"A History of the English Monarchy" extract: Lord of Warriors and Ring-Giver of Men

My most recent book A History of the English Monarchy covers the English Crown from Roman rule to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, when the monarchy began to shift into a British institution. To mark almost a year since it was released, I'm posting short extracts from each of the book's seven chapters, over the  next few days.

The book begins with Conquest: The violent birth of the monarchy, a chapter which covers the longest time-span of all seven by narrating the development of monarchy in England from 30 B. C., beginning with the suicide of the goddess-queen Cleopatra and the seeming victory of Britain's republican rulers in Rome, through to the reign of England's most famous royal saint, King Edward the Confessor. This short extract discusses the importance of the family of Alfred the Great, the Wessex line of kings who helped unite England in the ninth and tenth centuries.

After Alfred, who died in October 899 , there was a succession of four kings of his line who expanded the borders of Wessex and the authority of its Crown. Alfred’s son, King Edward the Elder, was acknowledged as overlord of sizeable portions of the country by 920. Like his father, he styled himself King of the Anglo-Saxons, rather than solely of Wessex, a telling indicator of their family’s growing power. It was his son, and Alfred’s grandson, Æthelstan, who could justifiably claim to be the first King of England by conquering the last of the Viking kingdoms at York. He also forced the Welsh and Scottish royals to acknowledge him, reluctantly, as their overlord and the chroniclers gave him the rather magnificent Tolkein-sounding epithet of ‘lord of warriors and ring-giver of men’. His successor and younger brother, King Edmund the Just, was called ‘lord of the English, guardian of kinsmen, loved doer of deeds’. It was a strong line of Christian warrior-kings who, from Alfred the Great to Edmund the Just, took a small kingdom on the brink of annihilation to be conqueror and liberator of an entire nation. It was this family, and their followers, who gave birth to the kingdom of England. 

In 946, King Edmund was murdered by a crazed ex-thief, shortly after attending Mass for Saint Augustine’s Day. Edmund was succeeded by his brother Eadred, who died in 955 and bequeathed the crown to Edmund’s handsome teenage son Eadwig, nicknamed Eadwig the Fair due to his good looks. Young and lusty Eadwig had other things on his mind than the piety and conquest of his forebears. He was determined to enjoy his kingship, not endure it. Things got off to a decidedly rocky start when the young monarch skipped-out on his own coronation banquet, an event at which his absence was rather likely to be noted. Wondering where the star of the show had gone, his courtiers made the horrible (in hindsight) decision of sending the saintly Dunstan to find him. Dunstan, abbot of the great monastery at Glastonbury, found the King romping in bed with a young woman – according to some sources, with two. To say that the leading champion of monastic reform in England did not see the funny side of the King’s actions would be something of an understatement. Later stories suggested that one of the women had been the young King’s future mother-in-law and that an enraged Dunstan had dared drag the King, possibly mid-coitus, out of bed and back to the banquet. Eadwig’s intermission performance at his coronation set the tone for the rest of the reign, marked as it was by deteriorating relations between throne and Church.  

Eadwig died before his twentieth birthday and he was succeeded by his younger brother Edgar, who was made of more conventionally holy stuff. Dunstan was back in royal favour as Edgar’s new Archbishop of Canterbury. Together, the two men organised a magnificent pageant of royal power at Bath in 973. It was an innovative coronation ceremony, which helped set the tone for nearly all that followed. As Edgar was enthroned as ‘Eadgar Rex Anglo’ (‘Edgar, King of the English’), the choir sang the story of Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointing King Solomon in the Old Testament. Today, those words still ring out at British coronations, albeit to the splendid music of Handel. Edgar was invested with the crown, the ring, the rod, the sceptre and the sword as symbols of his political, spiritual, judicial and military duties. These too are still part of the insignia of a British monarch.

A History of the English Monarchy: From Boadicea to Elizabeth I is available on British and American Amazon. 

The Black Dinner and the Rains of Castamere

PLEASE do not read this if you are currently reading A Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R.R. Martin or if you're watching the television version of the series, Game of Thrones, by HBO. This article contains spoilers, by discussing the alleged real-life inspiration for the event known as "the Red Wedding."

I am currently writing a history of the British monarchy which will be out later this year. Luckily, it's been split into two volumes and volume one, And the Sword Gleamed, will be available soon. The book is predominantly Anglocentric due to time and space constrictions, but where possible I am doing my best to discuss the monarchies in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, too. (I'd love one day to go back and to tell the story of their monarchies in another book.) One of the things that has struck me so much as I'm researching it is how brilliantly George R.R. Martin has been inspired by European medieval history in writing his epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire. On the one hand, this is shown in his immaculate recreation of aristocratic culture - similar names, sigils, rivalry, treachery, arranged marriages, wardships and concepts of honour. In other ways, it's by more specific nods - like the comet that trails across the sky, seen by many as a good omen for the exiled princess Daenerys Targaryen, so similar to the comet that flew over England in 1066 before the arrival from beyond the sea of William the Conqueror. 

One of the series' most infamous moments is the so-called "Red Wedding," in which Robb Stark, one of the combatants in the novels' central conflict, the War of the Five Kings, is lured into a trap by an erstwhile ally, Lord Frey, when an arranged marriage designed to seal the peace between the houses sees Frey betray Robb Stark by butchering him, his mother Catelyn and thousands of their followers while they are under his hospitality at a wedding banquet. The Starks were an aristocratic clan who, under Robb, had become so sickened by the capricious incompetence and cruelty of the boy-king Joffrey that they had developed secessionist ambitions, hoping to forcibly remove the north from the kingdom of Westeros and re-establish independent monarchy in the region. Joffrey's maternal grandfather, Lord Tywin Lannister, a man of inexhaustible wealth and equally inexhaustible cruelty, liaises with the Freys and ends the Starks' mission by orchestrating a bloody massacre that has left fans of both book and TV show reeling, particularly after the incident was so brilliantly dramatized this week in the penultimate episode of season 3, The Rains of Castamere.

Oona Chaplin, Richard Madden and Michelle Fairley as members of the Stark family in "The Rains of Castamere"

The parallels between the fictitious Red Wedding and the real-life Black Dinner are fairly clear, although Westeros's Wedding has been augmented by Martin's great skills as a writer. In a recent interview with  EW, Martin stated that two events in Scottish history - the Black Dinner and the Glencoe Massacre - had inspired him to write of the Red Wedding in which Robb and Catelyn Stark lose their lives. 

