Therefore a happy Wife this was,
A happy Mother pure,

Thrice happy Child, but Grandam she,
More than Thrice happy sure.”

For more than seven years, during which time she gave birth to four children, the queen’s household observed profound secrecy with respect to her marriage—a fact which honours the fidelity and discretion of its members.

Notwithstanding all these precautions, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who was regent during the minority of Henry VI, suspected the existence of something unusual, and, according to Sir Edward Coke,[6] forthwith framed a statute that “anyone who should dare to marry a queen dowager of these realms without the consent of king and council should be considered an outlaw and a traitor.” Spies were placed about the queen; but they either failed to discover anything unusual, or were bribed to secrecy: for the fact of the clandestine marriage was not really established until shortly before her death. When it became known, there must have been a terrible storm in the royal circle, for Owen was arrested and sent to Newgate, and the queen banished to Bermondsey Abbey,[7] where she died, six months later, on January 1, 1447, of a lingering illness and a broken heart. Katherine de la Pole, Abbess of Barking, took charge of the children, but she did not reveal their existence to Henry VI till some months after the queen’s decease, and then “only because she needed money for their sustenance.”

Meanwhile the London Chronicle, a most valuable contemporary document, thus relates the subsequent misadventures of the unfortunate Owen: “This year [1447] one Owen Twyder, who had followed Henry V to France, broke out of Newgate at searching time, the which Owen had privately married Queen Katherine and had four children by her, unknown to the common people until she was dead and buried.” Owen Tudor was three times imprisoned for marrying the queen, but each time he contrived to baffle the vigilance of his gaolers, only, however, to be promptly recaptured. As years went by, he came to be received into a certain measure of favour by his stepson, the king; and he fought so valiantly for the Lancastrian cause at Northampton, in 1460, that the king made “his well beloved squire Owen Tudyer” [sic] keeper of his parks in Denbigh, Wales.[8]

Later on, at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross, he again unsheathed his Agincourt sword in the Lancastrian cause, but, being taken prisoner by Edward IV, he was beheaded in Hereford market place. Many years later, by a strange and romantic concatenation of events, Edward’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married the fallen Owen’s grandson, Henry VII, thereby becoming the first queen of England of the Tudor line, and the great-grandmother of the Ladies Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey.

There was, it seems, a rugged grandeur about Owen Tudor, which stood him in lieu of gentle accomplishments. The physical power, persistent obstinacy and bluff address of his royal descendants may indeed have been derived from this fine old warrior; and from him surely it was that they inherited the magnificent personal appearance, the lofty stature, the fair complexion and leonine locks, that distinguished them from the dark but equally splendid Plantagenets. May we not also justly conclude that their violent passions were an inheritance transmitted to them by the amorous Katherine and her vicious mother?—passions which played so fateful a part in the tragic stories of Lady Katherine and Lady Mary Grey—the two younger sisters of the unfortunate “Nine-days’ Queen,” Lady Jane Grey.

[To face p. xxviii

MARGARET BEAUFORT, COUNTESS OF RICHMOND