(Cover image – © Pinterest)
Only ruins remain on the site where Harbottle Castle rested once upon a time, overlooking the River Coquet.
Legend says it was a place used by ancient Britons with a stronghold held by Mildred, son of Ackman. In 1160, the Umfraville family built the actual castle under the orders of the then ruling King; Henry II, after the mythical Norman Conquest, so that it could be used as a defense mechanism against the neighbouring Scotts. Ironically, the Scots took the building not even twenty years later by Robert I of Scotland, later used as a prison. But in 1515, this was to become a historical building when a young widow took refuge within its walls to give birth after a long, arduous horse ride.
Margaret Tudor was in her early twenties and heavily pregnant, running for her life in desperate need of her brother’s aid. She had lost her husband, James IV of Scotland, and her sons’ custody, being virtually exiled from her home by the new regent, John Stewart, Duke of Albany. Margaret had remarried into the Douglas family, therefore losing her widowhood by the late King and thus, losing as well her rights and position as Queen dowager and regent of her older son. She was left with nothing more than her second husband, Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, and the baby she was about to give birth to. The couple was running to seek help in Henry VIII’s English court as she was his sister, and this is why Margaret ended up birthing her daughter in English soil, changing both countries’ lines to the throne forever. It was the 8th of October and her name was Margaret Douglas, though it’s unclear whether she was named after her mother or her mother’s grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, but we do know her illustrious godfather: Cardinal Wolsey.
At age five, she was invited to Princess Mary’s household in Beaulieu, getting ever closer to the royal family due to her close ties to the throne. Spending those formative years, ever so tumultuous for little Mary due to her father’s outbursts and love affairs, both girls established a friendship that would survive the passage of time.
Angus never got custody of his daughter after he abandoned his wife and children at the border to go back to Scotland, scared by Albany’s threats. He didn’t get it the second time either when he ran back to England in 1529 even though he lived there until 1542, his daughter being well kept under Henry VIII’s wings.
Few years later, Margaret, who had become one of his uncle’s favourite people at court, gained a position as lady-in-waiting for his new Queen, Anne Boleyn, in spite of her close relationship with the now vanished Lady Mary, who had been downcast and repudiated just like her mother, Queen Katherine of Aragon, who languished from castle to castle, waiting for Henry to change his mind while refusing to lose her daughter’s rights to the English crown.
This is how Margaret came into contact with Anne’s uncle, Lord Thomas Howard, the son of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, by his second marriage to Agnes Tilney. They began a secretive courtship that ended in engagement without Anne’s nor Henry's knowledge. By that moment, marrying, courting or getting engaged to someone from the Royal family without the King’s consent was illegal (as Anne's sister, Mary Boleyn, had been banished from court for marrying without permission as she was the Queen's sister) and so when Henry tired of Anne and disposed of her, the whole thing came to light. Mary was joined by Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, in her status as bastard royal children, and Margaret suddenly ranked even higher in the race to the throne. Her having been in a relationship without his knowing and with a Boleyn relative no less was bound to become a tragedy.
The love birds were taken to the Tower and in July 1536, Lord Thomas Howard was condemned by an Act of Attainder to death for attempting to 'interrupt ympedyte and lett the seid Succession of the Crowne'; in other words, he was condemned to die for messing with the line of Succession and tampering with Henry’s plans for his niece.
Even when the death sentence was exchanged by him remaining in the Tower and Margaret broke it off with him, Thomas would never make it out. Meanwhile, she had gotten sick, and being Henry’s relative and with her mother writing to him asking for leniency with her daughter, he took pity on her and sent her to Syon Abbey to recover, where she would make a full recovery and be freed on 29th October 1537, only for Thomas to pass away two days later.
Their tragic love was rewritten into a failed attempt at stealing the crown by Thomas, and the poems and love letters they exchanged were simply taken out of the equation so that Margaret could get back on her feet again in royal favour.
The men of the Howard family must have had some kind of magic trick because she managed to fall from grace once more by having a liaison with Thomas’ half nephew; Sir Charles Howard, proving she was as reckless and heart-led as her mother had been during her marriages. This time, it didn’t escalate into something potentially reputation-damaging and she was present at Henry’s last wedding to Catherine Parr, becoming one of her chief ladies. They had met long ago when both women had arrived at court, and now they reunited through the bonds of marriage and family.
By 1544, she had settled and wedded a Scottish exile named Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, who ended up becoming regent in Scotland in 1570. The pair welcomed two sons called Henry, another two sons called Philip and Charles as well as four girls who were unnamed. Of those four children only two survived: Henry Stuart, born in 1546 at Temple Newsam; and Charles Stuart, who married Elizabeth Cavendish in 1574.
In 1548, she received an anguished letter from her father asking for help as her uncle, George Douglas, and other members of the family had been captured at Dalkeith Palace. Her husband proceeded to sent the letter forward to the Duke of Somerset, clearly with zero intentions of helping his in-laws.
Lady Margaret spent Mary I’s reign living in Westminster Palace’s rooms, with the Queen reporting to Simon Renard that she was the most fitting option to succeed her at the English throne. At the end, though, Mary had to come to terms with her sister’s claim to the crown and when she died in 1558, Margaret acted as chief mourner before leaving and moving to Yorkshire, where her new home at Temple Newsam became a center for Roman Catholic intrigue during Elizabeth I’s Protestant rule.
A fate-shifting event took place when her son, Lord Darnley, married Mary, Queen of Scots after she widowed in France and returned to Scotland. Their marriage united Mary’s claim to the throne with Margaret’s through her son, thus making them a threat to ever paranoid Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s disapproval on the issue landed Margaret with another stay at the Tower of London only to be released after her son’s murder. At first she rallied against her daughter in law but then relented and let her husband act as regent after Mary’s forced abdication until he too was assassinated in 1571.
Showcasing her way of committing the same crimes twice, she went and displeased Elizabeth again by marrying her younger son Charles to Elizabeth Cavendish, the stepdaughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. This granted her another quick stay at the Tower, even when the also participant Countess of Shrewsbury didn’t follow her there. Margaret received a pardon in 1476 when her son died, going on to contribute diplomatically to her grandson’s ascension to the throne of England and Scotland.
She decided to help take care of her other grandaughter, Lady Arabella, until she breathed her last breath two years later, after having dinner with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, which sparked a whole set of rumours of poisoning with no supporting evidence to prove it. The Queen paid for a grand funeral in her honour before being buried in the same grave as her son Charles in the south aisle of Henry VII's chapel at Westminster Abbey. She now rests under a beautifully enriched monument commissioned by the executor and former servant Thomas Fowler.
One of the only remains from her existence is the infamous Lennox Jewell, made approximately in the 1570’s and later bought by Queen Victoria, considered "one of the most important early jewels in the Royal Collection", being conserved at Holyrood Castle nowadays.
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