Tudor (4 page)

2

A CHILD BRIDE

H
ENRY
VI'
S COUSIN
, M
ARGARET
B
EAUFORT, WAS NINE YEARS OLD
when her mother received a royal summons to bring her to London, and wait on the king's command. Her father, John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, had died when she was an infant.
¹
She had been his only child but she nevertheless enjoyed the warmth of a large family of half-brothers and sisters as well as step-siblings. She would always remain devoted to her extended family, and it was a much-loved girl that was about to take her first steps on the national stage.
²

Courtiers who came to London regularly all had their usual haunts. Some stayed at taverns in Westminster, while many of the great lords had their own ‘inns': sprawling buildings built around courts in which they could also house their followers. Margaret's mother had a tower house called Le Ryall on the site of what is now the College of Arms in the City of London. It was here that mother and daughter awaited the royal summons.
³

Margaret was aware she had been invited to court because the king ‘did make means for Edmund [Tudor], his [half] brother' to marry her. It would be some years, however, before she could understand the full background to his decision. Margaret Beaufort was, like the king, descended from John of Gaunt, the father of Henry IV and founder of the House of Lancaster.
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The significant difference was that the Beaufort line was of illegitimate descent, having sprung from
Gaunt's relationship with his mistress, Katherine Swynford, and so they had no right to the throne.
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Nevertheless a marriage to Margaret Beaufort meant Edmund Tudor would gain the power that came with wealth. Margaret was a great heiress, with a Beaufort inheritance estimated at £1,000 a year.
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Still more significantly, the Franco-Welsh Edmund could have children of English royal blood and this would bolster the House of Lancaster, which was badly needed.

Henry VI as yet had no children while his cousin and heir, the wiry, dark-haired Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, was already the father of several sons. The House of York thus represented the future and that posed a possible threat to the king. As the last Tudor, Queen Elizabeth I, would observe: ‘more men worship the rising than the setting sun'.

There was just one small difficulty for the king's plans. Margaret had been promised, aged six, to the son of a leading councillor.
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Happily, such youthful betrothals only became binding when a girl was twelve, and Margaret had been invited to court to repudiate hers in a public ceremony.

Margaret's summons arrived during the period of feasting enjoyed in the run-up to Ash Wednesday and she was at court by 14 February.
⁸
The royal household was divided into two main areas: below stairs, concerned with practical daily necessities such as food and drink, under the Lord Steward, and, secondly, the king's apartment or chamber, under the Lord Chamberlain, whose department staged public ceremonies and provided the king's private service. There was meaning as well as practical consequences in who could, and who could not, approach the monarch. ‘What is the belly or where is the womb of this great public body of England but that and there where the king is himself, his court and his council?' declared one bishop of the period.
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For some there was the enormous importance of being able to counsel the sacred representative of God. But for Margaret even seeing the king would feel like a blessing, and Henry VI made a significant impression on the young girl.

Now aged thirty-one, Henry VI was pious and scholarly, with an elegance and otherworldliness that only added to his regal presence. Henry would greet visiting envoys standing by his throne, dressed in wonderful rich robes that fell to the ground. Beauty and bounty reflected the divine, with the king having ‘a prerogative in his array above all others, whereby his dignity is worshipped'.
¹⁰
Henry's queen, the twenty-two-year-old Margaret of Anjou, ‘a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark', set the high standards for the ladies of the court with her jewellery and fine clothes.
¹¹
Margaret Beaufort would be provided with a hundred marks for silks and velvets in order that she too might meet them.
¹²

Looking back in her old age Margaret remembered a different scenario to that with which, in reality, she was presented as a powerless girl of nine. She convinced herself she had been offered a choice between her two possible grooms. ‘Doubtful in her mind what she were best to do', she recalled turning for advice to an ‘old gentlewoman whom she much loved and trusted'. The woman suggested she pray to St Nicholas, the patron saint of unmarried girls.
¹³
Margaret duly prayed to him that night, and while she was half asleep St Nicholas had appeared to her, ‘arrayed like a bishop'. He named Edmund Tudor as the better choice and that, she later believed, was why she chose him the next day.
¹⁴
It helped reassure her, as well as others, that the marriage and everything that followed was God's plan – and that it was one in which she had a dynamic role.
¹⁵

In March the king granted the Tudor brothers Margaret's wardship, clearing the way for Edmund to marry her when she reached the age of twelve. The following month, with Margaret still at court for the Garter ceremony, the remarkable news was announced that, after eight years of disappointment, the queen was pregnant. A son and heir for the king was a cause for national rejoicing. But it was quickly overshadowed by events in France, with repercussions that would directly affect the newly betrothed Margaret and Edmund and change the course of their future.

What became known as the Hundred Years War had begun when Henry VI's great-great-grandfather, Edward III, had laid claim to the French throne. The rules of inheritance concerning the English and French crowns were not straightforward. Ideally they followed the rules of male primogeniture, but if there was no legitimate son it was uncertain whether a king's daughter could transmit her rights to a son, or whether the crown had to pass entirely through the male line. Edward III had decided to claim the French crown through his mother, the daughter of the last king of the Capetian dynasty.
¹⁶
The French nobility asserted against this that under ancient ‘Salic' law no right to the throne could pass through a woman, and had instead backed the House of Valois.

Henry V's victories against the Valois led to the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, under the terms of which Henry VI had inherited the French crown of his maternal grandfather, Charles VI. Many French accepted his rule, either because they acknowledged the historic claims of the English kings to France, or because it brought them a greater measure of political stability. But others, most of whom lived south of the river Loire, saw the treaty as a betrayal of the rights of Charles VI's son the dauphin. These two French nations had since been pitted against each other in a series of military confrontations, which ended in July 1453 in a final defeat for Henry VI at Castillon, on the Dordogne river. An English-ruled French nation, which had once extended across the whole of northern France, as well as Gascony, was reduced to a small area around Calais known as the Pale. The humiliation was terrible and Henry VI fell into a state of mental collapse.

