Lord Lennox

In 1531, Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, aged 15 and feeling threatened by the Hamilton clan headed by Lord Arran, sailed for France and joined the Royal Guard, became a naturalised subject of the French King and changed the spelling of his surname from Stewart to Stuart. 

 In 1543 he returned to Scotland and began paying court to Marie de Guise, the Dowager Queen of Scotland. Reported as a handsome, charming and gallant man, or, in the words of the times, "well-proportioned with lusty and manly visage, and carried himself erect and stately, wherefore he was very pleasant in the sight of gentlewomen." She was said to have enjoyed his company, which was not surprising since he spoke her native tongue fluently and was skilled in playing the lute. 

Both she and Cardinal Beaton thought Lennox would support them against the ambitions of Arran, but they discovered him to be unreliable and driven by self-interest, which was understandable when his livings in France were denied him and he had little that brought him money in Scotland. The lands that should have belonged to him had been scattered among the greedy lords when he left for France. Marie refused to marry him, and eventually he defected to the English to see if overtures from Henry VIII would pay off. In return for his support against the Scots, Henry VIII bestowed on him the hand of his niece, Lady Margaret Douglas.

The wedding took place in July 1544 at St James's Palace in London. Born the same year as Lennox, Margaret was the daughter of Henry VIII's elder sister, Margaret Tudor (widow of James IV and grandmother of Mary, Queen of Scots) by her second husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. She was close enough to the  English throne to be controlled by Henry, and yet he allowed a  marriage between her and Lennox that could only reinforce the dynastic claims of both parties. Of course, at that time Henry had his beloved Prince Edward, and two daughters to follow him in the succession. 

Their marriage seems to have been a love match: he was said to be 'far in love', and in his letters addressed Meg as 'mine own sweet Madge' or 'my Meg', told her she was his 'chiefest comfort', and signed himself 'Your own Matthieu and most loving husband'. 

Margaret was a devout Roman Catholic, so Lennox, who had been reared in the old faith but recently favoured the new religion, tempered his views to please her and also King Henry. Religion was a matter of expediency with him.

Regretably I cannot find a picture of  said Lord Lennox, certainly not one that is listed with certainty as him, so I have included a picture of my own taken on a trip to Stirling Castle on a grey day a couple of years ago. I was there familiarising myself with the place because I was, and still am, writing about Stirling and the Dowager Queen, Lord Lennox and  Meg Douglas. 

Bad Guys, anyone?

How bad do bad guys have to be before they are unbelievable? These days such horrid crimes are committed in real life that almost anything might be considered believable in a fictional character. Not that I want to move into Stephen King territory with my current wip, not at all; but I find that most of my characters qualify for the label villain in some way. Perhaps I have a warped, villainous mind and create characters in my own likeness.

 Genre matters, too. A Thriller Villain surely has to be a worse villain than a Romance Villain. Your average villain in a Regency Romance needs some redeeming qualities, otherwise no heroine would love him, would she? I know certain women love a bad boy, but there's a limit - I hope. A villain facing Rebus in the grey streets of Edinburgh can be as wicked as he likes and he still won’t out-villain the villains we have in our society today.

 What about the villains who fill the pages of historical novels? We know that people suffered horrid deaths, lawfully applied. Documents list hideous facts of torture. But if my characters live in those times, will their senses will be less squeamish than mine? Does it depend on the mental toughness of the character? Not everyone would be bold and brave. In A Place Beyond Courage, Chadwick has a female character who is an absolute wimp - and very believable. Facts record that the Marchioness of Salisbury picked herself up and ran from the executioner who failed to deliver the first blow correctly, and ten more blows followed as he chased her. One has to hope that the tale has been more than a little embroidered, but it has a terrible ring of truth about it.

 I've come to the conclusion that the times about which we write dictate the villainy level of the characters. Tudor characters had to be tough to survive in their world and maybe I'm wrong to label them as villains. But they're turning out to have some villainous qualities. All of them. Uncomfortable as it is, I will have to sit very firmly my 21st century sensibilities and think Tudorish. Otherwise the book will never be finished.

