On that fateful day in 1513,1
James, (five), the new king was aged just eighteen2
Months but not years, he grew up in the age
Known as Renaissance well known to the sage3
Medicine, science, the fine arts as well
Brought keen Scottish musing under their spell;
Literature, poetry, drama enjoyed
By better-off types, but not those employed
In scraping a living tilling the soil,
Whose short lives were ruled by back-breaking toil.
Renaissance James took a liberal stance,
Unmarried still---eyed some sweeties in France.
Maddy he married in grand Notre Dame,4
Sought, after she died, another French femme5
Young Mary of Guise agreed to a tryst6
Rather than be on King Henry (eight's) list7
Of the kids she bore Jim, one lass survived;8
James died in dispair when bad news arrived
Of Scotland's defeat at sad Solway Moss,9
When England's invasion led to the loss
Of Jim's own first team: a rugby-like score.
The trophy is theirs---we'll play them no more!10
The Regent of Scots is French if you please,
It's Mary's own mother, Mary of Guise11
Hist'ry repeats, the heir is young Mary,12
Her nearest kin is multi-wife Henry;13
Transpired as it did in Ed (the first's) time,
Norway's young Maid and her uncle sublime14
Two centuries on: it feels déjà vu,
Mary's betrothed to the Prince of Wales too15
Henry starts bossing the Scots like a toff,16
The Scots in their turn then broke it all off,
The English burned abbeys; wasted the land,17
But had to retreat on France's demand;18
Three years before, Henry Tudor was dead,
Maree got engaged to Francis instead19
Whisked off to France to be educated,20
Destined to wear two crowns "alternated",
Languages, rhetoric and "historie",21
In French, well she studied and "poetrie",
Her royal crest the sun-faced marigold
(In France they picked plants, a custom of old),
"Sa Virtu m'atire", the motto she chose,22
Which to her own name the letters transpose.
Francis she married while only sixteen,23
And in the next year of France she was queen;24
Her reign was cut short, young Francis was dead,25
And ma-in-law Kate made Regent instead26
Medici Kate was jealous of Marie,
So Mary chose no longer to tarry;
She caught the scheduled over-night ferry,27
Returning home a lot less than merry,
The Scots were now "Proddies": Mary---RC.28
The weather was "dreich", unlike gay Paree.
Notes
1 Battle of Flodden, 9 Sep. 1513.
2 James V, (r.1513-42).
3 Late Renaissance.
4 Princess Madeleine de Valois, 1 Jan 1537.
5 She died in Scotland, July, 1537.
6 James married the widow Mary in May 1538, (1515-60).
7 Henry VIII wanted Mary to be his 4th wife.
8 Mary. James declared: "It [the crown] came with a lass and it will pass with a lass".
The Stuart crown came with Marjory, daughter of Robert I and he thought the dynasty
would end with Mary.
9 Battle of Solway Moss, 24 Nov. 1542 in which the Scots were routed.
10 Mary was just six days old.
11 Queen-Regent, 1552-1560.
12 Mary, Q. of Scots, 1542-1567.
13 Dynastically speaking, Henry VIII was her great-uncle
14 Compare 1286, Chapter 3, note 11 et seq
15 Treaty of Greenwich, 1543.
16 The Rough Wooing, (1544-5).
17 Battle of Pinkie, 9 Sept 1547.
18 Treaty of Boulogne, 1550.
19 Francis, Dauphin to the French throne in 1548.
20 Treaty of Haddington, 1548.
21 This was also the Dauphin's curriculum deemed practical, though seemingly esoteric.
The education system was to enable young aristocrats to grow like plants in the sun
22 "Its virtue draws me". In French, Almost a perfect anagram of Marie Stuart.
23 24 April 1558 at Notre-Dame.
24 Her husband became Francis II of France on the death of his father in 1559.
25 1560
26 Dowager Queen Catherine of France.
27 On Tuesday, 19 August 1561 at 6 am she arrived at Edinburgh's port, Leith.
28 The Settlement of 1560 destroyed the papal authority.
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