Marguerite of Anjou was niece by marriage to the French king Charles VII, her own father, René, having been described as a man of many crowns but no kingdoms.

Few queens of England have so divided opinion few have suffered more from the propaganda of their enemies. Marguerite was, from the beginning, a controversial queen. a woman of sufficient forecast, very desirous of renown, full of policy, counsel, comely behaviour, and all manly qualities.” But then Vergil was writing for the Tudor king Henry VII, sprung of Lancastrian stock, and he would naturally try to praise the wife of the last Lancastrian king, the woman who would, in her later years, fight so hard for the Lancastrian cause. This would be the woman Shakespeare, in Henry VI, Part 3, famously dubbed the “she-wolf” of France, her “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide.” Italian chronicler Polydore Vergil, by contrast, would look back on her as “imbued with a high courage above the nature of her sex. From there she was carried to a local convent to be nursed, making her first English impressions ones of sickrooms and austerity. The people of Porchester, trying gallantly to provide a royal welcome, had heaped carpets on the beach, where the chilly April waves clawed and rattled at the pebbles, but Marguerite’s first shaky steps on English soil took her no farther than a nearby cottage, where she fainted. Marguerite arrived, as her new husband, Henry VI, put it in a letter, “sick of ye labour and indisposition of ye sea.” Small wonder that the Marquess of Suffolk, the English peer sent to escort her, had to carry the seasick fifteen-year-old ashore. The ship that brought her across the Channel, the Cock John, had been blown off its expected course and so battered by storms as to have lost both its masts. But no doubt as she first set foot on the English shore on April 9, 1445, her character and ambition were already there to see. In her later courage and conviction, her energy and her ruthlessness, Marguerite of Anjou would be in part what the times and the circumstances of her life in England had made her.

It was no way for a queen to enter her new country, unceremoniously carried ashore as though she were a piece of baggage-least of all a queen who planned to make her mark. O peers of England, shameful is this league,įatal this marriage, cancelling your fame

Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood