This left a plethora of female heirs in an era uncomfortable with feminine rule. One of the curses of the Tudor family was the tendency of the men to die young: Prince Arthur Henry Fitzroy Edward VI Henry, Earl of Lincoln and Charles, Earl of Lennox all died as young men, and many others in infancy. Margaret Beaufort is only the first of the dominating female figures of the Tudor family whom Ms de Lisle shows as using all the weapons available to women when direct power for a female was rare: money, connections, intrigue and the sheer inability of men to contemplate that women might have more complex lives than their outward show of wifely obedience might suggest. This was achieved first through the clandestine marriage of Owen Tudor to the widowed Queen, Catherine de Valois, then the marriage of their son, Edmund, into a junior member of the Lancastrian branch of the royal family – Margaret Beaufort. This book begins sixty years before and shows the progress of the Tudors from dispossessed gentry of Wales after the failure of Owain Glyndwr’s attempts to throw off English control, to half-brothers of the king, and finally to the Crown. Many histories of the Tudor period start with Henry Tudor, erstwhile Earl of Richmond, springing into life as he lands at Milford in South Wales, ready to capture the Crown.
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