Magnificent Progress

Woe​ to royal daughters over the centuries: from the moment of their birth, they were seen as assets to be traded on the international marriage market for the benefit of their families. The bidding for such unions began early, often when the girls were still infants; there would likely be a series of explorations, more or less serious, before one intricate set of negotiations made it to completion. Since it was rarely wise to marry a daughter into one of the noble families of one’s own realm and thus disturb political balances, the consequence for the princess was generally a journey to some unfamiliar land, often involving the need to learn an unfamiliar language and understand the intimidatingly different culture of a new royal court. There was the additional prospect of a husband who might or might not treat his bride well. Among other considerations, he would expect to be free to satisfy his emotional and sexual needs elsewhere, once he had produced a satisfactory quota of male heirs plus a new generation of royal daughters to be traded in advantageous ways. To defend the principle of succession and to conform to conventions governed by male privilege, the royal bride was not afforded the same liberties of behaviour as the groom. It was possible that if her husband predeceased her, she would gain some freedom of choice, but there would still be two royal houses keenly interested in what she would do next.

Only two daughters of the Tudor dynasty in its three-generation tenure of the English crown experienced the full force of these unpromising circumstances. They were both children of the dynasty’s founder, Henry VII: Margaret, the subject of Linda Porter’s biography, born in 1489, and her sister Mary, seven years younger. Two later Tudor daughters escaped such a fate by becoming mistresses of their own fortunes through genealogical accident. Henry VIII’s dogged quest for a male heir through six successive brides produced only one legitimate son, and when young King Edward died in his teens, it left Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to succeed to the crown. Both had survived various indecisive marriage negotiations proposed by their father, and once liberated from much male interference as reigning monarchs, struck out in their own idiosyncratic directions. Mary defied the disapproval of most of her leading subjects by marrying the Habsburg king of Spain, and Elizabeth postponed possible royal matches until her advancing years made any marital union superfluous or politically dangerous.

Elizabeth’s unexpected and wilful lifelong virginity worried the English political nation a great deal, but in 1603 the skilful diplomacy of her chief minister, Robert Cecil, escorted James VI, King of Scots, to the thrones of England and Ireland, with far less fuss than everyone had feared. The entire archipelago was for the first time in its history united under a single monarch, and moreover under the ruler of the neighbouring kingdom which the English had always treated with condescension and frequently with hostility. This was all remarkable enough, but more remarkable still was that it was a posthumous triumph and vindication for the first Tudor daughter to be married: Margaret, sometime queen consort of Scots, and twice over the great-grandmother of the new King James I. That was a satisfactory outcome for a royal life which, for all Porter’s enthusiastic advocacy as her biographer, remains a messy and confusing story.

Part of the problem in telling the tale is that the English side of it is almost too familiar, given the puzzlingly enduring popularity of the Tudor age among consumers of history. The brilliant light shed on the English side of the narrative casts into shade the different rhythms of the Scottish kingdom, whose contrasting Anglo-Norman and Gaelic cultures might seem an unlikely basis for its survival in independence against England, given its far smaller population and economic resources. Scotland’s record in warfare is punctuated by severe defeats at the hands of English armies, one of the worst of which, Flodden in 1513, resulted in the death of Margaret’s husband, King James IV, one of Scotland’s more flamboyant and talented monarchs. Yet the consistent pattern in such reverses, Flodden no exception, is that after their victory the English were never sure what to do next. As a result, Scotland endured in sturdy independence right up to 1603: a kingdom whose reason for existence might best be seen as the common interest among Scots Anglophones and Gaelic-speakers in not being English. That also brought Scotland into sympathy with medieval England’s long-standing foe, the French royal house of Valois. On this basis, a skein of links between France and Scotland endured among the nobility and higher clergy, symbolised visually by Scotland’s consistent rejection of the Perpendicular architectural forms developed in England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War between Plantagenet and Valois, and an embrace of building fashions familiar in France.

All this would become obvious to the young Princess Margaret, who set out in 1503 for Scotland in what Porter describes as ‘the most magnificent [English] royal progress of the 16th century’, stopping off with her father in the Midlands to visit the grandmother whose name she bore, the formidable Lady Margaret Beaufort. Beaufort was the dynast who was the real creator of Tudor royal power, and she had rebuilt her home at Collyweston, in Northamptonshire, in regal fashion as a triumphant expression of all that she had achieved in promoting the interests of her son Henry in his improbable progress to the throne of England. By 1503 Lady Margaret was styling herself when signing her letters as ‘Margaret R’, which might have been an abbreviation of her peerage title as countess of Richmond but could more straightforwardly be read as ‘Regina’.

The Collyweston visit was thus of great symbolic importance as the 13-year-old Margaret journeyed towards her thirty-year-old bridegroom, King James IV. There had been no royal marriage alliance between England and Scotland for eighty years; in a remarkable coincidence, the previous effort had featured Lady Margaret Beaufort’s aunt Joan Beaufort, but that had not been a success in drawing the two kingdoms closer together. It was nevertheless understandable that the Tudors should renew the effort to capitalise on the prestige of the Stewart royal house: the Stewart monarchs represented dynastic continuity, despite suffering a series of violent deaths that often implicated their own family. In 1503 Henry VII’s hold on the English throne was shaky even after eighteen years: his claim remained genealogically dubious in comparison with that of other claimants, and his reign had darkened over the previous months thanks to the death of his eldest son, Arthur, and his beloved wife, Elizabeth of York. It was imperative that he establish his family properly among the club of European royalty. Arthur’s death had disrupted Henry’s coup in acquiring a daughter-in-law from the Trastámara dynasty of Aragon-Catalonia-Castile: Princess Margaret’s sister-in-law Princess Catherine of Aragon was now a childless widow with an uncertain future. King James IV of Scotland seemed a safe bet as a monarch with a good deal of style, and he was apparently more than a match for his quarrelsome nobility, whose forebears had done so much to sabotage previous Stewart reigns.

