Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (2 page)

The first Henry Tudor, so all the chroniclers agree, was a puny infant, and- his earliest biographer, Bernard Andre, gives much of the credit for his survival to his mother's devoted care. But although the young Countess of Richmond was not, like so many of her contemporaries, destined to see her baby die in his cradle, the repercussions of that murderous family quarrel, conveniently known to history as the Wars of the Roses, were soon to separate mother and child. Things had begun to go very badly for the House of Lancaster, and by the spring of 1461 there was a Yorkist king on the throne. By the autumn, Pembroke Castle and with it Margaret Beaufort and her son were in Yorkist hands, and not long afterwards the wardship of five-year-old Henry had been sold to the Yorkist Lord Herbert of Raglan.

Although it is unquestionably a hard thing for any mother to be parted from her child, it was not an especially unusual occurrence in Margaret Beaufort's world, and she would have had no choice but to acquiesce. At least she had the consolation of knowing that her son would be 'honourably brought-up', since the Herberts were thinking of him as a possible husband for their daughter Maud, and she no doubt made sure of receiving regular reports of his progress. She herself re-married about this time to Henry Stafford, a son of the Duke of Buckingham and yet another descendant of Edward III. Whether or not there was any element of personal choice in this marriage is something else we don't know, but obviously it was necessary. A wealthy young woman could not do without male protection, and Jasper Tudor,* that loyal and active supporter of the Lancastrian cause, was now a wanted man.

Margaret's second marriage lasted about ten years, but there were no more children. One chronicler was later to feel that it was 'as though she had done her part when she had borne a man-child, and the same a kynge of the realms'. Perhaps a more likely explanation may be found in the physical effect of parturition on a pubescent girl. Whatever the reason, Margaret never conceived again, and all her life her precious only son was to fill the centre of her universe; all the force of her strong, vital nature being concentrated single-mindedly on the desire for his 'glory and well-doing'. But it was to be many years before any of her dreams came true, and at one time it seemed as if the separation of mother and son might well be permanent.

There was a brief resurgence of Lancastrian fortunes at the beginning of the 1470s, but the so-called 'Readeption' of Henry VI lasted less than six months, and the battle of Tewkesbury, fought in May 1471, ended in what looked like final disaster for the Red Rose. Almost overnight young Henry Tudor, now in his fifteenth year, had become the sole surviving representative of the House of Lancaster, 'the only imp now left of Henry vi's blood', and therefore liable at any moment to become the object of his Yorkist cousins' unfriendly interest. Fortunately Jasper, tough, resourceful and apparently bearing a charmed life, was at hand to spirit the boy away. Uncle and nephew sailed from Tenby on 2 June and reached a precarious haven in Brittany.

For Margaret Beaufort, who had seen the extinction of her family in the slaughter at Tewkesbury and was now cut off from all communication with her son, the next twelve years must surely have been the bleakest period of her life. True, Henry had escaped and had found sanctuary of a sort, but even in Brittany he was not necessarily safe from the long arm of the triumphant Yorkists. There was at least one attempt to bribe his Breton hosts to give him up, and any sudden shift in international pressures could easily result in his expulsion and death. If he survived, it seemed as if the best that could be hoped for was that one day the House of York would feel sufficiently secure to allow him to come home and enjoy his father's confiscated earldom. Time passed and Edward 1 v proved a popular and successful king, with two young sons to ensure the continuation of his line. For the exile in Brittany there was nothing to do but wait and hope, while at home his mother waited and prayed. Then, suddenly, everything changed.

At Easter 1483 King Edward died, probably as the result of a cerebral haemorrhage, leaving the thirteen-year-old Prince of Wales to succeed him. Within a matter of weeks the King's brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had seized power, declared his two nephews to be illegitimate and confined them both in the Tower for safe-keeping. By June Richard had been crowned and Henry Tudor had become the rival claimant.

We know very little about the ins and outs of the conspiracy woven in favour of the Tudor claim during that summer, but one thing is certain and that is that Margaret Beaufort was one of its instigators. Married now for the third and last time to Thomas, Lord Stanley, head of a powerful Yorkist family and steward of the royal household, she was close to the centre of affairs, and it is tempting to speculate that she may have been among the first to hear the whispers that the princes in the Tower had been murdered by the new king's hired assassins. Certainly there would have been very little chance for Henry as long as Edward IV's sons were alive, and whatever the real truth of the matter, it is not disputed that after midsummer no one outside the Tower ever saw either of the children alive again. By the autumn it was being freely rumoured that they were dead, but by that time Margaret's plans were already in an advanced state of preparation.

