What Did Margaret Beaufort Look Like? The Face of a Kingmaker

You may never have heard of Margaret Beaufort. A woman of astonishing intelligence and foresight, she has only recently begun to get proper credit as the mastermind behind several watershed moments in English history.

But what now looks like the inevitability of history was once just a thirteen-year-old girl: widowed, pregnant, and facing a labor that would nearly kill her. One fragile life, born in the cold January of 1457, would change England forever.

Below: a short history of that life in six facts, and then a deep dive into her face – the portraits, the forgery, the death mask, and the facial reconstructions at the end.

If you’d rather watch this article in video format, check out her 15 minute history & facial reconstructios video here.

Six Facts About Margaret Beaufort

1. Her bloodline was both her fortune and her curse

Margaret was born on 31 May 1443 at Bletsoe Castle in Bedfordshire, the only child of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. She was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, one of the sons of Edward III — but through the Beaufort line, born of Gaunt’s long affair with Katherine Swynford and legitimised only after the fact. She was of royal descent with an asterisk permanently attached, and that asterisk shaped everything that happened to her.

Her father died in May 1444, days before her first birthday. He had fallen catastrophically from the favour of Henry VI after a disastrous campaign in France, and it was widely believed at the time that he took his own life rather than face his disgrace.

With no siblings, that left the infant Margaret one of the wealthiest heiresses in England. And in the fifteenth century, that meant she was treated as nothing more than a valuable bargaining chip.

2. She was legally married by the age of three, and a widowed mother by thirteen

Margaret stayed in her mother’s household, but the king granted the wardship of her estate – the lands, the income, the marriage rights – to William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk. Suffolk moved fast, betrothing her to his own son, John de la Pole, and the two were legally married before she was three.

The union was dissolved in early 1453 after Suffolk’s fall from power, and Margaret herself never counted it among her marriages. She always named a different man as her first husband.

Henry VI shifted her wardship to his own Tudor half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper. At nine, Margaret was required to give her consent to marry Edmund. At twelve, in November 1455, the marriage took place. Edmund was roughly twice her age.

It is genuinely hard to read about what befell this child before she turned thirteen. With no father and no brothers to protect her in a deeply patriarchal world, she was a sitting duck for anyone who wanted what she had.

We have no record of how Edmund treated her, and no record whatsoever of her own thoughts on any of it. He may well have been a considerate husband by the standards of his time. He was not, however, considerate enough to wait until she was physically mature before getting her pregnant.

3. The birth that made the Tudor dynasty nearly ended it

As England slid into the civil wars we now call the Wars of the Roses, Edmund was captured by Yorkist forces and imprisoned at Carmarthen, where he died of plague in November 1456. Margaret was alone again, and seven months pregnant.

She took refuge at Pembroke Castle with her brother-in-law Jasper Tudor, and there, on 28 January 1457, she endured a grueling labour. Her confessor, John Fisher, later marvelled that a healthy child could be born to someone “of such little personage.” The birth nearly claimed both mother and baby, and is widely believed to have left her permanently unable to bear children again.

The healthy baby boy was named Henry Tudor. She never had another child, and from that moment her life had a single organizing purpose.

4. She and Elizabeth Woodville were allies, not enemies

Deeply religious, Margaret considered her son a gift from God. But a gift who was also a Lancastrian claimant to the throne. Within a year she had married Sir Henry Stafford, partly in an effort to secure her son’s position.

As the Yorkists took the crown, young Henry Tudor became a political liability and then a target. At fourteen he fled into exile on the Continent, while his mother stayed inside England, corresponding, plotting, financing, and waiting. Stafford died in October 1471 of wounds suffered at the Battle of Barnet, leaving Margaret a widow again at twenty-eight. Within a year she had married Thomas, Lord Stanley — a match that returned her to favour and put her at the royal court, in a near-perfect position to act as an inside agent.

When Edward IV died and his brother took the throne as Richard III in 1483, Margaret knew it could be her chance to strike. It’s here that she struck up the alliance most dramatisations get completely wrong: not with an enemy, but with the former Yorkist queen, Elizabeth Woodville. Popular fiction loves to paint the two women as bitter rivals. In reality they shared an enemy in Richard, and Elizabeth had come to believe that Henry Tudor’s accession was the best available route to peace.

Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret’s unlikely co-conspirator against Richard III.

The two women passed messages through their mutual physician, Lewis Caerleon, who could visit both households without arousing suspicion- and together they planned something extraordinary.

What became known as Buckingham’s Rebellion was a coordinated, multi-pronged rising against Richard, with forces gathering in England, Wales and Brittany. Storms in the Channel scattered Henry’s fleet and the rising collapsed. The Duke of Buckingham was its public face and took the fall, executed after capture. Margaret’s involvement was discovered. Richard stripped her of her titles and estates by act of attainder, handed the lands to her husband for his lifetime to keep him loyal, and confined her to house arrest specifically to cut off her communication with her son.

She found a way anyway. Working with Elizabeth Woodville, she developed the plan that became a huge part of Henry’s claim: he would marry Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, uniting the two warring houses in a single marriage. That promise drew enough support from disaffected Yorkists and surviving Lancastrians to put an army behind him.

In August 1485 Henry Tudor landed in Wales and marched to meet Richard at Bosworth Field. The battle hinged on the Stanleys — Margaret’s husband and his brother — who held their forces back until the decisive moment and then threw their weight behind Henry. Richard III was killed. Margaret Beaufort’s son was King of England, and the frightened thirteen-year-old widow was now the most powerful woman in the kingdom.

5. She signed her name “Margaret R” — and had herself made a legal individual

“Margaret R” – an ambiguity she almost certainly intended.

After Bosworth she began signing herself Margaret R, the “R” standing ambiguously for Richmond or, far more provocatively, Regina.

Styled “My Lady the King’s Mother,” she had visible trouble ceding precedence to her new daughter-in-law. She wore robes of the same quality as Queen Elizabeth of York and reportedly walked only half a pace behind her. How the two women actually felt about each other is unknowable; as Elizabeth’s biographer Amy Licence has observed, the only person who knew never wrote it down.

More importantly, Henry VII’s first parliament in 1485 reversed her attainder and declared her femme sole — a legal status granting her the right to hold, manage and litigate over property entirely in her own name, independent of a husband. She was still married to Thomas Stanley and would be for another nineteen years. For a fifteenth-century married woman, this was almost unheard of.

In 1499 she took a formal vow of chastity while still married to Stanley — a remarkable assertion of control from a woman who had been passed from marriage to marriage since childhood.

6. She built an educational empire that still runs today

Margaret became one of the greatest patrons of learning in English history. She supported England’s earliest printers, William Caxton and his successor Wynkyn de Worde, and translated devotional works into English herself. She endowed professorships of divinity at both Oxford and Cambridge — the Lady Margaret’s Professorships, still in existence. She refounded God’s House at Cambridge as Christ’s College in 1505, and left provision for St John’s College, founded by her executors in 1511 under the direction of John Fisher.

She remained an institution at court for the whole of her son’s twenty-four-year reign, outlived him, and lived just long enough to see her grandson crowned Henry VIII. On 29 June 1509, aged sixty-six, she died in the abbot’s lodgings at Westminster. Fisher, preaching at her month’s mind, said that everyone who knew her had loved her.

She was buried a few steps from the son she had spent her entire life fighting for.

Wewyck’s portrait, painted just after Margaret’s death and identified in 2019.

The Portraits: What Did Margaret Beaufort Actually Look Like?

Search for Margaret Beaufort online and you will meet the same woman over and over again: elderly, austere, hands clasped, kneeling at prayer in a white wimple and dark mantle. The National Portrait Gallery holds around twenty images associated with her, and almost every one shows her as an aged widow dressed very nearly as a nun.

There is no reliable portrait of Margaret as a young woman. The girl who gave birth to a future king at thirteen simply does not survive on panel — and may never have been painted at all.

The Forgery

For a long time, the great hope was a panel now in the National Portrait Gallery showing a young woman in a 1490s gable hood, with the Beaufort arms displayed beside her. If genuine, it would have been a treasure.

It was doubted almost from the moment the Gallery first saw it. When it was shown to George Scharf, the NPG’s first director, he was unconvinced — he sketched it on the back of the owner’s letter and wrote it off as a fabrication. The panel was resold, and by the time it resurfaced at auction in 1908 Scharf’s verdict had been forgotten. The Gallery bought it as a portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort.

