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On the 4th of May 1471, 6,000 Lancastrian soldiers led by Edward of Westminster clashed with a Yorkist army south of the town of Tewkesbury in western England. Thousands were killed and wounded in the hours that followed, including Edward, the son of King Henry VI. Edward's mother, Margaret of Anjou, was hiding nearby in a religious house, possibly Little Malvern Priory. Three days later she surrendered and was taken to London where her husband was executed hours later. Who was this French-born queen who suffered this terrible series of events in May 1471? This is the
story of Margaret of Anjou, the Lancastrian leader during the Wars of the Roses. The woman known to history as Margaret of Anjou was born on either the 23rd or the 24th of March 1430 in the Lorraine region of eastern France. Two different devotional prayer books that belonged to her family gave different dates for her birth on the 23rd and 24th of the month. Her place of birth is also not certain. While she was born in Lorraine, this might have been in the town of Pont-à-Mousson or in the city of Nancy. Margaret's father was René of Anjou, a son
of Duke Louis II of Anjou, a county in medieval France to the southwest of Paris and just east of Nantes. René's older brother succeeded their father as Duke Louis III in 1417. However, his premature death in 1434 was the start of a rapid ascent for René as he became Duke of Anjou. The family were royalty. René's grandfather, Louis I of Anjou, was the second son of John II, the King of France between 1350 and 1364. As such, Margaret was the great-great-granddaughter of King John II. Moreover, the rulers of Anjou had been powerful figures within France for centuries. For instance,
the Angevin branch of the royal House of Capet that ruled France until 1328 had controlled Naples and Albania in the thirteenth century, establishing a link between Anjou and Naples that would interrupt Margaret's family life when she was a child. Margaret's mother was Isabella of Lorraine. She was the eldest daughter of Duke Charles II of Lorraine and his heir in the absence of a son. Her position as heir to the Duchy of Lorraine at a time when René was not yet Duke of Anjou explains Margaret's birth in eastern France and also why she was raised during her earliest years at the court in Nancy rather
than far to the west in Anjou. Duke Charles died in January 1431, when Margaret was ten months old, and Isabella became the Duchess in her own right, with René inheriting parts of the region through their marriage agreement. Margaret was her parents' fifth child, after a son named John in 1424, a boy named Louis in 1427 and twins, Nicholas and Yolande, late in 1428. Nicholas died the same year Margaret was born. Although they had several other children in the 1430s, none of these survived to adulthood. The political and military environment in both
France and England was shifting in 1420, in ways that would influence the entire trajectory of Margaret's life. As is well known, England had been conquered by the Normans in 1066, establishing lingering ties between France and Britain. In 1337, King Edward III of England, a descendant of both William the Conqueror and Geoffrey Plantagenet, the Count of Anjou between 1129 and 1151, had gone to war with the French and three years later he started pressing his claim to the throne of France, arguing that he had a stronger claim to it than Philip VI of France,
the first Valois monarch, who had claimed the throne after the Capetian royal line died out in 1328. The Hundred Years War which Edward's actions instigated went on intermittently into the fifteenth century and ultimately down to 1453. Attempts to reignite the conflict after 1453 would have a bearing on Margaret's life too. The English and French fared better in different stages of the war. In 1415 the English had truly gained the upper hand when King Henry V inflicted a crushing defeat on the French at the Battle of Agincourt on the 25th of October. In the years after this,
the English and their allies in the Duchy of Burgundy had come close to defeating the French entirely and the government of King Charles VI of France had agreed to the Treaty of Troyes in 1420. Under the terms of this, Catherine of Valois, the daughter of the psychologically unstable Charles, married Henry V and a provision stipulated that a son of their marriage would succeed Charles when he died, bypassing the French kings' other heirs and uniting England and France under one ruler. While Henry and Catherine did indeed have a baby boy in December 1421,
whom they named Henry as well, Henry V died only nine months later, leaving his infant child as King Henry VI. A long minority rule dominated by Henry's family members like his uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, ensued. During it, the French reneged on the Treaty of Troyes and after Charles VI died in October 1422, his son became king as Charles VII. He and Joan of Arc led a successful resistance to English influence in France and by 1430 the French were pushing back against the English and Burgundians in what would prove to be the final stage of the Hundred Years War.
