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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Conventions and Conversions

  Family Trees

  Prologue

  Part One: ILL-GOTTEN THRONES, 1485–1488

  One – ‘This pretty lad’

  Two – The Field of Stirling

  Part Two: THE ROAD TO FLODDEN FIELD, 1488–1513

  Three – Uneasy Crowns

  Four – The Impostor

  Five – A Summer Wedding

  Six – Brothers in Arms

  Part Three: HALF A TUDOR, 1513–1542

  Seven – Queen and Country

  Eight – The Young King

  Nine – Uncle and Nephew

  Ten – Solway Moss

  Part Four: ‘THE MOST PERFECT CHILD’, 1542–1568

  Eleven – ‘Rough Wooings’ and Reformation

  Twelve – Daughter of France

  Thirteen – The Return of the Queen

  Fourteen – Downfall

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Dramatis Personae

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  For Isobel

  Author’s Note

  The idea for this book came to me when I realized that my knowledge of sixteenth-century history in the British Isles was heavily weighted towards England. This, I fear, is a product of the never-ending love affair that the English have with their Tudor monarchs, or, more accurately, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. But there is a great deal more to the past of these islands than Henry’s six wives and the mythical Golden Age of his younger daughter. Wales and Ireland have, of course, their own stories to tell, but it was Scotland, in particular, and the long-standing rivalry between the Tudors and the Stewarts, that intrigued me. For most English-speaking people, Mary Queen of Scots is the only Scottish ruler they have heard of, with the possible exception of Robert the Bruce. And Mary herself, the doomed, romantic queen of popular fiction and wildly inaccurate films, arrives somehow fully-formed on the English scene in Elizabeth’s time, with only the sketchiest of backgrounds and considerable misapprehension about the extraordinary events that had brought about her desperate flight from her homeland. But what lay behind this? The rivalry between the Tudors and the Stewarts did not start with Mary and her cousin Elizabeth. In order to understand it, I needed to go further back and to look at the relationship between England and Scotland against a longer time-frame. That is how this book was born.

  The reigns of the charismatic James IV and his capable son, James V (Mary’s father), are not as well-known as they should be, even in Scotland, let alone south of the border. There are a number of reasons that might explain this, starting with the obvious explanation that James IV’s death at the battle of Flodden in 1513 has obscured the achievements of one of the period’s most interesting rulers and the long minority of James V is so confusing that it tends to overshadow his success as an adult king. Yet both men enhanced Scotland’s role in Europe and neither was afraid of opposing the Tudors – indeed, James V spent his life successfully evading the clutches of his uncle, Henry VIII. For the Tudors, Scotland, a country with which they shared a border, was a constant source of aggravation, and one that they did not handle well. Its alliance with France posed serious diplomatic problems, exacerbated by the legitimate claim of the descendants of James IV and his wife, Margaret Tudor, to the English throne. Mary Queen of Scots was acutely aware of this and it was her overriding aim to be acknowledged as Elizabeth’s heir. The tensions that underlay Anglo–Scottish relations were also played out against the backdrop of almost constant war in Europe and the growing dislocation caused by the Reformation.

  The interwoven history of England and Scotland between 1485 and 1568 is one of high drama and its players are some of Britain’s greatest kings and queens. This is also a tale of powerful families, ambitious politicians and churchmen, of battles and intrigue, murder, rape and betrayal, of splendid courts and sibling rivalries. And, despite the prevalence of women rulers in the sixteenth century, it shows how difficult it was to be queen, whether a consort or a ruler in one’s own right.

  Over the years, Scottish historians have been somewhat guilty, perhaps, of keeping their history to themselves. I hope they will not be too disgruntled by an Englishwoman’s attempts to give the Stewart monarchs their due in sixteenth-century Britain. The outcome of the referendum on Scottish independence will decide whether Britain is once again divided. One wonders what Mary Queen of Scots would have thought. Her detractors would, of course, argue that she had her own dynastic interests at heart rather than those of Scotland itself.

