by Linda Porter
There are no surviving Scottish versions of what happened at this battle, which was, in truth, a raid that went disastrously wrong. The English had learned of Scottish intentions in the west in the nick of time, and Sir Thomas Wharton had left Carlisle with a force of no more than three thousand men to meet a Scottish army that may have been as large as seventeen thousand. The difference in odds did not overawe Wharton, a man highly experienced in border warfare and whose knowledge of the local terrain at Solway Moss was probably better than that of the Scottish commanders. Wharton was also confident in the ability of his lancers (his ‘prickers’, as he called them) to harry the Scottish forces. He spread his troops out along the water’s edge, to give the impression of a larger force, and set his lancers to work on the eastern flank of the Scots.
His tactics paid dividends. Trapped between the bog and the river and hemmed in by their own troops, the Scots were soon in disarray, defeated, as has been said, ‘by those eternal enemies of time and tide’. In the absence of coherent leadership – for there appears to have been confusion if not outright disagreement among the Scots under the command of Lord Maxwell – many saw that their situation was hopeless, though the English acknowledged that they fought valiantly. Eventually, preferring surrender to drowning in the Esk (though this fate awaited a considerable number of Scottish soldiers who tried to swim back to their side of the river), many gave themselves up. Among them were the earls of Cassilis and Glencairn and half a dozen lords, including Maxwell himself and Oliver Sinclair of Pitcairn, a favourite of James V. The English estimated that they took over 1,200 prisoners. The Scottish lords were sent south to London, to await negotiations for their release. This unexpected windfall of prominent prisoners would be put to good use by Henry VIII in his subsequent dealings with the Scots, as the king made clear when he wrote to Wharton on 30 November, giving him ‘our condign thanks’ for the victory ‘against our enemies the Scots’.18
Solway Moss was by no means the disaster for Scotland that Flodden had been but it was humiliation on a large scale, more than cancelling out the victory at Hadden Rig. James V himself, harkening to the pleas of his queen and no doubt mindful of what had happened to his father, took no part in the fighting. The English reported that he had watched the encounter from nearby Burnswark Hill but his precise whereabouts during the battle are unknown. He was certainly back in Edinburgh four days after Solway Moss and met his council in early December. The business of government continued but seems to have slowed thereafter. The reason for this was not pique on the king’s part or overwhelming depression at what had happened. He had not given up mentally.
James managed to visit Linlithgow to see his wife, who was in the latter stages of another pregnancy. We do not know what passed between them and it was fortunate for Mary of Guise that she did not contract the disease that was shortly to kill her husband. She gave birth to a daughter, Mary, on 8 December, in the midst of a spell of intensely cold weather. There is no record that James ever saw his daughter, though he might have had time to do so before he was laid low by severe illness. We cannot be sure of the sickness that afflicted him but he was probably a victim of dysentery or cholera, both illnesses that stalked armies, and James had been among his troops for some weeks. His half-brother, Moray, was also ill and the earl of Atholl was in fact dying during the war of 1542. James V could have been infected by either of them. The king had been unwell previously during his reign but recovered on each occasion. This time the outcome would be different. By 12 December he had retired to Falkland Palace and taken to his bed. He would not rise from it again. Suffering greatly and aware that the end was imminent, he signed a notarial instrument early in the morning of 14 December which appointed Cardinal Beaton, the earls of Moray, Huntly and Argyll and his wife to act as governors to his daughter during her minority. He knew it would be even longer than his own; she was just six days old.
