Note 162a — Chapter VIII · THE FIELD OF THE BATTLE OF BOSWORTH. [157a]

“Margaret Beaufort, sole daughter and heiress of John Beaufort, first Duke of Somerset, became Countess of Richmond by her marriage with her first husband, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond; her second husband was Sir Henry Stafford (a son of Humphrey Stafford, first Duke of Buckingham, slain at the battle of Northampton, and a brother of Humphrey Stafford, Earl of Stafford, slain at the first battle of St. Alban’s, and also a brother of John Stafford, Earl of Wiltshire); and her third husband was Thomas Lord Stanley, afterwards Earl of Derby. The Countess of Richmond had only one child, viz., Henry Earl of Richmond, afterwards King Henry VII., by her marriage with Edmund Earl of Richmond (see Pedigree No. 4, chap. ix. p. 201); and she had not any children either by her second or third husband, as if, to use the words of Sandford, in his Genealogical History, p. 319, ‘she had been designed to be the mother of a king onely.’ She lived to see her son Henry VII. and her grandson Henry VIII. successively kings, and died in the first year of the reign of the latter, on the 3rd July, 1509, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.”