TWENTY-FIVE
Tell me, how fares our noble mother?
Richard III, 5.3
It was an end, of course, but perhaps also a beginning. Lady Margaret Beaufort had now – with Elizabeth of York dead, Princess Margaret gone north and Princess Mary still a child – become England’s first lady. Perhaps she no longer felt she had to struggle so hard now that her position was acknowledged by everybody.
Before the end of the decade John Fisher,25 the cleric with whom she developed an increasingly close relationship in the last few years of her life, would be called on to preach her memorial sermon. All England, he would say, ‘had cause of weeping’ for her death:
The poor creatures that were wont to receive her alms, to whom she was always piteous and merciful. The students of both the universities to whom she was as a mother. All the learned men in England to whom she was a very patroness.… All the good priests and clerks to whom she was a true defenderess. All the noble men and women to whom she was a mirror and exemplar of honour. All the common people of this realm for whom she was in their causes a common mediatrix, and took right great displeasure for them.
Fisher, perhaps inevitably under the circumstances, painted a portrait of a saint; whatever Margaret Beaufort’s virtues, she was not that. Fisher’s assurance that she was never guilty of avarice or covetousness carries less conviction than his description of how her servants were kept in good order, suitors heard, and ‘if any factions … were made secretly amongst her head officers, she with great policy did bolt it out and likewise any strife or controversy’. The image of Margaret ruling her household with a rod of iron and a measure of surveillance is not hard to conjure up. More personal still, perhaps – even in an age when the spectre of death was considered a good companion for the living – was Fisher’s description of how Margaret would not only comfort in sickness any of the dozen poor people she maintained, ‘minstering unto them with her own hands’, but ‘when it pleased God to call any one of them out of this wretched world she would be present to see them depart and to learn to die.’
Fisher also gave a description of Margaret’s exhausting daily round of devotions, reminiscent of those recorded for Cecily Neville some years before. They began before dawn with the matins of our lady and the matins of the day ‘not long after v [5] of the clock’. She attended four or five masses a day ‘upon her knees’ before dinner (10 a.m. on ‘eating days’, 11 on fasting days); after dinner she ‘would go her stations’ at three altars; then say her diriges and commendations, and her evensongs before supper. ‘And at night before she went to bed she failed not to resort unto her chapel, and there a large quarter of an hour to occupy her in devotions’: all this, even though so much kneeling was difficult for her ‘and so painful that many times it caused in her back pain and disease’. She was probably suffering from arthritis.
Fisher describes her habit of saying every day when she was in good health the crown of our lady ‘after the manner of Rome’, kneeling each of the sixty-three times she heard the word ‘ave’; and her meditations from French devotional books ‘when she was weary of prayer’. He talks of her ‘marvellous weeping’ at confession, which at many seasons she made as often as every third day; and how when she was ‘houselled’ or received the Eucharist, nearly a dozen times a year, ‘what floods of tears there issued forth from her eyes’.
It is a picture of, for that time, perfect piety: wholly obedient to Rome, and partaking of all the old rituals though perhaps not uninfluenced by the more individual, more interior style of religious practice beginning to make its way over from the continent. Margaret would surely have been horrified by any suggestion that the inevitably questioning nature of her own intelligent interest – her readiness to challenge the Church authorities over matters of property and patronage when necessary – could have sown the seeds of her grandson Henry VIII’s future actions. But it is hard not to see in Fisher’s words a woman who had learnt through bitter experience that life was not to be trusted, even if you might still rely on God’s mercy; and hard not to be touched when Fisher recalls how the ‘merciful and liberal’ hands which gave comfort to the poor were so afflicted with cramps as to make her cry out: ‘O blessed Jesu help me. O blessed lady succour me.’
