The Thistle and the Rose by Linda Porter

Author:Linda Porter [Porter, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781801105767
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Unfaded both of colour and virtue

Thy noble lord that died has done devoir

Fade not with weeping thy visage fair of hue.

Dunbar finished by exhorting the queen to ‘live in lustiness’, a term which in the sixteenth century would have suggested something more akin to healthy enjoyment of life rather than sexual voracity.11

Margaret has been heavily criticized for this second marriage, notably by female historians, who have fallen over themselves to depict her as a thoughtless, selfish young woman overpowered by sexual attraction for Angus. This character assassination began in earnest with the prim Victorian historian Agnes Strickland, who combined a moralizing tone with a shaky grasp of history and a penchant for hindsight in her many ill-informed judgements about Margaret and other women rulers, most notably Margaret’s granddaughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, and James VI and I’s wife, Anna of Denmark. Strickland remained an authority for many years and has coloured interpretations of Margaret Tudor ever since. ‘In one moment of womanly weakness and romantic folly’, wrote Maria Perry in 1998, ‘Margaret Tudor had effectively destroyed her own power base’.12 Such sentiments are enough to make the modern cohort of vibrant young women scholars of the period shudder. Womanly weakness and romantic folly are not part of their vocabulary, nor should they be. Indeed, Margaret was looking to shore up her power base and build upon it. Yet that the marriage of Margaret Tudor and Archibald Douglas was a disaster that blighted many lives is beyond doubt.

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