  Writing this book has been a long journey and I would like to thank all of those who have helped me along the way. Dr Sean Cunningham at the National Archives at Kew spent time with me going over key documents and Dr Julian Goodare at the University of Edinburgh was generous in discussing ideas, also saving me from a number of errors in the section on Mary’s personal rule. Research in Scotland has been one of the great pleasures of this experience and I must acknowledge the friendliness and willingness to help of the staffs of the National Library of Scotland and the National Archives of Scotland as well as those in numerous fascinating buildings managed by Historic Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland. In England, the librarians of the London Library were always efficient and welcoming, as were their counterparts in the British Library and the staff of the National Archives. Georgina Morley, my editor at Macmillan, has been as enthusiastic as ever, ably assisted by Tania Wilde, who saw the book through its production stages. I should also like to thank Lorraine Green for her meticulous copy-editing. My agent, Andrew Lownie, continues to provide his unobtrusive but vital support. Above all, I should like, once more, to acknowledge the immense help given by my husband, George, in holding things together while I shut myself away and wrote.

  LINDA PORTER

  January 2013

  Conventions and Conversions

  Quotations used in this book are from both English and Scottish sources. Sixteenth-century Scots was a separate language, though it shared a number of English words. In most cases, spelling has been modernized but the quotations themselves have not, as I believe that we should let our ancestors speak for themselves.

  Monetary equivalents are impossible to give accurately and are disliked by purists. I have used the Measuringworth.com website’s 2010 RPI figures to give what is intended as an indication, to today’s reader, of the larger sums of money involved. It should be remembered that the Scottish pound was worth about one-third of the English pound in the 1530s. According to Andrea Thomas in her book The Princelie Majestie (Edinburgh, 2005), the French crown was worth about one Scottish pound and there were approximately two and a quarter livres tournois to the Scottish pound.

  Prologue

  LEITH HARBOUR, SCOTLAND, 19 AUGUST 1561

  The chilly summer morning brought only a muffled and impenetrable dawn. A sea mist, or haar, as it was known locally, enveloped the coastline, completely obscuring two galleys that had sailed unannounced into Edinburgh’s port on the Firth of Forth. ‘In the memory of man, that day of the year, was never seen a more dolorous face of the heaven … Besides the wet and corruption of the air, the mist was so thick and so dark that scarce might
any man espy another the length of two pair of boots. The sun was not seen to shine two days before, nor two days after. That forewarning God gave unto us; but alas, the most part were blind.’1

  If such gloomy premonitions were still far from the thoughts of most of the passengers on the two vessels, one, at least, made no secret of the fact that she had undertaken the voyage with mixed emotions. On board, and very much the centre of attention, as she had been all her life, was Mary Stewart. An unusually tall young woman of eighteen, regal in bearing and acknowledged for her charm and warmth, she had been a queen since she was six days old. Accustomed to being fêted and adored, she was gentle by nature and had given orders that the lash was not to be used on the rowers during the crossing. But she remained convinced that monarchs were divinely appointed and was always supremely conscious of her royal status. In matters of faith she was conservative, though not obsessively so. Raised in the Catholic religion of her ancestors (and the majority of the population in France, her adopted country), Mary had never known her beliefs rejected or her right to command the devoted loyalty of those around her questioned. Neither education nor experience had in any way prepared this undoubtedly intelligent girl for the challenges that lay ahead.