Her first step had been to enlist the support of another woman, the widowed queen, Elizabeth Woodville. Edward IV had broken with royal tradition by marrying for love (or, as some said, because the lady was not otherwise available) and socially very much beneath him. The marriage caused considerable ill-feeling at the time and was to give rise to a smouldering resentment among the older nobility and other members of the House of York, who frankly regarded the Queen's numerous relations as a tribe of rapacious upstarts. Elizabeth herself was never liked. She seems to have had an unhappy talent for making enemies, but her reputation for cold-hearted, calculated greed may not be entirely deserved. In a world where it was every man (and woman) for himself, she can hardly be blamed for taking full advantage of her amazing good luck in catching and holding Edward's notoriously roving eye.

Now, in the summer of 1483, her luck seemed to have run out. Apart from the tragic loss of her sons, her marriage had been declared invalid and she had been insulted and stripped of her dower rights by the new king. She and her five daughters were holed up in sanctuary at Westminster when Margaret Beaufort opened negotiations, using as emissary a Welsh physician named Lewis who, by a fortunate coincidence, also attended the Queen. The proposition brought by Lewis was for a marriage between one of the Yorkist princesses - preferably the eldest, another Elizabeth-and Henry Tudor. In return, the Queen would promise the support of the Woodville clan in Henry's bid for power.

The advantages of such a match from the Tudor point of view were obvious. The inclusion of the Yorkist heiress in the new Lancastrian-Tudor claim should go a long way towards satisfying those Yorkists who were already becoming disenchanted with King Richard and alarmed at his ruthlessness. As well as this, any alliance which offered a reasonable prospect of bringing the two factions together and putting an end to the destructive and tedious quarrel which had over-shadowed English political life for so long would be sure of a welcome from the business community, and indeed from all that solid middle section of the population with a vested interest in stability and the maintenance of law and order.

Elizabeth Woodville was ready to co-operate-naturally enough, since Margaret Beaufort's suggestion brought her not only a glimmer of hope for the future but also a possibility of revenge - but the two mothers could do nothing without money and men. Fortunately Margaret at least was not short of money or of the means of raising it, and she had begun to employ her trusted steward, Reginald Bray, on the delicate task of canvassing support for her project among 'such noble and worshipful men as were wise, faithful and active'. She'd also been doing a little canvassing of her own. Some time that summer, as the Lady Margaret was travelling from Bridgnorth on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Worcester, she happened to encounter the Duke of Buckingham on his way to Shrewsbury and, so the story goes, at once took the opportunity of begging him to intercede with the King on her son's behalf, for she earnestly desired that he might be allowed to come home. It's not likely that Buckingham misunderstood this touching maternal plea, made on the excuse of the close blood tie between them (the Duke had been the nephew of Margaret's second husband and was a Beaufort on his mother's side). At any rate according to the traditional account, it was shortly after this convenient wayside meeting that he decided to throw his very considerable weight behind the unknown quantity of Henry Tudor. This was a curious decision for a man who, until very recently, had been one of Richard of Gloucester's strongest supporters and who could himself have made quite a convincing bid for the throne. But then, if we knew what actually passed between Margaret Beaufort and Henry Stafford on the road from Bridgnorth to Worcester that summer day, we should know a great deal more about the intense personal and political manoeuvring which preceded the change of dynasty.

Couriers bearing news, instructions and large sums of cash were now slipping unobtrusively across to Brittany, while Margaret waited for her son to justify her unswerving faith in him. But she was playing a dangerous game. Before the end of September the King had got wind of what was going on, and by the middle of October the coup had collapsed. The Duke of Buckingham was captured and executed, and Margaret might well have suffered a similar fate, had not Richard been reluctant to antagonize the influential Stanley family. This, at least, is the explanation usually given for the fact that the Lady Margaret escaped the normal punishment of those caught plotting against the State. Instead, she forfeited her property, which was transferred to her husband for his lifetime, and Thomas Stanley was ordered to keep his wife under better control in future, removing her servants and making sure that she could not pass any messages to her son or her friends, nor practise against the King. All this, says Polydore Vergil, was done, but although Margaret's outside activities might have been curtailed, she continued to work on her husband, and when at last Henry landed in South Wales in August 1485, he was pretty well assured of the Stanleys' support. This was of great importance, as the family owned vast estates in Cheshire and the West Midlands, and while admittedly they waited until the last possible moment before committing themselves, it was the Stanleys' intervention which turned the scales at the battle of Bosworth.

