After a spell of captivity in a French prison, Henry Beaufort was eventually freed, and allowed to take refuge in Bruges, under the protection of Charles Count of Charolais, the son and heir of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. But Beaufort seems to have become demoralised by the collapse of French backing for the Lancastrian cause, and, isolated from other Lancastrians, began negotiations with Edward IV and his chief aristocratic supporter the Earl of Warwick. Although at the end of 1462 he joined a Lancastrian invasion of north-eastern England, he showed little stomach for a fight and quickly came to an agreement with the Yorkists – dramatically defecting to Warwick’s army.
Edward IV was initially cautious in his treatment of this prominent former Lancastrian. However, by the summer of 1463 a remarkable rapprochement had taken place. All Henry Beaufort’s lands and annuities (annual cash payments, charged on the royal exchequer) were restored, and the king displayed a considerable show of trust in a man who had once been one of his most bitter opponents, inviting Beaufort to joust in royal tournaments, going hunting with him and even allowing him on a number of occasions to share the royal bed. In medieval society such an act did not have the sexual connotations we would find today, but it was a signal mark of royal favour, and many were taken aback that it was now being bestowed so lavishly – one source, Gregory’s Chronicle, noting of Henry Beaufort in surprised indignation: ‘the king made full much of him’.
But in the aftermath of this extraordinary charm offensive by the Yorkist king a full reconciliation with the Beaufort family occurred. In July 1463 Henry Beaufort’s younger brother Edmund, held in the Tower of London for more than two years, was released from captivity. His widowed mother Eleanor Duchess of Somerset – Lady Margaret’s aunt – was given a royal pardon and her annuities restored to her. Trusted servants were also welcomed back into the fold. John Martyn of Deptford, who had been the estate manager of Margaret’s late father, received a pardon, as did Henry Court, who had served the Beaufort family loyally for two generations. Lady Margaret must have viewed these developments with surprise and delight, for the reappearance of her own family on the political stage was almost miraculous. And if Henry Beaufort had remained loyal to Edward IV she would have benefited not only politically but also financially from the Beauforts’ new position within the Yorkist regime, and gained a powerful protector at court. But her joy was to be short-lived.
At the end of July 1463 Henry Beaufort accompanied the king on a progress into the Midlands. But at Northampton local townspeople, infuriated at seeing him in the royal party, rioted and very nearly killed him. Deeply shaken, Beaufort left Edward IV’s entourage and retired to his castle of Chirk in north-east Wales. Once away from the seductive charm of the new monarch, he began to reconsider his political future, remembering his family’s long tradition of loyalty to the House of Lancaster and regretting his sudden conversion to the Yorkist cause. In the autumn of 1463 Henry Beaufort reopened communications with the exiled Lancastrians, and at the end of the year he fled to Scotland to join them.
Edward IV was incensed by Beaufort’s action, which he regarded as both a political betrayal and a deeply personal one. He had after all showered his former enemy with honours and gone out of his way to welcome him into the Yorkist regime. His generosity now appeared a serious miscalculation, and he had lost face through a very public courting of Beaufort’s allegiance. The king was enraged. When Henry Beaufort returned to northern England with a small Lancastrian army, and was defeated and captured at Hexham in May 1464, the king ordered him to be stripped of all aristocratic insignia and then summarily executed. Edward took a vindictive pleasure in Beaufort’s humiliation and death, and according to one chronicler, his executioner – the Earl of Warwick’s brother, John Lord Montagu – was promoted to the earldom of Northumberland solely because he had captured and then beheaded him.
Edward’s breach with the Beauforts was now permanent. Henry Beaufort’s younger brothers Edmund and John had escaped the rout at Hexham and went into exile abroad, joining the household of Charles Count of Charolais in Flanders. Charolais had earlier sheltered Henry Beaufort and now took his brothers under his protection. Edward – unable to reach them – took out his fury against the family by imprisoning their mother, the elderly Eleanor Duchess of Somerset, and confiscating all her possessions, a spiteful act against a defenceless and vulnerable widow. But the warning for Lady Margaret was clear.
