D
espite his efforts, Henry had raised very little money to pay for his wedding. He had pawned the crown jewels, but then realised he needed them for the ceremony, and was forced instead to pawn some of his personal jewellery and plate to retrieve them.
On 23 April 1445 Henry VI married ‘the most noble Lady Margaret’ in a quiet ceremony at the abbey of the Premonstratensian monks at Titchfield in Hampshire. The ‘venerable Master William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury’ and confessor to the King, officiated and gave the young couple his blessing. Henry placed on Margaret’s finger a ring set with an enormous ruby which had been given to him at the time of his coronation by Bishop Beaufort. Margaret also received an original wedding gift from an unknown admirer – a lion, which was brought to her at the abbey and then promptly dispatched at considerable expense to the royal menagerie at the Tower of London.
After the wedding the King and Queen spent several nights at Titchfield Abbey, and the Charter Rolls record that the abbot and convent were well rewarded for their hospitality. The chronicler John Capgrave, for whom Henry VI could do no wrong, predicted that ‘this marriage will be pleasing to God and the realm, because that peace and abundant crops came to us through it’. The marriage itself looked not to be so fruitful. Henry was twenty-three, Margaret sixteen; their wedding night is not likely to have seen the flowering of any grand passion, since the King’s confessor, Bishop Ayscough, had warned him against self-indulgence and having his ‘sport’ with his bride, advising him not to ‘come nigh her’ any more than was necessary for the procreation of heirs. As Margaret did not produce an heir for eight years, we may conclude that Henry took his confessor’s advice to heart.
Others were not so immune to his wife’s charm, for all contemporary sources agree that Margaret was beautiful. Chastellain called her the exemplification of ‘all that is majestic’ in woman, and one of the most beautiful women in the world. ‘She was indeed a very fair lady, altogether well worth the looking at, and of high bearing withal.’ She had, he added, excellent manners. A Milanese envoy described Margaret as ‘a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark’. Whether he meant her hair – which was very long – or her skin is not clear, but the surviving manuscript illustrations of Margaret portray her as blonde or auburn-haired; the ambassador, however, had seen her, the illustrators had probably not.
The best surviving representation of Margaret of Anjou is a head and shoulders profile relief on a medal struck in 1463 by Pietro di Milano and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A copy is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Both show Margaret with upswept hair wearing a crown. This sitter bears more than a passing resemblance to a noble lady painted by René of Anjou in a tournament scene in his manuscript
Le Livre de Tournois
, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale. This lady is evidently of high rank, for she is attended by a bevy of well-dressed ladies, and is shown standing at the right of the page, inspecting the helms of jousters. Did René here depict his own daughter? It is tempting to think so.
Margaret appears in several authenticated manuscript illustrations. The most famous is one in which she and Henry VI are being presented with an illuminated copy of John Talbot’s
Poems and Romances;
it dates from c. 1450–3 and is now among the King’s MSS in the British Library. There is a fanciful portrayal of Margaret’s wedding in the Royal MSS in the British Library, and a beautiful picture of her and Henry kneeling before the altar in Eton College chapel in the manuscript of Ranulf Higden’s
Polychronicon
, now in Eton College Library. Margaret appears as an older woman, hooded and at prayer, in a manuscript owned by the Worshipful Company of Skinners of the City of London, of whose guild – then the Fraternity of Our Lady’s Assumption – she was patron.
There are fifteenth-century carvings of Henry and Margaret at Lambeth Palace in London. A corbel head said to portray Margaret is in the porch of the parish church of Henley-in-Arden, while her head and Henry’s are shown in relief on a five-hundred-year-old bell that once hung in Valle Crucis Abbey in North Wales and is now at Great Ness Church, Shropshire. In nearby Wrockwardine Church is an ancient chair carved with an illustration of Queen Margaret confronting a robber, a famous episode from the Wars of the Roses. Finally, there is a stained glass window in the church of the
Cordeliers at Angers, showing Margaret kneeling in prayer, but this is an eighteenth-century copy of a fifteenth-century original.
