In 1552, John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland suggested a marriage of his youngest son Guildford to Margaret, yet, although the proposal had the warm support of Edward VI, her father was against it.

[2] A year later, in June 1553, the Imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfve reported that Northumberland's brother Andrew Dudley would marry Margaret.

[4] She joined Mary's court and married Henry Stanley, 4th Earl of Derby on 7 February 1555 in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall Palace.

[5] In 1567, Lady Le Strange petitioned the Queen's advisor, William Cecil, for a financial settlement from her estranged husband.

She claimed that the accused sorcerer, William Randall, was in fact her physician, who was staying with her because he could cure "sickness and weakness in my body".

She wrote repeatedly to the queen complaining that she was in a "black dungeon of sorrow and despair....overwhelmed with heaviness through the loss of your majesty's favour and gracious countenance."

The coat of arms in the top left corner, which may have been added later, are the impaled arms (those of a husband and wife) of Henry Clifford, 2nd Earl of Cumberland, and his wife Lady Eleanor, daughter of Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, and Mary Tudor, Dowager Queen of France.

Hence the later addition and erroneous use of the arms here suggests that the identity of the portrait was already unclear only two or three generations after it was painted, a situation by no means unusual amid the frequent early deaths, multiple marriages, and shifting alliances and fortunes of the most powerful families of the Tudor era.