Unfortunately we have no record of the first meeting between mother and son after the triumph of Bosworth, but it seems reasonable to assume that it was not long delayed. Certainly Henry Tudor showed a very proper recognition of the enormous debt he owed his mother. Thomas Stanley was rewarded with the earldom of Derby, and the first Tudor Parliament restored to Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, the estates confiscated two years before. As well as this, she was granted the wardship of young Edward Stafford, son and heir of her late ally the Duke of Buckingham, and a life interest in numerous manors and lordships. The Parliament of 1485 also conferred upon her the rights and privileges of a 'sole person, not wife nor covert of any husband', thus giving her control of her huge fortune 'in as large a form as any woman now may do within the realm'. 'My lady the King's mother', as she was usually styled, had therefore become an extremely rich and important personage, allowed to sign herself Margaret r and, for all practical purposes, honorary Queen Dowager. Bearing in mind the vital biological and political part she had played in establishing the new dynasty, this seems fair enough but, as far as Margaret was concerned, it's probably safe to say that her real reward had been the moment when she saw 'her son the King crowned in all that great triumph and glory'. Her friend John Fisher was to recall how she wept copiously throughout the ceremony, explaining that 'she never was yet in that prosperity, but the greater it was the more she dreaded adversity'. It was a natural reaction after all those years of anxiety, disappointment and fear, but there was to be no more adversity for Margaret Beaufort, and three months later she saw another of her long-cherished plans come to fruition. On 18 January 1486 Henry Tudor fulfilled the pledge he had given in the aftermath of the abortive coup of 1483 and married Elizabeth, King Edward's daughter-a union which all sensible people devoutly hoped would mark the end of the Wars of the Roses.

Elizabeth of York, another woman to whom the Tudor dynasty owes a large debt of gratitude, was not quite twenty-one at the time of her marriage-an unusually advanced age for a king's daughter to be still unwed. As a child, Elizabeth had been betrothed to the King of France, but this arrangement had fallen through, and her father's death, followed by the upheavals of the Gloucester take-over, had drastically affected her prospects.

If it was accepted that a hereditary title could be transmitted through the female line (and Henry Tudor's hereditary title, such as it was, devolved entirely from his mother), then the Yorkist branch of the Plantagenet tree was the senior and, as Edward IV's eldest surviving child, Elizabeth's claim to be queen in her own right was infinitely stronger than Henry's to be king. There was nothing in English law to prevent a woman from occupying the throne, but in the political climate of the late fifteenth century such an idea would obviously have been unthinkable, and there is no evidence that the Yorkist heiress herself ever resented the subordination of her rights to the Lancastrian claimant. Indeed, according to a contemporary ballad, The Most Pleasant Song of Lady Bessy, Elizabeth, horrified at the thought of being forced into marriage with her uncle Richard, summoned Lord Stanley and begged him to help the exiled Henry to come home and claim his right. When Stanley hesitated-he was afraid of Richard and besides it would be a deadly sin to betray his King - Bessy flung her headdress on the ground and tore her hair 'that shone as the gold wire', while 'tears fell from her eyes apace'. Lord Stanley was touched by her distress, but still he hung back. 'It is hard to trust women,' and Bessy might let him down. He also protested, rather feebly, about the difficulties of communicating with Henry. He himself cannot write and dare not confide in a secretary. But dauntless Lady Bessy was ready for him. She can read and write, if necessary in French and Spanish as well as English, and she will act as scrivener. Deeply impressed by the talents of this 'proper wench', Stanley gave in and, late that night, alone together in Bessy's chamber and fortified by wine and spices, they concocted a series of letters to Stanley's friends and to 'the Prince of England' in Brittany. It was Bessy who found a trusty messenger, Humphrey Brereton, and she was presently rewarded by a love letter from Henry, telling her that he will travel over the sea for her sake and make her his queen.