Margaret of Anjou

Queenship in wartime defined the career of Margaret of Anjou, who led the Lancastrian cause through the dynastic struggles later called the Wars of the Roses. Born in 1430, she was the daughter of Rene, duke of Anjou and titular king of Naples and Sicily, and Isabella, heiress of Lorraine. Her aunt Marie of Anjou was queen of Charles VII of France, a connection that placed Margaret near the centre of the Valois court and made her marriage a diplomatic instrument. In 1445, under the Truce of Tours negotiated by the earl of Suffolk, the fifteen-year-old Margaret married Henry VI of England; the associated promise to surrender Maine to France earned the match lasting unpopularity in England.

For eight years the marriage was childless, and the queen was identified with the court faction around Suffolk and later the duke of Somerset, opponents of Richard, duke of York. Her only child, Edward of Westminster, was born in October 1453, just as Henry VI fell into mental collapse and York claimed the protectorate. From the late 1450s Margaret was the effective leader of the Lancastrian party, and after the Act of Accord of 1460 disinherited her son in York's favour she refused any settlement.

Her armies won at Wakefield, where York was killed, and at the second battle of St Albans in February 1461, recovering custody of the king, but the crushing Yorkist victory at Towton drove her into exile. She sought help first in Scotland, ceding Berwick, and then in France from Louis XI. From her father's lands she maintained a court in exile until 1470, when Louis brokered her improbable reconciliation at Angers with the earl of Warwick, her old enemy, sealed by the marriage of Prince Edward to Warwick's daughter Anne Neville.

Margaret landed in England on the day Warwick was killed at Barnet in April 1471. Her army was destroyed at Tewkesbury on 4 May, her son was killed, and she was taken prisoner; Henry VI died in the Tower soon after. Held in England until 1475, she was ransomed by Louis XI in connection with the Treaty of Picquigny, renounced her English rights, and lived out her last years in Anjou on a modest French pension. She died near Saumur on 25 August 1482.