Margaret’s mother and grandmother were strong, capable women, and she took after them in many respects. She was intelligent and courageous and had great strength of character, which was apparent even in her youth. Charles, Duke of Orléans was of the opinion that ‘this woman excelled all others, as well in beauty as in wit, and was of stomach and courage more like to a man than to a woman.’ She was talented and valiant, but she had also inherited the hauteur and pride of her royal forebears, and could be domineering, ruthless, autocratic, hot-blooded and impulsive. She had a quick temper, and her changeable moods often irritated her male contemporaries, who complained that she would often change her mind ‘like a weathercock’. She could be vindictive, quick to repay the smallest slight or insult, and was therefore not a person to be trifled with.
Margaret’s native tongue was French, but she quickly learned to speak English well, applying herself with her usual energy to the task of learning the language of her adopted land. She was highly literate and particularly loved the works of Boccaccio, which were in light-hearted contrast to the pious tomes that made up her husband’s reading matter.
Margaret quickly became the dominant partner in the marriage. She had energy and drive enough for two, and Henry accepted her tutelage without protest; he had, after all, been dominated since infancy by a succession of strong characters, and Margaret was another such. Blacman says that Henry ‘kept his marriage vow wholly and sincerely, even in the absences of the lady’, which in later years ‘were sometimes very long’, through force of circumstances. Nor, ‘when they lived together, did he use his wife unseemly, but with all honesty and gravity’. He was a generous husband, anxious to ensure that Margaret lacked for nothing. She seems to have conceived a genuine affection for Henry, referring to him in her letters as ‘my most redoubted lord’.
In many ways they were unsuited: Margaret was in most respects the complete antithesis of Henry, and probably viewed his willingness to forgive his enemies and opponents as a weakness. Instinctively, she began to shoulder his burdens and responsibilities, and he let her, being content to allow someone else to take the initiative. Nevertheless, from the first they were deeply loyal to each other, spending as much time as possible together.
The physical side of marriage was of no great importance to Henry at least, and here again he was failing in his duty as king, for it was a
king’s responsibility to provide for the succession. This failure rebounded on Margaret in time, for in that age infertility in a marriage was regarded as a dereliction of duty on the part of the wife. In a queen such a lack was a national disaster, for the provision of an heir was crucial to the well-being and stability of the realm.
The royal marriage represented a triumph for Beaufort and Suffolk, but the English people in general did not want peace with France: they wanted glorious victories and conquests against their old enemy. The young Margaret represented a peace they regarded as ignominious, and they disliked her for it. Later, when it brought England only defeat and humiliation, she was held responsible, however unjustly. In addition her belief in the peace policy strengthened Henry’s resolve to pursue it in the face of public opposition.
And there was much of that. Later it would be said that, from the time of his marriage, King Henry never profited. Gloucester seized every opportunity to voice his disapproval and, although he was not, to begin with, personally hostile to Margaret, he did his best to engender distrust of her in the minds of the people. As a result of this, and the inbred Francophobia of the English, the marriage was never popular. Gloucester, and many others, felt that the truce constituted a threat to England, in that it gave the French time in which to re-arm and plan a decisive assault on England’s remaining territories in France. Nor would this have been difficult, for during the years of truce the English forces in France were in some disorder, lacking consistent or effective leadership and undermined by lawlessness and lack of discipline.
The royal marriage also led to increasing bitterness between court factions. From the first Margaret identified herself vigorously with Beaufort’s party, in the belief that she was helping her husband. By her willingness to support a particular faction she did much to exacerbate the divisions in court and household. Automatically placing herself in opposition to Gloucester and York, she thus, probably in youthful ignorance, made enemies of both of them.
In the opinion of the Duke of Orléans, ‘England had never seen a queen more worthy of a throne than Margaret of Anjou. It seemed as if she had been formed by Heaven to supply to her royal husband the qualities which he required in order to become a great king.’ The Milanese ambassador wrote in awe-inspired tones of ‘the magnificence of the Queen of England’. From the first, Margaret was every inch a queen, having a commanding presence and a haughty manner. Etiquette at her court was rigorously formal. Duchesses, and even princes of the blood, were obliged to approach
the Queen on their knees, and on one occasion the mayor of Coventry found that when he was escorting Margaret from his city he was expected to carry his mace of office, which he had only hitherto done for the King.
