Note 60 — Chapter V

Lady Margaret was of Plantagenet stock, being great-granddaughter to "old John of Gaunt, time honoured Lancaster," and one of the legitimatised family of the Beauforts. Her first husband was the Welsh Earl Edmund Tudor, the father of her only child, Henry of Richmond, who afterwards succeeded to the throne of England as Henry the Seventh. After his death she twice married again; but none of her nuptials were of long continuance, and her true life was that of her widowhood, when she became famed as the Lady Bountiful of the Kingdom: "the mother of both the Universities; the very patroness of all the learned men of England;[60] the loving sister of all virtuous and devout persons; the comforter of all good Religious; the true defendress of all good priests and clerks; the mirror and example of honour to all noble men and women; the common mediatrice for all the common people of this realm.... Everyone that knew her loved her, and everything she said or did became her." Before her death she had endowed Preacherships and Professorships of Divinity (which still remain), both at Oxford and Cambridge, and had seen her first Collegiate Foundation, that of Christ's College, rise into full life. Her second and greater Foundation, St. John's College, she only lived to plan and to endow. When she died, on the 29th of June, 1509 (in the bright dawn of her grandson's reign and marriage—both alike destined to end in so miserable a tragedy), the buildings were not yet commenced.