Nathen Amin > Quotes

“In November 1455, the king’s half-brother Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, married his twelve-year-old ward Margaret Beaufort. Presumably keen to secure her lands in his own right, he quickly consummated the marriage.”
― Nathen Amin, The House of Beaufort: The Bastard Line that Captured the Crown

“It would be inaccurate to suggest Joan Beaufort was merely an emotional character, however; she was, after all, a Lancastrian by blood. Her father Gaunt had incurred severe criticism during his life for associating with, and protecting, members of the early Lollard movement, and a similar religious curiosity seems to have existed in the countess, who also chose to associate with figures widely ostracised by the Church, in her case Margery Kempe, a controversial mystic from Lynn in Norfolk. Kempe became notorious for her alleged visions of Christ and travelled extensively throughout England and beyond discussing her spiritual experiences with anyone willing to abide her company. Her life was later recounted in the Book of Margery Kempe, an extraordinary work considered the first English-language autobiography, and the book includes an episode in which Kempe was forced to defend herself against allegations of inappropriate advice she had supposedly dispensed to the countess and her daughter Elizabeth Greystoke.”
― Nathen Amin, The House of Beaufort: The Bastard Line that Captured the Crown

“Those present would have noted the irony that, only a few weeks earlier on 21 October, Henry’s fifty-three-year-old father-in-law Charles VI had also passed away. If the English king’s disease-ravaged body could only have held on a few months longer, even in an incapacitated and bedridden state, he would have achieved his objective of becoming king of both England and France.”
― Nathen Amin, The House of Beaufort: The Bastard Line that Captured the Crown