Margaret Douglas

by Mary McGrigor

  Most dreadful of all was the treatment of old Lady Salisbury, once venerated by Henry to the point where he had made her both godmother and guardian of his daughter Mary. Held under house arrest for a year, she was then, at the age of 70, sent to the Tower, where, not allowed even warm clothes and bedding, she suffered misery from the cold.

  Margaret, in this instance, was thankfully spared the dreaded punishment of prison walls. Henry was fond of his pretty niece who, so Cromwell had told him, was now entirely subdued to his will. But she was a Catholic, as obdurate in her religion as his daughter Mary. As such she was a danger to the succession should anything happen to his one, rather delicate son.

  Over the years his spies had reported to him that some people in Scotland maintained that the marriage of Margaret’s parents had been illegal at the time of her birth. Initially Henry had taken these rumours to be inventions of enemies, particularly those of Margaret’s father, the Earl of Angus, long denounced as a traitor in Scotland for accepting Henry’s pension in return for fighting for his cause. However, were her parent’s marriage proved to be unlawful, Margaret, as illegitimate, could no longer be a claimant to the throne.

  The man sent as Henry’s ambassador specifically to investigate the legality of his sister’s marriage to the Earl of Angus was none other than Princess Mary’s chamberlain, William Howard, an elder half-brother of Thomas, the lover, if not secret husband of Queen Margaret’s daughter and namesake, the niece who the king now wanted to disown.

  William returned from Scotland with the news that Henry wanted to hear. Some of those questioned had assured him that the marriage was questionably valid. Angus had previously been betrothed to Janet Stewart, daughter of Lord Maxwell of Traquair, the long-time mistress to whom during his marriage to Queen Margaret he had frequently returned. The incident of how he had deserted his wife when she had fled to England with her baby daughter was clearly remembered. Where else had Angus gone but back to his mistress?

  All this gave Henry the evidence that he needed to exclude Margaret in the line of inheritance, making it certain that on his death a Protestant should inherit his crown.

  Margaret is known to have lived with Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth, now 4 years old, either at Hunsdon or Beaulieu for a period of some months. She was certainly at Beaulieu in June 1538 when she gave Princess Mary 20s, either as a present or repayment for a debt, both being gamblers at cards.

  At the following Christmas, spent that year at Westminster Palace, Margaret won a frontlet, or ornamental border to a headdress, from Mary, which had cost her 20s, as is proved by the expenses of her Privy Purse. From the same evidence, it emerges that Mary gave a mark to Margaret’s chaplain, a man named Charles, and the same to her grooms at New Year.

  It was Princess Mary who, on the orders of her father, had to break it to Margaret that she had now been declared illegitimate. Perhaps the depth of their friendship softened the blow; whatever Margaret’s reaction to her uncle’s treatment, it was soon to be made clear to her that it was only because of her religion that her status had been demeaned. It was not for any other cause.

  This was emphasised by Henry’s insistence on her appointment as first lady to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

  12

  THE FLEMISH WIFE

  Deputising for Princess Mary, who was ill once again, Margaret was sent to meet the king’s bride. Together with her other cousin Frances, the Marchioness of Dorset, she rode at the head of a procession of eighty-five court ladies to receive the German princess. The rendezvous was the mound near the cross at Blackheath, near to what was then the high road, where, on the king’s orders, were erected tents of gold cloth.

  All of the welcoming party waited in excitement to see the beauty whose portrait, painted by Holbein, had so greatly entranced the king. But as the horses of her carriage were reined in so that Anne of Cleves could step down, there were muffled gasps of disappointment. This apparently middle-aged lady (she was actually only 24), despite being slim and fairly tall, had dark hair and a swarthy skin. Moreover, instead of smiling, she looked not only apprehensive but severe. Nonetheless, nodding her head to acknowledge their greeting, unsure of how to reply in the language she was trying so assiduously to learn, she kissed both Margaret and Frances, before all the other court ladies were presented to her in turn.

