Of Virtue Rare: Margaret Beaufort, Matriarch of the House of Tudor - PDFDrive.com

great-great-grandson of Edward III, John Beaufort, and his wife, Margaret

Beauchamp. The child was named for her mother and her paternal grandmother,

and the event was delicately inscribed in the family’s illuminated Book of

Hours.

The infant girl was an heiress of both her parents’ fortunes. Margaret

Beauchamp had been the widow of a knight when she married Beaufort, and her

husband’s estates augmented the considerable holdings she already had inherited

from her father. John Beaufort had claimed his title of earl of Somerset and with

it large estates and important responsibility. He was treated well by the present

king, Henry VI, and given positions appropriate to his rank. For years, he had

served England in the seemingly endless Hundred Years’ War with France.

Though his record as a soldier was not startling — he had been taken prisoner in

1421 — the king, in 1443, made him captain general in two strategic areas of

France, Aquitaine and Normandy, then still under English control.

For the first two years of her life, Margaret lived at her mother’s ancestral

home at Bletsoe, Bedfordshire, some sixty miles north of London, with both

parents and a constellation of servants making up her small world. As an infant,

she was swaddled, each limb wrapped separately in bandages of wool strips

about two inches wide. Larger bandages enwrapped her whole body, from toes

to neck, in an effort to ensure that her limbs would grow straight and sturdy. She

was rocked to sleep in a hand-hewn wooden cradle, suckled for brief periods at

frequent intervals to prevent her from gorging herself, bathed carefully and

rubbed with oil of almonds or acorns, and, as their only child, was treated

tenderly by her parents.