Lady Margaret Beaufort

Lady Margaret Beaufort (31 May 1443 to 29 June 1509) was an English noblewoman and mother of King Henry VII whose patronage reshaped English higher education. She founded Christ's College, Cambridge in 1505 and began the refoundation of St John's College, Cambridge, a project her executors completed in 1511 after her death. In 1502 she endowed the Lady Margaret's Professorship of Divinity at Cambridge and funded a comparable professorship at Oxford, along with a free school in Wimborne. She was also an early patron of English printing, commissioning works from William Caxton and his successors, and produced her own translations of religious texts. Her sustained investment in colleges, professorships and free schooling opened a era of Tudor educational patronage that shaped English intellectual life well beyond her own lifetime; Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford, founded centuries later, was named in her honor as the first Oxford college to admit women.