In 1440, Scotland was ruled over by the ten year-old King James II and those around him struggled to see who could rule in his name. His father, King James I, had been stabbed to death in a plot led by his uncle and former ally, the treacherous Earl of Atholl, three years earlier. The young king's English mother, Queen Joanne (left; sometimes given as "Queen Joan"), had been wounded in the attack but had managed to escape back to Edinburgh, where she had managed to hold onto power for herself and her son. As an English aristocrat, Joanne's rule was not popular in Scotland and to bolster her political strength she allied herself to a man with the magnificently Westeros-sounding nickname of "the Black Knight of Lorn," whom she eventually married. In 1439, she had lost power and been replaced in government by her enemies.  By 1440, disagreements over the legacy of the queen-regent, the death of some of her strongest allies, the political fallout of the old king's assassination and out-of-control aristocratic infighting had all produced a fraught and dangerous political environment in which paranoia, dishonesty and violence were the dominant themes. 

One clan in particular who frightened the new regency government was the Douglas clan. Their late head, Archibald Douglas, had been a political ally of the queen mother's but after his death, she had fallen from power and the young king was now ruled by her enemies, Sir William Crichton, Sir Alexander Livingston and the earl of Avondale. By 1440, with the queen mother having been placed under house arrest, there were fears that Clan Douglas were preparing to seize more power for themselves and oust the triumvirate who were controlling the young James II. After Archibald Douglas's death, the new earl and head of the Douglas family was his 16 year-old son William, an age not too dissimilar to that of Robb Stark in the series. The royal household issued an invitation to the earl and his younger brother, 11 year-old David, to join the king at a banquet in Edinburgh Castle. As in Game of Thrones, the laws of hospitality in medieval Scotland were regarded as inviolable. The king's peace was an even more sacred concept and so the Douglas brothers attended the feast, safe in the knowledge that no self-respecting Christian or aristocrat could possibly besmirch his honour by harming them under those circumstances. At the climax, the regency's servants presented him with a dish covered in a white sheet. When the earl removed the sheet, he saw they had served him a black boar's head. It was a symbol of death and the musicians begin to beat on a single drum as William and his 11 year-old brother were dragged from the king's presence and executed on the castle's hill. Their sister, the beautiful Margaret, known as the Fair Maid of Galloway, was not present and did everything she subsequently could to rebuild the family's prestige.

A later event which Martin cited as inspiration for the Red Wedding was the Glencoe (above) Massacre of 1692. Two years earlier, the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland had seen the triumph of the Protestant Dutch prince, William of Orange (left), who had seized the British throne as William III, deposing his Catholic uncle, King James, in the process. The decision over which monarch to back had split many of the clans of the Highlands. On the one hand, William was a Protestant - the majority religion in Scotland by the seventeenth century; on the other hand, James was ancestrally Scottish and carried the name of the House of Stuart who had ruled over Scotland for centuries. The Campbell clan, who sided with William, saw his victory as the perfect opportunity to extirpate their rivals in the Highlands, Clan MacDonald, who had initially remained loyal to James. Forces loyal to the Campbells arrived in the Highlands, ostensibly on a mission to collect taxes for the Scottish parliament. Seeking shelter with the MacDonalds, the Campbells' men rose up one night and slaughtered thirty-eight of the MacDonalds, even stabbing some of them in their beds. Forty women and children subsequently died from exposure in the Highland winters after the vindictive Campbells burned their homes to the ground and evicted them. It had been a slaughter under trust and in violation of the hospitality that had been offered to them by the MacDonalds, who clearly placed the ancient customs of shelter and aristocratic protocol over the feud which the Campbells would use as an excuse to slaughter them. To this day, there are pubs in Scotland that deny the right of any member of a Campbell family to cross their threshold and groups as disparate as neo-Jacobite royalist movements and the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement still annually commemorate the massacre.

As Martin said to fan backlash about the savagery of the Red Wedding in Westeros: "No matter how much I make up, there's stuff in history that's just as bad, or worse." 

Long to reign over us: A brief history of the British monarchy (Part 2)

Her Majesty the Queen is the second-longest reigning  monarch in British history, so far. She acceded to the throne following the death of her father, King George VI, in 1952 and she celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 2012.

James VI of Scotland did not have an easy start in life. As parental dysfunction goes, James had parents who made Jason and Medea's marriage look like the front cover of House and Garden. When he was still a baby, his father Lord Darnley was found dead amidst the smoking ruins of a house on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Who authorised Darnley's assassination is probably one of the most famous unsolved murder mysteries in British history, but at the time suspicion fixed on James's mother - the ethereally beautiful and scandal-prone Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary was already unpopular with many of her subjects; most of them had embraced the new hard-line form of Protestantism known as Presbyterianism and so they subsequently resented their stunning young queen for her French upbringing and Catholic faith. Shortly after James's first birthday, she was overthrown in a Presbyterian-led coup and fled to neighbouring England. Nineteen years later, she was executed for her alleged complicity in plotting the murder of her Protestant cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.

Robbed of both his parents, little James VI found himself king before he could walk or talk. The Scottish monarchy was pitched into another period of prolonged instability, with coups, rebellions and counter-coups shaping the young king's life. It's hard to doubt that James's adult obsession with defending the Divine Right of Kings sprang from his childhood experiences, in which he had seen the consequences of a monarchy that had been reduced to being the plaything of ambitious politicians. Everywhere he went, James's personal skills were limited by the all-powerful Presbyterian Kirk and the aristocrats who supported it - the so-called "Lords of the Congregation." James himself was phenomenally bright and very well-educated, but he had precious few opportunities to employ his talents and even his personal life was subject to the whims of his Presbyterian minders. As a young teenager, he fell violently in love with his French cousin, the handsome and sophisticated Duke of Lennox, but the Presbyterian lords around him disapproved; they lured James to Ruthven Castle where they kidnapped him and then banished Lennox back home to France. Lennox died eighteen months later, allegedly of heartbreak, and James wrote a poem in his memory called An Ode to a Phoenix, in which he allegorised Lennox as a beautiful bird killed by the envy of others.

Six years later, James did his duty and married Anne, the daughter of the King of Denmark and Norway (then ruled by the same monarchy.) Anne of Denmark (left) was a vivacious and fun-loving blonde, who found life in Edinburgh almost as difficult as her husband did. Presbyterians have never exactly been famous for being flash with their cash and Lutheran-raised Anne resented the fact that her allowance as queen was so restrictive. Despite James's teen obsession with the late Duke of Lennox, as an adult he produced seven children with his Danish queen - Henry-Frederick, Elizabeth, Margaret, Charles, Robert, Mary and Sophia. In 1603, James received news that his elderly cousin, Queen Elizabeth, had passed away in London and he was now King James I of England and Ireland. He and the queen travelled south to London, where they were duly crowned and Anne was finally given free rein to spend as she liked in the magnificent palaces of the English royals - Whitehall (the largest palace in Europe at the time), Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court and Windsor Castle. Not content with these and the turtle-shell bed she felt was an essential purchase, Anne eventually decided she needed a little chez of her own and the King duly built the pretty riverside mansion called Queen's House in Greenwich for her, which stands to this day and was the sight for some of the equestrian events of the 2012 London Olympics. Dripping with jewels and spending like a maniac, I don't think Anne of Denmark missed life in the shadow of the Kirk too much. The lairds would have been even further riled to know that, in London, Anne openly expressed sympathy for the persecuted Catholic minority.

