August 8th in medieval history

Sorry to still remain MIA on Facebook, but I’ve been busy nursing my ailing spaniel and my own rogue knee. But here are some medieval musings (a bit late) for August 8th. On this date in 1171, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and conniving younger brother of King Stephen, died in his episcopal palace. I always thought he was a contender for the title bestowed on the French king, Louis XI, “the Universal Spider,” as I saw him as the driving force behind Stephen’s usurpation of the Empress Maude’s crown. He was also a self-server, bouncing back and forth between Stephen and Maude like a wayward Ping-Pong ball. But in his later years, he seems to have developed a conscience, possibly because he’d lost his sight and realized he needed to mend fences with the Almighty.
And on August 8, 1503, King James IV of Scotland wed Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, in Edinburgh. I don’t usually like to spend much time on those ubiquitous Tudors, but Margaret’s life was an eventful one. Margaret was only 13 at the time of her marriage and her mother had died just a few months before her journey to Scotland. Her husband was not faithful to her, and her dower castle of Stirling contained the royal nursery for his seven illegitimate children. There was a lot of tragedy in her life. Her first son was born in 1507, which indicates James waited until she was at a suitable age for sexual relations, as was usually the case in the MA; the birth of Henry Tudor to his thirteen year old mother, Margaret Beaufort, was fortunately not the norm. Margaret’s first son died within a year, and a few months later, she gave birth to a daughter who died that same day. A second son, named Arthur, was born in 1509 and died the following year. She had a stillborn daughter in 1512, and another son born in 1514, after his father was slain at Flodden in 1513, who died in 1515. She did have one surviving son, who’d become James V. She forfeited the regency when she took a second husband, the Earl of Angus in 1514; this marriage would end in bitter enmity, and her third marriage would fail, too. She was unpopular with the Scots, who felt that she was partial to English interests. When her brother Henry VIII tried to gain control of her sons, James and Alexander, the latter by the Earl of Angus, the Scots took both boys away from her. Having lost her regency, her sons, and her revenues, she fled to England in 1515, where she nearly died giving birth to a daughter. She was still extremely ill when her two year old son, Alexander, died, and for a time they kept the news from her in her weakened state. The remainder of her life continued to be turbulent, with estrangements from her brother Henry and her third husband and her son James. She died of a stroke in 1541, at age 52. While she found little happiness in Scotland, the Stuart line that would eventually rule England resulted from her marriage to James IV; their son, James V, was the father of Mary Queen of Scots and thus the grandfather of the man who’d assume the English crown after Elizabeth Tudor’s death.