Queens Consort (57 page)

One picture of medieval women, now thankfully dismissed, presents them as scarcely more than ‘animated title deeds’,
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their existence entirely determined by the transmission of property. Catherine’s queenship, more than that of any of her predecessors, might be said to be contained by this very limited concept. She did very little as a consort except to transmit the kingdom of France, a claim whose vanity was to prove devastating for her son. Yet in this Catherine may also be seen as the model for the perfect princess, the royal heroine who waited patiently for her true knight and confirmed God’s grace in her of fspring. As a woman, however, Catherine was considerably more interesting. She was courageous, independent-minded and astonishingly audacious in the pursuit of her desire. Hers was an extraordinarily vivid life, blighted by war and madness, elevated by marriage to the hero of the age and a love affair which really did change the course of history. It is a pity, perhaps, that only hints of the colour of that life can be found beyond the stilted, jewel-like radiance of her portraits as the beautiful bride of England’s greatest warrior prince.

CHAPTER 16

MARGUERITE OF ANJOU

‘An hault courage above the nature of her sex’

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n his book of hours for March 1430, René of Anjou noted on the twenty-fourth that his second daughter, Lady Marguerite, had been born. The winter that year had been so bitter that wolves stalked the suburbs of Paris, a fitting symbol for the battleground that western Europe had become. The ancestral Anjou heritage of baby Marguerite was as grand as it was complex. The Plantagenet branch of the house of Anjou had taken England to the height of its recent Continental power under Henry V, whose son Henry VI asserted his right to the crowns of both England and France. Marguerite’s great-great-grandfather was the King Jean of France who had been entertained so courteously by Edward II’s queen; his second son, Louis I, had brought up various hereditary claims and eventually styled himself Emperor of Constantinople, King of Jerusalem, Mallorca and Cyprus, titles ‘that were as grandiloquent as they were devoid of substance’.
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Interfamilial networks also related Marguerite to the rulers of Sicily, Naples, Provence, Hungary, Poland, Moldavia, Wallachia and the Dalmatian provinces. Her immensely capable paternal grandmother, Yolande of Aragon, the bride of Louis II, succeeded in betrothing her only daughter to Charles VII of France, who was thus Marguerite’s uncle by marriage as well as her third cousin, but the royal connection by which she was more significantly affected was the contentious claim of her father, René of Anjou, to the kingdom of Naples.

The Angevin claim in Naples had been established by Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, the husband of Eleanor of Provence’s sister Beatrice. By the early fifteenth century, two branches of the house of Anjou were contesting the crown, but a resolution was offered by Queen Joanna 11 of Naples, who adopted Louis III of Anjou, Rene’s elder brother, as her declared heir. Louis III died in 1434, followed the next year by Queen Joanna, so all his rights devolved upon René. The father of four-year-old
Marguerite was hardly in a position to celebrate at the time, being imprisoned on the orders of the Duke of Burgundy, but luckily for him, he had chosen in his wife Isabelle of Lorraine a woman as adventurous and loyal as his own mother, and the twenty-four-year-old Queen of Naples set off to reclaim her husband’s birthright. Some stories have it that she was accompanied by her young daughter, but Marguerite stayed at home in Anjou with her grandmother Yolande and her nurse, Tiphaine la Majine, who had also cared for her father and aunt Marie, and whose tomb may be seen at Saumur, holding them as swaddled babies.

By 1438, both Marguerite’s parents were successfully established in Naples, where they enjoyed four glorious years until the city fell to Alfonso of Aragon, and the erstwhile royal couple shuffled back to their impoverished French estates, exhausted and penniless. It was essential that a good match be arranged for their daughter, and the early negotiations surrounding Marguerite’s betrothal provide a particularly naked example of the way in which aristocratic women were used as bargaining tools. One candidate was the Count of St Pol, whose father, Jean of Luxembourg, was engaged in buying the county of Guise from René for 20,000 pounds; another was the Count of Charolais, to whom René owed part of the ransom for his release from the Duke of Burgundy’s incarceration, a debt that could be offset by a marriage settlement. The recently elected Emperor, Frederick of Hapsburg, also showed some interest in twelve-year-old Marguerite, and was received at Saumur by Yolande, who touchingly put on the best display she could muster, ordering 330 crowns-worth of gold, violet and crimson cloth and fur trimmings for Marguerite’s dresses. Yolande died that autumn, content in her belief that she had arranged a great match for her granddaughter.

