Owen Tudor
Owen ap Meredydd, commonly called Owen Tudor, a squire who appears at the court of the infant King Henry VI,
was born on or around 1400. By all accounts he was a goodly young man: the chroniclers dwell upon the beauty which attracted
the Queen Mother. She gave the handsome squire a post in her household. About 1428 or 1429, it
must have been common knowledge that the presumptuous Welshman and the daughter of Charles VI of France
were living as man and wife. There is no direct evidence for their marriage. An act had but lately been passed for making it a
grave offence to marry with the Queen Dowager without the royal consent: this act is said to have been afterwards cut out from
the statute book. Richard III denounced his rival Richmond as the son of a
bastard, but it must be remembered that Richard was ready to foul the memory of his own mother in order to say the same of the
young Edward V. But no one yet has found time or place of Owen Tudor's marriage with
Catherine of France.
Five children were born to them, the sons being Edmund and Jasper
and another son who became a monk. In 1436, a date which suggests that Bedford had been Owen's protector,
the influence of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was uppermost. In that year the queen dowager was
received within Bermondsey Abbey, where she died in the following January. Her children were taken from her, and Owen Tudor
"the which dwelled with the said queen" was ordered to come into the king's presence. He would not
obey without a safe conduct. When he had the safe conduct sent him he came up from Daventry and went at once to
sanctuary at Westminster, whence even the temptations of the tavern would not draw him.
Allowed to go back to Wales, he was retaken and lodged in Newgate. He broke prison, with his chaplain and his man, the sheriffs
of London having a pardon in 1438 for the escape from gaol of "Owen ap Tuder, esquire," and he returned to his native Wales.
When Henry VI came of full age he made some provision for his step-father, who took the red rose and
fought manfully for it. But Mortimer's Cross was his last battle (Feb. 4, 1460/1). He fell into
the hands of the Yorkists, who beheaded him in Hereford marketplace and set up his head on the market cross. Thither, they say,
came a mad woman who combed the hair and washed the face of this lover of a queen, setting lighted wax torches round about it.
His eldest son Edmund of Hadham, born about 1430 at Hadham in Hertfordshire, one of his mother's
manors, was brought up with his brothers by the abbess of Barking until he was about ten years old. The King,
their half-brother, then took them into his charge. Edmund was a knight in 1449 and in 1453 he was summoned as Earl of Richmond,
his patent, dated the 6th of March 1452/3, giving him precedence next to the dukes. He was declared of legitimate birth, and in
1455 the royal favour found him a wife in the Lady Margaret Beaufort, daughter of
John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. But Edmund died the next year, and his only child, afterwards
Henry VII, was born on the 28th of January 1456/7, three months after his death.
Excerpted from:
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed., vol. XXVII.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910. 363.
Other Local Resources:
- Wars of the Roses
- House of Lancaster
- Queen Catherine of Valois
- King Henry VI
- Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond
- Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke
- King Edward IV
- King Richard III
- King Henry VII
- Battle of Mortimer's Cross
Books for further study:
Hicks, Michael. The Wars of the Roses 1455-1485.
New York: Routledge, 2003.
Weir, Alison. The Wars of the Roses.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.
Owen Tudor on the Web:
- Biography - Royal Berkshire History
- Owen Tudor and Catherine of Valois - Lara Eakins
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