Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England from the Norman conquest to the fall of the Stuarts |
Margaret of Anjou;
WIFE OF HENRY VI.
1457. |
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 | Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England |  |
Margaret of Anjou;
WIFE OF HENRY VI.
1457.
There is a very general habit among ordinary, and what
may be called everyday readers—even among that portion of
them who would feel themselves greatly aggrieved at being
supposed to underlie such a charge—of forming their general
estimate of events, persons, characters, and circumstances even
of veracious history, from the fictitious delineations of them
found in the pages of poets, dramatists, and romancers; much
pleasanter reading certainly, if less to be relied on, than old
musty black-letter chroniclers, or modern pragmatical compilers.
Not a few even of our historians—themselves the teachers,
as they should be, of less solid and solemn falsehoods— have
too often, as it seems to me, condescended to become their
pupils; and have transmitted tales, intended for the brief amusement
of an audience wishing to be pleased for an hour, as grave
facts and authorities for the information of an audience desirous
to be instructed throughout ages.
Of no portion of history is this more true, than of that dark
and gloomy period known as the Wars of the Roses, which
devastated England for above thirty years, during which twelve[1]
in which the lives of above eighty princes of the blood-royal were
lost either in the field or on the scaffold; the ancient nobility
of England almost annihilated; the ancient spirit of chivalry,
with its redeeming charities, and courtesies, and mercies, and
above all its high sense of honor, utterly eradicated; and a
fierce, brutal, bloodthirsty, and scourgeful party furor—not palliated
even by a loyal adherence to party, and utterly regardless
of the sanctity of oaths, or hospitalities, or ties of blood—
was for a long and hideous lapse of years ill-substituted. Of
this black page—the blackest, I think, take it all for all, of the
history of England—there is but one point on which the Anglo-Saxon
reader can dwell with any satisfaction; it is the admitted
truth, that, whereas in the civil wars of the European
continent, it is the masses, the peaceful citizens and the hard-handed
peasantry, who have ever suffered, the yet bloodier civil
Wars of the Roses were literally war to the castle, peace to the
cottage.
While eighty princes of the blood-royal perished, many
slaughtered in cold blood by noble, nay, but by kindred hands,
many more arbitrarily doomed to the scaffold; while the old
feudal aristocracy were so hewn down, root and branch, that
an eloquent writer[2]
has asserted—a little extravagantly, perhaps,
but still with some base whereon to stand—that “after
the battle of Bosworth, a pure Norman-descended Baron was
a rarer thing in England than a wolf,” few citizens or peasants
fell, unless in the chaude melée to which they followed their
favorites or their lords; no military executions swept away the
captives by thousands, after the more merciful shock of arms
was past; no warrant of high treason followed the peasant to
fell on the nobles only.
“Society, therefore,” to quote the words of the most recent,
as he is assuredly the most eloquent, of English historians,[3]
“recovered from the shock as soon as the actual conflict was
over. The calamities of civil war were confined to the slaughter
on the field of battle, and to a few subsequent executions
and confiscations. In a week the peasant was driving his
team, and the esquire flying his hawks over the field of Towton
or of Bosworth, as if no extraordinary event had interrupted
the regular course of human life.”
“Even while the Wars of the Roses were raging,” he resumes,
a few paragraphs later—“our country appears to have
been in a happier condition than the neighboring realms during
years of most profound peace. Comine* was one of the most
enlightened statesmen of his time. He had seen all the richest
and most civilized parts of the continent. He had lived in the
opulent towns of Flanders, the Manchesters and Liverpools of
the fifteenth century. He had visited Florence, recently adorned
by the magnificence of Lorenzo; and Venice, not yet humbled
by the confederates of Cambray. This eminent man deliberately
pronounced England to be the best governed country of
which he had any knowledge. Her constitution he emphatically
designated as a just and holy thing, which, while it protected
the people, really strengthened the hands of the king
who respected it. In no other country, he said, were men so
effectually secured from wrong. The calamities produced by
our intestine wars seemed to him to be confined to the nobles
and the fighting men, and to bear no such traces as he had been[4]
cities.”
