Royal: Lady Margaret Beaufort, 1443-1509, Part 2

Lady Margaret Beaufort has almost universally been depicted in novels, plays and movies as, to quote historian David Starkey, the mother-in-law from hell.  A woman so imperious, so aware of her own royal blood and her status as the King's mother that she wouldn't give way to Henry's young wife, a teenager who didn't know the first thing about being a queen.  Margaret was now, My Lady the King's Mother, who signed herself Margaret R, whereas she had always used Margaret Richmond before 1499.  While R could mean Regina or Queen, R. could also stand for Richmond, and she'd never forgotten Edmund Tudor.  She was also proud of her son, and often completed her signature with the Latin for, Mother of Henry, King of England and Ireland.  Margaret completely reworked the etiquette and protocols for the new court.  Henry deferred to her and expected others to do the same.  However, the one who would most know what life with Margaret was like was Elizabeth of York who, if she found Margaret hard to deal with never let on. 

Margaret's husband was made Earl of Derby.  She was thus Countess of Richmond and of Derby and in control of a great deal of personal wealth.  She was a frequent benefactor of Westminster Abbey, and commanded the monks there to celebrate her birthday each May 31 with an appropriate Mass.  Both she and her husband endowed several churches in Wales.  She established the Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity at Cambridge.  She would turn God's House, Cambridge into the College of Christchurch in 1505.  After her death, she left instructions for the founding of another College, St. John's.  Today, she's considered the foundress of both institutions.  Lady Margaret Society and the Beaufort Club at Christchurch commemorate her, as does the Lady Margaret Boat Club at St. John's.  Lady Margaret Hall, the first women's college at Cambridge, was founded in her honor.  When flooding threatened some of her properties, she arranged for engineers to build sluices to reclaim the land.  She also founded a grammar school in Wimbourne. 

In her personal life, Margaret was an extremely pious woman.  In 1499, she decided that she wished to live a life of chastity, through her husband was still living.  Derby agreed and Margaret moved to Collyweston Manor, Northamptonshire, where she devoted her life to prayer.  It's from this period of her life that the portrait of her at prayer, in black with a nun-like wimple comes from.  She renewed her vows in 1504 but her husband was still welcome in her home.  A suite of rooms at Collyweston was kept ready whenever he visited.  Then, in 1503, tragedy struck.  Elizabeth of York died from the after-effects of childbirth.  Henry and his children were devastated and it was Margaret who rallied her son and kept his court going around him.  Henry repaid his mother by making her executor in his will.  In 1509 he died and his young son, Henry VIII took the throne.  Margaret managed his coronation.  She died in the deanery at Westminster on June 29, 1509 and was buried in the Henry VII Chapel of Westminster Abbey.  Her gilded bronze effigy lies between the tombs of William and Mary and near her great-granddaughter Mary Queen of Scots.

   

Royal: Lady Margaret Beaufort, 1443-1509, Part 1

Women dominated the Wars of the Roses.  While they may not have been on the battlefield or, with few exceptions, in the council chamber, they were almost everywhere else.  Their marriages formed alliances between various royal and noble families.  Their children were meant to sit on thrones or form alliances in their own right.  To that end women backed claimants to the crown, managed property and money, forged diplomatic ties and did whatever it took to survive and improve their family prospects.  Whether it was Cersei-esque Margaret of Anjou, who could go over her mentally-ill husband's head to order an execution, or daring Jacquetta of Luxembourg and sexy Elizabeth Woodville, both who married for love below, and then above, their stations in life.  There was avaricious Alice, Duchess of Suffolk and stalwart Lady Margaret Paston. 

And there was Lady Margaret Beaufort, great-great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt and the mother and grandmother of Tudor lions.  Margaret has been portrayed as conniving, imperious, a woman who believed in her own royal blood and smug superiority.  To those who knew her, such as Bishop John Fisher, she was an approachable, kind and courteous woman with a strong pious streak.  Married young like Sansa, ready to make alliance where she had to like Olenna, a benefactor who knew how to keep clear of the men around her like Margaery, Margaret is one of the better things to come out of the Wars of the Roses.

Margaret's father was John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, one of England's foremost military commanders of his day.  In 1443, as he prepared to return to France, he made provisions for his unborn child.  He requested of King Henry VI that the child should remain under the wardship of the mother should Somerset die on campaign.  This was a huge concession on Henry's part.  The Beauforts were a branch of the Plantagenet family, although technically barred from a claim to the throne.  They were wealthy and well-connected.  Generally, heirs of this type would be the King's prerogative.  Henry, in a generous mood, agreed.  Somerset left for France and Margaret was born.  Then, tragedy struck.  Somerset was accused of treason and summoned back to England to answer charges.  He died soon after, some said it was suicide.  Margaret was her father's sole heir.  Henry took over wardship of her, though he did allow her to remain with her mother at Bletsoe Castle.  Henry granted the wardship of her lands to William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk.  Suffolk arranged a marriage for Margaret with his son John, when Margaret was only 3.  Of course, they wouldn't live together until later.

