetings), James was a proficient sight-reader. ‘The king,’ it was said, ‘had a singular good ear and could sing that he had never seen before.’ He was not endowed with a melodic voice, however, his singing being described as ‘rawky and harske’ (raucous and rough).3 But he did expect high standards from the musicians he employed to entertain him in his private apartments and those who sang liturgical pieces in the royal chapels at his residences. Players of soft instruments had a higher status than musicians such as trumpeters and drummers. The latter were more often involved in state and military occasions, decked out in the red and yellow colours of the Stewarts, and many were foreigners. Musicians who played the lutes, viols, virginals and spinets – the ‘softer’ instruments favoured for more intimate evening entertainment – came from France and Scotland. They also performed the music for stately dances such as the pavane and more lively dances like the galliard. James was definitely eclectic in sourcing his musicians and his instrument makers, ordering viols from an English maker in 1535. This rich-sounding bowed instrument was gaining in popularity at the time.
Equally important in Scotland was sacred music, though little of it survived the Reformation, which is regrettable as the works that remain, notably those of Robert Carver, an Augustinian friar at the Abbey of Scone, suggest considerable complexity and depth. There were organs in the chapels of all the main palaces, and the chapel royal at Stirling, in particular, was a centre of musical life at this time. James was determined that his court should reflect his love of music and hold its own in this area with the other major courts of western Europe.
The king’s cultural interests also supported a flowering of literature. Two massive histories of Scotland, in Latin, by John Mair (Major) and Hector Boece, were presented to him during his minority, but it was only the strongly nationalistic Boece’s work that James favoured as an adult. Both men had taught at the University of Paris and were influenced by the European humanism of the period, though the emphasis of their work was very different. While Mair argued that the union of England and Scotland would bring prosperity to Scotland and suggested that James V was uniquely placed to bring this about by his Anglo–Scottish heritage, his argument sat uncomfortably with James’s commitment to the Auld Alliance. Much more palatable was the reasoning of Boece, who stressed the historic animosity between England and Scotland and saw the role of the King of Scots as exemplifying the heroic armed resistance of the smaller of the two British states against the larger. This account of Scotland’s past clearly appealed to James V, who commissioned John Bellenden, one of his clerks, to translate it into Scots for him. In his preface, Bellenden reinforced Boece’s message by noting that ‘this realm … was never subdued to uncouth empire, but only to the native princes thereof, howbeit the same had sustained great afflictions by Romans, English and Danes.’4
James V’s court also produced fine poetry, most notably that of his long-time confidant Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, and William Stewart, both of whom wrote in the moral vein that was considered appropriate for addressing princes at the time. James was exhorted to lead an upright personal life (something he clearly was not doing), to rule justly and act on good counsel from his advisers.
In his fine palaces, the king was able to demonstrate the strength of his monarchy and offer his courtiers a focus for their own aspirations. Pageantry and ceremonial and the continued observance of a chivalric tradition added to the effect that James wished to make and the new queen consort, gracious and attractive, enhanced his international standing. The Scottish court was hardly on the same scale as that of France (as Mary of Guise would soon have realized) or of England, but it was both civilized and vibrant. And while James V’s second wife missed some of the comforts of her French upbringing, she could still, at least, enjoy its cuisine. Her household accounts show that her patissier provided delicacies such as salmon pasties and plum and raisin tarts to tempt her.5 If she ever wondered what her life would have been like as the fourth wife of Henry VIII, she kept such thoughts to herself.
James V’s uncle, not surprisingly, was able to demonstrate his kingly power and magnificence with a gusto and expenditure that Scotland and the Stewarts simply could not command. Henry’s fifty-five palaces epitomized his wealth and status but they also demonstrated something more, for, as Simon Thurley has written, ‘Henry VIII was certainly the most prolific, talented and innovative builder to sit on the English throne.’6 One suspects that the king would far rather be remembered for this than the constant harping on about the fact that he had six wives but even a king as dominant as Henry could not manage his image from beyond the grave. During his lifetime, however, he was able to erect monuments to his kingship in bricks and mortar and to take a very personal interest in design. Indeed, design in all its aspects fascinated Henry VIII, whether the subject matter was jewellery, armour, tiltyards or coastal fortifications. Henry loved plans and maps and he kept copies of plans, as well as drawing instruments, in his studies. But his site visits must have been dreaded by the workforce and his architects, who frequently found themselves being obliged to make considerable changes at short notice. The king did not like to be kept waiting and he was an impatient builder.
It was in the decade of the 1530s, when his nephew James V was embarking on his own building programme, that Henry VIII’s involvement in royal building works became much more active. Before that, he had completed the new palace of Bridewell, near Blackfriars, on land that had once belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, in 1523. The palace of Westminster had been destroyed by fire in 1512, leaving the king without a residence in the heart of his capital. There had also been extensive alterations to Greenwich Palace, a countryside palace on the river Thames where Henry was keen to ensure that he could enjoy the recreations that pleased him most: jousting, hunting and general revelry. It was a place to entertain and be entertained. A new tiltyard, stables and viewing towers were constructed but so, too, was a library, for Henry liked intellectual as well as physical activities.
