Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker, Lauren Johnson, Bloomsbury Publishing, £21

On 28 January 1457, a young noblewoman gave birth at Pembroke Castle in Wales. At just thirteen, the new mother, Margaret Beaufort, was already a widow, her husband, Edmund Tudor, having died of plague shortly after impregnating his child bride. Consequently, her baby, named Henry after the King Henry VI of England, immediately inherited the Earldom of Richmond. But the long-term prospects of this fatherless boy, born into a country riven by civil war, seemed bleak.

As for Margaret, her own start to life was, as the historian Lauren Johnson shows, equally inauspicious. Thanks to her father, John Beaufort, she had royal blood. But after seventeen years as a French prisoner of war, he was ruined both financially and mentally, and died, possibly by suicide, days before his only child’s first birthday. Consequently, though Margaret was raised by her capable mother, Margaret Beauchamp, she was legally a ward of William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk. When she was seven, he decided to marry her to his son.    

Fortunately for Margaret, de la Pole was soon executed for treason, and her marriage was annulled. But then, aged nine, she was summoned to court, where Henry VI gave her a generous clothing allowance, and informed her that she was to be married to his twenty-something half-brother, Edmund Tudor. The wedding took place shortly after her twelfth birthday, and was immediately consummated – a decision which was legal, but morally dubious even by the standards of the day. (On average, late-medieval English noblewomen gave birth for the first time at twenty.)

Johnson writes sympathetically about Margaret’s traumatic early experiences, though (given the inevitable gaps in the medieval sources) her comments about the psychological impact are somewhat speculative. But it seems likely that a difficult labour left her with permanent physical damage. Margaret had no further pregnancies, and would later oppose her granddaughter’s early marriage, fearing that the girl’s prospective husband ‘would not wait, but injure her, and endanger her health.’

Nevertheless, leaving her infant son at Pembroke, she almost immediately embarked on a third marriage to Harry Stafford, a younger son of the Duke of Buckingham. Like Margaret’s previous unions, this was a political match, but the couple seem to have been genuinely well-suited: they travelled together, managed their estates together, and shared a passion for hunting. When he died in 1471, he left most of his goods to ‘mine entirely beloved wife.’

In contrast, Margaret’s fourth and final marriage, to the mighty Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, was, Johnson concludes, ‘a melding of interests between two pragmatic pessimists with a shared verve for political self-preservation.’ Though the couple had many common goals, Stanley was reluctant to risk his position for the sake of Henry Tudor – to whose cause, claiming the throne of England, Margaret was now fully committed, despite having met her son only a handful of times before he went into exile in Brittany with his uncle Jasper.

For years she agitated on his behalf, campaigning for the restoration of his estates; towards the end of Edward IV’s reign, she even negotiated a settlement that would have allowed him to come home and marry a Yorkist princess. And then, in the summer of 1483, as rumours about the Princes in the Tower began to circulate, a new opportunity emerged. As an adult male with royal blood – one of the few who had survived the Wars of the Roses, the long-running and ruinous struggle between rival claimants to the English throne – Henry Tudor was the obvious figurehead for opposition to Richard III.

The path to the throne was not an easy one: Henry narrowly evaded capture during his first attempted invasion, while his mother (who had been busy canvassing support in England) ended up under house arrest. Only towards the end of the Battle of Bosworth (1485), when the ever-cautious Thomas Stanley finally committed his sizeable army to his stepson’s cause, was Henry Tudor’s victory secure.

According to the traditional narrative, the beginning of the Tudor era transformed Margaret into the power behind the throne, enjoying greater influence over her son, now King Henry VII, than anyone else around him – including his wife, Elizabeth of York. But claims that Margaret was the mother-in-law from Hell are, Johnson demonstrates, based on a tissue of misreadings and misogyny; in reality, the two women had a cordial relationship.

This is not to say that Margaret was powerless. Early in the reign, her position was bolstered by her new status as a ‘femme sole’, which gave her the legal rights of a full person, rather than the limited agency of a married woman. Her legal position meant that she could control her now-substantial income and estates without consulting Stanley. Though lacking the status of a queen dowager, she was commonly known as ‘my lady the king’s mother’, and in time changed her signature from ‘Margaret Richmond’ to ‘Margaret R’, which implied queenship, though with plausible deniability.

Moreover, despite their long separation, mother and son were clearly close: her letters referred to him as ‘my dear heart’ and ‘my only worldly joy’, while his complete trust in her was demonstrated by his decision to place several young rivals to his throne in her custody. Henry, who had spent his entire adult life in exile, valued his mother’s extensive political experience, and for many years she was a near-constant presence at court. Despite her serious reputation, Margaret enjoyed hawking, employed several fools (spending substantial sums to try to cure her favourite, Skypp, when he was dying), and liked ‘joyous’ conversation and ‘tales…to make her merry’ at the dinner table.

By 1499, Margaret was ready for a change: she moved to Collyweston, a ‘fair and pleasant’ Northamptonshire manor, and took a religious vow to live as a widow. This decision was seemingly motivated by genuine piety rather than animosity towards Stanley, who visited her frequently until his death in 1504; according to John Fisher, the trusted cleric who acted as Margaret’s spiritual advisor, she prayed for hours each day, and wore a hair shirt under her luxurious black robes. An enthusiast for religious education, she founded two Cambridge colleges to train theologians ‘who might communicate the fruit of their studies to the people’, and established herself as a leading patron of London’s emergent print trade. In line with her life-long tendency to value female friendship, she also provided practical support to numerous women in difficulty, including kinswomen who fled abusive husbands.

Despite her undoubted commitment to the religious life, Margaret retained many worldly concerns. For several years, she effectively served as Henry VII’s regent in the Midlands, administering royal justice to miscreants including John Stokesley, vice-president of Magdalen College, Oxford, who was accused of baptising a cat in order to discover treasure by magical means. Though Fisher claimed that ‘avarice and covetousness she most hated’, she seemingly shared her son’s miserly tendencies, substantially increasing the revenue from her estates. She even sued the widow of her fiercely loyal chamberlain Roger Ormeston for a debt of £22.

Margaret’s semi-retirement from court ended abruptly in February 1503, when Elizabeth of York died in childbirth, less than a year after the death of Prince Arthur, the heir to the throne. Hurrying to Richmond to be with her grieving son, Margaret took on queenly duties such as supervision of the royal nursery; she even sewed the king’s shirts (despite her eyesight being so poor that she had to wear gold-framed glasses), and nursed him as his health failed. When Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, his mother was at his bedside.

By now, Margaret herself was increasingly frail, though she retained the mental strength to organise her son’s funeral, and to serve as executor of his 37-page will – a task she performed with scrupulous efficiency, personally signing off every page. She lived just long enough to see her grandson crowned as Henry VIII, before succumbing to a sudden illness (possibly a bout of food poisoning contracted from a cygnet served at the coronation banquet) at the end of June.

That Margaret died just as the future of the Tudor dynasty was secured seems a fitting ending to a life devoted to her family’s ambitions. Johnson is clear-sighted about Margaret’s shortcomings, including her ruthless pragmatism and her political misjudgements – but she is equally certain that Margaret’s perseverance and strength of character were crucial to the establishment of Tudor England. This deeply researched and highly readable biography is a powerful testimony to what a capable medieval woman could achieve.