#james v

Other people get killed; not you.

I love you, Mother—you’re the most trustworthy person in the world.

I don’t understand you, Mother. Your behavior is so strange.

I’m so annoyed with you, Mother.

Why won’t you fully support me?

That little baby in swaddling clothes, that little boy who always stood by you before your enemies, would grow into a cold, arrogant adult king.

He would not remember the love for your homeland you so often spoke of, nor understand your pain and inner turmoil.

A few weeks later, James received word that his mother, Margaret, was gravely ill after suffering a stroke at her residence, Methven Castle, a few days earlier. He immediately left Falkland Palace to be at her side but, yet again, he was too late and she died before his arrival. Although James put on a good show of being the dutiful mourning son, he made the true contempt that he felt for his mother clear by ignoring her final deathbed wishes that he forgive her second husband, Lord Angus, and give her few remaining jewels to her daughter, his step sister, Lady Margaret Douglas, who was living at their uncle Henry's court. He could hardly be seen to stint when it came to his mother's funeral however, most of which he had to pay for himself as she had left a legacy of just 2,500 marks, a pitiful amount for a Princess of England and former Queen of Scotland to leave. The entire court was summoned to attend Margaret's state funeral at the charterhouse of Perth and the royal couple remained in mourning for several months afterwards, even celebrating Christmas with unusual solemnity, while their chambers and the chapel royal were hung with black drapes.

The death of Queen Margaret, of whom Marie had been sincerely fond, did nothing to heal the rift that was steadily growing between her son and his wife. Like many depressed people, James had a tendency to push away the people closest to him. He wallowed in selfpity and attempted to assuage his bleakness and self-doubt with drink and hedonism, which of course made matters much worse. Although he seems to have remained faithful to Marie for a number of years, he once again took up some aspects of his old bachelor lifestyle in the wake of the Princes' deaths, seeking out other women for casual encounters and even, it was rumoured, setting up a mistress again. He was not especially discreet about this and naturally it didn't take too long before word of his misdeeds reached the ears of his wife, who was naturally hurt and chagrined by his lack of respect for her feelings. It was to be expected, of course, that a virile young King in the prime of life should have mistresses, and Marie would have been counselled by her mother to expect this and turn a blind eye, as she had done, to any peccadilloes that might well occur. However, gentlemen were expected to be discreet about such things to spare their wives' feelings and it would have seemed like an unpardonable insult to Marie to have her husband's infidelity paraded before her.

There is evidence of the discord between husband and wife in a small collection of letters sent by James V to Marie, which are undated but might well have been written during the autumn of 1541. In the first he complains that he is 'surprised by your letter, for I have been so ill for the last three days. I beg you to consider me a man of my word and one who will never fail you. The rest of my reply, I shall give you in person.' The next, which may well have been sent to Perth while James was winding up his dead mother's affairs, is even more worrying as, after sarcastically thanking her for the letter 'which it has pleased you to write to me', James goes on to say that:

...those who have told you that I mean to go away have falsely lied, because I have no other thought but of being with you on Sunday. As for my mother's things, I will not forget, begging you not to be so thundering until you know the truth. Praying you to be of good cheer until my return, which will be on Sunday, and praying Our Lord to give you a good and long life.

It's impossible to say now what had upset Marie so much that she wrote to her husband to berate him, but it's clear that someone had been mischievously causing trouble between the couple, perhaps telling Marie that her husband was away with other women.

Rumours of some dissent between the couple even seem to have reached France because Duchesse Antoinette wrote to her daughter in November to say that she was relieved to hear from Mademoiselle de Curel, one of Marie's ladies in waiting who had recently returned from Scotland, that both Marie and her husband were in good health and that 'all is going better with you than we thought'. She went on to explain that she and her husband had been worried about their daughter because of disquieting rumours and that Duc Claude had been on the brink of travelling to Scotland himself to make sure all was well with her; a great sacrifice considering the fact that he was an exceedingly poor sailor. Of course Antoinette could have been referring to Marie's health, which had been unusually but understandably poor since the death of the princes that spring, but it is more likely that the gossips of French court had been whispering that the handsome young King and Queen of Scotland were experiencing some marital issues.