But Greenwich and Bridewell were really only the beginning. The disgrace and death of Wolsey, followed later in the 1530s by the dissolution of the monasteries and a steady acquisition of property from courtiers who had fallen out of favour, provided Henry with a property windfall. Until this point, Wolsey had been something of an architectural mentor. His disappearance from the scene scarcely fazed Henry, or, indeed Anne Boleyn, at that point perhaps more influential than when she actually became queen. Wolsey’s new London house, York Place, was transformed into the palace of Whitehall and the cardinal’s other riverside residence, at Hampton Court, extensively converted. The king was keen to have more privy lodgings, to develop a retreat from the crowded outer rooms in which lawy
ers and politicians thronged, and to move his day-to-day living quarters on to a horizontal rather than vertical plan, which meant the demolition of the stacked lodgings of the early sixteenth century, when the king’s apartments tended to be above the queen’s. The overall appearance of Henry VIII’s homes owed a great deal to contemporary Burgundian architecture but French influences were also becoming apparent. The English king did not, however, have an equivalent of Falkland Palace. He wanted to preside over a European court, but that did not mean that he wished to copy all things French. His emphasis was on creating his own unique court and culture that could bear comparison with those of his European counterparts.
To help him achieve this goal he needed information about the palaces of his great rival, Francis I. Some of this was drawn from the reports of his own ambassadors. In 1540, for example, Sir John Wallop, his long-serving diplomat in France, gave a detailed description of Fontainebleau, the main residence of the French court just outside Paris, its galleries and decorations and, most notably, the impressive surroundings of the royal bedchamber: ‘and so we went into his [the king’s] bed chamber, which I do assure your majesty is very singular, as well with antique borders, as costly ceiling and a chimney right well made.’ The paintings and stucco work above the wainscoting were of the highest quality and Wallop was encouraged to clamber up on a bench to examine them at closer quarters. Francis even gave him a helping hand in his climb.7 Much of Francis’s great building programme, in the Loire, in the Île de France and in Paris itself (he also did a great deal of work in the Louvre) coincided with Henry’s. It was a boom period for the skilled craftsmen of Europe, the masons, plasterers, painters, glaziers, experts in stucco and wood, who laboured to fulfil the visions of these two master egoists. Henry already knew a considerable amount about the splendour of the French court and Francis’s personal style from Nicolas Bellin of Modena, a former valet of the wardrobe to the French king. Implicated in fraud, Bellin fled France and was given refuge at the court of Henry VIII. In England, his talents as artist and designer were put to good use at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, allowing Henry to demonstrate to Francis that he had ‘stolen’ one of the French king’s leading artisans.
Henry shared with James V a love of music. Francis I did not have their talent, but the English king could both read and write music and was particularly fond of part-singing, which he apparently did to more mellifluous effect than his nephew. The possession of a good voice was an important prerequisite for gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber. Henry played the organ, virginals, lute and recorder and he supported substantial numbers of musicians – more than fifty by the middle of his reign. As in Scotland, these instrumentalists often came from overseas and the King’s Musik, as the royal orchestra was known, was said to the finest in Europe.8 When he died, Henry VIII possessed three hundred musical instruments.
His collection of books was equally impressive – perhaps as many as a thousand volumes and manuscripts, some of them travelling with the king as he moved between palaces. James V had nothing like this vast library. This may reflect the difference in scale between the courts of Scotland and England but it also serves to underline the contrasting educational experiences of Henry VIII and his nephew. James does not seem to have been a great reader but his uncle was, even when failing eyesight meant the need for spectacles. Henry loved his books and the world of literature, just as much as he enjoyed disguisings, the performance of masques and the tennis court. Few monarchs of England have equalled the range and depth of the second Tudor’s cultural life.9
* * *
YET DESPITE the richness of court life and his own personal splendour, unforgettably captured in the portrait by Hans Holbein that has passed into national consciousness as our image of this man of overwhelming presence and sheer physical bulk, all was not well in England as the decade of the 1540s dawned. The previous two years had been full of alarm. There were fears of foreign invasion, of a deadly threat to English shores posed by the unlikely temporary rapprochement of Charles V and Francis I, who might target Henry VIII as a heretic without legitimate rule. To safeguard his coastline, Henry embarked on a massive programme of fortification. The greatest of his coastal forts, at Deal in Kent, can still be seen. At home, Henry moved against the remaining upholders of the White Rose, the descendants of Edward IV’s brother, the duke of Clarence, when he quashed the so-called Exeter conspiracy. Abroad, he looked for allies elsewhere – among the Protestant princes of Germany who continued to disrupt the Holy Roman Empire and plague Charles V. Encouraged by Thomas Cromwell, Henry embarked on the fiasco of his fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves (who was actually a Catholic, but whose brother was an important player in German politics), a lady for whom he seems to have felt it impossible to feel any sexual attraction. Henry was clearly humiliated by his inability to consummate the marriage and a humiliated king was a dangerous proposition. Anne of Cleves, a discreet and canny woman, survived the debacle of her speedy divorce unscathed but Cromwell, the faithful servant who had helped Henry VIII transform England in the 1530s, did not. As with Anne Boleyn, there are many things still unclear about the fall of Cromwell but, again, Henry’s personal animosity, so unpredictable and so deadly when aroused, seems to have played a major part. Perhaps he really did believe the charges of heresy brought against Cromwell. There may have been a genuine parting of the ways for them over the pace of religious reform and, if so, it was not an argument Cromwell was going to win. He had seemed the perfect servant, but, like all masters, Henry viewed servants as dispensable. For whatever mix of reasons, Cromwell, a remarkable man whose character still eludes historians as it may have eluded contemporaries, went to the block in July 1540.
