28th November 2016
Today in 1489 Henry VII and Elizabeth of York had their first daughter – Margaret Tudor. She would grow up to be Queen Regent of Scotland, wife of James IV (the last monarch in Britain to die in battle) and mother of James V. Her parents' and her grandmother Margaret Beaufort's dynastic hopes rested on her brother Arthur, and later on her younger brother Henry VIII, but it is her descendants who have held the English throne since 1603. The Tudor family was a difficult one to be born into; my book Three Sisters, Three Queens tells the story of Margaret's life of personal and political struggle. This quote from her birth is from The White Princess, my novel about her mother Elizabeth:
Henry is not going to waste money on celebrating the birth of a princess. He would have had a public holiday and wine flowing in the public fountains for another boy.
‘I’m not disappointed in a girl,’ he assures me as he meets me in the nursery and I find him with the precious baby in his arms. ‘We need another boy, of course, but she is the prettiest daintiest little girl that was ever born.’
I stand at his shoulder and look into her face. She is like a little rosebud, like a petal, hands like little starfish and fingernails like the tiniest shells ever washed up by a tide.
‘Margaret for my mother,’ Henry says, kissing her white-capped little head.
My cousin Maggie steps forwards to take the baby from us. ‘Margaret for you,’ I whisper to her.
Image: Miniature of Queen Margaret at prayer on f. 243v of the Prayer Book of James IV of Scotland, c.1503, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 1897 Han (http://search.obvsg.at/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?institution=ONB&vid=ONB&onCampus=false&lang=ger&docId=ONB_aleph_onb06000148511, detail from scan 500). The book was probably made for Margaret's marriage to James IV, and she later gave it to her sister Mary as a wedding present.