Fate took a hand again.  Suffolk was arrested for treason and summarily executed.  Henry VI had the marriage annulled because it was never consummated and turned Margaret's wardship over to his half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor.  In later life, Margaret never acknowledged a marriage with John de la Pole.  One of the perks of having a wealthy heiress as a ward was a possible marriage to her for her guardian, or the guardian's heir.  In this case, Edmund Tudor arranged Margaret's marriage to himself in 1455.  She was 12 and he was 24, and it was evidently thought that she was up to the responsibilities of being a wife.  Margaret was soon pregnant and tragedy struck again.  Edmund, who had been given the title Earl of Richmond by Henry VI was captured by the Yorkists and died in captivity.  His 13-year-old widow almost died having her only child, a boy, Henry, who would succeed to his father's title as Earl of Richmond.  Margaret never had another child.  She lived with her brother-in-law Jasper Tudor at Pembroke Castle, which is where the future Henry VII was born January 8, 1457. 

Margaret treasured the memory of Edmund Tudor, even requesting at one point to be buried beside him should she die.  Little did she know that would be years in coming and fate would find her another more august resting place.  Though the Tudors were technically not considered heirs to the throne, both the Yorkists and Lancastrians feared them, believing that Jasper Tudor might just try it.  From the age of 2, Henry had to be separated from his mother to take refuge in Wales and later in France.  Meanwhile Margaret had to find another husband or risk the King taking over her extensive personal inheritance as well as the Richmond inheritance of her son.  In 1458, while only 15 years old, she married Sir Henry Stafford, heir to the Duke of Buckingham.  He was, like Margaret, a Plantagenet descendant.  Though they never had children, Henry and Margaret enjoyed a close marriage.  Stafford was killed at Barnet in 1471 and Margaret, needing to ingratiate herself and her family with King Edward IV, married Thomas Stanley, the King's Lord High Constable.  Both she and Thomas recognized that this was a marriage of convenience and weren't particularly close.  Meanwhile, Margaret became friends with Elizabeth Woodville and godmother to one of her daughters.

Margaret's marriage proved to be a smart move.  When Edward IV died and Richard III came to the throne, Margaret carried Queen Anne Neville's train at the coronation.  She remained a lady in waiting to the Queen, but Richard was suspect of her closeness to Elizabeth Woodville.  He stripped Margaret of her vast inheritance, and gave the property to her husband.  Margaret and Elizabeth Woodville put their heads together.  With the death of her two sons, Elizabeth's hopes rested on a marriage between Margaret's son Henry Tudor and Elizabeth's daughter, the eldest York princess.  When Henry crossed the Channel to take the English throne in 1485, Margaret's husband Sir Thomas Stanley was summoned by King Richard.  He remained neutral, though he would fortuitously switch sides at Bosworth in time to place the fallen crown on Henry Tudor's head.  Margaret's fortunes had turned again.  She was now the mother of a King of England.

Royal: Edmund, Earl of Rutland, 1443-1460

Game of Thrones season has almost arrived, and with it another bunch of articles online about which character is based on what historical personage from the Wars of the Roses.  Whether Jon Snow or Daenerys Targaryen is Henry VII Tudor, the ultimate victor of the Wars of the Roses, is a subject for someone else's blog.  One thing GOT gets spot on was that that time period in English history was brutal, and it was dangerous to be a member of the wrong side of the royal family.  Edward of Winchester, the Joffrey-esque son of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou wasn't the only teenager killed in battle.  The Yorkists also lost one of their own.

Edmund of York was born in 1443 in Normandy, where his father, Richard, 3rd Duke of York was in command of the English forces busily losing the Hundred Years War.  Edmund was the second of Richard's and Cecily Neville's four sons.  Edward, the future King Edward IV was older, George, later Duke of Clarence and Richard, later Richard III, were younger.  Boys began training as knights very young.  By 1454, Edmund was Earl of March, but that wasn't Edmund's first royal honor.  When the Duke of York became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he appointed 8-year old Edmund as Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1451.  Of course, adults actually performed the duties of the office.  What the young Lord Chancellor probably didn't know was that his father was gathering support among Anglo-Irish barons for an invasion of England, to wrest the crown from the mentally incompetent Henry VI. 

