Documentary evidence, however valuable, can take us only so far. From the household records we know what Lady Margaret bought when Edward IV came to supper, but we do not know what her personal impressions were, what she thought about him – as a man and as a king. And when Edmund Beaufort rode into the great courtyard at Woking, with his riding household of forty servants, with the world once again in turmoil, we know that he stayed for four days, from 24–28 March 1471, but nothing about what was said during his visit. So we can imagine one scenario – rehearsed above – with Beaufort urgently and emotionally appealing for support for the Lancastrian cause, and Margaret and Sir Henry Stafford listening courteously and attentively, but in their inner thoughts and private conversations weighing the chances of the rival sides, and deciding the advantage now lay with Edward IV.
However, we could also imagine an alternative sequence, with the couple in disagreement, and arguing passionately and bitterly: with Margaret – more than at any other time in her life – swayed by loyalty to her family; and Stafford calm, rational and immovable, unwilling to support the Lancastrians – believing such a course of action was too risky, and too dangerous. If this was the case, Margaret’s impassioned pleas, her anger, her tears, would find no place in the records.
Then there was the safety of Margaret’s son, Henry Tudor, to consider. He was now in south Wales with his uncle Jasper, and Jasper would almost certainly attempt to join Margaret of Anjou’s army. We can assume that Edmund Beaufort would have argued that the right course of action was to throw every man, every retainer, into battle for the Lancastrian cause, and this was the only way to achieve Henry’s security. Was Margaret swayed by this emotional appeal? Or did she draw back, realising that if the Lancastrians lost the battle Stafford’s support for Edward IV would give the only real guarantee of her son’s political survival?
John Fisher, Margaret’s confessor, came to know an old lady in her sixties, the mother of the Tudor king and matriarch of the House of Tudor. The Margaret that he met would have mastered her emotions in March 1471, and calculated the best course of action from her head rather than her heart. I have shown you that woman here. But people – in the Middle Ages as now – are complex and never entirely consistent. If Margaret had once powerfully surrendered to her feelings, and then realised with hindsight that the actions she had advocated, however understandable, were misjudged and mistaken, she would have redoubled her self-possession and self-control. We will never know.
I will continue my narrative. In the aftermath of Tewkesbury Edward IV was now determined to wipe out his opponents once and for all. The Lancastrian Prince Edward had been slain attempting to flee the battlefield, and on the Yorkists’ return to London the hapless Henry VI was almost certainly murdered in the Tower on Edward IV’s orders. Resistance in other parts of the country quickly collapsed. In south Wales, Jasper and Henry Tudor briefly held Pembroke Castle for the Lancastrians, but in September 1471 they fled abroad. They had hoped to reach the shelter of France, but instead storms blew them to the duchy of Brittany, and here they would remain for the next thirteen years.
On 4 October 1471 Margaret’s husband Sir Henry Stafford died. He had been wounded fighting at the battle of Barnet, and was never able to recover from his injuries. Margaret’s estate manager and loyal servant Reginald Bray took care of the details of Stafford’s burial at Pleshey in Essex. After her husband’s death Margaret left Woking for a while – perhaps finding the memories of her time there too painful – and moved into her mother’s London house ‘Le Ryall’ with a reduced household of sixteen, headed by three of her ladies-in-waiting.
In January 1471 Margaret’s fortunes had been in the ascendant. She had been reunited with her son, a Lancastrian king was on the throne and, in her perception at least, the Beaufort family had been restored to its rightful position within the realm. In October 1471 they had reached a nadir. Her son was now in exile in Brittany, kept in captivity, under guard, and Margaret had no idea whether she would see him again. The Lancastrian King Henry VI, whom she revered as a saint, had almost certainly been murdered in the Tower of London. Her male Beaufort cousins had been wiped out, and Edmund Beaufort – whom she had come to know – had been hauled from the protection of religious sanctuary and executed. And now her husband for the last fourteen years – with whom she had enjoyed a companionable and affectionate relationship – had died. Margaret must have felt utterly bereft.