  Scotland, the country she had left behind at the age of five, whose language she still spoke but without the fluency of the French that had long since become natural to her, was engulfed by religious change and struggles for power between its unreliable nobility. Small and poor, harassed by England, its southern neighbour, Scotland may have been on the fringes of Europe, but its strategic importance in the never-ending machinations of European diplomacy was enhanced by Mary’s father and grandfather, both of whom were dominating figures. After Mary left Scotland in 1548, the position of the monarchy had changed. Lacking the strong personality of a resident ruler, the realm became unstable. A centuries-old battle for influence in Scotland, exacerbated by the religious upheaval of the Reformation, was still being fought between the English and the French. Behind it lay the larger question of who would control the entire British Isles. This problem had not been solved by any of the young queen’s immediate predecessors, in Scotland or England, and a deep-rooted tension remained between the occupants of the two thrones. The reality facing Mary Stewart on that dreary Scottish morning was one that would have given pause to even the wiliest and most experienced of monarchs. For Mary was very much alone. Her beloved mother and her young husband had died within six months of each other the previous year. She never knew her grandfather, the energetic, charismatic James IV, or her own father, his astute son, James V. Nor had she met any of her Tudor relatives. Henry VIII, her great-uncle, died the year prior to her departure for France and though as a baby she was the intended bride for his son, Edward VI, she had never seen him or either of his sisters. When the elder of these, Queen Mary, died in 1558, the throne had passed to the Protestant Elizabeth. Now the rivalry between the English and the Scots rested in the persons of two women who could not ignore one another but were total strangers.

  Mary knew no one well in her kingdom except for Lord James Stewart, a much older half-brother of dubious loyalty, on whose goodwill and support she was crucially dependent. She was exchanging a country where she was a widowed queen consort for a realm where she had long been an absent queen regnant. To her subjects she was unknown, a serious disadvantage in a land where the personal accessibility of the king had been a major element of Stewart success, and the land of her birth was equally unfamiliar to its own queen. But Mary had been frozen out of France, the country she loved, by her mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici, and by the realization that as a childless queen dowager she could play no further role there. The death of her husband, Francis II, in December 1560, left Mary with no choice but to return to Scotland. Whether she was genuinely welcome there was another matter.

  Yet Mary possessed an optimistic nature and was accustomed to getting her way. She was well aware of the effect she had on others. So, as she waited for the fog to clear, the queen of Scots put the sorrow of parting from the France she loved behind her. She accepted, with deep regret, that her life had changed. She did not, however, leave everything from her past behind. She was accompanied by three of the four Marys, the daughters of leading Scottish families, who had sailed with her from Scotland thirteen years earlier, and by a retinue of loyal French servants. As much as she could, she had taken her French life back with her across the North Sea. A vast array of personal belongings – horses, furniture, beds, rugs, tapestries, jewels, plate and a wardrobe more magnificent than that of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth of England – would soon follow, carried on a dozen ships. Mary was not returning to Scotland without her creature comforts. Ever conscious of her image, she was the daughter of kings and determined to live like them in splendour. Her youth and singular power to captivate were important weapons and she meant to use them to the full. She was also ambitious and dynastically aware, conscious of her legitimate descent from the Scottish House of Stewart and from the Tudor king Henry VII of England. Mary’s distant cousin and ‘sister queen’, Elizabeth, had only been on the throne in England three years and was of questionable legitimacy. She was also a heretic, unmarried and childless, though efforts were being pursued vigorously to find the English queen a husband. For contemporaries, both Mary and Elizabeth appeared equally vulnerable as unsupported female monarchs in a male-dominated world. Mary, though, was constant in the belief that she was Elizabeth’s rightful heir and, quite possibly, if Elizabeth’s position on England’s throne should become untenable, her replacement. The Scottish queen’s goal was nothing less than to unite the two kingdoms of England and Scotland under one crown. It was just a matter of waiting, and perhaps not even for too long.

  By late morning, the sea fog lifted and Mary was able to go ashore. Her arrival, after a voyage of just five days, took her brother and the Scottish government by surprise. There was to be no rapturous welcome but, as the weather improved, the people came out to greet her. It was a much more muted reception than she habitually received, but welcome nonetheless. Mary Queen of Scots was home at last.

