The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  The failure of the rebellion of 1483 placed Lady Margaret in considerable personal danger. Richard III was soon aware of the extent of her plotting, and – in his rage – may initially have considered executing her for treason. The later recollections of Henry Parker Lord Morley, who served as a cupbearer in Margaret’s household, made clear that ‘in Richard’s reign, she was often in jeopardy of her life, yet she bore patiently such trouble in a manner that is extraordinary to think of’. After reflection, the king chose to spare her life because of the loyalty of her husband, Thomas Lord Stanley, who had maintained his allegiance to Richard throughout the uprising. In the parliament of 1484 she was remitted the full rigour of attainder, ‘remembering the good and faithful service that Thomas Lord Stanley has done us, and for his sake’. Yet she was to forfeit all right to aristocratic titles and estates, the annual income that she enjoyed from her husband was declared void and the lands that she had conserved for the use of her son were now confiscated and dispersed among others. Stanley was instructed to keep her confined without household servants. In a life rich in triumph and adversity, it was the lowest point of her fortunes.

  And yet – even in failure – the conspiracy initiated by Margaret began to develop a momentum of its own. Exiled Woodvilles, fleeing from England in the aftermath of the revolt, now clustered around Tudor in Brittany, and on Christmas Day 1483 in Vannes Cathedral Henry solemnly promised to return to England as king, vanquish Richard III and marry Elizabeth of York. By 1484 he was using the regal style of a king of England in messages and proclamations to his supporters and in 1485 his claim to the throne was recognised by the French, who provided the ships and soldiers for a small invasion fleet. At the beginning of August 1485 he landed in Wales with a small army, marched into England and confronted Richard III in battle. And at Bosworth on 22 August the numerically smaller army of Tudor triumphed over the larger one of Richard, with the Yorkist king slain in combat as he tried to cut down his challenger. Against all expectations, and against all odds, Margaret Beaufort’s son Henry Tudor had won the throne of England.

  THE KING’S MOTHER

  The month of September 1485 saw a highly emotional reunion of mother and son. The victorious army of the new Tudor monarch reached London on 7 September, and two weeks later Henry VII left the capital and travelled to Margaret’s manor house of Woking, which he had last visited nearly fifteen years before. It was a deliberate recreation of their previous meeting together in November 1470, before political fortune drove them apart. It was a long visit – the king staying for nearly three weeks – but they had much to talk about.

  Henry’s incredible victory at Bosworth would have been top of the list. The new Tudor king would have shared details of the campaign and battle, the difficult negotiations with the Stanleys, the sudden and decisive intervention of Thomas Lord Stanley’s younger brother Sir William on the field of combat, Richard’s dangerous last charge, in which the Yorkist monarch slew Henry’s standard bearer William Brandon and was only a few feet from Tudor himself. Henry VII would have praised the performance of his French mercenaries, and their captain Philibert de Chandée, whom he elevated to the earldom of Bath in gratitude for his stalwart service. And more than anything, he and Margaret would have marvelled that, faced with Richard’s much larger army, his small force had triumphed at all.

  Henry had a present for his mother, taken from the spoils of Richard’s war tent – the late Yorkist king’s book of hours, his personal prayer book. It was a telling gift, and a well-chosen one. In public, the Tudor view of Richard was that he was an embodiment of evil, a man who had put himself beyond the pale through a series of horrifying killings. But many of these killings – the executions of Earl Rivers, Lord Hastings, Sir Richard Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan in June 1483 – had taken place before Lady Margaret met with the king in the Palace of Westminster on 5 July, and discussed her son’s future with him. Now that son had unseated him on the field of battle.

  When Margaret very publicly assisted in Richard III’s coronation on 6 July 1483, the day after this conversation, an Italian visitor to London, Dominic Mancini, related that people in the street already openly feared for the safety of the young princes in the Tower, adding that some believed they were already dead, and others thought they would soon die. Yet this fact did not stop Margaret lending her support to Richard’s cause. It is probable that she chose to rebel against him later that summer not out of a sense of moral outrage over the way he had seized the throne but because it seemed a more powerful and effective way of advancing the interests of her son.

