Tudors Versus Stewarts

by Linda Porter

  Yet even before Lennox set foot again on Scottish soil, Arran had run into difficulties. His first quarrel was with the devious, ambitious cardinal David Beaton, who announced himself to be the possessor of a last will and testament that James V had signed on his deathbed. This, it was claimed, had nominated a regency council, to consist of the leading earls, Moray, Argyll, Arran and Huntly, joined by Beaton. One report even had the cardinal as ‘governor of the princess and chief ruler of the council’, but this may just have been the assiduous George Douglas wanting to stir things up from England.3 Arran, however, was not inclined to share the power he believed to be rightfully his. He accused Beaton of lying, saying that he had caused James V to put his signature to a blank sheet of paper when the king was so ill that he did not know what he was doing. Whatever the truth – and it is possible that David Beaton did have some private communication with the dying monarch, though whether this amounted to coherent instructions is another matter – Arran was not going to back down. At the end of December he threatened to draw his sword on the cardinal in an angry meeting, calling him, with Shakespearian drama, a ‘false churl’. The two men had to be physically separated. But by 10 January, Arran had overcome his dislike of the cardinal (his mother’s cousin, and a man nearly a quarter of a century older than he) enough to grant him the office of chancellor.

  Arran’s motives for this change of heart could have been purely pragmatic but they may also indicate that the cardinal’s assertion of Arran’s exclusion from the regency council was correct and that he did have some form of documentation to prove it.4 James V, even in the extremity of his illness, might well have had reservations about someone who had so close a claim to the throne being put in charge of his heir. Beaton’s triumph was, though, to prove short-lived. Within days of his appointment, Arran welcomed the Douglas brothers back from their long exile. The ‘assured lords’, on parole to Henry VIII, soon followed them. The political and religious landscape was changing fast again in Scotland and the pro-French Beaton could not, at that point, survive. He was arrested in council at the end of January and deprived of the chancellorship he had held for little more than two weeks, accused of plotting to increase French influence in Scotland. Imprisoned in the grim fortress of Blackness Castle on the Firth of Forth, Beaton’s ascendancy looked as if it was over. Arran had apparently rid himself of a powerful enemy and forged an unlikely alliance between the Hamiltons and the Douglases that would underpin his regency and deliver to Henry VIII everything he wanted. But in the swirling of events of the year 1543 nothing could be certain. Jacques de la Brosse, newly arrived as French ambassador, had the sense of a country on the brink of violence: ‘for all the friends of one faction mistrust all those of the other faction. So much so that not merely is the nobility in arms, but churchmen, friars and the country people only travel through the countryside in large companies all armed with pikes, swords and bucklers and a half pike in their hands, which in this country is called a lance.’5 The impression of Scotland as being close to civil unrest was one that the new governor, anxious to stamp his authority on government and justice, would have found very troubling.

  Until recently, historians have tended to be critical of Arran. The standard depiction is of a vacillating, vain and greedy man, out of his depth in European politics, a great talker but to little purpose, lacking any qualities of real leadership or longer-term vision. But recent writing and a dissertation on the office of regency in sixteenth-century Scotland have presented a more complex and positive picture of the earl and particularly of two key areas for which he has long been criticized: his apparently convenient conversion to religious change in 1543 and his financial record.6

  Arran’s sudden announcement that he had adopted reforming religious ideas caused something of a sensation and was certainly music to the ears of Henry VIII. The governor wasted little time in apprising the English of his intentions, writing to Lord Lisle as early as 18 January 1543: ‘we minded, with the grace and help of God, to put some reformation in the state of the kirk in this realm to the high honour of God, setting forth of his true words, and profit to the common weal.’ Peace between England and Scotland, was, as Arran pointed out, a prerequisite of success in this lofty aim: ‘and if your sovereign and master be of mind that God’s word grow and prosper in this realm, as we trust he is, we doubt not that his majesty will put away the cause and occasion that is obstacle or impediment thereto.’7 And this was only the beginning. Two lapsed friars, men admired by John Knox, became his court chaplains and by March 1543 he was telling Sir Ralph Sadler that he had regarded the pope as no more than ‘a very evil bishop’ for the past five years.8 Sadler noted, however, that while Arran might be content for Scotland to break with Rome, the governor did not have sufficient support among his ministers to take such a momentous step. Nevertheless, Arran was able to introduce in his first parliament permission for the Bible to be read in the vernacular, though discussion of it in Scots was not allowed, and the heresy laws, at first relaxed somewhat, were later actually strengthened.9

