Margaret of Anjou

Margaret was born on March 23, 1430, at Pont-à-Mousson in the duchy of Lorraine, a daughter of René of Anjou and Isabella, duchess of Lorraine in her own right ^[1]. Her father held an extravagant collection of titles, including duke of Anjou and titular king of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem, though his actual power rarely matched his claims. René spent years imprisoned by the duke of Burgundy after a failed campaign for Lorraine, and later lost his Italian kingdom to Alfonso of Aragon, so Margaret grew up in a household rich in ceremony and thin in cash ^[2].

Her childhood passed between Lorraine, the Angevin castles of the Loire valley, and the household of her grandmother Yolande of Aragon, one of the sharpest political operators in France and a key backer of Charles VII during the darkest years of the Hundred Years' War ^[1]. Historians have often pointed to Yolande's example when explaining Margaret's later confidence in wielding power. The girl received an education suited to a princess of a cultivated court: her father was a poet and patron of tournaments, and the Angevin milieu prized literature, music, and chivalric display ^[2].

Margaret of Anjou facts often begin with this paradox: she was a princess of grand lineage but modest fortune, valuable on the marriage market chiefly for her family's closeness to the French crown. Her aunt Marie of Anjou was married to Charles VII, which placed Margaret one step from the king of France ^[1].

By the early 1440s England's long war in France was going badly, and the government of the young Henry VI sought a truce. Negotiations at Tours in 1444, led on the English side by William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, produced a two-year truce sealed by Margaret's betrothal to Henry ^[3]. The match brought England no dowry to speak of, and a secret undertaking to surrender Maine to the French later became a source of lasting anger in England. Margaret was married by proxy at Nancy in March 1445, crossed to England, and wed Henry in person at Titchfield Abbey on April 23, 1445. She was crowned at Westminster Abbey on May 30, 1445, aged fifteen ^[3].

The new queen adapted quickly. She learned English, built a substantial household, and cultivated a network of servants and allies, many linked to Suffolk's circle ^[4]. Her surviving letters show her intervening energetically in marriages, lawsuits, and appointments on behalf of her dependants, standard behavior for a medieval queen but pursued with unusual persistence ^[4]. In 1448 she founded Queens' College, Cambridge, giving her patronage a lasting institutional monument ^[5].

The political ground under her was unstable. The surrender of Maine in 1448, followed by the collapse of English Normandy in 1449 and 1450, destroyed Suffolk, who was murdered at sea after his impeachment, and triggered Jack Cade's revolt in Kent ^[3]. Margaret, associated in the public mind with the unpopular French peace, absorbed some of that resentment. Any Margaret of Anjou biography has to reckon with the fact that her position in England was contested almost from the start.

In August 1453 Henry VI suffered a complete mental breakdown, leaving him unresponsive for over a year. Two months later, on October 13, 1453, Margaret gave birth to her only child, Edward of Westminster, prince of Wales ^[3]. With the king incapacitated, the question of who should govern set Margaret against Richard, duke of York, the wealthiest magnate in England and, until Edward's birth, heir presumptive to the throne. Early in 1454 Margaret put forward a bill claiming the regency for herself, an extraordinary demand for a queen consort in England, but the lords chose York as protector instead ^[4].

Henry's recovery at the end of 1454 ended York's protectorate, and the rivalry turned violent at the first battle of St Albans in May 1455, where York's forces killed Margaret's ally Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset ^[3]. From this point Margaret emerged as the effective leader of the Lancastrian party. She moved the court to the midlands, centered on Coventry and the prince's earldom of Chester, and built a power base there while distributing her son's livery of the swan to loyal gentry ^[4].

Open war resumed in 1459. Lancastrian fortunes swung wildly: victory at Ludford Bridge, disaster at Northampton in July 1460, where Henry was captured. When York then claimed the throne outright, parliament's compromise, the Act of Accord, disinherited Prince Edward in York's favor. Margaret refused to accept it. She raised an army in the north, and at Wakefield on December 30, 1460, her forces destroyed the Yorkists and killed York himself ^[3]. Weeks later she won the second battle of St Albans and recovered her husband, but London closed its gates to her northern army, whose reputation for plunder ran before it. The chance slipped away. On March 29, 1461, York's son Edward crushed the Lancastrians at Towton, the bloodiest battle fought on English soil, and took the throne as Edward IV ^[3].

