THE MYSTERIOUS QUARREL BETWEEN HENRY VIII AND MARGARET DOUGLAS
HITHERTO HISTORIANS HAVE CLAIMED THAT HENRY VIII’S DECISION to exclude Margaret Douglas from the succession in his will followed a quarrel she had with him in the autumn of 1546, and have suggested it was over religion.1 This is false.
We know Margaret was at court at least until August 1546 when she was buying powder from the king’s apothecary. Historians suggest the argument with Henry took place at around this time, or later. They base this on a memorandum written in 1562 by her husband’s former secretary, Thomas Bishop.2 At this time (during the reign of Queen Elizabeth) he had been digging for dirt on Margaret and her husband Lennox, who had been scheming to marry their son Darnley to Mary, Queen of Scots. They in turn tried to discredit Bishop. According to the Lennox account, ‘after the death of King James [V] in Scotland the said Bishop returned into his country [i.e. Scotland] and was retained in service by the Earl of Lennox, and, for the faithful service which King Henry VIII supposed he had done to the said earl, he gave him the living which he now has, which thing the king did afterwards repent, understanding that he [Bishop] went about to set dissension between the said earl and his lady’.3 The Lennoxes complained that Bishop was a frequent troublemaker, not only coming between married couples, but also in setting the Lennoxes’ servants against each other, and that he was a coward and a thief to boot.
In the Bishop memorandum quoted by historians, Bishop defends himself by surveying all the work he has done for Elizabeth I’s predecessors, despite the difficulties Margaret has put in his way and how he has been rewarded for it. In 1546, ‘His majesty [Henry VIII], not repenting his former gifts of lands, pension and money, a little afore his death and after the breach with my lady Lennox, gave to me and my heirs . . .’, etc. This refers to land grants Bishop received from Henry that October and dates Margaret’s supposed argument with Henry to shortly before that time. He does not say what her argument with Henry was about, but he complains about her continued anger towards him ever since. He worked for Edward VI’s councillors, Somerset and Northumberland, and then ‘Queen Mary, though my lady Lennox told her I was a heretic, her majesty gave me, unknown to her . . . my pension anew’. He even claims that Queen Mary trusted him over her Catholic cousin and old friend. The memorandum concludes: ‘I trust . . . the queen’s majesty will be as good sovereign to me as her gracious father my master [Henry VIII] was in the like and as her highness predecessors, my masters, have been, whom without fear of my lady Lennox or any others truly and without malice I shall serve . . .’, etc.4
It has been assumed that religion was at the cause of Margaret’s supposed argument with Henry. But another previously overlooked manuscript remains extant in which Bishop clarifies the matter. His claim is that Henry VIII was so angry about false accusations the Lennoxes had made against him in the 1540s that ‘[Margaret] ever after lost a part of [the king’s] heart, as appeared at his death’.5 In other words, Henry VIII demoted Margaret in line of succession because she was rude about Thomas Bishop! Now, Henry VIII evidently did value Bishop’s services, but Henry’s efforts to describe Margaret as illegitimate in 1536 suggest that he had wished to demote her in line of succession long before Bishop came to England. Despite Bishop’s memorandum in February 1562, the imprisonment of the Earl of Lennox in March and Margaret Douglas in April, the many accusations made against them, and specific efforts made to dismiss Lennox’s claims of the positive achievements of his work for Henry VIII, it was nowhere else suggested in 1562 (or by anyone who had been alive in 1546, other then Bishop) that Margaret had ever quarrelled with Henry.
Bishop’s subsequent career proved him a rather less reliable Tudor servant than he had claimed. In 1569 he was found to be in contact with adherents of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots. He ended up in the Tower where he remained until 1576, and was granted permission to return to Scotland by James VI after Mary’s execution.6 Margaret died in 1578, when she still owned a treasured tablet picture of the king. In her will it was bequeathed to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.7 This may be the tablet book with a picture of Henry VIII that survives in the British Library. A gold enamelled Tudor girdle prayer book with open leaf tracery covers dating from around 1540, the tiny book still contains its original manuscript with an illuminated miniature bust of Henry VIII.8 It came to the British Library from a library that belonged to the heirs of William Seymour, Duke of Somerset, the widower of Margaret’s granddaughter Arbella Stuart. Arbella had as a child been betrothed to Robert Dudley’s short-lived legitimate son, and it could have passed to her then, if it had not always stayed in her care.