  It was then Margaret’s duty to ride at the head of the procession that followed the king and his bride, whose unattractive appearance had been such a shock to him at first sight, from Blackheath Cross to Greenwich Palace. Here, despite his outspoken misgivings, on 6 January 1540, Henry married Anne of Cleves.

  A month later, on 4 February, the king took his new wife from Greenwich to Westminster to present her to the city as previously he had done with Jane. Barges, magnificently decorated, were rowed in procession up the river. The first held the king, a huge, unmistakeable figure, who none on the banks could fail to recognise if only on account of his size. ‘Bluff King Hal’ to his cheering people, he came with his consort of nobles, picked by right of birth from the highest in the land. Behind followed the queen and her household, with Margaret, also distinguished by her height and the red hair falling on the shoulders of her velvet cloak, taking pride of place. The Londoners, loving such a spectacle, shouted, sang and danced with joy. Cannons roared from the Tower ‘with a sound like thunder’ as the procession passed by. Finally, on reaching Westminster, the queen, followed by her ladies, was armed ashore.1

  Henry’s marriage to Anne had been suggested by Cromwell, who saw it as a diplomatic move to counter the ongoing threat of an invasion by the allied armies of France and the Holy Roman Empire. The danger had seemed more imminent when it was believed that the king and emperor were preparing to sign a treaty with the Schmalkaldic League. This alliance ‘of all Protestant princes and free cities’, comprising seven princes and eleven cities, of which Dusseldorf was the capital, dated from 1530. Then the formidable block of states, bishoprics and duchies, stretching as far north as the Baltic, had been formed with the prime object of curbing the aggrandisement of the Emperor Charles, territorial ruler of the Netherlands.

  Duke John of State of Cleves, which was included in the Protestant League, had already proposed a marriage between his heir, William, and Henry’s daughter Mary, a suggestion repudiated on the grounds of her religion. But Duke John had four daughters and Cromwell, seeing the great advantage to England of forestalling a possible alliance of France and Austria with the Schmalkaldic League, had told Henry that one of them, named Anna, ‘excelleth as far the Duchess [of Saxony, her sister] as the golden sun excelleth the silver moon’.2

  Unbeknown to him, in doing so, he had signed his own death warrant. Repulsed by the physical appearance of Anne of Cleves, Henry was soon to be made aware that, as far as political advancement was concerned, he need never have married her at all.

  In the spring of 1540, the alliance between King Francis and the Emperor Charles broke up in a prelude to ensuing war. Thus Henry had married the wife he disliked for no political gain. Who was to blame but Thomas Cromwell? Henry, who had just created him Earl of Essex, now made Norfolk his instrument in bringing about his end. Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who had made a fortune in money lending before becoming Wolsey’s man, now had few friends left in either the government or the Church. On 10 June, when Norfolk accused him of treachery, the whole assembled council endorsed the charge. Denied a trial, he was executed in the Tower on 28 July.

  Notes

  1 Fraser, Lady A., Six Wives of Henry VIII, pp.313–4

  2 Ibid., p.299

  13

  THE ROSE WITH MANY THORNS

  The king’s brief marriage, never consummated, proved to be little more than a farce. Within weeks he had focussed his attention on one of her young ladies-in-waiting, none other than the niece of his second wife Anne Boleyn, a plump and pretty girl named Catherine Howard, aged only 17. Margaret probably knew of her reputation. Growing up in her grandmother’s househ
old, she had already become compromised, both with the music teacher, a man named Henry Madox, and her grandmother’s secretary, Francis Dereham. Nonetheless, despite her tarnished reputation, her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, had procured her a place at court.

  Innocent as he seems to have been of her character, Henry was soon totally in love with the girl he called ‘his rose without a thorn’. Within months he was giving her presents, mostly length after length of velvet and cloth of gold. Totally besotted, he married her just weeks after the annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves.

  On the same day, 28 July 1540, Thomas Cromwell – Henry’s chief minister for eight years, his strongest advocate for the Reformation of the English Church and the man behind the annulment of his first marriage, so recently created Earl of Essex in reward – was beheaded on the block on Tower Hill.

