But Margaret Tudor needed the support of her brother, Henry VIII, and so in the autumn of 1519 she consented to what proved to be a brief reconciliation with Angus, who agreed to it because he was again engaged in a power struggle with Arran and wanted Henry’s backing. Around that time, alarmed at an outbreak of plague in Edinburgh, Queen Margaret took her four-year-old daughter to Stirling Castle. In December the Queen was laid low with a vicious attack of smallpox, and there were fears that she might die. For days she lay prone, unable to move or speak.5 But she recovered to resume her battles with her estranged husband.
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It was the fate of nobly born girls to be the subject of marriage alliances that were advantageous to their parents, and it was not unusual for them to be betrothed in childhood. By reason of her royal blood and her claim to the English succession, and as James V’s half sister and Henry VIII’s niece, Margaret was a highly desirable bride—a great prize in the European marriage market. In 1520, when she was not yet five, her mother entered into negotiations with Angus’s enemy, Arran, with a view to her becoming affianced to his eldest son, another James Hamilton, then aged about four. Thanks to the ongoing feud between Angus and Arran, affairs in Scotland had deteriorated to the extent that the Duke of Albany was anticipating having to return from France to resume his role as regent. Albany was perturbed by reports of the proposed betrothal, fearing that the Queen and Arran would unite against him. Moreover, in the event of the young King’s death, Arran was Albany’s rival for the Scottish succession. There was no more talk of the marriage, but later that year Albany formally invited Queen Margaret to assume the regency pending his return. On October 15 she set out from Linlithgow for Edinburgh, having made the pragmatic decision to be reconciled once more with her husband—a decision that cost her the support of some of her party.
Angus and his faction had retained control of the capital, resisting the attempts of Arran to dislodge him from power. He rode forth at the head of four hundred mounted men to receive his wife, offered a cordial welcome and escorted her into Edinburgh Castle. Thereafter the couple resumed living together, but not for long. Angus continued to trespass upon the Queen’s property, whereupon she lost patience with him and decided to ally herself with his enemy, Arran. One night in December she left a dinner hosted by the Archbishop of St. Andrews and stole away to Linlithgow with her daughter and only six attendants. Leaving Margaret behind, she rode to Stirling, where she was welcomed by Arran. Angus protested against her desertion, and Henry VIII castigated her for doing “much dishonour” to herself and the King her son, warning that she could not look for any favor at his hand.6
Albany had approached Pope Leo X on Queen Margaret’s behalf about a divorce, but efforts were now made to turn him against her. When he returned to Scotland late in 1521 and resumed the regency, the Queen allied with him against Angus, and there were rumors—probably unfounded—that she was closer to Albany than she should have been. Albany summoned Angus to answer charges of high treason, but he failed to appear, whereupon he was sentenced to death and his estates were once more confiscated. In March 1522, after Queen Margaret had interceded for his life to be spared, he was exiled to France, whence, in June 1524, he escaped to England at Henry VIII’s invitation. It has been claimed that Angus took young Margaret with him into exile, and that she did not see her mother for the next three years, but this misunderstanding rests on the incorrect dating to 1523 of a letter that Margaret wrote complaining that Angus had removed Margaret from her care within the past three years.7 The letter was actually written in November 1528, and in any case Angus would hardly have welcomed the risks and practicalities of fleeing into exile with a six-year-old child.
Much to his estranged wife’s annoyance, Angus was received warmly at the English court. He was given a pension, and measures were taken to bring about his return to Scotland and the mending of his marriage.8 Queen Margaret remonstrated with her brother to obstruct his return, but Henry wanted a pro-English party north of the border, and Angus was ready to uphold the King’s interests. By the autumn of 1524, Albany had been overthrown and Scotland was “so divided, it is hard to say whom to trust. There is no justice, but continual murders, theft and robbery.”9 Henry VIII had no time for the Queen’s “wilfulness towards her husband.”10
On October 28, with the backing of an English alliance, Angus finally returned to Scotland to find his wife in power and refusing to have anything to do with him, an attitude that was believed to have been encouraged by “one Harry Stewart, a young man about her Grace, which ordereth all causes.”11 Henry Stewart was eleven years Margaret Tudor’s junior, and it was not long before Henry VIII was informed that the two of them had begun an adulterous relationship, one that would cause scandal for several years. Queen Margaret was said to be “so blinded with folly as to have her ungodly appetite followed; she doth not care what she doth.”12
Angus hated his wife’s lover, and he was outraged that young Margaret was being exposed to such an undesirable and immoral influence. On November 23 he stormed into Edinburgh, only to have Margaret Tudor’s forces open fire on him. Forced to retreat to his stronghold of Tantallon, he proceeded to rally a large contingent of lords to his side.
There is, alas, no evidence of how Margaret, at just nine, was affected by the enmity between her parents. She must have suffered to some extent from conflicting loyalties, and it may be that her mother and Henry Stewart did their best to poison her mind against her father. Nor do we know what she made of the affair between the Queen and Stewart. Fortunately royal children spent more time with those appointed to care for them than with their parents, so she was probably shielded to a degree from the tumult of her mother’s life.
