A disgraced war commander and a suicide was the worst stigma an aristocratic house could possibly bear. Beaufort was quietly buried in Wimborne Minster and his family put out the story that he had succumbed to ill-health. But as Margaret grew up she would have learned the truth about her father’s fate. In this intensely religious age, death at one’s own hand cast the soul of the suicide from the protective mantle of the Church’s intercession. The pious yet pragmatic Margaret found this prospect too painful to bear, and over time constructed a different reality, one that focused on the injustice of her father’s long captivity and heavy ransom, and portrayed him as an innocent victim of vengeful fate.
Some lines of verse on John Beaufort’s death – commissioned by the family – caught the same theme, reciting: ‘When he was wedded, and in estate most high, fortune – to ground him – cast him down most cruelly’. Margaret later confided to her confessor, John Fisher, her fear of the mutability of worldly fortunes, the turn of fortune’s wheel, that when great success had been achieved all might be taken away. Fisher was struck by Margaret’s extreme emotional distress – her convulsive sobbing and weeping – as she shared this recollection. It was made in the privacy of the confessional chamber, when Margaret was an elderly lady and matriarch of the House of Tudor. She had always impressed Fisher with her composure and presence of mind, her calm – almost icy – deliberation when dealing with matters of state or political intrigue. By then Margaret had witnessed many turns of fortune’s wheel herself. But this torrent of emotion had a quite shocking power, as if a deeply buried secret had suddenly been uncovered.
If Margaret perceived her father as a victim, over time, as she grew into adulthood, she cast herself as a survivor, a survivor who would right the wrongs of fortune and master the storms that had wrecked his reputation and standing. She would hazard all to advance the prospects and reputation of her family. This guiding principle held an almost redemptive power for her.
Although John Beaufort had been cast from royal favour, at the time of Margaret’s birth the Beaufort family still dominated the politics of Henry VI’s government. Her great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort was the most important statesman in the land, an experienced diplomatic negotiator and chief moneylender for the war effort in France. Her uncle Edmund Beaufort was another of Henry’s leading war commanders, soon to become his chief lieutenant in France. But Margaret became aware, over time, that this powerful position within the Lancastrian realm could prove transient. The king’s authority was weak and the war in France was going badly.
There were deeper reasons for the Beaufort family’s ambition and vulnerability, and to fully understand Lady Margaret’s own life it is important to explore them. To do so, we have to pull back in time from the tragedy of Margaret’s father and look at the family’s pedigree. For its origins in the late fourteenth century set the Beauforts apart from other aristocratic families. And here lay the source of another stigma. The Beauforts were originally bastards, the illegitimate offspring of John of Gaunt’s adulterous liaison with Katherine Swynford.
This earlier history is important. In the early 1370s, John of Gaunt – the rich and powerful uncle of King Richard II – had turned from his second wife Constance of Castile and begun an affair with Katherine, the governess of his children. Gaunt’s conduct quickly gained notoriety. This ‘scandalous affair’ – as one chronicler bluntly described it – produced four bastard children – three boys and a girl – who were named Beaufort after Gaunt’s French castle and lordship in the Champagne; the oldest of them was Margaret’s paternal grandfather.
The issue of bastardy was complex in the late Middle Ages. It was a time of increasing social mobility, with a land-based economy being replaced by a land-and-cash one, and a rising merchant class buying property and acquiring aristocratic titles. The de la Poles, Earls then Dukes of Suffolk in the fifteenth century, had risen to prominence 100 years earlier as a successful family of Hull merchants. It was possible for those of relatively humble stock to rise more quickly up the social ladder, whether through profits of trade or war. And this fluidity meant that the stigma of bastardy was lessening – within aristocratic and gentry families bastard offspring were more frequently mentioned in wills and granted money and even property.