Margaret's childhood was chaotic on account of her father's fluctuating political fortunes. After becoming Duke of Anjou in 1434, he then swiftly became King of Naples in 1435, though he was unseated from that position seven years later, after a war with Aragon, the Spanish kingdom that ruled Catalonia and most of the major islands of the Western Mediterranean, including Sicily. After her parents left for Naples in 1435, Margaret was largely raised by her paternal grandmother, Yolande of Aragon, at Saumur and Angers in the county of Anjou.
Her attitude was shaped by her grandmother and her mother, two women who exercised a lot of political power in France. At Saumur and Angers, and during her lengthy visits to Nancy in Lorraine, Margaret was exposed to a rich court culture where she received an education that was more advanced than most other men and women in Europe could avail of, although it was not yet a humanist education of the kind available to aristocratic women in Italy in the fifteenth century. Already when she was a child, there were discussions about who Margaret would marry,
as her position as the daughter of the King of Naples between 1435 and 1442 made her an important diplomatic pawn. Among those who were considered as potential husbands were Count Charles of Charolais and Count Charles of Nevers. The choice of Margaret's eventual husband was influenced by developments in the Hundred Years War. The long siege of the city of Orléans south of Paris between October 1428 and May 1429 concluded with the French capturing this important town and then proceeding on north to try to secure Paris, which at that time was held by the English
and their Burgundian allies. This military move failed and Joan of Arc's star waned thereafter, leading to her being burned at the stake after being charged with heresy in 1431. Five years later, King Charles VII's armies managed to secure Paris on the second attempt. The deadlock had been broken after the Burgundians changed sides in the war and allied with France through the Treaty of Arras in 1435. The fall of Paris coincided with the arrival in France of Richard, Duke of York, a cousin of King Henry VI of England, who was only just then entering his teenage years. Richard was
descended from King Edward III of England through both his mother and father. He was, for instance, a grandson of, Edmund, Duke of York, a son of the old king. Richard would float over and back between France and England throughout the late 1430s and 1440s as he was variously appointed to commands there. Nevertheless, the English military position continued to deteriorate owing to a growing factional struggle at the court in England between men like York and the Beauforts. The latter were Henry VI's close cousins, as they were descended from John of Gaunt via his relationship
with Katherine Swynford. Gaunt was another son of Edward III and was the grandfather of King Henry V. He had married Katherine in the twilight of his life, but their children were born two decades earlier, meaning that they were illegitimate for decades. Even after their parents married, a provision of the arrangement was that the Beaufort children could never try to claim the throne. For Margaret, growing up as a child in Anjou and Lorraine in the 1430s, she could not have had any idea that Duke Richard of York or the Beauforts would soon play a central role in her life.