In 1465 Margaret was admitted with her mother to the confraternity of the Abbey of Croyland (or Crowland). Joining a confraternity – a voluntary association of lay people supporting and faithful to a particular religious institution – was not an unusual occurrence in the late Middle Ages, but what was more significant was Margaret’s young age when she chose to do so – she was only twenty-two. The Fenland Abbey of Croyland was reasonably close to her principal residence of Bourne Castle, but more importantly it was the chronicler of the abbey who had recorded details of the fall from royal favour of Margaret’s father, from the pinnacle of regal trust to disgrace, banishment and suicide. Margaret would have known of this already, but her decision to involve herself more closely with the abbey at this time suggests that recent political events may have painfully reminded her of his tragic fate.
For Henry Beaufort’s bloody execution by the Yorkists, less than a year after basking in the sumptuous favour of Edward IV, was once again unsettling proof of the impermanence of worldly power. The Act of Attainder passed against the Beauforts in the parliament of 1465 – which formally confiscated all their landed possessions – showed the depth of the king’s anger against them. Its wording was surprisingly personal: Henry Beaufort had broken his oath to the king, ‘against all nature of gentilesse’ – he had acted dishonourably by breaking his word and abusing royal trust. By doing so he had brought dishonour and shame upon his family name. Against such treachery, the harshest punishment was justified. Fortune’s wheel had turned again – and done so with rapidity and violence.
With Edward IV pursuing a vendetta against the Beaufort family, Margaret must have feared for her own future, and in the face of such danger may have considered retreating from the political arena altogether, as she joined another confraternity at this time, the Order of the Holy Trinity, near Knaresborough in Yorkshire, a religious body concerned with freeing captive Christians imprisoned by the Turks. On this occasion she also obtained admission for her son, Henry Tudor. While England was afflicted by civil war and political unrest, eastern Europe was succumbing to the onslaught of the Ottoman Turks, led by the Emperor Mehmed II – aptly named ‘the Conqueror’ – who had besieged and captured Constantinople in 1453 and in the following decade annexed most of Greece and Serbia.
Margaret’s interest in the Order of the Holy Trinity shows her breadth of thinking, and that she was capable of seeing beyond the misfortunes of her family to a broader vista, the threat to European Christendom from the Islamic Turks. One senses she was deeply fearful for the future, yet determined to face its challenges as best she could. Contributing to the ransoms, and helping to free those Christian knights captured and imprisoned by the Ottomans, held the moral equivalence in the late Middle Ages of participating in a crusade, and receiving an absolution for past sins. It is striking that Margaret’s primary concern was to gain the admission of her eight-year-old son into the order alongside her. By associating herself and Henry Tudor with such a worthy cause she may have hoped to break a chain of punishment for past wrongdoing, and gain spiritual protection from present menace.
By 1465 Queen Margaret of Anjou’s exiled Lancastrian court had departed from Scotland and settled at the castle of Koeur in Alsace. Lady Margaret was well aware that the queen was now living in poverty with her son Prince Edward and a clutch of die-hard Lancastrian noblemen and household officials. The queen’s chancellor Sir John Fortescue described a hand-to-mouth existence, apologising to another exiled Lancastrian – John Butler Earl of Ormonde – that the bearer of a letter sent to him had only been given
two French crowns for his costs ‘because we had no more money [to give him]’. Henry VI was not among these penniless refugees; he had been discovered in northern Lancashire in 1465, leading the life of a fugitive in the aftermath of his flight from the battle of Hexham, and was now securely locked up in the Tower of London.
However, Margaret’s remaining male cousins Edmund and John Beaufort were living in better conditions, attached to the household of Charles Count of Charolais in Flanders, and receiving regular financial payments. Other exiled Lancastrians were drawn to Charolais’s service on a more occasional basis, and these included John Courtenay Earl of Devon and Henry Holland Duke of Exeter. But Edmund Beaufort and Charolais had become firm friends, and the two fought side by side at Montlhéry on 16 July 1465, when Charolais defeated the forces of Louis XI of France. The presence of Edmund Beaufort – who now styled himself Duke of Somerset – at this battle attracted considerable interest and was noted by a number of foreign chroniclers. It was Beaufort – in Flanders – who would become a rallying figure for Lancastrian exiles, a fact all the more galling for Edward IV, who had let him out of prison in the first place, and the king’s anger against all members of the Beaufort family ran unassuaged.
