<p>In March 1457, a short, slight widow left Pembroke Castle to embark on a 100-mile journey across territories stalked by civil war and pestilence. Her husband had died only four months earlier, carried off by plague contracted during imprisonment at another Welsh castle during the spurts of Yorkist resistance that marked the early Wars of the Roses. It was just weeks since she had given birth – a traumatic labour, endured without her family or support network. But she set out now to Newport with a firm sense of purpose. She would protect herself in one of the only ways a woman could at that time: by finding another husband.</p><p>This widow and mother was Margaret Beaufort. She was 13 years old.</p><p>The newborn she left at Pembroke would, in 1485, become King <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/people/henry-vii/">Henry VII</a>, the first Tudor monarch. Reading history backwards, it has become fashionable to portray Margaret as an obsessive, Machiavellian mother so consumed by the idea of her son’s divine right to the throne that she would commit child murder to bring it about. She, it is insinuated, was the true assassin of the princes in the Tower who threatened the claim of her “good and gracious prince, king and only beloved son”. But this interpretation is entirely fictional, and mired in misogynist oversimplification. Margaret did not aspire to a crown, either for her son or herself, until the unprecedented events of the Wars of the Roses made it essential for their survival.</p><h3 id="child-bride-8d2c7ce7">Child bride</h3><p>The notion that Margaret’s child might inherit the throne would have been laughable in 1457. The king then was <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/people/henry-vi/">Henry VI</a> (a Lancastrian), who had a healthy son and myriad cousins sharing his royal blood. In contrast, the Beauforts were products of an illicit liaison generations back between a Lancastrian prince and his children’s governess. And, though in later life Margaret and her son were close both personally and politically, for much of Henry’s youth her maternal style can best be described as ‘hands off’ – arguably, emotionally neglectful. Little wonder, given the circumstances of Henry’s birth.</p><p>Today we would consider Margaret a victim of child abuse. Her marriage to Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took place when she was about 12 – the age of consent for medieval girls (for boys it was 14.) This was her second marriage, her first having been dissolved in 1453, during a period of political turmoil.</p>
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2D4WH0N-2webready-b450274-e1764244782566.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A painting of a woman in a black dress and grey hood, holding a small maroon Bible in her hands" title="A painting of Margaret Beaufort. Despite being separated from her son, Henry Tudor, for many years, she battled to secure his inheritance as Earl of Richmond – and, ultimately, king of England (Image by Alamy)" />
<p>Even in the 15th century, when marriages were arranged for cradle-bound babies, it was highly unusual for unions to be consummated before a bride was 16, and 20 was the average age of first pregnancy for most noblewomen. For good reason: medieval women’s bodies were still developing until then, and early childbirth was far likelier to end in stillbirth, maternal death or physically damaging complications. In later life, Margaret’s confessor, John Fisher, alluded to how underdeveloped Margaret had been when she gave birth, writing: “She is… a woman not of a great stature, but at that time it is said she was much smaller still, to such a degree that it almost seemed a miracle at her age that so little a body could bring forth a child at all.”</p><p>Margaret was forced into motherhood so that her husband could claim her considerable inheritance. Her father had died before her first birthday, leaving her an heiress worth, in modern terms, hundreds of thousands of pounds a year – and with a distant royal claim that had seen her welcomed to court as the king’s “right well-beloved cousin”. Ironically, Edmund Tudor died before his child was born, leaving Margaret to face childbirth alone, half a kingdom away from her family, whose main seat was in Lincolnshire.</p><ul><li><strong>Read more | <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/membership/henry-vii-rise-how-pretender-richard-iii-bosworth-first-tudor/">The rise of Henry VII: how a life of cheating death prepared him for the throne as the first Tudor king</a></strong></li></ul><p>Given the trauma of this experience, it is understandable that Margaret left her baby as soon as was physically possible and set out to regain control of her life. Barely three months after leaving Pembroke Castle, she was betrothed again; before her son’s first birthday, Margaret remarried and moved back to Lincolnshire. Henry’s wardship was granted to his uncle, Jasper Tudor, and later to the Yorkist William Herbert. Henry would remain in the care of these Welsh lords, 300 miles from his mother, until he was 14.</p><p>Meanwhile, Margaret – still not yet 15 – was on her third marriage. She had reasserted the security torn from her by the marriage to Edmund Tudor. Her new husband, Sir Harry Stafford, was at least a decade older than her, but respectful and affectionate. Their household accounts show the couple working and travelling together, with thoughtful exchanges of anniversary and New Year gifts. In his will, Harry called Margaret his “best beloved wife”.