In May 1472 Margaret drew up her first will, and in it, she tried to make sense of her life so far. She sought reconciliation with her first husband, Edmund Tudor, whose body she wished to be moved from the House of the Grey Friars in Carmarthen and reinterred in Bourne Abbey, so that she could be laid to rest beside him. And she thought deeply about her exiled, captive son. She instructed her trustees to preserve an estate – drawn from her landed wealth – for the use of Henry Tudor, so that he could have an inheritance should he ever return to England and be restored to favour in the Yorkist realm. Sadly, this prospect seemed far distant.
Another aristocratic woman, faced with these traumatic experiences, might well have retired from active life altogether and joined a religious community. Margaret herself probably thought hard about taking such a step, in the autumn of 1465, and again in the autumn of 1471. Her sense of personal destiny, the vision of St Nicholas that she had seen as a child, the miraculous prophecy of Henry VI that she had heard as an adult, must at such times have seemed a mockery to her. Instead she had faced the bewildering turns of fortune’s wheel, and watched as those around her met with violence and death. A genuinely pious woman and intelligent thinker, Margaret must have wondered if she was being punished for some terrible sin, and as she did so, her thoughts would have returned again and again to the suicide of her father.
But Lady Margaret remained a fighter, and the drawing up of her will, far from turning her into a recluse, galvanised her once more into action. She resolved to return to court and find herself a new husband, and her sights were now set on one of the most powerful magnates in the kingdom, Thomas Lord Stanley, the steward of Edward IV’s household. In June 1472 the marriage took place at Stanley’s residence of Knowsley Hall in Lancashire. It was an arrangement of mutual interest. A carefully worked-out marriage contract guaranteed Margaret an annual income of 500 marks from Stanley’s estates in Cheshire and north Wales. For Stanley, the match expanded his territorial influence, giving him a life interest in Margaret’s substantial properties. The contract made no provision for issue, the most likely explanation being that Margaret wished to live a celibate life, rather than the later legend that Edward IV only allowed the union of Lady Margaret and Stanley on the condition that no children were produced.
Margaret now divided her time between Stanley’s Lancashire and Cheshire properties and the demands of court activity in the capital. Thomas Lord Stanley quickly came to respect his wife’s forceful personality and also her understanding of the law. In November 1473 a property dispute in Liverpool was delegated to an arbitration panel headed by Lady Margaret, and in August 1474 a dispute between two of Stanley’s tenants, Thomas Ashton and Richard Dalton, was referred to Margaret’s own legal counsellors. Lady Margaret was a frequent visitor to London, and early in 1475 she witnessed preparations for Edward IV’s expedition to France. Stanley was one of Edward’s principal captains, and in a flurry of activity craftsmen were paid for garnishing his armour and providing crimson and blue silk for his standards. Other servants went further afield, one, Edward Fleetwood, being given £50 to buy horses for Stanley in Flanders. The gathering of this great army, comprising almost half the English aristocracy, must have left a powerful impression on Lady Margaret.
Margaret’s marriage strengthened her connection to the powerful and influential Woodville family. By the mid-1470s the Stanleys and the Woodvilles worked in close co-operation in the administration of Cheshire and north Wales, a partnership cemented by family alliances. Sir James Molyneux, chancellor to Anthony Earl Rivers, was
Lord Stanley’s nephew. Stanley’s son and heir George had married Joan, the queen’s sister, daughter of John Lord Strange and his first wife Jacquetta. Lady Margaret now benefited from these contacts, particularly in the arena of court ceremony. In July 1476 Margaret played an important part in the reburial of Richard Duke of York, the king’s father, at Fotheringhay, in attendance upon the queen and her daughters. In November 1480 Margaret was honoured in the celebration of the birth of the seventh royal princess, Bridget, at the newly refurbished palace of Eltham, acting as godmother and carrying the child in the procession.
A measure of mutual respect and affection grew between Margaret and Stanley. In 1478 she commissioned a selection of prayers of the Passion and the Holy Name for her husband, with four charm-like formulae placed in the middle of the book. It was believed that whoever recited these prayers would not perish in battle, was assured immunity from the plague, and – in the case of women – protection during pregnancy. It is highly likely that Margaret had used these charms during her own dangerous pregnancy, and recognising Stanley’s fear of death in battle (his reluctance to commit his forces during the Wars of the Roses gave him a reputation for political guile that would last for centuries) deemed this an appropriate gift.