Margaret Beaufort was well aware of this, and in the aftermath of Montlhéry may have despaired of her own future. Yet she was pragmatic and astute, and above all a fighter, and with the dispersal of the Lancastrian cause her chief concern remained – as always – to protect the interests of her son, still in the wardship and keeping of William Lord Herbert, one of Edward IV’s closest supporters. The Beauforts were now the king’s irreconcilable enemies, but Margaret sought the support of the Stafford family of her husband. Her ability to cultivate alliances and negotiate with shrewdness and courage first tempered Edward’s suspicion of her, and then gave her an entrée into the Yorkist court.
An opportunity to do this certainly existed. In 1465 Sir Henry’s nephew, Henry Stafford Duke of Buckingham, had married Katherine Woodville, the younger sister of Edward IV’s new queen. And Margaret’s mother-in-law, Anne Neville, had also remarried Edward’s treasurer and close supporter, Walter Lord Mountjoy. It was the Stafford connection that gave Margaret a chance to win back the trust of the Yorkist king. This course of action required patience and prudence, but Margaret was intelligent enough to see where her best chance lay. Walter Lord Mountjoy was a close friend of Edward IV, and Margaret – who had a good relationship with her mother-in-law, Anne Neville, with whom she shared literary and religious interests – enlisted her support. By cultivating this connection Margaret gained Walter Lord Mountjoy’s advocacy and in late 1466 Mountjoy interceded with the king on her behalf. Edward’s hostility began to lessen.
In December 1466 Edward IV granted Margaret and her husband the Beaufort manor of Woking in Surrey, an estate that had been in royal hands since the attainder of Henry Beaufort Duke of Somerset. It was a highly symbolic act of patronage, for the fine manor house and its surrounding lands – in open countryside alongside the River Wey, but conveniently close to the capital – had been a favourite residence of the Beaufort family. But Edward was now treating Margaret as a Stafford rather than a Beaufort, and restoring both her and her husband to political influence. As a result of the king’s change of heart, Woking now became Margaret and Sir Henry Stafford’s principal residence.
Lady Margaret’s surviving household accounts give us a snapshot of the couple’s journey south. A flurry of improvements to Woking’s manor house took place in January 1467 before Margaret and Sir Henry Stafford moved in. The counting-house was re-roofed, stables repaired and a new larder built. Carts and extra staff were hired from the Abbot of Bourne to speed the transfer. The moated manor house lay a mile south of the town of Woking, screened by a copse and surrounded by parkland. Entrance was commanded by a gatehouse and drawbridge, leading to an outer courtyard, with its lodgings and stables. A second gate opened out on to the great hall, with adjoining pantry and buttery, the chapel and the private chambers of lord and lady. Beyond the moat were sheds for horses, sheep and cattle, and gardens, bordered by the fruit trees of the orchard, which ran down to a large fishpond and the winding river.
The ruins of the fine manor house at Woking in Surrey that became Margaret’s principal residence, and a reconstruction of its appearance in the fifteenth century
Margaret moved into this new residence with an enlarged household establishment, its strength doubled to between forty and fifty, with an influx of Stafford servants personally recommended by Anne Neville, Margaret’s mother-in-law, who had very much taken the couple under her wing. These included men of particular quality: William Wisetowe, who was appointed their steward, Thomas Rogers, their auditor, and – most important of all – Reginald Bray, who would become their estate manager and Margaret’s most trusted and loyal servant. After all the difficulties of the preceding years, Lady Margaret must have felt an astonishing surge of hope as she set up home at Woking. Fortune at last seemed to be turning her way.
