In some marriages, the love was hopelessly one-sided. Both England’s Mary I (Henry VIII’s older daughter, known as “Bloody Mary”) and the diminutive Portuguese-born princess Catherine of Braganza were tragically in love with their husbands. But their respective spouses, Philip II of Spain and Charles II, never returned their affection. Nicknamed the “Merry Monarch” for the jubilant and libidinous era inaugurated by his Restoration of the monarchy, Charles went so far as to flaunt his numerous mistresses in front of his love-struck wife for the duration of their twenty-three-year marriage! And Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret Tudor was the dupe of not one but three husbands who were incapable of fidelity.
At least these women survived to complain about their mistreatment—unlike Lady Jane Grey, wed against her will, and a victim of her parents’ and in-laws’ ambition. Ditto the two gorgeous Medici princesses Isabella Romola de Medici and Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo, who learned the hard way that in Renaissance Italy powerful husbands could behave with impunity—their wives . . . not so much.
Italian men created their own rules, as Marie Antoinette’s elder sister Maria Carolina learned when she wed Ferdinand IV, king of Naples. She had no choice but to feign amusement when he dumped hot pasta on their subjects’ heads at the opera house; and she could only rail at him or wring her hands when he made passes at every signorina in sight. Married to a buffoon, Maria Carolina became the decision maker at a crucial point in Neapolitan history, with Napoleon encroaching from all sides.
An overarching behavioral pattern emerges in many of the unions profiled here. Perhaps it was the fact that these royal couples couldn’t easily extricate themselves from a bad marriage. Consequently, a parabola of matrimonial misery can be drawn, beginning with mutual indifference on the part of the spouses, who in most cases scarcely knew each other, but certainly hadn’t viewed their mates with anything approaching passionate attachment. As the marriage progressed, familiarity did indeed breed contempt, if not utter loathing—often fertile ground for adultery. However, by the end of some of the lengthier marriages, the sparring spouses had become as comfortable together as a pair of bedroom slippers, settling into a benign state of tolerance and acceptance, occasionally sharing a platonic friendship that was solidified by their mutual devotion to their children. By the time death took one of them from the other, the survivor was often surprised by the intensity of his or her grief: It was a poignant realization, but a little too late to do anything about it.
The remarkable real-life stories in Inglorious Royal Marriages are interconnected; among the heroes and heroines of these connubial catastrophes are some of Europe’s most famous monarchs, as well as others whose lives may be less familiar to readers. Providing context and key events of their reigns, including Readeption, Reformation, restorations, and revolutions, this compendium of royal love gone wrong proves that once again, real life is often stranger—and juicier—than fiction!
HENRY VI
AND
MARGARET OF ANJOU
MARRIED: 1445–1471
It is said that history is written by the winners. Given the manner in which both sides of a conflict are often portrayed, this contention is unsurprising. For example, two of the fifteenth century’s biggest losers were England’s unpopular King Henry VI and his French-born wife, Margaret of Anjou. They were on the wrong side of fortune in what was then called the Cousins’ War—a bloody, decades-long dispute that would eventually be known as the Wars of the Roses, after the red and white floral badges adopted by the feuding royal houses of Lancaster and York.
History has not been kind to either spouse. Even Henry’s contemporary chroniclers drew biased portraits, based upon their own partisanship, fear of reprisals, or propaganda generated by years of civil war and multiple shifts in the political landscape, including regime changes.
Henry VI, who ascended the throne at the age of nine months, was the youngest English monarch to wear the crown, and the only one ever to be rightfully acknowledged and crowned as the king of France as well. Nonetheless, he is still perceived as one of the worst, and certainly among the weakest, sovereigns in English history. His reign was thirty-nine long years, and from the time he was a teen, he proved himself to be overly prudish and pious, credulous and malleable. He’s remembered as a failure, the only English king to lose his crown twice, his sovereignty ending in civil war.
Yet where has posterity largely placed the blame for Henry’s catalog of misjudgment and poor governance? On his wife, Margaret of Anjou, “she-wolf of France.”
