 Margaret
Beaufort
(1441-1509)
Born: 31st May 1443
at Bletsoe, Bedfords
Countess of Richmond
Countess of Derby
Died: 29th June 1509
The
Countess of Richmond & Derby, commonly called Lady Margaret Beaufort, was
the daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset (son of John
of Gaunt by Catherine Swynford), and his wife, Margaret Beauchamp. At
the age of about seven, she became the child bride of John De La Pole, 2nd Duke
of Suffolk, but the union was later dissolved. The Beaufort stock, though
originally bastard, was legitimized by an Act of Parliament in Richard
II’s reign. Thus, on the failure of the heirs of King Henry
VI, Margaret's claim to the crown of England became quite a possible one
(1471). Such as it was, however, the Lancastrian title had originally rested, if
on anything beyond usurpation or parliamentary election, on the exclusion of
females.
Henry
VI always looked upon the Beauforts as possible heirs and, in 1455, married the
twelve-year-old Margaret to his own maternal half-brother, Edmund Tudor, Earl of
Richmond (then aged twenty-five). Her son, afterwards Henry
VII, was born in 1456, and her husband died in the same year. She, soon
afterward, married Henry Stafford, the second son of the Duke of Buckingham, and
submitted to the Yorkist rule; but, after the Battle of Tewkesbury, she was
obliged to send her son, Henry, now the sole hope of the Lancastrian cause, to
seek refuge in Brittany.
Margaret's
third husband was a pronounced Yorkist, Thomas, Lord Stanley, afterwards Earl of
Derby; but his final defection from Richard III on the field of Bosworth secured
the victory to his stepson, Henry VII. Margaret, though she seldom appeared at
her son's court, remained, until her death, his constant correspondent and one
of his wisest advisers. She took vows of religion in 1504, but continued to live
out of a nunnery, although she had founded several.
Her
great glory is, however, her foundation of the two Colleges of Christ's and St.
John's at Cambridge, and of the' Lady Margaret' professorships of Divinity at
both Universities. She was instigated to these foundations by the advice of John
Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, one of the glories, as indeed Margaret
herself also was, of Renaissance learning in England. Margaret was an ardent
patron of the Early English Press and her grandson Henry
VIII's love of learning and books was no doubt a direct inheritance from
her.
Edited from Emery Walker's "Historical
Portraits" (1909).
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