Susan Higginbotham's Blog: History Refreshed by Susan HIgginbotham, page 34

Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset: Died May 15, 1464

On May 15, 1464, Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, fought his last battle. Defeated at Hexham and captured immediately afterward, he was beheaded that same day in Hexham's marketplace. He was twenty-eight years old. Despite his relative youth, he left a colorful career behind him when he was buried at Hexham Abbey.

Henry, described as "nearly of full age" on March 1, 1457, was born in early 1436. His parents were Edmund Beaufort, who was later made the Duke of Somerset, and Eleanor Beauchamp,...

Happy Mother's Day! A Letter from Henry VII to Mum

First, let me mention that The Traitor's Wife was picked as the discussion book for May by Shelfari's Medieval Junkies group! I just found this out yesterday. Thanks so much!

Second, over at my Facebook page, I asked my friends to name their favorite mother, and one person named Margaret Beaufort as one of hers. As I was casting about for a Mother's Day post, I thought I'd share this letter by Henry VII to his mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, taken from Original Letters...

Margaret of Anjou's Last Days: Her Dogs and Her Burial

While doing Monday's post, I wandered inadvertently into a rabbit hole of research and spent pretty much the whole day there. Here's the result.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, Louis XI, who as a condition of ransoming Margaret of Anjou from the English had forced her to sign over all of her inheritance rights to him, wrote to Jeanne Chabot, Madame de Montsoreau, to demand that Jeanne give to him all of the dogs that Margaret had given to her. What I didn't realize until I took another look a...

The Comic History of England

Remember a few posts ago, I showed you an old print of the marriage of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou? I knew the style looked vaguely familiar, and that's because it is by John Leech, a well-known illustrator for Punch. John Leech did a whole series of illustrations for a 1847 book called The Comic History of England, written by Gilbert Abbott a Beckett, a humorist who also served as a police magistrate and whose admirers included Charles Dickens. He seems to have been a very pleasant man, w...

So What Did Margaret of Anjou Look Like?

Though contemporaries had a great deal to say about Margaret of Anjou, complimentary and otherwise, scarcely anyone troubled to write about such a mundane detail as her personal appearance. The most detailed description is a secondhand one, which appears in a letter from Raffaelo De Negra to Bianca Maria Visconti, Duchess of Milan, dated October 24, 1458: "The Englishman told me that the queen is a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark and not so beautiful as your Serenity."

Flattery aside...

Website Updates

Yesterday (yes, I should have been writing), I added a couple of pages to my website. One is a page with contemporary quotes about Margaret of Anjou (I'll be adding to it), and the other is a gallery of images of Margaret of Anjou as well as samples of her signatures. If you've visited Margaret's Facebook page, you've seen the images, but for those who aren't on Facebook, now you can see them on my website!

Incidentally, while Margaret is delighted that her fellow maligned monarch, Edward II, ...

Margaret of Anjou's Will

Margaret of Anjou's starkly simple will, executed on August 2, 1482, is a vivid testament to her reduced fortunes at the end of her life. Here's an excerpt from it, as translated into English by J. J. Bagley in his biography Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England:

I, Margaret of Anjou, . . . sound of mind, reason and thought, however weak and feeble of body, make and declare this my last will and testament in the manner following. First I give and recommend my soul to God . . . my body also I...

Speaking of Margaret of Anjou's Marriage . . .

My husband found this print in a rare bookstore when we were visiting Richmond, Virginia, last weekend. There were a whole bunch of prints of English royalty in this vein, but, alas, I could only get this one!

A Happy Anniversary to Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou

On April 22, 1445, fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou married twenty-three-year-old Henry VI at Titchfield Abbey.

Margaret and Henry had been formally betrothed a year before, on May 24, 1444, at Tours, with William de la Pole, then the Earl of Suffolk, standing proxy for the king. Suffolk had arranged the marriage in exchange for a truce with France; modern historians have discredited the story that as part of the negotiations, he secretly promised to cede Maine to the French. Nonetheless, ...

Stolen Crown Giveaway!

Dropping by to let you know that Jess over at Confessions of a Book Hoarder is giving away a copy of The Stolen Crown. Stop by her blog and leave a comment to enter, and good luck! (You have until May 2 to enter.)