Margaret fled with Henry and their son to Scotland, buying support from the Scottish crown with the surrender of Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1461 ^[3]. For the next two years she kept resistance alive in Northumberland, sailing to France to bargain with Louis XI, who lent limited help in exchange for a pledge of Calais. The northern castles of Alnwick, Bamburgh, and Dunstanburgh changed hands repeatedly before the Lancastrian cause in England collapsed at Hexham in 1464. Henry was eventually captured and lodged in the Tower of London.

Margaret settled with her son and a small threadbare court at Koeur-la-Petite in the duchy of Bar, on a pension from her father ^[2]. Chief Justice Sir John Fortescue, in exile with her, tutored the prince and wrote works on English law and governance during these years ^[4]. She waited for Yorkist unity to crack, and in 1470 it did. Edward IV's greatest supporter, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, broke with him, and Louis XI brokered an alliance between Warwick and Margaret that required her to forgive the man who had helped destroy her house. Sealed by the marriage of Prince Edward to Warwick's daughter Anne Neville, the pact restored Henry VI to the throne in October 1470 ^[3].

The restoration lasted six months. Margaret and her son landed at Weymouth on April 14, 1471, the very day Edward IV killed Warwick at Barnet. She marched west to join Welsh reinforcements, but Edward intercepted her at Tewkesbury on May 4, 1471. The Lancastrian army was routed and Prince Edward, aged seventeen, was killed ^[3]. Henry VI died in the Tower within weeks, almost certainly murdered. In one battle Margaret lost her son, her cause, and any reason to fight on.

Captured after Tewkesbury, Margaret was paraded through London in Edward IV's triumph and then held for four years, first in the Tower and later in the more comfortable custody of her old friend Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk, at Wallingford ^[4]. In 1475, as part of the Treaty of Picquigny that ended Edward's invasion of France, Louis XI ransomed her for 50,000 crowns. The price of freedom was steep: she had to renounce her English dower rights, and Louis later pressed her to sign away her Angevin inheritance claims as well ^[3].

She passed her final years in Anjou in reduced circumstances, dependent on a French pension and the hospitality of Francis de Vignolles, an old servant of her father, at the château of Dampierre near Saumur. Margaret died on August 25, 1482, at Souzay-Champigny, aged fifty-two, and was buried beside her parents in Angers Cathedral ^[1]. Her tomb was later destroyed during the French Revolution ^[2].

Margaret of Anjou achievements are inseparable from argument. For centuries her reputation was filtered through Yorkist propaganda and then through Shakespeare, who put her in four plays and gave her the label of the "she-wolf of France", a queen with a "tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" ^[6]. That caricature of vindictive ambition dominated popular memory into the modern era. Historians since the late twentieth century have read her differently: as a consort forced into leadership by a husband incapable of ruling, who did what any fifteenth-century dynast was expected to do, defend the inheritance of her child ^[4].

Her record includes real and durable accomplishments. Queens' College, Cambridge, which she founded in 1448 and which her Yorkist successor Elizabeth Woodville refounded, still operates today ^[5]. Her letters form one of the fuller surviving correspondences of a medieval English queen, evidence of an administrator engaged with the practical machinery of patronage ^[4]. And her decade of military and diplomatic leadership, raising armies, negotiating with Scotland and France, and holding a fractured party together, made her the central figure of the Lancastrian cause between 1455 and 1471 ^[3].

Modern scholarship, notably Helen Maurer's study of her queenship, has traced how carefully Margaret worked within accepted norms of female intercession before crisis pushed her into open command ^[4]. She failed in the end, but the failure was dynastic, not personal: few rulers of her century fought longer odds with more persistence. That is why who was Margaret of Anjou remains a live question for historians and novelists alike.