Yet, of this singular and almost anomalous period, the admiration
of contemporaneous statesmen, the wonder of succeeding
philosophers, it is not too much to say that ninety-nine hundredths
of all English readers form their opinions in accordance
to the rules in which it has pleased the genius, or perhaps—
alas! that it should be said of the greatest as well as the basest
of men—the interest of Will Shakspeare to paint them.
In his great historical plays, by which he led captive the
fancies of the great of his own day, and has led astray the
judgments even of wise men ever since, Richard the Second,
the parts of Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, the parts of
Henry the Sixth, and Richard the Third, lie almost all the
opinions of almost all readers of the present day concerning the
rights and wrongs, the virtues and vices, the sins and sorrows
of the personages of that distracted period. So true is this,
that I well remember being myself asked by a lady of very
superior talents and various reading, “How it was to be explained
that some historian, whom she mentioned, and I have
forgotten, could describe Richard the Third as a wise, able,
and politic king, when it was well known that he was not king
more than a few days?” She had, of course, formed her idea
of the time from Shakspeare's play, or rather from Colley
Cibber's version of it—for Will himself does not quite so much
hurry the action—in which Richard is Duke of Gloucester in
the first act, King in the second, and slain by the young and
gallant Harry of Richmond in the fifth act; the latter personage,
by the way, whom it suited the poet to magnify, being
one of the coldest-blooded, meanest, and most cruel tyrants—
one of the most arbitrary and deliberate enemies of the English
constitution, and one of the most odious men, both in public
bloodthirsty monster, the wife-murderer, who succeeded him,
was less detestable than he, for his vices were those of a bad
man—the other's those of a villanous machine; the crimes of
the second tyrant were the effects of hot-blood and boiling passion,
while those of his father were the offspring of cold malice
and deliberate calculation.
In no case, it is clear from the very nature of his vocation,
can the dramatist or the romancer be a safe exponent, or be
received as a true authority of historic questions. Effect is his
object, not truth—contrast the points at which he aims, not
congruities. If he find contrasts and effects, it is the privilege
of his caste, perhaps it is his duty as a craftsman, to strengthen
the latter by exaggerating the former. If the true tale of the
courts which he has chosen whereon to build the lofty rhyme, as
otherwise well adapted to his purpose, lack these effects and
contrast, why then, at the expense of historical truth, he must
create them—and why not? He offers to amuse you as a poet,
never probably dreaming that you are so mad as to quote him
into an historical authority. His object is to stir your feelings
to the pitch of action, to make you burn with anger, melt with
tears, tremble with visionary terrors; he cares not whether his
portrait is to the life or no, so that your sympathies declare it
to be life-like; it matters not to him whether his censure
blacken the ermine's purity or his praise purify the murderer's
crimson; and wherefore should it? or “what is Hecuba to him,
or he to Hecuba,” that he should lose your approbation for her
honor?
This is good cause why any avowed writer of entertaining
fiction should be regarded as an insecure base whereon to found
an opinion of true character. Historians, whose privilege exempts
them not from the closest adherence to the literal fact,
enough, heaven knows, in this particular, and become guides
so blind, that we have no occasion to seek for pilots through
the Cimmerian darkness of darkest historic regions among those,
who as being human are equally liable to go astray through
faction or favor, and who have never bound themselves to
accuracy or adherence to the letter of the truth. But why the
authority of the great, the immortal poet of England, who
most of all his tuneful brethren was Saxon English to the core,
is to be viewed with suspicion and distrust as concerns facts of
history, during the Wars of the Roses more especially, is that
all his personal prejudices leaned to the Lancastrian side; that
all his principal patrons, most of all the man-minded Elizabeth,
was a genuine Tudor, and though in the female line descended
from the house of York, held and claimed her crown always as
the heiress of her grandfather—Henry VII., of Lancaster.
By vastly the greater proportion of all English readers, who
have not troubled themselves to look into dry genealogical
details, and who perchance regard heraldry as a mere jargon,
it is supposed to this day, through the enormous influence of
Shakspeare's wondrous dramas—of which influence the prevalence
of this error is not perhaps the least evident proof—that the
house of Lancaster was in the true line of the Royal succession,
and that the house of York were daring and intrusive usurpers.
