Margaret Beaufort: Mother of the Tudor Dynasty (5 page)
By February 1454, when it was clear that the King’s illness would be a long one, the Queen attempted to secure the regency, only for parliament to instead appoint Henry’s cousin, Richard, Duke of York, as protector. York, who, like both Henry VI and Margaret Beaufort, was a descendant of Edward III, was an enemy of Margaret’s uncle, Somerset, who had replaced Suffolk as the King’s chief minister. York ordered Somerset’s imprisonment in the Tower, and he was only released when Henry finally began to recover his wits at the end of 1454. He was able to wrest back authority from York, but it is clear that Henry’s recovery was only a partial one, and his Queen, Margaret of Anjou, emerged as the real power behind the throne.
Margaret Beaufort’s whereabouts are unrecorded during the period of her wardship with the Tudor brothers, although it is likely that she remained with her mother, continuing her education. Margaret’s sympathies during the early years of the Wars of the Roses, which involved a dispute between the rival houses of Lancaster and York, would naturally have been with the King, her own close kinsman, and her uncle, the Duke of Somerset. She therefore cannot but have been alarmed when she heard that her uncle had been killed fighting against the Duke of York at the first Battle of St Albans in late May 1455 or that the King had been returned to York’s custody and a second protectorate declared. Events did not, however, directly affect her, and whilst her value as a potential royal claimant had been devalued to some extent by the birth of Prince Edward, she was still a wealthy heiress, and she was married to Edmund Tudor in November 1455.
Edmund Tudor is a shadowy character and little is known about his life. His tomb, which was originally in the House of Grey Friars at Carmarthen but was moved to St David’s Cathedral following the dissolution of the monasteries, is marked by a brass showing an unprepossessing young man wearing armour. This is the only known representation of Margaret’s second husband, although it was not made in his lifetime, instead being produced during the reign of the couple’s son, Henry VII. Edmund’s epitaph also gives little detail about his life, merely declaring that ‘under this marble stone here inclosed resteth the bones of that most noble lord Edmond Earl of Richmond father and brother to kings, the which departed out of this world in year of our lord God MCCCCLVI the third of the month of November: on whose soul Almighty Jesu have mercy’.
It is possible that Margaret Beaufort and Edmund Tudor might have been rather more closely related than previously realised. Edmund Tudor’s birth was veiled in considerable secrecy, and he was not born in one of Catherine of Valois’s own properties, with the Queen instead travelling to Much Hadham, a manor belonging to the Bishop of London in order to give birth in the greatest possible privacy. The name Edmund was an odd choice for Catherine of Valois and Owen Tudor and deserves some further comment. Before her relationship with Owen Tudor began, Catherine had been romantically linked with Margaret Beaufort’s uncle, Edmund Beaufort, the future Duke of Somerset, and the pair had hoped to marry. Any man that Catherine married would become the King’s stepfather, with a good claim to the regency during his minority. Beaufort was a controversial choice amongst the King’s council, which was already deeply divided by a dispute between the King’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and his great uncle, Cardinal Beaufort. In 1426, parliament made a formal request to the regency council that they cease their refusals to allow Catherine to remarry. It is likely that Catherine petitioned parliament for their aid herself. Henry VI’s council was determined to prevent Catherine from making any new marriage, and in the parliament of 1429 to 1430, a statute was passed legislating on the remarriage of dowager queens. The new law ordered that anyone who dared marry the Queen without the King’s express permission would have his lands and property confiscated and effectively meant that Catherine could not remarry until Henry VI obtained his majority. This put an end to Beaufort’s ambition to marry the Queen, but given the choice of the name Edmund for her eldest son by her second marriage, it is possible that she and Beaufort had already been lovers and that her relationship with Owen Tudor, a man of such low status that the advantages of a marriage to the Queen far outweighed the risks, may have proved necessary in order to ensure that Catherine did not bear an illegitimate child. This can only be speculation, but the choice of name is suggestive. Catherine certainly retained links with the Beaufort family during the rest of her life, and Cardinal Beaufort is known to have visited her at Waltham soon after Christmas 1430. She also had links with Thomas Chaucer, a descendant of Katherine Swynford’s sister.
