Ferdinand, of course, was never going to be prepared to give England such a controlling hand in Spanish affairs, and within two years Juana had been confined by her father in a convent near Valladolid, nominally because of her mental health—an incarceration, attended only by a small retinue of Ferdinand’s servants, that would last almost a half century. But the negotiations did afford a more prominent role in the English court to Juana’s sister Catherine, who got involved, at Henry’s request, in the negotiations.
Catherine of Aragon obtained from her father, Ferdinand, a “letter of credence,” making her officially his ambassador to her father-in-law, Henry. Catherine, of course, had every reason to desire her sister’s presence at Henry’s side, which might not only help her free herself from limbo but also relieve her endless money worries. The disputes about her dowry had dragged on, and she sent frantic pleas to her father that she was spending what money she could obtain—money from selling her plate and jewels, the odd handout from Ferdinand himself or from Henry—not on frivolities but only on necessities. (The Spanish ambassador De Puebla was famous for eating at court to save money; Margaret Beaufort as well as her son found that funny.) The desperate tone of her letters in these last years of Henry VII’s reign recalls that of Elizabeth of York, seemingly writing of her burning desire to marry her uncle Richard more than twenty years before.
But while Henry VII was making every effort to secure Juana’s hand, it would soon become clear that he was in no state to contemplate anything so arduous as another marriage. In the next chill of the early spring of 1508, his illness returned, and soon Margaret Beaufort was back in Richmond with her orders and her sweet wine. Once again Henry recovered—he was strong enough by summertime to resume normal activities—but the writing was on the wall. The Spanish envoy Fuensalida wrote that the young Prince Henry was still kept “in complete subjection to his father and his grandmother and never opened his mouth in public except to answer a question from one of them.” But whether or not this was a true picture, it was clear the young boy who turned seventeen at the end of June would soon be called upon to carry forward the Tudor dynasty.
The great diplomatic game of arranging marriages went on, with Prince Henry and Princess Mary the two cards Henry VII had still to play. Three marriages had been discussed while Philip of Burgundy was on English shores: one between Prince Henry and Philip’s daughter, another between King Henry and Philip’s sister, and a third between Mary and the son of Juana and Philip, a boy named Charles who was destined to become the most powerful ruler in Europe, since Charles was heir through his mother to the Spanish territories and through his father to the Holy Roman Empire. The first two proposed matches never took on much color of reality, but on December 17, 1508, a betrothal between Charles and Mary was celebrated, amid great festivities. This would be a match indeed (and though in the end the planned marriage would never take place, no one knew that at the time). The bride made, in perfect French, a lengthy speech from memory, and the king kept his watchful eye on even the smallest detail of the pageantry. As the printed souvenir from the ceremony had it, the red rose (the recently conceived sign of the house of Lancaster) looked set to bloom throughout the Christian world.*
The times were repeating themselves again. Not long before, another father, Edward IV, had been obsessed by his daughter’s marriage as the last months of his life approached. Henry, too, was drawing close to the grave, as those around him—and perhaps he himself—surely knew. But in spite of that fact, or perhaps because of it, he poured himself into his daughter’s marriage to the young Charles.
In January 1509, as the air of triumph died away, so too did this last spurt of the king’s energy. The annual pattern must have been horribly familiar, but this time there was a difference: there would be no rally as the dank, sapping air of the early spring warmed into new life at last. Henry seemed to know it. His religious observance took on a hysterical note; observers recorded how he “wept and sobbed by the space of three quarters of an hour in penance, how he would crawl to the foot of the monstrance to receive the mass.” It was the end of March when Margaret Beaufort had herself rowed downriver from her own house of Coldharbour, where she had been nursing her own health. She brought to Richmond her favorite bed and a quantity of “kitchen stuff,” clearly prepared for a long stay. It would not, in the end, be that long: on April 21, Henry died.
