The Face in the Locket
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Well off the path being beaten by the great international multitudes visiting Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, in a side-gallery set apart from the foot-traffic of the “Gallery of Honor” that features the famous paintings of Frans Hals, Jan Vermeer, and Rembrandt, you can find a certain tiny gem of a work if you're stubborn about it. The thing is a miniature portrait by the great Nicholas Hilliard, an item that would fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. It's a tiny, evocative picture of an old woman, Margaret Douglas, the Countess of Lennox, a portrait Hilliard probably completed shortly before her death in 1578. Historian Morgan Ring, in her superb new biography of Lady Margaret, So High a Blood: The Story of Margaret Douglas, the Tudor That Time Forgot, describes Hilliard's work:
She tucked her white hair under a plain white cap and dressed in a high-collared black gown, trimmed with fur, sleeves slashed to reveal black-and-white embroidery, a small white ruff at her chin. Her eyes and lips were pale and the bones of her skull showed through her delicate skin, its pallor heightened by the contrast with the bright lapis background … Hilliard caught her beauty: at sixty, her skin is still unlined, her expression guarded, even piercing, observing the viewers who observe her.
“Characteristically,” Ring adds, “she looks like a woman with a secret.”Lady Margaret was the niece of King Henry VIII, the daughter of his sister Margaret, Queen of Scots, and her second husband, Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Angus. She was the mother of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the feckless, dashing Englishman who married Mary, Queen of Scots. She was the grandmother of James Stuart, who would go on to unite the thrones of Scotland and England when he became the successor of Queen Elizabeth I. She was lady-in-waiting to King Henry's second wife Anne Boleyn, and she was bosom friend to Henry's daughter and future successor Mary. “In an age in which women were expected to be subordinate to men, and to occupy themselves only with domestic concerns, she stands out as a strong, capable and intelligent character who operated effectively, and fearlessly, at the very highest levels of power,” wrote Alison Weir in her own 2015 life of Lady Margaret, The Lost Tudor Princess. “Her story deserves to be better known.” Antonia Fraser, in her big biography of Mary Queen of Scots, diplomatically calls Mary's mother-in-law “formidable” and describes her as “a worthy combination of the intriguing talents of Douglas and Tudor.” Here in her first book, Morgan Ring uses a broad array of sources in order to produce an exacting and objective portrait of Lady Margaret.She was born in a Northumberland castle in 1515 and raised in a succession of castles and stately manor houses until she was old enough to be installed in some suitably illustrious Court household – in this case, that of her godfather Cardinal Wolsey. After his downfall and death, she moved to the household of Princess Mary, and from there to lady-in-waiting status in the establishment of Anne Boleyn, then at the pinnacle of Court power and prominence along with the rest of her Howard kinfolk. She commenced, in other words, what could be called the normal lifestyle of a Tudor princess, a high-born young woman, firmly in the line of succession – in fact, there were many moments when Lady Margaret seemed first in that line, as in 1536 when Henry's nearly-grown illegitimate son the Duke of Richmond died suddenly at a moment when both Mary and Elizabeth were considered bastards; as Ring puts it, “If Henry did not have another child, Margaret might become his heir.”
Both Margaret and Howard had enough sense to know that it was not a suitable match. Howard, though a scion of one of the great families of England – Anne Boleyn was a Howard and so was Mary Fitzroy – was not in line to be Duke of Norfolk. A leading noble might marry a royal woman but it was rare for a minor one to aim so high. Knowing this, Margaret put aside whatever gratitude she felt to the king and queen and kept the affair as secret as she could manage.