  Yet Arran’s personal beliefs and the form of worship he followed showed that he had by no means abandoned Catholicism, certainly not as far as ritual was concerned. He continued to worship as a Catholic during his governorship, spending considerable sums on his private chapel at Hamilton.10 Nor, in 1543, did he keep his new chaplains around him for long. This may at first seem like the prevarication of a duplicitous man, but it also demonstrates the fluidity of belief at the time and the disservice done to history by the glib labelling of people as ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’. Henry VIII had imposed the Reformation on England but he would not have described himself as a Protestant and neither would the vast majority of his subjects during his reign. It is easy to label the earl of Arran as a man who latched on to new religious ideas for purely political reasons, but even this was not necessarily an unreasonable thing to do given the state of Scotland in early 1543. The governor had identified the need for peace with England as an absolute priority, both for his own survival and the future of the baby whose throne he was sworn to protect. The English king’s response to Arran’s ‘conversion’ was to ply him with religious books and encourage him to suppress the Scottish monasteries. Arran continued to pull the wool over Sadler’s eyes but, by early May, he was already hedging his bets by asking for papal protection and aid against England. At the same time, his carefully briefed negotiators were in London hammering out the details of the proposed marriage between the infant Queen Mary and Prince Edward Tudor.

  * * *

  THE TREATY OF GREENWICH, concluded on 1 July 1543, appeared a triumph for English hopes, promising a future union of the two crowns. Alas, for Henry VIII and for peace in the British Isles, what seemed like a great victory – an imperialist expansion, even, of English power – proved to be a chimera. Henry and Arran had, not surprisingly, very different aims. The Scot realized that he needed to be seen to support the English marriage but he was determined to safeguard Scottish sovereignty and independence while maintaining his own position. The prospect of marrying his own son to Anne Boleyn’s daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, was tempting but at the back of his mind was the belief that a match between his heir and the Queen of Scots would be even better. Henry, on the other hand, wanted everything – the title of governor for himself and custody in England of Mary herself. He got neither. Arran had sent commissioners to negotiate who he knew would be acceptable to the king of England, headed by earl of Glencairn (one of the leading Solway Moss prisoners), Sir George Douglas and Henry Balnaves, a man of strong Protestant convictions. But Anglophile as these diplomats may broadly have been, they would not agree to all of Henry’s demands. Their most significant success was in ensuring that Mary stayed in Scotland until she was ten years old, though the English king reserved the right to send ‘a nobleman or gentleman, with his wife or other lady or ladies and their attendants, not exceeding twenty in all, to reside with her.’11 And Arran remained as governor of Scotland, his
title uncontested for the present. Eleven days later, Henry VIII married Katherine Parr and left the threat of plague in London’s summer to spend a prolonged honeymoon with his new bride in the healthier countryside of the south of England. He could be well satisfied with life and turned his attention once again to the more exciting prospect of war with France.

  In Scotland, however, all was not so rosy as the summer progressed. Many Scottish nobles were profoundly suspicious of the English and unhappy at the idea of their little queen’s marriage effectively making them a satellite of an ancient and hated enemy. For such men, the natural ally was France and the course of action enshrined in the Treaty of Greenwich, which Scotland had yet to ratify, seemed perverse. They balked at the idea of subjugation to Henry VIII. The king of England’s old rival, Francis I, who had been slow to react to the potential loss of French influence in Scotland, now woke up to the danger after representations by Antoinette de Bourbon, mother of Mary of Guise. He realized that Cardinal Beaton and the pro-French party needed support. As the momentum of opposition to the English match grew, Arran saw that he was running out of time. He faced difficulties at home on several fronts and when Beaton, released from house arrest back in the spring, felt strong enough, he moved to challenge the governor directly. In late July 1543, supported by four earls, eight lords and several notable churchmen, Beaton threatened Arran with military force at Linlithgow. Arran responded by calling up his artillery and his supporters, and was still able to get the Greenwich Treaty ratified the next month at Holyrood, but he knew that the momentum was shifting and that his religious reforms were unacceptable to most Scots.