Margaret’s one-time carver Henry Parker confirmed Fisher’s picture of the extraordinary devotions – ‘as soon as one priest had said mass in her sight another began’. But he adds that at dinner (and ‘how honourably she was served I think few kings better’) she was always ‘joyous’ at the beginning of the meal, hearing tales to make her merry, before moving on to more serious and spiritual mental fare. None the less – despite her fondness for muscatel, her habit of keeping wine and spices in a locked cupboard in her own chamber for a nightcap – Fisher wrote of her ‘sober temperance in meats and drinks’. For ‘age and feebleness’, he wrote, she might have been exempted from the fast days appointed by the Church, but chose instead to keep them ‘diligently and seriously’, and especially all through Lent ‘restrained her appetite to one meal and one fish’ a day. ‘As to hard clothes wearing she had her shirts and girdles of hair, which when she was in health every week she failed not certain days to wear … [so] that full often her skin as I heard her say was pierced therewith.’
Like Cecily Neville Margaret owned – and commissioned Wynkyn de Worde to print – Walter Hilton’s writing on the ‘mixed life’, which combined a spiritual programme with more worldly concerns. Like her frequent opponent, Cecily’s daughter Margaret of Burgundy, she was particularly attached to the reformed order of Franciscans, the Observants. Margaret of Burgundy had probably been responsible for their establishment in England after 1480; in 1497 Margaret Beaufort was granted confraternity by the order.
A disproportionate amount of the surviving information on Margaret Beaufort comes from these final years of her life, thanks in part to her involvement with the Cambridge colleges in whose archives much of it is preserved. But perhaps that ever more active engagement was not coincidental – perhaps it was now, when she had been shaken by the death of one she can never have expected to predecease her, that Margaret realised it was time to follow her own interests and make her own legacy.
King Henry’s retreat immediately after Elizabeth’s death showed he was indeed devastated: he would continue, religiously, to keep the anniversary of her demise, and from this time on there would be a marked lessening in the cheer of his court. But Henry was now a widower; just as his son Arthur’s wife Katherine of Aragon was now a widow. For a moment it may have seemed a good way of resolving the equation and keeping Katherine’s dowry and the Spanish connection in the country: good to Henry, anyway. Her mother Isabella in Spain was horrified when she heard the rumours: such a marriage between father and daughter-in-law would be ‘a very evil thing – one never before seen, and the mere mention of which offends the ears – we would not for anything in the world that it should take place’. It is an interesting sidelight on Henry’s character that his instructions to his ambassadors, when later he was considering other candidates, made it plain he was not prepared to marry an ugly second wife. They were to make a careful note of breath, breasts and complexion: a roundabout tribute to Elizabeth of York.
In the event Katherine was betrothed shortly afterwards to Prince Henry, amid much debate as to whether she was betrothed as Arthur’s widow in the fullest sense, or as the virgin survivor of an unconsummated marriage: it was a debate which would display its full ramifications later in the century. Henry argued indefatigably over the question of Katherine’s dowry, but in this and other negotiations he was now manoeuvring from a position of decreased security.
The death of Elizabeth of York, so soon after that of the near-adult, heir Prince Arthur, put fresh question marks over a regime that had, after all, been in power for less than twenty years. Any persons tethered by loyalty to the old Yorkist dynasty of which Elizabeth had been, pretenders apart, the last embodiment might now consider themselves free. Too many of the men (and women) who had been involved in the rebellions against Henry had surnames like Neville, or else were under the young Duke of Buckingham’s sway. Margaret Beaufort’s one-time ward, son of Richard III’s nemesis, Buckingham had turned out to be another who gazed at the throne with covetous eyes. Henry VII was known to be ill, and his sole surviving son was at this moment only eleven years old. Had the king died now it would have been a matter of another minority – or another man’s opportunity.
In 1504 Henry’s officers were discussing a conversation that had earlier taken place between ‘many great personages’ about the succession and the future of the country. Some spoke of Buckingham as a possible next king, some of Suffolk; but none of them ‘spoke of my lord prince’. An agent of Suffolk’s at the court of the Holy Roman Empire had been assuring Maximilian that, should Henry VII die, young Prince Henry could in no way prevail against his own claim. This insecurity probably affected the way Henry VII comported himself once the warmth and influence, and the political authority, that he had gained from his wife were no longer his.
That summer of 1503 Reginald Bray died – Henry’s greatest officer, and one who had had his start under Margaret Beaufort. Rather than replace him by making any other individual as powerful Henry increasingly kept power in his own hands, raising new men in status but trusting no one completely. It may have given him less time for other things. A letter he wrote to his mother around this time makes excuse that he had ‘encumbered you now with this my long writing, but me thinks that I can do no less, considering that it is so seldom that I do write … ’. Henry was also becoming ever more obsessed with money – an accusation that could of course also be brought against his mother. Perhaps Elizabeth had been instrumental in his earlier comparative liberality.