“As secret as she could manage” didn't turn out to be very secret, particularly in the spotlight-bright chaos of Anne Boleyn's fall from grace in the summer of 1536. When King Henry learned that his niece was busily backstairs affiancing herself to the scion of an overly-ambitious noble family, the kinsman of the young wife Henry now hated, he was furious – and the tectonic shocks of his fury were felt even in distant Scotland, where the Dowager Queen wrote to her brother pleading that he show mercy to her daughter. The letter rings strange to 21st century ears, since it's as much the plea of a frightened subject as it is the plea of a sibling, and it tempts Ring to the kind of armchair-psychologizing Henry almost always elicits in historians, novelists, and playwrights:
To modern eyes, it seems shocking that a sister should have to make such a plea to a brother, but Margaret Tudor's fears were understandable. Henry took great pride in the women he loved and expected total obedience in return. When he did not get it, his reactions were volcanic: he raged when his younger sister remarried without his permission, banished Katherine of Aragon from court and refused to speak with her or even allow her to see their child, turned his eldest daughter into a servant for his youngest, and had Anne Boleyn put to death. His temper was ferocious and his behaviour increasingly cruel.
Bitter loss, familiar ambition, and passionate Catholicism: it was small wonder that the men who surrounded the new queen would never see Margaret as the poetic and charming Lady Margaret Douglas. To them, she was the power-hungry, untrustworthy Countess of Lennox. But she would never see herself that way. She was a deprived heir and daughter, determined to defend her right.
But the idea of casting Lady Margaret as a courageous woman alone in the man's world, defiantly fighting for her rights on behalf of herself and her two surviving sons runs the risk of getting diced up by Occam's Razor. Margaret's life is comparatively well-documented, and time and again in those documents we find her subverting and suborning, first on her own behalf and then on behalf of her elder son, Lord Darnley. In 1559, for instance, she and Lennox had meetings with Alvarez de Quadra, diplomat and former Bishop of Aquila, that left little room for creative interpretation. “As Margaret spoke, de Quadra realised that she and her husband were not, as he had first believed, talking in the abstract about what might happen if Elizabeth died suddenly,” Ring relates. “Rather, they were both nearing the end of their patience with the queen: '[T]hey did not mean it in that way, but to attempt to overthrow her at once.'That impatience to overthrow took other forms as well, including, infamously, Lady Margaret sending her son Darnley to Scotland specifically to woo Mary Queen of Scots into marriage – a scheme that had some theoretical merit, as Ring points out:
On paper, Darnley had much to recommend him. It had been more than a century since a Scottish monarch had married a subject, but Darnley was not a Scot, in spite of his claims to the earldoms of Lennox and Angus – he was an English-born member of England's royal family. Marriage with him might strengthen Mary's claim to the English throne and eventually see them ruling throughout the British Isles, giving her a native-born husband and removing a rival claimant.
In the last week of June, Cecil and William Howard came to Margaret's chamber with a message from Elizabeth: she was going to the Tower, and she had only until the tide rose to prepare herself. Perhaps for the first time, Margaret realised just how treacherous Elizabeth thought she was, and how severely the queen was ready to punish her. She had steeled herself for confinement within the palace, but the prospect of returning to her old prison was terrifying.
Darnley's murder in 1567 prompted her release, but there was more scheming and scandal to follow, including one involving her other son, Charles, contracted by her into yet another unsanctioned marriage and resulting in yet another stay in the Tower. When Lady Margaret died in March of 1578, the queen she had so often wronged paid for her state funeral, and tourists every year to Westminster Abbey gaze at her striking stone monument there, a stately mass of alabaster that looks as calm and right as a fresh snowfall.But it's the tourists at the Rijksmuseum, the few who go hunting for her, that come much closer to seeing the real Margaret Douglas. The Hilliard miniature is as revealing as an X-ray. This was an artist who could read the hearts of his subjects, and this was a subject who no longer had even a vestigial reason to pretend. The face in the little oval is a cold one, the line of the mouth is tight from a lifetime of calculating pitiless odds, the tilt of the head as much a product of surefooted arrogance as the artist's necessary perspective. In many ways, it breathes a queenly ease far greater and more natural than the miniature Hilliard also made of Queen Elizabeth. In Lady Margaret's fierce, sardonic eyes the watchful museum-goer can glimpse a sight far more haunting than any of those Rembrandts across the hall: an entirely different path for England and Europe, a radically different shape for five centuries of monarchy and faith, all hinging on the chances that that did or didn't happen to come to this monstrously capable woman.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston. He reviews for The National, The American Conservative, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.
