Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
attributed to queens features in the scene where Shakespeare’s Marguerite first meets Henry VI: it was the lofty spirit that, in the years ahead, was to prove the difficulty. Vergil too wrote that Marguerite exceeded others of her time ‘as well in beauty as wisdom’; and though it is not easy to guess real looks from the conventions of medieval portraiture, it is hard not to read determination and self-will in the swelling brow and prominent nose that are evident in images of Marguerite of Anjou – in particular the medallion by Pietro di Milano.
The royal couple met officially five days after Marguerite had landed, and had their marriage formalised just over a week later in Titchfield Abbey. The first meeting failed to reveal either the dangerous milkiness in the man, or the capacity for violence in the young woman. But the first of the problems they would face was – as Marguerite moved towards London – spelt out in the very festivities.
Her impoverished father had at least persuaded the clergy of Anjou to provide funds for a white satin wedding dress embroidered with silver and gold marguerites; and to buy violet and crimson cloth of gold and 120 pelts of white fur to edge her robes. As her party approached the city she was met at Blackheath by Henry’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, with five hundred of his retainers and conducted to his luxurious riverside ‘pleasaunce’ at Greenwich. Gloucester had in fact opposed the marriage, seeing no advantage in it for England.
Marguerite’s entry into London on 28 May, after resting a night at the Tower, was all that it should have been. A coronet of ‘gold rich pearls and precious stones’ had been placed on the bride’s head, nineteen chariots of ladies and their gentlewomen accompanied her, and the conduits ran with wine white and red. The livery companies turned out in splendid blue robes with red hoods, while the council had ordered the inspection of roofs along the way, anticipating that eager crowds would climb on to them to see the new queen pass by.
The surviving documentation details a truly royal provision of luxury goods for Marguerite’s welcome. A letter from the king to his treasurer orders up ‘such things as our right entirely Well-beloved Wife the Queen must necessarily have for the Solemnity of her Coronation’. They included a pectoral of gold embellished with rubies, pearls and diamonds; a safe conduct for two Scotsmen and their sixteen servants, ‘with their gold and silver in bars and wallets’; a present of £10 each to five minstrels of the King of Sicily (the nominal title of Marguerite’s father) ‘who lately came to England to witness the state and grand solemnity on the day of the Queen’s coronation’; and 20 marks reward to one William Flour of London, goldsmith, ‘because the said Lord the King stayed in the house of the said William on the day that Queen Margaret, his consort, set out from the Tower’.
The ceremonies were ‘royally and worthily held’, the cost reckoned at an exorbitant £5500. All the same, Marguerite had had to pawn her silver plate at Rouen to pay her sailors’ wages; and as details of the marriage deal began to leak out, the English would feel justified in complaining that they had bought ‘a queen not worth ten marks’. In the years ahead, they would discover they had a queen who – for better or worse – would try to rewrite the rules, and indeed the whole royal story.
As Marguerite rode into her new capital, the pageantry with which she was greeted spelt out her duty. It was hoped that through her ‘grace and high benignity’:
Twixt the realms two, England and France
Peace shall approach, rest and unite,
Mars set aside, with all his cruelty …
This was a weight of expectation placed on many a foreign royal bride. Earlier in the fifteenth century the Frenchwoman Christine de Pizan had written in The Treasury (or, Treasure) of the City of Ladies that women, being by nature ‘more gentle and circumspect’, could be the best means of pacifying men: ‘Queens and princesses have greatly benefitted this world by bringing about peace between enemies, between princes and their barons, or between rebellious subjects and their lords.’ After all, the Queen of Heaven, Mary, interceded for sinners. Marguerite would be neither the first nor the last to find herself uncomfortably placed between the needs of her adopted country and that of her birth. The Hundred Years War had been a conflict of extraordinary bitterness. This bitterness Marguerite, by her very presence as a living symbol, was supposed to soothe; but it was a position of terrifying responsibility.
Her kinsman the Duke of Orléans wrote that Marguerite seemed as if ‘formed by Heaven to supply her royal husband the qualities which he required in order to become a great king’. But the English expectations of a queen were not those of a Frenchman, necessarily. Marguerite’s mother, Isabelle of Lorraine, had run the family affairs while René of Anjou spent long years away on campaign or in captivity. Her grandmother, Yolande of Aragon, in whose care she spent many of her formative years, had acted as regent for her eldest son, Marguerite’s uncle; and she had been one of the chief promoters of Joan of Arc, who had helped sweep the French Dauphin to victory against the English. Those English, by contrast, expected their queens to take a more passive role. Uncomfortable memories still lingered of Edward II’s wife Isabella, little more than a century before: the ‘she-wolf of France’, as Marguerite too would be dubbed, who was accused of having murdered her husband to take power with her lover. Had Marguerite’s new husband been a strong king, the memories might never have surfaced – but Henry showed neither inclination nor ability for the role he was called on to play.
Henry VI had succeeded while in his cradle, and had grown up a titular king under the influence of his older male relatives. Perhaps that had taught him to equate kingship with passivity. For although Henry had now reached adulthood he still, at twenty-three, showed no aptitude for the reins of government. There has always been debate over what, if anything, was actually wrong with Henry. Some contemporaries describe him as both personable and scholarly; others suggest he may have been simple-minded, or had inherited a streak of insanity. But what is certain is that he was notably pious, notably prudish – described by a papal envoy as more like a monk than a king – and seemed reluctant to take any kind of decision or lead. He was the last man on earth, in other words, to rule what was already a turbulent country. At the end of Henry IV Part 2 Shakespeare vividly dramatises the moment at which the new Henry V, this Henry’s father, moves from irresponsible princedom to the harsh realities of kingship. There was, however, no sign of Henry VI reaching a similar maturity. It was a situation which left Marguerite herself to confront the challenges of monarchy.
It is difficult to conjure up a picture of Marguerite or her husband in the first few years of their marriage. Anything written about them later is coloured by hindsight, and the early days of Marguerite’s career tend to be lost in the urgent clamour of events just ahead. But there is no reason to doubt that her expectation was that of a normal queenship, albeit more active than the English were accustomed to see. Though her husband’s exchequer may have been depleted, though English manners might not compare to those across the Channel, her life must at first have been one of pleasant indulgence.
Christine de Pizan gives a vivid picture of life for a lady at the top of the social tree. ‘The princess or great lady awaking in the morning from sleep finds herself lying in her bed between soft, smooth sheets, surrounded by rich luxury, with every possible bodily comfort, and ladies and maids-in-waiting at hand to run to her if she sighs ever so slightly, ready on bended knee to provide service or obey orders at her word.’ The long list of estates granted to Marguerite as part of her dower entitlement forms an evocative litany:
To be had, held and kept of the said Consort of Henry, all the appointed Castles, Honours, Towns, Domains, Manors, Wapentaches, Bales, county estates, sites of France, carriages, landed farms, renewed yearly, the lands, houses, possessions and other things promised, with all their members and dependencies, together with the lands of the Military, Ecclesiastic advocacies, Abbotcies, Priories, Deaneries, Colleges, Capellaries, singing academies, Hospitals, and of other religious houses, by wards, marriages, reliefs, food, iron, merchandize, liberties, free customs, franchise, royalties, fees of honour … forests, chaises, parks, woods, meadows, fields, pastures, warrens, vivaries, ponds, fish waters, mills, mulberry trees, fig trees …
It is the same genial picture of a queen’s life that can be seen in a tapestry that may have been commissioned for Marguerite’s