Margaret Beaufort: Mother of the Tudor Dynasty
For Grandad
This edition first published in Great Britain 2011
Copyright © Elizabeth Norton 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012
This electronic edition published 2012 by Amberley Publishing
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CONTENTS
1. A Beaufort Heiress: 1443-1444
4. Margaret’s First Widowhood: November 1456-January 1458
6. The Fall of the House of Lancaster: 1469-1471
7. A Fourth Husband: 1471-1483
8. Mother to the King’s Great Rebel & Traitor: April 1483- December 1483
9. Bosworth Field: January 1484-August 1485
10. The King’s Mother: August 1485-January 1486
11. Margaret R: January 1486-July 1504
12. A Patroness of Learning: July 1504-April 1509
13. My Lady, the King’s Grandmother: 23 April-29 June 1509
14. Mother of the Tudor Dynasty
Appendix: Margaret Beaufort in Her Own Words
1. Margaret’s royal descent.
2. The Beaufort family.
3. Margaret’s links to the House of York.
At a sermon given in memory of Margaret Beaufort in 1509, her friend, John Fisher declared, ‘Dare I say of her, she never yet was in that prosperity, but the greter it was, the more alwaye she dredde the adversyte.’ Margaret was observed to weep at the coronation of her son, Henry VII, and at the marriage of her grandson, Prince Arthur, and the coronation of her younger grandson, Henry VIII. These were not tears of joy, and as Fisher observed, ‘whereyn she had full grete joy, she let not to saye, that some adversyte wolde follow. So that eyther she was in sorrowe by reason of the present adversytes; or else whan she was in prosperyte, she was in drede of the adversyte for to come’. The idea of Fortune’s wheel, with its random changes from prosperity to disaster, was a popular one in medieval England, and Margaret Beaufort, with her long and turbulent life, saw herself, and was seen by others, as the living embodiment of the concept. Margaret was the mother of the Tudor dynasty in England, and it was through her that Henry VII was able to bid for the throne and gather enough strength to claim it. She knew times of great prosperity and power, but also times of deep despair. These were, to a large extent, products of the period in which Margaret lived, and her family, the Beauforts, had also suffered and prospered from Fortune’s random spin in the years before her birth.
Margaret Beaufort was born on 31 May 1443 at Bletso in Bedfordshire, a manor that belonged to her mother, Margaret Beauchamp, the daughter and heiress of Sir John Beauchamp of Bletso. Margaret was named after her mother, who had been a widow at the time of her marriage to John Beaufort, Earl, and later Duke, of Somerset. Margaret Beauchamp was of gentry, rather than noble stock, and she had previously been the wife of Sir Oliver St John, who died in 1438 and by whom she had seven children. She was not a particularly good match for Somerset, but by the time of their marriage in 1439, he was already a bachelor in his late thirties, and she was the most prestigious wife he could find.
Fortune’s wheel was not kind to John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. He was the second son of John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, and succeeded to the earldom on the death of his elder brother in 1418, when he was still a child. The Beaufort family enjoyed a somewhat uncertain status in England. The 1st Earl of Somerset was the eldest son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (the third surviving son of Edward III) by Katherine Swynford. Katherine was the daughter of a knight from Hainault who served Edward III’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, in England, and she was placed in her youth with Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt. Katherine married an English knight, but she remained with John of Gaunt’s family, and around the time that he married his second wife, Constance of Castile, she became his mistress. The affair between John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford lasted throughout his second marriage and was common knowledge in England from at least 1375. The couple had four children, who were given the surname ‘Beaufort’ after one of John of Gaunt’s continental possessions. They were openly acknowledged by John but, due to their illegitimate birth, had no rights of inheritance. This changed in 1396, when ‘the duke of Lancastre, for the love he had to his chyldren, he wedded their mother the lady Katheryn of Ruet, wherof there was moche marveyle bothe in Englande and in Fraunce, for she was but of base lynage, in regarde to the two other wyves’. The marriage of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford shocked England but did not, in itself, legitimise their children. John of Gaunt, as the then eldest surviving son of Edward III and one of the most powerful men in Europe, was determined to improve his children’s status, and he obtained the Pope’s consent to the legitimisation of the Beauforts. Whilst this ensured that, in the eyes of the Church, the subsequent marriage removed the stain of bastardy from the four Beauforts, under English law, they remained illegitimate. John of Gaunt was able to persuade his nephew, Richard II, to pass a statute in 1397, in which he declared,