To a certain extent, this social mobility benefited the Beauforts. John of Gaunt immediately recognised them as members of his broader family, and after the death of his wife Constance of Castile he chose to marry Katherine Swynford, his former mistress, at Lincoln in early 1396. This remarkable decision showed that Gaunt genuinely loved Katherine, and it paved the way for the elevation of the Beaufort family. In September 1396 the Pope ratified the marriage – despite the couple’s earlier adulterous affair – and declared all its offspring, past and future, legitimate. The following year Gaunt had the Beauforts’ legitimacy confirmed by act of parliament, and subsequently the family was granted a stream of lands and titles.
But the stigma of bastardy still remained. Gaunt’s marriage to Katherine elicited much comment, and little of it was approving. One contemporary noted: ‘the wedding caused many a man’s wondering, for, as it was said, he had held her long before.’ And when the Lancastrian King Henry IV took the throne in 1399 he confirmed the legitimacy of his family of the half-blood, but inserted a clause barring the Beauforts from succession to the throne. The three words – inscribed in Latin in the act of patent – excepta dignitate regali planted a lasting slur on the family. While the Beauforts were loyal servants of the new dynasty, and active in their military and civil responsibilities, they were barred from ever bearing the crown of England.
It is worth speculating on the effect this had on the family, for the decision would have powerfully impacted on the Beauforts’ sense of identity. In the medieval age individuals saw themselves within a larger family story, one that for the English nobility was mapped out in lavish pedigrees and genealogies, where rights were borne from generation to generation, and where the ‘livelode’, the family livelihood and its line of inheritance, was defended almost as a sacred trust. The mocking nickname for the Beaufort family, ‘Fairborn’, was still in regular use in the fifteenth century, not only in the gossip of taverns and dining halls, but even inscribed – slightingly – in the pedigrees of rival aristocratic families.
A common perception in the mid-fifteenth century was that the Beauforts were becoming increasingly acquisitive and ambitious, eager to grasp money and property in whatever fashion – however unscrupulous. Such a view would further explain the reckless greed of Margaret’s father on his military campaign in 1443, but it had a wider impact.
Chroniclers were struck above all by the family’s ruthless self-interest. The charge of avarice was first laid against Margaret’s great-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, and then her own father and her uncle, John and Edmund Beaufort, successively promoted to the dukedom of Somerset. Prejudice against the Beauforts’ bastard origins remained – with hostile observers and rival magnates perceiving them as upstarts, seizing an undue share of royal patronage at the expense of more established aristocratic families. This grievance fuelled Richard Duke of York’s bitter animosity towards his rival Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset, for Duke Richard went to great lengths to stress, in his writings and political proclamations, the purity of his own blood line and lineage.
For the Beaufort family, the amassing of lands, wealth and titles may have been a palliative, as it almost certainly regarded the bar on succeeding to the throne as a considerable injustice. If so, this anger would have fuelled an abiding desire to overturn the prohibition and reinstate the Beauforts at the heart of the Lancastrian dynasty.
This powerful family ambition was certainly picked up by contemporaries and it was a formative experience in Lady Margaret’s own political education. It was masked in the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V, for these kings had sons and brothers to succeed them, but was flung dramatically to the fore during the reign of Henry VI, when the king’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou i
n 1445 failed, for eight years, to produce any children, and it was rumoured that the pious and unworldly monarch – who flew into a paroxysm of terror and moral consternation when confronted with naked female bathers on a visit to Bath, and who banned all low-cut blouses and dresses from the Lancastrian court in case he caught sight of a woman’s cleavage – was incapable of begetting any.
At a time of uncertainty about the succession, what one Lancastrian king could prohibit, another could remit, and Henry VI – whose grasp of royal patronage was as uneasy as his sexual confidence – was at this time dominated by the court favourite William de la Pole Duke of Suffolk, a close ally of the Beauforts who was working to further their cause. Some observers voiced a very real concern that the king, manipulated by Suffolk, might now choose to overturn the clause barring the Beauforts from the throne.
