This Was the Life of Margaret of Anjou | Year 1482 | Shakespeare’s Original She-Wolf of France

The year is 1460, December. Frost covers the stones of the city of York, and a single severed head is fixed to the top of Micklegate Bar, the southern gate of the old city. The head is not naked; someone has placed something upon it—a crown. It is not a real one, not made of gold or jewels, nor the crown of a king, but a makeshift circlet of paper, painted in hasty colors and balanced like a cruel joke upon the dead man’s brow.

The man who wore that head in life had nearly become King of England: Richard, Duke of York, of the blood of Edward III, the claimant who almost made it. Killed at the Battle of Wakefield, just four days before Christmas, his head was severed from his body, ringed with paper, and mounted where the whole of northern England would see it. The paper crown was the order of a woman—the Queen of England, not the king.

The king was elsewhere, half-mad, praying in a tent. The order came from his wife, Margaret of Anjou. She was about thirty years old that winter, a French princess married into the English crown at fifteen, bound to a husband whose mind had begun to unravel and a small son whose claim to the throne she would now have to defend entirely by herself. She had taken command of an army, fought her own war, and mounted her enemy’s head on a wall.

A hundred and thirty years later, in a London theater, William Shakespeare would write a play about these events. In it, just before Richard of York dies, he screams at her one of the most famous lines in the English language. He calls her, for the first time in literature, the “she-wolf of France.” This nickname has belonged to Margaret of Anjou for more than four hundred years, though many today mistakenly attribute it to a different queen entirely.

To understand how a French princess ended up freezing on an English battlefield and ordering paper crowns onto severed heads, one must return to her origins and see how completely unprepared the world was for her. Margaret was born on the 23rd of March, 1430, in the town of Pont-à-Mousson in the Duchy of Lorraine. The country we now call France was, in those years, not truly a country at all.

It was a patchwork of duchies and princedoms, half of it still being contested by the English crown in the conflict we know as the Hundred Years’ War. Her father was a charming, cultured, and impossibly poor man named René, Duke of Anjou and the titular king of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem. These titles sounded magnificent but meant almost nothing; René spent his life failing to enforce his claims, losing wars in Italy, and writing poetry between defeats.

History remembers him as “Good King René,” a man who was universally liked and universally bankrupt. The true strength in Margaret’s family came from the women around her. Her mother, Isabella, Duchess of Lorraine, ruled in her husband’s absence, while her grandmother, Yolande of Aragon, was one of the most feared political operators of her age, having personally backed Joan of Arc thirty years earlier.

The women of the House of Anjou knew how to hold a court even when the men disappeared, and they taught the young girl well. By her teens, Margaret was poised, sharp, fluent, and intelligent—possessing a pride far greater than her father’s purse could have justified. Then, the English came knocking, though England, during those years, was losing its grip.

The Hundred Years’ War, which had once been an English triumph under Henry V, had turned. Henry V had died young, leaving the throne to his infant son, Henry VI. By the time this son reached twenty-three, he was, by every account, a gentle, devout, and scholarly man who was generous to the poor but completely unsuited to be king. He shrank from war and gave away crown lands as a religious duty.

The Earl of Warwick, the Duke of Suffolk, and the Duke of York ran circles around him, while France clawed back the territory it had once lost. To buy peace, Henry’s chief minister, the Earl of Suffolk, negotiated a marriage. The English king would wed a French princess, and the kingdoms would call a halt to the war. The bride chosen was Margaret of Anjou.

The treaty was a humiliation for England—there was no dowry, and Suffolk secretly agreed that England would return the rich provinces of Maine and Anjou to France. Land bought with English blood under Henry V was being bartered away, and the price of this truce was a girl. The English crown packed away its pride and brought her over.

On the 23rd of April, 1445, in the small Abbey of Titchfield in Hampshire, Margaret of Anjou, aged fifteen, was married to the King of England. She was crowned at Westminster five weeks later. From the very first moment, she understood the nature of her husband: he was kind and gentle, but he was utterly incapable of rule.

