Authors: Sarah Gristwood
If worship might have kept me, I had not gone.
If wit might have me saved, I needed not fear.
If money might have helped, I lacked none.
But O good God what vaileth all this gear?
When death is come thy mighty messenger,
Obey we must, there is no remedy,
Me hath he summoned, and lo now here I lie.
Besides having Elizabeth bid a respectful farewell to Margaret Beaufort, and a heartbreakingly affectionate one to her children, More’s poem also warned King Henry, in curiously modern terms, that: ‘Erst were you father, and now must ye supply/The mother’s part also.’ He may not have found it easy. Even in adulthood his son Henry VIII, who evinced little sign of warm feeling towards his father, remembered his mother’s death bitterly enough to recall that ‘hateful intelligence’ as a standard for melancholy. In the wake of Elizabeth’s death there must have been adjustments all round in a diminished family. But as the months passed, life went on.
In summer 1503 the thirteen-year-old Princess Margaret was sent north, as promised, to finalise her marriage to James of Scotland. On 27 June she and her father travelled from Richmond to Margaret Beaufort’s Collyweston, whose gardens had been extended and fitted out with new summerhouses to entertain the royal party. On 8 July she set out again, to be crowned in Edinburgh on 3 August, not yet 14 years old. (Out of the six children she would bear James, five would die in infancy; perhaps her mother and grandmother had been right to worry about her health.)
The long account of the journey north, written by that same Somerset Herald who had described Margaret’s proxy marriage ceremony eighteen months earlier, makes fascinating reading. There is a melancholy, elegiac tone about a document avowedly written ‘to comfort the hearts of age for to hear it, and to give courage to the young to do thereafter in such case to come’.
Everything was splendidly done; Margaret was sent off ‘richly dressed, mounted upon a fair palfrey’. The list of towns, of official receptions and leave-takings (the bride always ‘richly dressed’) is exhausting. Margaret must have been tougher than reputed in order to have survived it, even if she had not ‘killed a buck with her bow’ at Alnwick. But there is no doubt the ceremonial must have been impressive: this was, of course, a publicity exercise.
Minstrels were sent along to make sure no one missed Margaret’s entry into and departure from the various towns, and a party of gentlemen was ordered ‘to make space, that more plainly the said Queen and her company might be better seen’. As she passed into Scotland her servants sometimes had to force a way for the carriage; but the ‘great quantity’ of people flocking to see her had at least brought ‘plenty of drink’ for those prepared to pay for it.
The description of Margaret’s initial meetings with her husband at Hadington Castle shows, with unusual clarity, the stages of two people getting to know each other under these trying circumstances. As James was brought to her great chamber she met him at the door, and the two ‘made great reverences, the one to the other, his head being bare, and they kissed together’. The greeting to the rest of her party being done, they ‘went aside, and communed together by long space’ – though it is doubtful how much a thirteen-year-old girl and an experienced womaniser of thirty can really have had to say to each other.
Next day James found Margaret playing cards in her room; she kissed him ‘of good will’ and he played for her on the clavichord and the lute ‘which pleased her very much’. The next day again, seeing that the stool where she was seated for supper ‘was not for her ease’, he gave her his chair. Things were looking good, surely. The two did appear to have some things in common – an interest in music as well as in hunting – and there were still several days to go before their marriage was completed. But, this was an account written to glorify, and although Margaret may have been lucky by comparison with, for example, her grandmother Margaret Beaufort, married at an even earlier age, a letter back to her father Henry in England none the less breathes homesickness.
After formal thanks to all the ladies and gentlewomen who had accompanied her, she asks her father to give credence to the bearer of the letter to whom she had showed more of her mind than she could write, and asks him to take care of one Thomas, who had been her mother’s footman. Describing the intimacy that had sprung up between the Earl of Surrey and her new husband, and how her own chamberlain, committed to ‘my cause’, could hardly get a look in, she can only write that ‘I pray God it may be for my poor heart’s ease in time to come.’ An inexperienced young girl trying to negotiate the politics of a foreign court, she added: ‘I would I were with your Grace now, and many times more.’ It was the common lot of princesses, but that cannot have made it any easier.
Among the previous generation of York women, 1503 ended on the same sad note with which it had begun. On 23 November Margaret of Burgundy died. Whatever personal grief she had felt for the loss of Perkin Warbeck she had remained a central figure at the Burgundian court: the dowager whose presence was in demand for diplomatic functions; the devoted mother figure who would care for the children of the new duke and duchess whenever they were called away. Indeed, Duke Philip spoke of ‘how, after the death of our late lady mother, she behaved towards us as if she were our real mother …’. She had become, almost, the Plantagenet who got away: safe from the precautionary violence that in decades to come the Tudors would continue to wreak on other remaining scions of the family.
At some unrecorded time between January 1503 and May 1504 Edward IV’s other sister Elizabeth also died – the mother of Lincoln and Suffolk, the last of Cecily Neville’s brood. The ground was being cleared. Of the women who had figured earlier in this story, there was only one survivor. It was, inevitably, Margaret Beaufort.
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,
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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.