This slur on Margaret’s character has endured for more than four centuries, and it came from the quill of a dramatist. William Shakespeare’s indelible portrayals of the key figures in the Wars of the Roses have forever shaped the way we view them, and although Shakespeare relied upon contemporary chronicles as a springboard for his history plays, scholars ever since have continued to promulgate his theatrical portrayal of Margaret as fact.
In Henry VI, Part 3, Act I, scene iv, line 110, Shakespeare places the words “She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France . . .” into the mouth of Margaret’s greatest enemy, Richard, Duke of York—the father of the man who will one day depose her husband and seize his throne. The “she-wolf” insult, which is utterly in character for the duke, comes at the top of a lengthy diatribe jam-packed with insults against Margaret, blaming her for the death of his teenage son, the Earl of Rutland. Very dramatic in the play, but the real Margaret wasn’t even present when Rutland was slain.
In Act V at line 80 in scene iv, York’s insult will be paralleled when Margaret calls his son, Edward IV, usurper of her husband’s crown, a “wolf.” I’ve yet to come across another analysis of Margaret of Anjou that refers to the other bookend of this lupine metaphor. Instead of recognizing a literary device lifted from a drama, generations of scholars have swallowed the misogynistic invectives spewed in York’s forty-two-line monologue, taking his words at face value. They have reconstructed Margaret’s historical persona based upon an insult uttered by a playwright’s fictional depiction of another historical figure, portrayed in the text as her mortal enemy.
Consequently, based largely on propaganda and dramatizations, we are left with this portrait of Margaret and Henry as a mismatched royal couple: a termagant madly mated to a monk. There are elements of truth to this simplistic synopsis. But the whole story, as one might expect, is much more intriguing and nuanced.
The marriage of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou is inextricably entwined with the events of the Cousins’ War, the seeds of which were sown before Henry ascended the throne in 1422. While the scope of this chapter is not intended to provide a literal blow-by-blow account of this lengthy conflict, some background information might be helpful.
Flash back in time to the reign of Edward III, which lasted from 1327 to 1377. Edward had thirteen children, five of whom were sons. By making his sons the first English dukes, Edward created a social stratum of royal magnates who wielded significant power and expressed their sibling rivalry in land grabs. Eventually, their fraternal tension would be reduced to two factions: the cousins of the Lancastrian line versus those of the York line, a veritable battle royal for which side of the family had the greater claim to the crown.
The Lancastrians descended from Edward’s third surviving son, John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, who had inherited that title from his father-in-law. The York branch of the family descended from Edward’s fourth son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York.
By 1399, Richard II, who was Edward III’s grandson and the son of his eldest boy, Edward, “the Black Prince,” had been on the throne for nearly twenty-two years and had no heir to show for it. That year also marked the death of the powerful John of Gaunt. Gaunt’s son, Henry of Bolingbroke, became the new Duke of Lancaster, and usurped the crown from his cousin Richard, declaring himself King Henry IV.
Henry IV’s grandson was Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou’s husb
and.
Additionally, because his grandfather had deposed Richard II, many still believed that the Lancastrian Henry VI had no right to wear the crown at all, and they continued to view his whole line as usurpers.
There was a popular saying at the time: “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.” It was never truer than in the case of tiny Henry VI, whose parents were the English warrior king Henry V and Catherine of Valois, a daughter of the mentally unsound French King Charles VI. In 1420, five years after Henry V vanquished the French in the Battle of Agincourt, the Treaty of Troyes was signed, proclaiming Henry’s offspring the heirs to the French throne, and overlooking Charles’s own son. Charles died on October 11, 1422, less than two months after the infant Henry VI ascended the English throne. Henry VI was then proclaimed king of France as well.