  Cromwell’s death was a salutary warning of how, under Henry’s despotic power, even the mightiest could fall. No one was more aware of this than Margaret, now high in his favour but always in fear of what might happen should her uncle find fault. Once again made first lady, she was given a suite of rooms in Hampton Court. She is known to have been at Reading Palace, on her way to take up her appointment, on 22 August 1540.

  A list of the allotments of the apartments at Hampton Court shows those of the Lady Margaret to have been at the foot of the stairs leading to the Queen’s Gallery. She must have felt a personal connection with the palace if only because it had been built by her godfather, Cardinal Wolsey, determined to show that the king’s chief minister could live as graciously as any cardinal in Rome. Wolsey had given it to Henry in a last, desperate effort to be restored to favour, when knowing he stood on the cusp of disgrace. Henry, determined to make the palace a showpiece of his power, had set to work to make it large enough to hold most of the near thousand people who at that time attended his court. Having extended the vast kitchens, he had set to work on the Great Hall, with its intricate hammer-beam roof, with such impatience that the masons had been forced to work by candlelight throughout the night. Now, with his masterpiece completed, he dined on a raised dais above the assembled company below.

  Most original of all the king’s innovations was the post-Copernican astronomical clock, which, at the time of Margaret’s arrival, had just been erected on the gatehouse of the second inner court. Considered one of the wonders of the world, it showed not only the time of day but the phases of the moon, the month, the quarter of the year, the date, the sun and star sign; most marvellous of all, the clock showed the high water at London Bridge, where at low tide the surging current made it dangerous to travel up the Thames to London by boat.

  There was much entertainment in the great new palace where the young men could amuse themselves by playing tennis on the newly built courts. Also, its very size, with its many stairs and corridors, was an inducement for illicit meetings, particularly after dark. Soon it was being remarked upon that Queen Katherine, who loved dancing and entertainment, never seemed to go to bed. Later it was to transpire that some of her clandestine meetings had been with Frances Dereham, her grandmother’s former secretary, who, given the fact that he was known to have been her previous lover, she most unwisely employed. Also her name was being linked to a dashing young man called Thomas Culpeper, who, as a gentleman of the privy chamber, was familiar with and popular with the king. It soon leaked out that Katherine’s accomplice in her assignations was a foolish woman called Lady Rochester, whose husband, Anne Boleyn’s brother, had been executed for supposed incest with his sister, an accusation never proved.

  Margaret, who must have been aware of the insinuations and whisperings that were going on, probably chose to ignore them, being herself involved in a love affair. The queen’s brother, Charles Howard, thanks to his sister’s influence, had been given a post at court. Good looking, like most of the Howards, Margaret, who herself at twenty-five was at the height of her beauty, fell in love with him and he with her.

  Their romance, although encouraged by Katherine, was once again forbidden by the king, who fearing that both she and his daughter Mary might be used as figureheads should a Catholic rising break out again in the north, sent them both under house arrest to Sion. Fortunately, the former abbess, Agnes Jourdan, who had quarrelled with Margaret over what she had claimed was her extravagance, had been replaced by an apparently more amenable lady called Clementia Tresham.

  It must also have been some consolation to her that Charles Howard, unlike his unfortunate cousin Thomas, was spared punishment. This must have been, at least in part, due to Henry’s continuing infatuation with his young wife, Charles’ sister Katherine, who in the early part of the summer of 1541 made a tour with him in the north of England. The reason for this ‘progress’, as it was termed, was that in April there had been further dissension in Yorkshire; here, five years earlier, the country had been torn apart in the rebellion which had begun as the peaceful demonstration known as The Pilgrimage of Grace.

  Henry had now become paranoid in his fear of a Catholic rising. Convinced of a national rebellion on the scale of civil war, he ordered that the Tower be cleared of state prisoners to be ready to house the rebels who would soon be brought in chains.

  But this in itself was not enough. Still obsessed with loathing for Cardinal Pole, who had sent him his published treatise the Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione in which he openly denounced his policies, he ordered the execution of Pole’s mother, the saintly Lady Salisbury.