In 1460, Richard of York made his move, with his now 17-year-old son at his side.  On December 30, 1460, his father's forces met those of the Duke of Somerset at Wakefield.  Richard of York was killed in the fighting and Edmund's attendants urged him to escape.  He was captured by John, 9th Baron Clifford, who had lost his own father at the Battle of St. Albans.  Whether Clifford killed Edmund himself or had it done, Edmund's head appeared with that of his father and of his uncle Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, on the gates of York shortly after the battle.  Their bodies were buried at Pontefract Priory, and later re-interred in the family vault at Fotheringhay.  Karma would catch up to Lord Clifford a few months later, at the Battle of Ferrybridge. 

 

Medieval Life: Juries

One of the rights enshrined in America's Bill of Rights is the right to trial by jury in all felony cases.  Today's juries function a lot differently than their English ancestors.  The jury has its roots in Saxon times, when leading members of a town, all male, would gather to investigate instances of crime in their community.  If an offender was caught, it was up to the jury to locate and interview witnesses and determine guilt or innocence.  There were two practices to aid them in this task.  If an offender's guilt was uncertain, he could be made to undergo a trial by ordeal.  A hot piece of metal would be placed in his hand, then the resulting burn bandaged for a period of time, usually three days.  If, at the end of the three days, the wound was healing with infection, the person was innocent.  If the wound was festering, he was guilty and punished accordingly.  Accused people who had some status in their community could also get their friends, neighbors and relatives to swear to their good reputation and innocence.  

One of Henry II's aims as King was to standardize England's judicial process.  Through the Assizes of Clarendon of 1166, he abolished trial by ordeal or combat and put the responsibility on local juries to determine the guilt or innocence through evidence.  Sheriffs were responsible for arresting and holding offenders.  The jury would interview witnesses, view evidence and, if more was needed, undertake an investigation to find more witnesses or convincing evidence of a crime.  Judges were to preside over trials, answer questions of law, announce verdicts and pass sentences.  The sheriff would then see that the sentence was carried out.  Thus, unlike modern juries, were rules prevent jury members from undertaking any investigation on their own, juries in Medieval England were responsible for seeing that their communities were crime free.  Sitting on a jury was considered the responsibility of the more well-to-do members of the community, but it could be a time-consuming and tedious process.  Jury members might hear several cases, much like a modern grand jury, instead of just one. 

Magna Carta and America

In the summer of 1776 delegates from Britain's 13 North American colonies met in Philadelphia to consider the direction their burgeoning rebellion would take.  Would they be satisfied with remaining British subjects, providing that their rights and liberties as they saw them were respected.  Or, did they want full and complete independence.  Full and complete independence was decided upon and a committee of three men, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, were designated to draw up a declaration setting forth the colonies' official reasons for declaring independence, including a list of abuses of British officials, including taxation without representation, billeting troops and the like.  Though a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" read-potential allies among European nations, compelled them to draw up a formal declaration, Jefferson and the others were drawing on centuries of British precedent.

Reel back to 1215, to a meadow along the Thames River not far from Windsor Castle.  King John had bumbled from one disaster to another during his reign.  He'd lost most of the Plantagenet possessions in France and was intent on pursuing with his war with age-old enemy and person arch-rival Phillip II.  His barons, or leading nobles, were in open revolt.  In January, 1215, John had called a counsel at Windsor to demand more money and men and most of them refused to show up, levying their armies for battle against their sovereign.  The only thing that might force some of these men, who were oftentimes as powerful, as wealthy and in command of as many men as the King himself to come to reason was the threat from the Pope to excommunicate everybody if they didn't work out an agreement.  Enter Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury.  He met with the barons, who were at Runnymede not to parley with the King, but to start a war if he didn't give in.  By June 15, 1215, Langton had formalized a list of the barons' worst grievance and mutual demands.  John consented to meet them at Runnymede and accept the charter. 

Over the centuries, Magna Carta has been blown up to be a first blast of the trumpet in forming England into a primitive parliamentary democracy.  No.  Nor was it a means of protecting ancient Saxon liberties, or the rights of the common man.  The barons were addressing their own concerns and it was specifically in regard to grievances they'd experienced under Henry II, Richard I, and John, who had encroached on baronial authority with courts of law, regular parliamentary meetings to demand taxes, and other feudal dues for wars and crusades.  The barons wanted their power back.  Among the demands were a reduction in feudal dues and fees, preservation of justice throughout the realm, trial of barons by barons (trial of your peers), reduction in royal domain land claimed by the king, no new taxes for war without consent of a counsel of the barons, no new royal decrees without consent of a counsel of the barons and preservation of Church authority.

John promised to ratify the agreement in 40 days, which he didn't.  Despite this, the barons considered the document binding.  Several copies were made, of which four survive.  John's son, Henry III, reissued the Magna Carta in 1216, and again in 1217.  The basic list of baronial demands turned baronial rights was reissued several times during successive Plantagenet reigns, give or take a few clauses.  The constant feuding between monarch and barons, later monarch and Parliament, not to mention monarch and members of the Royal Family, who were often barons in their own right, shows just how much attention the Kings of England paid to it.  It would take centuries and much more legal and constitutional reform before England became anything like the realm the Founding Fathers looked to for inspiration in 1776.

