A Young Tender Plant at the Royal Scottish Court: The Youth of Margaret Tudor in her Marriage to James IV

Margaret Tudor, the daughter of an English king, married James IV, King of Scots, in 1503. The union had been carefully arranged to bring political advantages to both England and Scotland, and the wedding festivities were suitably lavish. Yet one aspect of the match that worried people on both sides of the border was the youth of Margaret: she was only thirteen years old when she married James, who was then about thirty. Reports from English heralds and a Spanish ambassador, poems by the Scottish court poet William Dunbar, expenses recorded in the Scottish treasurers’ accounts, even the handwriting in a letter that Margaret wrote shortly after arriving in Scotland show more concern for Margaret’s youth among people at the time than later commentators have allowed. People surrounding the new Queen of Scots understood that Margaret, while legally of age to marry, should be afforded time to grow into fuller maturity before taking on the responsibilities of a royal wife.

Mairi Cowan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga. She has written about the tensions of international theology, national politics, and local tradition in twelfth-century Glasgow; experiences of childhood in the court of James IV, King of Scots; the connections between social discipline and the Catholic Reformation in Scotland; colonial efforts to “Frenchify” Indigenous people in seventeenth-century Québec; and Jesuit missionaries’ beliefs about demons in Indigenous societies of North America. Her most recent monograph, The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), is a microhistory of bewitchment in New France. She is also co-editor of the recent collection Gender in Scotland 1200-1800: Place, Faith and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).