MARGARET TUDOR, QUEEN OF JAMES IV.
I am certain that Dom Pedro de Ayala did not linger in the court to gossip with Dunbar, or with the hangers-on. Dom Pedro had come up from Spain on a strange ambassadorial errand, to offer to James in marriage a Spanish princess, knowing well that there might be no Spanish princess (Maria was betrothed to Portugal); but no doubt believing that there ought to be, since James was slow in marrying, and surely a Spanish princess would best mate this royalest of the Stewarts. Dom Pedro better liked the extravagant kingly court at Holyrood than the niggardly court at Windsor. He wrote home to Ferdinand and Isabella, "The kingdom is very old, and very noble, and the king possessed of great virtues, and no defects worth mentioning." No defects! Certainly not. James had the qualities of his defects, and these were royal. James could speak—not keep still—in eight languages, and could and did say "all his prayers." So Dom Pedro reports to his Most Catholic Majesty.
When he was thirty years old, this King Errant married, not the hypothetical daughter of Spain, but the substantial youthful Margaret Tudor, aged fourteen. The Scottish king would none of the alliance for years; James preferred hypothetical brides and errant affairs. But the English king saw the advantage and pressed it. He had united the roses, red and white, of England; he would fain join the thistle to the rose.
So James, in August, 1503, journeyed out to Dalkeith, whither Margaret had come. He returned to "hys bed at Edinborg varey well countent of so fayr a meetyng." A few days later, Margaret made her entry into Edinburgh, James having met her, gallantly dressed in "a jacket of crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold." Leaving his restive charger, "mounting on the pallefroy of the Qwene, and the said Qwene behind hym, so rode throw the towne of Edinburgh." Their route lay through the Grassmarket up to the Castle Hill, and down the High Street and the Canongate, to the Abbey. Here they were received by the Archbishop of St. Andrews. Next day they were married by the Archbishop of Glasgow, the Archbishop of York joining in the solemn and magnificent celebration.
It is the most splendid moment in Edinburgh history, within the Abbey and the palace, and within the city. The Town Cross ran with wine, the high lands were hung with banners and scarlet cloth, and morality plays were performed before the people. In the palace there was a royal scene. And our friend, William Dunbar, Kynges Makar, read his allegory of "The Thrissl and the Roiss," which is still worth reading, if Chaucer is worth reading.
But, at night, in the royal apartment, the night before the wedding, perhaps in the fragment of the old palace which remains, the gallant king played to the little princess upon the virginal; and then, on bended knee and with unbonneted head, he listened while she played and sang to him. Out of the dark of the time it is a shining scene; and out of the splendour of the moment it brings a note of tenderness.
Another decade, another August, and the Boroughmoor (where now run the links of Burntland) was covered with the white of a thousand tents, Scotland was gathered for war, the "ruddy lion ramped in gold" floated war-like over all, and James and all Scotland prepared to march down to Flodden, heeding not the warning which had sounded at midnight in ghostly voice at the Town Cross; a warning no doubt arranged by Margaret, never a Stewart, always a Tudor. And—all Scotland was turned into a house of mourning.
Half a century later the history of Scotland came to a climax, and Mary Stewart came to Holyrood; that queen who then and ever since held half the world in thrall, like another Iseult. The covenanted world has rejected her, as no doubt it would reject Iseult.
Shrouded in a gray "haar" from off the North Sea, rising like a Venus out of the mists of the sea, Mary Stewart, Dowager of France, Queen of Scotland, Heiress of England, came unto her own. And, her own received her, and, received her not.