by Linda Porter
Duly emboldened, Sadler found Queen Margaret still resentful of her brother’s treatment of her. The envoy had opened on a positive note, saying that Henry was ‘healthful and merry’ – something of an exaggeration, as the king was deeply unhappy about the Cleves marriage – and had given him ‘special charge to visit and see her and also to know how she was used and how all things went there’. Margaret was not impressed by this display of brotherly concern, noting that Henry could not be bothered even to write to her:
She took it the most unkindly that might be, that she had no letter from your highness, saying that she perceived that your grace set not much store by her. But, quoth she, though I be forgot in England, shall I never forget England. It had been but a small matter … to have spent a little paper and ink upon me and much it had been to my comfort; and were it perceived that the king’s grace my brother did regard me, I should be the better regarded of all parties here.
After this crotchety outburst, which illustrates how deep-seated was the rift between the Tudor siblings, Margaret went on to acknowledge that ‘she was well treated and made much of, of the new queen, with such other things of light importance’, concluded Sadler dismissively.11
In the last year of her life, Margaret played a significant role in comforting the grieving James and Mary of Guise when both of their infant sons died in May 1541. It was to prove her final service to James V. She was taken ill, apparently the victim of a stroke, in the autumn of 1541, and died at Methven Castle near Perth on 18 October. Not at first realizing how close she was to death, Margaret did not ask for her son until too late. He could not make the journey from Falkland Palace in time. Her last thoughts, strangely, were with her second husband, the earl of Angus, and she asked her confessor to beseech James V to be ‘good and gracious unto the earl … and did extremely lament and ask God’s mercy, that she had offended unto the said earl as she had.’ What prompted this change of heart is unknown. Perhaps she hoped such a declaration would ease things for the daughter she hardly knew, Lady Margaret Douglas, but, if so, she was sadly mistaken, since Angus cut his daughter out of his will when he died sixteen years later.
Margaret Tudor was buried in St John’s Abbey in Perth, to lie among other Scottish monarchs. Her rest did not last long. Twenty years after her death the abbey was desecrated by Calvinists and Margaret’s skeleton removed from its coffin and burned. Her ashes were contemptuously scattered around and so she, like her first husband, James IV, has no monument. It seemed a sad and ignoble end for the young Tudor princess who had progressed so magnificently up to Scotland in 1503. But time would give her memory a greater prize.
* * *
ONE OF MARGARET’S overriding aims was always to seek for better relations and amity between England and Scotland without compromising her son’s position. Yet in the year of her death there were growing signs of friction between the two countries, of rivalries and deep-seated doubts that, once more, seemed to herald war. The causes were to be found in the always uneasy relationship of James V and Henry VIII and, as had so often been the case before, in the shifting relationships of the great European powers, which neither of the British kings could ignore. But it is certainly true that Henry’s attitude towards his nephew had become one of growing impatience at the start of the 1540s and he believed he had good reason for his displeasure. For in the autumn of 1541 James had spectacularly snubbed the king of England, and Henry VIII was not a man to forget insults in a hurry.