James V died later the same day. Many legends sprung up after his passing, including the famous saying that his last words, about little Mary Queen of Scots and the future of the Stewart dynasty, were ‘it cam’ wi’ a lass and it’ll gang wi’ a lass’. This is good, dramatic stuff, but someone dying of a virulent disease is unlikely to think that clearly or romantically. His hopes for his daughter were encapsulated in the provisions he made for her (subsequently set aside) and in the knowledge, which must have offered him some comfort in the extremity of his life, that he had governed Scotland effectively and well after the most difficult of starts to his reign. Until more balanced judgements appeared in recent years, James V was dismissed as the most unpleasant of the Stewarts, a rapacious, priest-ridden seeker of international recognition, disliked by his subjects, who had dared to oppose his uncle, Henry VIII. In this interpretation, he suffered a nervous collapse after Solway Moss and left his country in disarray. But such a view overlooks his achievements, the cultural richness of his court and the importance he placed on good government. There is considerable work still to be done on his reign and he awaits a worthy biographer. Meanwhile, it can be said that James V, though half a Tudor by birth, was entirely a Stewart in his approach to kingship and more than equal to the prolonged rivalry with the uncle that he never met. Yet even as the bitter winter closed in on Scotland, that uncle had plans for the little girl that James had left behind.
Part Four
‘The Most Perfect Child’
1542–1568
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘Rough Wooings’ and Reformation
‘Our greate affayre of Scotland.’
Henry VIII to Viscount Lisle, January 1543
‘So was the Princess sold to go to France, to the end that in her youth she should drink of that liquor, that should remain with her all her lifetime, for a plague to this realm, and for her final destruction.’
John Knox looks back in anger on the departure of Mary Queen of Scots for France in 1548
THE DEATH OF JAMES V and the fierce winter weather brought a halt to the English military campaign against Scotland. As John Dudley, Lord Lisle, an English soldier and politician who would rise, by the end of the decade, to a position of supreme power in England, told his king shortly before Christmas:
seeing that God hath thus disposed his will of the said King of Scots, I thought it should not be to your majesty’s honour, that we your soldiers should make war or invade upon a dead body or upon a widow or upon a young suckling his daughter, and specially upon the time of the funeral of the said king, which time all his realm must lament the same. Wherefore … I have thought it good to stay the stroke of your sword until your majesty’s pleasure be further known to me.1
Dudley’s attitude was surprisingly humane. He had a large family of his own and seems to have felt for the widowed queen and her daughter, whose sickliness had been exaggerated by the reports of the exiled Douglas brothers. Henry VIII did not disagree but he was determined not to lose the advantages so providentially delivered to him by battle and nature. Often presented in popular literature as the prey of factions and his own ill health in the 1540s, Henry was still very much in charge of government and policy in England. He was now fifty-three years old and if his body was failing through overweight and bone disease, his mind remained alert and his ambitions lofty. At the beginning of 1543 he seemed to be coming back to life after the depression that had followed the disaster of his marriage to Katherine Howard and was shortly to fall in love for a sixth and final time, with the attractive and intelligent widow Katherine Parr. And now the untimely death of James V at just thirty years old presented Henry with a wonderful opportunity to orchestrate the union of England and Scotland.
Henry’s intention was to achieve this through diplomacy rather than warfare, aided, he hoped, by growing religious dissent in Scotland as the ideas of the Reformation began to divide his northern neighbour more seriously than they had done while James V was alive. A full-scale military assault followed by occupation was never part of his policy towards Scotland – if, indeed, he had
anything amounting to a carefully considered policy before 1543. Circumstances now allowed him to fashion something more coherent that would avoid the difficulties of trying to impose direct rule on a largely hostile country. Lacking the resources of the modern nation state, this was not an option for the English king. And yet he never had a better opportunity to impose himself on Scotland than in the winter of 1542–3. That he did not do so, in effect repeating what had happened after Flodden, can most readily be explained by events on the wider European stage. For, once again, Henry was preoccupied with France and the prospect of one final chance of glory there. The Habsburg–Valois struggle had moved away from the Italian theatre of war and was now threatening France’s northern and eastern borders. Henry VIII hoped that, in allying with Charles V, he could reclaim at least Boulogne and increase the English footprint on French soil. Scotland was significant but it was always France that captured his imagination.
