Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville were both strong women who lived their lives during a tumultuous time when survival was key, but looking to the future for others close to you was also extremely important. On opposing sides of The Wars of the Roses they came together at one point to join the Lancasters and the Yorks and eventually became the grandmothers of Henry VIII.
A Weather House. One figure is always going to be in the dark.
We begin our talk with Margaret Beaufort, born the only child of John Beaufort, the first Duke of Somerset in 1443. He “worked” under Henry VI, but had a very dubious reputation of missing the battles in favor of shaking down the locals. His death left an infant Margaret, and her Lancastrian blood open for a wardship. Young Margaret is a catch based solely on her really fab ” luggage”. Of course she gets married off…at 6 or 7. The marriage is never a traditional one. Come on, she is a CHILD , and the law didn’t recognize such a young marriage anyway, A few years later the marriage is dissolved.
So, young Margaret is up for a wardship again, and this time, it was given to the King’s half brothers Jasper and Edmund Tudor. Edmund, 24, became her first “real” husband when she was 12 years old. But within a year, Edmund had been taken prisoner by Yorkist forces and died of the plague while in captivity at Carmarthen, leaving young Margaret a seven-months-pregnant widow. At 13, after an agonizing and body altering delivery, she gives birth to what would be her only child, Henry Tudor…although you may know him more by his later title: King Henry VII.
Pembroke Castle, where Margaret’s son Henry Tudor was born.
Margaret Beaufort, later in life
We discuss her life, how Henry was raised, her third marriage to Henry Stafford, and her fourth marriage to Thomas Stanley. We talk about some of the other challenges she had in life but during all this time she has thought that her one son, Henry, was destined for greatness. The opening came as Richard III is knocking off those in line to the throne. This vile act brought Henry closer and closer to the top of the list, and as history ( and our previous Quaruple T podcast) reports, with a rag tag army scrapped together on the way to battle- Henry Tudor claims the crown. And Margaret? Just call her, M’lady, the King’s Mother.
This is where the stories of Margaret and Elizabeth merge. Through some behind the scenes action, their children- Henry and Elizabeth of York- marry combining the York and Lancaster lines. We would have loved to have been privy to some of the conversations happening at Court during this time. The Mothers- one the Dowager Queen, the other the King’s Mother, and then add in a third woman, now Queen Consort. Talk about your Golden Girls!
At court she has a lot of influence over her son, and we discuss all of the dynamics of this time and the rest of the lives of both Elizabeth, the White Queen (we have a thing for Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen and the Red Queen novels) and Margaret, the Red Queen.
Margaret Beaufort’s tomb, with the spikey fence
Elizabeth Woodville was a bit older than Margaret Beaufort, and was born in 1437. She was the first child of Richard and Jacquetta (why couldn’t that name be passed down? So much more interesting than Elizabeth or Mary…oh, sorry, you know how we love to carry on about that!) Woodville. She was also born into a fairly wealthy family, although we like to think that this one was a marriage made from a love match. Because we are romantic like that. Elizabeth, in addition to family connections, was a very beautiful woman and by about age 15, she was married to her first husband, Sir John Grey. From this marriage she had two sons, Thomas and Richard, and they lived a fairly quiet life for the times until his death in battle nine years later.
The origins of Elizabeth’s second marriage are open to speculation. And oh, you know how much we love that! Did she wait by a tree, holding the hands of her two young sons as an advertisement that she was a boy producer, and wait for Edward IV to ride past? Was there some sort of witchcraft involved? Did she attract his attention and then use her powers as a beautiful and desirable woman to get him to wed her? Whatever the case, Elizabeth and the Take No Crap King were married in secret.
The legend of Elizabeth Woodville meeting her future husband by the side of the road. (As seen by a Victorian artist.)
A portrait of Elizabeth Woodville, classic version
Elizabeth, as the Victorians saw her. Wait – this isn’t Red Riding Hood?
The family that she married into isn’t exactly protective of their own, and not beyond mayhem. We talk about some of that, but really, you will need to research it on your own to get all the deets, there was A LOT of mayhem. Bad, meyhem. But Elizabeth did her queenly duty and began producing children, first up the child who would grow up to be Queen herself, Elizabeth of York. Mama Elizabeth has 10 children in 14 years (who survived infancy) including two sweet young boys who will forever be known as The Princes in the Tower.
Prince Edward and Richard, the Princes in the Tower
What happens to Elizabeth and her children after her husband dies was covered by us in our QuadT podcast. And thinking about it makes us sad, so can we skip on now to the part where Elizabeth and Margaret’s lives intertwine?