The following summer Margaret’s husband Stanley died, which allowed her greater access to her own funds. She took the opportunity to confirm her vows of chastity:
In the presence of my Lord God Jesu Christ and his blessed Mother the glorious Virgin St Mary and of all of the whole company of Heaven & of you also my ghostly father I Margaret of Richmond with full purpose and good deliberation for the weal [welfare] of my sinful soul with all my heart promise from henceforth the chastity of my body. That is never to use my body having actual knowledge of man after the common usage in matrimony the which thing I had before purposed in my lord my husband’s days.
But despite her powerful religious interests she did not turn to a semi-retired and contemplative life as others had done. She had different duties.
She now felt it necessary to abandon her recently established power base of Collyweston for a variety of houses often borrowed from the bishops whose perks of office they were; Margaret was prepared to take advantage of everything the Church had to offer. She wanted to be nearer to her son and his court, even if there were some frictions between them: Henry was in the process of taking her beloved, and convenient, Woking away from her to convert it to royal use. The matter recalled Cecily and Fotheringhay – which, indeed, was one of the properties Margaret now used, cleared and cleaned for her convenience.
One thing Margaret did have was that other ever more absorbing field of independent interest: patronage, especially of Cambridge University. Her benevolence had originally been a little more widely spread: in the closing years of the fifteenth century Oxford too had hailed her as the princess ‘of rank most exalted and of character divine’ who would exceed all others in her patronage. However, the influence of John Fisher – as well, perhaps, as its proximity to her geographical areas of influence – had led her to the other establishment.
Margaret’s support for Queens’ College in Cambridge (which Marguerite, Anne and Elizabeth Woodville had supported before her) could be taken as part of her ongoing bid for the regal role. Her long-standing interest in Jesus College, too, was shared by the whole royal family. But what came next was all her own. She took the underfunded ‘God’s House’ in Cambridge and turned it into Christ’s College: not her only enduring legacy in that city, but the one that can be most clearly identified with her. The college statutes of 1506 show that she reserved for her own use a set of four rooms there, located between the chapel and the hall and with windows giving a direct view down into either. From this position she could partake of the college devotions in privacy, perhaps fancy herself part of this masculine seat of learning, and keep an eye on daily college business. Her heraldic devices – a portcullis and a ‘yale’ – are still prominently modelled on the oriel outside her former lodgings. The mythical Yale was a goatlike creature with the ability to twist its horns in different directions so as to keep one of them safe in a fight. It symbolised proud defence and was highly appropriate for the wary Tudors.
Margaret not only ensured that Fisher could use her rooms when she was not in residence, but arranged for a country property to be used by the scholars whenever plague came to the city. Margaret is known to have visited Cambridge in 1505, 1506, 1507 and less certainly 1508. Nor did her work there cease with the foundation of Christ’s. As early as 1505 Fisher drew her attention to the lamentable state of the ancient hospital of St John the Evangelist; and though in the event it would be her executors who oversaw the difficult process of converting it into St John’s College, a place to be ‘as good and as of good value’ as Christ’s, here too her arms can still be seen resplendent above the porter’s lodge.
There is a story of how, looking out of her windows at Christ’s once, she saw the dean punishing a lazy scholar and cried out ‘lente, lente’ (gently, gently). But that softer side of her character is not often visible; life had not taught her to display it readily. After Elizabeth of York’s death, however, Margaret was certainly involved to some degree in the upbringing of Prince Henry. The excessive interest his father now took in the young prince meant he was never going to be sent off to Ludlow where his brother had died, but as heir to the throne he was still in need of a more adult and masculine establishment. Here, as everywhere, his grandmother’s hand can be seen, and the composition of his new household showed a considerable degree of cross-fertilisation with hers. His bede-roll – a portable prayer manual, meant to be pored over daily – suggests not only a genuine piety but a particular interest, which Margaret shared, in the crucifixion itself: the wounds and the holy name of Jesus. His love of chivalry might have originated in the York side of the family, but here too Margaret played a role: in 1504 two of the four young men added as ‘spears’ to the prince’s household came from hers, and she would send him a gift after he had distinguished himself ‘running at the ring’ in the tourney.