  In early September, at a meeting with Beaton in Stirling, Arran made the second remarkable volte-face of what was, for him, an extremely trying year. At the Franciscan convent in Scotland’s former capital, he announced his return to Catholicism. It seems highly likely that, in his heart, he had never really left it. But now he needed Beaton more than Henry VIII. Scotland was unquiet, the growing revival of French influence threatened Arran’s position and he had always to consider the danger posed to him, not just by the cardinal, but by the earl of Lennox and the queen dowager. For Mary of Guise, apparently a powerless widow at the beginning of the year, had shown cunning, resolve and grit, fooling Sadler, who was ever a poor judge of Scottish affairs, into thinking that she supported the English marriage of her daughter, and dangling the earl of Lennox on a string while she did nothing to discourage his hopes of making her his own bride. She was a much more formidable opponent than anyone had guessed. In late July, supported by the forces of the lovestruck earl of Lennox, Mary Queen of Scots and her mother finally moved from Linlithgow Palace to Stirling Castle, where they would remain in safety for four years. And on 9 September, the thirtieth anniversary of the battle of Flodden and one of the most emotive days in the Scottish calendar, Mary of Guise achieved her own personal triumph when she saw her daughter crowned as Queen of Scots, at the age of nine months. The future did not yet belong to James V’s canny widow, but she could no longer be ignored.

  Henry VIII’s Scottish plans were beginning to unravel and he did not help matters by failing to ratify the Treaty of Greenwich himself. By October he seemed to sense that his grand plan was going awry, accusing Arran of ‘forgetting your duty to that realm [Scotland], your honour and estimation to the world and your private and secret promises unto us.’ But Arran had made his decision and was not to be swayed by bullying. He presented himself as a true Scot, working for the interests of his county and his queen, and emphasized that he would govern ‘to the honour of this realm against all them that would threaten the same’.12 Henry VIII’s bombastic approach did him no favours and his capacity for railing against the duplicity of the Scots made it hard for his supporters north of the border to maintain the upper hand. In the event, it was the Scottish parliament, meeting shortly before Christmas 1543, that threw the treaty back in his face. The rejection of a Tudor marriage for their queen and the renewal of the French alliance were a triumph for Cardinal Beaton and, indirectly, for Mary of Guise.

  It has been said that by the end of the momentous year of 1543 little had changed in Scotland and perhaps, to contemporaries, that would have been their perception. Yet though it was to be another sixteen years before the full impact of the Reformation suddenly burst on the country, there had been a brief interlude when Arran’s ‘godly fit’, as his period of flirtation with religious reform was known, gave hope to burgeoning Protestantism in Scotland and hardened the attitudes of those evangelicals who passionately believed in change. Many of these, unsurprisingly, were at least partially Anglophile in outlook because their ideas were supported by their southern neighbour. Scotland may have seemed slow to adopt religious change but events of the first year of Mary Queen of Scots’ reign sowed the seeds of a slow-burning revolution in belief that would split the nobility and have immense repercussions for Mary as an adult ruler. But as 1544 dawned, Scotland faced a more immediate threat. The king of England, humiliated by his rejection, attempted to impose his will on Scotland by force. So followed the first of what have been called the ‘rough wooings’ of the young Queen of Scots.

  * * *

  AT FIRST it might seem odd that Henry VIII, while preparing for war with France, should spend more money on a campaign against the Scots. Yet while desire for vengeance may have played a considerable part in his thinking, there were other motives. The Borders needed to be secured at times of European war, to avoid the kind of excursion into England that had proved fatal to Mary’s grandfather, James IV. And while he had clearly lost the support of a number of key Scottish noblemen, whose patriotism proved hard to shake, promises of money and support for religious reform might yet be powerful inducements. Henry liked stirring up trouble in Scotland – it was really the only constant in his policy – and he had never abandoned his claim to overlordship. Finally, he wanted the Scots to understand that he was utterly serious in his intentions and that he intended death and destruction.