Wow, that’s kinda sad too.
Ok, here it is in a nutshell: Mama Elizabeth is looking at two options for her daughter, one Richard III (Scar!) who had her family killed, or the other Henry Tudor who hasn’t really done much since he was hanging out in France most of his life, waiting in the wings. At the Battle of Bosworth Richard III is taken out. Elizabeth and Margaret support the marriage of their children after Henry took the crown. They are all living at Court now, one big dysfuntional family. But, once Elizabeth of York becomes Queen, and Mama Elizabeth has Margaret Beaufort nipping away at her Elizabeth leaves Court and takes up residence at Bermondsey Abbey. And that is pretty much the end of the tale for Elizabeth who lives out her life there. Quietly, again.
But what remained? Most notable a the grandson to both of these women: Henry VIII was the second born son of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York. And what Henry VIII did was legacy making indeed.
Time Travel With The History Chicks
For book recommendations, we again suggest Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen, and The Red Queen. (Recommended on QuadT shownotes, as well). Yes, historical fiction, but will really color in the rainbow of your ideas of Margaret and Elizabeth.
Non-fiction, you say? Philippa Gregory we respond (again).
Websites? The Westminster Abbey website has a lot of interesting information, as well as bios of people that are buried there. (Link will take you to a bio of Margaret Beaufort)
If you want to get a little bit of Tudor history dropped into your twitter feed here are a couple of options:
We do typically talk about the women. History Chicks: It’s not just who we are, but what we discuss. But this time? We needed to talk a bit about The Roosters.
Yes, we will devote the rest of this series to the women, but we have to give you a teeny, tiny Tudor tutorial to set the stage. And that kind of talk requires us to focus on the men.
But before we do all that, can we just carry on..again…about the names? It wasn’t just our imagination! We’ll throw out some stats in the podcast about the repetitiveness of certain names. In this case: Richard and Henry, with a few Edwards thrown in for good measure. Really! It makes looking back so very confusing!
Back to the Tudors. As a family, they only ruled for a historically short period of time- only three generations, 118 years. That’s it. But in that time we had some seriously note worthy rulers! But first, they had to take power. The Wars of the Roses had been going on for a few decades. Unlike the. fairly easy to understand line to the throne of the modern British monarchy,this time period was rather fuzzy. Two houses, Lancaster and York, played a tug of war of sorts back and forth for quite some time. We give you the skinny on the real flags they fought under (the macho red dragon), but time has simplified the images down to two roses: The House of Lancaster represented by the red rose badge, The House of York by the white. Years later Shakespeare would use picking of roses as a choosing of sides analogy, and many years after that the phrase,”Wars of the Roses” was coined in a Victorian novel by Sir Walter Scott. But the real battles were neither cute nor as sweet as a rose.
Perhaps just a convenient twin?
The real deal; the Yorkists' white rose.
The new and improved royal brand identity.
We talk about all of it in the podcast: how the two branches of the same family, fueled by generations of feuding and slaughter, eventually ended up in a battlefield with two men in the lead: Richard III (York) and Henry Tudor. How Henry Tudor whipped himself up a nice little army, and how Richard III had lost some admirers (that happens when you kill them) and didn’t really have the military backing necessary to fight. Richard fell. Hard. Dead. And Henry picked up the crown.
As Henry VII, the first of the Tudor kings, he married Elizabeth of York. This union combined the Houses and (someone, maybe his PR people) developed the the emblem that we associate with the Tudors, the combined white and red roses.
Richard vs. Henry
Don't see this movie. That's WAR of the Roses..not WARS.
In the podcast we give a little bit more detail into these lives and times that are quite complicated; but if we had to sum up all those men in just a few words it would look like this:
Henry VI- Coo Coo
Edward IV-Not taking anyone’s crap
Richard III- Scar, from The Lion King
Henry Tudor/ Henry VII- Grandpa King
Henry VIII- Dirty Rotten Scoundrel
Edward VI-Child Puppet
THEN we get to the women, the first British Queens:
Mary I
Elizabeth I
Henry VII - warrior, businessman, miser.
Henry VIII. Egotist, reformer, serial monogamist (mostly).
Edward VI, who ruled from the age of 9 until 15.
Mary I ruled from the age of 37 to 42.
Elizabeth I ruled from the age of 25 to 69.
And that is where the Tudor Dynasty ends. But not our series! Next time we dive back into the founding mother and grandmother of this family!