There is no evidence of her having fulfilled any such sympathetic function for Katherine of Aragon – however much the girl may have stood in need of it, caught as she was between her father’s and her father-in-law’s diplomacy. At the end of 1504 the death of her mother Isabella of Castile reduced Katherine’s diplomatic value, representing as she now did only a less valuable alliance with her father’s Aragon rather than with a united Spain. In June 1505 Prince Henry was instructed to repudiate his official marriage with her, leaving Katherine once again without clear prospects in a strange land.
Isabella’s own kingdom of Castile, her share of Spain, descended not to her husband Ferdinand but to her daughter Juana, Katherine’s elder sister. This created a battle for control between Juana’s husband Philip of Burgundy and her father Ferdinand, who had no intention of giving up so easily. There is evidence that Juana made valiant if ineffectual efforts to take control into her own hands and rule as her mother had done, but the real tussle was between the two men. Juana has been given the sobriquet ‘the Mad’,26 but though her behaviour could sometimes be erratic the slur was probably little more than a pretext used by the men of her family to set her aside.
In January 1506, the wintry weather gave England a first-hand view of Juana and her problems and blew an unexpected bonus on to Henry’s shores. Juana and Archduke Philip, on their way to Spain to claim her inheritance, were shipwrecked on the Dorset coast. On hearing the news at Richmond Henry immediately sent word to his mother at Croydon and set about preparing a dazzling welcome for guests who, despite their gracious reception, were also now in a sense hostages. The reluctance of her male connections to support the isolated Katherine was dramatised when she invited her brother-in-law Philip to join her in a dance, and got only a resounding snub. It was the precocious Princess Mary, not yet in her teens, who saved the situation by dancing with Katherine herself. (It was common practice for women to dance together.) Philip’s attitude to Juana was also made plain. He purposely kept her away from Henry’s court until he himself was firmly established as the star visitor, which left Katherine only a few hours to spend with the sister she was never likely to see again. Other factors apart, the last thing Philip would have wanted was for Katherine either to encourage Juana in independence or to get too much evidence of her sanity.
Philip was taken also to visit Margaret Beaufort at Croydon. Here the archduke’s minstrels performed for the king’s mother, and Prince Henry received a grandmotherly present of a new horse with fine gold and velvet trappings, the better to show off in front of a Burgundian guest who was a leading exponent of martial chivalry.
King Henry’s main topic of negotiation with his guest was a treaty of mutual defence between England and Burgundy – something which made an Aragonese alliance with Katherine even less necessary. One subtext was Henry’s determination to regain custody of Suffolk, who was still enjoying Burgundian hospitality. He won – for all that Philip initially demurred, apparently invoking the memory of Margaret of Burgundy to whom he said he still owed a loyalty. And King Henry, when he met her, appeared to have been considerably more impressed with Juana than Juana’s own husband, lending her, when the time came to resume her journey, Elizabeth of York’s ‘rich litters and chairs’.
Suffolk was brought back to imprisonment in England: he would eventually be executed, but by Henry VIII rather than his father. Indeed, a number of compromised figures were treated with a leniency that may owe something to their female connections. In other directions, however, the king was proving himself a harsher ruler than in earlier days. He now had two new and dauntingly aggressive money collectors, Empson and Dudley, who used every tactic of law and intimidation to extract revenue and caused, so Bacon heard from an earlier chronicle, ‘much sorrow’ from the autumn of 1506. Perhaps this was what John Fisher meant when he wrote that Margaret Beaufort detested avarice and covetousness in anyone, but most especially in any that belonged to her. Her own love of money was tempered by possibly a softer heart, and surely a stronger morality.
