Chagrined by the antipathy shown to them by the new regime, they returned to Temple Newsam, thankful at least that the house, parkland and farms were still in their possession, as surely they would not have been had King Henry remained alive.
From there, in the following September, Matthew had no alternative other than to prove his obedience to the new young king by raising a force to fight in Scotland, under Somerset’s command. Margaret, as Tom Bishop certainly suggested in his reports to Cecil, must have had divided loyalties in the ‘War of the Rough Wooing’, as this conflict came to be known. She could hardly have had otherwise. Angus, her father, now pardoned by the Scottish government, would be fighting against her husband in the forthcoming campaign.
Torn between love for the husband, to whom she was devoted, as all contemporaries relate, and filial affection for her father, hero of her early years, Margaret faced the dilemma with commendable common sense. To have refused Somerset’s order would have meant imprisonment or worse; even if spared the punishment of being sent to the Tower, she and Matthew would have lost Temple Newsam, where the land produced not only their income and sustenance for their large household but also provided some stability as the only real home that they possessed.
The Scottish ambassador in London, Sir Adam Otterburn, sent urgent messages to the Regent Arran in Scotland warning him of the preparations for war. Early in September 1547 an army was marching north from England. Reinforced with several hundred German mercenaries, and a large contingent of cavalry, it reputedly numbered 16,000 men. Behind them came the siege engines, cannons of deadly force, dragged by teams of horses and oxen on creaking timber frames with iron wheels. Moreover, there was another threat: the great cavalcade was supported by a fleet of warships from the sea.
Once across the Border, Somerset shared command with Lord Dacre. Their combined force then advanced up the coast of East Lothian, keeping in touch with the ships sailing for the mouth of the Forth. Ahead of them, just south of Musselburgh, the Governor Arran, with the main part of the Scottish army, said to number about 22,000 men, waited on the west bank of the River Esk, aiming to stop their approach. On the left was the Firth of Forth, on the right, a very large bog.
On the morning of 10 September, Arran moved his army over a bridge across the Esk. The infantry was commanded by Angus, while Arran himself, together with Huntly, led the vanguard. The commanders are said to have been in disagreement: one cause of the fiasco which occurred. As the left wing of the army came under fire from the English ships, the panicking men of the vanguard pushed into the central division, causing great confusion. At the same time, on the right wing, Somerset’s cavalry blocked all attempts at advance. The Scottish army was penned in between the River Esk and the sea without room to manoeuvre and unable to return enemy fire. Slaughtered from three directions, by guns and a hail of arrows, it was forced to retreat in what became a disastrous rout. Many men drowned in the Esk, trying to swim across. Others were mown down by archers and pikemen as they tried to escape through the bog.
Margaret’s father, the Earl of Angus, was amongst those who survived. Made prisoner, he was taken to Drumlanrig to be placed under house arrest.
20
THE HOSTAGES
Following his victory at Pinkie Heugh, Somerset stationed the English army at Haddington in East Lothian. From there, while still threatening the capital city of Edinburgh, he could control the Firth of Forth. Such was the lack of authority in Scotland that some of the landowners in the south part of the country, believing that the marriage of their queen to King Edward would accrue them some benefit, actually transferred their loyalty to the English.
The master of Maxwell was one of the Border landlords who treated with the English. In order to free his father, Lord Maxwell, from imprisonment in the Tower, he had some time previously promised the English ambassador, Sir Ralph Sadler, that he would do his utmost to serve his country’s interests in Scotland. Subsequently however, the Governor Arran and the Lords of the Scottish Council had compelled him to give security by keeping his castles of Caerlaverock, Lochmaben and Threave for the queen ‘from their enemies of England’. Thus, inadvertently, he was caught between both sides, as was to prove disastrous for him when the test of conflicting loyalties took place.
On 27 January 1548 the Earl of Arran, still officially the governor, bribed by the promise of the French Duchy of Châtelhérault, promised that he would secure the consent of the Scottish parliament to the marriage of their queen and the dauphin. In proof of his word, the fortresses of Blackness and Dunbar were given to the French who installed garrisons forthwith.
