Episode 157 of the Renaissance English History Podcast was on the Rough Wooing, part of the Europe-wide wars beginning in 1542, when Henry wanted to make war with France, and needed to close off Scotland as a threat. Also, he could force Mary Queen of Scots to marry his young son Edward. Read on for the transcript and sources.
Sources:
Hedrick, Lance Adrian, “Anglo-Scottish Relations from Gentle to Rough Wooing, 1543-1547” (1999).
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539626227.
https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-z91v-hd48
The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots 1542-1551 by Marcus Merriman. Buy it on Amazon here.
Transcript of Episode 157: The Rough Wooing
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
This is episode 157, and we’re going to chat about the Rough Wooing when Henry VIII thought he could bully love.
But first, one quick admin note. Tudorcon Tickets for 2021 – because why not start planning some fun stuff for 2021, right? And they will be discounted for Black Friday starting on Friday – because I’m old school like that. So check it out at englandcast.com/Tudorcon2021 – three days of Tudor talks, music, bonding with your new best friends, and fun in beautiful Lancaster County Pennsylvania, October 1-3. Englandcast.com/Tudorcon2021. I have under 30 tickets left, so they will very likely sell out, and you don’t want to miss out on this amazing event.
So now, the Rough Wooing. Which, I have to say, you need to be very careful when you start researching Rough Wooing because Google will give you some very dodgy and questionable results with that query string. When King James I became King of England, it was the first time that England and Scotland were ruled by the same leader, who was actually Scottish. Which was really Scotland getting the final laugh after England had spent nearly a decade in what has been called an orgy of destruction, trying to break up the alliances between Scotland and France, which England saw as an existential threat. In Scotland the war was called the eight or nine year’s war, depending on when you start counting, but the term rough wooing comes from the fact that both England and France were fighting to decide where the baby Mary Queen of Scots would marry. Sir Walter Scott apparently coined the phrase “Rough Wooing”, and it begins to appear in history books from the 1850s onwards. Supposedly the phrase appears to derive from a famous remark attributed to George Gordon, 4th Earl of Huntly: “We liked not the manner of the wooing, and we could not stoop to being bullied into love.” The historian William Ferguson contrasted this jocular nickname with the savagery and devastation of the war:
English policy was simply to pulverise Scotland, to beat her either into acquiescence or out of existence, and Hertford’s campaigns resemble nothing so much as Nazi total warfare; “blitzkrieg”, reign of terror, extermination of all resisters, the encouragement of collaborators, and so on.
Like many of us who are fans of the Tudors, I had been familiar with the term Rough Wooing, and I was vaguely aware that it was a war over Mary Queen of Scots. But it’s only been through more recent readings of the period during the reign of Edward VI that I began to see just how destructive it was, and also how unpopular a war it was. So I thought I would do an episode just on this period of these wars.
So let’s begin with Mary Queen of Scots, who was born this past week, on the 8th of December, in 1542. She was, famously only 6 days old when her father died at the battle of Solway Moss. So this battle can help inform us of the situation between England and Scotland in this period. England and Scotland had been at each others’ throats for centuries, and the border lands were dangerous, and even the border itself was fluid with sides continuously changing. The border was populated by people who developed the habit of raids between the countries, and these raids were often exploited by others. The border was divided into six regions called the Marches – east, middle, and west, both English and Scottish. Each march was governed by a warden appointed by his king to keep the peace.
It’s important also to remember that there are various sets of alliances and relationships going on here. Scotland had a good relationship with France – called the Auld Alliance. England’s relationship with France and the rest of Europe was pretty sketchy at this point. England had left the Catholic Church, and the Pope had essentially approved any kind of attack against England. And then there was England and Scotland, which had an up and down relationship for centuries.
So here we need to detour a little bit because the next few years where England makes peace with Spain and makes war on France is known in history books as the Italian War of 1542-46, and it comes about – in short – because France began to have good relationships with the Ottoman Empire, which was, of course, pretty much of an anathema to the rest of Catholic Europe. There were also strained relationships with Spain already, and it bubbled up in 1542. Henry wanted to get involved with it and invade France, because Henry lived his life seeming to just look for opportunities to invade France.
But if England was going to invade France it needed to shut the back door. Essentially, mess with the Auld Alliance – spelled A-U-L-D – between Scotland and France. England couldn’t be having French troops invade from the north through Scotland, or even have Scottish troops making mischief there while he was busy invading France. So that needed to be handled.
So let’s start with that Battle of Solway Moss that killed James V. When Henry VIII broke from the church, and founded the church of england, he wanted his nephew James V to do the same, and follow in his footsteps. But James refused. Not only that, but James snubbed Henry. Remember that famous northern progress that we hear about because it’s when Katherine Howard supposedly got up to all her shenanigans with Culpepper? Well, it was on that progress when Henry VIII was supposed to meet with James, but James stood Henry up. Henry got mad, and sent raiding parties into Scotland to show his frustration. James responded by raising an army. On 24 November 1542, an army of 15,000–18,000 Scots advanced into England. And while they outnumbered the English who were waiting for them, it was in effect, a rout. The Scots were defeated mightily, and many were taken prisoner, where they were moved back to London to spend the Christmas holidays with Henry at court. They were mostly well treated, and Henry hoped that they would influence Scottish sympathies towards him.
And this was even more important because suddenly there was the potential for a marriage alliance because Scotland had a new Queen. The infant Mary, who could easily marry Henry’s son Edward. What Henry was after here was a way to unite the thrones of England and Scotland, under England, of course. This would have been Henry’s way to fight against the Auld Alliance with France, and to secure the northern border. There was a pro English party, and a pro French party, and the two began to fight against each other for years until the pro French party finally won.