Porter’s account of the marriage as Margaret moved towards childbearing age suggests that James was a conscientious husband according to his own standards: he was known for providing adequate honour and financial support for his wife, allowing her some adventurous travel round the realm, while having mistresses who were more in accordance with his personal taste and an array of illegitimate children, treated generously and adding to the quota of people called Stewart in Scottish aristocratic circles. By 1507 the queen had produced an heir to the throne, James, who did not live long, but a second James was born five years later, to survive as the vital link to the future.

This meant that in 1512, the new James was also heir presumptive to the Tudor throne, in default of any surviving issue so far from Catherine of Aragon’s second marriage to Margaret’s younger brother, now Henry VIII. That would not endear the queen of Scotland to King Henry, who suffered agonies of jealousy first towards James IV and later to the equally stylish king of France, François I. Porter rightly presents a consistently unflattering picture of the English monarch in all his touchiness and narcissism. His relationship with his sister was never easy, and not made easier by her ready recourse to long letters that rarely achieved the level of sycophancy Henry expected, and were often written in her own distinctive (not to say impenetrable) hand. In Scotland, it was difficult to regard her as a stooge for the English, given her detestation of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, who had been an unwelcome escort to her new husband in 1503, and who went on to command the English army which in September 1513 shattered the Scottish elite and killed King James IV at Flodden. Later she continued to be eclectic in her distribution of diplomatic favours between England and France, always seeking the best advantage for herself and her royal son.

Margaret, who was given the powers of regent to James V on her husband’s death in accordance with his will, was pregnant with the king’s last son, Alexander, when the disaster of Flodden struck. Perhaps it was her wish to protect him against rival interests at court (in vain, since he died in 1515) that led her into the first of two deeply unwise marriages in her widowhood: to Archibald Douglas, sixth earl of Angus following his father’s death at Flodden. Porter is anxious to rescue her heroine from the condescension of posterity, especially when it is censoriously Victorian and female, but she doesn’t try very hard with this marital disaster, which among other ill consequences, infringed the terms of Margaret’s regency. The marriage’s one product of lasting significance before its collapse was a seventh pregnancy for the widowed queen: she gave birth to Margaret Douglas in 1515. One of Angus’s many misjudgments was to show scant interest in this child, who was both Henry VIII’s niece and, later, mother to a second husband for Mary Queen of Scots, who furnished her with the heir to three thrones: James VI and I. Lady Margaret Douglas was to spend most of her life in England, beginning with her mother’s year-long escape from her deteriorating fortunes back to the land of her birth, as a not especially welcome guest of King Henry in London; her life story is as full of spirited self-assertion and dubious decisions as that of Queen Margaret.

Any follower of the narrative that unfolded after Margaret’s return to Scotland in 1517 is likely to become dizzy with the diplomacy and political alliances into which she was now plunged. They revolved around contests between her now detested husband, Angus, the aspirant though ineffectual James Hamilton, earl of Arran, and the late James III’s francophone nephew John Stewart, duke of Albany. Albany was the most trustworthy and competent of this trio; Margaret had the sense in the long run to see that he best served the interests of her son the king. Meanwhile, after her divorce from Angus, Margaret provided some comic relief with a third wedding in 1528 to the rather younger Henry Stewart, Lord Methven – by then a long-standing liaison that sorely tested the loyalties of the dowager queen’s supporters in Scotland. The marriage soon evaporated: Methven ended up in domestic bliss with his mistress, the noblewoman Janet Stewart. Queen Margaret’s credibility either side of the border suffered accordingly. King Henry might now be forgiven for his irritation with her and her often precarious finances, though his own contemporary marital arrangements would hardly bear closer scrutiny.

As the dowager queen’s son James V entered maturity and to some extent resolved the confusion of Scottish politics, he showed himself generally well-disposed to his mother, valuing her particularly as a means of communication with her royal brother, who was otherwise reluctant to negotiate directly with his undeferential nephew. Margaret also got on well with James’s very capable second wife, Marie de Guise, another dynastic pawn sent to lie abroad for her country. The dowager queen’s last service to Scotland was to console the devastated royal couple after the death of their two infant sons (one aged eleven months, one eight days) in 1541. She did not live to see the birth of her granddaughter Princess Mary, James V’s eventual heir, who much later would marry Margaret’s grandson Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley – from which abruptly terminated union sprang King James and the union of the crowns. Meanwhile, Henry VIII, preoccupied with recently executed and prospective wives, did not show much inclination to mourn his sister in the autumn of 1541, not expecting that his promising trio of children would fail to beget heirs and that the shade of Margaret would outdo her brother in royal productivity in 1603.

Porter appreciatively cites a healthy spread of recent doctoral theses and specialist studies on the period that have generally shown Margaret Tudor in a better light, but her book’s scholarly apparatus does not suggest that it has involved much primary source research beyond what is in print. As a winningly written work of intelligent synthesis and determined reappraisal of a key historical link-figure, it serves a useful purpose. It will guide the reader securely through a period of Scottish history made more opaque by the confusing alliterative dance of Angus, Albany and Arran, not to mention a quite excessive number of Stewarts.