Margaret Douglas

by Mary McGrigor

  Princess Mary, renowned both for her sweet face and equally lovable temper – she had nursed the French king devotedly during their brief marriage – greatly loved children. She is known to have been particularly fond of her little niece Margaret, to whom later she was to be almost a second mother. Now, although the Duchess of Suffolk, she was still known as the French Queen.

  Evidence of the presence of King Henry’s wife and his two sisters being together at Greenwich in May 1516 is found in the illustration on the front page of one of his music books, kept in the Harleian Collection. Below the arms of England are shown the badges of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, the rose and the pomegranate, while opposite them are the daisy, called a marguerite, and a marigold denoting Mary.

  Henry himself played with the children, tossing his little ‘Marget’ in the air. Otherwise he was occupied in arranging entertainments including a tournament in his sister Margaret’s honour, in which he played a leading part, knocking over a burly knight called Sir William Kingston together with his horse!

  Queen Margaret, meanwhile, although estranged from him, was still corresponding with her husband, Angus, urging him to do everything possible to help the English army to cause destruction on the Scottish Borders. Lord Dacre asked Cardinal Wolsey to get what information he could from her to aid him in a scheme to overthrow the regent, while she is claimed to have given secret information about Scotland to the English Council. Albany himself, having threatened to visit Henry’s court, thought better of it. However, he did return the large collection of Margaret’s jewels and court dresses (which had been taken from Tantallon Castle) with the Master of Graystock College, whom Dacre allowed to cross the Border.

  During the season of Advent, Queen Margaret was moved to Scotland Yard – so called because kings of Scotland had once stayed there – within a court below Charing Cross. Later she went to Windsor Castle, before returning to Baynard’s Castle, now stacked with presents from Henry (jewels, plate, tapestry and horses) which had to be taken back to Scotland.

  Soon afterwards her brother urged her return. It was possible he was exasperated by her constant demands for money, yet Henry VIII was also famously devoid of scruples in using members of his family for political reasons. Word had reached England that the Regent Albany, due to his wife’s illness, was about to return to France; Henry realised an opportunity to use Margaret as a diplomat – the widow of national hero James IV and revered for his sake if not her own – to effect a unity with England and end the ruination of continued war.

  In the spring of 1517 she began her journey northwards, stopping for a time in York. Then she moved on to stay once again with Lord Dacre at Morpeth. Here she waited until news came that the Duke of Albany, hastening to return to France where his wife was dying, had sailed on 7 June. Travelling farther north to the border, the queen was met at Berwick by her husband, the Earl of Angus. The earl escorted her and their little daughter, now eighteen months old, to the palace of Holyrood below Edinburgh Castle, no longer in hostile hands.

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  WILD AS A TANTALLON HAWK

  Reaching Edinburgh, Queen Margaret immediately demanded to see her son James V, now a boy of nearly six. But he was rushed off to Craigmillar Castle at once on the excuse that Margaret or one of her attendants might be carrying the dreaded plague, or sweating sickness, which was rampant in England. At Craigmillar she was eventually allowed to see him but only for short amounts of time.

  Writing to her brother King Henry, she reported her son to be in good health while taking the opportunity to suggest to him that he should seize the goods of merchants trading by ship with England to reimburse the income of her estates, which she claimed she had not received. It would seem that in her first infatuation she had made over the life-interest of the royal estates in Ettrick – part of her settlement at the time of her marriage to King James – to Angus.

  Now, however, they were at loggerheads: their furious quarrels culminating in abduction when Angus seized their small daughter who was then only 3 years old. He took her to his castle at Tantallon, that massive rose-coloured fortress towering above the estuary of the Firth of Forth, defiant of bombardment, a landmark from afar against the sky.

  For little Margaret, Tantallon was a haven. In his castle, mainly used as a barracks, her father found Douglas ladies to look after her. Amongst them were the wives of his brother George and his cousin Archibald. These chatelaines took care of the little girl, robbed of the mother who, unbeknown to her at the time, she would never see again.