  Later Tudor portraits of Margaret and her son, Henry VII

  In private, it is more likely the king and his mother were struck by the late king’s piety, and that a genuinely religious person could be politically ruthless none the less, and on occasions take that ruthlessness to terrible extremes. As Henry and Margaret talked about past events and shared their hopes for the future, the king had already granted her a fine new London house at Coldharbour. Locked securely in one of its rooms was Edward Plantagenet, the son of Edward IV’s brother George Duke of Clarence. One of Henry’s first actions after winning Bosworth was to send an armed retinue to seize Plantagenet and bring him to the capital. Both Henry VII and his mother knew that his own claim to the throne was weak, and that Clarence’s son was a dangerous dynastic rival. He was a ten-year-old child, innocent of wrongdoing, but a dangerous child, and Margaret was now in effect his jailer. He was soon transferred to the greater security of the Tower of London, from where – like the princes – he would never reappear. The Tudor monarch lambasted Richard ‘for the shedding of innocent blood’ (a veiled reference to the murder of the princes) then cynically waited until the equally innocent Edward Plantagenet came of age before executing him on trumped-up charges.

  Henry’s Beaufort lineage gave him a royal pedigree, but one not strong enough in itself to justify a claim to the throne. To effect this, Henry duly married Elizabeth of York, the match that his mother had laboured hard to bring about. But the king’s mother remained a dominating presence. At the Tudor court, Margaret’s standing was as great as the queen’s. In 1488 both she and Elizabeth were issued with liveries of the Order of the Garter, a sign of special standing, and a song was composed to celebrate their wearing of robes together. At the ceremony Margaret wore identical robes to the queen, cloth furred with miniver and woven with garter letters of gold, and in her heraldic insignia she used the royal coronet with its fleurs-de-lys. Royal household ordinances made provision for Lady Margaret’s accommodation at all the palaces and residences used by the Crown. And contemporaries noted the frequency with which Margaret accompanied the king and queen on royal visits or progresses.

  Their close relationship was reflected in the architecture of royal palaces. At Woodstock Margaret’s lodgings were placed close to her son’s, linked by a ‘withdrawing chamber’, a room that was built between the king’s rooms and his mother’s, one that allowed them to be together in utmost privacy, whether to discuss affairs of state or relax at cards or chess. And in the Tower of London Margaret’s rooms were to be found next to the king’s own bedchamber. And their remarkable intimacy and sense of common cause were reflected in their personal correspondence.

  In a letter to his mother Henry VII wrote: ‘I shall be glad to please you as your heart desirest, and I know well that I am as much boundeth to do so as any creature living for the great and singular motherly love and affection that it have pleased you at all times to bear me.’ Margaret responded in equally fulsome fashion, addressing Henry as ‘my own sweet and most dear king and all my worldly joy, my good and precious prince, king and only beloved son’.

  Lady Margaret maintained an active political role. A postscript to a letter of hers, written in 1488 to Richard Fox, keeper of the privy seal, requested the latest news from Flanders, well aware that Margaret of York, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, was sheltering opponents of the new Tudor dynasty. At the times of Henry VII’s
expedition to France in 1492 it was the king’s mother who made the greatest financial contribution and also donated large supplies of grain. In April 1497 the return of an embassy from the Burgundian court occasioned a typically sardonic gift. She was unable to resist a weighted jibe against the pretensions of Margaret of York, whose glittering court continued to support a host of plotters against her son’s regime.

  ‘I thank you heartily for the gift of gloves that you have brought from her,’ she began, ‘which are finely chosen, except that they are far too large for my hand. I think the women of this court are great ladies, one and all, and as befits their great estate, they are great in size also.’ Beneath the mockery one senses the bitterness she felt towards the duchess, who had sheltered the pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, and encouraged their plots against the Tudor dynasty.