The cause of this deterioration in personal relations was the famous summit-that-never-was at York, planned for September 1541. Accompanied by his new wife, the teenaged Katherine Howard, who had speedily replaced Anne of Cleves the previous summer, Henry set off on a major progress to the north of England. It was the longest, costliest and most sumptuous travel he ever undertook outside the south of his realm and its culmination was to be a great occasion of state when he would finally meet with the nephew he had never seen in York. But Henry’s journey was not solely motivated by family considerations and a desire to improve Anglo–Scottish relations. The north of England was still recovering from the Pilgrimage of Grace six years earlier, support for the old religion remained strong and there was a further conspiracy, known as the Wakefield plot, involving a small group of laymen and priests that had caused him anxiety. It has recently been argued that this disaffection was not, in itself, a sufficient cause for the king to head to Yorkshire. Henry’s presence was intended to reinforce his authority but the northern aristocracy and gentry may also have hoped it signalled a new beginning for a troubled region that had never really established a successful relationship with the Tudors. They were to be sadly disappointed by the king’s uncompromising attitude.12
The royal party began its journey on the last day of June 1541. It included the French ambassador Marillac, who would have been keenly interested in any meeting between Henry and his nephew. As the king journeyed north through Lincolnshire (the inhabitants of which county he had long regarded as ignorant rebels) and into Yorkshire, he received grovelling delegations of local worthies and accepted their protestations of loyalty – and their gifts of money – in a demonstration of regal might: ‘When he entered into Yorkshire,’ wrote Edward Hall in his Chronicle, ‘he was met with two hundred gentlemen of the same shire, in coats of velvet, and four thousand tall yeomen, and serving men, well horsed; which on their knees made a submission, by the mouth of Sir Robert Bowes, and gave to the king nine hundred pound.’13 Thus did the once recalcitrant men of Yorkshire make amends for their region’s continued animosity towards the religious policies of Henry VIII. This was a king who had come to humiliate, not to offer his northern subjects a distinctive role in his realm. Taking comfort in collective amnesia of the indignities of 1541, Yorkshire chose in succeeding centuries to remember instead the progress of Henry’s sister, Margaret Tudor, and her glorious reception in their city. Henry would not have been pleased by his sister upstaging him once again.
It was not so simple, however, to bring the King of Scots to do his bidding. The Scottish view, as held by the king and his advisers, was later summed up in verse by Sir David Lindsay of the Mount:
Soon after that, Harry of England King,
Of our sovereign desired a communing.
Of that meeting, our king was well content,
So that in York was set both time and place;
But our prelates nor I would never consent
That he should see King Harry in the face;
But we were well content howbeit his grace
Had sailed the sea, to speak with any other,
Except that king, which was his mother’s brother:
Where through there rose great war and mortal strife,
Great hardships, hunger, dearth and desolation.
On either side did many lose their life
Of which I would give a true narration,
I caused all that tribulation;
For to talk peace I never would consent,
Without the king of France had been content.14
Lindsay clearly played up his own part in the outcome of this episode, probably to exonerate James V from any charge of having been duplicitous or indecisive. There is no evidence that the Scottish king was ‘well content’ to meet his uncle, except in the politely vague terminology that characterized diplomatic exchanges with Henry VIII’s ambassadors. Much of what we know of James V in this respect comes from the lengthy despatches of Sir Ralph Sadler, who suspected that he was being courteously held at arm’s length but could find no actual offence in James’s stance. No doubt this was the intention. In Sadler’s reports, James comes over as a consummate politician, well versed in saying the appropriate thing. He was welcoming, sophisticated, knowledgeable – and cleverly inscrutable. In 1540, Sadler told James that, in his opinion, ‘such a meeting might now redouble all; and it should be a great comfort both to the king’s majesty your uncle and your grace, the one of you to see the other.’ James was not going to deny t
his, of course, but his response was to muddy the waters. ‘By my truth,’ quoth he, ‘I would be glad to see the king mine uncle, but I would wish that the French king might be at it [the meeting] that we three might meet and join together in one.’15 But such a tripartite summit was, as James well knew, beyond Sadler’s commission. Neither was he impressed by the gift of several horses sent by his uncle, supposedly as a mark of respect. James was a good judge of horse flesh and he knew (as did the embarrassed Sadler) that the English king could have done better.