James, however, struggled with his new role as king of a united Britain. He had several key political aims - the first was to create a united British state, the second was to maintain the monarchy (rather than parliament) as the dominant political power in Britain and the third was to end England's long-running war with Spain. In the latter, he was certainly successful; with Elizabeth I and her old adversary, Philip II, both dead, their successors, James and Philip III, were able to end the hostilities that had persisted since the defeat of the Spanish Armada. With peace concluded, there was even talk of marrying James's son to Philip's daughter, Maria-Anna. (The talks fell through when pious Maria-Anna point-blank refused to marry a Protestant.) However, in his aims to create Great Britain, James was thwarted. England, Scotland and Ireland may all have had the same king, but each of them had their own parliaments that met in London, Edinburgh and Dublin; they had their own customs, needs and laws and they were reluctant to unify under one parliamentary system. Even the subject of a British flag was unpopular, despite James's enthusiasm for the idea. But perhaps his greatest failure as monarch was in trying to ameliorate the power of Parliament. Everything he did seemed to antagonise them.

As far as James was concerned, kings and queens were closer to God than they were to rest of mankind. Parliament's role was therefore simply to advise the king, but he was under absolutely no obligation to take that advice. When Parliament attempted to force the king to do things that he didn't want to do (like harsher measures against Catholics or an end to the extravagance of the royal court), then James would react with apoplectic fury. Where the late Queen Elizabeth had deftly manipulated Parliament by flattering them into voting her the money she needed, James I harangued them and demanded, not requested, their financial assistance. By the time James died in 1625, after twenty-two years on the British thrones, relations between Parliament and the monarchy were at an all-time low and James's twenty four year-old son, Charles I, inherited a particularly unenviable situation. 

It would therefore be easy to write James VI/I off as a political failure. However, whilst the British Isles could not be united legislatively, they had been united by the monarchy and it would be this unity which eventually gave birth to the United Kingdom and, through it, the British Empire. He was also responsible for the mammoth cultural task of translating the Bible into perfect English - thereby giving the world the hauntingly magnificent King James Bible. He had survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which aimed to blow up the King, his heir and the Houses of Parliament in retaliation for the penal laws in place against English and Welsh Catholics. He had been clever enough to balance the very different religious requirements of his kingdoms - he had been raised in the Calvinist-Presbyterian tradition in Scotland, but wisely did not attempt to impose the more liberal Anglican view of Christianity on them once he became Governor of the Church of England in 1603. He had admittedly done nothing to end the legal discrimination against Catholics or Puritans in England and Wales, but he had not caved in to populist demand that he start a kind of Protestant Inquisition against them, either. He had fathered heirs with his wife, despite the fact that he was far more attracted to his own gender. (After Lennox, he was obsessively devoted to the Earl of Somerset and, after him, the King got all in a fluster over the muscular legs of the gorgeous Duke of Buckingham, whom everybody else seemed to find insufferably annoying.) He had been a great patron of the arts, music, architecture and literature (Shakespeare received more backing from James I than he ever did from Elizabeth I.) He had overseen the expansion of British colonies in Ulster and America. And he had attempted to impose the new view of monarchy, prevalent with most European philosophers in the seventeenth century - that royal power should be absolute, that regional characteristics must be subordinated to a centralised culture and government, and that only a unified state could be a strong one. It's undeniable that James blundered and made many errors, but to dismiss his entire reign as a grotesque embarrassment is to misrepresent it. Whatever his failings, James I had arguably made the monarchy central to the emerging notion of being British. In doing so, he had successfully tied the Crown to a sense of national identity; the monarchy was, and arguably still is, far more central to the emotional identity of the British than parliament ever could be.

Queen Elizabeth: Ten Years On

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall attended a memorial service in Saint George's Chapel at Windsor Castle today to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, His Royal Highness's maternal grandmother. 

Queen Elizabeth was born Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon on 4th August 1900, the ninth child of Claude, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and his wife, Nina Cecilia (née Cavendish-Bentinck). During the First World War, Elizabeth helped run Glamis Castle, when it was converted into a convalescent home for wounded soldiers; her mother's ill-health prevented her from executing her duties as chatelaine. Elizabeth was instrumental in saving the legendary castle from destruction from an accidental fire during those years, in which she also made her Society debut as a debutante in London. She came from a particularly close family and all were devastated when her elder brother, Fergus, was killed in active service in 1916. Another brother, Alexander, had died as a result of cancer five years earlier, at the age of twenty-four.  Some of the very few occasions on which Elizabeth was subsequently to show strong upset in public was whilst attending the memorial services at The Cenotaph every November.

At the age of twenty-two, Elizabeth married King George V's second son, Prince Albert, known in the family as "Bertie". He was a shy but dignified man, with a strong sense of duty who often felt frustrated by the stammer he had developed as a child. Elizabeth was tireless in her support of her husband and in her relentless quest to find him a "cure" for his speech impediment, something movingly and fairly accurately dramatised in the recent Oscar-winning movie The King's Speech. Through her marriage, Elizabeth acquired the titles of Duchess of York, Countess of Inverness and Baroness Killarney. One of Elizabeth's first official visits as a member of the Royal Family was to Northern Ireland, where she commented on the warmth of the reception she received from the crowds in Belfast. The visit also gave the young Duchess a chance to stay with old friends, who were members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, mainly relatives of the Duke of Abercorn, who was then the Governor of the newly-created state of Northern Ireland. The Duke and Duchess of York took a townhouse in London as their first main residence, as the Duchess was still in her early twenties and allegedly reluctant to abandon the fun and excitement of the London Social season. The Royal couple subsequently had two children - Princess Elizabeth, the current Sovereign, born in 1926, and her younger sister, Princess Margaret Rose (1930 - 2002).

In 1936, Elizabeth's husband became King and assumed the regnal name of King George VI, following his brother's decision to abdicate in order that he might marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson. King George ruled with exemplary dedication to his country from 1936 to 1952 and he led the nation through the horror, trauma and difficulties of the Second World War. Due to her many public appearances, her refusal to abandon London even during the Blitz and her constant good humour, Queen Elizabeth was widely credited with boosting and sustaining the public's morale during the war years. She was complimented on this fact by both Winston Churchill and, rather bizarrely, by Adolf Hitler, who grudgingly described her as "the most dangerous woman in Europe".

In 1952, King George lost his battle with lung cancer and his widow assumed the title of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother; her daughter assumed the throne as Sovereign. The Queen Mother continued to remain one of the most consistently popular members of the Royal Family, as her 100th birthday celebrations in August 2000 showed. Even her extravagance and love of horse-racing and gambling were generally affectionately regarded by the public and she was well-known for her wit, charm and her joie de vivre. Upon receiving a magnum of champagne from sailors in the Royal Navy, the eighty-something year-old Dowager publicly joked that she was planning to drink the whole thing herself when she got home.