  A letter written by Margaret in her own hand, to the Earl of Ormonde in 1497

  Margaret now became a great landowner, renegotiating her marriage contract with Thomas Lord Stanley so that she could hold her properties in her own right and acquiring plentiful estates from the king, whose income funded a substantial household, building projects, and her acts of religious and educational patronage. She built a fine palace at Collyweston in Northamptonshire where she entertained the king and great aristocrats of the realm but also held a court of equity, and a governing council of the Midlands, where she arbitrated in disputes on Henry’s behalf. Here, in the summer of 1503, Henry’s court stayed for three weeks, as Margaret’s granddaughter, the Princess Margaret, made her way north to marry James IV, King of Scotland. Lady Margaret’s choristers sang, acted and performed for her many guests.

  Margaret’s wealth allowed her to sponsor works of devotional literature, such as the printing of Walter Hilton’s Scala Perfectionis or Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools, and she also tried her hand at translating, most notably the fourth book of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. Her educational patronage culminated in her Cambridge foundations of Christ’s and St John’s colleges. But these good works, which attracted the interest of her early biographers, were not undertaken in religious seclusion but from an active and highly pragmatic involvement in worldly affairs. Lady Margaret’s household contained a full range of personalities: the scholarly, cultural presence of her confessor John Fisher or the dean of her chapel, Henry Hornby, contrasting with servants such as Reginald Bray – described as ‘plain and rough in speech’ – and John Hussey, an estate official notorious for his strong-arm rent-collection tactics. Lady Margaret respected Bray and Hussey because they were tough, practical and got things done – and she did not ask too many questions about how they did it. And among all these men Margaret exerted a commanding influence. Fisher said simply that, if division or strife arose among any of her household, ‘she with great policy [forcefulness] did bolt [sort] it out.’

  And such forcefulness was more than necessary. The turns of fortune’s wheel did not end with Henry VII’s accession. The court poet Bernard André likened the first twelve years of the Tudor dynasty to the labours of Hercules as a series of dangerous threats were beaten off, at home and abroad. Lady Margaret’s book of hours, her own prayer book, was not divorced from this world, and in it she recorded her son’s victories against his assailants, in 1485 at Bosworth, where he won the throne, Stoke in 1487, when he defeated his first major rebellion, and in 1497 Blackheath, where he vanquished the last.

  On 14 November 1501, when the marriage of Henry VII’s oldest son Arthur to Katherine of Aragon in St Paul’s Cathedral was lavishly celebrated by the king and his mother, it appeared that the Tudor dynasty had fought its way through such trials and won diplomatic and political acceptance on the European stage. But then fresh calamity struck. Only six months later the fifteen-year-old Arthur fell suddenly ill, and died at Ludlow on 2 April 1502. As the king’s youngest son Edmund had succumbed to an outbreak of the plague two years earlier, and Prince Henry’s health was at this stage not robust, the dynasty’s hold on power began to appear fragile, and a new round of conspiracies started, initiated by the de la Pole family. A final blow fell on 11 February 1503 when the 37-year-old Queen Elizabeth of York died, shortly after giving birth to another daughter, Katherine. The king was stricken with grief, his mother drew up ordinances for the court to dress in black, the colour of mourning, and the unfortunate court astrologer William Parron, who a few months earlier had unwisely predicted that the queen would live to at least eighty, hurriedly left the country.

  In the event, the fresh crisis was mastered, and Lady Margaret had the pleasure of watching her grandson Henry grow into a strong and athletic young prince. Henry’s youthful athleticism was particularly encouraging as her son, the king, was succumbing to increasing ill-health, finally passing away on 21 April 1509. Margaret outlived him, participating in the festivities that marked the marriage of Henry VIII to Katherine of Aragon on 23 June. It was her last appearance at court, but a highly symbolic one – the Tudor dynasty was now fully established. She fell ill shortly afterwards, and died on 29 June 1509.