Margaret’s badges and coat of arms and the badge of her husband Thomas Lord Stanley from their book of prayers
By the beginning of June 1482, ten years after her marriage to Lord Stanley, Margaret had established herself at the heart of the Yorkist court, wielding considerable political influence. She now used this power in an effort to secure the return of her son, who was still in exile in Brittany. A remarkable document was drawn up in the presence of Edward IV and Stanley at the Palace of Westminster on 3 June 1482. It laid out arrangements for the disposal of the properties of Margaret’s mother, who had died a month earlier. They were reserved for Henry Tudor’s use, on certain conditions, the principal being that Henry now return from exile ‘to be in the grace and favour of the king’s highness’. Edward added his royal seal in confirmation of the agreement. The pious hope expressed in Margaret’s will of May 1472 had now become a reality. A place had been found for Henry Tudor within the Yorkist realm.
Greater honour was envisaged. Lord Stanley later recalled that towards the end of Edward IV’s reign discussions were held about the possible marriage of Henry Tudor to one of the king’s daughters. If a York–Tudor marriage was to take place, a major restoration to Henry of aristocratic title and lands would have followed, and draft documents preserved in Lady Margaret’s archives suggest that after Edward IV granted Henry Tudor a royal pardon his promotion to the earldom of Richmond (the title held by his father Edmund) was anticipated. These arrangements show Edward now conciliatory towards the exiled Tudor, and were a remarkable triumph for Lady Margaret. Fortune’s wheel had turned once more.
CONSPIRATOR
All rested on how Henry Tudor would react to the new arrangement. Margaret had not seen her son for nearly twelve years – and the thirteen-year-old boy she had last met was now a 25-year-old man. Edward IV was now ready to welcome Tudor back to England, yet it was hard to put aside the legacy of years of suspicion and mistrust. The Tudor court poet Bernard André described an earlier occasion, in 1476, when Henry had been warned by his mother not to come back to England if the king offered him one of his daughters in marriage. Margaret’s doubts were well founded – at this stage Edward IV had other plans for all his daughters – and a year earlier another Lancastrian claimant, Henry Holland Duke of Exeter, had died in the most suspicious of circumstances, being pushed off a boat and drowning on his return from France in the royal expedition of 1475.
In November 1476 Henry Tudor managed to escape the clutches of an English embassy sent to Brittany, slipping away from his escorts and seeking sanctuary in the church of St-Malo. Polydore Vergil gave a vivid description of this incident, almost certainly derived from Henry himself, that he was terrified, fearing for his life, and clearly believing that he would suffer a similar ‘accident’ to Henry Holland once he was shipped to England. Even though Margaret was now vouching for Edward IV’s good faith, the indenture of June 1482 also made provision for the possibility that Henry would choose not to return, despite these reassurances. Henry Tudor would bitterly tell the chronicler Philippe Commynes that most of his life had been spent as a captive or fugitive, and the result of such experiences was an almost pathological suspicion.
The lack of response from Henry Tudor cast a shadow over Margaret’s achievement, although the new arrangement was never fully put to the test, for on 9 April 1483 Edward IV suddenly died – having fallen ill after a boating trip on the Thames, in which he contracted a serious chill. His son and heir was recognised as Edward V and a governing council, dominated by the Woodvilles, was set up to rule the country until the young king could be crowned, then replaced by a protectorate under Edward IV’s younger brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester. The protectorate itself abruptly ended when Richard dramatically announced that his brother’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid and that the couple’s two sons – Edward and Richard – were in fact illegitimate. Richard Duke of Gloucester now claimed the throne himself, accepting kingship by proclamation on 26 June and being crowned as Richard III on 6 July.