The upshot of the political situation in England was that the English war effort in France continued to decline. By 1439, the government of Henry VI was already in talks with the French about arranging a new marriage alliance between their young king and a French bride. Charles VII had daughters. Nonetheless he was reluctant to organise for one of them to marry Henry, as it would perpetuate the English royal family's claim to the French crown. Instead, he needed a cousin, close enough to perhaps end the war, yet far enough away from the throne that it would not
give Henry VI any further claim to rule over France. The French government soon decided that Margaret was a good candidate. The idea was discussed through the early 1440s and then in 1444 the Earl of Suffolk, William de la Pole, arrived in France as head of an English embassy charged with negotiating the marriage alliance. Margaret's father had been deposed from the throne of Naples by then and was back in France to promote the union of his daughter with the English king. A formal betrothal occurred in the Cathedral of St Martin in the city of Tours on the 24th of May 1444, with Suffolk standing in as a proxy for King Henry VI. A truce
in the Hundred Years War was declared four days later. It would last for 20 months. The English did not renounce their claim to either the French throne or to rule over Normandy and Gascony, meaning that fighting would break out again before long. It was a strange alliance in a way. Margaret only brought a paltry dowry of 20,000 francs and the fact that the English agreed to the marriage indicates how desperate they were in 1444, for a respite from the war. After the first proxy marriage between Henry and Margaret in France, a confusing series of events
began. The Earl of Suffolk returned to England and prepared a fresh embassy before crossing the English Channel again to France. This was a more magnificent embassy that cost over £5,500, a very large sum of money in the middle of the fourteenth century. It may have been that the English had simply decided that the first embassy was not befitting of a royal marriage. Thus, Suffolk returned to France and a second proxy marriage appears to have taken place at Nancy in March 1445. Alternatively, Margaret's father was involved in some chicanery whereby control of the
County of Maine, which adjoined Anjou, was being negotiated with Suffolk as part of the marital agreement. This led to several court historians later being unsure whether Margaret and Henry's proxy marriage had occurred in 1444 or 1445. Once the second proxy union had taken place, Margaret was sent on her way with Suffolk to Rouen, the capital of the English presence in the Duchy of Normandy. In an ominous portent of future events, she was unwell and could not take part in the pageant which the English had organised to welcome her as their new queen. After she recovered,
they made their way across the Channel and arrived in England on the 9th of April 1445. Henry was anxious to meet his bride and headed off south to do so immediately. Thus, rather than having a ceremony at Westminster, 15-year old Margaret and 23-year old Henry VI were married in Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire on the 22nd of April 1445 by the Bishop of Salisbury, William Aiscough. Then it was on to London, where a series of pageants and celebrations were performed in late May before Margaret was crowned as Queen of England there on the 30th of the month at Westminster Abbey.
Margaret's position in this new land was not easy. England and France remained at war. There had only been a cessation of hostilities and correspondence between senior French ministers and letters from King Charles VII, that formed part of Margaret's archive of letters from late 1445, indicate that she was performing a role as an unofficial emissary of France in her new home, with explicit instructions to aid the peace process. This situation swiftly bore fruit. Henry VI wrote to Charles VII on the 22nd of December 1445 stating that he had decided to
surrender control over occupied Maine following advice from his new wife. In the period that followed, Margaret settled into her role as queen. She was given extensive lands and an income to support her own household, which included estates taken from the Duchy of Lancaster and scattered across several counties in England. Margaret also acquired control over a large share of the customs duties of the port of Southampton and the right to export wool to the Low Countries. These were important developments. As she grew into her adult years, Margaret needed money to build up her
own faction at a court that was increasingly divided between figures like the Beauforts, who were trying to exploit her husband, who had revealed himself to be a weak ruler as he grew up, and other factions of lords like the Duke of York. She also developed close relationships with people at court. Given how absent her own father had been during her youth in France, and the role he played in her marriage negotiations, the Earl of Suffolk became a kind of surrogate father to her in England down to his death in 1450. In 1448 she founded Queen's College at Cambridge University, while she also clearly enjoyed riding and hunting.
