Margaret of Anjou

Margaret of Anjou was born on 23 March 1430 at Pont-a-Mousson in the Duchy of Lorraine, a fief of the Holy Roman Empire. Her father Rene, popularly known as Good King Rene, was Duke of Anjou and titular king of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem, a man of many crowns and no kingdoms. Her mother Isabella was Duchess of Lorraine in her own right. The female line of the family provided unusual political role models. Isabella commanded armies and ruled Lorraine while her husband was imprisoned by Burgundy in 1431-32 and 1434-36. Margaret's paternal grandmother Yolande of Aragon ruled Anjou as regent and engineered the rise of the Dauphin Charles VII of France. Margaret spent her childhood at Tarascon in Provence and at the old royal palace at Capua near Naples, watched these women, and was educated to read French romances and to hunt.

In May 1444, at the age of fourteen, she met English envoys at Tours to discuss her marriage to Henry VI. The match was promoted by William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk and Cardinal Beaufort as part of peace negotiations near the end of the Hundred Years' War. The Treaty of Tours gave Margaret no dowry beyond a paper claim to Mallorca and Menorca, and committed England in secret to cede Maine to her uncle. On 23 April 1445 she married Henry VI (aged twenty-three) at Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire, and on 30 May was crowned Queen at Westminster Abbey. The cession of Maine in 1448 broke as a public scandal and Suffolk, blamed for the negotiations, was impeached and murdered in 1450 along with Jack Cade's rising in Kent.

In the early years she and Henry shared an interest in education. On 30 March 1448 she received the founding licence for Queens' College, Cambridge, where she is still remembered as foundress. Few of her surviving letters from this period concern high politics; most are intercessions and patronage matters. The decisive turn came in 1453. Henry collapsed into mental illness, England lost Castillon in August and the Hundred Years' War ended in defeat, and on 13 October Margaret gave birth to their only son, Edward of Westminster. Her demand for the regency was refused. The Council appointed Richard, Duke of York, as Lord Protector instead.

The Wars of the Roses now opened. When Henry briefly recovered at the end of 1454, the Yorkists were ejected from the council. The First Battle of St Albans on 22 May 1455 was a crushing Lancastrian defeat in which Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset was killed. With Henry incapable, Margaret became the de facto leader of the Lancastrian faction, gathering Henry Beaufort, the new Duke of Somerset, the Percies of Northumberland, Jasper Tudor of Pembroke and others around her. After defeat at Blore Heath in 1459 she won at Wakefield on 30 December 1460, where the Duke of York and Earl of Salisbury were killed; their heads, including York's wearing a paper crown, were displayed on Micklegate Bar in York. At the Second Battle of St Albans on 17 February 1461 she commanded in person, defeated Warwick and recovered her husband. Two Yorkist prisoners, William Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell, had been promised safety by the king; Margaret ordered them beheaded anyway. The cruelty solidified the propaganda image that Shakespeare would later canonize as the She-wolf of France.

On 29 March 1461 the Yorkist Edward IV, son of the dead Duke of York, crushed the Lancastrians at Towton. Margaret fled north and then to France, where in 1462 she persuaded Louis XI to lend her a small force of 800 men. When Henry VI was captured and put in the Tower in 1465 the Lancastrian cause collapsed. In April 1470 Edward IV quarrelled with his kingmaker Warwick. Margaret swallowed her hatred and made an alliance with him in July, sealed by the marriage of Warwick's daughter Anne Neville to her seventeen-year-old son Edward of Westminster. Warwick restored Henry briefly to the throne in October 1470, but Edward IV returned from Burgundy and killed Warwick at Barnet on 14 April 1471, two days before Margaret finally landed.

On 4 May 1471 she led her army in person at Tewkesbury and was destroyed. Her son Edward died, whether in the battle itself or at the hands of the Duke of Clarence afterwards remains unclear. William Stanley captured her and reportedly had to drag her bodily from the priory where she was hiding once she had heard the news. Henry VI died in the Tower on the night of 21 May 1471, almost certainly murdered. Margaret was held first at Wallingford Castle and then in the Tower, then in 1472 placed in the custody of her former lady-in-waiting Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk. In 1475 Louis XI ransomed her under the Treaty of Picquigny, on terms that stripped her of her dowry rights. She spent her last seven years in genuine poverty with relatives in Anjou and died on 25 August 1482 at the chateau of Dampierre-sur-Loire at the age of fifty-two. She was buried beside her parents in Angers Cathedral, but her tomb was destroyed by revolutionaries in the 1790s. Suffolk had praised her valiant courage and undaunted spirit; Edward Hall called her stomach and courage more like to a man than a woman; her enemies and Shakespeare's Henry VI plays fixed her as the She-wolf, and she remains the only character to appear in all four plays of his first tetralogy.