The circumstances of Richard’s seizure of the throne were bloody and confused. Edward IV’s two sons were confined to the Tower, William Lord Hastings executed for treason and Edward IV’s queen forced to withdraw into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey with her daughters. Yet at this stage Lady Margaret’s intention was to seek an accommodation with Richard III and safeguard the arrangements for Henry Tudor’s return, drawn up a year earlier. She had opened negotiations with Richard in late June, using Henry Stafford Duke of Buckingham as an intermediary, and again the prospects of a marriage alliance for Tudor were discussed. On 5 July, the day before the coronation, Stanley and Margaret secured a private meeting with Richard and his chief justice William Hussey at Westminster. The following day Margaret played a prominent part in the coronation ceremony itself, bearing Queen Anne’s train in the procession to Westminster Abbey, and serving at the banquet afterwards.
Richard III now undertook a royal progress throughout the realm. Thomas Lord Stanley was commanded to join him, and Lady Margaret, who had remained behind in London, began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of supporting Richard. She may have been informed by Jasper and Henry Tudor that they would never be willing to support such a scheme, and begun to despair of ever securing her son’s return. Whatever the reason for it, Margaret now took a calculated but highly dangerous step, abandoning her allegiance to Richard III and beginning to plot against him. At the end of July 1483 she may have even participated in a plot to rescue the princes from the Tower, in which a newly restored Edward V would be supported by an invasion force led by Jasper and Henry Tudor. Information on this early conspiracy is fragmentary, being confined to a brief comment in one contemporary source, the French chronicle of Thomas Basin, and material gathered by the early-seventeenth-century antiquary John Stow. According to Stow, an attempt to storm the Tower failed, and Basin added that about fifty people were arrested and executed in London for their involvement in this rescue attempt.
The evidence for Margaret’s plotting later in the summer is much firmer. The princes had now been withdrawn to the inner recesses of the Tower and their servants dismissed. By September 1483 most people feared that they were dead. Exactly what had happened to them, and – if they were murdered – who was responsible for it, has never been fully established. Chief suspicion rested on Richard himself, though some contemporary chroniclers also pointed an accusatory finger at Henry Stafford Duke of Buckingham, and in the early Stuart period researchers such as William Cornwallis and Sir George Buck even suggested that Margaret Beaufort herself may have decided to kill them, in order to further Henry Tudor’s chances of taking the throne. Such a possibility cannot be entirely ruled out, and if so it would represent the darkest
and most terrifying fruit of her remorseless ambition for her son.
However, while a motive for Lady Margaret existed – albeit a profoundly disturbing one – hard evidence for her involvement in such a scheme is scant indeed. Buck claimed to have found proof ‘in an old manuscript book’, but as he never cited its provenance or quoted from it, its existence remains a mystery. And no contemporary chronicler or source blamed Margaret for the princes’ disappearance. Most believed Richard III himself was guilty of the crime. It is Margaret’s motives for joining a rebellion against Richard that smack of opportunism, particularly since she had sought to co-operate with him at the start of his reign.
What is clear is that once the princes were assumed dead, with many contemporaries believing – rightly or wrongly – that Richard had murdered them, a major uprising was planned against the new Yorkist king, and Margaret herself took a leading role in its organisation. As Polydore Vergil said, she was ‘commonly called the head of that conspiracy’. Her ambitions for her son’s future now reached a dramatic and powerful culmination. Henry Tudor, united with the Woodville faction through a proposed marriage to Elizabeth of York, would claim the throne of England itself. Negotiations with Elizabeth Woodville were carried out by Margaret’s physician, Lewis Caerleon, while contact with Henry Tudor in Brittany was undertaken by her servant Hugh Conway. Margaret’s communication with the chief aristocratic supporter of the rebellion, Henry Stafford Duke of Buckingham, remained more ambiguous, and it was uncertain whether the duke fully knew of or supported Henry Tudor’s bid to claim the throne.
In the event, all these plans came to nothing. In October 1483 separate risings against Richard III began in different parts of the country. They were badly co-ordinated, and the Kentish rebellion was promptly crushed by Richard’s staunch supporter, John Howard Duke of Norfolk. Henry Stafford’s tenants in Wales deserted him in large numbers, allowing Richard to move down on the rebellion in south-west England in considerable force. By the time Henry Tudor and his small fleet appeared off the coast of Dorset in early November, the rebel cause was all but lost, and Tudor prudently beat a hasty retreat.
The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 26