Margaret’s motto was ‘Humble and loyal’, but she was also ambitious and loved power for its own sake. She used her rank and influence to secure the advancement of her favourites, and thereby ensured that the court party remained dominant. Headstrong and inexperienced, she was unable to assess the damage she was doing to her reputation. In France and Italy, where she had spent her formative years, rule by factions was accepted as a necessary evil, but in England it was bitterly resented. Unfortunately, Margaret never learned to understand the prejudices and fears of her husband’s subjects, and would not have paid much heed to them even if she had, believing that it was not their place to question the decisions made by their betters.
Not since the time of Isabella, the ‘She-Wolf of France’, wife of Edward II, in the early fourteenth century, had a queen of England ventured to involve herself to any degree in politics. Margaret made it clear from the first that she was to be no passive consort, content to remain in her husband’s shadow. She had a fine brain and meant to use it, even though the business of government was then considered to be a male preserve. By thrusting herself forward and taking the initiative on the King’s behalf, Margaret confirmed the suspicions of those who suspected that she would have preferred the ineffectual Henry to concentrate his energies exclusively on his prayers and his foundations, so that she could get on with the serious business of ruling England in his name.
The Queen’s willingness to involve herself in politics drew much adverse comment from all classes. It did not, of course, happen overnight, but was a gradual process. The more she discovered just how inept Henry was, the more she was driven to make decisions for him. She certainly had enough self-confidence to do so. But until 1453, when the whole political scene shifted and changed, Margaret’s opponents, despite their criticisms, were not overly concerned about her influence because she was childless and would have no power whatsoever if the King died. She herself seems to have realised this, and until then she trod a fairly cautious path, aware of the precariousness of her situation.
Margaret made the most of the financial advantages of her position. Despite the state of the treasury, she did not lack for material comforts, although she spent comparatively little on herself. She wasted no time in obtaining a licence to export wool and tin
wherever she pleased, thereby evading customs duty and the strict rules of the Merchants of the Staple at Calais. As the Paston Letters confirm, ‘she spareth no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion for her power’. She did, however, attempt, with some success, to boost England’s wool trade by importing skilled craftsmen from Flanders and Lyon, and she also tried to introduce silk weaving into England, bringing in foreign weavers, encouraging women to join the trade, and becoming patron of the Sisterhood of Silk Women, a guild based in Spitalfields, London.
*
Margaret also paid for the fitting out of English merchant ships destined for ports in the Mediterranean.
The Queen’s Wardrobe Book for the year 1452–3 survives. It shows that she did not lavish large sums on clothes. The only items she bought were bolts of silk and cloth of gold, which were imported from Venice and cost £72.12s.6d. (£72.62½), and jewellery and items of goldsmiths’ work amounting to £125.10s.od. (£125.50). These were, of course, luxury items, but a queen was expected to attire herself in a manner worthy of her rank, for it was an age that set much store by outward appearances.
Margaret attended Mass daily and offered 4d on each occasion, unless it was a holy day or royal anniversary, when she gave more. She patronised many charities and gave liberally to them, as well as giving financial help to members of her household who were ill or getting married, or to those who had suffered bad luck, such as the two Newmarket men whose stable had burned down during a royal visit; to them, she gave £13.6s.8d. (£13.33).
Margaret is often credited with being the foundress of Queen’s College, Cambridge, but this is not strictly true. The college was founded in 1446 as St Bernard’s College by Andrew Docket, Rector of St Botolph’s, Cambridge, who urged Margaret to become patroness the following year. Margaret petitioned the King to grant a new charter to the college and rename it Queen’s College. In 1448 Henry did this, donating a sum of £200, but it was Docket who bore the lion’s share of the cost of the foundation. There is no evidence that the Queen gave any financial endowment, although she certainly took an interest in the college, sending her chamberlain, Sir John Wenlock, to lay the foundation stone of its chapel in 1448.