During Henry’s minority, while his uncle Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, acted as his regent and protector of England, France was governed by another regent, his uncle John of Lancaster, the Duke of Bedford. On November 5, 1429, seven-year-old Henry was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey. On December 16, 1431, he was crowned king of France at Notre Dame—but Bedford had badly miscalculated the mood of the French. Many refused to recognize Henry as their sovereign, and didn’t like being ruled from afar by a little English boy’s regent. They wanted a French grown-up on their own throne, preferring to recognize the dauphin, the son of Charles VI, as King Charles VII of France, despite the fact that the Treaty of Troyes had overlooked him.
In 1435, during renegotiations of the treaty, France completely rejected the pact, Bedford died in the middle of the discussions, and a new concord, the Treaty of Arras, was concluded between former French foes Charles VII and Philip of Burgundy, cutting the Lancastrians out of the picture entirely.
Two years later, sixteen-year-old Henry VI declared himself of age and repurposed his regency council. He also fired his tutor, the Earl of Warwick, from whom he had learned all the arts of chivalry and military strategy. When the time came to utilize these lessons, Henry would evince little interest in employing them.
Unfortunately, Henry lacked the experience and skill to manage England’s nobles, so he tried to buy their support with money and lavish land grants, which his treasury could ill afford. His council cautioned him about such profligacy and urged him to conserve his funds. But Henry was not a strong leader and had tremendous difficulty asserting his authority with the same men who had run things for years during his minority.
Henry inherited a nearly bankrupt treasury, a council split into factions, an increasingly powerful aristocracy, and a corrupt legal system. He also inherited an unwinnable conflict—the so-called Hundred Years’ War, begun by Edward III in 1337 for control of the French throne—that continued to drain England’s resources. Most devastating of all, Henry was essentially powerless to curb any of these problems.
Although he had been a natty dresser as a boy, favoring colorful garments in the latest fashions, around the time he turned sixteen he went through a monkish phase, deciding that his former sartorial indulgences had been a display of worldly vanity. He started wearing long tunics and gowns with round hoods. His entire wardrobe was dark gray. Henry’s courtiers were dismayed by the image he projected, complaining that he dressed “like a townsman.”
Even after his marriage, the king continued to show so little regard for finery that in 1459 he gave his best gown to the prior of St. Albans, but then discovered he had nothing else to wear on state occasions and couldn’t afford to buy a new ensemble! Much to Henry’s annoyance, his treasurer bought back his garment from the prior for fifty marks.
The king’s ascetic wardrobe may have gone hand in glove with his religious outlook as well. By this time, Henry was renowned for his piety. Not only did he view himself as the guardian of public morals, but he practiced what he preached. Henry never swore, nor would he tolerate it from others. Spending the lion’s share of his leisure hours reading religious books and moral tracts, he believed that if his subjects did so, too, their character would be improved by it. And he was, at least compared to other men, extremely prudish. He warned the boys at Eton College, Windsor (which he founded), to stay away from the castle, where they might be corrupted by the courtiers’ debauchery. Nudity offended him, and he vented his displeasure at a lord who produced a Christmas pageant featuring topless dancing girls. The king stormed out of the performance, averting his eyes as he cried, “Fie, fie, for shame!”
He “avoided the company of women,” wrote John Blacman, whose memoir chronicled Henry’s reign, adding that the king was “a pupil of chastity—chaste and pure from the beginning of his days and eschewed all licentiousness in word or deed while he was young.” Even four years after his marriage, when he journeyed to Bath in 1449, Henry was horrified to see men and women bathing naked together in the famous spa waters.
A medieval monarch had to be a brave leader in the field, but Henry VI had no wish to fight against his fellow Christians. He was the first English king since the Norman Conquest never to have led an army against a foreign enemy. Although he desired France as much as his predecessors had, he harbored a distaste for the destruction of war and the devastating loss of life.
Couldn’t France be gained through peaceful means instead?
By 1441, Henry VI had developed, in the words of a contemporary chronicler, “an earnest desire to live under the holy sacrament of marriage.” He doubtless knew his duty to sire an heir, and by this point in time he wasn’t so disinterested in women that looks were unimportant in choosing a bride. He demanded portraits of all prospects.