The king’s death was followed by what was in essence a massive cover-up—a two-day pretense he was still alive, until a smooth succession of power could be established. There can be no doubt Margaret Beaufort was at the heart of it. Henry had named his mother chief executrix of his will, and she moved quickly to take the reins of power from her late son. The account left by Garter herald Thomas Wriothesley made that clear: the busy councilors were being “over seen by the mother of the said late king.” Here was another woman, like Elizabeth Woodville after Edward IV’s death, who could not afford the time to mourn her private loss. She was another woman having to cope with what was once again in a sense a minority—though this time, blessedly, there was only a matter of weeks to go before, in June, Henry VIII would reach his eighteenth birthday.
As the young King Henry VIII—once his father’s death was publicly admitted and he was proclaimed—moved to the Tower in preparation for his coronation, his grandmother briefly stayed behind at Richmond, from whence, notable even amid this stream of business, were sent out the orders to arrest Empson and Dudley. The seizure of these hated officials would be one of the defining moments that set the seal on the new king’s popularity. And it is tempting to speculate that the arrests may have been in part the handiwork of the new king’s grandmother; coincidentally or otherwise, Margaret Beaufort had once been crossed in a property deal by Dudley.
Similarly, the interim council that would keep firm hands on the reins of government until Henry VIII was crowned is likely to have had Margaret Beaufort’s fingerprints all over it. Stow’s Annales would state that the young king “was governed by the advice of his grandmother in the choice of the privy council he appointed at the commencement of his reign.” Edward Herbert in the seventeenth century would write that Henry trusted his grandmother’s choices for councilors “and took their impressions easily,” suggesting even that it was she who held the group together during her life, though afterward its members might fall out among themselves.
One wonders what Margaret would have felt if, as Fuensalida reported, the death of her beloved son had made people “as joyful as if they had been released from prison.” But that was not the real point. As Henry VII was buried as he had ordered beside “our dearest late wife the queen,” Elizabeth of York, it was the future of the dynasty that mattered. And Margaret Beaufort, in ensuring her grandson’s smooth accession, had struck another blow for the Tudor monarchy.
It is interesting to speculate whether, had she lived longer, Margaret would have won lasting influence, but it must be unlikely. The influence she had enjoyed under Henry VII had been based not only on a similarity of temperament (and sheer gratitude on her son’s part) but also on the fact that he arrived in England as an outsider, in urgent need of trusted allies.
It was very different with Henry VIII. Margaret had a vital role to play in that tense moment of succession, but young men do not usually wish to be governed by old women, as Elizabeth I would discover in the last years of her reign. The new king seemed, moreover, to take after his mother and his mother’s York ancestors, right down to his height and splendid appearance. In the long term, he, like his father, would move remorselessly to stamp out any Yorkist threats to his throne, but his first instinct on reaching the throne seems to have been to treat his Yorkist relations kindly. That heritage may have been more inviting for a young man.
Perhaps it was memories of his mother, and of the happiness she had brought his father, that made Henry so anxious to be married himself. His wedding to Catherine of Aragon took place fast and privately. The joint coronation less than two weeks l
ater was to be huge and public, a fit celebration of what some see as the end of the long war. It was effectively the end of a long battle for control of the English throne. “The rose both red and white / In one rose now doth grow,” as Henry’s onetime tutor, the poet John Skelton, put it.
The coronation ceremony took place on June 24, the crowd hacking up the carpet just as they had done when Henry VIII’s mother was crowned twenty-two years before. Just as before, Margaret Beaufort, with Princess Mary, watched the procession from behind a lattice, in the window of a hired house in Cheapside, with “full great joy,” as Fisher recorded, though the old lady kept up her usual reminders that “some adversity would follow.” (She had, at least, set aside her usual conventual black and white and ordered dresses of tawny silk for her entourage to wear on the occasion.) Maybe she felt vindicated when a sudden shower forced the drenched bride to shelter under the awning of a draper’s stall. Margaret enjoyed the coronation banquet. Henry Parker records that “she took her infirmity with eating of a cygnet.” But Margaret was now sixty-six, and it was soon clear that this was no mere case of surfeit, but a serious illness. She seems, predictably, to have been prepared for the end. Having always sought so desperately to control all the details of her life, Margaret had not neglected her own obsequies. In fact, some of her instructions and bequests would be a source of controversy, not least among her servants unhappy with the leading role John Fisher was given in handling her legacy. But her tidy mind and attention to detail were reflected even in the date of her death. Margaret Beaufort died on June 29, the very day after her grandson’s eighteenth birthday.