It is therefore not impossible that Margaret and her second husband might have been first cousins, although, if this was the case, it was not commented upon by contemporaries. Both Edmund and Jasper Tudor supported the Duke of York in his first protectorate, and during that period, Edmund received a grant of the manor and lordships of Kendal and Weresdale by parliament, although Jasper was present with the King at the first Battle of St Albans. York, Margaret and a number of other leading members of the nobility were also the co-heirs to the estates of the Earldom of Kent through their descent from the Holland family, and in 1455, Margaret and Edmund, along with York and the other co-heirs, co-petitioned the King in relation to the manors of Collingham and Bardsley and the advowson of the church in Middleton, which were part of the inheritance. This again suggests some degree of co-operation between the King’s half-brothers and his Protector. In 1455, Edmund was sent to Wales to act as Henry VI’s representative there, and it is likely that he took Margaret with him as his wife. Although, at twelve, Margaret was considered old enough to marry, she was physically small and underdeveloped and, to her contemporaries, would not have been considered ready to consummate her marriage. Legally, where a man married an heiress in the medieval period, he received a life interest in her estates once he had fathered a child by her. This almost certainly informed Edmund’s decision to marry Margaret once she reached the age of twelve, and to the indignation of his contemporaries, he immediately consummated the marriage, with Margaret falling pregnant during the first half of 1456, traditionally whilst the couple were staying at Caldicot Castle in the Welsh Marches. The early consummation of the marriage shows an unpleasant side of Edmund Tudor’s character, and it is clear that he was acquisitive to the point of disregarding his young wife’s health and wellbeing. His actions placed her life, and the life of her child, in danger. Margaret’s thoughts on the early consummation of her marriage can also be seen in her vocal opposition to the early marriage of her granddaughter and namesake, Princess Margaret. She spoke of her concern that young Margaret’s husband ‘would not wait, but injure her, and endanger her health’. Margaret spoke from experience.
As it happened, Edmund Tudor was not destined to ever see his child. On 10 August 1456, he was captured at Camarthen Castle by Sir William Herbert, an ally of the Duke of York, and imprisoned. He was released soon afterwards but died at Carmarthen on 1 November 1456 after contracting the plague. Margaret was only thirteen at the time of her husband’s early death and heavily pregnant. She was also acutely aware that, by virtue of her relationship to the Lancastrian dynasty, she was a figure of importance in the Wars of the Roses, and, in terror of her own life and that of her child, she immediately sought protection with her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, as she awaited the birth of her child.
MARGARET’S FIRST WIDOWHOOD: NOVEMBER 1456-JANUARY 1458
Edmund Tudor’s sudden death came as a shock to Margaret, and she later admitted that she was terrified that she and her unborn child would also succumb to the plague. At the age of only thirteen, she found herself alone and unprotected in Wales whilst the dispute between the King and the Duke of York raged, and she took the only practical course, immediately travelling to her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, at Pembroke Castle to seek his protection.
Few houses in which Margaret lived survive, and Pembroke Castle, which can still be visited today, is therefore of interest. A near contemporary of Margaret’s, the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland, provided a description of the town and the castle, and from this, it is easy to see why Margaret felt secure there. According to Leland, the town was ‘well waullid and hath iii Gates by Est, West and North’. The castle dominated the town and
stondith hard by the Waul on a hard Rokke, and is veri larg and strong, being doble wardid. In the utter Ward I saw the Chaumbre wher King Henri the VII was borne, in Knowlege wherof a Chymmeney is new made with the Armes and Badges of King Henri the VII. In the Botom of the great stronge rownd Tower in the inner Ward is a mervelus Vault caullid the Hogan. The toppe of this round Towr is gatherid with a Rose of stone almost in conum, the Top wherof is Keverid with a flat Mille Stone.
According to tradition, Margaret was lodged in a chamber in the outer ward of the castle, and it was there, on 28 January 1457, that she gave birth to her first child: a son.