The Queen Mother passed away at Royal Lodge, her home in Windsor, on 30th March 2002, at the age of one hundred and one. She was buried next to her husband in Saint George's Chapel, after a State funeral. Controversy was caused at the time when the BBC news reader making the official announcement accidentally forgot to don a black tie when broadcasting the news for the first time to the nation.

Reflecting on Queen Elizabeth's enduring popularity, her commitment to nearly eighty years of public engagements and her indefatigable devotion to the monarchy and to the nation, the Archbishop of Canterbury was moved to quote the words spoken of Queen Esther in the Bible, when delivering the Queen Mother's funeral eulogy, "And who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

I was on holiday in Scotland with my family at the time The Queen Mother passed away and had the opportunity to sign one of the many books of condolence set up across the nation; in my case, one at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. She was a very great lady, with style, wit and a naughty sense of humour. She was the last of her kind and I admire her tremendously.

The moment the television was halted across the nation and the official announcement was made, followed by the customary playing of the National Anthem for such announcements, can be watched below.

The Kings and Queens of Scotland

The exact date at which Scotland became unified under one monarchy is still a matter of debate amongst historians. Local leaders and kings had certainly been calling themselves kings of Scotland or Caledonia (the Latin name for Scotland) for generations, but historians would usually date the beginnings of the Scottish crown and nation either to 834, the reign of King Aodh or to 1016, when Malcolm II assumed power in Lothian and the geographical region we now know roughly as the kingdom of Scotland came into proper existence. 

The first royal family, the House of Alpin, were the hereditary rulers of the Scottish kingdom of Dalriada, a kingdom which also had roots in Ulster, which is why one of Northern Ireland's best grammar schools is named in its honour. In 1603, after years of rivalry between the two nations, Scotland technically "conquered" England when its royal family, the Stewarts (spelt "Stuart" in England and France), inherited the English and Irish thrones after the death of the childless Queen Elizabeth. However, after that the royal family spent almost all of their time south of the border. Charles II was the last monarch to be crowned separately in both England and Scotland in 1651 and in 1707, the two crowns technically merged under Queen Anne to become the monarchy of Great Britain. This list will go right the way up to Anne, giving the numbers of the monarchs as they were known in Scotland.

April 10th, 1512: The Birth of James V, King of Scots

My friend Claire at The Anne Boleyn Files marks the anniversary of the birth of King James V of Scotland, son of King James IV and his English queen, Margaret Tudor.

For my account of James's death in 1542 and the birth of his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, click HERE.

New Portrait of the Queen

Lord Belmont In Northern Ireland reports on a new photographic portrait of Her Majesty The Queen, recently unveiled at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh in a ceremony conducted by Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, in honour of the Parliament's tenth anniversary. The portrait was taken by a young photographer, twenty-four year-old Shaun Murawski, who received the commission as part of a country-wide search for Scotland's young artistic talent.

Mr. Murawski said, "I still feel hugely grateful to be given such an opportunity at my age ... For me the portrait captures what a moment in Her Majesty's company feels like. She is an extraordinary human being in all her benevolence and warmth."

 

The portrait was taken in the throne room at Holyroodhouse Palace, Edinburgh, the Royal Family's official residence in Scotland. 

February 8th, 1587: The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

Glamorous women should never live too long. History doesn't like it that way. In return for missing out on the lives of their children and grandchildren, of growing old in comfort and security, history freezes them forever in an eternal prism of youth. Like a fly caught in amber, Anne Boleyn, Gabrielle de Polignac, Eva Perón, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were spared the first signs of wrinkles, of infirmity, of senility, or even of middle age. Their husbands, their enemies, their co-stars, rivals, lovers, enemies, children and friends grew old. But they did not. The allure of their stories was achieved in no small part by the fact that their premature deaths meant that they could remain forever young. By this standard, Mary Stuart, Queen of France by marriage and Queen of Scotland by birth, lived too long. In her youth, she had been universally acknowledged as the most lovely princess of her generation. Poets had been driven half-mad by their worshipful desire for her and the sordid, tragic mess of her private life and all the men who had been drawn to her like moths to a flame, only to be burned and consumed, was a testament not only to her dazzling beauty but also the dangerous enchantments of her personality. Now, at the age of forty-four, Mary had lost her figure thanks to long years of inactivity and the only sign of her once legendary physical perfection which remained was the ivory-white, unblemished skin.

For nineteen years, the one-time Queen of Scots had been living under virtual house arrest as a guest and prisoner of her second cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. The two women had never met, but since Mary first became a widow at the tender age of eighteen, they had stalked each other's imagination and become much more important in one another's lives than any husband, lover, child or adviser ever could. Mary saw herself as Elizabeth's natural heir, but many saw her as Elizabeth's natural replacement. In some very real sense, the rivalry with Elizabeth Tudor was Mary Stuart's life and, at least for a time, vice-versa. Now, nearly two decades into the miserable purgatory of her confinement, the hysteria in the English Parliament and Court regarding the papist viper living amongst them had reached fever pitch. Despite fearing and mistrusting her implicitly, Queen Elizabeth had done everything in her power to prevent Mary being sent to the block. Butchering queens had been her father's past-time, not hers. And interestingly, given recent historiographical attempts to paint her as naturally crueler than her half-sister, Elizabeth had waited almost twenty times as long to murder Mary Stuart as Mary Tudor had to do away with Jane Grey. 

Parliament, however, and most of Elizabeth's advisers had now had enough of Elizabeth's squeamish horror at spilling royal blood, which she regarded as near-sacred. Not for the first time since she had so foolishly fled to England instead of France, Mary had been the centre of a Catholic plot to depose and murder Elizabeth and put Mary on her throne instead. Letters between the deposed Scottish queen and the plot's ring-leader, an English courtier called Sir Anthony Babington, had been unearthed by Elizabeth's spy master, Sir Francis Walsingham. In them, it seemed quite clear that Mary had not only consented to being rescued from the manor house she was currently been kept at but that, for the first time, she quite explicitly approved of the plans to murder Elizabeth. Elizabeth had wept and sighed and stormed and raged, but, in the end, she had signed the death warrant, conceding that her own life was in danger and that this time, she herself had completely lost control of English public opinion which had turned with astonishing, brutal venom on Mary Stuart.