In February 1548, commanding a section of the army, Matthew Lennox and deputy warden of the English Marches Thomas Lord Wharton marched west to Dumfries to destroy the town of Annan, which they took after a heroic defence. Wharton had been promised the support of 2,000 men by the Master of Maxwell, who, in confirmation of his intentions, had left hostages, sons of the local Border lairds, in the royal castle of Carlisle. However, on reaching Carlisle with Wharton, Matthew Lennox found that Maxwell had reneged on his word. Whereupon, obsessed with fury at his deceitfulness, he ordered the young hostages to be hanged.
Accounts of the time are conflicting, both as to the number of hostages and to how many were actually killed. The nineteenth-century historian Agnes Strickland, quoting Lord Herries’ Memoirs, claimed that eleven out of twelve were executed while only the young son of the Master of Maxwell, thanks to the kindness of a soldier who could not bear to pull the rope round his neck, was spared. Caroline Bingham, however, in her excellent biography of Darnley, says that a court was convened to decide their fate, after which only four out of ten were killed while the remaining six were reprieved.
Whatever the true story, it does seem possible that Tom Bishop, Matthew’s secretary, a man who appears to have had an almost Machiavellian influence over him, may have urged him into the action which he afterwards lived so bitterly to regret. Bishop’s correspondence with Cecil is revealing. In one letter, he actually boasts that:
Above all others my countrymen, I have been most earnest, most inventive, most cruel, most careful to subvert that realm of Scotland. Let a trumpet be blown on the Marches, requiring any of that nation or of France to come forward to charge me, I seek not Scots to try my doings, but noblemen of England under which I serve.1
Can it be that Matthew – who, as is known, was easily influenced both by his wife and his secretary – succumbed to the suggestion that he needed to show a heavy hand and committed an atrocity that afterwards never left his mind?
Later, Margaret, describing his bouts of depression, was to claim that he suffered from ‘a disease which solitariness is most against’. From this it has been taken that his guilt over ordering the deaths of young boys, some hardly older than his own son, was the cause of the mental anguish which plagued him for the rest of his life.
The disastrous defeat of the Scots at Pinkie Heugh accelerated the struggle between the French and English to win control of Scotland. The Governor Arran persisted in his liaison with the French King Henry II, who succeeded his father Francis I in 1547, to try to get aid from France.
In the uncertain situation, the government in Scotland, lacking firm leadership, was virtually out of control. The English were at the gates of Edinburgh, threatening to storm the city. At Stirling, the queen mother, Mary of Lorraine, was terrified that her little daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, would be seized and carried across the Border. She sent her to the Island of Inchmahome, on the Lake of Menteith, where she stayed for six weeks until it was thought to be safe enough for her to rejoin her mother in the strongly fortified, almost unassailable, castle of Stirling.
Then, in June 1548, in answer to Arran’s supplications, a French force landed at Leith. The Scottish army, with French reinforcements, attempted to relieve the besieged town of Haddington; here, on 7 July, in a nunnery nearby, an agreement was signed promising Mary Queen of Scots as a bride to the Dauphin of Fr
ance.
The French galleys, having landed their troops, then sailed on from Leith. They travelled round the north coast of Scotland and down the west to Dumbarton, where, at the end of July, the little queen and her four Marys were taken aboard to sail for France. The winds were fair: the flotilla, having rounded the north coast of Ireland, landed safely near Brest. Six months later, in February 1549, in recognition for his part in organising the marriage between the Scottish queen and the dauphin, Arran was rewarded with the French duchy of Châtelhérault.