Scharf’s successor-but-one, Sir Charles Holmes, wrote a sceptical report in January 1911, noting that the image was painted on very fine linen laid onto a modern panel, and that the coat of arms was a later addition. His suspicions were confirmed in 1939, when two x-ray photographs revealed a completely different image underneath — a woman’s head thought to come from an early sixteenth-century Flemish altarpiece. Someone in the nineteenth or early twentieth century had overpainted it with a period hood and Margaret’s maiden arms, almost certainly to make a sale.

Copies of the fake exist at Christ’s College, Cambridge and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, which is how thoroughly it fooled people.

Wewyck’s portrait, identified in 2019

Fortunately, we do have two reliable likenesses — and one of them is the subject of a genuinely thrilling piece of recent scholarship.

A large painting had hung for centuries in the Master’s Lodge at St John’s College, Cambridge — one of the colleges Margaret founded — showing an older woman kneeling at a prayer desk in a richly furnished closet. In April 2019, Dr Andrew Chen of Cambridge and Dr Charlotte Bolland of the National Portrait Gallery published their findings in The Burlington Magazine. Documents in the college archives recorded a portrait of Lady Margaret by the painter Meynnart Wewyck arriving at St John’s; dendrochronology dated the oak panel to trees felled after 1487 and 1489, with the panel itself constructed before 1521. The two strands of evidence locked together.

Wewyck was a Netherlandish painter who had been Henry VII’s own preferred artist, active at the English court from around 1502. Until 2019 not a single surviving work could be securely attributed to him. This is now the anchor of his entire body of work.

It was commissioned by Bishop John Fisher, Margaret’s confessor and executor, around 1510–12 — immediately after her death. At over 180 cm tall and 122 cm wide, it is now believed to be the earliest large-scale portrait of an English woman in existence, and one of the earliest large-scale portraits of any single individual in Britain.

How do you paint a woman a year after she has died? Two answers, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. Wewyck was working at the English court from 1502, so he may well have seen Margaret in life. And, like her son Henry VII, Margaret is believed to have had a death mask taken after embalming — a mask that would have served both this painting and her tomb effigy.

The portrait has since undergone a monumental conservation project at the Hamilton Kerr Institute — over 1,500 hours of work stripping away centuries of varnish and later overpaint — and now hangs as a centrepiece of the National Portrait Gallery’s Tudor galleries in London. Every earlier “standard” image of Margaret, including the widely reproduced NPG 551, appears to descend from this composition.

The tomb effigy: her face in three dimensions

The second reliable likeness is sculptural. Margaret’s tomb in the south aisle of the Henry VII Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey was contracted in November 1511 and executed by the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano — the same artist responsible for the tombs of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.

The gilt-bronze effigy shows her in old age in widow’s dress, hood and long mantle, her head resting on two pillows worked with the Beaufort portcullis and the Tudor rose, with the Beaufort yale (a mythical beast with swivel horns, now lost) at her feet. Westminster Abbey’s own account notes that the face was probably modelled on a death mask, and that the effigy was produced using a wax-cast technique that allowed extremely fine detail.

And the detail is the point. The hands are raised in prayer, delicate, and unmistakably wrinkled — a wonderfully lifelike inclusion by the artist, and not the sort of thing a sculptor invents. Traces of original colour survive on the hands, wimple and the trimming of her mantle. The face is thin, with high cheekbones, drawn cheeks and a strong hooked nose.

Her Coloring

Skin tone we can take from the Wewyck portrait. Hair and eyes are far harder. Almost every image shows her in a widow’s hood and wimple, so there is essentially no hair visible anywhere in her iconography. The portrait gives us eyes that read as either dark blue or brown depending on the light and the state of the varnish, beneath delicately arching brown eyebrows. Her son Henry VII, for what it’s worth, was recorded as red-haired with grey/blue eyes.

The Reconstructions

So here’s what I’ve done. Working from Torrigiano’s death-mask-derived effigy, I’ve built the Margaret Beaufort who died at sixty-six – the face we can actually evidence.

Then, I’ve built an educated-guess version of a younger Margaret, regressing the bone structure the effigy gives us. This second one is an interpretation, and I want to be clear about that. The first is as close to her real face as the surviving evidence allows.

Let’s see the face of this extraordinary woman.