At the beginning of 1543, however, he held two very strong cards. The debacle at Solway Moss had delivered to him a pack of Scottish nobles who were brought south to face honourable captivity and who would not be allowed to return to their native land until they had given signed assurances that they would support English dynastic policy and push for religious change. These ‘assured lords’, as they were known, were a key part of Henry’s strategy: they were to make palatable to their own countrymen Henry VIII’s underlying goal. For his second card was his own son, five-year-old Prince Edward, and the wily old Tudor was determined to marry the boy to the infant Mary Stewart. Thus, the joining of the two kingdoms of the British Isles could be achieved without bloodshed. It seemed a perfect match, at least from the English perspective. There was never any doubt in Henry’s mind who the dominant partner would be in this arrangement and in this he echoed his father’s views, expressed at the time of Margaret Tudor’s marriage to James IV. The details would be hammered out in lengthy diplomatic discussions, culminating in a treaty that, it was hoped, would shape the future of Britain.
Henry had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve but he had overlooked one vital element – the response of the Scots themselves. Reliant as he was on the information supplied by pro-English and often disaffected members of the Scottish nobility, he did not have a well-informed picture of attitudes north of the border. The extent of opposition to his plans was not fully appreciated even by Sir Ralph Sadler, sent up to Edinburgh once more as ambassador, who failed to read the complexities of Scottish politics or understand the play of personalities involved. And too much confidence was invested in the ‘assured lords’, who could not necessarily sway their fellow Scots and whose loyalty to Henry VIII may have been bought but was by no means certain. Thus the scene was set for a year in which triumph turned to disaster as Henry saw his aims for Scotland negated by the survival of French influence and a deep underlying aversion to English dominance. He was to discover, to his cost, that when it came to a stark choice between the English or the French having the upper hand in Scotland, the Auld Alliance could best him yet.
* * *
IN SCOTLAND, despite the uncertainty of yet another long minority, the humiliation of Solway Moss and the grief of a nation that had lost a firm and competent ruler, the proprieties of a monarch’s death were fully observed. James V’s obsequies were not carried out amid the murky uncertainty that had clouded those of his grandfather, James III, and though his death was a shock it was not accompanied by the gut-wrenching sense of loss that had accompanied his father’s demise at Flodden. James V had died amidst the effluvia and pain of a foul disease, but his mortal remains were buried with pomp and dignity. It was a full heraldic and chivalric funeral, befitting his regal status and the honours he had accrued during his brief lifetime. Probably organized by the faithful Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, who had been in James V’s service since the king’s childhood, the funeral took place on 8 January 1543 at Holyrood, more than three weeks after James’s death. The Christmas season had delayed arrangements but on the day before his burial the late king’s body was removed from Falkland Palace and taken overland and then by ferry across the Forth to Edinburgh to await interment:
whatever could be devised in solemn pomp, or honourable decorum, or doleful dolour, mourning and grief, here all was done filled with all due ceremonies and due diligence: torches lit, places spread with tapestry, with notable cloth and well-painted, lamentable trumpets, cardinals all in sadness … the earls of Argyll, Arran, Rothes and Marischal, and others in great number of the nobility … were all in the meantime so dressed that albeit you may marvel much of their pomp in order, in colour nonetheless easily mourning you might see (for all were dressed in black), when in Edinburgh in the abbey of Holyrood House, in the same sepulchre where Madeleine, his first wife, was buried, was he laid.2
The infant Mary, his only surviving legitimate child, had become Queen of Scots at six days old. She was Scotland’s first queen regnant and the first in the British Isles; it would be more than ten years before another Mary, Henry VIII’s elder daughter, became the first queen of England. Though looking back we may see the sixteenth century as an age of women rulers, contemporaries were not comfortable with the concept, which seemed to them unnatural. In such a patriarchal society, women were meant to bear children, not to rule. Mary’s inheritance was thus made doubly difficult, by virtue of her gender and her age. It is true that the Stewarts claimed descent from Robert the Bruce through his daughter, Marjorie, the wife of Walter Stewart, the hereditary Lord High Steward of Scotland (hence the surname), but the only other female who had been viewed as having the legitimate title of Queen of Scots was the ill-fated Maid of Norway, Margaret, granddaughter of Alexander III. In the late thirteenth century, this seven-year-old had been destined as a bride for the future Edward II of England, and might have united the two crowns but for the fact that she died at the age of seven on the Isles of Orkney, after a stormy journey from her Norwegian home. It was not a happy precedent and the prospect of another interminable minority, this time with the unexplored difficulties of raising and training a girl as sovereign, seemed daunting.
