ABSTRACT
Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), Countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Henry VIII, was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt and his third wife (formerly his mistress) Katherine Swynford. The Lady Margaret married Edmund Tudor, Henry VI’s half-brother, in 1455 and bore him one child. Edmund died when she was still very young and she remarried twice, strictly for reasons of political convenience, bearing no more children, and eventually took a vow of chastity (see further Routh 1924; Simon 1982). Her son Henry claimed the throne in 1485 through his Beaufort mother, not through his Tudor father (the Tudors were descended from Catherine de Valois, widow of Henry V, and her second husband Owen Tudor).