  It was from these Douglas women, proud as they were of their heritage, that she heard the story of the castle and the men who had made it one of the greatest bastions of the time.

  William, the 1st Earl of Douglas, had been the founder in about 1350 almost 120 years before. He had chosen an almost impenetrable site above cliffs that only a madman would attempt to climb. Making certain of its safety, he had surrounded his castle with a massive curtain wall, 50ft high. Towers at each end of the rectangle were pierced with arrow slits through which archers could train their arrows on approaching foes from all directions. Finally, for extra security, a deep ditch had been dug to surround the walls.

  William had taken no chances, carefully weighing up every eventuality that might possibly occur. Foremost, and most obvious, had been that of prolonged siege. Before even finding an architect, he had summoned a water diviner who, with a forked twig of hazel, had pinpointed the existence of a spring. Once water had been located and reached by drilling through the rock, a well in the courtyard had been surrounded by a stone wall.

  It was Earl William who, having ambushed and killed his godfather, also named William Douglas, had tyrannised the Borders. The 3rd Earl, known for his ferocity as Archibald the Grim, had been followed by the heroic ‘Black Douglas’, famously hacked to pieces by the Saracens while carrying the heart of Bruce on a crusade to Spain.

  Then had come the dreadful story of the ‘Black Dinner’. The young King James II, only 10 years old at the time, had been greatly excited when the 14-year-old William Douglas and his brother David – to him men of the world – had come to dine at Edinburgh Castle. The little king, sitting at the head of the table spanning the length of the great hall, had grown sleepy, dazed by the effects of red wine, the heat from the fire and the clamour of voices. He had not understood the significance when, just as the dinner was ending, the head of a black bull, a portent of death, was carried in by the Chancellor, Sir William Crichton, and laid before the Douglas boys. He had cried out terrified as the brothers were hauled from the room. His pleas to spare them had gone unheeded: after being given a mock trial, they were executed on the castle hill.

  Their great uncle, avaricious for their land and titles, had been their killer. Known as James the Gross for his bloated size, he was the 7th Earl. Meanwhile James II, dubbed ‘Fiery Face’ for a birthmark that matched his temper, had nursed his hatred of the Douglasses, whose power threatened his own. James the Gross had been succeeded by his son William on whom the king had wrought revenge. Summoned to Stirling under a safe conduct, William had been warmly received. A banquet had followed at which both had heavily imbibed. Then, drawing him into an alcove, James had asked William to forgo his alliance with the Earls of Crawford and Ross. William, haughty in his cups, had refused and James, uncontrolled in fury, had stabbed him above his steel corselet with a dagger in the throat. He had not actually killed him, but the Master of Gray, one of his bodyguards, had the murder of a nephew to avenge and had finished him off with an axe.

  The murdered William’s brother James, the 9th Earl, had been exiled and forfeited after King James’ cannons had destroyed his castle’s walls. The last of the Black Douglass earls, his lands and titles had then devolved upon George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus.

  It was George’s son, Archibald, born in Tantallon in 1449, who was notorious for hanging James III’s favourites over the Bridge of Lauder and was famously known thereafter as ‘Bell the Cat’.
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  Archibald’s son George (Margaret’s grandfather) had been killed in the melee at the Battle of Flodden, thus Margaret’s father, the red-haired Archibald, had become the 6th Earl as a very young man.

  During the daytime, the castle echoed with noise as the men of the garrison and the servants tramped up and down the stone stairs. The family, as was then normal, dined in the great hall at about midday, but when Angus himself was absent, his little daughter, with her aunts in attendance, most likely kept to their apartments in the first floor of the main tower.

  At night the sounds abated as the occupants settled down to sleep, the family in the upstairs bedrooms, the rest of the household on the floor by the fire of the great hall and elsewhere throughout the house. Upstairs, in the quiet of the night, the little girl, lying in one of the few beds, snuggled under a down filled quilt and listened to the cries of sea birds above waves crashing on the rocks.