The baby queen was, however, immediately accepted as James V’s heir and the rightful monarch. There was no question of rejecting her, despite the fact that she had several illegitimate half-brothers of an age to rule. The principle of legitimacy was the bedrock of monarchical government in Britain and Henry VIII had changed the course of history in pursuing it. Nor would the Scots abandon it now, however capable James V’s bastards might be. But several men and one remarkable woman were to engage in a prolonged struggle for the right to rule in the name of Mary Queen of Scots from the moment of her birth. This, like the minority of Mary’s father, is a complex period, though somewhat easier to unravel. At its centre is the intriguing figure of the queen dowager, Mary of Guise, who would eventually make a fateful decision on her daughter’s behalf after five years of warfare and strife. Her time as queen consort of Scotland had given the widowed queen insights into the functioning of Scottish politics and some understanding of the difficulties that would lie ahead if she were to make a bid for power. Unlike Margaret Tudor, she had not been nominated as regent, was still recovering from childbirth when her husband died, and so had no clear role. She knew that if she was to protect her daughter effectively, she would have to bide her time. And it was the fierce determination to uphold little Mary’s rights to the Scottish Crown and safeguard her future that underpinned everything that Mary of Guise now did. Not of royal blood herself, she was, nevertheless, the daughter of one of the most ambitious families of the sixteenth century and a true dynast. Remaining at Linlithgow with her daughter during the first months of 1543, she watched and waited, using her intelligence, good looks and marriageable status to brilliant effect as the Scottish lords quarrelled and the English king tried to lay down the law to them. In particular, she sought to charm and use for her own ends the gullible Sadler, whose support she felt necessary in achieving one of her major short-term goals:
the removal of her daughter from Linlithgow to the much more defensible castle at Stirling. Mary of Guise did not entirely trust the Scots and was already well aware of the ill feeling between Arran and the Lennox Stewarts. But she feared the English and their intentions even more. So she embarked on a clever course of action. She would undermine the newly appointed regent, who appeared to her to be a willing tool of Henry VIII, by casting doubts on his motivation and the true extent of his support for an English alliance. Sadler, allowed to see the infant Mary in the flesh and admire her for the bonny child she was, fell for Mary of Guise’s wiles.
The situation required all of the queen dowager’s talent for pretty dissembling. The new governor of Scotland, and officially tutor to her daughter, was James Hamilton, second earl of Arran, a great-grandson of James II, whose authority to rule Scotland during the minority was first declared just over a week after the death of James V and recognized by parliament in March 1543. Arran was also declared second person of the realm and was therefore likely to be Mary Queen of Scots’ heir presumptive for a very long time. Given the high infant mortality rate in the mid-sixteenth century, it was not unrealistic for the twenty-four-year-old earl to take his closeness to the Scottish throne very seriously, even though there were questions about the legality of his father’s second marriage, of which he was the product. Needless to say, this sense of entitlement, allied to doubts about his legitimacy, did not endear him to many of the other Scottish nobles and the existing blood feud between the Hamiltons and their Lennox Stewart rivals, simmering angrily below the surface of Scottish politics, was given added spice. Matthew Stewart, fourth earl of Lennox, then a liegeman in the service of Francis I in France, was so incensed by the rise to power of the earl of Arran that he persuaded the French king to let him return to Scotland as Francis’s representative in April 1543, with momentous consequences for both Scotland and England.