However, in April 1444, René met William de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk, at the court of his brother-in-law Charles at Montils, near Tours, where Suffolk proposed for Marguerite on behalf of King Henry VI of England. Such a match would gain René Charles’s support in dealing with discontented subjects. Metz had recently rebelled in protest at excessive taxation and the non-payment of interest on the loan René had raised to pay off his ransom to the Duke of Burgundy, and an English marriage, with the corollary of a truce between England and France, would release Charles’s forces to help him. Charles was famously stingy (when he became Dauphin he had no treasury, barely the scraps of an army and it was said he could not even afford shoes), and the price he demanded from the English for his niece was high: the counties of Maine and Anjou itself were to transfer their allegiance to the French crown. Moreover, Henry would have to meet the
costs of Marguerite’s wedding journey and accept the farcical dowry of Rene’s claims to Mallorca and Menorca, which he might conquer in right of his wife if he got round to it. René was a king without a country, and his reverses in Italy had absorbed what little of his fortune and future revenues were not mortgaged to pay the Burgundy debt.

Nevertheless, the wedding was a splendid affair. Marguerite and her mother had arrived at Tours from Angers, where they stayed at the abbey of Beaumont les Tours. The night before, 22 May 1444, a treaty securing a truce between England and France was signed, guaranteed until 1 April 1446. The betrothal was celebrated in the church of St Martin, attended by the King and Queen of France, René of Anjou and Isabelle of Lorraine, the Dukes of Calabria, Brittany and Alençon, the Dauphine, Margaret of Scotland, the Counts of St Pol and Vendôme and Marguerite’s uncle, Charles Count of Maine, though not by the bridegroom. After curtseying to the King of France, Marguerite was presented with the marriage licence (a provisional document allowing the couple to marry even though they were within the prohibited degrees; the real licence took one year), by the papal legate, Monsignor de Mont Dieu, bishop of Brescia, and the ring was placed on her finger. At the feast afterwards, at the abbey of St Julien, the fourteen-year-old bride was treated with the status of an English queen.

Marguerite remained at home long enough to see Metz submit satisfactorily to 30,000 French troops sent by Charles VII and to witness the marriage of her sister Yolande at Nancy. She then set off on the journey to her new country with an escort of 1,500. Two leagues from Nancy, she wished her uncle Charles a tearful goodbye, then continued on to Bar-le-Duc to see Isabelle and René. In Paris in mid-March, she heard Mass at Nétre Dame and was presented with relics from the treasury. At St Denis she was formally handed over to Suffolk and the party sailed to Rouen, the capital of the English territories in northern France, where she was saluted by 600 archers as Richard, Duke of York and regent of France, came to meet her. Marguerite was presented with a gift from Henry, a beautiful palfrey draped in crimson velvet sewn with gold roses, then rode in a carriage to the Hôtel de Ville for yet another banquet, although she was unwell and her place had to be taken by Lady Suffolk. On 9 April, Marguerite’s ship, captained by one Thomas Adam, arrived at Portchester. The vessel had inevitably endured a terrible storm, losing both its masts, and though the people of Portchester had tried to provide a welcome, heaping carpets on the beach, the new Queen was able only to stagger, ill and raggedly dressed, to a nearby cottage, where she promptly fainted.

