Margaret Drummond (mistress)

Her presence, and perhaps a previous similar arrangement for another mistress in the royal houses, was noted by the Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala.

[2] Ayala later wrote of James IV:"When I arrived, he was keeping a lady with great state in a castle.

Margaret returned to Stirling, and Lady Lundie was given £10 Scots for keeping her for 11 days, and then she went home at the end of March 1497.

[5] As a child she lived at Edinburgh Castle in the care of Sir Patrick Crichton and his wife, Katrine Turing, where one of her attendants was Ellen More.

[10] It has been suggested in that Margaret Drummond was murdered, either by English agents or by pro-English elements in the Scottish nobility.

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.

[10] It is not supported by the contemporary evidence, and is first recorded in the history of the Drummond family written by Viscount Strathallan in 1681.

Following the Cornish Rising in 1497, Henry VII had sought peace on the northern frontier by an alliance with James IV.