There are no known accurate portraits of her from her lifetime, although we do know from written records as she entered her twenties, that contemporaries considered her to be attractive. There is a misnomer in many accounts of the relationship between Margaret and Henry that theirs was a frigid marriage in which the domineering Margaret considered Henry to be a pawn to be manipulated. This perception of a distant relationship between the couple is partly due to the fact that the marriage only resulted in one child and it took eight years for
it to happen. Edward of Westminster was born in Westminster Palace on the 13th of October 1453. The evidence, though, suggests that the long wait was not for the want of trying and Margaret and Henry were actually close in the late 1440s and early 1450s before his mental state deteriorated. His grandfather on his mother's side, King Charles VI of France, had been psychologically unwell. Throughout Charles' reign of more than forty years, France's courtiers had to contend with his peculiar mental state, including a belief that he was made out
of glass and would shatter if hit. Henry's mental decline came about in the early 1450s, partially in response to events in France. The war had resumed in the late 1440s and continued to go badly for the English. The capital of Normandy, Rouen, fell in 1449. Then, on the 17th of July 1453, the English were comprehensively defeated at the Battle of Castillon in Gascony in the west of the country. With this, the Hundred Years War was effectively over and the English crown's continental possessions were broadly restricted to the port of Calais in the far north. When he
learned about the English defeat at Castillon, Henry VI collapsed psychologically. He was so catatonic that when his son was born two months later, he failed to respond to the child when he was presented before him and as discontent about the losses in France grew, opposition to the king and those closest to him, such as the Beauforts, coalesced around Richard, Duke of York. The Wars of the Roses did not erupt immediately after Henry VI's mental deterioration in August 1453. First there was a period where an interim government was put in place to rule while he was
incapacitated. There was a familiarity to this which made it feel as though it was not too out of the ordinary. Henry, after all, had become king when he was an infant and there was a regency government for nearly two decades while he was growing up. Margaret began pressing her case to be appointed as the regent in January 1454, but she was outflanked by the Duke of York, who in March was appointed as Protector of the Realm. We don't really know much about how Margaret felt about these developments or what her thoughts were about the situation she was now in. Record-keeping
was under-developed in England in the fifteenth century and there is limited correspondence available for her in these years. What is much more certain is that when her husband partially recovered late in 1454, she decided to support Edmund Beaufort, the second Duke of Somerset, who then manoeuvred to remove York from power on the basis that Henry could rule the realm on his own again. In reality, Somerset viewed the king's partial recovery as an opportunity to claim power himself. These events triggered the outbreak of the first stage of the Wars of the Roses. It was
brief. At the First Battle of St Albans north of London on the 22nd of May 1455, York won a complete victory. Somerset was killed and the king was taken captive by York, who then led him south to London and reinstalled himself as Protector of the Realm. Thus, in the summer of 1455, Margaret's husband, the king, whose mental state remained extremely fragile, had become little more than a prisoner of York, yet, with Somerset dead, there was now an opening for Margaret to step forward as the de-facto head of the Lancastrian faction. The period between 1455 and 1459 was characterised
by a gradual re-descent back into war. Henry reasserted himself enough in the spring of 1456 to remove York from his position as Protector and Margaret began forming alliances with several powerful nobles to ensure that there was a strong anti-Yorkist faction, for when violence inevitably broke out again. In April 1456, she convinced the king to leave London, where support for York was strong, and then set up the royal court at Kenilworth Castle near Coventry. Margaret had been granted extensive lands here via her dowry and she had income from the Midlands region with which to
build up her network of supporters. Contemporaries viewed her as a capable person taking charge of the emergency. In 1456, John Bocking, wrote, "The Queen is a great and strong laboured woman, for she spareth no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power." Open war between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians recommenced in 1459 after years of sparring with one another. In response, a parliament was convened in which the lands of the Yorkist rebels were formally confiscated and the members were asked to swear an oath, not just of loyalty to Henry,
but to the Queen and Edward, Prince of Wales. There can be little doubt that Margaret was operating behind the scenes to ensure that if anything happened to her husband, the Lancastrians would transfer their support to her son and that York would not become king. Indeed, Richard Duke of York, never did secure the crown. He was killed fighting at the Battle of Wakefield on the 30th of December 1460, but his 18-year old son, Edward, followed up on this, by defeating the Lancastrians decisively at the Battle of Towton on the 29th of March 1461. At the end of this the