This fear was expressed openly in 1450, when the Duke of Suffolk acquired Margaret’s wardship and hastily arranged her marriage to his son and heir John. The country was in turmoil. The last English possessions in Normandy were being lost to the Valois armies of King Charles VII and parliament sought a scapegoat. The king’s chief minister was an easy target. The House of Commons was virulently hostile to Suffolk and prepared impeachment charges against him. Strikingly it declared that the marriage between his son and Margaret Beaufort was proof of a wish to gain the crown for his own family through Margaret’s rights as a Lancastrian heiress. Since the Beauforts were at this stage still barred from the succession, the accusation made little sense unless the Commons feared that the stipulation was about to be removed by the king, perhaps as a mark of favour to the Duke of Suffolk. This concern was never put to the test, for Suffolk – forced into exile – was captured in the English Channel by a privateering ship and brutally murdered later the same year.
Yet the dynastic issue remained, and with Henry VI suffering increasingly poor health and the government of the country in a state of collapse, the lack of a clearly designated succession posed a very real threat to political stability. There were a number of dynastic contenders – Richard Duke of York, the wealthiest magnate in the realm and the key political figure in the early 1450s, was the most prominent; there were also the senior members of the Holland and Stafford families. Yet after the death of the Duke of Suffolk in 1450, it was not Duke Richard but Margaret’s uncle Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset who became Henry VI’s principal counsellor. The signal favour shown to Edmund Beaufort was ill-deserved – he had presided over the last disastrous English defeats in Normandy, a source of fury to Richard Duke of York, who now suspected that the Beauforts might be nominated as heirs to the crown ahead of him and the other candidates, an accusation he made openly in articles drafted against Edmund Beaufort in 1452.
I have taken time to rehearse these broader family issues because I believe they strongly shaped Lady Margaret’s own identity. Embedded within it was an overarching theme – powerful yet thwarted ambition and a deep desire, almost a yearning, for the throne of England itself. By harnessing this ambition Margaret sought an opportunity to right a family wrong and to remove the stain on its reputation caused by her own father’s disgrace and death.
By early 1453 political tension was running high: Richard Duke of York and Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset were jostling for influence with the king, and the country was facing armed insurrection and revolt. It was at this dangerous time that the nine-year-old Margaret was summoned to court by Henry VI. The Beaufort family story was now to take a new turn, as Margaret made her first entry on to the political stage.
THE VISION
Margaret Beaufort’s early childhood had been a quiet one, lacking the show and ostentation normally associated with the wealthy heiress to a duke, the highest aristocratic title in the land. After the death of her father John Beaufort Duke of Somerset, on 30 May 1444, she had been brought up by her mother, Margaret Beauchamp, at her house at Bletsoe in Bedfordshire, and at the Beaufort castle of Maxey in the Lincolnshire Fens. These were small residences; indeed Maxey was little more than a fortified manor house, which Margaret shared with the two sons and three daughters of her mother’s first marriage to Sir Oliver St John. Margaret Beaufort always had an enormous affection for the St John family, and from this one imagines that the first part of her life was happy and untroubled. She clearly enjoyed the company of her half-brothers and -sisters and, for a time at least, was sheltered from hearing about her father’s tragic death and the dangerous intrigues of high politics.
In January 1450, with Margaret still only six years old, came the first sign that this idyllic period would not last. Henry VI’s favourite and chief minister William de la Pole Duke of Suffolk was fighting for his very survival. William de la Pole had enjoyed a remarkable pre-eminence in the Lancastrian regime, able to easily manipulate the king and dominate the political stage, but now the House of Commons was determined to make him the scapegoat for the disastrous reopening of the Hundred Years’ War, a resumption of hostilities against the Valois regime of Charles VII that had seen much of English-held Normandy lost to the French, and the duchy’s capital, Rouen, surrender after putting up only token resistance. Failure abroad and government mismanagement at home had created a volatile and angry mood in London, where a turbulent parliament was now in session.