Tidily again, Margaret died in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, where she would also be buried—in Cheyneygate, that section of the abbot’s lodging that Elizabeth Woodville had once planned to occupy. Fisher, in his memorial sermon, described Margaret’s deathbed, “how with all her heart and soul she raised her body . . . and confirmed assuredly that in the sacrament was contained Christ Jesu.” If prayers, pity upon the poor, and pardons granted by diverse popes could ensure her future in the next world, her confessor said, then it was a “great likelihood and almost certain conjecture” that she was indeed in the country above. But even as Margaret Beaufort found peace, Fisher touched too on that other side of her personality, the side that lived always in fear, “for that either she was in sorrow by reason of the present adversities, or else when she was in prosperity she was in dread of the adversity for to come.” The theme of his sermon was to compare Margaret to the biblical Martha: he cited the nobleness of her nature and the excellence of her endeavors and compared the painful death of Margaret’s own body to the way Martha “died for the death of her brother Lazarus.”
It is true, of course, that the one Margaret loved most—her only son, Henry—had gone before her. But one cannot but wonder whether Fisher was not responding also to some echo in Margaret of Martha’s resentment; she was the woman, after all, who complained to Jesus that her sister Mary, whose life was so much easier, was more appreciated than she.
In Fisher’s long character analysis of Margaret, hagiographical though it is, there are flashes that reveal her true personality. He recalled that she was never forgetful of any service done to her and wary of “any thing that might dishonest [dishonor] any noble woman” and that she was of a wisdom “far passing the common rate of women,” “good in remembrance and in holding memory,” and “right studious” in books in French and English, even the ones that were “right dark.” Fisher touched on the way that, “for her exercise and for the profit of others,” she was herself responsible for translating several devotional works from the French: The Mirror of Gold for the Sinful Soul as well as the fourth book of the Imitation of Christ. Her linguistic ability is reminiscent of that of her multilingual great-granddaughter Elizabeth I, while as a bulk purchaser and a patron she did much to popularize translations of religious literature and to encourage printing in England, giving a seal of royal approval—celebrity endorsement—to the new industry.
Despite Fisher’s repeated assurances of her generosity, liberality, and freedom from concupiscence, Margaret died hugely wealthy. The paperwork from her executors in the weeks after her death mentions bequests to the “King’s good grace that now is, King Henry VIII; the queen that now is, the princess of Castile” (as Mary was now called). The truly extensive list of memorandums concerning her various properties shows just how far Margaret’s grasp had stretched: from Kent to Kendal, from Devon to Dartford. There are memos concerning “the profits of rabbits in Upton Dorset” and “three tenements in the market place of Boston Linc.” Annuities were made in consideration of services already rendered and appointments of stewards and auditors whose services were to come. There were executors’ assessments of portable property: “plate and great jewels to the value of £4,213. 4s. 3 and a half d.,” “Chapel stuff £1,193. 18s. 2d,” “Wines left in the cellar £28. 3s. 4d.,” and “Ready money £3,595. 8s. 9 and a half d. Obligations £783. 6s. 8d.” It was a comforting balance tipped the right way: in the financial realm at least, Margaret had known how to find her security.