But if there were any differences of opinion between Margaret and her son, they would now regularly be subsumed into concerns over the king’s health. Early in 1507 he fell ill with an infection of the throat or chest – perhaps an abscess or tuberculosis. Lady Margaret moved in to Richmond to be by his side, just as she had done in 1503; and, just as she had done then, she buried her worries in the practicalities, ordering not only a supply of medicinal materials but also mourning garb which in the event proved unnecessary.fn12
That May the tournaments with their elaborate springtime pageantry were all about the young Prince Henry and the ravishing sovereign of the joust, his budding sister Princess Mary. After Elizabeth’s death Mary had probably spent some of her time in Margaret Beaufort’s care, whether at court or at Eltham – where even the swans in the moat now wore enamelled badges bearing the Beaufort portcullis. By the summer the king was sufficiently recovered to be set on a new courtship. Philip of Burgundy had died unexpectedly in the autumn of 1506, leaving Juana, the queen of Castile, a widow. From Henry’s viewpoint she was almost as desirable a prospect as Elizabeth of York had been – beautiful, and carrying with her a kingdom. The Spanish ambassador wrote that the English ‘seem little to mind … her insanity, especially since I have assured them that her derangement of mind would not prevent her from bearing children’.
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 entered into the incarceration, nominally because of her mental health, that would last almost half a century. But in the meantime Juana’s sister Katherine got involved, at Henry’s request, in the negotiations and delivered to her father-in-law a ‘letter of credence’ which declared her her father’s ambassador. Katherine, of course, had every reason to desire her sister’s presence at Henry’s side – it might not only help her free herself from limbo but 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 not on frivolities but on necessities.
It would soon become clear that Henry VII was in no state to contemplate anything so arduous as another marriage. In the chill early spring of 1508 his illness returned and Margaret Beaufort was back at Richmond with her orders and her sweet wine. Once again Henry recovered – strong enough by the summer to resume normal activities – but it was clear what the future would be. 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, he would soon be called upon to carry forward the Tudor dynasty.
The great diplomatic game of arranging marriages went on, with his children Henry and Mary the two cards Henry VII still had to play. Three marriages had been discussed while Philip of Burgundy was in England: of Prince Henry to Philip’s daughter; of King Henry to Philip’s sister; and of Princess Mary to Philip and Juana’s son Charles, the boy who would become the most powerful ruler in Europe. The first two never took on much colour of reality, but on 17 December 1508 a betrothal between Charles and Mary was celebrated amid great festivities. This would be a match indeed, since Charles was heir through his mother to the Spanish territories and through his father to the Holy Roman Empire. The bride made, in perfect French, a lengthy speech from memory; the king kept his watchful eye on even the smallest detail of the pageantry and, as the printed souvenir had it, the red rose (Lancaster’s rose) looked set to bloom throughout the Christian world.fn13
The times were repeating themselves. There had been another father, Edward IV, obsessed by his daughter’s marriage as the last months of his life approached. 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; and there would be no rally as the dank, sapping air of 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 upriver from Coldharbour, where she had been nursing her own health. She brought to Richmond her favourite bed and a quantity of ‘kitchen stuff’, clearly prepared for a long stay. It would not, in the end, be that long: on 21 April Henry died.
He had named his mother chief executrix of his will. When the king’s death was followed by what was in essence a massive cover-up – a two-day pretence that he was still alive, until a smooth succession of power could be established – there can be no doubt that Margaret Beaufort was at the heart of it. The account left by Garter Herald Thomas Wriothesley made that clear: the busy councillors were being ‘over seen by the mother of the said late king’. Margaret, like Elizabeth Woodville after Edward IV’s death, could not afford the time to mourn her private loss; she too was having to cope with a minority – though this time, blessedly, there was only a matter of weeks to go before, in June, the heir would reach his eighteenth birthday.
As the young King Henry VIII, now at last proclaimed, moved to the Tower in preparation for his coronation, his grandmother briefly stayed behind at Richmond from where, notable even amid this stream of business, orders were sent out 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. Coincidentally or otherwise, Margaret Beaufort had once been crossed in a property deal by Dudley.
The interim council, which would keep firm hands on the reins of government until Henry was crowned, is likely to have had her 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 counsellors ‘and took their impressions easily’, suggesting even that it was she who held them together during her life, though afterwards they might fall out among themselves. As Henry VII was buried according to his wishes beside Elizabeth of York, ‘our dearest late wife the queen’, Margaret Beaufort, in ensuring her grandson’s smooth accession, had struck another blow on behalf of the Tudor monarchy.