Sir Henry Stafford now enjoyed a far more active political role. In May 1467 he rode to a royal council meeting at Mortlake; on another occasion he was summoned to attend the king at Windsor. In May 1468 both he and Margaret came up to stay in London during the meeting of parliament, arriving in the capital by boat and lodging at the Mitre in Cheapside. Edward IV, whose foreign policy – with Woodville support – had become increasingly hostile to France, was considering sending a military expedition against Louis XI, led by Walter Lord Mountjoy. In retaliation, Louis backed a small invasion force commanded by Jasper Tudor. In July 1468 Tudor landed in the Dyfi Estuary, close to the castle of Harlech, which remarkably had never been reduced by the Yorkists and was still in Lancastrian hands, and then launched a raid across north Wales. Edward responded quickly, ordering William Lord Herbert to raise an army and deal with this threat. Herbert chose to take young Henry Tudor with him, and Margaret – anxious for his safety – sent out a stream of messages enquiring after his well-being. In the event, the eleven-year-old Henry Tudor was safe enough. He witnessed the destruction of his uncle Jasper’s forces at Twt Hill near Caernarfon, and then saw his guardian Herbert finally capture the Lancastrian stronghold of Harlech, which surrendered to his army on 14 August. But Jasper Tudor himself was able to escape Herbert’s soldiers and sail back to France.
Lord Herbert had once again performed stalwart service for his master. However, Edward IV’s rule was becoming increasingly unpopular, and unrest within the realm was growing. Law and order was beginning to break down in the localities, and – faced with a threat to some of their properties in Kendal – Margaret and Sir Henry Stafford now sought a stronger demonstration of Edward’s favour. In December 1468 they took a remarkable step, inviting the king to hunt at Woking park, and afterwards to dine with them at their lodge at Brookwood. Edward accepted their invitation. Lady Margaret – chief heiress of the Beaufort family, enemy of the House of York – was now to entertain a Yorkist king to supper.
The lordship of Kendal had been granted to Margaret’s father on the eve of his great expedition to France in 1443, and she felt honour-bound to protect her lands there. Estate management was a vital skill in the late Middle Ages, particularly as Lady Margaret’s properties were, like many aristocratic holdings, scattered over a wide geographical area. She held a clutch of estates in the West Country, and another in the eastern Midlands. But it was her manors in north-west England, around the Cumbrian town of Kendal, that were now at risk. In the summer of 1468 the Parr family – enjoying the support of the powerful magnate Richard Neville Earl of Warwick – had challenged Margaret’s legal right to hold these properties and also stirred up unrest among her tenants. Storm clouds were gathering over the Yorkist polity: Warwick’s relations with the king were deteriorating, and this ambitious nobleman – known to posterity as ‘the Kingmaker’ – was very much pursuing his own agenda. In November Margaret’s estate manager Reginald Bray had ridden north with a trusted group of servan
ts in an attempt to collect arrears of rent. Conditions were dangerous, and the men received extra financial reward because, as one document noted tellingly, ‘of the trouble now in the world’. But the rents remained unpaid.
Margaret and Sir Henry Stafford sought the backing of the king. But they also judged the opportunity was right to personally meet and entertain Edward IV, and build a deeper relationship with him. While Stafford would receive the king at Guildford, hunt with him and escort him to Brookwood, Margaret took charge of organising the festivities. In 1453 she had been bought fine clothing to meet the Lancastrian Henry VI. Now, in 1468, as she prepared to receive a Yorkist monarch, she chose her own, a dress of fine velvet and high-quality Flemish cloth. A pewter dinner service was bought in from London, servants carefully transporting its five dozen dishes and four dozen saucers to Brookwood. Further provisions were acquired in Guildford: wildfowl and a variety of fish, including pike, lampreys, several hundred oysters and eel, ‘half a great conger for the king’s dinner’, to be washed down by five barrels of ale.
As Margaret prepared to receive Edward IV she was fully aware that she was entertaining a man who had ordered the execution of her cousin and was the implacable enemy of the remainder of her family. Yet she must have felt an extraordinary sense of pride and excitement. On this December night the king, Sir Henry Stafford and Lady Margaret dined together under a magnificent canopy of purple silk, especially made for the occasion, with music provided by the royal minstrels. That such a meal had happened at all was tribute to Margaret’s perseverance, prudence and courage. But it was also proof of a ruthless pragmatism. She would stop at nothing to further the interests of her son. He – and he alone – commanded her abiding loyalty.
The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 24