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.”