The King's Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby.

Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 19 pls. + xxvi + 322 pp. $59-95.

Michael K. Jones is an historian who has long studied the Beaufort family. Malcolm G. Underwood is Archivist of St. John's College, Cambridge. Their collaboration is the most thorough, well-documented account to date of Lady Margaret's remarkably eventful and influential life. These scholars have made extensive use of neglected archival sources to shed new light on Margaret's life and milleu. This rich documentary material becomes central both to fashioning a coherent interpretation of Lady Margaret's complex character and to the skillful reconstruction of the political, religious, and social environments within which she functioned.

Earlier distortions and exaggerations regarding Lady Margaret are gracefully corrected. Margaret can no longer be stereotyped --as a malicious conspirator, selfless dynastic nurturer, holy recluse, or paragon surpassing her sex in learning, foresight, or courage. Jones and Underwood maintain that Margaret must be understood above all as a tough political survivor. They analyze persuasively the influence of early adversity in shaping the seeming paradoxes of her being.

Margaret's sensibilities were substantially formed, they argue, by the checkered history of the Beaufort family, by her childhood experience of the aristocratic marriage market, and by the dangers of civil war. Through these trials, Margaret developed a mature understanding of the powers and rights and responsibilities of her future royal station. She acquired pragmatism, fortitude, a sense of foreboding discernible even at moments of triumph, and a vigilance against future perils, real and imagined. She became fiercely loyal and politically ruthless, a generous patroness and compulsively greedy, spiritually disciplined and assertive of her royal status and authority.

Margaret Beaufort was the great granddaughter of the adultery of John of Gaunt. Her grandfather prospered, but the family's bastardy was never forgotten. Margaret's father died in the year of her birth, disgraced and indebted and perhaps a suicide. By age twelve, she had been married twice, made pregnant by the twenty-six year old Edmund Tudor, and widowed by the plague. Her pregnancy and childbirth, nearly fatal, left her unable to bear other children. Separated from her son for almost all of the first twenty years of his life, she undertook heroic risks to protect his title and property. Margaret attempted an alliance with Richard III, but then conspired against him and joined the failed attempt to rescue the two princes from the Tower. She may have encouraged the duke of Buckingham, her third husband's nephew, to rebel and claim the throne, while secretly planning her own son's succession.

This study suggests that Margaret enjoyed a near-partnership with her son, King Henry VII, her influence rivalling that of Cardinal Morton and Richard Fox. It assesses the significance of Margaret's unprecedented status as a femme sole, which afforded her a useful legal independence, and her unusual vow of chastity taken during her fourth marriage. The authors examine Margaret's relentless acquisition and improvement of property, her standing on the letter of her every feudal right, and her capitalizing on the political misfortunes of others to add to her vast estates at bargain prices.

Margaret created the greatest establishment in England after the king's. She is revealed as a severe and efficient estate administrator and a power in the midlands. Her households at Coldharbour and Collyweston are fully described. Jones and Underwood further explain that was through her concern for the education and careers of the members of her household that Margaret began her great patronage of education. They are consistently original and illuminating regarding her deep and emotional relationship with Bishop John Fisher, her confessor and the catalyst for her founding of St. John's, her personal piety, her dealings with the printers Caxton, de Worde, and Pynson, and conflicts after her death concerning her provision for the refoundation of God's House as Christ's College.

This exceptionally astute biography renders the complex justice its subject deserves. Genealogical tables, an excellent bibliography, and several detailed appendices add to its usefulness.