Lancastrian cause was in complete disarray and Edward of York was able to seize the throne. He was crowned as King Edward IV that summer. After Edward IV claimed the throne and won the most destructive phase of the Wars of the Roses in 1461, Margaret continued on as the fulcrum of the Lancastrian cause. Regardless of how her husband's psychological state might fluctuate, she had a son whose future claim to the throne of England had to be fought for. There were also many English lords whose loyalty to the House of Lancaster remained solid even if they pretended
to accept the young Yorkist upstart. Others openly defied the new king and left England or remained in rebellion in the north of the country, along the border with Scotland. For instance, the Earl of Pembroke continued in rebellion after 1461 from the Scottish Lowlands. Margaret spent the early 1460s in Scotland too, first taking up an offer from the Bishop of St Andrew's to reside at Linlithgow Palace. Later she moved to the Dominican convent in the capital, Edinburgh. Here she was principally negotiating with the Scottish lords to try to get them to
support the Lancastrian camp, as King James II of Scotland had died in 1460, leaving behind his son and heir as the new ruler. King James III was only eight years old at the time and was in no position to negotiate with Margaret. After her promise of a future marriage alliance, in which her son would marry the sister of James III when they were of age, in return for Scottish military aid, was rebuffed, she and Edward sailed for France in April 1462. There, a new King of France, Louis XI, who had succeeded Charles VII the previous summer, proved to be reticent about
supporting Margaret's cause, though Duke Francis II of Brittany was much more helpful and provided the former Queen of England with 12,000 gold crowns to help her in her plan to build up a new force to travel back to Britain with. Margaret spent the next six months negotiating in her homeland. The key person here was King Louis XI. He indicated his willingness to support Margaret and the Lancastrian faction, though only if concessions were made. While we retrospectively know that the wider Hundred Years War was over, contemporaries didn't recognise this reality
and the French government was concerned that the English would soon reignite the war from the port of Calais in the far north of France, their last major outpost on the continent. Louis therefore put forward the proposition that he would finance an expedition to England on behalf of Margaret's husband and send French troops with it if she guaranteed that once Henry was back on the throne, Calais would be handed over to the French. Margaret agreed and in October she set sail for Scotland with an armada of 42 small ships and roughly 800 men. These would be led by Pierre de
Brézé, the seneschal of Normandy, a Frenchman who was a firm supporter of Margaret. After arriving off the coast of Scotland, the expedition rendezvoused with Henry and the Lancastrian lords around him. They then headed back south into Northumberland and captured Alnwick Castle there. After this, things went astray. A Yorkist army drove the makeshift Lancastrian forces back northwards to Berwick and even a Scottish relief force could not make any headway. Thus, in August 1463, with this expedition having failed, Margaret made the decision to head back to France with her
son. Henry remained behind in Lowland Scotland with several Lancastrian lords. Margaret would never see her husband again after leaving for France in the late summer of 1463. Back on the continent, Margaret began years of steady diplomacy. She knew it would be a difficult thing now to secure backing for a further military expedition. On the 8th of October 1463 representatives of England, France and Burgundy had agreed to the Truce of Hesdin whereby the French and Burgundians agreed to end their support for the Lancastrians. Spurned by King Louis XI, Margaret began writing as far afield as Castile and Portugal,
to seek out supporters. She also presided over a kind of miniature Lancastrian court in exile, paid for via a pension of 6,000 crowns annually which she received. This consisted of anywhere between 50 and 200 people at a given time and was centred on the Chateau de Keour at St Mihile in the Duchy of Bar in northern France. Meanwhile, in England, her husband and the Lancastrian supporters around him, had been defeated at the Battle of Hexham in May 1464, after making another incursion into northern England. Henry took refuge at Waddington Hall after the defeat, but he was
eventually handed over to Edward IV and placed in the Tower of London. Thus, Margaret really was working now on behalf of her son, as her husband could, in theory at least, be killed at any time if Edward IV so wished. 1460s, spurred on by Edward IV's poor diplomacy. Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, had lost his second wife in 1465. This created an opportunity in Edward's eyes, to re-establish the alliance with Burgundy and try to reacquire a portion of the territory that had been lost in France between 1429 and 1453. In 1468, the Yorkist king married his sister, Margaret, off to Charles the Bold,
a move which deeply alienated Louis XI of France and drove him back towards supporting the exiled Lancastrians. As well as this, in England, Edward had also alienated a number of powerful lords who had helped him to secure the throne in 1461, most notably the sixteenth Earl of Warwick, Richard Neville. Neville's wealth and power across England was so great, that he is euphemistically known as 'Warwick the Kingmaker' for his role in dictating the course of the Wars of the Roses. He was deeply annoyed when Edward married Elizabeth Woodville, the daughter of a relatively low-born
