Demon’s brood

Demon’s brood is an epithet for the Plantagenets that Margaret Pole reclaims as a language of family vitality and political defiance. Its force comes from a central contradiction: the family’s many branches and close ties make it resilient, but also make its members appear threatening to the Tudor rulers whose authority they serve and contest.

A name for abundance

Margaret links the phrase to the Plantagenet name and its supposed botanical origin, Planta genista, the broom shrub. The plant flowers widely, grows in unlikely soil, and returns after being burned; in her account, even an attempt to cut down one Plantagenet leaves another to spring up. The image makes family continuity feel like a force of nature rather than a succession of isolated individuals.

She extends the metaphor through fertility and lineage. The Plantagenets, she says, seem to have heirs in abundance, and traces their line to Fulk of Anjou. Against that expansive family stands the small Tudor line: at the moment she reflects on the succession, Henry VIII is its only son and heir, and the family has few alternatives if he is lost. The contrast gives the epithet its political charge. What sounds like an accusation of excessive breeding becomes, from Margaret’s perspective, a measure of the dynasty’s capacity to survive.

A family network, and its double meaning

The family’s strength is not only numerical. Margaret describes Plantagenet cousins and kinsmen as closely joined through blood and marriage, spread across England and connected to influential people at court and beyond. Edmund de la Pole, her cousin and an ornament of the court, embodies one version of that presence: a Plantagenet serving Henry VII, apparently demonstrating that York and Tudor could coexist as a royal family. Margaret presents him as a signal of accommodation, not revolt.

The same kinship ties acquire a more dangerous meaning when suspicion replaces trust. Margaret explains that marriages within the family preserve wealth, concentrate power, and join lands; looked at fearfully, those arrangements can make relatives appear to be a faction or conspiracy. The phrase therefore gathers both sides of dynastic kinship: it names a source of solidarity and influence, while exposing how readily that solidarity can be interpreted as a political threat.

Defiance as an inheritance

For Margaret, the epithet also names a disposition. When Margaret Beaufort threatens her over what she should say about Katherine of Aragon, Margaret’s fear gives way to defiance. She associates the House of York with ancestors who pursued their own wills even when danger followed, and describes approaching danger rather than retreating from it. Demon’s brood is thus not simply a label for a large family; it becomes a claim about the stubborn will its members inherit.

That claim returns when Margaret’s sons propose acting against Henry VIII’s treatment of the queen and Princess Mary. Montague presents their family as the White Rose of York and as England’s natural rulers, joined in the duty to oppose the king’s course. Margaret is reluctant, but her loyalty to Katherine and responsibility for Mary lead her to accept that her family’s inherited position carries an obligation to act. The earlier image of a lineage that cannot be uprooted now has a political counterpart: relatives bound together by blood and marriage can also act together.

The epithet’s political irony

The phrase holds pride and danger in the same image. A family that appears everywhere, replenishes itself, and preserves its influence through intermarriage can represent continuity and collective strength to its own members. To a threatened ruling house, those same qualities can look like an organized rival. Margaret’s language refuses the reduction of her family to a menace, but it does not erase the risk: the ties she describes as natural bonds and shared duty can be redescribed as conspiracy. Demon’s brood is therefore both a reclaimed name and an index of the suspicion surrounding Plantagenet power.