The Tudor dynasty owed everything to Margaret Beaufort’s machinations

Of the clutch of female powerbrokers who emerged during the civil wars of the English 15th century, the diminutive figure of Margaret Beaufort stands out: first, for her spectacular navigation of the repeated regime changes of the Wars of the Roses; and second, for the act of political opportunism which saw her help her son Henry Tudor to the throne, in the process founding a new dynasty. She herself became the epitome of a dynastic matriarch, a pious, self-assertive figure of immense independent wealth and power.

Margaret was born in 1443 into a great Lancastrian family. Like the ruling king Henry VI, the Beauforts could also trace their lineage back to John of Gaunt — but their descent, through Gaunt’s mistress, meant they were bastards, banned from ever claiming the throne in their own right. Margaret was only a few months old when her father John Duke of Somerset died, leaving her an exceptionally rich heiress — and, consequently, highly vulnerable to the vagaries of wardship, the property market in valuable minor heirs.

Henry VI first bestowed her on his household steward the Duke of Suffolk; then, with Suffolk dead, the king handed her to his half-brother Edmund Tudor with the intention of providing Tudor with landed ‘means’. The way for Tudor to lay his eager hands on these means was to get Margaret pregnant, and he duly did so, with a brutal lack of consideration for her young age. Margaret was a small 13-year-old when, at Pembroke Castle in south west Wales, she gave birth to the boy who would become Henry VII. Irreparably damaged by the birth, she had by this time also lost her husband, who had died of plague.

Meanwhile, the country had started to spiral into civil war: in 1461, a new family, the house of York, seized power, in the shape of Edward IV.