</p><p>Margaret was welcomed with open arms by the Stafford clan, especially Harry’s politically astute mother, Anne, Duchess of Buckingham, who took “my daughter Richmond” under her wing and protected her interests at court. Most happily of all for Margaret, the Stafford marriage brought her back to her own adored mother and half-siblings, close to the estates where she had grown up. It must almost have felt to Margaret as if the last few terrible years – encompassing marriage, widowhood and childbirth – had never happened.</p><h3 id="distant-mother-71cd2cc7">Distant mother</h3><p>It was not unusual for medieval children to grow up apart from their parents, but it is noteworthy – given that both Margaret and Henry grew up without fathers – that, whereas she lived with her mother until adolescence, she left her son shortly after birth. And though there is little surviving evidence for the first decade of Henry’s life, it is unclear if mother and son were in contact. Margaret did not return to Wales for almost a decade. Perhaps she rationalised that she was acting in her son’s interests; he was a boy, in need of male role models. Given the violent turbulence of this period, though, it is significant that Margaret kept her distance.</p><p>She had chosen her alliance with the Staffords because, with civil war looming, they represented a dominant, stabilising force. But even they could not keep the incompetent Henry VI on his throne. In March 1461, he was deposed in favour of his charismatic young kinsman, Edward of York.</p>
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/Cardiffcastle-Eingangshalle1bErkerfensterwebready-00a5c3f-e1764244858208.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Jasper Tudor, depicted in stained glass in Cardiff Castle, accompanied Henry into exile for more than a decade (Image by Wikipedia/Public domain)" title="Jasper Tudor, depicted in stained glass in Cardiff Castle, accompanied Henry into exile for more than a decade (Image by Wikipedia/Public domain)" />
<p>Margaret and her relatives quickly came to terms with the new king, <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/people/edward-iv/">Edward IV</a>, but her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, was a diehard Lancastrian whose rebellions incited Yorkist reprisals. Pembroke Castle was besieged, with Margaret’s son, Henry, inside. Fortunately, as titular Earl of Richmond, Henry was a valuable commodity. His life was spared and his wardship granted to a leading Welsh Yorkist, William Herbert. There is no sign that Margaret protested; perhaps she could not cope emotionally with the responsibility of mothering a child after enduring so much at such a young age.</p><p>Mother and son would not meet again until Henry was 10. The causes of their parting and ultimate reunion probably stemmed from the same root: Margaret hoped that she and Harry Stafford would have children of their own. But Henry’s birth had scarred her physically and psychologically, and as years passed it became clear that he would be her only child. Only when confronted with this realisation did Margaret belatedly seek to re-establish a relationship with her son. In September 1467, she returned to Wales for the first time since her remarriage, spending a week with Henry at Raglan Castle. He had grown tall and serious, with her capacity for quick learning. Perhaps she saw in his appearance and character glimpses of herself or her half-siblings – and perhaps, less comfortably, of Edmund Tudor.</p><p>The visit to Raglan marked the beginning of Margaret’s self-identity as Henry’s mother, but she was no closer to taking physical possession of her child. Two years later, after another outbreak of civil war, she attempted to regain legal control of her son. When William Herbert was executed after the battle of Edgecote in 1469, Margaret struggled to assemble lost legal documents; to reassert her guardianship of Henry, she convened assignations in the manor houses of aristocrats, and with lawyers in alehouses. Mother and son were reunited briefly in 1470, touring London and Surrey together, indulging their shared love of hunting. Presumably they discussed Margaret’s hope of regaining Henry’s birthright, which had been stripped from him and parcelled out to leading Yorkists – not the crown, which was still entirely outside her aspirations, but the earldom of Richmond.</p>
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/BAL3309180webready-c464ebd-e1764245134726.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a large stone castle, with trees in front of it and a large path leading up to it" title="An early 19th-century coloured engraving of Raglan Castle, seat of William Herbert, who was granted wardship of young Henry Tudor after 1461. Following a long separation, Margaret visited her son here in 1467 (Image by Bridgeman Images)" />
