The Tudors in Love by Sarah Gristwood

Author:Sarah Gristwood [Gristwood, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786078957
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2021-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Henry’s had not been the only Tudor heart in turmoil at court in the early 1530s. Even as Anne Boleyn was unwittingly assembling the case against herself, another romantic love story had been unfolding within the dynasty. Henry’s niece Margaret Douglas had been raised largely at her uncle’s court, as a valuable pawn in the marriage market. But like her mother (and in the phrase of her future daughter-in-law Mary, Queen of Scots), this Margaret would regard her heart as her own. She had shared more with Anne Boleyn than just the queen’s rooms, which had seen such dangerous games of love. Would they end as badly for Margaret?

Born in 1515, in the course of her mother’s wild flight from Scotland and, crucially, just after her mother crossed the border into England, Margaret was an Englishwoman only by a bare week; but this was nonetheless a vital point. Foreigners, like Margaret’s surviving half-brother the young Scottish king, were by common practice debarred from inheriting land in England – let alone, presumably, the land of England itself. So Margaret’s English nationality shot her into edgy prominence with regard to succession to the English crown.

Margaret nonetheless spent her first decade or more receiving the upbringing of a Scottish princess. Aged five, negotiations for her own possible marriage, with a series of suitors, began. But everything changed when, in 1527, the Pope granted Margaret Tudor her long-sought annulment from Angus, albeit with the proviso that their daughter’s legitimacy was not affected by the decree. Sometime around then, Angus seized the young Margaret Douglas from her mother’s care. But in 1528 James V, Margaret’s half-brother, escaped from his stepfather Angus’s custody to assume rule himself.

Margaret was holed up at Tantallon Castle with her father as news came that Angus was now an attainted traitor. James was advancing on Angus with an army, and a reward was offered to anyone who would return the young Margaret (willing or not) to her mother’s charge. In the best traditions of her family, there was a dramatic scene as Angus, shouting across the River Tweed which formed the Anglo-Scottish border, negotiated for his daughter to be admitted to England, out of her half-brother’s reach. For some eight months she remained at her first place of refuge, Norham Castle in Northumberland, then for another year at Berwick under, effectively, the distant care – or protective custody, since there was fear she might be snatched back to Scotland – of her godfather Cardinal Wolsey.

Happily, by the time Wolsey died, Margaret’s father had committed himself wholly to England’s cause. Margaret came south to Henry VIII’s court, her uncle marking the occasion by ordering a costly wardrobe for the notably good-looking fourteen-year-old; gowns of tawny velvet and of black satin, of black damask decked with crimson and white. Margaret was sent to join the household of her cousin and contemporary Princess Mary. But when, within a few years, Mary was stripped of her privileges, and even of her title of princess, Margaret was brought to court, first lady in rank of all those around the new queen Anne Boleyn.

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