  In April 1544, at the start of the campaigning season, the Privy Council in London issued a thunderous set of instructions which were almost biblical in their apocalyptic vision of Henry’s wrathful intent:

  Put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God lightened upon [them] for their falsehood and disloyalty … and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as ye may conveniently, do your best to beat the castle, sack Holyrood House and sack Leith and burn and subvert it and all the rest, putting man, woman and child to fire and sword, without exception where any resistance shall be made against you and this done pass over to the Fifeland and extend like extremities and destruction to all towns and villages whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not forgetting among all the rest so to spoil and turn upside down the Cardinal’s [Beaton’s] town of St Andrews, as the upper stone may be the nether, and not one stick stand by another, sparing no creature alive within the same.13

  This diatribe may have been as much for internal English consumption as it was a realistic threat to the Scots. Henry simply did not have a large enough force to realize his bloodthirsty aims, a fact somewhat overlooked by generations of indignant Scottish historians. Nevertheless, a substantial English fleet sailed into Leith Harbour, captured two Scottish warships and disgorged ten thousand men. The English under Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, brother to Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane, inflicted considerable damage on the Scottish capital, deserted in its hour of need by both Arran and Beaton. But Hertford’s forces could not take Edinburgh Castle and soon retired to pass back into England and thence to France, where their presence was more urgently required.

  The following autumn Hertford was back in the Borders, hoping not just to undertake another round of crop-burning and local devastation but to establish a permanent garrison at Kelso. Military theory might have backed his intentions, but some members of the
Privy Council, notably the duke of Norfolk, knew the area well and realized it was inappropriate. Hertford’s second incursion was really nothing more than a major border raid and Henry VIII’s aims for Mary Queen of Scots remained unfulfilled. Further warfare continued in the Borders for several years and the English tried, also, to stir up trouble in the Highlands and Islands, areas of Scotland still barely under control from Edinburgh. But in respect of the fates of two key figures in Scottish politics, Henry did have success. The first of these men was Matthew Stewart, earl of Lennox, a neglected figure in British history but a man whose ambition led him, as a welcome and high-profile prize, to change sides and pledge himself to Henry VIII.

  Matthew Stewart was born in Dumbarton Castle, on the south-west coast of Scotland, in September 1516. As the great-grandson of James II, he had a legitimate claim to the Scottish throne, made stronger by the little queen’s vulnerability and doubts about his cousin, Arran’s, legitimacy. For, unlike the Hamiltons, there was no taint on the Lennox Stewarts and they had, indeed, another particular advantage – a long-standing connection with the French court through the d’Aubigny branch of their family, going back to the previous century when a significant number of prominent Scots had gone to seek their fortune in France. Matthew’s great-uncle, Robert Stewart, had been captain of the Scots Guard to Louis XII and fought in Italy. He was a highly regarded soldier and a great landowner in France, marrying a French heiress and spending freely on La Verrerie, the castle that he had inherited in the Loire, as well as constructing his own Château d’Aubigny. To Matthew Stewart and his younger brother, John, Robert had been a conscientious guardian and protector after the murder of their father by Sir James Hamilton of Finnart in 1526. But it was not until 1532 that Matthew Stewart joined him in France, a boy of sixteen with a famous surname but no clear indication of what his future might hold. The young earl accompanied Francis I on the military expedition to Provence that had initially delayed his own king, James V, from pursuing the match with Princess Madeleine, and was commended for his zeal, though his later command of the French king’s lances was to prove less successful. Francis I was sufficiently happy with the performance of this young Scottish nobleman to grant him French citizenship and Matthew seems to have thrived in the life of an adopted French grandee. It was, after all, in his blood. The sudden death of James V, however, transformed his life. The French court undoubtedly had its attractions but an altogether greater prospect beckoned at home in Scotland.