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Early in 1525, when Margaret was nine, the Earl of Moray asked for her hand. A bastard son of James IV, he was about twenty-six, and an ally of Queen Margaret. The Queen pushed for the match, fearing that her husband might try to marry Margaret to one of her enemies, the Douglases,13 but Angus was having none of it. In February 1525 he staged a coup, occupying the capital and summoning Parliament, which restored him to power, jointly with David Beaton, the future cardinal and archbishop of St. Andrews, and granted him custody of the resentful young King, whom he kept strictly under his control.
Queen Margaret was forced to establish a fragile accord with Angus. Thomas Magnus informed Wolsey that she “entertaineth the Earl with good countenance and familiar communication, but continually her Grace procureth [him], by all the ways and means she can, to a divorce.”14 Angus’s friends wanted him freed from their marriage, so that he could take another wife and father sons, which would spare him the necessity of having to leave his title and estates to his daughter. The Queen was anxious to ensure that a divorce would not impugn Margaret’s legitimacy. She now petitioned Pope Clement VII on the grounds that before their marriage Angus had entered into a precontract—a formal exchange of promises to marry made before witnesses that was as binding as wedlock—with Lady Janet Stewart; she urged His Holiness to consider that “by the ignorance of the mother [the daughter] should not suffer any loss, damage or disadvantage.”15 Normally an annulment rendered the children of an irregular union bastards, but if a marriage had been made in good faith, its issue could be deemed legitimate.
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For the next three years Angus enjoyed great power in Scotland, acting as regent for James V; in August 1527 he was made high chancellor. He put Queen Margaret and her supporters to flight, curbed the ambitions of the Hamiltons, and restored order in the kingdom. The young King he kept a virtual prisoner, diverting him with women and dice from learning his kingly duties. The Douglases were now supreme, and it was said that “none that time durst strive against a Douglas nor a Douglas’s man.”16
Angus had permitted Margaret’s betrothal to Moray to go ahead, and her mother had arranged it, but according to an instrument from the Moray charter chest, dated January 10, 1527, the Queen, when required by Moray to procee
d to the marriage, had refused because she had found a more promising bridegroom, ten-year-old Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, whom Margaret would eventually marry nearly sixteen years later.17 But her plans came to nothing, and we hear no more of either betrothal at this time.
Now came a period of far-reaching change for eleven-year-old Margaret. On March 11, 1527, the Pope granted her mother’s petition for an annulment.18 In accordance with the Queen’s wishes, he added a special clause declaring Margaret legitimate.19 This was endorsed by David Beaton, who declared “that, the mother being innocent of bad faith in the marriage, the daughter ought not to be disinherited.”20 Thirty years later it would be asserted by a hostile witness that Margaret “was openly taken and reputed a bastard in Scotland” after her parents’ divorce,21 and this was no exaggeration, because James V, who hated the Douglases, always referred to her as his “base sister.”22 But he had no grounds for doing so.
By April 2, 1528, the Queen had married Henry Stewart, provoking the ire of Henry VIII, who was then seeking the dissolution of his own marriage. He was shocked and indignant on his niece Margaret’s behalf, and wrote a letter reminding his sister of “the divine ordinance of inseparable matrimony first instituted in Paradise,” expressing the hope that she would “perceive how she was seduced by flatterers to an unlawful divorce from the right noble Earl of Angus upon untrue and unsufficient allegations.” Furthermore, the dispensation sent from Rome plainly showed “how unlawfully it was handled,” for judgment had been “given against a party neither present in person, nor by proxy.”
Thinking of the innocent victim of this “shameless sentence,” and revealing that he had received reports on her daughter’s progress, Henry urged the Queen
for the weal of your soul, and to avoid the inevitable damnation threatened against adulterers, to reconcile yourself with Angus as your true husband. Yet the love, the tender pity and motherly kindness towards the fruit of your body, your most dear child and natural daughter, cannot but provoke your Grace unto reconciliation, whose excellent beauty and present behavior, nothing less godly than goodly, furnished with virtues and womanly demeanours, after such a sort that it would relent and mollify a heart of steel, much more a motherly mind, which, in your Grace, Nature enforcing the same, ought largely to be showed. Moreover, what charge of conscience, what grudge and fretting, yea, what danger of damnation should it be to your soul, with perpetual infamy of your renown, slanderously to distain with dishonour so goodly a creature, so virtuous a lady, and namely your natural child, procreate in lawful matrimony, as to be reputed baseborn, which cannot otherwise be avoided, unless your Grace will (as in conscience ye are bound under peril of God’s everlasting indignation) relinquish the adulterer’s company with him that is not, nor may be of right, your husband.