An inventory made of the goods in her closet, hard by her bedchamber, at the time of Margaret’s death shows her interests and concerns, her physical frailty, and her ability to command luxury: spectacles, but made of gold, and combs of ivory; cramp rings worn to ward off pain and silver pots for powdered medicines; a small gilt shrine to hold reliquaries; two service books bound in velvet and a small gold goblet with the Beaufort emblem of a portcullis on the cover; and a pile of paperwork—bonds, details of the jointure made to her by Thomas Stanley, annuities arranged for dependents, and the king’s patent for founding a preacher’s position in Cambridge.
In her wardrobe at her death were seven gowns of black velvet with ermine trimming as well as an old scarlet Garter gown: the nunlike (to modern eyes) appearance of her late portraits, with the widow’s wimple and white barb, should not deceive us into thinking that the pleasure and pomp of dress were something Margaret had put away. Black fabric was expensive, because to produce a true color required a large quantity of dye. In the keeping of one of her gentlewomen were pearls and rubies, “a serpent’s tongue set in gold garnished with pearls,” two books whose images were mounted in gold leaves, and a piece of the holy cross set in gold and one of “unicorn’s horn.”
Shakespeare never wrote a voice for Margaret Beaufort, and indeed it is hard to envisage her fitting into his parade of betrayed and bitter women. But instead, as well as her papers and her writing, we have, in her accounts, what records from this period often lack—the tangible, day-to-day details of a full human life.
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*After James’s death, Margaret would be appointed regent for her baby son, albeit some argued this was against Scottish tradition. But after making a controversial second marriage to the Earl of Angus, she was demoted to a lesser title, albeit one with resonance in her family—that of “My Lady the King’s Mother.”
*Mary’s marriage to Charles would not in the end proceed. She would instead be married by her brother Henry VIII to the aging French king, and dance him into his grave.
EPILOGUE
The tomb Lady Margaret’s executors commissioned in Westminster Abbey looks oddly austere today, but it is among the most convincingly human of the abbey’s monuments. Its bronze-gilt portrait effigy was, ironically, constructed for a woman who in life might sometimes have seemed to command either pity or respect rather than any warmer sympathy. But the qualities she defied in life are evident in the architecture of her death. The hands are those arthritis-ridden hands John Fisher described—the hands of an old lady. Old, too, are the deep brackets around the mouth.
Margaret’s head rests on a cushion; at her feet is (so the contract for the carving stated) “a beast called a Yale,” that fitting symbol of Tudor defensiveness. The arms around the base of the tomb speak to her fierce loyalty to family: there are the arms she shared with her first husband, E
dmund Tudor; those of her son, Henry VII, and his queen; of her dead grandson Arthur; of her grandson Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon; of her parents and of her grandparents; those she shared with her third and final husband, Stanley; those of Henry V and Katherine of Valois, even; but no visible sign of her second husband, Stafford, happy though her life with him seems to have been. He was commemorated in the masses she had ordered for him at the abbey, but the tomb was about the dynasty.
Margaret in her will had given instructions—a controller to the last—for the religious services that should take place in the church of the parish and the fifteen parishes around it and in every parish through which her body should pass in its Westminster-bound journey. Since she died in Westminster itself, the instructions proved unnecessary. But someone else got to choose the sculptor who would do her figure—the quarrelsome Italian Pietro Torrigiano, the man who broke Michelangelo’s nose—and, for a fee of twenty shillings, Erasmus composed the Latin inscription around the ledge.
This tomb was not finished until well into Henry VIII’s reign. The contract for the figure of Margaret was drawn up only on November 23, 1511, and her executors’ accounts record the transaction: “First paid the 27th day of December in the 4th year of the reign of King Henry VIII to M. Garter the king of heralds for making and declaring my lady’s arms in viii ‘scochyns’ [escutcheons] for my lady’s tomb, and delivered to the Florentine: 8s 4d.” It was probably his figure of Margaret that won Torrigiano (“the Florentine”) the commission to create the figures for an even more important royal tomb—that of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York—which is one of the glories of Westminster Abbey.
Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses Page 36
