Margaret, the 13-year-old daughter of Henry VII, slept in the Bishop’s Manor House in Darlington on her way to meet her new husband, James IV of Scotland, for the first time. Margaret’s hand had been part of the deal that had sealed the 1502 Treaty of Perpetual Peace between the feuding countries. She married James by proxy (i.e. the bridegroom was absent) in Richmond Palace on 25 January 1503, and then journeyed to meet him.
She rode on horseback, but when she came within 3 miles of a town, she jumped into a richly decorated bed and was carried in style by two footmen. The footmen picked their way over the Tees into Neasham, where the Abbess of Neasham, the Bishop of Durham and a ‘fayr company’, including forty horsemen, offered her a cross to kiss.
She was conveyed into Darlington, greeting knights and sheriffs on the roadside, and at the gates of St Cuthbert’s church, the vicar and ‘folks of the church’ welcomed her.
Margaret slept in the Bishop’s Palace – where the town hall is today – and a special lock was fitted to her chamber door (for centuries, its key was one of Darlington’s most prized possessions). Next morning, she left for Durham ‘in fayr array’.
The Treaty of Perpetual Peace lasted ten years before James invaded England in 1513.
(Longstaffe: History and Antiquities of Darlington)