For her first years in England, Margaret played the role she had been raised for. She was a queen consort; she built, she donated to the church, and she founded Queen’s College, Cambridge. Yet, she watched as the kingdom slowly came apart. Henry VI was incapable of balancing the factions at court, and the great nobles—the Beauforts, the Percys, the Nevilles, and the de la Poles—fought one another for influence.

The Hundred Years’ War continued to go poorly in France; Normandy fell, then Bordeaux. By the early 1450s, the only French territory England still held was the town of Calais. When the news of these catastrophic losses reached the king, Henry VI broke. In August of 1453, after word arrived that the last English army in France had been annihilated at Castillon, he fell into a total collapse.

He could not speak, recognize anyone, feed himself, or follow a conversation. The greatest physicians in England were summoned, but they could do nothing. The condition was not a temporary fit; it would last for nearly eighteen months and would return again and again for the rest of his life. Modern historians believe Henry VI likely inherited the illness from his maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France.

Margaret was twenty-three years old, the queen of a country whose king could not speak. In October of that same year, two months after Henry’s collapse, she gave birth to a son. They named him Edward after his great-grandfather, Edward III. He was the heir to the throne, but when the boy was brought to his father to be blessed, Henry VI could not raise his head.

He stared at the child without recognition and could not even say his name. Margaret looked at her newborn boy and at the husband who could not see him, and she did the only thing she could: she became the king. There was a problem, however, as the king could not name her regent because he could not name anything at all.

While the King of England slept inside his own body, Richard, Duke of York, saw his chance. A direct descendant of Edward III, he possessed a claim some argued was superior to Henry’s. He was rich, experienced, and popular with the army. With Henry incapacitated, the royal council named York protector of the realm. Margaret refused to accept this, seeing him as a rival waiting to steal her son’s birthright.

The lines were drawn. On one side stood the House of Lancaster—Margaret, Henry, their son Edward, and the powerful Beaufort family. On the other stood the House of York—Richard, his three sons, and the Nevilles, led by the Earl of Warwick. A rose was chosen as the emblem of each side: the red for Lancaster, the white for York. In 1455, the two houses went to war.

For the next thirty years, England would tear itself apart over which rose was the true flower of the crown. At the center of the Lancastrian cause, growing harder with every battle, was Margaret of Anjou. What Margaret did next was, for her age, almost unthinkable; the medieval world did not expect queens to lead armies.

A queen was supposed to be a figure in a painting beside the throne: pious, fertile, and a peacemaker. Margaret stepped outside the painting and never went back. She had no choice. Through the later years of the 1450s, the kingdom drifted between Henry’s fragile lucidities and his collapses. During the lapses, Margaret was the de facto ruler of England.

She raised troops, controlled the privy purse, made appointments, and gathered loyalists. When the first true battle of the Wars of the Roses broke out at St. Albans in 1455, she was the head the army marched behind. When Henry was captured, she organized his rescue; when he sank back into illness, she held the throne in his name. Her enemies hated her for it.

Chroniclers, mostly writing for the victorious Yorkists, described her as proud, vengeful, and scheming. She was indeed foreign and she did scheme, but she did so because the kingdom she had married into was being dismantled around her. Then came Wakefield. By December of 1460, the Yorkists held a serious advantage, as Richard of York had been formally recognized by Parliament as Henry’s heir, effectively disinheriting Margaret’s son.

Margaret refused to accept it. She fled north to Scotland, then returned south with a Lancastrian army gathered from the loyalist north of England. The Yorkists pursued her. Richard of York and his second son, Edmund, marched north to confront the forces gathering near Wakefield. It was a terrible mistake; the Lancastrians outnumbered them, and on the 30th of December, the Duke of York was killed.

His seventeen-year-old son, Edmund, was caught on the bridge over the river and stabbed to death. Then came the order. The chronicles disagree on whether it was hers, but the tradition, repeated for centuries, says it was Margaret’s. The order was simple: cut off the head of the Duke of York, make a crown out of paper, and place it on his head, mounted on Micklegate Bar so that “York might overlook York.”

