| Notes |
- Margaret Drummond (c. 1475 – 1501) was a daughter of John Drummond, 1st Lord Drummond, and a mistress of King James IV of Scotland. She was a great-great-great-great-niece of the Margaret Drummond who was King David II's second queen.
Her death has been the subject of a very persistent romantic legend.
She was definitely the mistress of James IV during 1496-97, and possibly as early as 1495. Records show her living in his castle at Stirling from 3 June 1496, and from 30 October to March 1497 at Linlithgow Palace. Her presence,and a previous similar arrangement for another mistress in the royal houses, was also noted by the Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala.[1] Ayala later wrote of James IV:
"When I arrived, he was keeping a lady with great state in a castle. He visited her from time to time. Afterwards he sent her to the house of her father, who is a knight, and married her [to a third party]. He did the same with another lady, by whom he had had a son."[2]
However, the king had a number of mistresses in his time, and this relationship seems to have been shorter than those he had with either Marion Boyd or Janet Kennedy.
It has been widely suggested in more recent years that Margaret Drummond was murdered, either by English agents or by pro-English elements in the Scottish nobility. Many believe that James IV was planning to or had already secretly married Drummond, and her death was necessary in order to allow or force the King to marry the English princess Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII of England and Elizabeth of York. The (comparatively recent) plaque on her grave in Dunblane Cathedral claims that she was commonly believed to be "privately married" to the king, and that she was murdered by Scottish nobles who supported the English marriage.
Furthermore, the "Marriage of the Rose and Thistle", as the poet William Dunbar described it, brought about the Union of the Crowns exactly 100 years later, as it enabled their great-grandson James VI of Scotland to claim the English throne upon the death of Elizabeth I through his descent from Henry VII.
Had James IV married Margaret Drummond instead of Margaret Tudor, the Union of the Crowns might never have taken place and Scotland might have remained an independent country. This idea has been the theme of numerous historical novels and popular histories.
Serious historians are skeptical of the theory. It is not supported by the contemporary evidence, and originates in a history of the Drummond family written by Viscount Strathallan in 1681. Her death was probably a case of accidental food poisoning, a common cause of death at that time. The idea that James had to be pressured to marry Margaret Tudor is dubious. As Scotland was the less important and poorer country, it is more likely that James IV pressured Henry VII to give him his daughter. It is also clear that negotiations for the marriage had been taking place before Margaret Drummond died. But it is definite since they met when they were teenagers that she was his first love but she knew that he had been betrothed since birth to King Henry's little sister.
(This can’t be possible as James was 15 when Margaret Tudor was born.)
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1475 - 1501 (26 years)