<h3 id="dangerous-blood-7382c055">Dangerous blood</h3><p>The same forces that reunited Margaret and Henry also drove them apart. The internecine chaos unleashed on England in 1469 was finally resolved in 1471, when Edward IV conclusively vanquished his rivals in battle. Henry VI and his teenage son were killed. So, too, were several of Margaret’s Beaufort cousins and, within a few years, even Edward’s Lancastrian former brother-in-law, the Duke of Exeter. Suddenly, the possession of Lancastrian blood, no matter how thin, was dangerous. According to the Tudor poet Bernard André, Margaret advised Henry to flee into exile with his uncle Jasper: “Unless my imagination or maternal instinct deceives me… [Henry’s] life will be safer on the ocean’s waves than in this tempest on land.”</p><p>In September 1471, Henry and Jasper sought asylum in Brittany, where they remained until 1483. Meanwhile, Margaret was left in limbo. Alive to the dangers inherent in Henry’s distant royal claim and traditional family loyalties, she warned him not to return to England until she had assurances for his safety. Mother and son could communicate only through intermediaries, trusted servants who braved the Channel crossing.</p><p>Margaret demonstrated a profound sense of responsibility to Henry. The rightful Earl of Richmond was heir to a proud inheritance and, as any medieval aristocrat would, she fervently believed that her son should claim it.</p><ul><li><strong>Read more | <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/membership/5-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-tudors/">5 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Tudors</a></strong></li></ul><p>But it wasn’t until 1482, when Henry was 25, that making such a claim seemed possible. The death of her mother, and the ensuing business of settling her estate, enabled Margaret to cut a deal with Edward IV to bring Henry home safely. On 3 June 1482, Edward and Margaret publicly agreed that, if Henry returned “in the grace and favour of the king’s highness”, he could claim his grandmother’s substantial West Country estates. An undated pardon now in the archives of Westminster Abbey suggests that this may have been a precursor to the restoration of Henry’s earldom.</p><p>More privately – though loud enough that several leading courtiers later reported it – Margaret and Edward discussed how they were “related in the fourth… degrees of kindred”. This was almost certainly the first step in arranging a marriage between Henry and one of Edward’s daughters which, because of their relation, would demand a papal dispensation. Margaret, always less risk-averse than the men in her life, was willing to gamble her son’s life for this bright future. Unfortunately, 11 years of political exile had left Henry paranoid, and even these substantial guarantees did not convince him that he would be safe. He refused to return.</p><p>Then political upheaval simultaneously dashed Margaret’s careful plans and enabled her to contemplate a future for her son that would have previously been inconceivable.</p><h3 id="maternal-kingmaker-88919887">Maternal kingmaker</h3><p>Margaret’s hopes of regaining Henry’s Richmond inheritance were thwarted when, in April 1483, Edward IV died unexpectedly. With two adolescent sons, Edward’s dynasty should have been assured. Instead, his brother Richard detained those young princes and claimed the throne himself. A contemporary eyewitness reported that the princes “were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, until at length they ceased to appear altogether”. It was rumoured that Richard had murdered them.</p><p>For Margaret, like much of the English nobility, Richard’s accession was an unanticipated complication. Her hoped-for marriage between Henry and a Yorkist princess was dead in the water, and the princesses had fled into sanctuary. Moreover, after Harry Stafford’s death in 1471, Margaret had remarried the northern lord Thomas Stanley, whose family were stalwarts of the regimes of Edward IV and his son. Over the years, the Stanleys had had several ugly confrontations with Richard. Indeed, Stanley was briefly arrested during Richard’s coup.</p>
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/hip2705239webready-894c19a-e1764245293950.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a pan with a long, narrow build and a hat on his head" title="Northern magnate Thomas Stanley, who married Margaret Beaufort in 1472, shown in an engraving of a Holbein portrait. Having opposed Richard III, he and his family played a key role in bringing Henry to the throne (Image by Topfoto)" />
<p>A pragmatist above all else, Stanley soon came to terms with Richard and so, apparently, did Margaret. But the circumstances of Richard’s accession had entirely changed the political landscape. Disaffected opponents plotted rebellion, and Margaret – whose territories stretched from Flintshire to Lincolnshire, Surrey to Devon – had myriad connections through whom she gained intelligence about these nascent conspiracies.</p><p>The anti-Ricardians were a disparate band. There were servants of Edward IV who hated his queen’s Woodville relatives; the Woodvilles themselves, fearing reprisals; attendants of the lost princes, jealous of missed opportunities or genuinely concerned for their charges; even Lancastrian stalwarts who wanted rid of the Yorkists altogether.</p><ul><li><strong>Read more | <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ladies-in-waiting-six-wives/">Inside the six wives’ bedchamber: the stories of Tudor ladies-in-waiting</a></strong></li></ul><p>Their very heterogeneity was a boon to Margaret. If the princes were dead – and by August it seemed they must be – then the rebellion needed a new figurehead. It needed to be an adult with royal blood and no loyalty to Richard – and, because they would have to fight for the crown, a male. Most of all, it needed to be someone impartial enough to unify these factions. In short: Henry Tudor. The exceptional circumstances of summer 1483 made it possible for the first time for Margaret to hope not merely for her son’s return but for his accession as king.