Authors: Sarah Gristwood
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. 8
s
. 9½
d
. Obligations
£
783. 6
s
. 8
d
.’ 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.
The tomb Lady Margaret’s executors commissioned in Westminster Abbey looks oddly austere today. But it is among the most convincingly human of the Abbey’s monuments, albeit that of a woman who in life tended to command either pity or respect rather than sympathy. The hands of the bronze-gilt figure are those old, arthritis-ridden ones that John Fisher described, and old too are the deep brackets around the mouth. The sculptor was the quarrelsome Italian Pietro Torrigiano, the man who broke Michelangelo’s nose, and for a fee of 20 shillings Erasmus composed the inscription around the ledge.
Margaret’s head rests on a cushion, at her feet (so the contract for the carving stated) ‘a beast called a Yale’. The arms around the base of the tomb are those she shared with her first husband, Edmund Tudor; those of her son Henry VII and his queen; of her dead grandson Arthur; of her grandson Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon; of her parents and grandparents; those she shared with her last husband, Stanley; those of Henry V and Katherine of Valois, even; but no visible sign of her second husband, Stafford, happy though her life with him seems to have been. He was commemorated in the masses she had ordered to be said for him at the Abbey – but the tomb was about the dynasty.
This tomb and its companion were not finished until well into Henry VIII’s reign. The contract for the figure on Margaret’s tomb was only drawn up on 23 November 1511, and her executors’ accounts record: ‘First paid the 27th day of December in the 4th year of the reign of King Henry VIII to M. Garter the king of heralds for making and declaring my lady’s arms in viii ‘scochyns’ [escutcheons] for my lady’s tomb, and delivered to the Florentine: 8
s
4
d
.’ It was probably his figure of Margaret which won Torrigiano the commission to sculpt the figures for the more important royal tomb – that of Henry and Elizabeth – which is one of the glories of Westminster Abbey. The figures lie side by side in unemotional gilt splendour, on a plinth of Italian marble. They are gazing upwards to God, and God sees them clearly: two gold images, almost sanctified by their beauty. Static and stationary, in their tranquillity they emphasise the message of the Henry VII Chapel that the Tudors were here to stay.
Above the tomb of Henry and Elizabeth are the Beaufort portcullis, the Tudor rose and, the French fleur de lis. Leland called the chapel ‘
miraculum orbis universali
’, the wonder of the entire world: not only for its myriad carvings – the saints in their ranks, the beasts of heraldry – and its stained glass, now long lost, but for the soaring arches of the roof. It was the last great gasp of Perpendicular Gothic, built just as a new world was coming into being. Henry VII’s dream of seeing Henry VI canonised and ‘translated’ here had never become reality, but both he and Margaret Beaufort had poured money into the project – some
£
20,000, equivalent to about £7 million today.