The 7th Wife of Henry the 8th: Royal Sagas: Tudors I by Younis Betty

Author:Younis, Betty [Younis, Betty]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Published: 2016-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Each day, she gave thanks and immediately afterwards asked for forgiveness.

Lady Margaret Beaufort had achieved her ends, but her means made her queasy when she thought about them and it was then that she would go to confessional. She had not anticipated the shipwreck and she prayed fervently for the souls who had suffered such an end, but she could not in good faith say that she was sorry about it. This paradox in her thinking was not something to which she was accustomed. In Margaret’s world she always managed to avoid areas of gray. In this way she had put aside the vicious years of warfare that had been necessary for her son Henry to secure the throne. In her mind, they had been brought about by the House of York’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the Tudor claim. Likewise, when the plague had swept through London, or the sweating sickness carried away the innocent by the thousands, she believed with her whole heart that those unfortunates must have had a dark stain upon them from the beginning. Otherwise, how to account for such horror? This system of belief was buoyed by the good fortune which had come the way of her family. Henry was king. Her grandson, young Henry, would surely follow in his footsteps. It was true that Arthur had died young, but his sibling was far better equipped for the throne in many respects. She knew her tribe to be noble, chivalrous, kind, generous and true, so the good fortune which fell to their lot was obviously further reward and proof of their worthiness from God himself.

From triumph to triumph, the Tudor line had risen ever higher in the waning years of the last century, and she took this long train of successes as God’s stamp of approval upon her and her kin. Time would heal her of these feelings of uncertainty about her part in this whole affair. If she had been a different person, she would have recognized them as guilt. But she was Lady Margaret Beaufort, and guilt was for lesser beings, not for her. And so her personal priest, Friar Chauncer, spent many hours hearing her confessionals. But her whispered litany of sins was always the same, and in fact was the same one he had always heard from her – she had eaten too many sweets and worried about gluttony (even though the woman was so thin as to be almost transparent); her alms to the poor had not been adequate she feared; she had listened to the idle gossip of her ladies-in-waiting. Clearly, something was driving Lady Margaret to confessional at a pace usually reserved for thieves and murderers. Equally clearly, no one would ever know what it was. And then the thunderbolt had struck.

It arrived one bright and sunny morning in the grimy hand of a guardsman from the palace gate. She was once again staying at Greenwich, having progressed only recently from Collyweston. Her mid-morning doze was interrupted by angry and insistent voices in the grand hallway.

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