It is the image Shakespeare seized upon, and it is the moment that fixed Margaret in the English imagination as a woman beyond the natural limits of her sex. After Wakefield, something in her would not soften again. When Edward, Earl of March—Richard of York’s eldest son—heard what had happened, he stopped weeping and raised an army.

He was eighteen, six feet four inches tall, handsome, charming, and a born soldier. Within weeks, he defeated a Lancastrian army at Mortimer’s Cross. By March of 1461, he had ridden into London and been proclaimed King Edward IV. There were now two kings of England: Henry VI, a holy man slipping in and out of madness, and Edward IV, an eighteen-year-old warrior with the largest army anyone could remember.

They met on Palm Sunday, the 29th of March, 1461, near the village of Towton in Yorkshire. Snow was falling. What followed was, by most accounts, the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. Estimates of the dead run to 28,000 in a single day. The snow blew into the faces of the Lancastrian archers, blinding them, while the Yorkists fired into the storm.

The Lancastrian line broke, and the retreat became a slaughter. Men were chased into the freezing river and cut down on its banks, the water reportedly red for miles downstream. Margaret, her husband, and her son, now eight years old, fled north. They first went to Scotland, then she crossed to France to seek the aid of her cousin, Louis XI.

The exile lasted nearly a decade. Through the 1460s, Margaret was a queen without a country, dragging her son from court to court across Europe, begging for soldiers and ships. England mostly forgot her; her husband was captured in 1465 and locked away in the Tower of London, alive but as good as buried.

The change came from inside the Yorkist camp. The Earl of Warwick, the great power behind Edward IV’s throne, quarreled with his king over marriage. Edward had secretly married a commoner, Elizabeth Woodville, without consulting Warwick. The “Kingmaker” turned on the king he had once crowned. In 1470, in the Bishop’s Palace at Angers, Margaret of Anjou and the Earl of Warwick met face to face.

The man who had spent a decade trying to destroy her now needed her help to destroy Edward. She made him wait; the chroniclers say she made the Kingmaker kneel before her for fifteen minutes before she would consent to speak. When she did, she demanded an alliance: Warwick would invade England, restore Henry VI, and to seal the pact, Warwick’s daughter would marry Margaret’s son, Prince Edward.

In the autumn of 1470, Warwick crossed the channel. Edward IV was taken by surprise and fled to Burgundy. Henry VI was dragged out of the Tower—confused, ill-clothed, and unwashed—and put back on the throne. This period is known in English history as the “Readeption,” a brief restoration that lasted only six months.

Margaret hesitated to return, wanting assurances. By the time she was ready to cross the sea in the spring of 1471, Edward IV had already returned. He landed in Yorkshire in March, gathered an army, and on the 14th of April, at the Battle of Barnet in a thick fog, he destroyed Warwick. The Kingmaker was cut down on the field.

That same day, Easter Sunday, Margaret landed on the south coast of England with her son. She heard the news of Barnet only hours after stepping ashore; the army she had come to join no longer existed. She would not turn back, however. She marched west, hoping to cross the Severn into Wales and raise the loyal western counties.

Edward IV caught her at the town of Tewkesbury on the 4th of May, 1471. The Lancastrians, exhausted from forced marches, were drawn into battle on uneven ground. The Yorkists broke through, and the Lancastrian line collapsed. Margaret’s son, Edward of Westminster, the seventeen-year-old Prince of Wales, was killed.

Whether he died fighting bravely or was executed after the battle by Edward IV’s brothers—including the future Richard III—remains a subject of historical debate. Regardless of the exact truth, the boy was dead. Margaret herself was found a few days later, hidden in a small religious house called Little Malvern Priory.

The Yorkists took her without resistance; there was nothing left to resist for. They brought her to London in a wagon, putting her on display for the city she had once ruled. Two days after she arrived, on the 21st of May, 1471, Henry VI was killed inside the Tower of London. The official Yorkist account claimed he died of “pure displeasure and melancholy.”

Almost no one believed it then, and almost no one believes it now. He was, by every reasonable historical reading, murdered on the orders of Edward IV, perhaps by the hand of his brother, Richard. The body was put on public display the next morning at St. Paul’s, and witnesses recorded that fresh blood ran from it onto the pavement.