This, Wolsey assured the Queen in an enclosing note, was “the faithful exhortation of my most dread lord and sovereign, your entirely loving brother, with a motherly respect towards your natural child, your own flesh and blood.”23
Katherine of Aragon wrote too, sorrowfully reminding Margaret Tudor of the great sin of disparaging “the fair daughter she had by my Lord Angus.” Margaret replied that she had married him in good faith, so her daughter’s legitimacy would not be in question.24
Sometime between 1525 and April 1528, Angus removed Margaret from her mother’s care. It has been described as a kidnapping,25 but as a father and a peer of the realm he had every right to the custody of his child. Margaret was approaching marriageable age, which for girls was then twelve, and she could be a valuable political asset in terms of a marriage alliance. We know of her removal from her mother only from a letter written by the elder Margaret on November 25, 1528, in which she recites the evils that Angus had done to her, especially in “these three years by-past, not having no consideration of our person, honour nor weal, but always putting all in jeopardy; and after would not suffer our own daughter to remain with us for our comfort, who would not have been distressed.”26
Some modern accounts have Angus seizing Margaret, literally from her mother’s arms on earlier occasions,27 but this is the first recorded complaint that the Queen made about being deprived of her daughter. The unqualified word “after” seems likely to refer to the divorce, which suggests that Angus removed Margaret from her mother’s care on account of the Queen’s notorious relations with Henry Stewart. Probably he took custody of her after news of the Papal judgment reached Scotland in December 1527. She was then twelve, and Margaret Tudor’s letter reveals that the change in her circumstances was traumatic for her. She had spent all her life in her mother’s care, although the Queen had been much preoccupied with her own personal and political struggles. Margaret Tudor’s voluminous correspondence reveals that she was far more interested in her sons, especially James V, than in her daughter, who rarely merits a mention. It was James who was the “tenderest” of all in the eyes of his mother.28 Nor is there evidence that she did her utmost to get Margaret back. Any distress that Margaret suffered was probably due to a scene between her parents when she was taken from the Queen.
Angus probably installed her at his mighty stronghold of Tantallon on the East Lothian coast. Tantallon Castle was a magnificent and forbidding fortress, spectacularly situated high on a rocky headland overlooking the Firth of Forth and the Bass Rock, an island in the sea to the east of Scotland. It had been built in the 1350s by William, 1st Earl of Douglas, the son of the Sir James Douglas who had carried Bruce’s heart to the Holy Land. Tantallon’s great curtain wall of red sandstone encircled a courtyard surrounded by soaring towers, and in the northwest of these, the Douglas Tower, were to be found the lordly apartments. This tower was a circular edifice seven stories high, with a radius of forty feet. The chambers on the ground and upper floors were square, with wooden floors and vaulted privies, and there was a prison in the basement, or pit. There were also ranges of buildings erected against the curtain wall; these included a fourteenth-century great hall, which was connected to the Douglas Tower. The sea provided a natural line of defense and supply on one side of the castle, while the landward wall was massively fortified and surrounded by a huge ditch. The only entrance was a drawbridge to the great gatehouse.29
If Angus took Margaret with him when he needed to be in Edinburgh, she would probably have stayed either at court or at medieval Dalkeith Castle, Midlothian, another Douglas property, in a household that seems to have been run by the wives of his brother, Sir George Douglas, and his cousin, Archibald Douglas, Laird of Kilspindie.30 As the daughter of an earl Margaret was honorably housed and looked after, but not (it was later implied by James V) as well as she had been when in her mother’s care.31
Margaret cannot have seen much of her father at first because he was much occupied with ruling Scotland, but from now on she became subject to his influence. If she grew up to be a true Douglas, it was thanks to him, and not only because it was in her blood. For it seems that at this time an enduring bond was forged between father and daughter—it has even been suggested that their attachment to each other brought upon Margaret “the enmity of her mother,”32 although that is more likely to have resulted increasingly from Margaret Tudor’s indifference and neglect. Indeed there is no evidence that Margaret ever saw her mother again. From now on, as Angus’s letters show, he was far more protective and affectionate toward her than Margaret Tudor had ever been, and those feelings grew and matured until by 1545 he had come to think of his daughter as “the woman whom [he] loved most in all the world.”33
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By April 1528, Queen Margaret and her new husband were under siege at Stirling with Angus’s old enemy, Arran. Margaret must have been in her father’s charge by then, because Angus was to have no other chance to take custody of her. For in June James V, now sixteen, asserted his authority as king. With astonishing speed, he threw off the hateful constraints imposed on him by Angus, escaped to his mother at Stirling, toppled Angus from the regency, and forbade him and the Douglases—whom h
e loathed and feared—to come within seven miles of his royal person. Thereafter he ruled by the advice of his mother and Henry Stewart, whom he created Lord Methven.
Angus was willing to retire from politics, but when the King tried to force him and his kinsfolk into virtual exile and threatened them with imprisonment, he took refuge at the well-defended fortress of Tantallon and fortified it against attack by the royal forces; elsewhere his Douglas relatives were taking similar measures to protect themselves.
Margaret was either already staying at Tantallon, or had fled there from Dalkeith when her father fell.34 Here father and daughter should have felt reasonably secure—in common parlance, to “ding doon” Tantallon Castle was to achieve the impossible35—but the King now had Angus attainted as a traitor and sentenced him to lose his life and his property, which was forfeit to the Crown. The same sentence was passed on Angus’s brother, George, and his cousin, Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie, and both fled into exile. Angus stayed where he was, but he was a marked man, and so feared capture that he had his loyal lords keep watch, in full armor, at his chamber door each night.