The king at first suffered a sudden ‘frenzy', after which he could neither move, nor speak. His ‘wit and reason withdrawn', he had to be spoon-fed to keep him alive. These symptoms indicate a severe form of depression, but it has also been suggested that he was suffering from catatonic schizophrenia, or even porphyria. It is possible he had inherited a disposition to mental illness through his mother.
¹⁷
Her
father, Charles VI, had suffered periods of madness for the last thirty years of his life, and believed for a time that he was made of glass. When Henry VI's son was born in October, Henry was incapable even of acknowledging him.
¹⁸
In this desperate situation his cousin, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, was made Protector, a role that encompassed the protection of the physical person of the monarch, as well as of the realm. It proved to be a role he was reluctant to give up as the king's faculties returned.

The Duke of York had long claimed to stand for good government in opposition to the king's preferred councillors – and he did not want to see them back. On 22 May 1455, nine days before Margaret Beaufort's crucial twelfth birthday, thousands of York's retainers attacked the king and his accompanying force in the streets of St Albans, twenty-two miles north of London. The local abbot saw one man fall ‘with his brains dashed out, there another with a broken arm, a third with a throat cut and a fourth with a pierced chest'.
¹⁹
The killing ended with the king grazed by an arrow, and surrounded by the bodies of his noble servants and knights. The period which the nineteenth-century novelist Sir Walter Scott romantically but inaccurately termed the ‘Wars of the Roses' had begun.
²⁰

The simple five-petal design of the heraldic rose was inspired by the wild dog rose that grows in English hedgerows. As a symbol it had a long association with the Virgin Mary, who is sometimes called the ‘Mystical Rose of Heaven'. But although the king's grandfather, Henry IV, had once used red roses to decorate his pavilion at a joust, their use as a Lancastrian royal badge was not widespread before the advent of the Tudors.
²¹
Equally, the white rose had yet to be associated strongly with the House of York.
²²
Lancastrian supporters sometimes even boasted white-rose badges.
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Whatever the origin of the term Wars of the Roses, however, the coming succession of battles between royal cousins would prove to be bloody and real enough.

When Margaret turned twelve it was decided she should marry Edmund Tudor without delay, before the Duke of York could
intervene. While it was usual for young brides to stay with their parents or guardians until they were physically mature – in their mid-teens, at least – Margaret would not be returned home after her wedding. Instead she discovered she was also to leave England with Edmund. He was under orders to consolidate royal power in the unsettled regions of north and south Wales and he had to consummate their marriage for it to be irrevocably valid. If she became pregnant it would also guarantee he received the income from her estates.

The belief that children were more ‘mature' then than they are today is misplaced. In physical terms they were far less so. This placed Margaret in great danger at childbirth. Nevertheless, by late August of the following year she was three months pregnant. Little good it did Edmund Tudor, captured that same month by a supporter of the Duke of York. Although released from Carmarthen Castle only a few weeks later, his health had suffered and he proved insufficiently strong to fight off the plague that was sweeping the town. The Welsh poet Llywelyn Fychan, lamenting the death of his four daughters killed by plague a century earlier, noted pustules like ‘brittle coal fragments' scattered over their bodies.
²⁴
There had been regular epidemics over the previous decade, but Margaret was still appalled by her husband's death on 1 November.
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For the rest of her life she would keep books describing the best means of protection from the disease.

Having given Edmund a hurried burial in front of the high altar at the Greyfriars in Carmarthen, Margaret now had to consider what to do next.
²⁶
Thirteen years old, pregnant and alone in a remote region of Wales, she would surely have liked to return home. But icy rains could turn the roads to mud in hours and with her baby due in less than two months, she was in no state to travel to her mother in the Midlands. Instead, as soon as she was able, Margaret began making her way to Pembroke Castle, held by her brother-in-law and guardian, Jasper Tudor. Margaret was terrified that the plague which had killed Edmund would follow her.
²⁷
Happily it did not. She found safety
within the castle's massive walls, where Jasper joined her as soon as he had permission to leave the king's side.

In January, when Margaret's pregnancy entered its last weeks, she withdrew into a tower room overlooking the river. This was the traditional period of confinement, in which the expectant mother rested before her labour. When it came the pain was terrifying. As her later friend and confessor John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, recalled, Margaret was never ‘a woman of great stature' and ‘she was so much smaller at that stage'. The birth of her son on 28 January 1457 left her immature body so damaged that she would never be able to bear another child. He was given a Lancastrian rather than a Tudor name, the same name as her cousin the king: Henry.
²⁸

Just over a month after Margaret had delivered her baby Jasper travelled with her to meet Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, in Gwent. It was less than two years since the Battle of St Albans and already a second marriage was to be arranged for her. Buckingham had a reputation for having an ungovernable temper. Famously he had tried to stab the French rebel leader Joan of Arc during an interrogation in 1431. But he was the only man in England whose power matched that of the Duke of York, and his second son, Henry Stafford, was free to marry. An agreement between Jasper and Buckingham was soon thrashed out. Although the Staffords were not descendants of the Lancastrian house, they were of royal blood, as descendants of John of Gaunt's youngest brother Thomas of Woodstock.
²⁹
Margaret's marriage to Stafford, sealed when her son was a year old in January 1458, thus had a political dimension, yet it was also to prove happy.