Whether Mary was guilty or not, there is now no earthly way of telling. A variety of theories explaining her correspondence with the Babington conspirators have been put forward by historians studying this case and none can be said to be truly unconvincing. It is the assessment of Mary's most recent biographer, the strongly sympathetic Professor John A. Guy, that she probably was guilty and her consent to Babington's treason and attempted regicide was the desperate action of a desperate woman. He does however believe that Walsingham knew of the plot long before he revealed it to Queen Elizabeth and only allowed it to continue for as a long as he did in the hope that Mary would eventually agree to it and he would at long last have the incontrovertible proof Elizabeth demanded before she would even contemplate making a definitive move against Mary. Other historians have hypothesized that Mary had only consented to being rescued by Sir Anthony and that the incriminating postscript, in which she condoned her cousin's assassination, was added by Walsingham and his agents. And others, perhaps slightly less convincingly, have argued with great passion that every last bit of Queen Mary's alleged correspondence from 1586 was the result of English forgery. Either way, we will never know for certain and what mattered in 1587 was that Elizabeth clearly believed Mary was guilty and Mary believed, with equal fervour, that as an anointed queen she was legally ineligible to be judged by English law. (For a brief discussion on the various theories on Mary's guilt on this blog, click here.)

December 8th, 1542: The Birth of Mary, Queen of Scots

A thick snow and a treacherous layer of ice enveloped the Scottish countryside as the faithful made their way to church to observe the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on that dark and frigid day in 1542. Now, the feast and its name are frequently misunderstood, for the Immaculate Conception has in fact nothing to do with the virgin birth or the Incarnation of Christ, as is so often assumed. Instead, it is the belief that at the moment of her conception in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne, the Holy Virgin - having been conceived by normal and earthly means - underwent a pre-natal miracle, whereby she was preserved forever from the stain of Original Sin. She therefore became, in the moment of her conception, full of grace. Debates about this philosophical concept had both bedevilled and enlightened the Middle Ages, where the issue of whether or not the Immaculate Conception was true, false or unknowable had been hotly debated within the universities and monasteries of the West. It was only in 1854 that it was infallibly defined as requisite dogma for believing Roman Catholics, but it had enjoyed its own feast day in the west for nearly eight centuries by that stage. It had not always been the happiest or most tranquil of theological beliefs. The Dominican Order were still, in the sixteenth century, objecting that the entire notion of the Immaculate Conception pertained to blasphemy and implicitly belittled the sacrifice at Golgotha. Even some of the medieval church's most devout enthusiasts for veneration of Mary in its fullest form had been opposed to the Feast - Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in particular, had waxed into near apoplectic fury at the very mention of it. Aquinas insisted that Mary had become immaculate at the end of her life, not at the beginning. Bernard was more aggressive, dispatching a scathing letter to the priests of Lyon Cathedral when he heard they were contemplating celebrating a Mass in honour of the Immaculate Conception in 1150. As far as he was concerned, venerating Mary's conception in Saint Anne's womb was tantamount to venerating a sexual encounter - "Or are we to assume that there was no sin where lust was not absent?" he snapped. The belief in Mary's innate sinlessness, however, was particularly popular amongst lay Christians, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the Franciscan order, which had much more flexibility and sensitivity when it came to the feelings of the laity, leant their support to the Immaculate Conception, in opposition to the Dominicans, who still zealously opposed it.

By the beginning of the fifth decade of the sixteenth century, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception was therefore an optional festival to be observed as the diocese, priest or congregation felt appropriate. If any Scotsman or woman had been able to brave the horrific winter blizzards to make it to the local chapel in time for Mass that day, it is likely that they would have been attending a church which did celebrate the festival. In Scotland, it was generally popular with Catholics across most of the social hierarchy. If any parishioners had been attending Mass in the tiny chapels which dotted the countryside in the forty snow-covered miles between the Palace of Linlithgow and the Palace of Falkland, it may have been that at the very moment sweet hymns, prayers and incense were wafting their way towards Heaven in praise of a celestial Mary that their thoughts would have been interrupted as they heard the royal messengers thunder-by on horseback outside, carrying news that another, more terrestial Mary had entered the world.

The 27 year-old Queen of Scotland, Marie, had not relished sending out those messengers. She had wanted more than anything to give her husband a male heir. Both of their sons - James and Robert - had died as infants and now the hopes of the Stewart dynasty rested on the tiny, frail little princess sleeping contentedly in her sumptuous cradle. Her mother, Marie de Guise, was a woman whose entire life had been spent as living proof of accepting the things one cannot change. She recovered quickly, both from the rigours of childbirth and from the disappointment of the baby's gender. The same could not be said for her royal husband, who was lying in the midst of a soul-crushing depression in his apartments at Falkland Palace, not having made it to his wife's side either because of the weather or because of his mental health. When the news was brought to him that Queen Marie had been delivered of a girl, rather than a boy, the King lay in his bed stock-still for a moment, before muttering, "It came from a woman, and it will end in a woman." Then, he turned his face to the wall and gave up even the pretence of wanting to carry on living.

James V's cryptic comment was an acknowledgement of his ancestress, Marjorie Bruce, a Scottish princess from whom the Stewarts had acquired their subsequent claim to the throne. The rule of the Stewarts had begun with a woman and, in the shape of his tiny daughter, it would end with one as well. No woman could possibly hope to hold a kingdom as troublesome as Scotland, considering how many men had failed to do so over the last few centuries. That Mary would prove incapable of holding Scotland under her rule was true, but her father could not known how incorrect he was in saying the Stewarts' association with monarchy would die with her. It is thanks to Mary that James V's descendants still sit on the British throne today.

The King was ensconced at Falkland Palace when he heard the news of his daughter's birth, one of the Scottish royal family's most conspicuously magnificent homes. The birth itself had taken place at Linlithgow Palace, a fantastically beautiful residence which seemed like something lifted right out of a fairy tale. With its many turrets and graceful stonework, rolling green fields and breathtaking setting beside a loch, Linlithgow belonged to a world of Arthurian legend, rather than 16th century reality. It was here, in its luxurious and pretty confines, that Marie de Guise had chosen to give birth for the third time since her marriage to the King of Scots, a man curiously torn between his twin obsessions of the sacred and the sexual. He had loved God as he had loved women - intensely, viscerally, potently. He had been married before, to Princess Madeleine de Valois, a delicate teenager who had not long survived the traumatic sea journey to the harsher climate of Scotland.

Marie de Guise had been born in 1515 into one of the greatest and most ancient families of the French aristocracy, the House of Guise, whose wealth and power had already begun to rival that of the Valois, France's royal family at the time. As a young girl, she had been married off to the Duc de Longueville and with him she had become the mother of two sons. When the duke died in 1537, he left Marie a widow at the relatively tender age of twenty-two. She was not beautiful, or even particularly pretty, but she was intelligent, gracious, sophisticated and determined. She was also fabulously well-connected and had proven her ability to procreate thanks to her first marriage. By the standards of her day, Marie was a tall woman and hearing news of this, King Henry VIII of England, recently made a widower by his third wife's death in childbed, proposed marriage to the fetching French heiress. Henry too was tall (as well as increasingly wide) and he proclaimed, "I am a big man and I need a big woman!" Marie replied that although she was a big woman, she had a tiny neck and therefore couldn't risk a marriage like poor Anne Boleyn's. Henry's pique was turned into incandescent fury when Marie added insult to injury by marrying his troublesome nephew, James, King of Scots, a year later. The thwarted monarch then flounced off into a disastrously short-lived marriage to the Princess of Cleves. Only time would show what a dangerous enemy he had become to Marie de Guise.

