On this day in 1503, James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor married. The union, preceded by the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, was meant to secure peace between the two kingdoms and would eventually lead to the Union of the Crowns a century later under their great-grandson James VI & I

[u/t0mless]

By the late 1490s, both Henry VII of England and James IV of Scotland had compelling reasons to pursue peace between their traditionally hostile kingdoms. Henry, having taken the throne in 1485, sought to legitimize and stabilize his relatively new rule, while James was young, popular, ambitious, and eager to assert Scotland’s sovereignty and prestige through both diplomacy and force. Coincidentally, both monarchs had come to power through violent conflict, each claiming victory over a slain predecessor: Henry over Richard III at Bosworth, and James after the death of his father, James III, at Sauchieburn. Despite their shared military origins, both kings had a strong interest in foreign policy, trade, and internal consolidation. Most importantly, they saw the value in peace.

Tensions between the two kingdoms had peaked earlier in the decade when James IV harbored and supported Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the English throne claiming to be one of the lost Princes in the Tower. Specifically, Richard of Shrewsbury. Perkin was even granted a royal marriage to Lady Catherine Gordon (a woman James had allegedly been courting himself) and a fleet to invade England, but the rebellion failed. Realizing the limitations of such provocations, James turned to diplomacy. The Treaty of Perpetual Peace, signed in January 1502, marked the first formal peace treaty between England and Scotland in over 170 years. Its terms called for a “good, real and sincere, true, sound, and firm peace, friendship, league and confederation, to last all time coming.” Central to the treaty was a dynastic marriage between James IV and Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, who was just 13 at the time, while James was 30.

The treaty included provisions for mutual non-aggression, arbitration of future disputes, and significantly, a papal clause: should either monarch break the terms, they would face excommunication by the Pope. It was a striking attempt to bind two rival crowns with the weight of divine and diplomatic authority. Nothing like this had been signed since 1328 between Edward III and Robert I.

On 8 August 1503, the royal wedding took place at Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh. The celebrations were lavish and filled with feasts, tournaments, and pageantry, intended to publicly display the strength of the new alliance. James IV was already regarded as one of Scotland’s most charismatic and capable kings: fluent in multiple languages, a patron of the arts, and deeply interested in architecture, technology, and medicine. Though he had fathered several illegitimate children prior to marriage, it is notable that, unusually for a monarch of the era he took no mistress after his wedding. Margaret, by contrast, was only a teenager when she arrived in Scotland, but she gradually grew into her role as queen consort with a mix of English pride, political tact, and cultural adaptability. Despite their age gap and James’s past, their marriage was, by contemporary standards, successful and productive. The couple had several children, though only James V survived to adulthood. James also continued to support his illegitimate children, many of whom would go on to play prominent roles in Scottish politics and nobility.

Although the treaty had promised lasting peace, it ultimately collapsed in 1513, when James IV was killed at the Battle of Flodden, fighting against an English army. The rupture came when Henry VIII, now king of England, declared war on France. James found himself torn between honoring the Treaty of Perpetual Peace or upholding the Auld Alliance: Scotland’s longstanding pact with France.

The relationship between James and Henry was cool and increasingly strained. Unlike his cordial dealings with Henry VII, James received little diplomatic engagement from Henry VIII, who treated him more as a subordinate than a sovereign equal. James reportedly regarded Henry’s refusal to negotiate and his demands that Scotland remain neutral as both insulting and dismissive. For his part, Henry, eager to assert his dominance on the European stage, saw little reason to treat the Scottish king as a peer.

In choosing to invade northern England, James acted on a combination of dynastic pride, chivalric duty, and political calculation. He may have genuinely felt bound to France by honor, or he may have believed that Henry’s high-handedness had rendered the treaty void. Either way, his decision violated the Treaty of Perpetual Peace. Accordingly, he was excommunicated by Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge, Archbishop of York, acting on the authority of Pope Julius II. Somewhat ironically, Henry VIII himself would be excommunicated twenty-five years later in 1538 by Pope Paul III, though under very different circumstances.

Despite the failure of the peace and James’s death in battle, the dynastic consequences of his marriage to Margaret Tudor proved enduring. Their great-grandson, James VI of Scotland, would ascend the English throne in 1603 as James I, uniting the crowns of England and Scotland. In that ironic and roundabout way, the royal wedding of 1503 fulfilled its ultimate promise, laying the foundation for a single monarchy over both realms a hundred years later.

[u/AidanHennessy]

James VI was actually descended from Margaret Tudor twice, through both parents.

[u/GoldfishFromTatooine]

A shame more of their children did not survive. There were a couple more sons and daughters including a son named Arthur. Margaret also gave birth to James IV's posthumous son named Alexander in 1514.