For the time being though, whatever Mademoiselle de Curel had to say about the couple seems to have reassured Antoinette and she was even able to imbue a cheerful note into the correspondence, asking Marie to pass on her thanks to James for the gift of a fine diamond, which she would 'treasure always for his sake' and teasing that the accompanying portrait sent with it had made her long to see him again for he was 'in truth such a handsome prince'. He was so good looking, she joked, that she herself might make her daughter jealous by falling in love with him.

had been but a small matter … to have spent a little paper and ink

upon me.’

Queen Margaret to the English diplomat Ralph Sadler, 1540

In these bitter words, Margaret Tudor summed up the resentment and rivalry between herself and her brother, Henry VIII, which had characterized their relationship since he was eleven and she thirteen years old. He had used her occasionally, when he believed she could be of help, grudgingly and without ever really acknowledging her place in the politics of the British Isles. The Queen of Scots was not impressed by Sadler’s opening gambit, that Henry had given him ‘special charge to visit and see her and also to know how she was used and how all things went there’.¹ Margaret had, though, never given up on him, despite his careless, sometimes insulting, treatment and infuriating support for her hated second husband, the earl of Angus. If she had hoped, during the period between the death of Queen Jane Seymour in 1537 and his fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves in 1540, that Henry might mellow towards her, by the time of her conversation with Ralph Sadler she was thoroughly disabused. And perhaps a part of her recognized that, however hurtful her brother’s neglect was, the quest for a suitable spouse could be all-consuming for a king. Certainly, her own son had not wasted any time looking for a new bride after the death of the delicate Queen Madeleine.

James viewed his wife’s demise as a setback rather than a tragedy. Their relationship was once viewed as a romantic love-match, the final scene of which was played out with the young queen dying in her husband’s arms. This makes great historical fiction but has no basis in fact. There was, of course, official mourning and Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount wrote a poem of twenty-nine verses lamenting Madeleine’s untimely death.

Oh death! Though thou the body may devour

Of every man, yet have thee no puissance

Of their virtue for to destroy the glory:

As shall be seen of Magdalene of France,

Somewhile our queen, whom poets shall praise

And put her in perpetual memory:

So shall her fame of thee have victory.²

Perpetual memory has not, alas, given Madeleine the victory. Her very brief time as Queen of Scots is almost forgotten now.

James’s immediate reaction was one of spiteful cruelty rather than personal sorrow, at least as regards the terrible fate of another woman. Convinced that he must demonstrate to Francis I that he was firmly in control in Scotland before he approached the French king to find a replacement for Madeleine, he executed one of the leading Scottish nobles, Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, the bastard son of the first earl of Arran, whose loyalty he had long doubted. Yet this was not enough for a man whose memory stretched back to the bitter restrictions imposed on him by the Douglas family. His resentment led to the most vicious act of his life in the death sentence by burning which he imposed on Janet Doune of Glamis, the sister of Angus. Lady Glamis, who had stayed in Scotland when her brothers went into exile, was a convenient target for all of James’s simmering hatred. She was accused of treason on the trumped-up charge of attempting to poison the king. James refused to commute her sentence and she went to the stake on Castle Hill in Edinburgh on 17 July 1537. James’s ruthlessness reminds us that he was half a Tudor, a fact that is often overlooked. Margaret’s thoughts on her erstwhile sister-in-law’s fate are unknown.

Yet despite the chagrin that Margaret could not refrain from demonstrating to Sadler, there was, in these closing years of her life, recompense. She was often at court and acknowledged that ‘she was well treated and made much of’. She also spoke highly, Sadler reported, ‘of the new queen’ and, he added dismissively, ‘with such other things of light importance’.³ Her comforts and treatment at court were not of light importance to Margaret and neither, indeed, was the new queen, Mary of Guise.

The eldest daughter of a family whose power and influence with the French crown was growing, Mary was the widowed wife of the duke of Longueville, with whom she had two sons. Despite the unpopularity of her family with the French princes of the blood – that extended family of cousins and more distant relatives that provided an almost unending prospect of heirs for the French monarchy – it was undeniable that the Guises were on the rise. No one questioned their ambition but many were doubtful of their loyalty to France. Their estates in eastern France had once been part of the Holy Roman Empire and it suited their enemies to portray them as Germanic upstarts, more Habsburg than French. The Guise were thick-skinned and determined to succeed. Disapprobation only made them stronger.

