Lady Margaret Douglas, a favourite of Henry VIII,
negotiated the shady politics and shifting alliances of the courts of
four Tudor monarchs. Leanda de Lisle tells the story of the ‘progenitor
of princes’, whose grandson, James VI of Scotland, became the first
Stuart king of England.
Painting of Lady Margaret Douglas from 1560-1565. Unknown author.Henry
VIII ordered a dress from his Great Wardrobe for ‘our niece’, Lady
Margaret Douglas, to welcome her arrival at court in April 1530. The
14-year-old princess was destined to be a player in key events over four
Tudor reigns. Her youthful romances would see her caught up in the fall
of two of Henry’s queens, she would be arrested at least four times,
imprisoned in the Tower twice and plot – ultimately successfully – for
her heirs to inherit Elizabeth I’s throne. In Margaret’s will of 1578
she still remembered her uncle fondly, listing a picture of Henry among
her treasured possessions. Yet her dramatic life story and dynastic
significance has been obscured by the story of a quarrel between them
that never was.Margaret Douglas was the child of Henry’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor (1489-1541), Queen of Scots by her second husband Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. As such she was third in line to the English throne in 1530, following her elder half-brother, the 16-year-old James V of Scots, and Henry’s daughter, Mary Tudor, who was four months her junior. Her parents’ unhappy marriage had been annulled in 1527. The following year her father sought to flee his step-son, who hated him. Archibald had kidnapped Margaret and sent her to Henry as a goodwill gesture, hoping to gain free passage to England in return.
Henry ignored her mother’s pleas for Margaret to be returned home. She was too valuable a commodity on the international marriage market to let go. Nevertheless, for 18 months Margaret was left in the north of England, while Henry focused on his pursuit of a papal annulment of his own marriage to Katherine of Aragon. His hopes of being freed to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn, had all but drained away when he, at last, sent for his niece. She found Henry living alongside a ‘somewhat stout’ Katherine, as well as the hot-tempered Anne, in what David Starkey has characterised as a virtual ménage à trois.
Henry left Katherine for good in the summer of 1531, while Margaret was sent to join her cousin Mary’s household as her principle lady-in-waiting. She was to stay at Mary’s side during one of the most traumatic periods of the princess’s life: the break with Rome, Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the birth of Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, and Henry’s decision to have Mary declared a bastard. With Mary’s household dispersed in 1534, Margaret was then transferred to Anne Boleyn’s privy chamber.
The now 18-year-old Margaret, described by foreign ambassadors as beautiful, was highly esteemed. Despite her closeness to Mary she made friends with a group of talented young courtiers related to Anne and who together contributed to the collection of poetry known as the Devonshire Manuscript. Among these friends was the 23-year-old Lord Thomas Howard, a younger brother of Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. He and Margaret fell in love and, at first, Henry seemed to encourage the couple, but they kept secret their betrothal at Easter 1536.
The atmosphere at court was tense. Henry had married Anne in the expectation of her delivering male heirs, but the birth of Elizabeth in 1533 was followed by a number of miscarriages, the most recent that January. He had begun flirting with one of Anne’s ladies in waiting, Jane Seymour, and Anne was quarrelling with the king’s chief minister and vicar-general, Thomas Cromwell. On May Day 1536 Anne was suddenly arrested, accused of adultery with several men, including her own brother, and of plotting the king’s death. By the end of the month she was dead, beheaded for treason.
Sent to the Tower
Henry promptly married Jane Seymour, with Margaret obliged to attend on the bride at the wedding. But these shocking events had a still more personal impact. Anne’s daughter Elizabeth was bastardised, leaving Margaret and her brother James V as Henry’s senior heirs in blood. As Henry had no legitimate heirs they were also a potential alternative focus of loyalty. To counter this a new Act of Succession was drawn up, giving Henry the right to appoint his heirs, even, if he wished, his illegitimate children over his legitimate nephew and niece. Henry’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, stood to be the principle beneficiary, since of the king’s children he, at least, was male.At the same time as it emerged that Fitzroy was terminally ill with ‘a rapid consumption’, Henry learned of Margaret Douglas’s betrothal to Thomas Howard. His bastardised daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, made far weaker claimants than Margaret, who was legitimate and now connected to the powerful Howard family. Henry had the couple sent to the Tower.
On July 18th a Bill of Attainder proclaimed that Thomas Howard, having been ‘led and seduced by the devil’, had ‘traitorously contracted himself by crafty, fair and flattering words to the Lady Margaret Douglas’. His object was to to usurp the throne, believing that people would prefer the English-born Margaret to the foreign King of Scots, ‘to whom this Realm has, nor ever had, any affection’.