In order to solidify the peace between their realms after 104 years (and counting) of conflict, Henry recognized that his best alliance, regardless of physical appearance, would be with the French. He viewed the field of France as a vast chessboard. So his first choice was the daughter of the comte d’Armagnac, in order to checkmate Armagnac’s rival, the Duke of Burgundy.
Henry’s chief adviser, his cousin Cardinal Beaufort, proposed another girl instead: the niece of King Charles VII by marriage—Margaret of Anjou. However, Henry still wanted to see the goods before he agreed to the purchase. But how to get a portrait of Margaret?
The following anecdote may have been written much later on, and it probably contains a bit of fictional embellishment, but some historians present it as fact, and it’s a marvelous adventure story, right out of a medieval romaunt.
Living on parole in London was a French chevalier from Argon named Champchevrier. This knight had given his word of honor (his “parole”) to remain in London to Sir John Fastolf, the English knight who had taken him prisoner.
Never mind Champchevrier’s promise to Fastolf (a name, albeit spelled a bit differently, that will be familiar to Shakespeare aficionados): King Henry himself needed a Frenchman! He dispatched Champchevrier on a secret diplomatic mission to Anjou to secure a portrait of his potential bride. The chevalier did so, but the irate Fastolf—who had not been told why his prisoner had “escaped” to France—demanded to know why he’d broken his parole. Sir John then insisted, by the laws of chivalry, that his prisoner be returned to him!
What happened next was a veritable comedy of errors.
Believed to have violated his parole to Sir John Fastolf, Champchevrier was arrested in France—with Margaret of Anjou’s portrait on him. This was highly irregular. After the French authorities were willing to grant his desperate request to see the king of France, the chevalier told Charles VII that he was not an escaped parolee, but was on a secret diplomatic mission from Henry VI. He produced the portrait of Charles’s niece and stated the reason for his flight from England. Happy to consider a marriage between Margaret and Henry, Charles released Champchevrier and sent the knight on his merrie way back to olde England.
Receiving the portrait in October 1443, Henry VI apparently became uncharacteristically smitten with the image of “the excellent, magnifi
cent, and very bright Margaret,” who was all of thirteen years old at the time. He contacted the Earl of Suffolk to go ahead and broker his marital alliance.
Unfortunately, the princess, who still bore her childhood nickname, la petite créature, wasn’t that much of a catch. Although her uncle the king was the man who by popular acclaim and diplomatic treaty had nudged Henry off the French throne, her father, the nearly impoverished René, duc d’Anjou, was only the titular king of Naples and Sicily, Jerusalem and Hungary. He didn’t actually wear the crowns of any of those realms, and in the case of Naples he’d been compelled to cede the title to Alfonso of Aragon. Even René’s duchy of Anjou had been occupied by the English when he inherited it in 1434.
Margaret’s mother, Isabelle, was the daughter of the duc de Lorraine, Charles the Bold. The women in her family were not only sophisticated and well educated, but they were accustomed to taking the reins of power and assuming authority when necessity demanded it. Her own mother had been such an object lesson; Isabelle had continued to claim her husband’s rights and wage his battles for him while René was a prisoner of war awaiting ransom. Margaret’s paternal grandmother, Yolande of Aragon, whom she lived with for eight years during her childhood, had ruled as regent for her oldest son, resisting the English at her peril by supporting the disinherited dauphin Charles, even marrying him to her daughter Marie. Yolande’s gamble had paid off. The dauphin came out on top; he was now Charles VII of France and Marie was his queen.
Although Henry VI had chosen a bride who would turn out to be an utter mismatch for him in so many respects, in a way he had inadvertently lucked out, because in the long run he could not have made a better selection. Henry was someone who became literally helpless in a crisis, whereas Margaret had not only the temperament but came from a family of women who knew how to meet a challenge head-on.
The betrothal with Margaret was part and parcel of negotiations for a lasting peace treaty between England and France. By January 1444, a cessation of hostilities seemed to be on the horizon, with a summit organized between both sides at which the peace and the king’s marriage plans would be discussed.
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