Marguerite of Anjou met her husband, King Henry VI, for the first
time on 14 April 1445 at Southampton. A week later they were married privately, at Titchfield Abbey by William Aicough, bishop of Salisbury and royal confessor. What did they make of each other in their earliest days as a couple? At twenty-three, Henry had been king for his entire life. Unlike other aristocratic boys he had not been brought up among his peers, but had lived a rather sad, solitary life, lonely among the older men who made up his household. He was already displaying the deep piety and lack of worldliness that made him seem more fit for life as a monk than as a king, a view expressed by a papal envoy as early as 1437. Marguerite’s mother and grandmother had provided her with examples of strong, influential women who had fought hard for their husbands’ rights. Not unlike Henry, René was a dreamy character. He particularly loved painting — he worked on a portrait of Philip of Burgundy even while detained in the man’s prison — and it was said that he was so underwhelmed when he heard the news of his inheritance that he barely glanced up from the manuscript he was illuminating. Yolande and Isabelle of Lorraine had made the best of what power they had in an essentially masculine world, so perhaps quiet, docile Henry aroused a protective instinct in his young wife, a desire to offer the decisive support she had seen provided by her female relatives. If Henry responded to an incipient dominating tendency in her personality, it may have reassured him, as he had been bossed about for ever. By the time Marguerite made her formal entry into London on 28 May, Henry is described as being ‘wildly in love’.
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One romantic story about the couple’s first meeting comes from Raffaelo de Negra, a correspondent of the Duchess of Milan. Henry supposedly disguised himself as a squire and brought Marguerite a letter ‘from the King’, so that he could gaze at her while she read it, as he believed that watching a woman read was the best way to observe her.

Marguerite was crowned at Westminster on 30 May. For her journey from the Tower she wore a white damask dress decorated with gold and a gold and pearl coronet set with jewels set on her loose hair. The fact that the pageants enacted to celebrate her arrival were in English indicates that Marguerite could understand something of her new country’s language, but they were perhaps more remarkable for the two themes on which they concentrated: peace and power. A figure of ‘Plenty’ welcomed her as a bringer of ‘wealth, joy and abundance’ and she was compared to the dove who came to Noah after the Flood and to the Virgin as Mary, Queen of Heaven. Comparison with the Virgin was a frequent theme of such pageants, but it is notable that those prepared for Marguerite concentrated less on the queen’s maternal role and focused so strongly on that of ‘peaceweaver’.
At Leadenhall, Marguerite was greeted by ‘Dame Grace’, who announced herself as ‘God’s Vicar General’. The personification of such an important figure as a woman suggests that Marguerite was expected to be more than a humble supplicant for the King’s grace, rather someone who might be capable of assisting him in his judgements. Does this betray a degree of uneasiness about Henry’s qualities as king, and a hope that Marguerite might be able to compensate for his deficiencies? At least one scholar has concluded that ‘the surprisingly powerful image of queenship conveyed in these particular pageants may have reflected contemporary concerns about Henry’s inability to govern’.
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The political purpose of Marguerite’s marriage became even more explicit with the arrival of a French embassy just a few months after her coronation, in July 1445. Its purpose was the cession of Maine, which Suffolk had conceded as part of Marguerite’s marriage contract. Henry dithered, unable to entirely resist the aggressive elements in his council, though the French demands were reasonable: usufruct of Maine for Charles of Anjou’s life in exchange for ten years’ revenues. Eventually, a twenty-year alliance was proposed, and a second French party arrived in October to discuss this, but this time Suffolk prevaricated. Impatiently, Marguerite wrote directly to her uncle in December, and on the twenty-second an agreement was finalised, whereby the truce would continue and Maine would be handed over in April 1446. The letter was given under the King’s signet and contained the phrase: ‘To please the King of France and at the request of his wife’. Margaret’s precise role in this is not known, but it has been suggested that the peace initiative was not Henry’s and that the letter was supervised, if not written, by Suffolk himself.
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Marguerite’s name might be present as a diplomatic courtesy, showing that she was fulfilling her intended role in her marriage, or she may indeed have been working to bring Henry round.

Certainly, the next year finds Marguerite writing to Charles regarding the idea that Edward, Earl of March, son of the Duke of York, should marry Princess Madeleine of France: ‘In that you pray and exhort us perseveringly to hold our hand towards my most redoubted Lord that on his part he may still be inclined to the benefit of peace, may it please you to know that in truth we are employed at it and shall be with good heart so far as it shall be possible’. Elsewhere, Marguerite concentrates her efforts on the restitution of Maine and on maintaining Henry’s commitment to peace. In these early gestures at diplomacy, however unsubstantiated her real influence at the time, Marguerite reveals a degree of naïveté, an impatience with ambassadorial feints, that betrays a failure to understand
how delicate mendacity can be part of the art of negotiation. In trying to achieve her ends explicitly and directly, she appears not to realise that her actions could easily be misconstrued as treacherous meddling.