Henry VIII continued to hope and press for a meeting during the summer of 1541. Although, as we have seen, he had other reasons for making a show of strength in the north, his prestige would be further enhanced if he could persuade the King of Scots to meet him on English territory. He was preoccupied with the so-called Confessional Border and the fact that English heretics posed a threat to his national security. This and foreign policy issues, notably Scotland’s continued closeness to France, were items that he wished to address when he met his nephew. But James faced significant distractions within his kingdom, not the least being the deaths of his two sons. If he left to go to York, he would do so without an heir. There were concerns for his safety and mistrust of Henry VIII’s intentions. Kidnap was genuinely feared as a possibility and if this sounds paranoid, it is worth remembering that abduction was not an unusual occurrence in Scotland, as James V’s daughter would find to her cost in 1567. There was not universal opposition to the idea of a meeting in York among James’s counsellors, but there was little enthusiasm and the king seems to have accepted the view that, on balance, he would have little to gain and potentially much more to lose if he committed himself. He was more willing to offend his uncle than Francis I of France and so, while never formally giving Henry VIII a yea or a nay, he simply stayed put in Scotland.
This decision was evidently made by the beginning of September, when Cardinal David Beaton, a strong opponent of England and a man increasingly hated by Henry VIII, wrote from the French court to James V saying that Francis I ‘thanks him that he has not condescended to a meeting with the king of England’. There was also confirmation from Sir Thomas Wharton, one of the northern wardens and captain of Carlisle, that the meeting would never happen. He told the Privy Council: ‘I did send my espial to know as he could whether the King of Scots would come or did mind to come into England to the king’s majesty or no … which espial sayeth that the king and queen [of Scotland] was upon the last days of August at Falkland with a small company … and that there was no likelihood of his coming into England nor preparing therefore that could be perceived.’16 Henry continued to cling to the hope that James might appear until October 1541, when he eventually left York in considerable displeasure. Within a matter of weeks, however, he had far greater heartache when the infidelity of Katherine Howard, his far too lively young queen, was revealed to him. Scottish affairs seemed, suddenly, far less pressing than those that had been going on under his nose. The evidence of the queen’s loose living was incontrovertible and her fate unavoidable. She went to the block in February 1542, leaving Henry VIII, for a while, broken by her betrayal. His depression did not, however, mean that he lost all interest in government. Henry was a resilient man.
* * *
IN THE MONTHS that followed, neither the English nor the Scottish governments ever made any formal announcement that the idea of a conference between their two kings had been abandoned altogether. It continued to be mooted into 1542 but as the year wore on, events on the European continent made its likelihood even more remote. In the summer, the Habsburg–Valois struggle resumed and Henry VIII reverted to his old dream of victory in a war with France that would enable him to emulate his ancestor, Henry V. The emperor Charles V again appeared as a natural ally and was, needless to say, more than happy to have Henry join him, especially if the English would supply men and money. Almost thirty years after the battle of Flodden, the question of what Scotland might do in such circumstances could not be ignored.
By the autumn of 1542, relations between England and Scotland were deteriorating, with Henry VIII intransigent on the question of English religious rebels being harboured in the Scottish Borders, and there was no consensus on exchange of prisoners held by either side. There had been a series of raids and counter-raids in August, with the Scots successful in a serious skirmish at Hadden Rig near Kelso in the Borders, where Sir Robert Bowes, who had knelt before Henry VIII in York the previous year, was captured. But before they even knew of this defeat, the English were already mustering for war against Scotland, under the command of the duke of Norfolk. Norfolk, the old earl of Surrey’s son who had fought at Flodden, had a low opinion of the Scots and was an enthusiastic lieutenant for Henry VIII in the north. It was he who called James V the ‘ill-beloved’ in an attempt to paint a picture of an unpopular and greedy king, aloof from his nobles and people.
