"Margaret of Anjou (French: Marguerite; 23 March 1430 – 25 August 1482) was the Queen of England by marriage to King Henry VI from 1445 to 1461 and again from 1470 to 1471. Born in the Duchy of Lorraine into the House of Valois-Anjou, Margaret was the second eldest daughter of René, King of Naples, and Isabella, Duchess of Lorraine.
She was one of the principal figures in the series of dynastic civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses and at times personally led the Lancastrian faction. Owing to her husband's frequent bouts of insanity, Margaret ruled the kingdom in his place. It was she who called for a Great Council in May 1455 that excluded the Yorkist faction headed by Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York, and this provided the spark that ignited a civil conflict that lasted for more than 30 years, decimated the old nobility of England, and caused the deaths of thousands of men, including her only son Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.
Margaret was taken prisoner by the victorious Yorkists after the Lancastrian defeat at Tewkesbury. In 1475, she was ransomed by her cousin, King Louis XI of France. She went to live in France as a poor relation of the French king, and she died there at the age of 52.
Margaret was born on 23 March 1430 at Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine, a fief of the Holy Roman Empire east of France ruled by a cadet branch of the French kings, the House of Valois-Anjou. Margaret was the second daughter of René, King of Naples and of Isabella, Duchess of Lorraine. She had five brothers and four sisters, as well as three half-siblings from her father's relationships with mistresses. Her father, popularly known as "Good King René", was duke of Anjou and titular king of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem; he has been described as "a man of many crowns but no kingdoms". Margaret was baptised at Toul in Lorraine and, in the care of her father's old nurse Theophanie la Magine, she spent her early years at the castle at Tarascon on the River Rhône in Provence and in the old royal palace at Capua, near Naples in the Kingdom of Sicily. Her mother took care of her education and may have arranged for her to have lessons with the scholar Antoine de la Sale, who taught her brothers. In childhood Margaret was known as la petite créature.
The marriage of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou is depicted in this miniature from an illustrated manuscript of Vigilles de Charles VII by Martial d'Auvergne
Titchfield Abbey in 2014
On 23 April 1445, Margaret married King Henry VI of England, who was eight years her senior, at Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire. The king and queen of France were the uncle and aunt of the groom and the bride respectively: Henry's late mother, Catherine, had been the sister of King Charles VII, whose wife Marie of Anjou was a sister of Margaret's father Rene. Further, Henry claimed for himself the Kingdom of France, and controlled various parts of northern France. Due to all this, the French king agreed to the marriage of Margaret to his rival on the condition that he would not have to provide the customary dowry and instead would receive the lands of Maine and Anjou from the English. The English government, fearing a highly negative reaction, kept this provision secret from the English public.
Margaret was crowned Queen Consort of England on 30 May 1445 at Westminster Abbey by John Stafford, Archbishop of Canterbury at the age of fifteen. She was described as beautiful, and furthermore "already a woman: passionate and proud and strong-willed". Those that anticipated the future return of English claims to French territory believed that she already understood her duty to protect the interests of the Crown fervently. She seems to have inherited this indomitability from her mother, who fought to establish her husband's claim to the Kingdom of Naples, and from her paternal grandmother Yolande of Aragon, who actually governed Anjou "with a man's hand", putting the province in order and keeping out the English. Thus by family example and her own forceful personality, she was fully capable of becoming the "champion of the Crown".
Henry, who was more interested in religion and learning than in military matters, was not a successful king. He had reigned since he was only a few months old and his actions had been controlled by regents. When he married Margaret, his mental condition was already unstable and by the birth of their only son, Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales (born 13 October 1453), he had suffered a complete breakdown. Rumours were rife that he was incapable of begetting a child and that the new Prince of Wales was the result of an adulterous liaison. Many[who?] have speculated that either Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset, or James Butler, 5th Earl of Ormond, both staunch allies of Margaret, was the young prince's actual father.
Although Margaret was aggressively partisan and had a volatile temperament, she shared her husband's love of learning by dint of her cultured upbringing and gave her patronage to the founding of Queens' College, Cambridge.
Elizabeth Woodville (born ca 1437), later Queen of England as future wife of her husband's rival, King Edward IV, purportedly served Margaret of Anjou as a maid of honour. However, the evidence is too scanty to permit historians to establish this with absolute certainty: several women at Margaret's court bore the name Elizabeth or Isabella Grey. Elizabeth Woodville married her first husband, Sir John Grey of Groby, in about 1452."
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