The common people called it a miracle, accusing the new king of murder; the Yorkist court called it a coincidence. Margaret was now alone in the world. Her husband was murdered, her son was murdered, and the cause she had fought for her entire life was extinct. Edward IV did not put her to death, as there was no one left for her to threaten his throne with.

He locked her in the Tower for a time, then transferred her to less harsh confinement at Windsor and Wallingford. She lived under guard in slowly fading dignity for the next five years. In 1475, Edward IV made peace with Louis XI of France in the Treaty of Picquigny. One of the smaller clauses of that treaty was Margaret.

For a payment of 50,000 crowns, Louis bought his cousin back from England. In exchange, Margaret was required to renounce, in writing, every claim she had ever made or might make to anything in England. She signed. She crossed the Channel in January of 1476 and stepped onto French soil for the first time in twenty years.

She was forty-five years old, a widow with no son, having renounced her queenship. The country she had come to was no longer the one of her childhood. Her father, René, was old and broke, his lands seized in turn by Louis, who had no interest in supporting a powerless cousin. The last years of Margaret of Anjou are the cruelest in her story.

The “Spider King,” having paid for her, gave her almost nothing to live on. Her father died in 1480, leaving her nothing, and Louis seized what remained of René’s lands. Margaret moved between borrowed manors and minor castles in the Loire Valley, supported by old retainers and the charity of distant friends, growing sicker each year.

She died on the 25th of August, 1482, at a small château called Dampierre near Saumur. She was fifty-two. She had asked in her will only to be buried with her parents in Angers Cathedral, but even that final request had to be paid for by friends. Her tomb survived in Angers until the French Revolution, when mobs broke it open in 1793, scattered her bones, and destroyed the effigy.

No one knows precisely where her remains lie. For about a hundred years after her death, Margaret of Anjou faded out of memory—a defeated queen of a defeated cause on the wrong side of a war whose winners wrote the history. Then, a young Englishman in London wrote a play. William Shakespeare, in the early 1590s, was just beginning his career.

He set out to dramatize the entire Wars of the Roses in four plays: Henry VI, parts one, two, and three, and Richard III. Across those four plays, one character appears in all of them—not Henry, not York, not Edward, but Margaret. Shakespeare saw in this dead queen a kind of terrible, mythic stature that none of the chroniclers had managed to capture.

He made her the dark heart of the entire cycle. In Henry VI, Part 3, in the most famous moment of all, just before Richard of York is murdered, Shakespeare gives her enemy a curse to spit at her. “She-wolf of France,” the dying duke calls her, “but worse than wolves of France, whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth.”

That is the original. That is where the phrase enters the English language. It was written for Margaret of Anjou. Centuries later, in 1757, the poet Thomas Gray borrowed the same phrase in his poem “The Bard” and fastened it, almost by accident, onto a completely different queen—Isabella of France, who had invaded England in 1326.

The label stuck to the wrong woman. Popular history books, modern films, and documentaries almost all say the “She-wolf of France” was Isabella. Encyclopedias today will tell you the same. The other queen got the name, but the original earned it. Centuries later, when George R. R. Martin sat down to write the novels that would become A Song of Ice and Fire, he was open about his inspiration.

The Wars of the Roses was his blueprint, he stated in interview after interview. In the figure of Margaret of Anjou—the exiled queen fighting endlessly to put a stolen throne back into her son’s hands—readers and historians can still glimpse the shadows of several of his most famous women. Half of the most-watched television show of this century is somewhere under the dragons and the snow, reflecting the story of a French queen who fought for twenty years to put her boy back on a throne and lost.

In a small French town in the summer of 1482, in a borrowed bed in a borrowed château, a fifty-two-year-old woman drew her last breath. She had asked for only one thing: to be buried with her parents in the cathedral at Angers. Even that grave, three centuries later, would be smashed open and lost.

But on a paper crown on a stone wall, on a winter day in 1460, and on a page in a London playhouse 130 years after her death, Margaret of Anjou wrote her own name into the language. She-wolf of France—the first, the original, the real one. This was the life of Margaret of Anjou.