Mary’s marriage to Longueville seems to have been happy. She lived mostly at her husband’s castle in the town of Châteaudun, north-west of Orléans, on the River Loir.⁴ But in the early summer of 1537 the duke was taken ill while visiting his estates in western France and died unexpectedly. His wife gave birth to a posthumous son two months later, but the child died before Christmas. It was while she was recovering from this double loss that Mary learned that her marriage to James V had been negotiated without her knowledge and that Francis I would brook no opposition. As a female member of the aristocracy, Mary knew that her future lay in the hands of others. It was, though, still a shock. While struggling to find the dowry that James V demanded, Francis I had also to fend off the interest of none other than Henry VIII himself, who had heard good reports of Mary of Guise’s appearance and wit. The duchess had cause subsequently to be thankful that the king of France, not wanting to raise a Guise to be queen consort of England, rebuffed Henry’s enquiries into her availability.

Eventually, after the protracted financial arrangements were concluded, Mary set sail for Scotland with her sister Louise and father, Claude, having taken a tearful farewell of her surviving son, Francis, the new duke of Longueville. She feared she might never see him again but had the satisfaction of knowing that he would be brought up by her own mother on the Guises estates on the banks of the River Marne. It had been a happy childhood and she hoped his would be the same. Mary set sail from Le Havre and landed at Crail, on the coast of Fife, six days later, on 16 June 1538. There, at Balcomie Castle, James V and the leading noblemen of Scotland waited to greet her. The welcome was warm: ‘The whole lords, both spiritual and temporal, many barons, lairds and gentlemen … received the Queen’s grace with great honours and merriness, with great triumph and blitheness.’⁵ These sentiments may not have been entirely shared by Mary herself, but she was gracious enough to conceal any misgivings. After her marriage to James at the cathedral of St Andrews, Mary went on the traditional tour of her Scottish lands, as her mother-in-law, the dowager Queen Margaret, had done thirty-five years earlier.

The marriage between James V and his second wife was not one of great passion. She was handsome rather than beautiful but dignified and with presence. Though not raised to be a queen, she knew how to act like one. Like Margaret with James IV, Mary would soon have discovered, if she had not already been apprised of the fact before leaving France, that her husband had a sizeable family of children by various women. The king may not have given up his womanizing after their marriage, though there is no evidence that he had further illegitimate children. Like Margaret, Mary was required to tolerate his dalliances and turn a blind eye. In fact, the two women had more in common than either might have supposed on first meeting. They both loved Linlithgow Palace and understood the need to be visible to the Scottish people. They were conscious of the importance of appearance, of the impression of majesty that was created by a splendid wardrobe and jewels. Both found that marriage cast them adrift in a foreign land and if this might have been harder initially for the thirteen-year-old Margaret than the twenty-three-year-old Mary, Margaret had not left behind a young child and the memory of a husband she had loved. In fact, the two women got on well and Margaret was grateful for her daughter-in-law’s company and support. She was happy to play the role of queen mother. And in the spring of 1541 Margaret was able, in some part, to repay Mary when tragedy struck the Scottish royal couple.

Mary of Guise had given James V two sons, Prince James and Prince Robert, one born at St Andrews, the other at Stirling. The queen had recovered well from both births and the security of two male heirs was something that Henry VIII, whose fourth and fifth marriages were to prove so disastrous, could not match. Yet if Queen Margaret, godmother to the

elder son, took pleasure in this realization she knew better than to crow over it to her brother. Then, in May 1541, there came to London tragic news from Scotland. Both boys had died within days of each other and James and Mary were beside themselves with grief. Prince James had been not quite a year old and the details of his luxurious garments and the furnishings of his bedchamber are hauntingly reminiscent of those supplied to Margaret’s long-dead first son, another Prince James, who had succumbed at very nearly the same age. The children were buried together at the Abbey of Holyroodhouse, leaving their parents reeling. ‘The death of both the King of Scots’ sons … doth much perplex the said king and divers other nobles and councillors there’, wrote an English visitor to the Scottish court.⁶ Even allowing for a change of emphasis over the centuries, this was something of an understatement.