  ‘All England on her death had cause of weeping,’ said John Fisher in his funeral sermon, and it was indeed an extraordinary life. Margaret had fought long and hard to further the interests of her son, and the creation of the Tudor dynasty was in large part her achievement. And it is her fight that I have sought to recreate here. Margaret’s early biographers paid little attention to her early career, instead becoming fascinated by her religious and educational patronage. For those interested in learning more about this, I have added their works in my bibliography, and the subject is also covered in the study of Margaret’s life that I jointly undertook in 1992 with the archivist at St John’s College, Cambridge, Malcolm Underwood. But it is the political arena – particularly in the period up to 1485 – that particularly fascinates me, and it is this I have focused on, in order to mirror Philippa Gregory’s powerful historical novel The Red Queen.

  Readers wishing to gain a full sense of Lady Margaret as a person are often confronted by a series of rather bland late-Tudor copied portraits. Here Margaret is presented in the wimple or headdress of widowhood, in the black cloth of mourning, plain, as if she were a nun. In some of these images she reads from a devotional book, in others she kneels at prayer. She appears to have retired from the world, to live the life of a spiritual recluse. The face is soft and featureless. The power and purpose of her life, and the dark, driving passion of her ambition, are nowhere to be seen.

  To reconnect with that ambition, I recommend a visit to Margaret Beaufort’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. Here, in the effigy strikingly fashioned by the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano from an exact likeness, one sees the strength of character in her face. The sharply etched lines, the pronounced cheekbones and slightly hooded eyes convey considerable force of personality. Her features are intelligent, but worldly and astute, an impression reinforced by the coats-of-arms and badges that surround them. It is the face of a political survivor.

  The sense of destiny that Margaret experienced as a child took her on a long and perilous journey. It was a journey of darkness more than light, yet as her life drew to its close, she saw that destiny reach its fruition. In 1499, as Margaret began to build her impressive palace at Collyweston, and govern the east Midlands on behalf of her son, she changed her signature from ‘M Richmond’ to the regal ‘Margaret R’. Contemporaries – with a mixture of awe and respect – referred to her simply as ‘the King’s Mother’.

  Margaret Beaufort’s signature (from 1499)

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  Readers wishing to find out more about Margaret’s remarkable life are recommended, as a first port of call, the author’s own biography, co-written with Malcolm Underwood, the archivist at St John’s College, Cambridge: Jones, Michael, and Underwood, Malcolm The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, Cambridge, 1992. But I would also like to discuss its major predecessors. The first major study was Halsted, Ca
roline Life of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, London, 1839. Halsted, who also undertook a biography of Richard III, was perceptive in some of her judgements, but while she praised Margaret’s moral qualities and patronage of learning, she neglected her political ambition and ruthlessness, and quite wrongly believed that she retired from the political scene once her son took the throne. The Cambridge antiquary Charles Cooper, in his The Lady Margaret: A Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, Cambridge, 1874, also focused primarily on Margaret’s educational achievements and religious patronage, and largely neglected her early life. Routh, Enid A Memoir of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, Mother of Henry VII, Oxford, 1924, was the first biography to draw on Lady Margaret’s household accounts – held in the archives of Westminster Abbey – but while she drew a fuller picture of Margaret’s domestic routine and position at court, she again underplayed her political acumen. Simon, Linda Of Virtue Rare: Margaret Beaufort, Matriarch of the House of Tudor, Boston, Mass., 1982, while adding little new information to Margaret’s life, was the first biography to emphasise the difficulties she faced as a woman in the world of fifteenth-century politics. For a good, readable recent study that pays proper tribute to her political role, readers are recommended Norton, Elizabeth Margaret Beaufort: Mother of the Tudor Dynasty, Stroud, 2010.