Margaret Tudor (1489-1541) - Queen of Scots 1502-1541

Margaret was the eldest daughter of King Henry VII of England and Elizabeth of York, the daughter of King Edward IV of England. She was born at the Palace of Westminster and was married, at the age of twelve, to King James IV of Scots. From this union came, ultimately, the inheritance of the Crown of England by the Stuart kings. Margaret's son, James V, was born in 1512, seventeen months before his father's death at the Battle of Flodden. Though left as Regent by her husband's will, Margaret had little real power, for all Scotland was, at heart, devoted to the French alliance. She remarried in 1514, to Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Angus, but thereby lost all hold on the Regency, which passed to the Duke of Albany. In 1517, after a visit to England, she quarrelled with her new husband and was believed to have subsequently had affairs with more than one of the Scottish nobles. Her brother King Henry VIII of Engalnd, who had hoped to sway Scotland through her, found her as unstable in politics as she was faithless in matrimony, and wrote letters scolding her on both subjects. She was finally divorced from Angus in 1527, and, in the next year, declared her marriage to Henry Stewart, afterwards Lord Methven. Although she tried hard to divorce him in 1537, she never succeeded. She had, by Angus, one daughter, Margaret Douglas, afterwards Countess of Lennox and mother of Henry, Lord Darnley, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, and father of King James VI & I. She was, in character, probably the worst specimen of the great House of Tudor.

Edited from CRL Fletcher's 'Historical Portraits' (1909)

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