Margaret wrote to her brother with the sad news, explaining how she was trying to support her son and daughter-in-law in their distress. ‘It has been’, she said, ‘great displeasure for the death of the Prince and his brother and she was constantly with the king and queen to give them comfort. The letter is also interesting for the light it throws on her continued correspondence with Henry VIII. It indicates that Henry had been writing to her after her outburst to Ralph Sadler and that she was still not entirely happy about her situation. Whether this was in respect of her finances, her marital problems with Henry Stewart or her desire to see England again is not clear, but she did ask Henry not to raise anything with her son without first discussing matters with her. She was afraid a direct approach might do together for many years. And it was here, in the peaceful countryside of central Scotland, that Margaret Tudor fell ill, in mid-October, a month short of her fifty-second birthday. There is no indication that there were concerns about her health until she suffered a stroke. At first, her illness, described as ‘a palsy’, did not seem too serious and so she did not send immediately for James V. But her condition deteriorated rapidly and the king, who was at Falkland Palace in Fife, could not get to his mother in time.

On her deathbed, Margaret, perhaps confused by the effects of her illness, asked her confessor to convey to her son a plea that he show mercy to the earl of Angus and that Margaret Douglas, her daughter, might have her goods. The queen noted poignantly of young Margaret that ‘she never had nothing of her before’. James ignored both these requests, though he took care to lock up what possessions his mother had in the castle. Among the items that had long since left Queen Margaret’s possession was the beautiful Book of Hours that James IV had commissioned for their wedding. It would appear that in the year after Flodden, Margaret gave this to her sister, Mary, perhaps on the occasion of her own marriage to Louis XII of France. It appears still to have been in England in 1538, by which time all references to the pope had been erased from it. How it subsequently found its way into the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold in the mid-seventeenth century is not known. A keen bibliophile, Leopold noted in the flyleaf that it had once belonged to James IV and his consort, Margaret. From his private library it passed into the Imperial Library in Vienna and can still be seen there.

This and so much of the sumptuous lifestyle Margaret had known as James IV’s consort was now long gone. The Berwick Herald, Henry Ray, sent by Henry VIII to discover whether this sister had left a written will (she had not), noted somewhat disparagingly at the end of his report that Queen Margaret had left as ‘ready money’ only 2,500 Scottish marks, about £337,000 today. He clearly did not consider this a princely sum.⁸

It used to be thought that Margaret’s funeral was an understated affair, but though there is no surviving evidence of how the queen’s funeral was paid for, it is clear that James V and Mary of Guise, scarcely recovered from the deaths of their sons, did observe all the proprieties of royal mourning. James may have appointed his companion and servant, John Tennent, to be in charge of the funeral arrangements. Tennent had been in the king’s service since at least 1529 and had accompanied James V to France in 1536. As well as being a close confidant, Tennent would have been well placed, as pursemaster and master of the wardrobe, to organize a fitting funeral for Margaret. Both of his roles gave him access to the initial sums of money that would have been needed for the funeral trappings, the coffin and hangings. Suppliers of such goods could well have provided them on the promise of eventual payment. The Stewarts, like the Tudors, seldom settled outstanding bills quickly. It may also be that James was able

to recover his mother’s ‘unready money’, her past and due rents, from her feudal tenants more quickly than the cash-strapped Margaret had ever done. James now had more motive to do so than he had exhibited in the queen’s lifetime and while Margaret’s tenants and husbands had been brazen in their disregard for what was rightfully owed to her, ignoring the demands of a king would have been a different matter.

The exact date of Margaret’s funeral is not known. but it must have been to recover his mother’s ‘unready money’, her past and due rents, from her feudal tenants more quickly than the cash-strapped Margaret had ever done. James now had more motive to do so than he had exhibited in the queen’s lifetime and while Margaret’s tenants and husbands had been brazen in their disregard for what was rightfully owed to her, ignoring the demands of a king would have been a different matter.