family, in secret, rather than going forward with a marriage alliance with the French, that Warwick had been hoping to organise. Although Margaret bitterly resented Warwick for the role he had played in overthrowing her husband in 1461 after giving his support to the Yorkists on that earlier occasion, she set this animosity aside and formed an alliance with him after he arrived in France in the summer of 1470, following an abortive rebellion in England. The alliance was sealed with a promise that Warwick's daughter, Anne, would marry Margaret's son, Edward of Westminster, who
was now about to turn seventeen years of age. With this agreed, Warwick departed for England, where he swiftly marched on London and entered the capital in early October 1470. He released the long-suffering Henry VI from the Tower of London and re-established him as King of England, an event which chroniclers referred to afterwards as 'the readeption' of Henry VI. The king's mental state was so poor after years in prison that he had to be led like a child through the streets of London, so that people could see he was the king again. Warwick had succeeded,
but Edward IV made his way to the Low Countries and rapidly made an agreement with Charles the Bold whereby he acquired Burgundian assistance to launch a counter-invasion. As he was doing so, Margaret was preparing to cross with her son from Normandy to England. Poor weather, though, delayed them and it was the 14th of April 1471 by the time mother and son arrived in Weymouth. That very same day, the Lancastrians suffered a major defeat to the Yorkists at the Battle of Barnet near London, during which, Warwick was killed. With Edward back in the ascendancy, Margaret, Prince Edward and the
remaining Lancastrians headed north towards Wales. Edward IV followed them and on the 4th of May 1471 clashed with the Lancastrians again at the Battle of Tewkesbury in western England. The forces here were relatively small, a sign of how depleted the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions were, after years of war since 1455. The minor clash was catastrophic for Margaret and the Lancastrians. Her son was killed in the battle, dead at 17 years of age. Margaret surrendered three days later and was taken to London in a carriage in front of
Edward's own party. They entered the capital on the 21st of May. That night, Margaret's husband was murdered in the Tower of London on Edward's orders, as the Yorkist king ruthlessly sought to ensure that there would be no further challenge to his rule. With both her husband and son gone, Margaret now had little or no political influence. She was imprisoned first in Windsor Castle and was then moved to Wallingford Castle to the northwest towards Oxford. Edward was seemingly anxious to be rid of Margaret and wanted her back in France. Nevertheless, he was not going
to return an important prisoner for free. Hence, Margaret became part of the negotiations in 1475, after Edward briefly led a new military expedition to northern France in a short-lived attempt to reignite the Hundred Years War. Under the terms of the Treaty of Picquigny which was signed in August 1475 between Edward IV and Louis XI, Margaret was ransomed for £10,000, with the additional stipulation that she had to renounce her claim to any lands she had received in England since 1445. With this agreed, she was transported across the English Channel in January 1476 to Normandy,
where the first part of her ransom was paid. After nearly five years in captivity, she was free. With the Treaty of Picquigny and her return to France, Margaret's role in the Wars of the Roses, and indeed in the tortured politics of fifteenth-century England, came to an end. When she left for her homeland, it would have seemed to most observers of the political and military situation, that the civil wars were finally at an end. After all, Edward IV was a young and capable monarch who would potentially rule for another twenty to thirty years. In any event,
he already had several children through his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. However, fate and his own brother had other ideas. On the 9th of April 1483, Edward died, three weeks before his 41st birthday from an illness which is a source of debate to this day and which could have been pneumonia or malaria. His twelve-year old son succeeded him as King Edward V. However, within weeks his position was usurped by his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who placed Edward and his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, in the Tower of London, never to be seen again. Then,
he claimed the throne as King Richard III and was crowned on the 6th of July 1483. Such an act of terrible injustice towards his own nephews was viewed unfavourably by the lords of the realm and within weeks the storm clouds were brewing for Richard and his reign. In France, Henry Tudor, another descendant of John of Gaunt and King Edward III on the side of his mother, Margaret Beaufort, John's great-granddaughter, became a fulcrum of discontent. As a descendant of John of Gaunt, Henry was effectively presenting himself as the heir to the Lancastrian cause,
that had otherwise died with Margaret's husband and son back in 1471. In the late summer of 1485, he finally crossed to Wales and marched into the English West Midlands, where he met Richard in battle at Bosworth Field. In the clash, Richard was killed and Henry ascended as King Henry VII, establishing a new Tudor dynasty to supersede both the Yorkists and the Lancastrians. Although there would be sporadic Yorkist revolts in the late 1480s and into the 1490s, Henry VII succeeded in stabilising the realm after the long Wars of the Roses.
