AH Challenge: Une femme différente pour Jacques IV d'Écosse

Your challenge, should you accept it, is two-fold:

*Find a non-Tudor wife for James IV of Scotland.
*Figure out a way for him to survive the Battle of Flodden.

With a POD no earlier than his coronation.
 
Plenty....he was on a sporadic 'make nice with the big neighbour' stage as I recall.

Given Scotland's normal preoccupations, I would say likely options are a minor scion of the Valois or a Scottish noblewoman to neutralise a faction at home.
Exactly who would depend on the various dates of birth, whether they're married already etc which is a level of detail I entirely lack.
Outside chance a Scandinavian princess.

I mean, okay, you could go for any unmarried woman of noble rank in Western Europe at the time, but in terms of the strategic concerns, I see the Scottish king having three main ones.
1) Trying to engage in the next round with England at an advantage
2) Making sure France will also be involved
3) Stability at home.

Of course as Flodden showed, point 2 might not be enough to keep you safe...

James surviving Flodden seems on cursory (wiki) reasearch to require him to be less gung-ho. If he can have led a border raid at some point in his youth which was embarrassingly defeated, preferrably by forces led by Surrey...ehh, I'm stretching.
Reading on (wiki again) does seem to suggest that the marriage was THE logical choice at the time; so perhaps get him to marry earlier?
 
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An alternate wife for James IV is problematic but not impossible - he succeeded his father in 1488 at 15 and didn't marry until 1503 (betrothed to Margaret Tudor the year before).
However his fertility was in no question he had had several mistresses and might well have been tempted to marry one of them.
The fact he married so late give plenty of scope but there is a bit of a dearth of appropriate french brides for him. Certainly his father had initially favoured an English match and James was initially betrothed to Cecily of York (almost from his birth), though by 1482 that had collapsed due to war with England. Again Henry VII proposed a new Scots match in 1486/7 - James III was to marry the King's mother in law Queen Elizabeth Wydeville and the future James IV one of her suriving unmarried daughters but the death of James III rendered the proposal redundant.
France's instability from the death of Louis XI to the Italian Wars of the 1490's also played a part in decreasing the attractiveness of a French Royal Bride - and its worth bearing in mind that despite the Auld Alliance Scots Kings had rarely looked to France for their Queens.
James III married Margaret of Denmark
James II married Mary of Guelders
James I married Joan Beafort
Robert III married Annabella Drummond
Robert II married Elizabeth Mure and Euphemia Ross
David II married Joan of England and Margaret Drummond
and so on.
Scots Kings weren't regarded as good catches!
Louis XI's daughters - Anne (b1461), and Jeanne (b1464) would have been a bit old for James IV whilst their brother Charles VIII was childless and his near contemporary. There was also a dearth of eligible french princesses amongst the great houses related to the French crown who might have otherwise been an option - and during the 1480's the regent Anne was in constant fights with her brother in law the Duke of Orleans which probably rules out his two sisters but again both were much older than James IV.
One interesting option might be his cousin Elizabeth of Denmark born in 1485 she married in OTL in 1502 - but say negotiations with Henry VII broke down and no treaty is signed she would have been a real strong alternative (James IV's mother's dowry had been large and as a guarantee her father had granted James III Orkney and the Shetlands as security - marriage to Elizabeth might have increased the Scots hold on them as his mother's dowry was never paid!) interestingly Elizabeth was in OTL an early convert to Protestantism.
 
That's interesting about Elizabeth of Denmark. Say she married James IV in TTL - how could Scotland have changed?
 
I don't know a great deal about Elizabeth of Denmark - however she married a devout Catholic and left him after her conversion to Lutheranism - returning to Brandenburg only after her husbands death. Her brother Christian II of Denmark, Norway and Sweden was of course deposed so it may be in later years that Scotland might have been drawn into scandinavian conflicts.
I think its difficult to avoid Scotland and England coming to blows once England went to war in France in 1513 (despite the papal interdict) so I think James IV is inevitably going to die young (and to be fair hardly any Stewart monarch succeeded his father as an adult).
James was conventionally devout but leaving Elizabeth as Queen Regent and had she not had the passionate nature of Margaret Tudor she might not have been persuaded to remarry to a Scots noble (which was what destroyed Margaret Tudor's hold on power in Scotland) and she might have overseen her son's minority successful - influences from her brother and family in germany would have increased her awareness of the accusations made by Luther which might have still appealed to her. She may well have encouraged an earlier Lutheran Style Scots reformation than the Calvinist one they had in the 1550's.
She lived far longer than Margaret Tudor dying in 1555 - ironically she was of course sister in law to Isabella sister of Charles V and niece of Henry VIII's Queen Catherine of Aragon.
 
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