An Accidental Tragedy Read online

  The raiders entered England and burnt property belonging to the Grahams, but achieved nothing except to warn the English that a Scots army was nearby. The English deputy warden of the West March caught up with the Scots who were re-crossing the River Esk on their way home. With ‘spears of the borders to prick at them [he] set upon their hinder ends and struck down many’. The Scots were then trapped by the rapidly rising tide in the Solway Estuary and the retreat turned into a total shambles. The incoming tide drowned many, while others were trapped in the marshes of Solway Moss or simply surrendered to whoever they could find to prevent their certain slaughter. One sorry remnant was overtaken in Liddesdale and sent home barefoot, clad only in their shirts. In the bitter November weather few survived. The English pursuit continued until 12 December, being now justified as retribution for a cattle raid. Their haul, apart from prisoners, amounted to 1,018 cattle, 4,240 sheep and 400 horses.

  It was when James realised the extent of the losses that he fell into a deep depression and turned north, accompanied by only his personal retinue. There are reports that he first travelled to Tantallon Castle on the south-eastern coast of the River Forth to say farewell to his mistress, who was being cared for by the wife of Oliver Sinclair, but he certainly rode to Edinburgh and put some of his personal affairs in order before visiting his wife, Marie, awaiting the birth in Linlithgow.

  The Palace of Linlithgow, technically the private property of the queen, was lavishly furnished in the latest French style; warm fires, rich tapestries and all the comforts that a Renaissance prince might expect welcomed James as he rode through his new southern gatehouse, itself modelled on that at Vincennes, outside Paris. Frozen, but still impressive, there was an elaborate fountain in the courtyard, covered in splendid carvings of mermaids, minstrels and heraldic beasts in the contemporary French style and built by James to please his queen. But James’s depression was severe, and none of the luxuries held any further interest for him. He spent two days with his pregnant wife, during which her ladies tried to prevent his gloom from distressing her, before saying goodbye and riding to his hunting lodge at Falkland in Fife.

  In happier times Linlithgow Palace had been a particular project for James and Marie, and together they had closely supervised its building and decoration. As the king rode into the new palace on this occasion, these were only distant memories since, back in Edinburgh following the calamity at Solway Moss, he had prophesied that he would be dead in fifteen days. His domestic servants, anxious to make arrangements, asked him where he would hold his Christmas court and were told, ‘I cannot tell, choose ye the place. But this I can tell you, on Yule day you will be masterless and the realm without a king.’ He retired to his chamber at Falkland, inconsolable as the detail of his losses at Solway Moss bore in on him.

  Although few men had been killed, a large number of the nobility had been taken prisoner and their ransom would cost James large amounts of money that he did not have. He was crying out, ‘Is Oliver taken? Oh! Fled Oliver!’ to the distress of his servants. At the age of thirty, James Stewart was undergoing a total collapse under the stresses of kingship. Mourning the loss of the men he had led into a foolish encounter was the final torment and he was dying of grief for his shortcomings as a ruler. The chronicler Lindsay of Pitscottie says that he was ‘near strangled to death’ by the extreme melancholy.

  This latest news of his daughter’s birth was not received with any happiness by James who, according to legend, said, ‘It cam wi’ a lass and it’ll gang wi’ a lass,’ before turning his face away from his attendants to await his death.

  This prophecy, if that is what it was, is difficult to interpret. The Stewart dynasty was certainly founded ‘by a lass’ when Marjory Bruce, the daughter of the victor of Bannockburn, married Walter the Steward, and David II’s crown descended to their son, Robert the Steward. Stewart rule did finally end in 1714 with the death of the childless Queen Anne, but it is unlikely that James was so farseeing. It is far more probable that he meant that the king felt that it would be impossible for the factious and troublesome kingdom of Scotland to be ruled by a queen alone.