The exact date of Margaret’s funeral is not known, but it must have been in early November 1541 because invitations to the queen’s ‘tyrement’ were sent on 1 November and to local lairds in the Perth area on 5 November. The ladies of the royal household came from Falkland, dressed in black cloaks made by Thomas Hannay, who had trained with the king’s tailor, Thomas Arthur. Mourning certainly continued in Holyrood into December, when the chapel there was draped with black cloth for what may have been a second, more formal type of state funeral.⁹ The king and queen continued to wear black mourning clothing until at least Christmas. Mary of Guise and her ladies were also provided with black harnesses and riding equipment, which suggests that they may have taken part in Margaret’s funeral procession. Pieced together, the surviving evidence, even if indirect, strongly indicates that the rituals surrounding the queen’s death were properly observed and that James V did, indeed, honour his mother appropriately as a Queen of Scots and the daughter of a king in her death. Given Margaret’s lifelong concern with the importance of display and ceremony it was surely what she would have wished.

The English court does not appear to have observed any mourning for Margaret’s death. Berwick Herald’s letter, though undated, indicates that he was sent into Scotland by Henry VIII before the end of October. A period of a week to ten days would have been ample time for the news to reach Henry VIII, then returning from his progress to the north of England with Queen Catherine Howard, his fifth wife. Henry’s temper, already affected by ill health, had not been improved by waiting around in York for a meeting with James V that never took place. Anglo-Scottish relations, enflamed by continued border raiding and religious tensions, were worsening rapidly, and shortly after Henry got back to London he was completely thrown by the revelation, made by a nervous Archbishop Cranmer, that his young wife had a very murky past and had been unfaithful to him. Deeply disturbed, Henry was far too preoccupied to give any consideration to a proper commemoration of his sister’s death. They had been rivals in life. Her death

prompted a mercenary interest in her financial affairs, but nothing more. Henry had, as historian Gareth Russell noted, ordered eleven days of mourning for Queen Isabella of Spain, a woman he never met, when she died in 1538. ‘For the sister he had exploited and ignored, who had been the daughter, niece and granddaughter of kings of England, the English court cannot have expressed anything but the most perfunctory mourning.’¹⁰

changes of heart along the way from the unpredictable Arran and Beaton, attempted to rescue her son from the earl’s clutches. She had left the Scottish capital when Angus’s ascendancy seemed insurmountable but she never gave up on the idea of getting her son back. Margaret knew that James V loved her and she was greatly troubled by the private letters she received from the young king imploring her to rescue him from the domination of his stepfather.² Angus kept a close watch on James V, replacing the king’s household staff, and, most notably, the affronted Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, with his own hand-picked followers, many of whom were relatives from the extensive Douglas family. Whatever he might have wanted the world, and particularly his English backers, especially the naïve Magnus, to think, the truth was that Angus held sway.

Who with his prince was more familiar,

Nor, of his grace, had more authority?

Was he not great warden and chancellor?

But Lyndsay, through the mouthpiece of James V’s pet parrot, went on, in the next two lines, to show how short-lived this supreme power was.

Yet when he stood upon the highest gre [step or tier]

Trusting nothing but perpetuity,

Was suddenly deposed from his place

Forfeit and flemit [exiled], he got none other grace.³

These lines were written in 1530, so are a contemporary judgement, admittedly from someone hostile to Angus, but there is an undeniable authenticity to them.

Nevertheless, James V, anxious and depressed by his lack of freedom, had no idea how long his captivity, as he felt it, would last. In hindsight, it is easy enough to see how Angus’s power-base, dependent almost entirely on his own family, could not last. There were many factors against him. The continuing problems on the Borders, which his English backers came to realize soon enough were beyond the earl’s capacity to handle effectively, bedevilled Anglo-Scots relations for another seventy years. Albany may not have been physically in Scotland, but he maintained an interest in the country and the possibility of his return had not entirely gone away. The duke’s support of Margaret’s divorce, which included not just appeals to the

