Scotland is both a neighbouring kingdom and a recurring pressure point in the English court’s politics: a frontier to defend, a royal family connected to England by marriage, and a possible partner in dynastic schemes. Its most decisive appearance comes in 1513, when James IV invades while Henry VIII is away campaigning in France. The victory that follows makes Scotland seem briefly within England’s grasp, but later episodes reveal a less settled relationship, marked by Margaret Tudor’s exile, disputes over marriage, and proposals for a Scottish alliance through Princess Mary Tudor.

A kingdom across the northern frontier

The 1513 invasion comes despite a sacred, permanent peace, sealed by James IV’s marriage to Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret Tudor. With Henry and the English army in France, the kingdom is left to defend itself. The contrast is stark: the king has taken the fleet overseas, while Scotland’s king acts against the peace and brings the conflict to England’s borders. Scotland is not merely distant diplomatic background; its actions create an immediate military crisis at the moment England’s ruler is absent.

The narrative also presents the frontier as a continuing responsibility rather than a single emergency. Thomas Darcy, a northern lord whose life is devoted to keeping the Scots on their side of the border, belongs to a tradition of local vigilance. His lands and duties connect the Scottish question to the lives of powerful northern families, whose authority is bound up with guarding the border. Scotland thus remains present in English political life even when no invasion is underway.

The 1513 invasion and England’s defence

With Henry away, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, is described as the only man left in England capable of command. At Richmond, the pregnant Katherine of Aragon and the seventy-year-old Thomas Howard take over the presence chamber. The room’s usual materials—music and plans for dances—give way to maps of England and Scotland, mustering lists, and the names of landholders expected to bring out their tenants. The queen’s ladies, too, report on the household men available to serve and on their border castles. The change in the room’s work makes the emergency concrete: courtly space has become a centre for mobilizing the kingdom.

Katherine’s decisions draw on her childhood with parents who fought to defend their own kingdom. She and Thomas Howard plan for more than one possible outcome. He will march north against the Scots; she will hold a second line in the Midlands in case he is defeated. The queen then rides out to the army despite her pregnancy, on a white horse and dressed in cloth of gold, to urge the English soldiers onward. Her action changes how the narrator sees her: the homesick young woman once comforted at Ludlow has become a commander and, in the narrator’s assessment, a queen militant.

The plan succeeds. Thomas Howard sends Katherine the bloodstained coat of James IV, killed in the conflict. His death leaves Margaret Tudor widowed, with a seventeen-month-old baby, and the English court celebrates Katherine’s defence of the kingdom. The account’s triumphant claim that Scotland is theirs for the taking registers the scale of the victory as it is felt at court; it does not describe a lasting English conquest. Instead, Scotland reappears in later episodes as a separate kingdom whose instability and royal connections continue to matter.

Margaret Tudor and Scottish instability

By autumn 1515, the narrative reports that Margaret Tudor has escaped Scotland, where she had markedly failed to rule, and collapsed in a northern castle to give birth to a daughter, Lady Margaret Douglas. Her husband has returned to Scotland, leaving Margaret in exile. She must make her way south to safety with her brother, while Katherine sends what she needs for the journey. These details reverse the earlier image of a marriage that had sealed peace: the royal union has not secured Margaret’s position or prevented the Scottish court from becoming a place from which she must flee.

The dispute over Margaret’s marriage further exposes the instability of that alliance. A northern lord warns Thomas Wolsey that Margaret is seeking a divorce from her husband with the help of the Duke of Albany, her rival regent and, according to the report, her lover. The warning predicts murder rather than an annulment. Henry VIII responds by insisting to Margaret and her husband that marriage is a sacrament and an indissoluble bond. Scotland is therefore linked not only to border warfare but also to a conflict over who may alter a royal marriage—and whether religious principle will be applied consistently when political and family circumstances change.

Scotland as a dynastic possibility

Scottish marriage remains one option in the English court’s shifting calculations. During Margaret Pole’s exile at Bisham Manor, she hears that Princess Mary Tudor has been betrothed first to Charles V, then to James, the young King of Scotland, and then possibly to a French match. The sequence presents Mary’s future as an instrument of changing alliances, not as a settled personal choice. Margaret hopes someone will teach her former pupil to view these suitors and political arrangements sceptically rather than becoming attached to the idea of them as lovers.

Taken together, these episodes give Scotland several connected roles in the story. Its invasion tests England’s ability to act without Henry; its royal marriage to Margaret Tudor proves unable to guarantee either peace or security; and its king becomes a possible match in the wider competition to arrange Mary Tudor’s future. The country’s relationship with England consequently shifts between military danger, troubled kinship, and diplomatic opportunity. Scotland remains close enough to shape English decisions, but independent enough that those decisions cannot ensure control over what happens there.