On July 23rd it was reported that Thomas Howard had been condemned to death for treason and that Margaret was spared only because the marriage had not been consummated. There was, in fact, a further reason. The annulment of the marriage of Margaret’s parents’ had left her legitimacy intact. The attainder nevertheless referred on several occasions to Margaret Douglas as being her mother’s ‘natural [i.e. illegitimate] daughter’. This was a clear attempt to demote her in the succession and ensure Henry’s children had the superior claim.
Margaret believed that Thomas Cromwell had also helped to save her life and she took his advice in pretending she had no further interest in Howard. The king’s anxieties were further reduced after Jane Seymour bore a son, Edward, on October 12th, 1537. Margaret (by then imprisoned at Syon Abbey in Middlesex) was released early in November, only to learn that Thomas Howard had died in the Tower of ‘an ague’. She took the news ‘very heavily’ and it would be four years before Margaret risked her heart again.
Henry was married to his fifth wife, Katherine Howard in 1540, when Margaret formed an attachment to the new queen’s brother, Charles. Unfortunately for Margaret – and still more so for the doomed Katherine – it emerged in November 1541 that the queen had been unchaste before her marriage and was conducting a relationship with a gentleman of the privy chamber, Thomas Culpepper. As the investigations uncovered Margaret’s latest romance she was delivered a chilling warning. She had ‘demeaned herself towards His Majesty, first with Lord Thomas Howard and second with Charles Howard’, to whom she had shown ‘overmuch lightness’. She was advised: ‘beware the third time’.
Following Katherine Howard’s beheading Margaret was careful not to risk any further unauthorised love affairs and when she did marry it was at Henry’s arrangement. In 1543 he was hoping to build up a body of support in Scotland for a marriage between James V’s infant daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Edward, his son. Margaret was a pawn in these plans, with Henry offering her as a bride to Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, who led a pro-English Scots party. Happily, Margaret was delighted with Lennox, ‘a strong man of personage well shaped’, who ‘was most pleasant for a lady’. Lennox was equally enamoured of Margaret and their marriage of 1544 proved a happy one.
Margaret was not mentioned in the Third Act of Succession, which had been given the royal assent that spring. Having named Mary and Elizabeth as Edward’s heirs, the Act merely promised that Elizabeth’s heirs would be named later in letters patent. The king remained anxious to protect his children from rival claimants, but on a personal level Henry was fond of Margaret. He wrote to her from Calais that September, sending the new bride his special ‘recommendations’.
Margaret’s biographers tell us that, nevertheless, in 1546 she quarrelled with Henry so bitterly over religion, that, when the dying king named the long stop heirs to Elizabeth that winter, she was denied her rightful place in the line of succession, along with James V’s daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots. This supposed quarrel has helped diminish Margaret’s significance in Tudor and Stuart hist-ory, with the impression given that she was a woman of poor judgement and one who lacked political importance thereafter. This is far from the truth.
A tangled web
The Lennox payments that year to chantry priests, who prayed for souls in purgatory, does indicate religious conservatism, but Henry’s will also asked for masses to be said for his soul. The only evidence for Margaret’s quarrel lies in a source that postdates Henry’s death in 1547 by 15 years, but it remains important because, 450 years later, the mud thrown at Margaret still sticks.By this time, early in the reign of Elizabeth I, Margaret was 46 and the birth of eight children had taken its toll. But she had done well in negotiating the lethal riptides of the contrasting courts of Edward VI and Mary I, as well as being deeply involved in Scottish affairs, promoting her claims as her father’s heir. Indeed Margaret had matured into a political operator to match her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509), who had helped plot her son Henry VII’s rise to the throne.
In 1561 Elizabeth invited Margaret to court to celebrate the Christmas season and in order to keep an eye on her cousin. The queen had discovered Margaret was plotting to marry off her eldest son, Henry, Lord Darnley, to Mary, Queen of Scots. Under the terms of Henry VIII’s will Elizabeth’s heir was her Protestant cousin, Lady Katherine Grey, granddaughter of Henry’s younger sister, Mary, the French Queen. But some considered this unsigned document invalid, even forged, making Mary, Queen of Scots Elizabeth’s heir, as the senior in blood. If she were to be married to Darnley his English birth, combined with his Tudor blood, would greatly strengthen her claim.
A nervous Margaret insisted to the Spanish ambassador, Alavarez de Quadra, that securing the succession for Mary, Queen of Scots was her duty, for it would protect England from a civil war on Elizabeth’s death. But as the ambassador noted, Elizabeth based ‘her security on there being no certain successor should the people tire of her rule’. Margaret was in danger of being returned to the Tower and her fears of this grew when she spotted an agent of a sacked Lennox servant called Thomas Bishop skulking at court.