Margaret did not live to see the death of her great nemesis, Edward IV, and the fall of the Yorkists in 1485. After her return to France, she had a difficult life. Her father was still alive. He, though, was living in the south of France where he ruled as Count of Provence, having long since been ousted from his rule as King of Naples in 1442. Margaret's mother Isabella had died back in 1453 and René had married Jeanne de Laval in 1454. He remained a southern French lord for the rest of his life and displayed very little interest in the fate of his daughter, even
when she was imprisoned in England between the end of the war in 1471 and her release in 1475. Margaret consequently became reliant on the charity of others after returning to France at the start of 1476. Louis XI responded to her predicament by offering to resume a pension of 6,000 French crowns annually, the catch being that she was pressured into relinquishing all of her claims to the Angevin inheritance, which included lands in Anjou, Provence and Bar, thus paving the way for the French crown to acquire substantial new lands in northern and southern France when
her father finally died in 1480. By then, Margaret had retired to the chateau of Reculee near Angers. She did inherit a chateau at Dampierre near the town of Saumur in 1480 and so she spent her last two years in Anjou. There, she wrote her last will and testament, a short document, on the 2nd of August 1482, three weeks before she died at the age of 52. She was buried in the cathedral in Angers. The pattern of queen dowagers not being buried with their husbands was not uncommon and there are many former English queens buried in France and elsewhere.
Because of her immense role in the Wars of the Roses, Margaret was central to many books, plays and histories written from the end of the fifteenth century onwards. A distinct view of her emerged, shaped by the portrayal in the works of sixteenth-century historians like Polydore Vergil, Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed. These depicted her as a manipulative woman, grasping for power. In their view, she was a major cause of the Wars of the Roses, and that depiction of her was then popularised even further by William Shakespeare in his trilogy of plays on the reign of Henry
VI. Many historians have since concluded that this portrayal of Margaret was deeply unfair. In reality, this was a young woman who was married by proxy to a man she had never met in 1444, when she was barely 14 years old. In 1445, she was sent to live in a foreign land and had to try to make her own way as an unofficial emissary of her cousin, the King of France. She arrived at an English court where the political situation was deteriorating, owing to the collapsing war effort in France and the rise of overmighty lords determined
to promote their own interests in the face of a weak and psychologically frail king. Then her own husband suffered a mental collapse when she was heavily pregnant, spurring Richard, Duke of York, to try to secure control over a government in crisis. Margaret spent the rest of her life trying to fight on behalf of her husband and her son, which from 1461 meant attempting to retrieve the crown of England from Edward IV. She used every resource available to her, to try to reclaim the throne for her family. In the end, she failed, and in 1471 she lost both her
husband and young son in the space of two and a half weeks. After nearly five years in captivity, she was released and returned to a French kingdom where her royal cousins and her own father spurned her. Margaret had outrun her use. In short, she was not a villain, but a woman trying to survive after being cast adrift in a foreign land when she was fifteen years old. Unfortunately for her, she found herself in England during a period of great violence that she could not emerge victorious from. What do you think of Margaret of Anjou? Was she
a major cause of the Wars of the Roses through her incessant scheming on behalf of her son, or was she a woman cast into a volatile political emergency in which she was trying her best to protect her family, following her husband's psychological collapse? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