Time Travel With The History Chicks
Honestly, we could list and list and list, and where to start? We thought a good idea might be to read some historical fiction to begin. Yes, it’s fabricated stories, but they might give you an image to hang facts on, give you colorful ideas about the times. Who do we like? So many to pick from…how about Phillipa Gregory?
Phillipa Gregory, The White Queen
The Red Queen
Of course, we also like Non-fiction for this background study (of course we do!) Alison Weir!
The Princes in the Tower, Alison Weir
The War of the Roses, Alison Weir
For you visual learners, skip on over to Netflix and stream David Starkey’s: The Monarchy. If you only have a little time, and want to be topic specific watch Season One- Episode Six, then Season Two- Episode One.
Got kids? Or just like your information boiled down to the basics? Project Britain is a website jam packed with information.
And for a website with lots and lots of information (as well as daily Today in Tutor History tweets) The Tudor Tutor
Our subject for this minicast is a woman who let her adventurous life soar! High above France, Sophie Blanchard was the first female professional balloonist and given the title “Aeronaut of the Official Festivals” by Napoleon Bonaparte during his reign.
Sophie Blanchard
Born March 25, 1778, Marie Madeleine-Sophie Armant was, by the few accounts of her, a nervous, petite and unremarkable woman…that is until her marriage to Jean-Pierre Blanchard. Blanchard, a professional balloonist was looking for a new gimmick and found it in his wife. We speculate as to what type of conversation it would take to get a woman like this into a balloon basket, but up she went, the first woman to take to the skies in this new -fangled, and dangerous, contraption. She as the first woman balloon pilot as well as the first professional female balloonist.
Hold on tight, Sophie!
We discuss early ballooning, what type of antics the competition of the Blanchards were up to, and exactly how scary these flights must have been during this time. In 1809 Jean-Pierre died in a ballooning accident and Sophie took over his business.
For as brave and daring as her husband was, he left his business in a financial pickle. Sophie did her best to cut corners and created some new ballooning stunts which she performed all over Europe, sometimes, to disastrous results. We cover those in the podcast, of course. But none were more disastrous than her last flight over the Tivoli Gardens in Paris in 1819. And by “last flight” yeah, we mean last anything. Sophie perished at the age of 41 doing the one thing that she had excelled in before any other woman.
A daylight ascension – 1810
The last show, 1819.
TIME TRAVEL WITH THE HISTORY CHICKS
We discuss an indie, animated documentary about Sophie that is in production. Here is a link to the site about this project. We have not seen it, have not contributed, were not asked to talk about it but are very excited about the premise so we link you up here!
Interested in finding out a little bit more about the history of ballooning?
And we know you like books! Here is one you might enjoy!
For this episode we focus on a woman who embodied sass, drive, creativity, brains, bravery, and heart. She was a journalist, a novelist, an adventurer, an inventor, an advocate for social reform and did it all under a name that wasn’t her own!
The most famous image of Nellie Bly headed off around the world (we think her bag is small, but very cute!)
Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born May 5, 1864 in Cochran’s Mill, PA. Her father, Judge Michael Cochran was a self made man with a lot of power, money and not a lot of forethought: When little Elizabeth (who the family called “Pink”) he died without a will.
SWOOP! (That’s the sound of his children showing up with their hands out.)
Mary Jane was forced to sell their beautiful home, and the family moved to much less lush surroundings. Of course, we will tell you the rest of the tale in the podcast, but let’s just say that the family hit some hard times. Mary Jane had a less than successful marriage, Pink had a less than successful education, and the family saw a gritty side of humanity.
It was during the floundering years that Pink read an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that would change her life. Enraged with the message, she penned an anonymous letter signed, “Lonely Orphan Girl”. The letter led to a job, and a nom de plume based on a Stephen Foster Song, Nelly Bly.
We chat about her days at the Pittsburgh Dispatch and her first adventure in Mexico as a correspondent, the nerve of her move to New York, her wit and schemes that landed her first undercover assignment, “Ten Days in a Mad House”.
Nelly may have been trying to earn a living, stand out and survive in a male dominated world, but her daring adventures led to social reform, too. BONUS!
The professional life of Nellie Bly was legendary and personally, she had some adventures and very quick romance that led to marriage to a man 40 years her senior and a second career as a head of industry.
The latter years subjects of Nellie’s stories were more about social reform than attention-grabbing gimmicks. She rallied for poor women and mothers and was a champion for orphans. She worked tirelessly…really, as in: she worked herself sick. She neglected both her health and her medications until Elizabeth Cochran, Nellie Bly, died at the age of 58 in 1922 from pneumonia.