I do not intend to charge the great poet with intentionally
originating this falsehood; for it is more than probable that
historians and chroniclers—such as they were at that day—
began, so soon as Henry VII. had secured the crown upon his
head, and Henry VIII. all but added to it the Papal tiara, to
conciliate the favor of the arbitrary and grasping Tudors, by
strengthening the claims of the usurping house of Lancaster
and depreciating those of the rightful heir of York.
How easy a thing it is to falsify history by personal favor
and factious partisanship; and how difficult a thing it is, when
it has once been falsified, to unravel the tangled yarns of truth
and falsehood, how almost hopeless to arrive at the right, we
need not go far to discover—not farther than to the history of
these United States, and that of the last half century, within
the personal memory of many men now living—for it is yet a
mooted question, and probably never now can be satisfactorily
answered, whether or no a general of high command was a
traitor, a commodore in a celebrated naval victory a coward;
and if it be so easy a thing for partisan pens to cloud the truth
of actions so recent, as to make it undiscoverable—how arduous
must it not be to follow the clue of history through the devious
winding of ignorance, of sophistry, of prejudice, of intentional
falsehood to the right end, when that end is centuries distant!
In this case, happily, the truth lies in a nutshell, and depends
on facts of genealogical descent, so plain and potent, that
we need not dive deep into the mysteries of heraldic science to
develop it.
Richard II., who succeeded to the throne of England in 1377,
was the only son and heir of Edward the Black Prince, the
eldest son of Edward III.; he survived his father, and ascended
the throne at the decease of his grandfather, being then only
eleven years of age; and though in his early youth, while yet a
minor, he displayed both energy and courage; as he advanced in
years, he proved himself the weakest, most imbecile, and favoriteled
of English princes, with scarcely the exceptions of his hapless
great-grandfather, Edward II., and yet more hapless successor,
the sixth Henry, with whose reign we have to do.
It is very usual to hear much pity wasted upon weak princes,
and it is a favorite subject of declamation with historians, to
lament over the private virtues of the victim of his own imbecility,
idiots, which had remained tranquilly loyal under the rule of
capable despots. The truth is, that, for the most part, nations
suffer more under weak princes—themselves subservient to a
host of insolent, voracious, and ambitious favorites, each and all of
whom oppress the masses—than under one despot who oppresses
them himself, but who allows none to oppress them but himself
—on the principle that one bad master is better than a thousand;
and so it was proved with Richard. For, during his incapable
and unfortunate reign, he so completely lost all hold on any
party that, when he disappeared, no one cared to inquire whether
it was by actual violence, or by the natural termination of
imprisoned misery. The Duke of Lancaster, better known to the
general reader as Harry of Bolingbroke, usurped the throne, with
the consent, indeed, of Parliament, and amid the rejoicings of all
parties; and the unhappy Richard was committed to close custody
in Pomfret Castle, where he soon died, not without suspicion of
being murdered by Sir Piers Exton, who had him in charge. This
Harry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, was son to the last Duke
of Lancaster, third brother of Edward III., by Catherine Swineford,
the daughter of a private knight of Hainault. He assumed
the crown, in 1399, under the title of Henry IV., and held it
successfully and firmly, though with the strong hand always—
a manifest and double usurper; since, even supposing the forced
resignation of Richard to be valid, the true title to the throne,
vacant by his demise, was in the house of Mortimer, represented
by the Earl of March, son of the daughter of Lionel, Duke of
Clarence, second son of Edward III., and Edward Mortimer, the
Earl, preceding him. This is the point on which the whole case
turns, as in this the primogeniture of the house of Lancaster
breaks down, and ultimately, as I shall presently show, the true
title was vested in the house of York.
Although this may seem a little dry and tedious, I will promise
that it shall be brief, and I would beg even the most impatient
of my readers to bear with me yet a little further, as a
few more words will put them au fait to the solution of a
very knotty question, at which to get, through the regular
channels of legitimate history, they would have to wade through
many a weary chapter, and then among the multiplicity of
Philippas, Isabellas, and Margarets—they had very pretty names
it must be admitted—and of ever recurring Dukes of Clarence,
York, Lancaster, and Gloucester, reign after reign; and generation
after generation, will, ten to one, overlook the gist of the
question when they come at it.
