Katherine’s hostility toward James IV of Scotland

Katherine’s hostility toward James IV of Scotland is rooted in the threat his kingdom poses to England’s northern border, but it does not end in a call for revenge. She works to contain James through diplomacy and military readiness, then makes the harder choice to spare a defeated enemy. The relationship reveals both her understanding of the danger and her growing conviction that victory alone cannot make a lasting peace.

A northern threat

Katherine treats the Scottish danger as a matter of national security, not merely a quarrel between neighboring rulers. When Henry discusses Arthur’s gifts as a potential commander, Katherine suppresses her grief at hearing her first husband remembered and turns the conversation toward practical questions: how to limit Scottish raids and whether the border lords should be reinforced. Henry’s adviser acknowledges that the border is long and difficult to defend, and that James, an experienced warrior, is eager for conflict. Katherine’s response is to look for a way to make James delay while England strengthens its defenses.

Her proposed answer is diplomatic. She sends Richard with a letter to the Pope, framing the threat to England’s border as a disturbance to Christian peace and to a wider alliance. The Pope then writes to James and threatens excommunication if he does not respect the agreed borders. James is compelled to apologize for his incursions, but he protests to Henry that England had no right to appeal to the Pope without him. Katherine’s method thus checks the immediate pressure without removing the underlying hostility: James resents the intervention, while his actions have shown that a purely local border dispute can become a question of Christian authority and international politics.

Containment through strategy

Katherine’s response also depends on managing England’s attention and resources. She believes the Scots are the greater danger because they can cross the land border quickly, while the French, however hostile, are separated by the sea. Yet she recognizes Henry’s desire to fight France and uses that impulse to her strategic advantage. She maintains his resolve for the French campaign while opposing members of the Privy Council who argue that her father’s unreliability is a reason not to go to war. Her own calculation is that a campaign to the south can keep Henry occupied while she prepares to confront the threat in the north.

The division of attention becomes perilous when Henry and the English army are in France. James declares war and begins a southward march, while Thomas Wolsey writes to Katherine asking whether troops should return to meet the emergency. Katherine judges that she can handle a border skirmish and orders a new muster using lists she has already prepared. She summons the London militia and inspects it in armor, mounted on a white horse, before it marches north. This is not an abstract claim to authority: she organizes the response while the king and the principal army are away, and presents the royal presence in the field as a practical means of rallying the remaining forces.

As the invasion intensifies, Scottish forces cross the border and take northern castles with little difficulty. The best of the English command and many of its soldiers remain overseas. Katherine therefore orders the royal standards and banners brought out, so that the English army in the north can appear under the king’s authority. Her readiness to assume that visible role marks the height of her confrontation with James: the threat has become immediate, and she treats the defense of England as her responsibility.

Victory and restraint

When Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, reports that the Scots are defeated and asks whether he should advance into Scotland, Katherine initially gives the answer expected of a victorious monarch. Scotland is exposed, its forces weakened, and further destruction appears to offer a chance to prevent another attack. She then stops herself and considers what such a decision would set in motion. Drawing on her own childhood amid the wars of her parents, she recognizes that military triumph followed by devastation could leave enduring hatred rather than security. A ruined country, she reasons, would recover, and its children might take up the conflict against England’s next generation.

That judgment transforms her hostility from a demand to punish James’s kingdom into an effort to end the cycle of retaliation. Katherine argues inwardly that her parents’ victory over the Moors did not end the conflict between Christians and Muslims; conquest had secured a battle, not a lasting settlement. She applies the same lesson to Scotland: war cannot answer war or finish it, and peace is the only possible ending. The analogy does not erase her earlier assessment of the danger. It changes what she believes a victory should be used for.

Katherine sends a messenger to Surrey with thanks for the victory and orders him to allow the Scottish soldiers to surrender their arms and depart in peace. She also says she will write to the Scottish queen, offering peace if she will act as a good sister and neighbor. Instead of treating the defeat as permission for further violence, Katherine makes clemency part of the military outcome and presents it as a route to durable security. Her hostility toward James is therefore neither personal vendetta nor simple reconciliation: it is a sustained response to raids and invasion, ultimately restrained by the conviction that defeating an enemy is not the same as making the border safe.