Note
1 Strickland quoting Harleian Manuscript etc., p.293
21
‘MY DERREST DOUCHTER’
In the spring of 1548, previous to the little queen’s escape, Matthew Lennox and Lord Wharton, after causing much destruction and leaving its ancient church in ruins, left the town of Annan. They then moved on to Drumlanrig, where, in the fourteenth-century castle of the Douglasses, Matthew’s father-in-law, Angus, had been held after being taken prisoner at Pinkie Heugh. Angus had written to them from the castle to ask what they meant to do with him, to which they had promptly replied, ‘They be only favourable to those who favoured the godly marriage [that of Mary Queen of Scots and Edward VI] and peace.’ However, by the time they reached the castle, which they then proceeded to destroy, Angus had somehow managed to escape. From Edinburgh he reached the Highlands by sea, returning only to Tantallon when the hunt for escaped prisoners had died down.
He was certainly in his castle in the summer of 1548, because Margaret, having ridden from Yorkshire to join her husband, probably in Dumfriesshire, sent him word that she wished to see him and was bluntly told not to come.
There is good reason to believe that it was fear of Matthew Lennox which made Angus refuse to see his daughter in such an unfeeling way. He was all too aware that since his return to Scotland Matthew, holding him responsible for his father’s death, had nursed his relentless hatred. Margaret, nonetheless, was furious as well as deeply hurt by her father’s cruel rebuff, for which probably, at least in some part, she blamed his new young wife.
Following his divorce from her mother Queen Joan, Angus had at first returned to his mistress, Janet Stewart of the Dumfriesshire family of Traquair. It would appear to have been after Janet’s death that he had married Margaret Stewart, daughter of the 5th Lord Maxwell of Traquair, the man who had reneged on Matthew Lennox, causing him to hang the young hostages at Carlisle. This second marriage, to a girl who must have been younger than his daughter, had resulted in the birth of two young sons.
Margaret, therefore, formerly his heiress, was now deprived of her inheritance by the births of these two young boys. Thought to have been so near to Tantallon that she could actually see the massive fortress on the rockbound coast, she realised with great bitterness that she was now expelled by her father from her childhood home.
Under these circumstances, it is even more extraordinary that hardly was she back in Yorkshire before a messenger from her father appeared on a sweat-covered horse. Opening the letter which the messenger pulled from his saddlebag, she found to her amazement that it came from her father, who now had the temerity to beg her to help their relations, held prisoner, as he claimed, and in great danger of their lives.
Another fortress taken by the English army was the even more ancient castle of Dalkeith where Margaret when not at Tantallon, had spent part of her early years. The men of the Douglas family taken prisoner and sent to the Tower were, Angus claimed, in great distress and poverty.
It seems hardly credible, that after so many years of neglecting her, he now had the audacity to write to his daughter asking her to provide for these men and give them the protection of taking them into her house. Typically, he made no secret of the fact that he cared more for his nephew, married to an heiress, than he did for his own illegitimate son whose mother was his longterm mistress Janet Stewart of Traquair.
Derrest Dochter
After my maist tender recommendations and hearty blissing, this sal be to advertise you, that through mischance and under traist as I believe, the house of Dalkeith was ditroyit. And taken furth it our cousin the Laird of Glenbervie, the Master of Morton, George my son, David Home of Wodderburne, and Alexander Home his eme [uncle]. Praying you, with advise of your husband to se gif ye can get them, or part of them, put in friend’s hands, and gently treated there, and specially the Laird of Glenbervie, that is ane sickly tender man, and has ix motherless bairns; and let George lie in pledge for him, as zour wisdom thinks best. And make my hearty commendations to my Lord, zour husband, and give credence to this bearer, my servitor, David Stewart, as to myself, and God preserve you.
Written at Edinburgh the xx of June 1548.
Zour father,
Ard Earl of Angus
To my derrest Douchter, the Countess of Levenax.1
Margaret was at this point living at Temple Hirst, originally one of the preceptorys of the Order of the Knights Templar, which, in 1308, had been sequestered by the Sheriff of Yorkshire on the king’s writ. Since then, the house, with its 200 acres, had been part of the Temple Newsam estate.
On receiving the letter she consulted her husband, just returned from Scotland, who in turn talked it over with the messenger, David Stewart, who was able to give him details of the state to which the Douglasses were reduced.
