Margaret was born of “poor but proud,” royal parents, and was, at the age of fourteen, celebrated all over Europe for beauty, accomplishments, courage, et cetera. I fancy she would have been a good, average “American girl” of the present day, so you can fancy the sensation she created at the court of her uncle, the King of France, and afterward at that of her husband. She was a fascinator. The Earl of Suffolk lost his judgment about her when he went to negotiate the marriage, and he made so bad a bargain that he lost his head for it afterward; it was cut off in a mysterious manner in a skiff in the middle of the Channel. It was a sorry match for Margaret, after all. Her husband was grandson of the insane Charles VI. of France. When the hereditary taint did not show in Henry and he had lucid intervals, he was a weak man indeed; spending most of his time counting his beads and meditating; a good, simple-hearted man, just the one who ought not to have been the husband of Margaret of Anjou and King of England at that troublous time.
For, from the time when Henry, a babe of nine months, came, or was brought, to the throne, he had been the victim and alternate tool of the most selfish and unscrupulous noblemen in England arrayed in hostile factions. Into this den Margaret was brought at the age of fifteen, and before two years had passed she had become, to all intents, ruler of England. Henry from that time was as much counted out of the dark games of state-craft and priest-craft that cursed England as if he had been a holy relic. Intrigue, assassination, foreign aggression, and even servile insurrection under Jack Cade were brought to bear on her in vain. The people of England hated her because she was a foreigner, and visited on her all the sins of her court, the imperfections of her husband, their own miseries at home and their shame abroad for the loss of all the winnings of Henry V., Edward III., and the Black Prince. There was no real ruler, and the evil seeds of the usurpation of Henry IV. had ripened in a fearful crop of lawlessness and violence, high and low. There was “a man on horseback” to take advantage of all this evil conjunction of Margaret’s stars,—Edward, Duke of York, to-wit: He first plotted, then struck for the throne. The issue between Lancaster and York was made up, and the red rose and the white became symbols of blood and pale death.
It was while this ill-omened issue was crystallizing into action, that Margaret’s only child was born, and even this usual solvent of kingly troubles proved the culmination of her misfortunes and of England’s woes. The birth of the successor changed the issue from a quarrel of York with the court to a deadly enmity of York against Margaret and her son: they were one more block in his path. When the child was born (1453) his father had been for weeks in an idiotic daze—one of the fits he was subject to—not able to move or speak, or hear, or perceive anything; and the boy was some months old before his father could be made to know of his existence. Even this distressing affliction was made to tell against her, for, says an old letter writer, the “noble mother sustained not a little slander and obloquy of the common people, saying that he was not the natural son of King Henry, but changed in the cradle.” The poor mother repeatedly tried to vindicate her honor and strengthen the perilous position of her son by getting the father to recognize him. A letter of that day pathetically says:
“The Duke of Buckingham took the prince in his arms, and presented him to the king in goodly wise, beseeching the king to bless him: and the king gave no manner answer. Nathless, the duke abode still with the prince by the king: and when he could no manner answer have, the queen came in and took the prince in her arms, and presented him in like form as the duke had done, desiring that he should bless it. But all their labor was in vain, for they departed thence without any answer or countenance, saving only that once he looked upon the prince and cast down his eyes again, without any more.”
Is there a more touching tableau in all the pages of romance than this? Picture the young mother, with the discredited babe in her arms, watching, heart-sick, day after day and week after week, for the first flicker of the light of returning reason on that vacant countenance. But no sign of intelligence did the imbecile king give for over a year, and meantime York had himself appointed “protector” of the young prince, and all the barons stood by their castles in “armed neutrality,” waiting to see if the Lord’s anointed would not die and leave the crown to be wrestled for. Better for them, better for England, far better for Margaret, had he never wakened from his trance. When he did, York set his army in motion, and the War of the Roses was begun.
Battles, with alternating victories, supplemented by summary executions by the victors, followed each other. At length King Henry was taken prisoner and forced to a compromise, by which he was to reign for life and Edward of York was to succeed him. This treaty, which dishonored Margaret and disinherited her son, changed her. From that hour the mother became a lioness in defense of her young.
The mother’s struggles in her son’s cause during the succeeding sixteen years contain volumes of romance. The alternations of defeat and victory, of hope and despair, of triumph and exile in caves and woods, of intrigue with Lancastrian haters of the house of York, and of negotiations with foreign powers, sometimes fruitless, sometimes successful—at all times the highest exhibitions of diplomacy of the time—all seem, at this distance, to be strangely out of place in sober history.
The first battle of St. Albans, 1455, was followed by the Love Day when “all was forgiven,” as the advertisements say, and the best haters were paired off and marched to St. Paul’s to hear the grand Te Deum over the peace; the queen led by the Duke of York, Somerset and Salisbury, Warwick and Exeter, after the manner of the “Massachusetts and South Carolina” procession at the Peace Conference during the civil disturbance in our own country. This lasted a short time, and then came the battle of Bloreheath, where Henry for once showed a spirit “so knightly, manly and comfortwise that the lords and people took great joy,” deserted the Yorkists and compelled Warwick to flee the country. But before the middle of that summer (1460) Warwick and Edward were back with an army. The queen was beaten at Northampton; wondering King Henry was taken prisoner, and a few days later placidly attended with his captors a service of thanksgiving for his wife’s defeat and his deliverance from his friends. It was now that the treaty was made disfranchising his own son. As for Margaret and the prince, they fled to Wales, where she was waylaid and robbed of her jewels, and escaped while her baggage was being rifled; thence crossing Menai Straits in a skiff, they reached Scotland.
Now occurred a tragic episode in keeping with all this strange, eventful history. King James of Scotland undertook to create a diversion in Margaret’s favor by besieging the border city of Roxburgh. One of the weapons of the besiegers was a rude cannon of that day, made of bars of iron heavily hooped like a barrel, and keyed with oaken wedges. King James wanted to “touch off” this dreadful “bombard” himself; it burst, a wedge struck him and he fell dead; and Margaret lost another ally. But the castle was taken, for the widowed Scottish queen came into camp leading the heir, a boy of eight years, the eldest of a family of seven children; her exhortations incited the assault that carried the castle. And then this widowed queen hastened to comfort and aid the worse than widowed queen who had fled to her realm. In eight days thereafter Margaret had 18,000 brave North-of-England men around her, and on the last day but one of the year 1460 she fought and defeated York at Wakefield. Thus within six months from the day when her fortunes seemed irretrievably ruined, and her husband and kingdom alike lost to her, she had the bleeding head of her antagonist, the Duke of York, stuck up over the gate of his own city of York. So it is said: but so it is contradicted. Here comes in the contemporary romancing. In this scene Shakspere’s genius has blackened the name of Margaret of Anjou, as it did that of another French heroine of this epoch, Jeanne d’Arc; he was English enough to always hate the French, and especially French heroines.
Margaret marched toward London, and encountered the King-Maker, who had come out as far as St. Albans with the captive royal imbecile at the head of his forces. Warwick was beaten and Henry fell a captive into his wife’s hands. There was a touching family re-union on the battlefield, and the king knighted his son, who, though only seven years old, had acted as much like a “lion’s whelp” as the Black Prince had done at Cressy.