Nellie shortly before her death
Time Travel With The History Chicks
Both of us began our adventure with Nellie by listening to the Librivox recording of Around The World in 72 Days . Download from itunes or check out their website! You can read that as well as 10 Days in a Madhouse online .
Yes, we know, some of you are more visual learners! There is a PBS American Experience for that!
Is there a Nellie Bly website? Of course there is! Right here It seems aimed at a youngish demographic, but there is a lot of research material on it that is not all juvenile.
Gee, we wonder if a certain podcast/website that we adore and is based in New York ever did anything about Nellie since she lived there? Well of course the Bowery Boys did, here is a piece about the asylum where she got her start. Wait, that sounds bad…
Books! Here is what we felt was the best biography about Nellie that we found:
Nellie Bly: Daredevil Reporter Feminist by Brooke KroegorAnother one we would recommend
A Bio of Nellie Bly by Kathy Emerson
And for the younger crowd (or those of you who like lots of pictures…no shame in that!)
National Geographic, Bylines: Nellie Bly
You know what would be neat? If someone made a musical out of Nellie’s story! Oh wait, they did! If anyone has ever seen this, we would love to hear what you thought! Stunt Girl! The Musical!
For this minicast, we discuss a madam far removed from Madame de Pompadour; another country, another time period, a different social class. However, both used similar tools to gain power and influence; both used brains in addition to body to make their marks, and both had ties to a title that they were not born to. The madam du jour is Annie Chambers, the Queen of the Kansas City Red Light District!
Annie, later in life
Because we live in Kansas City, this woman’s life was physically close to us- but she was brought to our attention by one of our listeners! A sweet man named Donald sent us an email suggesting that we research this woman whose history he had become fascinated with many years ago while on a visit to our fair city. Just a quick search and we were hooked. We can’t tell you enough, your suggestions really do influence who we discuss- usually if you are interested in learning more, so are we!
Born in Kentucky in 1842, she was given the name Leannah Loveall (That’s enough to grab your attention right? A woman of negotiable affections has LOVEALL as her surname?) The family moved to Sullivan, Indiana when Annie was just a young girl so that Dad could operate a hotel.
If Annie’s story were a novel, it would begin on a day that was different, a day when change began. That day was when Abraham Lincoln was campaigning for the 1860 election and he came through Sullivan. Annie, against her father’s desires, rode on horseback in the parade.
She made a decision and marched in that parade for Abraham Lincoln, and it changed her life. We talk about what happened in the podcast- her life as a teacher, and as a woman who married very much like many women did at the time. We talk about her son, his death, and another three days of tragedy that sent her life off on an entirely different path that takes her from sporting houses in Indiana to her own “resort” in Kansas City.
Annie’s neighborhood. Her house was on the corner of 3rd and Wyandotte
Annie’s is a story about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Yes, it is also a story about prostitution and brothels, about the Kansas City Red Light district and “sporting life”. A tale of a Madam With a Heart of Gold who tried to treat her girls right. But she was a smart business woman who was always looking for ways to expand, always looking for the best for both her clients and her girls. She guided the woman who came to her to vastly improved lives, boasting a high success rate for sending her “girls” off to respectable lives and marriage.
Even in death, she used her wealth wisely. Her estate was bequeathed to the City Union Mission, an organization that is still providing support to the people of Kansas City. Of course, we go into all those details in the podcast, name drop again (Carrie Nation! ) And chat about details of her life including a VERY May/December romance and marriage later in her life!
Annie Chambers died on March 24, 1935 and is buried in Kansas City, her grave marked with the last legal married name that she had, Leannah Kearns.
The story of Annie Chambers is a remarkable adventure during a very exciting time in the history of the United States and we are thrilled to be able to share it with you.
And here is recommended reading about this woman and her times from the Kansas City Public Library.
Another really informative stop is this family ancestry blog. After reading about Annie, we will confess that we clicked around the site and read more about the other people and times that are contained in this website – although they are not directly related to the topic at hand. We just get nosey like that sometimes. You never know what you are going to find!
Books : We found a historical fiction novel about Annie that did a decent job of filling in the blanks and bringing her story to life. We got our copy through our local library. (Have we spoken enough about our love of libraries?)
Annie Chambers by Lenore Carroll
Annie’s house was destroyed in 1946, but her legacy lives on in the history of Kansas City and the good work done by those at the City Union Mission. Want to learn what that is? City Union Mission
We know that sometimes we introduce you to women you may not have known. This time it was one of our listeners who introduced us, and we are so very grateful that he did!
As always, music comes courtesy of Music Alley. Visit them at Music.mevio.com