So what did the Magna Carta do?  It's important enough in our history that a replica is in the National Archives, stored in the same glass case that holds an original of the Declaration and the Constitution.  Magna Carta Libertatum, the Great Charter of Liberties was a list of demands to form the basis for a peace treaty, not a declaration of anyone's independence, but it did set a precedent in English custom.  By enforcing their rights, the barons were enforcing, at least for themselves, the right of legal process as it stood in England at the time.  Henry II had already started the process of legal writs, by which legal cases were pursued and judgments given.  Magna Carta started the precedent of charters.  Nothing was legal, be it a royal decree or the judgment of court or parliament, unless it was written down and the duties and obligations of all those bound by it were enumerated.

The Founding Fathers would have been aware of this tradition.  It began in 1620, with the Mayflower Compact, which bound both the Pilgrims and those traveling with them as servants, sailors and one mercenary to formally draw up a charter of laws at a future date.  Each colony had a charter, many of them setting forth what by that time were considered basic common law rights such as suffrage, even if partial and gendered, rights to trial by jury and the like.  By 1776, the idea of drawing up a charter to both formulate demands and catalogue reasons for taking a legal and binding action was well-ingrained.  The barons at least gave us that much.

What Is: a Turnspit

In 1487, after Henry VII had successfully put down the revolt and imposture of Lambert Simnel, who claimed to be Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick and a nephew of Edward IV and Richard III.  He was confronted with a young boy, perhaps a teenager, who had been the pawn of others who wanted to put a premature end to the young Tudor dynasty.  In a rare show of mercy, or maybe a case of making the punishment fit the crime, Henry put Simnel to work as a turn-spit in the royal kitchens.

What is a turnspit?

The most common form of meat preparation in Medieval times was roasting over an open flame.  Sometimes whole dressed carcasses, sometimes joints of meat were slowly turned over the flame by means of a lever known as a roasting jack or spit jack, similar to a modern rotisserie, but on a much grander scale.  Someone had to turn the spit or spits, meaning hours of standing or crouching near an open flame, slowly turning the handle of the spit-jack until the meat had cooked.  Medieval kitchens were a preview of Hell, the heat of several large open fireplaces pouring into an open room, along with heat and smoke.  The turn-spit worked always closest to the fire, so they felt the heat, literally.  There were work hazards associated with their job, including heat exhaustion, burns and even falling or otherwise coming into contact with the fire.  It was lowly, dangerous work but boys who proved efficient could hope to secure a better job in the kitchen, or even elsewhere in the household.  Simnel eventually became royal falconer, a skilled and prestigious job indeed.

In time, small dogs were trained to run on wheels which turned the spit-jacks.  A breed of small terrier-type dog was created to deal with this irksome chore, a breed which was no extent.  However, in royal kitchens, humans were used to turn spits.  In Henry VIII's kitchens at Hampton Coiurt, which are still operated as part of living history, turnspits were granted extra rations of beer, an acknowledgment of their need to keep hydrated in an age that didn't always appreciate the benefits of water or have access to clean drinking water.  Modern turn-spits can still be seen, showing just how demanding this work was.

Place: Chateau de Falaise, Falaise, Normandy, France

Most Medieval castles had one keep, or central fortress tower.  Over the years, Chateau de Falaise in Normandy acquired three keeps.  It was important in the history of the Norman and early Plantagenet kings.

The word falaise means cliff in Norman French.  The castle site is on a very steep bluff overlooking a valley in the Calvados Department of Normandy.  The town is famous as the birthplace of William the Conqueror, the first Norman King of England in 1028.  The castle he was born in was later replaced by his son, Henry I, who built the squared-off Norman stone keep on the bluff.  Later, a second keep, the petit donjon, was added alongside the larger structure.  Henry I's heirs, the Plantagenets, kept the castle in their possession.  It was here in 1202 that Arthur, Duke of Brittany, was interned by his uncle, King John, to prevent Arthur from exercising his claim to the Kingdom of England and the Duchy of Normandy.  Later, in 1203, Arthur would be taken to Rouen and there disappear from history.  By 1207, Phillip II had overtaken most of Normandy.  He acquired Chateau de Falaise and began constructing a round tower keep near the other two. 

But the Plantagenets weren't through trying to reconquer their ancestral portions of France and the castle changed hands several times, particularly during the Hundred Years War.  The round tower is often called La Tour Talbot, after one English commander during the Hundred Years War, John Talbot, later Earl of Shrewsbury.  The castle was deserted during the 17th century and survived the French Revolution.  In 1840, it was designated a historical monument by the French Ministry of Culture.  The area suffered bombardment during World War II but the three keeps were unscathed.