 

The importance of a son

I read somewhere that the last instalment of The Tudors will have Henry’s death bed visited by some of his former wives. Given that most of them are dead, I thought that would be interesting, and started watching the programme once more.
There’s glamour still, lots of sex and the sheen of silken costumes, (in which the ladies must have frozen while the men are bundled up in thick brocade and heavy velvets) but the show is no better now than it was when I first tried it. Henry seems ageless, and strangely Irish. Nowhere does it suggest Catherine Howard’s frantic couplings with Culpepper might have been because pregnancy was what was required and Henry wasn’t doing the job.

The problem of childlessness attracts a lot of attention today, but it cannot match the strain such a matter put on a sixteenth-century Queen. Her one function in life was to bear sons. If she did not, she was a failure. Anne Boleyn reached Henry’s side by education, personality and courage, but then had to accept that everything hung on the production of a son. Her step-daughter Mary, who understandably resented Anne, no doubt laughed at her problem; but she too would fall foul of the same problem in years to come, and so, in a different way, did Elizabeth.

One son – one would think it surely could not be too difficult with a man like Henry. Yet time went by and the living sons did not arrive for Anne Boleyn any more than they had for Katherine. Anne, like Katherine before her, shouldered the blame. Yet large families were not the commonplace we might think in the sixteenth century. Women spent what must have seemed like lifetimes being pregnant, but that did not always translate into living families. And especially it did not mean that a son and heir was a given. Many families of the time produced only daughters, or no children at all, and titles skipped to nephews.

Did Henry have sexual problems? In 38 years he slept, over a period of time, with eight women, including both wives and known mistresses. Only four of the eight conceived and produced healthy children, one for each of four women – Katherine, Anne, Elizabeth Blount and Jane Seymour. Other pregnancies ended in stillbirth, miscarriage or death in the first few days of life.

It certainly raises the possibility that Henry was the root cause of his lack of heirs. It seems clear venereal disease was not to blame, as is sometimes suggested. His medical history and treatments are most unlike those of Francis of France, who definitely had the pox. There are no payments in the household accounts for the particular medications in use at that time for such a complaint. The so called syphilitic leg ulcer was likely caused by osteomyelitis as a result of an injury in the tilt yard. A seventeen-hands horse in half armour falling on someone is apt to leave an impression and the wound never healed satisfactorily. It caused Henry massive pain when abscesses formed deep in the bone.

Medical knowledge of the time could not deal successfully with such an injury. He never rode to the joust again, and increasing immobility coupled with a huge appetite led to an ominous weight gain. Pain led to shifting moods plus outbursts of irritation and temper.

When Anne Boleyn miscarried in July 1534, it probably brought back all the doubts Henry was prey to during his marriage to Katherine. Today we know that anxiety about virility can lead to loss of potency, and he must surely have suspected, deep down, that he was the problem. A wife who produces no sign of pregnancy is one thing, but a wife who becomes pregnant but produces weak and sickly children is another thing again. Henry would know, as would his courtiers, of families where in-breeding produced deformities. They would also know of infertile stallions and bulls. From there it was a small step to the obvious conclusion.
It was more than a year before Anne was pregnant again.
At George Boleyn’s trial, he was asked if his sister, Anne, had told him that the King was unable to attain or sustain an erection. They say that the question was written, and the fact that George answered verbally ensured that he was executed.

Anna of Cleves may not have been Henry’s type, as we say these days, but his reluctance to bed her suggests his at least partial impotence. More conclusive is the fact that Mary Boleyn and Katherine Parr became pregnant the moment they married and bedded other men.

If Catherine’s dalliance with Culpepper had led to pregnancy, Henry might have feared that his son would not inherit the crown of England. The Tudors systematically ridded themselves of all Plantagenet heirs to keep their throne secure. Henry couldn’t take the risk of a Culpepper bastard ousting his son. Nor could he face the public shame of Catherine claiming she carried another man’s son...she had to go.