She moved at once to claim back her old home of Woking, which her grandson made over to her on 19 May. But it is unlikely that, had she lived longer, she would have won lasting influence. The influence she had enjoyed under Henry VII had been based not only on a similarity of temperament (and sheer gratitude on his part) but on the fact that he had arrived in England as an outsider, in urgent need of trusted allies. It was very different for 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 would remorselessly stamp out any Yorkist threats to his throne, but his first instinct on acceding to it was to treat his Yorkist relations kindly.
Perhaps it was memories of his mother, and of the happiness she had brought his father, that made him so anxious to be married himself. Henry’s wedding to Katherine of Aragon took place fast and privately; the joint coronation less than a fortnight later was to be huge and public, a fit celebration of what some now see as the end of the long war. ‘The rose both red and white/In one rose now doth grow’, as Henry’s one-time tutor, the poet John Skelton, put it.
The ceremony took place on 24 June, the crowd hacking up the carpet just as they had done when Henry VIII’s mother had been crowned twenty-two years earlier. Just as before, Margaret Beaufort, with Princess Mary, watched the procession from behind a lattice in the window of a rented house in Cheapside. She did so with ‘full great joy’, Fisher recorded, though the old lady kept up her usual reminders that ‘some adversity would follow’. She had, at least, set aside her usual convent attire of 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, but afterwards felt unwell. 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, who had always sought so desperately to control all the details of her life, 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 who were 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 29 June, the day after her grandson’s eighteenth birthday.
Tidily again, she died in the precincts of Westminster Abbey where she would be buried. Fisher described how on her deathbed ‘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 divers popes could assure her future in the next world, he said, then it was ‘great likelihood and almost certain conjecture’ that she was indeed in the country above. But he 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 focus of his sermon was a comparison of Margaret to the biblical Martha: he cited the nobility of her nature and the excellence of her endeavours, 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 she loved most had gone before her. But perhaps Fisher also saw in Margaret some echo of Martha’s resentment: the woman who complained to Jesus that her sister Mary, whose life was so much easier, was yet more appreciated than she.
Fisher’s long character analysis contains some flashes that bring Margaret to life. He recalled that she was never forgetful of any service done to her; and wary of ‘any thing that might dishonest [dishonour] any noble woman’; that she was of a wisdom ‘far passing the common rate of women’; ‘good in remembrance and in holding memory’; ‘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 would be mirrored by her multi-lingual great-granddaughter, Elizabeth. As a purchaser and patron she did much to popularise translations of religious literature and to encourage printing in England, giving a seal of royal approval to the new industry.
Despite Fisher’s repeated assurances of her generosity and liberality, her freedom from concupiscence, Margaret died hugely wealthy. The paperwork from her executors 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 extensive list of memoranda concerning various properties now ‘in the king’s hands by the death of his grandmother’ shows just how far Margaret’s grasp had stretched: from Kent to Kendal, from Devon to Dartford. Where cash was concerned, it was noted that she left ‘Ready money £3,595. 8s. 9½d. 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 of the goods left in her closet, hard by her bedchamber, reveals her interests and concerns, her physical frailty and her ability to command luxury. There were spectacles, but made of gold; combs of ivory; cramp rings worn to ward off pain; 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. A pile of paperwork included bonds, details of the jointure made to her by Thomas Stanley, annuities arranged for dependants, 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 nun-like appearance of her late portraits, with the widow’s wimple and white barb, is deceptive: Margaret had not put away the pleasure and pomp of dress. Black fabric was expensive, because it 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 leaf; a piece of the holy cross set in gold and one of ‘unicorn’s horn’.
Here is something that was previously lacking: the tangible, human details of daily life. Combined with the personal emotion that she, unlike the other women in this story, expressed in her letters, they form the materials of modern biography. Shakespeare never wrote a voice for Margaret Beaufort;27 and indeed it is hard to envisage her fitting into his parade of betrayed and bitter women. Her papers and her writing contain clear evidence not of a dramatic creation, but of a real personality. It is a world different from today’s – more than five centuries different – but one that is brought vividly alive.