The House of Tudor Read Free Page A

was conditionally released - one of the conditions being that he made no attempt to go to Wales or ‘parts adjacent’. Presumably the authorities were remembering the old Tudor involvement with Glyn Dwr. At last, in November 1439, he was granted a general pardon for all offences committed before October, though there is still no indication as to what those offences had been.
    Owen had spent three years in gaol without trial and a further four months on probation, but from then on he became respectable. The King, ‘moved by special causes’, provided him with a pension of forty pounds a year, paid out of the privy purse ‘by especial favour’ and his name crops up from time to time over the next twenty years in the Calendars of the Close and Patent Rolls as witness to a charter, as sharing in the grant of a holding at Lambeth, as receiving an annuity of a hundred pounds; but it is an entry of 1459 which is the most significant historically, for it was then that Owen ap Meredith ap Tudur seems to have finally become Owen Tudor esquire. Owen himself followed the normal Welsh custom of adding his father’s name to his own - at least he referred to himself as Owen ap Meredith in his petition for letters of denizenship in 1432. In official documents he is variously described as Owen ap Meredith, Owen Meredith, Owen ap Meredith ap Tudur (or Tider) until 1459, when a hurrying clerk wrote him down as Owen Tuder and gave England a Tudor instead of a Meredith dynasty.
    While their father was enduring his mysterious difficulties and gradually winning his way back into polite society, Edmund and Jasper Tudor were growing up. In November 1452 they were created Earls of Richmond and Pembroke respectively and thereafter were granted lands and offices by the Crown. In fact, the gentle, devout, ineffectual Henry VI showed both his half-brothers a remarkable degree of generosity, but never more so than when it came to choosing a wife for the new Earl of Richmond. On 1 November 1455, Edmund Tudor married Margaret Beaufort - an event which took him a giant step up the social ladder and which was to have an incalculable effect on the whole course of English history.
    The Beaufort family was the result of a long-ago liaison between John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and his daughters’ governess, Katherine Swynford, née de Roet. Their four children were indisputably born on the wrong side of the blanket, but after the death of his second wife John of Gaunt had made an honest woman of Katherine, and his Beaufort progeny (so called after the castle in France where they were born) had been legitimized by the Pope, by Letters Patent issued by Richard 11 and, for good measure, by Act of Parliament. The Beauforts grew rich and powerful - Cardinal Beaufort, last survivor of Katherine Swynford’s brood, had governed England with the Duke of Gloucester during Henry VI’s minority - and after the King and his heirs they represented the ruling family of Lancaster.
    The bestowal of Margaret Beaufort, a great-great-granddaughter of Edward in, was a matter of State and what prompted the King to grant first the wardship and then the marriage of this important heiress of the blood royal to such a junior member of the peerage, son of an obscure Welsh esquire but with possibly complicating royal connections, is yet another mystery. Perhaps, at a time of increasing political instability, Henry simply felt that the Tudors at least could be trusted to remain loyal Lancastrians. If so, he was to be proved right.
    Edmund’s marriage coincided with the outbreak of that long-drawn-out dynastic struggle among the all too numerous descendants of Edward III, conveniently known as the Wars of the Roses. The roots of the quarrel went back to the coup d’'état of 1399, when Henry Bolingbroke had wrested the crown from his cousin Richard, and, like most family quarrels, it became progressively more bitter and more complicated with the passage of time.
    Edmund Tudor,