The queen who wouldn't go quietly

Margaret of Anjou was a foreigner and a woman. Those facts alone should have sunk her bid to regain the English throne for her husband, Henry VI. Yet, writes Joanna Arman, when it came to fighting her family’s corner, Margaret simply didn’t know when she was beaten

- Joanna Arman

Margaret of Anjou crossed swords with some of 15th-century England’s most formidable warriors. But it was a playwright born eight decades after her death who inflicted the most damage on the queen’s reputation.

When William Shakespeare had Richard, Duke of York describe Margaret as the “She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France,” in Henry VI Part III, he helped secure the queen a place in historical infamy. For 500 years, Margaret – wife of Henry VI, and towering figure in the Wars of the Roses – has been labelled an unfaithful wife, a foreign enemy within, a Machiavellian schemer and a bloodthirsty monster who delighted in exacting terrible vengeance on her enemies. Even in modern times, some say Margaret was the inspiration for Game of Thrones’ notoriously manipulative monarch Cersei Lannister.

The truth is, inevitably, far more nuanced – and compelling – than the stereotype. Margaret was neither the unscrupulous ogre of Shakespeare’s portrayal, nor the innocent bystander that some historians have presented in recent years. She was a woman who fought with no little skill and tenacity on behalf of her husband, her son Edward of Westminster – and, of course, herself – in the maelstrom of one of England’s most protracted and vicious civil wars. She suffered setbacks and endured abuse (much of it a result of her gender) that would have broken many of her contemporaries. And yet she so nearly realised her aim of securing her son the English throne. That in itself makes her one of the most fascinating figures of the 15th century.