Margaret and Lennox suspected Bishop was feeding information against them to Elizabeth’s secretary of state, William Cecil. In response they launched a pre-emptive attack on Bishop’s reputation. They described how he had come to work for Lennox while their marriage was being arranged in 1543. Henry VIII had rewarded Bishop for his good service to Lennox, but, they claimed, the king later regretted this, ‘understanding that [Bishop] went about to set dissension between the said Earl and his lady’ and that Bishop had proved a coward, a sexual reprobate and a thief.
It is Bishop’s reply to the Lennox attack that is quoted by historians as evidence of Margaret’s fatal quarrel with Henry. In a long memorandum Bishop focuses his attention on her, describing his work for Elizabeth’s predecessors in the face of Margaret’s enmity, and his rewards. In particular he refers to the land grants Henry gave him in October 1546, ‘a little afore his death and after the breach with my lady Lennox’. Bishop does not say what her argument with Henry was about, but in the previously overlooked manuscript, Cotton Caligula B VIII (folios 165-168), Bishop clarifies matters.
He claims that Margaret had wanted him sacked in the 1540s, ‘seeking the rule of her husband’, and that Henry VIII was so angry about her false accusations against Bishop that ‘she ever after lost a part of [the King’s] heart, as appeared at his death’. In other words, Henry VIII demoted Margaret in line of succession because she was rude about Thomas Bishop.
Henry VIII evidently did value Bishop’s services, but the king had named the Grey sisters as Elizabeth’s heirs because, as unmarried females and minors with only a distant claim under common law, they had posed far less of a threat to his children than either Mary, Queen of Scots, or Margaret, who, alone among his sisters’ children, had a growing son.
Nowhere else is it suggested that Margaret quarrelled with Henry over religion and Bishop’s claim that there was a quarrel does not appear to have been taken seriously. But he had other accusations to make and by April 2nd, 1561 Margaret was imprisoned at the former Carthusian Abbey of Sheen, while Lennox was in the Tower.
In May Margaret’s interrogators complained that she was being extremely obstinate in her replies to charges that included treason in the recent war in Scotland and secret communications with a foreign monarch (Mary, Queen of Scots), as well as the French and Spanish ambassadors. There were also said to be ‘proofs’ that Margaret did ‘not love the Queen’. Bishop claimed Margaret had persuaded Mary Tudor to imprison Elizabeth in the Tower in 1554 – which was believable, as Mary Tudor had wanted to leave Margaret the throne, which proved impossible. Other servants confessed that Margaret often referred to Elizabeth as a bastard. They further described how her fool would roundly mock Elizabeth and her favourite, Robert Dudley, whose wife, Amy Robsart, had been found at the bottom of a flight of stairs in 1560 with a broken neck. Their servants said Margaret called Dudley ‘a pox-ridden wife-murderer’.
There was even an attempt to accuse Margaret of planning to kill the queen with witchcraft, a smear Cecil had used successfully against several Catholics the previous year. Margaret often heard Mass said ‘by one little Sir William’ and it was being alleged that she was in contact with ‘witches and soothsayers’, even that she had conjured the lightning that had burned down the steeple of St Paul’s in 1561 on the feast of Corpus Christi.
Tamed ambition
It was to be Cecil’s life’s work to prevent any Catholic inheriting Elizabeth’s throne and it is this Elizabethan antagonism to Margaret’s post-Marian Catholicism that has been read into her relationship with Henry VIII. It is the kind of anachronism we see time and again in Tudor history, with later anti-Catholic attitudes projected into the past.Meanwhile, with fear of witchcraft being stoked in Parliament, where MPs were making it an offence in common law, Cecil had been busy seeking information in Scotland to ‘prove’ Margaret illegitimate. This concerned Margaret still more than the wild claims of treason and occult practices, which Lennox characterised as the lies of ‘exploiters, hired men and other fantastical persons’. When Margaret learned that Bishop had described her ‘a mere bastard’, she fired off a furious missive, reminding Cecil: ‘Even as God hath made me, I am lawful daughter to the Queen of Scots [Margaret Tudor] and the Earl of Angus which none alive is able to make me other.’
In the end Elizabeth chose to leave Margaret’s life unharmed and her legitimacy intact. Margaret’s royal claims remained a useful counterbalance to those of the Protestant Katherine Grey. In February 1563, with Elizabeth believing Margaret’s ambitions had been tamed by her imprisonment, Margaret and Lennox were freed. Margaret even became godmother to Cecil’s baby daughter, Elizabeth, in 1564. But behind the scenes she continued to seek support for her son’s marriage.
