Studies from Court and Cloister | Page 6

statecraft may be said to have had its dawn; yet Henry VIII., by the
sheer force of his tyranny and despotic will, baffled them both. While
Cromwell, the greatest genius in Europe, thought he held all the threads
of intrigue in his own hands, his royal master by the dogged pursuit of
one end overthrew the minister's entire scheme. Saturated though he
was with Machiavellian theories, a man of one book, and that book The
Prince, Cromwell lost all by his inability to read the bent of Henry's
mind and purpose.
Henry VIII. and his elder sister, Margaret, were strikingly alike in
character. Both proved themselves to be cruel, vindictive, unscrupulous,
sensual, and vain. Both were extraordinarily clever, but Henry being far
better educated than his sister, contrived to cut a much more imposing,
if not a more dignified, figure. In the matter of intrigue, there was
nothing to choose between them. That Henry succeeded where
Margaret failed, was owing to the fact that circumstances were in his
favour and not in hers. Given two such characters, the only parts that
were possible to them were dominating ones. Henry was master of the
situation all through the piece; Margaret was not, but she could play no
other part. Had she been differently constituted, had she been barely
honest, true, constant, and pure, there is no limit to the love and loyalty
she would certainly have inspired.
But, for want of insight into Margaret Tudor's disposition, the Scottish
people were repeatedly betrayed by one whose interests they fondly
hoped had become, by marriage with their king, identical with their
own. She had come among them at an age when new impressions are
quickly taken and experiences of every kind have necessarily been very
limited, but to the end of her days she remained an alien in their midst.
From the moment that she set foot in Scotland, as a bride of thirteen,
she began to sow discord; but although it was soon apparent that she
would seize every occasion to turn public events to her own profit,
James IV. had so mistaken a belief in her one day becoming a good

Scotswoman, that when he went to his death on Flodden Field, he left
the whole welfare of his country in her hands. Not only did he confide
the treasure of the realm to her custody, but by his will he appointed
her to the Regency, with the sole guardianship of his infant son.
Such a thing was unprecedented in Scotland, and it needed all the
fidelity of the Scottish lords to their chivalrous sovereign, as well as
their enthusiasm for his young and beautiful widow, to induce them to
tolerate an arrangement so distasteful to them all. Had Margaret cared
to fit herself for the duties that lay before her, her lot might have been a
brilliant one. Instead of the wretched wars which made a perpetual
wilderness of the Borders, keeping the nation in a constant state of
ferment, an advantageous treaty would have secured prosperity to both
England and Scotland, while the various disturbing factions, which
rendered Scotland so difficult to govern by main force, would gradually
have subsided under the gentle influence of a queen who united all
parties through the loyalty she inspired. Fierce and rebellious as were
so many of the elements which went to make up the Scottish people at
that time, Margaret had a far easier task than her grand-daughter, Mary
Stuart, for at least fanatical religious differences did not enter into the
difficulties she had to encounter. But such a queen of Scotland as
would have claimed the respect and won the lasting love of her subjects
was by no means the Margaret Tudor of history, as she stands revealed
in her correspondence.
While James IV. lived she had comparatively few opportunities of
betraying State secrets, but from the disaster of Flodden to her death,
her history is one long series of intrigues, the outcome of her ruling
passions--vanity and greed. Her first short-sighted act of treachery after
the death of James was to appropriate to her own use the treasure which
he had entrusted to her for his successors, the queen thereby incurring
life-long retribution in her ineffectual attempts to wring her jointure
from an exchequer which she had herself wantonly impoverished.
Hence the tiresome and ridiculous wrangling in connection with her
"conjunct feoffment," neither Margaret nor Henry being conscious, in
the complete absence of all sense of humour on their part, that the
situation was occasionally grotesque. Stolidly unmindful of the effect
they produced on the minds of others in the pursuit of their own selfish
ends, they pursued the tenor of their way with bucolic doggedness. The

doggedness ended in the defeat of all Henry's enemies; in Margaret's
case it ended