This constituted Margaret's famous grievance against James, his objection to her divorce being, his mother declared, the fear lest she should pass into England and remarry the Earl of Angus. "And this Harry Stuart, Lord of Methven, causes him to believe this of ME!" she exclaimed contemptuously.* One plea for getting rid of the now despised Harry Stuart is too amusing to be omitted. James was in France, whither he had gone to bring home his bride, the young and beautiful Magdalene, daughter of the French king, and Margaret thought to induce Henry to interest himself in her divorce through his jealousy of the French.
* State Papers, v. 119.
After begging him to send a special messenger to the king her son, to know his "utter mind," she says: "For now, dearest brother, your Grace I trust will consider that now the queen his wife is to come into this realm soon after Easter, as he hath sent word here, to make ready for the same, and that being, it will be great dishonour to him that I, his mother, having a just cause to part, can nought get a final end; and I trust your Grace will consider I may do your Grace and my son more honour to be without him (Lord Methven) than to have him, considering that he is but a sober man, and if the Queen that is to come, see me not entreated as I should be, she will think it an evil example." *
* Hamilton Papers, f. 109.
But all her efforts were fruitless; Henry could not be persuaded to take up her quarrel, and James was obdurate. His mother, however, then in her forty-ninth year, dispensed with legal formality altogether, and allied herself to a certain John Stuart, who, according to some, is identical with the adventurous Earl of Arran, so notorious in the reign of James VI.
A few more miserable years of petty intrigues, it being no longer in her power to carry on important ones, and Margaret came to the close of her faithless, undignified life. But before the end, a ray of sorrow for her mis-spent days brightened the hitherto unrelieved gloom of her career. Henry's messenger, sent after her death to gather up the details of her last moments, and above all, to find out whether she had made a will, wrote to the king as follows:—
"When she did perceive that death did approach, she did desire the friars that was her confessors, that they should sit on their knees before the King, and to beseech him that he would be good and gracious unto the Earl of Angwische, and did extremely lament and ask God mercy that she had offended unto the said Earl as she had."
The friars were also to plead with her son for the Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter whom she had so remorselessly abandoned, and to beg him that she might have some of her mother's goods. And thus, making what reparation she could, with penitent words on her lips, Margaret Tudor passed away.
II. NOR WIFE NOR WIDOW
The history of the first two marriages of Henry VIII. is of such vital importance, affecting as they did the whole course of religion in England, from the first whisperings of the divorce down to the present day, that it is not to be wondered at if the royal Bluebeard's subsequent matrimonial alliances have been considered negligible quantities. And yet, at least one of them was of extreme political, and even religious, importance, and was fraught with so much mystery that until the most recent investigations, the true inwardness of the matter has been totally misapprehended. The story of Anne of Cleves' portrait, and Henry's supposed disappointment when he saw the lady herself for the first time, is authentic in so far as it was exactly what the king chose to have circulated about his fourth marriage. But if it contained half the truth, it was the other half that really mattered.