Now, four years later, it was difficult to tell if Marie regretted her decision to marry into Edinburgh rather than London. The great love of her life had been her first husband, not her second, and the Scottish nobility was fractious, quarrelsome and treacherous. Many resented the "Auld Alliance," the ancient diplomatic ties between Scotland and France, which Marie represented and more and more of the people were beginning to turn towards the new Protestant religion, rather than the old Catholic faith which Marie's family in France considered themselves to be one of the European champions of. Still, perhaps Scotland with all its troubles was preferable to a marriage with Henry VIII. After all, earlier that year he had cut off the head of his fifth wife, a flighty and vivacious teenager who had allegedly been carrying on affair with a handsome young buck of the court behind her corpulent husband's sizable back. To butcher one wife was extraordinary; to butcher a second looked like a worrying habit. Moreover, Marie had never intimated by word or gesture that she found Scotland anything other than delightful. In her justly acclaimed 1968 biography of Mary of Scots, Lady Antonia Fraser wrote that her mother Marie was "a woman of innate tact [who] was at pains to please her husband by praising his country. Fife, for example, she admired extravagantly, and confided to James that although she had been warned in France that she would find Scotland a barbarous country, destitute of comforts, ever since her arrival she had found the exact reverse". Scotland was both more civilised and more luxurious than its European counterparts liked to pretend, but it was also a political minefield as Marie eventually discovered to her cost.

The thick blanket of snow presented Scotland at its most rugged, its most perfectly and spectacularly beautiful on the day of Mary Stewart's birth. But, it would not be a true part of Mary's story if it was not saturated in drama and intrigue. Scotland was in the depth of one of the worst national catastrophes and humiliations in its history. Her father the King had badly bungled his torturous diplomatic interactions with England or, more specifically, with his uncle King Henry. The rapid deterioration in Anglo-Scottish relations had been sped-up by a lethal combination of King James's poor decisions and King Henry's venomous cruetly. On November 24th, two weeks before the princess's birth, the two armies had clashed at the Battle of Solway Moss. The result was a devastating defeat for Scotland, in which half of the fighting flower of the Scottish army lost their lives. Grief stricken and traumatised by what he had seen on the battlefield and realising that his kingdom was now essentially defenceless in the face of his uncle's vindictive wrath, King James had returned to his palace at Falkland, taking to his bed. And it was there that the news that his two dead baby boys and thousands of dead soldiers had been replaced by a screaming, useless, defenceless girl was brought to him by messengers who knew they could expect no reward for bringing such tidings.

Back at Linlithgow, Queen Marie proceeded like a model of propriety. Everything must be done according to the rule book of royal etiquette and it was arranged that the princess should be baptised in the nearby Church of Saint Michael, which stood at the palace gates and which can still be seen today. The baby had been born a trifle premature, with the Queen perhaps going into labour as a result of the worry caused by the recent defeat of the national army. The result was unhelpful rumours that the "Queen was delivered before her time of a daughter, a very weak child, and not likely to live". The Queen Dowager of Hungary heard later that it was a miracle the baby had lived to see Christmas given the state she was in at the time of her birth.

Much of what happened next sounds miraculous or, rather, improbable. James V died six days after his daughter's birth, at the age of thirty. His daughter thus became a reigning queen before her one week-birthday and his 27 year-old widow assumed the Herculean task of ruling Scotland for her, struggling to preserve Mary's inheritance in the face of the epic political turmoil James V left in his wake. It was a task which would have felled a lesser-woman and whatever one might think of the de Guise clan, Marie de Guise was never anything less than an heroic woman.

And so it was, in a turret room in the north-west tower overlooking a freezing loch that the tragic, mesmerising and improbable life of Mary, Queen of Scots first began. It was a life which was to bewitch and betray, dazzle and destroy, in equal measure. She was the daughter of a great woman and a troubled man, born into a turbulent age. It's difficult to think of a more appropriate entrance for the life of one of history's most enigmatic and controversial queens.

December 7th, 1545: The Birth of Lord Henry Darnley

Henry, Lord Darnley, was destined to become the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots and thus the father of King James, the first man to unite the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland under one monarchy. Darnley and his wife Queen Mary had birthdays one day apart from each other - tomorrow, December 8th, was Mary's birthday, as I hope to post about tomorrow.

Later, Henry Darnley was known for many things - his good looks, his sexuality, his alcoholism, his temper, his narcissism and, in the end, his grotesque and mysterious murder. At the time of his birth, however, there was nothing to suggest that the baby aristocrat's prospects were anything less than golden. 

He was born at Temple Newsam House, a luxurious mansion in the north of England which had been given as a wedding present to his parents, the Earl and Countess of Lennox. The earl was technically a member of the Scottish nobility, but he had been living in exile in England ever since his disastrous support for the English invasion of Scotland had lead to him being branded a traitor. 

His wife, Countess Margaret, was a niece of King Henry VIII of England and, as such, she occupied a privileged place in the English royal hierarchy. Beautiful and glamorous, with a strong personality, Margaret had once been one of the bright young things of the court aristocracy and she had enjoyed friendships with men and women as diverse as Mary Tudor, Anne Boleyn, Mary Shelton, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard. In her younger days, however, she had also been something of a scandalous figure, having embarked upon torrid affairs with two members of the ambitious but attractive Howard family. In 1536, she had fallen madly in love with Queen Anne Boleyn's uncle, Lord Thomas Howard, at precisely the time when Queen Anne's political credit was falling. Thomas had been imprisoned by the King and the poor man later died incarcerated for having dared make love to the King's niece. Margaret had apparently failed to learn her lesson from this tragic affair and a few years later, she became the lover of Queen Catherine Howard's brother, Lord Charles Howard. When this liaison was discovered in 1541, an enraged King Henry, who was ironically obsessed with the concept of female sexual purity, had Margaret temporarily detained in an abandoned convent. She only escaped further punishment because everybody's attention soon switched to the much greater scandal of Queen Catherine's adultery, later in the same year.

Sufficiently chastened by her experience this time around, Margaret re-invented herself as an icon of Catholic royal propriety and she willingly entered into a marriage with Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, the King's trusty Scottish ally - or dogsbody, depending on one's point-of-view. The baby born in 1545 (Alison Weir in her book Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley suggests it may have been 1546) was christened Henry in the King's honour and the ageing monarch also agreed to stand as godfather to the infant who bore his name. Margaret had, apparently, been forgiven.