Henry saw there was uncertainty during the period of a regency, and proposed marriage between Mary and Edward, hoping for a union of Scotland and England. On 1 July 1543, the Treaty of Greenwich was signed, promising that, at the age of ten, Mary would marry Edward and move to England, where Henry could oversee her upbringing. The treaty provided that the two countries would remain legally separate and, if the couple should fail to have children, the temporary union would dissolve. But then the Scottish Cardinal Beaton, who had a claim to the regency himself, rose to power again and began to push a pro-Catholic pro-French agenda, gaining power, and making the whole thing even more uncertain.
Shortly before Mary’s coronation, Henry arrested Scottish merchants headed for France and impounded their goods. The arrests caused anger in Scotland, and The Treaty of Greenwich was rejected by the Parliament of Scotland that December. The rejection of the marriage treaty and the renewal of the alliance between France and Scotland prompted Henry’s “Rough Wooing”, a military campaign designed to impose the marriage of Mary to his son. English forces mounted a series of raids on Scottish and French territory.
One of the most infamous episodes to happen in the Rough Wooing was in May 1544, when English Earl of Hertford (later Duke of Somerset – brother of Jane Seymour) raided Edinburgh, burning it. Mary had to be moved for her safety.
Contemporary sources suggest that every building in the capital, including Holyrood Abbey and the palace, was burnt. Only the castle managed to hold firm. The English ships were filled with looted goods at Leith and sailed south. The English army retreated over land, generally being terrible and burning things as they went. Meanwhile, pro-English agents were instructed to spread the word that the invasion was solely the fault of Cardinal Beaton. The aim was to ferment anti-catholic feeling and bolster the protestant faction.
The Scots gained some revenge the following year at the battle of Ancrum Moor. An army led by Arran routed an English force, which had been marauding in the Borders.
In May 1546, the pro French Beaton was murdered by Protestant lairds. And things sort of subsided a bit after Henry’s death, but France also had a new king in Henry II, who was out for revenge, and was much more war mongering than his predecessor.
King Henry II of France proposed to unite France and Scotland by marrying the young queen to his three-year-old son, the Dauphin Francis.] In February 1548, Mary was moved, again for her safety, to Dumbarton Castle. The English left a trail of devastation behind them once more and seized the strategic town of Haddington. In June, the much awaited French help arrived at Leith to besiege and ultimately take Haddington. On 7 July 1548, a Scottish Parliament held at a nunnery near the town agreed to the French marriage treaty.
Twenty years later, the English diplomat Ralph Sadler reported Adam Otterburn’s words to him on the Scottish opinion of the marriage to England:
Our people do not like of it. And though the Governor and some of the nobility have consented to it, yet I know that few or none of them do like of it; and our common people do utterly mislike of it. I pray you give me leave to ask you a question: if your lad was a lass, and our lass were a lad, would you then be so earnest in this matter? … And lykewise I assure you that our nation will never agree to have an Englishman king of Scotland. And though the whole nobility of the realm would consent, yet our common people, and the stones in the street would rise and rebel against it
Protector Somerset – the new King Edward’s Uncle, put a lot of money into defence in both Scotland, and France in Calais fortifying castles and adding troops. This was expensive, and deeply unpopular in most of England. An English invasion in September 1547, about 9 months after Henry VIII’s death, won a major encounter at the Battle of Pinkie where, even though they were outnumbered, the English managed to beat the Scots and leave 10,000 of them dead on the battlefield. They also put much of southern Scotland under military occupation.
Somerset got as far as Leith but then he abandoned a full victory – the country was nearly bankrupt, and spending more time and money on the war would have been devastating.
By 1548 Mary was taken away to safety and betrothed to the Dauphin. And the English started spending money on Spanish, German, and Italian mercenaries to augment their own army. But Scotland was given more money from France, and was able to add to their army, and fight back any raids and incursions. Things were at a standstill.
The English abandoned Haddington on 19 September 1549. Hostilities ended with Scotland comprehended in the Treaty of Boulogne [fr] of 24 March 1550, which was primarily between France and England.[27] Peace was declared in England on Saturday 29 March 1550; a week earlier the Privy Council had sent secret orders to English commanders telling them not to move cannon that would be abandoned to the Scots. There were conditions to return prisoners and dismantle border fortifications. As part of the treaty six French and English hostages were to be exchanged on 7 April. These were, for France: Mary of Guise’s brother, the Marquis de Mayenne; Louis de la Trémoille; Jean de Bourbon, Comte de Enghien; François de Montmorency; Jean d’Annebaut, son of the Admiral of France; François de Vendôme, Vidame de Chartres, were sent to London. For England: Henry Brandon; Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford; George Talbot; John Bourchier, 5th Baron FitzWarren; Henry Fitzalan; Henry Stanley.
A separate peace negotiation between Scotland and the Holy Roman Empire was required, mostly to resolve trade and piracy disputes. This treaty was concluded in Antwerp by Thomas, Master of Erskine on 1 May 1551. The Treaty of Norham in 1551 formally ended the war and the English military presence withdrew from Scotland. By October 1551, Mary of Guise herself was welcomed in England and she travelled from Portsmouth to meet Edward VI in London.
And of course, 52 years later in 1603, Marie of Guise’s grandson James VI became the Ist in England, finally uniting the two countries, though not in the way Henry VIII had hoped or expected.
‘So that’s it for this week. You can get show notes with sources at englandcast.com/wooing. And do let me know what you thought about this episode -You can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or join the new Tudor Learning Circle, which is a free social network just for TUdor history nerds. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you’re having a joyful advent season!
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]