  This was she whom the king’s daughter Mary regarded as a surrogate mother. Likewise, his niece Margaret Lennox, even if once constrained by her strictness, remembered with deep gratitude the kindness with which she had been received at Beaulieu, where she had arrived, almost as a vagrant, eleven years ago. Neither she nor Mary could save her, knowing full well that even an approach to Henry could only result in punishment, perhaps even death for themselves. Like others who greatly pitied her – scandalised that an old lady of 70, known to be innocent, should suffer in such a way – they had to wait helpless while the sentence of death was carried out.

  It proved to be particularly horrible, a young executioner, untrained to his task, literally hacking her to death. Buried in the chapel of St Peer ad Vincula within the Tower, she was venerated by the Church of Rome.

  She was not the only one to die.

  14

  THE FALL FROM GRACE

  The queen was still in great favour with Henry when they returned to Hampton Court in the autumn of 1541. But by now she had made many enemies, particularly through installing her friends and relations in much coveted positions at court. Amongst them was John Lassells, a fervent Protestant, who believed that through her influence over Henry she was doing the devil’s work. Lassells had a sister, Mary, married to a man named Hall, who had been a servant in the Duchess of Norfolk’s household at Lambeth; Hall told him, in no uncertain language, how Katherine had behaved at that time.

  It was not until 2 November that the fateful day occurred. As they attended an All Souls’ Day mass, Archbishop Cranmer gave Henry a letter informing him that, on the sworn word of a chambermaid in her grandmother’s household, Francis Dereham had once been not only Katherine’s lover but had also openly called her his wife.

  Henry, furiously disbelieving such slander, as he then thought it to be, nonetheless allowed Cranmer to investigate; forthwith, both Dereham and Culpeper, to whom Katherine had written a love letter in her very distinctive hand, were dragged off to the Tower. Questioned under torture, they admitted that they had had some sort of dalliance with the queen but swore that sexual intercourse had never taken place. Nonetheless, it was enough to condemn her. Charged with treason, she denied infidelity but admitted that before her marriage she had behaved with impropriety on more than one occasion.

  Margaret and Mary at Sion must then have heard the pathetic story of how Katherine, although constantly watched, had somehow managed to reach the Royal Chapel, adjacent to her rooms, where she knew Henry to be attendi
ng mass. Hammering on the door, she had screamed for him to help her until the guards had dragged her away. Even Cranmer pitied her, saying that it would touch any man’s heart to witness her distress. But Henry, remorseless as he had been to Lady Salisbury and to Katherine’s aunt and predecessor, Anne Boleyn, ordered that she would be imprisoned at Sion, from whence his niece and daughter had to be removed.

  Prior to her departure, Margaret was harangued by no less a person that Cranmer himself, who lectured her, on the instructions of Sir Ralph Sadler, who for his part had been told by King Henry to deal with his ‘troublesome womankind’. Told that she had behaved indiscreetly, first with the Lord Thomas and then with his cousin Charles Howard, she was warned ‘to beware the third time, and wholly apply herself to please the King’s Majesty’.1

  Margaret, with the awful example of the fate of Catherine Howard still upmost in her mind, listened demurely to his lecturing, terrified, as she must have been, that this was only a preliminary to further imprisonment or death.

  Waiting in such fear that it is doubtful if she could sleep at night, she eventually heard, to her enormous relief, that this time it was not the Tower but the Duke of Norfolk’s house in Norfolk, Kenninghall, where she was to be sent on 13 November. With her went the former Mary Howard, now the Duchess of Richmond, young widow of Henry’s illegitimate son by his mistress Bessie Blount, who had died aged only 17. Sir Ralph Saddler, put in charge of the operations, wrote:

  The King’s pleasure is, that my Lady Mary be conducted to my Lord Prince’s house, Havering Bower, by Sir John Dudley, with a convenient number of the Queen’s servants; and my Lady Margaret Douglas to be conducted to Kenninghall, my Lord of Norfolk’s house in Norfolk, in whose company shall go my Lady of Richmond, if my Lord her father and she be so contented.2