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Margaret
of Anjou
(1429-1482)
Born: 23rd March 1429 at Pont-à-Mousson, Lorraine,
France
Queen of England
Died: 25th August 1482 at Château de Dampère,
Saumur, France
Margaret,
the Queen of Henry
VI, was the fifth child of “Le Bon Roi René,” Count of Anjou, and
Isabella, Duchess of Lorraine, and was born at Nancy. Her father became
successively Duke of Bar, Duke of Lorraine, Count of Anjou, Count of Provence
and titular King of Naples & Sicily. The young lady was therefore much
sought after as a bride and, in 1444, the Earl of Suffolk headed an embassy to
ask her hand for his master, King Henry. A marriage by proxy took place in that
year and the consent of the King of France to the arrangement was obtained. She
brought no dowry to the already impoverished English Crown and it was believed,
though without evidence, that Suffolk had agreed, in the marriage contract, to
terms surrendering some of the fortresses which England still held in France.
In 1445,
Margaret crossed the Channel and was married to Henry at Titchfield Abbey in
Hampshire. Once in England, though only fifteen years old, she became a violent
partisan of Suffolk and Beaufort against the Duke of Gloucester and the war
party. When these were gone, two successive Dukes of Somerset became her
favourites and the policy of the Court, against the Duke of York, became her
cause. Her only child, Prince Edward of Lancaster, was born in 1453, at the very
time when her husband was suffering from his first mental and bodily collapse.
She would never agree to the compromises and peaces which Henry was, on more
than one occasion, ready to conclude with the Yorkists and was incensed by the
Duke of York’s appointment as Protector in March 1454.
After
the King’s recovery the following November, Margaret took control of Royal
affairs. She persuaded her husband to dissolve Parliament and raised an army
with which to crush those she saw as his opponents. When Margaret got the upper
hand in the field, she used her victory without mercy and understood how to pack
a parliament so they would attaint her enemies wholesale. After the Lancastrian
defeat at Northampton, she was found wandering on the borders of Wales and was
at least once in danger of her life from robbers. From Wales, she made her way,
in 1461, to Scotland and surrendered Berwick to the Scots as the price for their
help. She was not present when her army of Northerners won the Battle of
Wakefield, but she rejoined her friends after the victory and advanced upon
London with a large army which won the Second Battle of St. Albans. There,
however, for some reason unknown, she stayed her hand, fell back northwards and
saw her forces annihilated and dispersed by the Duke of York's son, now Edward
IV, at Towton. She and Henry escaped from that field to Scotland whence,
in 1462, she embarked for France to seek foreign help.
King
Louis XI of France was friendly towards the Lancastrians and lent Margaret a
small force, with which she returned to Scotland. But it seems to have been of
little use, for the Royal couple were soon reduced to the direst straits. It was
at this time, while wandering in a Northumbrian forest, that Margaret is said to
have met a ferocious robber and threw herself upon his generosity, not in vain,
by revealing to him her rank and that of her young son. She was again on the
Continent in the Autumn of 1463, and received some rather unwilling charity from
the Duke of Burgundy. She remained in Lorraine, a costly burden upon her
father's charity, waiting always for a chance to strike again at England, but
only occasionally travelling as far as the Channel coast.
In 1470,
the all-powerful Earl of Warwick
finally broke with his cousin, Edward IV, and was reconciled to Margaret and her
husband by the mediation of King Louis. However, while Warwick sailed in the
Lancastrian interest, almost at once to England, Margaret delayed too long and
so allowed Edward IV, whom her friends had driven out, to return and reoccupy
London. She finally landed at Weymouth in April 1471, the very day on which her
new friend, Warwick, was beaten and slain at Barnet. Edward, by a forced march,
fell upon her small army at Tewkesbury, annihilated it and slew her son.
Margaret remained his captive in various English castles until 1475, when Louis
XI stipulated for her release. Thence after, she lived in the province of
Anjou in extreme poverty until her death in 1482, and was buried in the
Cathedral of Angers.
Margaret
was learned and fierce, a far truer product of the clever and cruel Angevin
house than her gentle and scrupulous father, René; she was devoted to hunting
as well as to reading and, even in the days of her comparative prosperity, was
an importunate beggar of everything which she desired. Her career in England,
whose rights and whose fortunes she was ready to sell to anyone who would help
her cause, was accompanied by unvarying misfortune for the Lancastrians and most
of all for her gentle and uncomplaining husband.
Edited from Emery Walker's "Historical
Portraits" (1909).
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