  But sometimes there were other sounds frightening and dreadful to hear. Deep in the foundations of the castle, buried into the cliff, prisoners in the dungeon groaned and screamed for help. Some of them, so the legend runs, were cast adrift on rafts and left to the mercy of the tides, which took a few to the Bass, where sometimes monks dragged them on to land. Others were simply carried to their deaths at sea.

  Standing in the courtyard today it is hard to imagine what life in Tantallon Castle must have been like nearly 500 years ago for a little girl of 3.

  It would be nice to think of her playing, like so many other children then and now, on the sands near the rock formation called St Baldred’s Boat. However, it is more probable that because of the threat of abduction by the Regent Albany’s and her mother’s men, she was kept within the safety of the castle; she was probably allowed, in fine weather, to play in the courtyard or under surveillance close by.

  In the spring and summer months, there was always the diversion of the colony of gannets, diving into the sea like arrows from their sanctuary on the Bass Rock. Later, when the chicks were hatched, men climbed down the rock, held by ropes from above, to collect the fledglings, which when smoked were a much-prized delicacy to eat.

  Before John Duke of Albany left Scotland in May 1517, a commission of regency had been given to a confederacy consisting of the Archbishops of Glasgow and St Andrews; the earls of Angus, Huntly, Arran and Argyll; and Seigneur Antoine d’Arces, de la Bastie, Albany’s Scottish Agent. There were French garrisons in the castles of Dunbar, Dumbarton and Inchgarvie, the island in the Forth from where the Queen’s Ferry was guarded. Hardly had Albany set sail before de la Bastie was murdered in a fracas with the Homes. Arran, a son of James III’s sister Mary who had married Lord Hamilton, a first cousin of the regent, then took over as head of the council, supported by Argyll, Huntly and James Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow. However, this alliance was overruled by Angus, who, seeing the chance to win control, joined forces with the Homes and other dissident Borderers. With them, apparently to the joy of the populace, he drove the Hamiltons out of Edinburgh.

  So complete was his predominance that in March 1520 Arran openly declared that ‘he sould nocht cum within the toun quhill my Lord Chancelor [Beaton] maid ane finall concord betuix him and the nychbouris thairof.’1

  This was the incident known thereafter as ‘Cleanse the Causeway’. So fraught was the situation that in the following October it was decreed that the Provost of Edinburgh must be neither a Douglas nor a Hamilton and should always be accompanied by four stout halberdiers. Further to this it was suggested that to heal the rift between the families Angus’ little daughter Margaret should marry Arran’s son.

  Margaret, probably not even told of this marriage brokerage, was still at Tantallon when on 19 November 1521 Albany returned from France. Coming ashore in the Gareloch, he rode to Linlithgow where – to what must have been to his and most people’s great surprise – he was warmly welcomed by Queen Margaret. Brazenly, they rode together at the head of a procession from Linlithgow to Edinburgh, displaying rather more than friendship, or so King Henry was told.

  Soon tongues were wagging as they began an adulterous affair; this was all the more scandalous because while the queen was known to be estranged from her husband, Albany was still married to his ailing wife, his first cousin Anne de la Tour d’Auvergne, daughter of his mother’s brother, who had given her his sister’s name.

  Queen Margaret’s brother, King Henry, to whom while she was at his court in England she had constantly misnamed the regent, now sent an envoy to harangue her on the evils of divorce. His hypocrisy is almost unbelievable seen in the light of what was to come.

  But Henry, as ever, had a motive, in this case his wish to keep Angus in Scotland as the leader of the so-called ‘English Party’, which he had by then become. Henry’s wife, Catherine of Aragon, more sympathetic to her sister-in-law, sent priest Father Bonaventura to advise Queen Margaret to endure her misfortunes as best she could.