Lord Darnley - a courtesy title borne by the eldest son and heir of the earls of Lennox - blossomed into a handsome and intelligent youth. His parents ensured he received a superb education, even sending him abroad to France once they felt his English tutors had no more to teach him. He was well-read in the Classics, History, Theology, art, music and languages (he was fluent in English, French and Latin, as well as understanding parts of Gaelic.) Whilst studying in Paris, the French writer Castelnau wrote that it was "not possible to see a more beautiful prince." Darnley stood at about 6'3" in height and he had a slim, elegant, toned physique, fair hair and a pretty, almost effeminate, face. His parents idolised him and he had a ready charm, which he used to get his own way and to get both women and men to fall for his charms. How far he managed to persuade the men to fall is still a matter of debate, although Alison Weir makes a very convincing argument that Darnley's numerous teenage sexual conquests probably numbered as many men as they did women.

Beneath the surface of beauty, charm, wealth and intellect, however, Lord Darnley hid an altogether less attractive side of his personality - as anyone familiar with the life of Mary, Queen of Scots will tell you. Although he was an intellectual, he was not clever and he possessed an explosive temper. Spoiled and entitled, he was also indecisive, selfish and deceitful. His manners appeared only in a position where he was the weaker party, when he was placed in any position of authority he exhibited "a very insolent disposition". Much worse than his promiscuity or his extravagance was his alcoholism, since there can be no real doubt that Darnley was a functioning alcoholic by the time he reached the age of twenty. 

This tragic and often contemptible youth, who began life on this day in the final years of Henry VIII's reign, in a splendid Yorkshire mansion, was to acquire some measure of contemporary importance because his good-looks and connections managed to seduce the equally beautiful Queen of Scotland. And, by her, he became the father of a future king. But Darnley's real impact on history only came on a chilly morning of February 1567 in Edinburgh, when he was found half-naked and strangled amidst the smouldering ruins of a house blown apart by gunpowder. It was only then that Henry, Lord Darnley finally became a figure of importance, acquiring a significance in death far beyond anything he had enjoyed in life, sparking one of the greatest and most devastating political scandals in history.

The Other Queen: The Life of Matilda of Boulogne, Queen of England

"In many ways, Matilda of Boulogne was a model consort. As a regent, diplomat, warrior, counsellor and mother, she occupies a position alongside her predecessors Matilda of Scotland and Matilda of Flanders, at the apogee of English queenship, after which many historians concur that the power invested in the office began to decline ... Matilda's husband is one of the great, if misunderstood, failures of English kingship. Matilda herself, though, was never anything less than a great queen." 

- Lisa Hilton, Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens (2008)

Author's Note

Firstly, a note of apology for having taken so long to write and upload the fourth instalment in this blog’s “Queens of England” series. The last update – “The Fair Maid of Brabant” – chronicling the life of Adeliza of Louvain was posted on August 31st, over two months ago. With writing the sequel to Popular and working on various scripts and my Masters degree in Medieval History, things have rather gotten away from me. This post – the life of Adeliza’s successor (although Adeliza never really regarded her as such) – is the last post chronicling the lives of the queens of the House of Normandy, which ruled England from 1066 to 1154. In terms of time, it was a short dynastic reign; in terms of importance, vast. After this, I shall be posting on the House of Normandy’s genealogy and then moving onto the queens of the House of Plantagenet, who reigned from 1154 to 1399. 

Secondly, a note on structure. Just as the names Eleanor and Isabella were to dominate the lists of their immediate successors, the name Matilda was very much the preferred name of the queens of the Anglo-Norman empire. In fact, with the exception of the decorous Adeliza of Louvain, every Anglo-Norman queen bore the name of Matilda. In part, this was because the British-Norman elite was a relatively tiny and close-knit group. Its first queen, Matilda of Flanders, stood as godmother to her future daughter-in-law and successor, who was thus also named Matilda, in her honour. This Matilda (of Scotland), in turn, stood as godmother to this queen, her niece Matilda of Boulogne. All this would potentially be complicated enough from a narrative point-of-view were it not for the fact that for the entirety of Matilda of Boulogne’s time as queen, her life was fatally intertwined with that of her cousin, also named Matilda (herself the daughter of Matilda of Scotland). At the very same time as Matilda of Boulogne claimed to be the true queen-consort of England, her cousin was claiming to be the true queen-regnant. Needless to say, neither acknowledged the legitimacy of the other’s claim. The two Matildas were intimately aware of one another, but from the perspective of telling their story, having two Matildas appearing so frequently in the text is going to be distracting. Luckily, their world was bi- and sometimes even tri-lingual. “Matilda” was the European version of their name, but their Anglo-Saxon subjects preferred to render it by its more traditional usage – “Maud.” This chapter in the series focuses primarily on the life of Matilda of Boulogne, a French heiress married to the prince who controversially seized the throne of England in 1135 and became known as “King Stephen.” Their cousin and rival, who claimed to be the true inheritor of the English crown, was an English princess and the widow of the German Emperor. She will thus be referred to either as “the Empress” or by the Anglo-Saxon variant of her name, “Maud.”

***

ENGLAND,

In the Year of Grace, 1135

The mystic’s eyes gleamed with certainty as he pronounced his prophecy. It is always difficult to tell where the fire of spiritual surety springs from – either a religious gift or a mental imbalance. But the hermit need not have worried; the prince standing before him was a pious soul, much more inclined to see the old man’s mutterings as visionary, rather than insane. It was a dangerous time in England, dangerous, even, for the prince to be consulting the hermit about the matter in question. An old and sick man, who had long outlived the sons of his first marriage, was sitting upon the throne; his queen, beautiful and charming, was barren. After over a decade of marriage, she had produced no children to replace those lost years ago in a catastrophic shipwreck off the coast of Normandy. A crisis of the succession was brewing, just as surely as there was a God in Heaven. Recently, the King’s only surviving legitimate child - a daughter - had recently been made a widow by the death of the German Emperor. In her widowhood, she had returned to her father’s realm, which placed her back in play as viable contender for the succession. Certainly, it seemed to be the old king’s wish to leave his crown to his imperial daughter. But within the elite of his kingdoms in England and Normandy, there were many great lords who said that for them to be ruled over by a woman would be an abomination. They said that the true heir was not the King’s daughter, but his nephew, Stephen.

It was that prince, Stephen, who now stood before the old man, who years earlier had eschewed the vanities of the world and retreated into a life of religious seclusion and poverty where, it was said, the angels had endowed him with the dubious gift of prophecy. The Hermit fixed his rheumy eyes upon the prince who, despite his quiet and chivalrous exterior, wanted so desperately to take the throne of England when his aged uncle at last died. The holy man spoke: the Queen would remain barren. It had been ordained by Heaven that no child would quicken the womb of Adeliza of Louvain, whilst the Crown of England still sat upon her head. The King would not die in England, the monk said next, but rather in his possessions beyond the sea – in Normandy, the land of his ancestors. Finally, he concluded the prophecy by giving the prince the news he had been so desperate to hear – the Empress would not sit upon the throne when her father died. England and Normandy would pass instead to Stephen. Infused by an intoxicating mixture of piety and ambition, Stephen received the hermit’s blessing and hurried swiftly from the dank cave where the holy man chose to worship Christ in solitude and suffering. 