  The queen-to-be who would undertake this task was, as yet, only two days old, and a close watch was being kept on her during her first dangerous days of life; it was a time when infant mortality was high and, as her mother knew all too well, certainly no respecter of royalty. The practice, at least in France, was to have a priest attend the delivery so that, as soon as the cord was cut, the child could be baptised, but there is no evidence that this was done in Mary’s case. Under the supervision of one Janet Sinclair, a team of nurses kept constant watch over the royal baby, who, at this moment, only knew that she was hungry and was yelling loudly in the first of many celebrated royal tantrums. She was immediately taken from her cradle and given to a wet nurse to be fed. This lady had been chosen with care, having nursed several babies, some even her own, to a healthy infancy. Royal or noble ladies did not nurse their own children since the sooner their lactation ceased, the sooner they would be fertile again and ready to fulfil their raison d’être – like the prized mares and pedigree bitches in the stables and kennels – to continue the bloodline.

  Marie knew that her marriage to James V had been entirely political and expedient. Henry VIII’s Reformation and Dissolution of the Monasteries had been about to engulf Scotland, and to stem this heretical tide James sought an alliance with France. Thus, on 1 January 1537 François I of France gave his twenty-year-old daughter Madeleine to be James’s queen in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. James returned to Scotland, happy that he had forged a bond of Catholicism with Henry’s greatest enemy. He received a dowry of 100,000 livres and an annual payment of 125,000 livres, always a welcome increase to the treasury of a comparatively poor Scottish king. The marriage was also, extraordinarily, a love match. James had been in negotiation for the hand of Marie de Vendôme, but, on seeing the beauty of Madeleine, switched his suit. Unfortunately, the fragile Madeleine died of influenza within two months of arriving in Scotland, but, nothing daunted, James returned to France. This time he was engaged to Marie de Guise et Lorraine, daughter of two of the most dominant people in France. Her father was Claude, Duc de Guise, and her mother was Antoinette de Bourbon, a terrifying virago, a glance from whom was said to frighten even the king. Marie had previously been married to the Duc de Longueville, but was widowed at the age of twenty-two, with one surviving son, François, now the young duke in his father’s place.

  Marie had none of the fragility of Madeleine but was tall, high-busted and striking. Any sixteenth-century suitor could see that she would breed healthy children. Henry VIII had proposed marriage to her after Jane Seymour died giving birth to Prince Edward, but Marie replied that while her figure was big, her neck was small and she would rather not. François I – always keen to provoke Henry VIII – agreed a suitable second dowry for her wedding to James and the marriage was performed with Lord Maxwell standing proxy for James. On 18 May 1538, in the presence of the French royal court, Lord Maxwell placed his leg beside Marie in her bed and the marriage was deemed to have been consummated. In June she came to Scotland where James and she remarried in the cathedral of St Andrews before setting out on a triumphal tour. She duly praised the elegance and civilisation of Scotland, and, although she knew that James was still visiting a mistress at Tantallon Castle, she behaved as a dutiful daughter of the House of Guise and smiled graciously at everyone she met. She started to learn Scots, at which she became proficient, but sent homesick letters to her mother and to François. He wanted to see his mother again but did not want to visit Scotland so, touchingly, he sent her a piece of string knotted to show how tall he was growing. Like all grandmothers-to-be, Antoinette, Marie’s mother, sent copious amounts of gossip and advice to her daughter, especially in her time of pregnancy. She was to consult only French doctors. ‘The Queen will only be well if she washes her hair at least once a month or cuts her hair short, for her greasy hair makes her catch cold.
She must not let herself be bled.’

  Then, when she had delivered two princes and was at last crowned queen and felt that she could relax her diplomatic adoration of all things Scottish, she had craftsmen, luxuries and even seedling trees sent from France. There was always a highly practical side to Marie’s nature and she put her own comforts high on her list, resulting in strong French Renaissance influences in the royal court. But now, only four years after her marriage, with both her princes tragically dead, she was about to become a widow.