  Lord Dacre, however, knew her only too well; in writing to Cardinal Wolsey, he called Margaret’s conduct scandalous. In a further letter to Queen Margaret herself, he accused her of over familiararity with Sir James Hamilton, an illegitimate son of Arran and a notorious womaniser with whom she had ridden alone, at dead of night, from Edinburgh to her palace of Linlithgow.

  Albany arrived bringing not only a force of soldiers but also a large sum of money from France, sent by King Francis I, to induce the Scottish Council to support the Aulde Alliance. Angus, who had been in Edinburgh, opposed his wife’s determination to divorce him and took refuge in Tantallon or, it is said, in a church somewhere on the Borders.

  From whichever place he was in hiding, he sent his uncle Gavin Douglas, the Bishop of Dunkeld, to King Henry to suggest his willingness to head an alliance against Queen Margaret and the regent if support from England could be gained. Gavin Douglas, ageing and in poor health, took ten days to reach the English Court. Henry, however, wasted no time in writing to the Scottish Council to denounce the divorce of his sister and, with the threat of renewed war, demand the dismissal of Albany.

  Gavin Douglas died shortly afterwards, his illness aggravated by the stress of travelling in mid-winter. Angus, bereft of his support, supposedly tried to become reconciled to his wife; on the pretext that she was showing him forgiveness, she prevailed upon Albany to send him to France as an ambassador, on the promise that his now known treachery would be forgiven.

  The story that Angus and his brother George, unconscious after consuming drugged wine, were put aboard a ship for France bears no credence. However, both are known to have been in or around the French Court for a period of about three years. Angus apparently took his daughter Margaret with him. Nothing is heard of her in Scotland during that time. That she went to France seems likely in view of the fact that she was later known to speak fluent French. She was certainly not with her mother, as is proved by a letter the queen wrote from Edinburgh on 25 November 1524 in which, amongst many complaints against her husband, she adds that ‘he would not suffer our own daughter to remain with us for our comfort’.2

  It was shortly after this that the Regent Albany, having quarrelled with Queen Margaret again, finally returned to France. On news of his departure, Angus came back to Scotland with his daughter. This is proved by a letter from Catherine of Aragon to her mother begging that she would not disparage ‘the fair daughter she had by my Lord Anguish [sic]’, whose legitimacy was under question.3 Queen Margaret responded, not to Catherine but to Margaret’s godfather Wolsey, writing that because she had made a legal marriage to Angus, their daughter could not be called illegitimate. The edict was endorsed by Archbishop Beaton in a clause of Queen Margaret’s divorce, finally granted in 1528.

  By its terms Angus retained the custody of his daughter, by then 13 years old. Despite having contributed nothing towards the costs of her upbringing, her mother nonetheless promised her as a bride to the Earl of Moray as a means of achieving his allegiance.

  On his return from France in 1524, Angus is kno
wn to have stayed first at his castle of Boncle, from where he could escape to England across the border. From there he wrote to Queen Margaret, still technically his wife, to try to make reconciliation. This was a mere formality: word had reached him that, despite her looks being ruined by smallpox, Queen Margaret had found a new lover in the form of Harry Stewart, a brother of Lord Avondale and one of her own guard. On his letter being returned unopened, as he had expected, he took the action he had already planned.

  Margaret now lived largely at Tantallon Castle. Her father, chief of the Red Douglasses, saw to it that she was treated as a princess, which, as the daughter of the Queen of Scotland, she was entitled to be. Her biographer Agnes Strickland, on the evidence of a letter from Lord Eure to Cardinal Wolsey, states that it was at this time that Margaret, aware of her own importance, developed the ‘imperious manner’ she afterwards maintained throughout her life.

  Certainly, from all that is known of her, it appears that Margaret inherited her father’s stature rather than her mother’s, who was small and, in later years, stout. Slim and with striking colouring, she was taller than most women of her time.