Margaret’s date of birth, on 31 May 1443, from the Beaufort Hours
In the same month the House of Commons brought a stream of accusations against William de la Pole, ranging from corruption to high treason, and despite William answering these allegations he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London on 28 January. New charges were drafted, and it must have become clear to the beleaguered royal favourite that the Commons intended to impeach him and that his position was now desperate. His thoughts turned to his seven-year-old son and heir, John de la Pole. By 7 February he had arranged a marriage for him, to the six-year-old Margaret Beaufort.
This child marriage was a hasty measure, put in place by a desperate man who feared for his own future. As William secured it, he was negotiating with the king for an act of royal clemency in which he would be banished from the kingdom but allowed to keep his life. Yet, amid such terrible concerns, it was significant that he chose Margaret for his son. Appearances can always be deceptive in politics and Margaret – despite her relatively humble lifestyle – was a wealthy heiress, and thus a significant acquisition in the medieval marriage market. And William de la Pole, intensely ambitious for his family, well knew Margaret’s dynastic position and that – most important of all – in the right circumstances she could hold a claim to the throne herself.
There is no evidence that Margaret ever met William de la Pole or his son. But she would certainly have been told about him, and the contract that now existed between her and John de la Pole, although because it was a child marriage it would only be formally ratified when Margaret was twelve. What would she have made of it all?
For this young girl, the idea of marriage did not yet have any meaning or reality. She would have been delighted and flattered that she had been chosen by a duke, a royal minister and the most prominent politician in the country. William de la Pole had been one of the principal English captains in the Hundred Years’ War and was an accomplished and charming courtier. Margaret’s mother would have told her pleasing tales of William’s chivalric gallantry. Less welcome would have been news of the English military defeats in France, which Margaret would have also learned about at this time. These distant yet unsettling reports were not only threatening the life and career of Margaret’s prospective father-in-law but also that of her uncle, Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset, for Edmund Beaufort was now the king’s lieutenant in France, and Henry VI’s principal commander in Normandy.
After this brief hiatus, Margaret’s life continued very much as before. However, she had become aware of her own dynastic importance, even though such concepts would have been fleetingly grasped by a young child. But Margaret was no ordinary child. She had a precocious sense of a gr
eat destiny being mapped out for her, a sense that was powerfully strengthened by a fresh series of political developments.
Early in 1453 the nine-year-old Lady Margaret was summoned to the Lancastrian court of Henry VI and his queen, Margaret of Anjou. The king instructed Margaret’s mother, Margaret Beauchamp of Bletsoe, to come to London at Shrovetide (14 February) and wait there at his command. Towards the end of February the child marriage between Margaret and John de la Pole was annulled, and King Henry authorised a payment of 100 marks (almost £67) to ‘his right dear and well-beloved cousin Margaret’ for her clothing to attend upon him in state. This was a sumptuous gift, worth over £25,000 in today’s money, so Margaret would have been dressed magnificently, in fine cloth embroidered with jewels. Being fitted for such wonderful garments, and then making her entrance at the royal court, would have been an extraordinary experience for a young girl. She would have known that everyone’s attention was on her as she was thrust into the political limelight. The king was planning to dissolve Margaret’s child marriage to John de la Pole, and arrange another one in its place, to his half-brother Edmund Tudor. Only Edmund Tudor was not a child, but a 22-year-old man.
Margaret had a clear memory of the events that followed, one that she later shared with her confessor and spiritual adviser John Fisher. In her recollection, the events took place with the court in full session at the royal palace of Westminster in mid-May 1453, when she had been forced to choose between two suitors, John de la Pole and Edmund Tudor. The king, Henry VI, had urged her to consider the merits of Edmund, his half-brother. But Margaret had been unable to decide. So she decided to pray to St Nicholas, ‘who was the patron and helper of all true maidens’, appealing to him to show by a sign what was right for her to do. That night she had a vision of St Nicholas, ‘dressed in white, as if he were a bishop’, who advised her to choose Edmund for her husband. Margaret duly did.
The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 22
