Rough Wooing — English garrison at Lauder 1544
Who Fought
History & Significance
The Rough Wooing (Scottish Gaelic: An t-Suirghe Chnaparra; December 1543 – March 1551), also known as the Eight Years' War, was part of the Anglo-Scottish Wars of the 16th century. Following the English Reformation, the break from the Catholic Church, England attacked Scotland, partly to break the Auld Alliance and prevent Scotland being used as a springboard for a future invasion by France, partly to weaken Scotland, and partly to force the Scottish Parliament to confirm the existing marriage alliance between Mary, Queen of Scots (born 8 December 1542), and the English heir apparent Edward (born 12 October 1537), son of King Henry VIII, under the terms of the Treaty of Greenwich of July 1543. An invasion of France was also contemplated.
Henry declared war to force the Scottish Parliament to agree to the planned marriage between Edward, who was six years old at the start of the war, and the infant queen, thereby creating a new alliance between Scotland and England. Upon Edward's accession to the throne in 1547 at the age of nine, the war continued for a time under the direction of the Lord High Treasurer, the Duke of Somerset, before Somerset's removal from power in 1549 and replacement by the Duke of Northumberland, who wished for a less costly foreign policy than his predecessor. It was the last major conflict between Scotland and England before the Union of the Crowns in 1603.
In Scotland, the war was called the "Eight" or "Nine Years' War". The idea of the war as a "wooing" was popularised many years later by Sir Walter Scott, and hides the extreme nature of the war. The phrase "Rough Wooing" appeared in several history books from the 1850s onwards.
The phrase appears to derive from a famous remark attributed to George Gordon, 4th Earl of Huntly by Patrick Abercromby in his edition of Jean de Beaugué's history of the war: "We liked not the manner of the wooing, and we could not stoop to being bullied into love", or as William Patten reported, "I lyke not thys wooyng." The historian William Ferguson contrasted this jocular nickname with the savagery and devastation of the war,
English policy was simply to pulverise Scotland, to beat her either into acquiescence or out of existence, and Hertford's campaigns resemble nothing so much as Nazi total warfare; "blitzkrieg", reign of terror, extermination of all resisters, the encouragement of collaborators, and so on.
More recently, Marcus Merriman titled his book The Rough Wooings to emphasise the division of the conflict into two or three distinct phases. Historians including Lorna Hutson object to the name as a "joking diminutive" which diminishes and trivialises the conflict.
The ground they fought on
The site of Rough Wooing — English garrison at Lauder 1544 lies on Reston Group, bedrock that formed in the Early Devonian. The rock here is conglomerate and [subequal/subordinate] sandstone, interbedded.
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- Rough Wooing · Wikipedia
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