She was from the House of Lancaster and her son Henry’s lands were confiscated by Yorkist King Edward IV when he became King of England in 1461 (and who awarded Yorkist Stamford Royal Charters of Incorporation in 14). Margaret was, however, according to a number of historians, driven by her love for her son rather than a personal desire for power and became an active participant in plotting and manipulating the unsettled political landscape to secure his future. Such a series of traumatic experiences at a young age must have had an impact. She married Henry Stafford in 1458, when she was 14, a rich heiress whose estates provided the couple’s income. Her next marriage was arranged once by a powerful man - her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor. Bishop John Fisher, speaking after her death, deemed it a miracle that a baby could be born of so little a personage. Terrifying enough, but the birth of her son was also extremely difficult and may have caused Margaret physical injury. Just one year into her first official marriage, Edmund was captured by Yorkist forces in one of the early skirmishes of The Wars of the Roses, and died of the plague. She became a mother as both a child and a widow. Margaret herself never recognised this marriage, which was dissolved in 1453 when Henry VI chose her as a bride for his half-brother, Edmund Tudor and two years later, when she was 12, she married her 24-year-old fiancé. And gave birth to the future King, Henry Tudor when she was just 13. She was then betrothed and married as a young child to John de la Pole, her guardian’s son, no doubt with her inheritance in mind. She had no agency or ability to decide where she lived or whom she married. She was made the ward of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk by King Henry VI after John Beaufort died (possibly by suicide), when Margaret was an infant. Margaret’s young life was full of trauma and her destiny was decided by her male relatives. But how did she go from being the granddaughter of the illegitimate son of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster and his mistress Katherine Swynford, a child who experienced death, birth and marriage, controlled by powerful men, to being the mother of the king, financially independent, owning all her lands in her own name, and administering half of England from her Collyweston palace? She acquired the property at Collyweston in 1487, and it became one of the few Royal and early Tudor Palaces beyond London. It was the home of Margaret Beaufort, born on or 1443 (there is some debate), mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Henry VIII.
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