The Lennoxes faced a dilemma. While Margaret, having been a refugee herself, knew how her relations were placed, common sense warned that in helping them, she would be putting not only herself but also Matthew and their immediate family into a situation of great danger. Matthew, on the other hand, while aware of the risk he was running in playing a double game, saw that with the support of the Douglasses, he might regain his forfeited Scottish estates.
Deciding to play for safety, Matthew wrote to Somerset, with whom he was on friendly terms after soldiering with him in Scotland. He enclosed both Angus’ letter to Margaret and one from Angus’ brother, Sir George Douglas of Pittendreich, with a short explanation of his own. Referring to Margaret’s uncle, he told Somerset that he had required his niece to ask ‘that his grace will permit her (if he will not grant the keeping of all the Douglas prisoners) to take home his son, the Master of Morton, as well as the sick Laird of Glenbervie’.
Matthew then added, sarcastically, that it was evident that Sir George Douglas cared more for his younger son, husband of the heiress to the earldom of Morton, than he did for the elder, who he had offered to leave as a hostage in prison. So much did his father value the younger son (albeit that the Morton heiress was mad) that he had actually written to Matthew to say that there was no limit to the amount of money that he was willing to pay for a ransom and neither would he exchange him for ‘any English prisoner the Scotch had in their hands’. Lennox wrote the following, with some bitterness:
The Earl of Anguish [sic] might better have dressed [addressed] themselves to others to have been suitors for them than either my wife or me, for we have received no such benefit at nother of their hands so to do, but rather to desire to keep them fast when you have them, like as always my poor opinion has been … Notwithstanding, if it shall please your Grace that I may have the keeping of the Master of Morton and the Laird of Glenbervie with the others, I shall answer for the sure keeping of them always to your Grace, for I would be very glad to prove what fruit might follow the fair words of the Earl and his brother.2
Thus did Matthew make it clear to Edward Somerset that in helping his wife’s relations, he expected something in return. Still playing for safety, he added a postcript. ‘My wife hath desired me to make her humble recommendations unto your Grace and saith that she will make answer neither to father nor uncle until she know your Grace’s pleasure therein.’
Then sending off this missile with a fast riding messenger, he labelled it ‘Haste – post haste – haste with all possible diligence.’3
Somerset, in reply, agreed to the suggestion that the Douglasses could be freed from prison if Matthew and Margaret were
willing to be responsible for their keep. Subsequently, they opened their doors at Wrexham Castle to what would have seemed a strange collection of people: the old and obviously dying Laird of Glenbervie, with, one must presume, his gaggle of nine motherless children. Their arrival must have reminded Margaret of her own at Berwick, when Lord Strangeways, reluctant as herself at that moment, had been forced to lower the drawbridge to allow a 15-year-old vagrant and her equally destitute attendants to enter the safety of the castle.
The family of Glenbervie did not come alone. With them were two other Douglas relations: James, Master of Morton, and Margaret’s own illegitimate half-brother, George. Both were arrogant young men, entirely devoid of compunction in the exploitation of anyone who might restrict their devious ambitions.
James, Earl of Morton, Margaret’s first cousin, was the son of Angus’ ruthless brother George Douglas. By marrying Elizabeth, the heiress of her father the Earl of Morton, James had become the Master of Morton (courtesy title of a peer’s eldest son). The fact that Elizabeth, like both of her sisters, was mentally deficient, had done nothing to deter either James or his father from achieving such an affluent and influential match.
Despite her mistrust of her relations, Margaret could not have known, or even guessed, how one day these young men to whom she was giving sanctuary were to be so disastrously involved with her own son, Henry, at that time just a year old.
As she watched with great pride, the fair haired, sturdy little boy, so noticeably tall for his age, taking his first unsteady steps, not a vestige of intuition warned her that by agreeing to her father’s request to harbour indigent relations, she was sheltering the very men whose daggers would one day take his life.
Margaret Douglas Page 10
