James V of Scotland

Seventeen months old at his accession, James V spent more of his reign as a minor than as a ruling king. He was born at Linlithgow Palace on 10 April 1512, the only surviving child of James IV and Margaret Tudor, and became king on 9 September 1513 when his father fell at Flodden. His minority was turbulent: his mother held the regency until her remarriage in 1514, then John Stewart, Duke of Albany, governed intermittently, and from 1525 the young king was held in the power of his stepfather, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. In 1528 James escaped, took up personal rule, and drove Angus and the Douglases into exile.

As an adult he proved an energetic and often severe ruler. He enforced order on the Borders and in the Isles, pursued the wealth of the church and of forfeited nobles to rebuild royal finances, and in 1532 founded the College of Justice, a central civil court. He spent lavishly on his palaces, leaving Renaissance work at Stirling, Falkland, and Linlithgow. As a nephew of Henry VIII he was courted by England, but he held Scotland to the French alliance and to Rome at the moment England broke from both.

His marriages confirmed the French orientation. In January 1537 he married Madeleine of Valois, daughter of Francis I, at Notre-Dame in Paris; she died at Edinburgh within months of her arrival in Scotland. In June 1538 he married Mary of Guise, of the ducal house of Lorraine's cadet branch, who bore him two sons; both died in infancy in 1541.

Relations with England then collapsed. James declined to meet Henry VIII at York in 1541, and the war that followed brought the rout of a Scottish army at Solway Moss in November 1542. The king, already ill, withdrew to Falkland Palace and died there on 14 December 1542, aged thirty. His heir was his daughter Mary, born at Linlithgow only six days earlier — the infant who would reign as Mary, Queen of Scots, under the regency of her mother, Mary of Guise.