pope but the actual financing of the process, merely added to the enmity Angus felt for him, while leaving open the possibility that his wife could still out-manoeuvre Angus, no matter how many relatives he ar high office. The justice system in Scotland was unreliable and national embarrassment. The state of the country’s finances was even more parlous. James V had been declared of age (yet again) by the June parliament of 1526, but while this hollow gesture apparently shifted financial and political control to his stepfather, its success was reliant on consistent support from England and stability in Scotland. Neither was likely. And, in the end, despite putting down a conspiracy to free the king headed by his erstwhile ally the earl of Lennox, who was murdered during a skirmish at Linlithgow, Angus was regarded with too much suspicion andfinancial and political control to his stepfather, its success was reliant on consistent support from England and stability in Scotland. Neither was likely. And, in the end, despite putting down a conspiracy to free the king headed by his erstwhile ally the earl of Lennox, who was murdered during a skirmish at Linlithgow, Angus was regarded with too much suspicion and resentment by his fellow Scottish nobles. He had failed to learn the lessons of 1514, when, so soon after his marriage to Margaret Tudor, he saw his wife deprived of the regency. Perhaps he thought his grip on power was much stronger now but he failed to take into account one crucial factor: the king was now a young man with a mind of his own. Despite Angus’s attempts to distract James V with a sumptuous wardrobe, an arsenal of kingly weapons to feed the teenager’s love of martial arts and the company of nubile young women, the king had suffered constraint and marginalization long enough.

Easter Sunday in 1528 fell on 15 April, just five days after James V’s sixteenth birthday. The Scottish chroniclers, writing years after the momentous events of that spring, claimed that the king was at his palace at Falkland in Fife, to the east of Edinburgh. While there, it is said, he planned and executed a daring escape from the Douglas stranglehold. With both Angus and his brother, George Douglas, absent temporarily, James was under the supervision of James Douglas of Parkhead, who held the office of master of the larder. Such an appointment sounds as though it might suit someone who was more interested in his stomach than the exercise of government but these sorts of posts were attractive to Douglas kin for their prestige and remuneration. If Douglas of Parkhead was in a responsible position as regards the security of the king at Falkland then what happened that Easter, according to the chroniclers, suggests that he had, indeed, been paying too much attention to the contents of the royal larder than to keeping a firm grip on the discontented boy under his control.

James announced that he intended to go out hunting early the next morning. Like all members of the ruling class, and certainly all Tudor and Stewart monarchs, hunting was one of his major pastimes. His mother was very competent with a bow and arrow in her youth and was clearly a proficient horsewoman. James V had hunting and equestrian skills in his blood. His request, even involving an early start at seven o’clock in the morning, must not have seemed remarkable to James Douglas. As the story goes, the king plied him with wine and advised him to get an early night; the unsuspecting Douglas complied. When he eventually awoke, it was to find James gone. The king had escaped under cover of darkness, donning the clothes of a yeoman of the stable, and ridden hard for Stirling Castle with just two servants. His arrival was warmly greeted by Margaret and her new husband, who promptly raised the drawbridge to keep out anyone who might demand James’s return. When Angus and his brother and kinsmen approached Stirling to try to retrieve the king, they were greeted by a herald bearing a proclamation forbidding them to come within seven miles of James V’s person. This they might have ignored if they had sufficient political backing but it soon became obvious they did not. Almost all the lords of Scotland who were not directly related to them had gone over to the king and his mother. Moray, of course, was chief among them but now he was joined by a formidable array of men who had vacillated since Margaret lost her second regency. Arran was among their number, as were Argyll. Eglinton, Bothwell, Rothes and Montrose. Maxwell had been br into the fold, as had the Douglases’ great rivals in the Borders, watchful Homes. Faced with such overwhelming opposition, Angus and his supporters retreated to Tantallon Castle, whose impregnable position made it all but impossible to be taken by attacking forces. Free at last, James V named Gavin Dunbar as his chancellor and elevated Henry Stewart, his new stepfather, to the title of Lord Methven.