  James V finally departed this life at midnight on 14 December 1542, and immediately the rumour mill started to turn. The king had been poisoned; he had been smothered with his pillow by fanatical churchmen or equally fanatical heretics – all the usual hysteria flowed in abundance, since the truth was too banal. The king had suffered vomiting and diarrhoea, had previously contracted venereal disease, was prone to the unspecified fevers that abounded at the time and was in a state of deep depression, having lost his favourite, Oliver Sinclair, and invoked the wrath of his belligerent neighbour, Henry Tudor. In legend he is thought to have died of grief, but today we would give his probable cause of death as dysentery. John Knox said, ‘All men lamented that the realm was left without a male to succeed.’ The ruler of Scotland was now a six-day-old girl.

  The news that reached England was, firstly, that the child was very weak and then, on the same day, that the child was dead. English courtiers were wise always to give Henry good news while they worked out how to give him any unwelcome tidings and it was not until after James’s death that Henry was told that Mary was alive and healthy. The ripples of bad news were enthusiastically spreading, and by Christmas the reports reaching far-off Hungary were that both mother and child were at death’s door.

  In fact they were far from it, and as soon as Janet Sinclair thought the weather was dry enough and Queen Marie fit enough, the baby was wrapped in warm blankets and carried the few hundred yards to St Michael’s Church, where she was baptised at the font wrapped in a chrisom, or christening robe, of white taffeta, as a symbol of her innocence. If Mary died within a month of her birth then the chrisom would be used as a shroud. She was then carried to the high altar, at which she was confirmed as a member of the Roman Catholic faith. The christening party then returned to the palace for celebrations, albeit muted ones as the court was in official mourning.

  Henry Tudor, as Mary’s great-uncle, was also respectfully observing this period of mourning. The temptation for the ageing king must have been great. After the debacle of Solway Moss, Scotland was leaderless, many of its nobility were in English prisons and the country was in disarray. But John Lisle, who was gathering an army for Henry in the north-east of England, wrote, ‘seeing that God hath thus disposed his will of the said King of Scots, [we] thought it should not be to your Majesty’s honour that we your soldiers should make war or invade on a dead body or upon a widow, or on a young suckling his daughter.’ Scotland was ripe for Henry to pluck, but his agile brain saw that with tact and diplomacy he might bring Scotland under Tudor rule peaceably and, what was always a consideration for the Tudors, cheaply.

  Gaining the subservience of his northern neighbour had been a lifetime ambition of Henry’s, and he had attempted to negotiate with James V earlier in the year. It was when James simply failed to appear at a conference at York to discuss this that Henry, infuriated, sent a punitive raiding party north. The Scots’ successful repulse of this raid at Haddonrigg had encouraged James to make the disastrous foray in response at Solway Moss, leaving Scotland open to swift retribution.

  Now a girl had succeeded to the crown, and girls, once married, were subservient to their husbands. Henry had a five-year-old son, Edward, who could grow into a usefully dynastic husband, so he decided, for the moment, to wait.

  The Scots now faced another long period of regency with an infant monarch. This was not new, and the tale of kingship and regency under the James Stewarts is a sorry one, but briefly told. James I became king at the age of twelve, but was a prisoner of the English until he was thirty and later stabbed to death in a palace privy by his nobles when he was forty-three. His son James II was aged six when his father was murdered, but he reigned until his thirtieth year (1460) when a cannon he was inspecting blew up, leaving a nine-year-old James III to rule. At the age of thirty-seven he was running from the Battle of Sauchieburn when his nobles caught up with him and killed him on the spot. Their feeble comment upon this murder was that ‘the king happened to be slain’. His son, James IV, was then fifteen and had been involved in the revolt against his father, for which act he did penance by wearing an iron belt next to his skin for the rest of his life. He did preside successfully over an energetic Scottish Renaissance court until his death at the folly-driven slaughter at Flodden put his son, James V, on the throne at the age of eighteen months. Mary was the youngest monarch to wear the crown, but she was far from the first child to succeed to the throne.

