A true and tender chord is struck at last, when Margaret, appealing to Henry, exclaims, “God send I were such a woman as might go with my bairns in mine arms.  I trow I should not be long fra you!” Nor is it possible to feel aught but sympathy for her, when she allows herself to be stormed in Stirling Castle before she suffers her children to be torn from her.  Dacre professed to believe, and perhaps caused Margaret to fear, that they would be destroyed if they fell into the Duke of Albany’s power.  But the very day on which Dacre wrote to Henry’s Council, advising that money should be sent to enable her to hold out, the regent prepared to bombard her, and it was not till her friends had forsaken her, flying for their lives and in terror of Albany’s proclamation, that placing the keys of the fortress in her little son’s hands, she desired him to give them to the regent, and to beg him to show favour to himself, to his brother, and to her husband.  The regent answered that he would be good to the king, to his brother, and to their mother; but that as for Angus, he “would not dalye with no traitor.” *

* Cotton Ms. Calig.  B 2, 369; B.M.

No sooner had Margaret given up her children, than she began to manoeuvre how to steal them back and spirit them over the Border.  While pretending to be too ill to leave her palace at Linlithgow, where she gave out she had “taken to her chamber” in anticipation of her approaching confinement, she effected her escape into England, but her plan for capturing the king and his brother failed.  Nothing could now exceed her desolate condition, as, wandering from place to place, alone, ill, and worse than friendless, she sought in vain a refuge in all that wild Border region where she might await her hour of peril.  Angus, seeing the turn affairs had taken, had thought it prudent to abandon her to her fate, and, after helping her to escape, returned to Scotland in the hope of coming to terms with Albany.  His wife was at last thankful to accept Lord Dacre’s rough hospitality in his gloomy castle of Harbottle.  Here in the midst of a brutal soldiery, with no woman to render her the most needful service, she gave birth to a daughter, the Lady Margaret Douglas, on the 5th October 1515.  On the 10th she wrote to Albany to announce her delivery “of a cristen sowle beying a young lady,” and miserably ill though she was, did not omit to demand “as tutrix of the young king and prince, her tender children, to have the whole rule and governance of Scotland.”

To this letter Margaret received an answer written by the Council, stating that the governance of the realm had expired with the death of her husband, and had devolved to the Estates; that with her consent they had appointed the Duke of Albany; that she had forfeited the tutelage of her children by her second marriage, and that in all temporal matters the realm of Scotland had been immediately subject to Almighty God, not recognising the Pope or any superior upon earth.