III.
Efforts were made, more or less feeble, for the delivery of the incarcerated Queen by Louis,—fearful of offence to the Yorkist King,—and by René, who had no resources with which to back up his appeal. Anyhow, Margaret was, at the Christmas following the fatal battle, released from durance vile, and consigned to the care of the Duchess-Dowager of Somerset,—one of her earliest friends,—and went to live under her wing at Wallingford. Edward made her the beggarly grant of 5 marks weekly for the support of herself and two maid-servants! There Margaret remained for five years, each one more intolerable than its predecessor.
At the Peace of Picquigny, August 29, 1475, between Louis and Edward, the latter agreed to accept a ransom of 50,000 gold crowns for the widowed Queen. This compact was not an act of grace on the part of Louis so much as a quid pro quo. He insisted upon René ceding Provence to the crown of France, upon his death, by way of payment of the ransom. Still, in this matter Edward was as good as his bond, and directly the first instalment of the amount was paid in London to John Howard, Edward’s Treasurer, Margaret was conducted to Sandwich, not without indignity, and placed upon a common fishing-boat. Landing at Dieppe, January 14, 1476, she was taken on to Rouen, where she received the following affecting letter from her sorrowing father, King René:
“Ma fille, que Dieu vous assiste dans vos conseils, car c’est rarement des hommes qu’il faut en attendre dans les revers de fortune. Lorsque vous désirerez moins ressentir vos peines, pensez aux miennes; elles sont grandes, ma fille, et pourtant je vous console.”[A]
[A] “My child, may God assist thee in thy counsels, for rarely do men render help in times of fortune’s reverses. When you desire to resent your trials the least, think of mine; they are great, my child, and therefore I wish to console you.”
True enough, the troubles and reverses of King René were more than fall to the lot of most men of high culture and degree; but what of Queen Margaret’s shipwreck? For nearly thirty years she had endured experiences which had tried no other Queen half so hardly; and all the while she had set a unique example of devotion, loyalty, courage, and endurance, unexampled in history. There never was a truer wife, a more self-sacrificing mother, a more intrepid and a nobler Queen, than Margaret of Anjou.
From Rouen the Queen sent a message to King Louis, desiring to see him; but he, knowing well her desperate case, and seeing no likelihood of profit accruing to himself, coward-like, evaded an interview. His miserable aunt might forage for herself, for all he cared, and go where she listed, but not to Paris nor Amboise. With bent head and slow feet, the great heroine of the Wars of the Roses, broken like a pitcher at a fountain, took her lonely way no more in gallant cavalcade, but almost in funereal cortège, to Anjou and Angers—the cradle of her race.
At Reculée father and daughter once more embraced each other. Alas, what a sorrowful meeting that was, and how mixed their feelings! Margaret’s filial duty conquered the reproaches she had prepared, and René’s tears and silence spoke more loudly than words of regret could do. Providence had been cruel to them both. René loved Reculée for its peace and solitude, and there Margaret should repose awhile and recover mind and body. No prettier resort was there in all Anjou than the Maison de Reculée—“Reculée” René named it, a place of “recoil” from the buffetings of fate. He had purchased the estate, in 1465, from one Colin, an Angers butcher, for 300 écus d’or, and had greatly enjoyed laying out the estate and erecting a bijou residence. His paintings and his sculptures, his books, his music scores, his miniatures, and all his artistic hobbies, he lavished there for himself and fair Queen Jehanne. They often dropped down the Maine in a pleasure barge, and landed in the sedges, full of warblers and wild life. Reculée was but a league or two from Angers. Hard by the manoir was the sheltered and picturesque hermitage of La Baumette,—a shrine of St. Baume, patroness of Provence,—and hither René and Margaret resorted daily for prayer and meditation.
Margaret’s home-coming was sad enough, but her demeanour was rather that of defiance than of patience. Her pride had been laid low by her sufferings and ill-treatment, but not slain; and when she heard of the treachery and chicanery of the King of France in entering Angers in force, and proclaiming himself Sovereign of Anjou, her scorn knew no bounds, and she chided her father for his pusillanimity, and reproached him for his dilettante life. His sedentary pleasures and his artistic tastes bored her cruelly; she despised his peaceful handiwork, and craved his strong arm once more in the fight. If England was lost to her, Anjou and Provence should not be; this was her grim determination, and she roused herself for action and foray. Like a lioness at bay, she fought out to a finish strenuously her troubled life, away from stricken fields and gruesome dungeons. René felt his daughter’s strictures more acutely than he said; indeed, they fell like blows of sharp poniards upon his wounded heart. The deaths of all his near relatives, sons and daughters, and his son-in-law, Ferri de Vaudémont, saddening as they were, were as nothing to the vituperations of Margaret—now almost a frenzied recluse. King René sank at last, wearied, heart-broken, yet trustful in his God, into his mortal resting-place, and Queen Margaret retired to the Castle of Dampière, near Saumur, the modest manoir of a devoted servant of her father’s house,—the Sieur François de la Vignolles, of Moraens,—to end her dire days of woe.
Her father left her what he could, impoverished as he was: 1,000 gold crowns and the Castle of Queniez—an inconsiderable estate between Angers and Saumur. René wrote to Louis a few months before his death, commending Margaret to his care and charity, and this is how the King of France executed the trust, so characteristic of his greed and cunning. He negotiated with Margaret the sale of her reversionary rights in Lorraine, Anjou, Maine, Provence, and Barrois, for an annual income of 600 livres. The deed was executed at Reculée, November 19, 1480, but Louis never paid the annuity! One purpose Margaret had in view in this arrangement was the recovery of the bodies of her husband and son, that she might give them decent burial. Edward IV. would not allow this seemly duty, and the bones of the illustrious dead were left dishonoured and unnoted.
Margaret’s nature would not allow of comfort. She was devoured with regret and consumed by revenge; she spent the last two years of her stormy life in fretting and fuming over the disasters of her family. Her whole appearance and her manner changed. No longer lovely, as when she stepped on England’s inhospitable shore, she became shrunk, aged, and pallid. The ravenings of her spirit had indeed transformed her into the “grim grey wolf of Anjou.” She became leprous and hideous—“the most hideous Princess in Europe,” one might write. Gently but firmly she had to be restrained, lest she should do herself some harm and injure others. Alas! Margaret of Anjou came to her death, not in the halo of sanctity, but in the mist of mental obscurity, and thus she died alone—perhaps unlamented, and certainly misjudged by posterity. Near her end languor and paralysis seized her, and she passed away unconsciously on August 25, 1482.
Above the chief portal of his castle De la Vignolles put up this epitaph:
“In the year 1480 Margaret of Anjou and Queen of England, daughter of René, King of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem, forced to abandon her kingdom after having courageously borne herself in a great number of encounters and in twelve pitched battles, deprived of the rights of her family, spoiled of all her possessions, without means of support and without help, found a resting-place in this manoir, the home of François de la Vignolles, an old and faithful servant of her father. She died here August 25, 1482, aged no more than fifty-three years. Upon whose soul may Christ Jesus have pity.”
All that remained of this remarkable woman was interred without ceremony in the Cathedral of Angers. She was laid, it was said, by her father’s side, but no inscription, no mark of any kind, records the fact. No one knows exactly where to bow the head in reverence and bend the knee in homage to the memory of Great Queen Margaret. In a very few words, however, are summed up in the “Paston Letters,” No. 275, the character of Margaret d’Anjou: “The Queen is a grete and stronge laborid woman, for she spareth noo peyne to save hir things.”