October 18th, 1541: Death of Margaret Tudor, Queen Mother of Scotland

Claire Ridgway over at The Anne Boleyn Files marks the anniversary of the death of Henry VIII's eldest sister, Margaret Tudor, Queen Mother of Scotland. The widow of the late King James IV, who had predeceased her by twenty-eight years, it was through their granddaughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, that James and Margaret have become the ancestors of every monarch to sit on the British throne since 1603.

The second child and eldest daughter of King Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York, Margaret was born at the Palace of Westminster in London during the final weekend of November 1489 and christened in honour of her paternal grandmother, the Countess of Derby. At the age of thirteen, she was placed into an arranged marriage with James IV, the thirty year-old King of Scots. Although she lacked the beauty of either her mother or her younger sister, the Queen of France, Margaret was still considered attractive and vivacious. As later events would show, she certainly had a taste for chosing her own mates - apparently something of a family trait in Henry VII's children.

The marriage between the Scottish king and the English princess lasted for ten years, in which time Margaret was pregnant six times - although thanks to 16th-century infant mortality, only one of those children, the future King James V, survived into adulthood.

Years later, Margaret was to be the only one of Henry VIII's surviving family to publicly approve of her brother's separation from Katherine of Aragon and his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn. Margaret and her new sister-in-law even exchanged apparently chatty letters and gifts with one another and Margaret showed where her sympathies lay by swiftly removing her daughter (also named Margaret) from the company of her cousin, Princess Mary, and placing her into the household of the new Queen Anne. Relations between Margaret and her former sister-in-law, Katherine, had not always been warm, which perhaps explains Margaret's enthusiasm for the Boleyn marriage. Margaret had been left a pregnant widow when her husband, James, invaded England in 1513 and was defeated and killed by the English armies at the Battle of Flodden. Exultant at the victory, Queen Katherine had wanted to send the entirety of the dead King's body as a present to her husband, King Henry, who was then off fighting a rather pointless war in France; it was only when the Earl of Surrey begged the Queen to consider how such a gesture would be viewed by the rest of Christendom that Queen Katherine relented and instead dispatched King James's blood-stained coat. Neither was a proper Christian burial was not arranged for the dead King of Scots, in contravention of the proper etiquette of medieval chivalry; some said his body was buried at Sheen Abbey, others at Hume Castle. A rather more lurid (and probably ridiculous) story is that Queen Katherine had him posthumously decapitated and the head buried at the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel in Wood Street, London. Whatever happened - and it's possible that after stripping him on the Queen's orders, the English soldiers had simply hurled him into a communal grave - the exact whereabouts of Margaret's first husband are still a mystery.

Alone and friendless, forced to grapple with the thankless task of being Regent since her son James V was only a toddler when he came to the throne, Margaret - whose affection for Scotland can probably generously be described as "lukewarm" - soon fell in love and married for a second time to a Scottish lord. His name was Lord Archibald Douglas, the 6th Earl of Angus, and by him Margaret produced another child - a daughter, Margaret, who would make her career at the court of her English uncle, as has already been discussed. Like her mother, younger Margaret also seemed determined to chose her own men, rather than have other people chose them for her. And, like so many of the Tudors, she seemed to find members of the Howard clan absolutely irresistible. She was to earn her fearsome uncle's wrath after being romantically involved with Anne Boleyn's uncle, Lord Howard, and later with Catherine Howard's brother, Charles.

In any case, regardless of their daughter's romantic shennanigans, the marriage between Margaret Tudor and Archibald Douglas was apparently not an altogether happy one and in 1527, Margaret secured a divorce from him, on the flimmiest of theological grounds - something which, quite ironically, earned her a strict lecture from her brother in London. (Secretly, however, it's my hunch that the ease with which Margaret secured a divorce from the Vatican on the most tenuous and, indeed patently false, grounds, led Henry to believe that acquiring his divorce from Katherine of Aragon would be equally easy. He failed to realise that it wasn't theology that was at play here, but politics. Katherine mattered; Archibald didn't.) Not long after ridding herself of the irksome Archibald, Margaret married her lover, Lord Methven, to whom she was still married at the time of her death in 1541.

As Claire records, death came for the former Queen at her husband's castle in Perthshire, in the form of a massive stroke. She was fifty-two years old at the time and her body was conducted to the nearby Carthusian Abbey of Saint John, where it was buried with due ceremony.

She was survived by her son, King James V, and her daughter, Margaret, the future Countess of Lennox, whose affair with Charles Howard Margaret had been (perhaps hypocritically) infuriated to discover, via an angry letter from King Henry, shortly before her death. Younger Margaret was lucky, however; a more serious punishment was spared her when Queen Catherine's own adultery diverted the English King's attention from his niece's altogether more trivial romantic misdemeanour.

Margaret Tudor was the penultimate of the children of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York to die - her younger brother, King Henry VIII, outlived her by just over five years.

For Claire's full account of Margaret's political significance, read here.

Daughter of the Church: The Life of Matilda of Scotland, Queen of England

"From the time England first became subject to kings, out of all the queens none was found to be comparable to her, and none will be found in time to come, whose memory will be praised and name will be blessed throughout the ages."
- The Hyde Chronicle

For seventeen years after the death of Matilda of Flanders, England had no queen. William the Conqueror followed his wife to the grave four years later, to be succeeded in England by his son, William II, who for his own reasons decided not to marry. When William died and was succeeded by his brother, Henry I, in 1100, the new King married for reasons very similar to his father’s – his chosen queen was a princess of unassailable royal ancestry and famed for her piety. The two queens even shared the same Christian name and, in fact, the new Queen Matilda had been the god-daughter of the old. Unlike her predecessor however, the new Queen was not beautiful. One of her champions rather kindly said that the Queen’s appearance was ‘not entirely to be despised.’

Beauty or no beauty, Matilda of Scotland, Queen of England, had an august lineage and, as the career of her predecessor showed, such things mattered at that time. Matilda could claim in her family one parent who was to become a character in a Shakespearean play and another who was to become a Catholic saint. Her father, Malcolm III, King of Scots, was the hero whose victory heralds the end of Macbeth, whilst Matilda’s mother, Queen Margaret, was an English princess so famed for her religious zeal that she was to be canonised in the 13th century by Pope Innocent IV. Four of Matilda’s brothers and one of her half-brothers – Duncan II, Edmund, Edgar, Alexander I and David I – were to wear the Crown of Scotland and her sister, Mary, was to become the mother of the Queen of England in the next generation.