Eventually Margaret’s allies helped convince the queen to grant Darnley a passport to Scotland and in April 1565 a horrified Elizabeth realised his marriage to the Queen of Scots might actually go ahead. It was in a failed effort to prevent it that Margaret was, at last, returned to the Tower. For nearly two years following Darnley’s proclamation as King of Scots Margaret remained imprisoned, with disastrous consequences for mother and son.
The new Spanish ambassador, Diego Guzman de Silva, believed that if Margaret had been in Scotland her good counsel would have prevented the breakdown of Darnley’s marriage and his involvement in the killing of his wife’s principle servant, David Riccio, in 1566. As it was, Darnley’s misjudgements paved the way for his murder in Edinburgh in 1567.
When Margaret was given news of Darnley’s death, she collapsed in ‘such passion of mind’ it was feared she might die of grief. To ease her suffering Elizabeth had her moved out of the Tower and by the time Mary, Queen of Scots was overthrown in Scotland and fled to England in 1568, Margaret was free again. It was the safety of her infant grandson, James VI, that now most concerned her.
Although James is known as a ‘Stuart’, using the French spelling of ‘Stewart’ favoured by his mother, the dynasty takes its name from the paternal line represented by Margaret’s son, Darnley; it was a line she was determined to protect. In 1570 Margaret persuaded Elizabeth to accept Lennox as James’ regent in Scotland while she remained in England as his ambassador at court. The couple kept in close touch, with Lennox relying on his ‘Good Meg’ for her advice until he was shot in 1571, during a raid on Stirling made by supporters of the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots. His last act was to send his love to his wife.
Turning enemies into allies
Of her eight children Margaret was now left with one surviving son, Charles. Despite Elizabeth’s virulent opposition to his marrying anyone, Margaret arranged a match to a daughter of the courtier Bess of Hardwick in 1574. Since this non-royal, non-noble marriage did not pose a threat to the queen, Margaret was punished only with a spell of house arrest. Charles died of an unknown illness in 1576 but he left a young daughter, Arbella, to comfort Margaret in her last years.A portrait Margaret had commissioned of Arbella, aged 23 months, depicts a hazel-eyed infant clutching a doll. Around her neck, on a triple chain of gold, hangs a shield with the countess’ coronet embellished with the Lennox motto in French: ‘To achieve, I endure.’ Margaret did endure. Her old enemy Thomas Bishop had proved a rather less reliable Tudor servant than he had claimed to be. In 1569 he was found to be in contact with adherents of Mary, Queen of Scots and ended up in the Tower from where he was released only in 1576.
Eventually Bishop returned to his Scottish homeland, where Margaret remained in contact with her grandson, sending James works of history and, on one occasion, a pair of embroidered hawking gloves. In 1578, aged 62, Margaret also continued to entertain Elizabeth’s most powerful courtiers. At a dinner in February she entertained Robert Dudley, now Earl of Leicester, as her guest. Margaret was adept at turning enemies into allies and, despite her earlier accusation that he was a pox-ridden wife murderer, they had once even worked together towards the Darnley marriage.
By the end of the month, though, Margaret was seriously ill and on February 26th she wrote her will. The sum of £12,000 was put aside for her funeral and burial expenses at Westminster Abbey. Among her many bequests was her ‘tablet picture of Henry VIII’, which she left to Dudley.
‘Tablets’ often referred to pendant jewels containing pictures or even miniature prayer books. Margaret’s could be the famous gold enamelled Tudor girdle prayer book known as Stowe Manuscript 956. It came to the British Library from a collection that belonged to the heirs of William Seymour, Duke of Somerset, the widower of Margaret’s granddaughter Arbella. She had, as a child, been betrothed to Robert Dudley’s short-lived legitimate son and it may have passed to her then, if it had not remained in her care. It contains an illuminated miniature bust of Henry VIII, dating from around 1540.
Margaret Douglas died on March 10th. Her funeral, which took place on April 3rd, was befitting a royal princess. She was buried in what is now called the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster, close to her ancestor and namesake, Margaret Beaufort, whose role in ushering in a dynasty she had emulated in her own life. Few tombs in the abbey match the royal ancestors listed on Margaret’s, but she was prouder still to be ‘a progenitor of princes’ in her son Darnley and her grandson James VI and I.
When Darnley was a baby Margaret had heard a prophecy that he would unite the crowns of England and Scotland. Although he was dead, Darnley’s English birth, as well as his Tudor blood, greatly enhanced James’ claim to Elizabeth’s throne. One day, Margaret believed, James would lie in Westminster Abbey, as a King of England, as he does today.
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