</p><p>A lifetime of political and economic activity had readied her for this moment. Even the collapse of their first rebellion in autumn 1483, which left Margaret under house arrest and deprived of her fortune, could not cow her. She was linked by blood, marriage and loyalty not only to most of the nobility of the realm but also to the working men and women who served them. Her vast network of connections can be read in her memberships of religious guilds, gifts and letters exchanged with neighbours, favours recorded in her household accounts, payments to merchants and craftsmen who provided for her husbands and family, and in many more ways – scarcely tangible then and almost entirely lost now.</p><p>The loyalty of these associates to Margaret was longer-standing, and more immediately beneficial, than their allegiance to <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/people/richard-iii/">Richard III</a>. When Margaret mobilised her network, she was able to gather considerable sums of money – and money meant weapons and manpower for Henry, which he used to invade and then defeat Richard in battle at <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/battle-bosworth-facts-when-where-who-won-richard-iii-henry-vii-tudors-wars-roses-york-lancaster/">Bosworth</a>.</p>
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/gr0036018Hwebready-068df39-e1764245479790.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An engraving showing a battlefield, with one man on a black horse, being handed a crown by a man in armour on the left" title="Henry receives Richard III’s crown from his stepfather following the 1485 battle of Bosworth, in a 19th-century engraving. Funds for Henry’s military campaign were raised by Margaret (Image by Topfoto)" />
<p>Thus the mother who had been absent from her son’s life for so long was essential to the success of the campaign that won him the throne. Margaret enabled Henry to be crowned Henry VII in 1485 – and so to re-enter her life and build a close, lasting relationship. In an undated letter as king, son told mother: “I am as much bound [to you] as any creature living, for the great and singular motherly love and affection that it hath pleased you at all times to bear towards me.”</p><p>Perhaps Margaret had not shown that affection “at all times” – mother and son both had a habit of rewriting their pasts to better suit their present circumstances. But, after a long, difficult journey, they ultimately built a relationship that proved unbreakable.</p>
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<p><h4>Mother-in-law from hell?</h4>
<div>After claiming the crown at Bosworth, Henry wed Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, helping to heal dynastic rifts. The myth goes that Margaret was the ideal mother but a nightmare mother-in-law, so power-crazed that she even directed how her daughter-in-law must give birth. This idea is founded on a book of ordinances (rules for the royal household) attributed to Margaret by an 18th-century antiquarian, but there is no evidence that she wrote them. </div>
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Other contemporary writings have also been misunderstood. In 1498, three Spanish ambassadors reported that “the Queen [Elizabeth] is a very noble woman, and much beloved [but] she is kept in subjection by the mother of the King.” However, it is not certain that those writers actually met either woman. Stopping only briefly in London, the ambassadors probably padded their reports with rumours, and their claims were tainted by jealousy. </div>
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They sought to undermine their rival Rodrigo De Puebla, then pre-eminent in English affairs, who was close to Elizabeth. By insinuating that the queen was powerless, De Puebla’s enemies made his carefully fostered relationship appear self-serving and futile. De Puebla himself, who observed the two royal women first-hand, never represented their dynamic as problematic, and nor did other European agents in England.</div>
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There is a powerful strand of misogyny to such claims – an interpretation of female relationships that persists today: that powerful women cannot coexist. But the (albeit sparse) evidence testifies to mutual respect and affection between Margaret and Elizabeth. Official documents and private letters refer, virtually in one breath, to “the queen and king’s mother”. They jointly founded a chantry chapel, and intervened to protect the royal children. After Elizabeth endured a difficult childbirth in 1496, Margaret wrote that the queen’s health was not “so good as I would [wish], but I trust heartily it shall [be soon] with God’s grace”. </div>
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We do Elizabeth an injustice when we interpret her conservative queenship as a passive infliction rather than a pragmatic choice. She had lost many relatives in the Wars of the Roses, and saw the danger of promoting political agendas. Such shared trauma was a further connection between her and Margaret – another chain in a strong bond between two royal women who backed and shaped Henry’s reign.</div>
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<p><strong>Lauren Johnson</strong> is a historian specialising in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Her new book is <em>Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker </em>(Apollo, 2025)</p><p><strong>This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of<em> <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/bbc-history-magazine/">BBC History Magazine</a></em></strong></p>
