Highways and Byways in Cambridge and ElyConybeare, John William Edward
History
Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely
Conybeare, John William Edward
Cambridgeshire (England) -- Description and travel; Isle of Ely (England) -- Description and travel
[Footnote 59: The above quotation, as well as that which follows, is
from the sermon preached by Fisher in Westminster Abbey at her burial.
(I have modernised the spelling.)]
[Illustration: _Trinity College Chapel and St. John's Gateway._]
Lady Margaret was of Plantagenet stock, being great-granddaughter to
"old John of Gaunt, time honoured Lancaster," and one of the
legitimatised family of the Beauforts. Her first husband was the Welsh
Earl Edmund Tudor, the father of her only child, Henry of Richmond,
who afterwards succeeded to the throne of England as Henry the
Seventh. After his death she twice married again; but none of her
nuptials were of long continuance, and her true life was that of her
widowhood, when she became famed as the Lady Bountiful of the Kingdom:
"the mother of both the Universities; the very patroness of all the
learned men of England;[60] the loving sister of all virtuous and
devout persons; the comforter of all good Religious; the true
defendress of all good priests and clerks; the mirror and example of
honour to all noble men and women; the common mediatrice for all the
common people of this realm.... Everyone that knew her loved her, and
everything she said or did became her." Before her death she had
endowed Preacherships and Professorships of Divinity (which still
remain), both at Oxford and Cambridge, and had seen her first
Collegiate Foundation, that of Christ's College, rise into full life.
Her second and greater Foundation, St. John's College, she only lived
to plan and to endow. When she died, on the 29th of June, 1509 (in the
bright dawn of her grandson's reign and marriage--both alike destined
to end in so miserable a tragedy), the buildings were not yet
commenced.
[Footnote 60: Amongst these we must count Erasmus; who composed the
epitaph on her tomb.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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