  The effects of these recurrent crises were twofold. Firstly, the nobility had become accustomed to existing without an effective sovereign. The system of feudal government with all power and land tenure descending from a king had been established with great care by the Normans but now had become fragile. Swearing fealty to a sovereign lord for the land you had personally taken by the sword became farcical when that sovereign lord was still in a cradle or, at best, a fresh-faced boy of fifteen. In the cases of two of the royal successions, the very lords who were swearing fealty had been party to the death of the new king’s father. Knees were dutifully bent and heads were bowed but the reality was very different. Scotland was a loose and occasionally uneasy federation of lordships held together in a governing council only by family ties and the overwhelming need for peace. The crown had the ultimate control of the law, but in his own lands the lord had total personal power of ‘pit and gallows’. These lords were not the ignorant thugs they are often thought to be: for the most part they had been given a classical education, spoke Latin and French with ease and had travelled widely. Many had seen the European Renaissance and had brought aspects of it back to their own castles. Though still ready with a sword, they were sophisticated and cultured men in a comparatively prosperous country. Their tenants were no worse off than the inhabitants of Gascony, Piedmont or Extremadura, and they shared the hardships of life common to all peasants in the sixteenth century. King James V himself ‘plenished the country with all kinds of craftsmen out of other countries’ and even maintained a ‘Keeper of the Royal Parrots’ among his numerous courtiers.

  The second result of the loss of power at the centre was that the only unity of purpose evident among the nobility was represented by their occasional combining under the king to thwart any invasion by England, and any royal campaign to cross the border and invade England was undertaken reluctantly. The motive to defend the realm was often superseded by the thought of booty, and when that became difficult the wish to return north became paramount. The last Stewart to learn this bitter lesson was Charles Edward Stewart in 1746.

  Obviously, to prevent a state of near anarchy it was imperative that a regent, or governor, was appointed as soon as possible. He would take over the palaces and treasure of the king and receive the income from his estates until the new sovereign took power for herself; the governor would also be the most influential man in the kingdom. Immediately, David Beaton, Cardinal-Archbishop of St Andrews, stepped into the gap. He was fifty years old, an experienced diplomat and a dedicated Catholic – in spite of numerous mistresses and illegitimate offspring. He was a supporter of a Franco-Scottish alliance and a bitter opponent of Henry VIII’s reformation of the English Church. He now presented Scotland with what he claimed to be the late king’s will, passing power to a committee of four governors – the earls of Huntly, Moray, Argyll and Arran – with himself as chief of the council and ‘tutor testamentary’ to the princess whom he memorably described as a ‘skittering [inconsequential] lass’. Since the will was detailed in its instruction
s for the education of a princess, James must have written it in the four days between 10 and 14 December, while he was dying. But he was unconscious for most of the time and lucid for none of it; he called for no secretaries, gave no instructions and apparently died intestate. The king had died in Beaton’s arms and the cardinal was rumoured to have gained the royal signature to a blank document which he afterwards completed as the king’s will. It was all very neat. Beaton’s ‘will’ was clearly an opportunistic forgery made with the help of one Henry Balfour, and it was immediately challenged by the Earl of Arran.

  James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, had, in fact, an extremely close hereditary claim to the throne himself. His grandfather had married Mary Stewart, the sister of James III, and so James had royal Stewart blood in his veins. However, his grandfather may not have been free to marry Mary since his dubious divorce from his previous wife was tacitly accepted without any solid proof. Arran could, therefore, have been the son of a bastard. An undoubtedly legitimate descendant was the Earl of Lennox, but his claim came entirely from the female line and thus was weaker. It was from this line that Henry Darnley sprang. But if the child Mary should die – always a strong possibility – then Arran could claim the crown for himself.

  Arran was, however, one of the most incompetent and vacillating men ever to draw hesitant breath in Scotland. Every move he made was for his own personal gain and advancement, but he lacked the wit or constancy to determine where that gain might lie or how to pursue it. He allied himself at first with Marie de Guise and Catholic France, then changed sides to join John Knox and the Reformation. He made very sure, however, that by January 1542 he was confirmed in the office of governor, where his first act was to appoint Cardinal Beaton as chancellor. Then, with a volte-face which would come to typify the man, he threw the cardinal into prison. He was highly relieved when Henry released the noblemen captured at Solway Moss without asking for any ransom, but it never occurred to him to question this apparent generosity.