As told by the chroniclers and seventeenth-century historians of Scotland, this is a rousing tale, but it has gained a lot in the telling. The sequence of events, in particular, is unclear and may well have happened possibility of any reconciliation with Angus or his Douglas affinity completely gone. James needed his mother’s support if he was going to escape once and for all from Angus and it was clear to him that possession of Stirling Castle would be vital to his success. James witnessed a Great Seal Charter at Stirling on 9 May, and though it is not certain that Angus was with him at this time, it seems unlikely that he would have allowed the boy to carry out one of the key functions of monarchy at Margaret’s dower castle without his presence. Margaret’s own whereabouts at the time are unclear.⁴ Nor can we be certain of precisely when she agreed to hand over control of Stirling to her son, a price she was willing to pay to ensure that this time he would succeed in throwing off the Douglas yoke and which was balanced by the ennoblement of her new husband. In an undated missive which she entrusted a messenger to pass on to the earl of Northumberland for transmission to her brother, Margaret wrote that her son had ridden ‘privily’ with five or six horsemen from Edinburgh (not, one should note, Falkland) to Stirling, where he had consulted with a number of lords, including Arran and Argyll. She ends with the cryptic note that ‘a change is expected’. The most probable dates for James V’s escape from Angus’s control are that it took place between 31 May and 19 June, when a proclamation was issued commanding the Douglases not to come within seven miles of the king’s person and to stay away from Stirling altogether. But though the Douglases were able to raise a force with the intention of removing James from Stirling, this enterprise did not succeed. James had definitely returned to Edinburgh by 6 July, when he revealed the names of his new councillors, who were ‘to remain ever with the king’s grace … for the direction of all matters that shall happen to occur concerning his grace’s realm’.⁵ There was, however, one significant omission from the list: Margaret was not among them.This does not mean that James V’s relationship with his mother had suffered a sudden collapse, or that she was to play no further political role. Yet a change had definitely taken place. The assumption of authority by the sixteen-year-old king was something he evidently felt passionately about. Free at last, though obviously still advised by an influential and experienced

group of men, he was determined that the world should see him as his own man, a king who ruled with good counsel but was not the darling of his mother or the puppet of an ambitious stepfather. His freedom from Angus also meant distancing himself from Margaret. Though it may be an exaggeration to say that the price of the king’s acceptance of Margaret’s third marriage and the elevation of her husband was the diminution of her role in public life, she had to accept that her relationship with her son was changing. James V’s priority in 1528 was to be rid permanently of Angus and the Douglases while pursuing the long-awaited peace treaty with England. This was finally achieved in December 1528, a positive note at the end of a momentous year for James V and Margaret. The timid Magnus, almost a permanent fixture in Scotland now, had changed his tune during the autumn. He came round to the view that the English government’s support of Angus had perhaps not been such a good idea after all and An was forced into exile just before the treaty was signed. He ha quietly, remaining in Tantallon for as long as possible and causing the Borders even after he had crossed into England, which displeased James V greatly and clearly embarrassed Magnus when he conveyed an account of Angus’s misdeeds to London in February 1529.⁶ The earl was still too close to Scotland for comfort and James complained vehemently about his activities. Magnus was forced to acknowledge to Henry VIII that his own journey south from Edinburgh had been perilous because of unrest and violence in the Borders. He certainly came round to the belief that his masters had backed the wrong horse, even if they were unwilling toV greatly and clearly embarrassed Magnus when he conveyed an account of Angus’s misdeeds to London in February 1529.⁶ The earl was still too close to Scotland for comfort and James complained vehemently about his activities. Magnus was forced to acknowledge to Henry VIII that his own journey south from Edinburgh had been perilous because of unrest and violence in the Borders. He certainly came round to the belief that his masters had backed the wrong horse, even if they were unwilling to acknowledge this truth themselves.

James wrote to his uncle about the troublesome earl, noting that he had offered him a pardon but this had been refused. He was, he said, convinced that Angus intended to cause a rupture between the two realms.⁷ He assured his uncle that he would never follow such a course himself, since this would be to his own destruction. Yet he began almost at once to restore Scotland’s relations with France, a move that displeased his mother and was further evidence that he was determined to direct affairs of state himself.

Margaret was relieved by Angus’s ignominious departure but concerned for the fate of her daughter. Lady Margaret Douglas remained in Berwick-upon-Tweed for a year in a state of uncertainty, in the household of Sir Thomas Strangeways, where Angus had lodged her for safe-keeping. He failed to provide much financial support for his daughter and Strangeways

ran up considerable debts in keeping the girl in the manner to which she was accustomed. There are hints that Queen Margaret might have tried to get her daughter back, as the English reports at the time refer to Angus’s concern for Margaret Douglas’s security.⁸ The girl remained in Berwick for a year until she received the long-awaited summons to travel south to the court of her uncle in London. She may, however, have stayed initially with her aunt, Mary Tudor Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, at Westhorpe, before being summoned to join the household of her cousin Princess Mary, as chief lady of the princess’s privy chamber, at the end of 1530.