Margaret’s son was born more than three months after his father’s death, and Margaret must have spent an anxious few months awaiting the birth. The last few months of 1456 saw her fortunes at their lowest ebb. Aged only thirteen, she had reason to be anxious about the birth; pregnancy in a girl so young was generally looked upon with disapproval. Margaret endured a long and arduous labour, during which it was expected that both she and the child would die. For Margaret, who was a pious woman, it may have seemed miraculous that both she and her son survived, and she later came to look back on the day of her son’s birth as one of the best of her life, reminiscing in a letter that she wrote to Henry VII after he had become king, ‘At Calais town, this day of St Anne’s, that I did bring into this world my good and gracious prince, king, and only beloved son.’ In the same letter, Margaret also referred to her son as ‘my dearest and only desired joy in this world’ and, in an earlier letter, declared that Henry was her ‘own sweet and most dear King, and all my worldly joy’. Margaret became utterly devoted to her son from the moment that he was born, and this may have been due to the fear that she felt after being widowed during her pregnancy and the dangers of the birth. Whilst she was grateful to survive, however, it is believed that the birth itself damaged Margaret, as there is no record that she ever conceived another child, something that was commonly attributed to her youth at the time of Henry VII’s birth.
Margaret was living with her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, at the time of the birth, and it appears that he sought to influence her decisions regarding her son. The sixteenth-century Welsh chronicler Elis Gruffydd claimed that, at his baptism, Margaret’s son was named Owen, and this was almost certainly Jasper’s choice, as a tribute to his father, Owen Tudor, who was then still alive. It is likely that the first Margaret heard about the choice of name was at the baptism, and in this incident, it is possible to see her forceful and strong-willed character for the first time. The chronicler records that Margaret, on hearing the name, ordered the bishop conducting the christening to baptise her son again, this time with the name Henry. For Margaret, whose ancestry was, for the most part, English, Owen may have seemed an unsuitable name for her son, but she also had a practical reason for her choice of name. By naming her son after his uncle, King Henry VI, who was probably also his godfather, Margaret ensured that he had a powerful protector and firmly linked her child to his royal Valois family, rather than to his less prestigious Tudor kin.
During the reign of Henry VII, a number of attempts were made to stress Owen Tudor’s noble lineage as a means of demonstrating that the members of the Tudor dynasty were as well born as their predecessors on the throne. Owen Tudor had indeed come from a prominent Welsh family, although he was not of princely rank. In spite of this, during Henry VII’s reign, it was rumoured that Owen had been a descendant of the ancient kings of Britain, and it was with reference to this that Henry named his eldest son Arthur, as a reminder of the mythical British King Arthur. Jasper Tudor was proud of his family and birth, and in his Will, which he wrote during the reign of Henry VII, he left a sum of money for four priests to pray for ‘the wele of my soul, and for the soul of my father; as also for the souls of Katherine, sometime Queen of England, my mother, Edmund late Earl of Richmond my brother, and the souls of others my predecessors’. Henry Tudor never met any of the people to whom his uncle referred in his Will, but he benefitted his Tudor kin when he was in a position to do so. Whilst he was king, Henry VII ordered that ceremonies be kept to commemorate his father at Westminster Abbey annually on 3 November, and he also granted a yearly sum to the grey friars of Carmarthen in order for them to carry out a daily chantry mass for his father’s soul. Henry VII also aided more distant members of the family. After his accession, he knighted his uncle, David Owen, an illegitimate son of Owen Tudor, and arranged for him to marry a Sussex heiress. The third son of Owen Tudor and Catherine of Valois, who became a monk in childhood, also received some benefit from his kingly nephew, and in his accounts for 1498, Henry VII recorded a payment of £2 ‘to Owen Tudder’ as a reward. In 1502, he paid over three pounds ‘to Morgan Kidwells for burying of Owen Tudder’. Henry always identified with his paternal family to some extent. It was, however, Margaret who would be the dominant family influence on Henry’s life.
As a widow at the time of Henry’s birth, Margaret was able to focus her attention fully on her son. Her feelings for Edmund Tudor are unclear, but it is unlikely that she had ever been in love with her husband, who was considerably older than her. Margaret had reason to worry about her child, as, according to his contemporary biographer Bernard Andreas, Henry was a delicate child. Andreas claimed that Margaret was devoted to raising Henry and that she kept him with her in an attempt to help build up his strength. For the most part, she and her son remained at Pembroke Castle, and they would often have been in each other’s company. Margaret would have attended to Henry’s early education, although, given his young age, she must also have found other ways to occupy herself.
