The King’s Mother

"Lady Margaret Beaufort was Henry VII’s mother. She gave birth to him in January 1457 when she was just 14 years old – pretty early even by the standards of the time. The Beauforts are descended from the House of Lancaster, one of the sides contesting the Wars of the Roses – the other, of course, being the House of York. Lady Margaret Beaufort has a claim to the throne but the Beauforts, although descended from Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt, were his illegitimate offspring, so they were banned by an Act of Parliament from ever laying claim to the throne. Lady Margaret is a great political operator, and has a huge influence on events which lead her son to the throne, and subsequently throughout his reign. The book is a fantastic piece of scholarship, based on meticulous archival work, and paints a wonderfully rich picture of Lady Margaret’s world, from the day-to-day running of her huge household to how she negotiates and at times dominates the politics of the age. In April 1483 the Yorkist King Edward IV dies and leaves two young sons – Edward V, the heir to the throne, and Richard, Duke of York – by his wife Elizabeth Woodville. The boys’ uncle, Richard of Gloucester, puts the boys in the Tower of London – they are, of course, the Princes in the Tower – and they’re never seen again. Richard then claims the crown for himself and becomes Richard III. It’s at this point, with resistance to Richard III looking for a figurehead, that people start to think of Henry, Earl of Richmond, the man who will become Henry VII. And what prompts his emergence is, to a great extent, secret and ongoing negotiation between Elizabeth Woodville and Lady Margaret Beaufort. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Between them, these two powerful women decide that Lady Margaret’s son – who will become Henry VII and who, of course, has Lancastrian blood – will marry Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, the older sister of the Princes in the Tower. This marriage will create a new dynasty, uniting the houses of Lancaster and York, and carry England into a glorious new future. The interesting thing is that this pact is as much a stitch-up between the houses of Beaufort and Woodville as it is about any genuine union between the houses of Lancaster and York. Well, of course, most of the time they didn’t. Kingship was seen as a male preserve, and the crown is passed on down a male line of inheritance. But much of the time the male heir is either too young to govern or – most notoriously, in the case of the later Tudors – dies. In this situation, royal women end up effectively wielding sovereign power, even though in theory they’re not meant to. Incidentally, this is something that Helen Castor ’s book She – Wolves explores quite brilliantly. But Lady Margaret’s case is especially interesting, because she’s one of Henry VII’s very few surviving close blood relatives – he’s an only child and his father’s dead – so she ends up having a massive and very influential power base."