But neither James nor his council wanted war and Henry VIII also thought that continued talking was preferable to outright hostilities, despite English pride being dented by what had happened at Hadden Rig. Commissioners from both countries were still in earnest discussions about ransoming prisoners and arranging a meeting between the two kings early in October 1542. But progress could not be made and on 22 October Norfolk left Berwick with an army of between ten and twenty thousand men. James V and foreign ambassadors gave wildly excessive estimates for this force but it was sufficient to cause the bridge over the Tweed at Berwick to collapse as Norfolk’s soldiers marched across. Burning and destroying as they went, the English reached Kelso four days later before turning back into England at the end of the month. They were short of supplies and sickness was rife. Even Norfolk himself became seriously ill with dysentery and was compelled to rest. He had, however, done enough to inspire Henry VIII to continue what he had begun. The English king justified his stance in a document entitled ‘A declaration containing the just causes and considerations of this present war by the Scots’, adding, ominously, ‘wherein also appeareth the true and right title that the king’s most royal majesty hath to the sovereignty of Scotland.’ The blame was laid squarely at James’s door: ‘Being now enforced to war by his nephew, the king of Scots, the king notifies his nephew’s provocation of it, whom he maintained and protected in minority, and from who he has received letters, embassies, etc., as gently devised as possibly could be.’ Henry went on to cite James V’s missing the meeting at York the previous year and to accuse the Scots of refusing to ransom prisoners and of misrule in the Borders. But it was the repetition of Henry’s claim to Scotland that was always going to cause the most offence, especially couched in the altruistic language of English justification: ‘if the king had minded the possession of Scotland, he had the opportunity during his nephew’s minority, and yet he has just claim to Scotland, recognised by the kings of Scotland, but would not move war at a time when all Christendom should be united to resist the Turk.’17 Such sweeping claims were never going to be acceptable in Edinburgh. Faced with this ultimatum, James V did what his father had done three decades before. He prepared to fight. And to his own timescale – not his uncle’s.
In late October, James summoned the Scottish host to be ready to fight with supplies for twenty days. Arms and provisions were already being sent south. Far from James being unpopular and isolated, the nobility and clergy were solidly behind the king. Although Scottish records for the time are fragmentary, it appears from the reports of English spies that James may have been trying to raise two armies, one under the earl of Huntly, his boyhood friend, to keep Norfolk tied down and away from Edinburgh, and the second, led by the earl of Moray, the king’s half-brother, to come down from Lauder, the traditional mustering place for Scottish armies, and catch the duke in a pincer movement between the two forces. The numbers of those involved were probably exaggerated, as was often the case, though it is no doubt true that the ‘wild Irish’ counted among the earl of Argyll’s Highlanders were much feared, even by other Scottish troops. The
fact that neither of the Scottish forces engaged the English army under Norfolk later gave rise to rumours, reported by English spies, of accusations of cowardice, particularly against Huntly, and assertions that James V was displeased by his army’s failure to take on the English before they withdrew. But Norfolk did not stay in Scotland for long and the Scots may have faced the same difficulties of lack of supplies and disease that he did. Certainly it was late in the season for campaigning on a large scale. A full-scale offensive foray into England was never really on the cards at this time. The Scots had learned something from Flodden and James V realized that Norfolk’s retreat meant that he would have to rethink his military strategy.
James decided to strengthen his border garrisons and redeploy his forces. He could be reasonably confident that his fleet would give a good account of itself if there were to be any naval engagement, as he had resumed his father’s programme of shipbuilding and constructed a new harbour in Fife. In terms of technological warfare, he could match his uncle. He and his advisers expected, however, that the war would be decided by armies, not navies, and so he continued to prepare accordingly. His plan, from what can be pieced together from the often inaccurate reports of English spies and the fragmentary records of the Scottish Treasurer’s Accounts at the time, suggest that he hoped to persuade the English commanders, Norfolk and Hertford (Henry VIII’s brother-in-law), that he would concentrate his forces in the east, on the Northumbrian border, when, in fact, he intended to surprise them on the western border with Cumbria, where the English forces were much smaller. If successful, such a raid might be matched by an eastern attack led by the earl of Moray, accompanied by the propaganda coup of a papal interdict against the heretic English king. It was a bold and clever idea that would have given James an advantage in negotiations with Henry VIII without committing to the pitched battle that his father had fought and lost at Flodden. But on 24 November, amidst the swirling waters of the river Esk and the boggy lands along the shore of the Anglo–Scottish border, James V’s forces were to suffer a wretched defeat at Solway Moss.