  Part One

  Ill-Gotten Thrones

  1485–1488

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘This pretty lad’

  ‘We will unite the red rose and the white … England hath long been mad and scarred herself.’

  Henry VII in William Shakespeare’s Richard III

  ON ANOTHER DAY IN AUGUST, seventy-six years earlier, Mary Stewart’s great-grandfather was standing in a field in the heart of England. This may sound idyllic but the reality was not that of a pleasant pastoral scene. The noise of battle and the fear of death were all around him. He had good reason to wonder how much longer he might breathe the air of a country he had never yet been able to call home. The life he knew best was that of a wandering exile, often in flight, always penurious, harbouring schemes and consorting with unreliable malcontents. But there was one clear aim that underpinned his determination after all the uncertain years of living in foreign courts, surviving on the transitory goodwill of European rulers who reckoned his presence might give them a political edge in the realization of their own ambitions. He wanted the throne of England. His hopes were based on a distant and dubious claim, but the prolonged upheavals of the fifteenth century had presented others with unforeseen opportunities and he had gambled that such good fortune might also be his, in the right circumstances. Most people in England would probably never even have heard his name, such a rank outsider was he. Living so long across the water, the Breton and French tongues came more easily to him than English. But that scarcely mattered on 22 August 1485. As the fighting raged, his own safety seemed the first priority. There are signs that he was not entirely confident of success on the battlefield and with good reason. Supporters were fickle and uncommitted, his forces were outnumbered two to one and he had chosen survival over heroism by staying behind the vanguard of his troops and preparing an escape route if the day went agai
nst him. He could always try again.

  But his enemy had seen a chance to put a decisive end to the fighting that rolled across the countryside of Leicestershire that summer’s day. It was a battle in which the rebels were achieving a surprising degree of success, but although the larger force led by the king had been outmanoeuvred, it was by no means beaten. It was noted that the pretender was separated from his main force, with just his immediate bodyguard and a small number of horsemen and infantry to protect him. His vulnerability was obvious. In late medieval warfare, the death of a leader almost inevitably led to the capitulation of his forces. A direct onslaught, perhaps even hand-to-hand combat between the rivals, might settle things once and for all. As a tactic, it was not without risk, but the rewards – the removal of a continuing threat and the promise of stability in a strife-torn country – would be worth the gamble. Urged on by his advisers and doubtless following his own well-honed battle instincts, the king did not hesitate for long. A cavalry charge, led by the monarch himself, bore down on the small force of men gathered around the pretender’s standard, a red dragon which proclaimed his Welsh ancestry. As the riders approached, the man in the field knew that his life hung in the balance. Henry Tudor, unlikely heir to the House of Lancaster, was about to come within a spear’s length of Richard III, the Yorkist king he had pledged to overthrow. A matter of minutes would decide his fate.

  * * *

  ‘HE WAS a comely personage, a little above just stature, well and straight-limbed, but slender. His countenance was revered, and a little like a churchman, and as it was not strange or dark so neither was it winning or pleasing, but as the face of one well disposed. But it was to the disadvantage of the painter, for it was best when he spoke.’1 This description, although written more than a century after the death of Henry Tudor, captures what we know of him perfectly. A considered person, not given to great public displays of emotion, somewhat ascetic in appearance, not exactly handsome, but with an interesting and by no means unattractive face, the whole man only at his most appealing when he was animated. His portraits show that he did, indeed, have something of the churchman about him: a calm and also an inscrutability, a sense that you would never entirely know what he was thinking. It gave him an air of authority which must have been invaluable for a man who had never been part of any establishment, never so much as managed an estate or led men, in war or peace, and who had existed on the periphery of the English ruling class. He was of it but not part of it. His background and the dislocation of long years of civil strife had set him apart from those whom he might view as his peers. This distinctiveness marked him and would characterize his approach to the dangerous business of winning the throne. For Henry Tudor, nothing had been simple. His background was unusually complicated and the circumstances of his birth compellingly strange.