In Scotland, James V was also getting rid of opponents and strengthening his rule during these years. There were three high-profile cases, beginning with the trial and execution of the Master of Forbes in July 1537 and culminating with the death of Hamilton of Finnart three years later. Though James’s record of reprisals is nothing like that of his uncle, there was a vindictiveness in his treatment of at least one of these victims that may be perfectly explicable when one considers the king’s past (and the accepted punishments of the time) but it still had the power to shock contemporaries. Within two weeks of the death of Queen Madeleine in July 1537, Janet Douglas, sister of the exiled earl of Angus and George Douglas, was brought to trial in Edinburgh to face two charges of treason. One was that she had conspired to poison the king; the other was that she continued to communicate with and give assistance to her brothers. Always known as Lady Glamis, from her first marriage, Janet was, in fact, the wife of Archibald Campbell of Skipness, who was charged along with her, as was her son. Found guilty, Lady Glamis was sentenced to be burned on Castle Hill in Edinburgh immediately. There was to be no commutation of her sentence nor delay in carrying it out. The following day her husband tried to escape from Edinburgh Castle, where he was imprisoned, but he fell and broke his neck. He, at least, was spared the dreadful death endured by his wife, a good-looking woman in her early thirties, who was the highest-ranking victim of James V.
The manner of her death may seem unbearably cruel but was standard for women convicted of treason in both sixteenth-century England and Scotland. Anne Boleyn would have suffered the same fate had Henry VIII not shown some mercy and agreed that she should be executed by a swordsman. And though the charge of attempted poisoning seems to be more the product of a superstitious age (it is not at all clear how Janet Douglas would have been able to achieve such an outcome since she was not at court), the accusation that she had sought to aid her brothers and had kept in touch with them carries more weight. She had been suspected before, in 1529 and 1531. Newly returned from nine months in France and having so recently lost his wife, it is not surprising that James V was disinclined to moderate Janet’s sentence. If he wanted to make an example and send a message to any other members of the Scottish aristocracy who contemplated treason, Janet Douglas provided him with the perfect excuse
. He hated her family and while he could not touch her traitorous brothers, he could strike against their sister.
In 1540 he underlined his determination to be rid of unsatisfactory elements from his past when he executed Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, the bastard son of the first earl of Arran and the man who had murdered the third earl of Lennox at the battle of Linlithgow. Hamilton’s career had actually prospered during the 1530s and his role as master of the king’s works meant that James V’s ambitious building programme was delivered largely through his own architectural expertise. But James had a long memory and he could not overlook the fact that Hamilton did not come out firmly on the king’s side back in 1528, when the young James was desperate to impose his authority after his escape from the Douglases. By 1540, Hamilton was yesterday’s man. Most of the rest of the nobility hated him, he potentially stood in the way of James V’s determination to annex all of the Douglas lands, and he was, as has been said, a soft target for a confident king, who, like Henry VIII, had no compunction in demonstrating that those he had built up could just as easily be destroyed.10 Accused of treason, Hamilton was convicted by a jury that included Margaret Tudor’s third husband, Henry Stewart, and was duly sent to the block.
* * *
WHILE HER SON stamped his authority on his magnates, Margaret continued her long life of regret. Her third marriage turned sour as Henry Stewart, Lord Methven (the nephew of Janet Kennedy), spent her money and started a family with his mistress, Lord Atholl’s daughter, Janet Stewart. In 1537, Margaret tried to obtain a divorce but though she was thought to have sufficient grounds, her son stepped in to halt proceedings. James had had enough of his mother’s marital adventures. Eventually, a reconciliation of sorts was achieved with Methven and in Scottish national life Margaret was not entirely overlooked. When the English diplomat Sir Ralph Sadler, a protégé of Thomas Cromwell, was sent to Scotland on a mission at the beginning of 1540, he found the queen dowager installed at court. Asking permission of the king to visit her, he was told: ‘ye need not to ask my licence for that, but ye may boldly see and visit her at all times.’
