On This Day 28th November 1489

On 28th November 1489, Elizabeth of York, Queen of England, gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Margaret, presumably for her grandmother, (who was also her godmother) Lady Margaret Beaufort. Margaret was married to James IV, King of Scots at the age of fourteen, as part of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, which, unfortunately, did not live up to its name. With her husband killed at the Battle of Flodden, Margaret, aged twenty-four, became Governor of Scotland for her son, the infant James V. She quickly married again, and thereby forfeited the Regency.

Her second marriage, to the Earl of Angus, was less successful than her first, and she finally obtained a divorce, remarrying a third time to Henry Stewart, Lord Methven. Margaret spent much of her life trying to encourage her son to follow a pro-English policy, but the heavy-handed tactics of Angus, and Margaret’s brother, Henry VIII, inculcated a deep resentment of them both in James V. Margaret was the grandmother of both Mary, Queen of Scots, and Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley, and it is thus from Margaret that the British Royal Family is descended.