This usurping Henry IV., as I have said, held his crown so
long as he lived, and transmitted his title, disputed during his
life, to be yet more fiercely disputed after his death, to his son,
Henry V., one of the brightest supporters of the English crown,
dying a natural death in 1413, as unpopular at his demise as
he had been popular at his accession. In that year Henry V.
succeeded, and though disputes were raised in behalf of the
Earl of March, by an admixture of mercy tempering the severity
of law, he suppressed all conspiracies, spread the glories of
English arms far beyond the seas, and died the last great
foreign conqueror, and perhaps the most popular of English
kings, in 1422.
To him succeeded, at the age of nine months, his only son, by
Catherine of France, under the title of Henry VI., and, with his
crown, inherited the false and disputed title, without the strong
heart or the strong hand which can out of might make right.
During his long minority, and the protectorate of the able
and upright Dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, his uncles, no
claims were laid to his crown. Yet even his minority was unfortunate;
for the loss of all the French provinces, one by one
English at his accession heated the mind of the public against
him, and tended in some degree to his subsequent disasters.
A short time before he attained to his majority, the great and
good Duke of Bedford died at Rouen; and the unfortunate dissensions
which existed between the Cardinal Winchester and
the Duke of Gloucester excluded that honorable prince from the
councils of the young king, who, as he arrived at years of manhood,
showed an imbecility of character, a want of parts, a silly,
weak good-nature, and a willingness to be guided, not inferior
to that which had discrowned Richard II., and set his own
house on the throne, though his character was not disgraced by
the love of low society and vulgar debauchery, which belonged
to that most unprincely of princes.
On the death of the Duke of Bedford, a man, with whom,
henceforth, we shall have much to do, was appointed Regent of
France in his stead—Richard, Duke of York, namely—destined
thereafter to be his rival for the crown. This Richard was son
of the Earl of Cambridge, who was second son of the old Duke
of York, fourth son of Edward III. His mother was sister to
the last Earl of March, who died without issue during the late
reign, and therefore great grand-daughter of Lionel, Duke of
Clarence, second son of Edward III. The death of the Earl of
Cambridge's elder brother without issue, left Richard Duke of
York. He was therefore, on his father's side, heir to the fourth,
and on his mother's, to the second son of Edward the Third.
The house of the eldest son, the Black Prince, was extinct with
Richard II., and that of the third, the usurping house of Lancaster,
held the throne to the prejudice of the true heirs.
This Duke of York, however, though a man of parts, character,
integrity, and courage, was mild, kind-tempered, and cautious;
and it is little likely that he would ever have disturbed
from inaction into arms.
Shortly after Henry's accession, his ministers—or governors,
as they might be called more justly—the Dukes of Somerset,
Suffolk, and Buckingham, negotiated his marriage with Margaret
of Anjou, the daughter of René, King of Provence, and
titular king of Sicily, Naples, and Jerusalem, and Count of Anjou,
of all which splendid titles he possessed the barren honor
only, with scarce the land or revenue of an English baron. The
lady herself, however, was the loveliest of her day, and, both in
mind and body, the most accomplished in all Christendom. She
had a high, courageous spirit, an enterprising temper, a solid
understanding, and vivacious talents. In all respects, she was
one of whom, says Hume, who does not on the whole write
favorably of her—“it was reasonable to expect that, when she
should mount the throne, these”—her great talents—“would
break out with still superior lustre.” In all respects, she was
one fitted to be the wife of a husband lacking the energies
alike and the capacities of a man, without the wit to conciliate
and the will to control his people. In circumstances, as in
character, she was not unlike the unhappy wife of the sixteenth
Louis of France, although she lacked her more feminine virtues
and her gentler graces. In devotion to a drivelling, dotard
husband; in maternal affection, maternal courage, she was surpassed
by no one. Both foreigners in the countries they were
destined to rule, both hated by their people for being foreigners,
both linked unequally to drivelling dastards, both strove, according
to their natures and the ages in which they lived, for
the rights of their lords, and the inheritance of their children.
It were no mean praise to say of Margaret of Anjou, as I should
not hesitate to say, and as I hope to establish, that she was a
sanguinary epoch or a more cruel country.
It happened, unfortunately for Margaret, that by the treaties
of her marriage, negotiated, as I have said, by the Dukes of
Suffolk and Somerset, the remote province of Maine, lately
conquered by the English arms from the French crown, had
been ceded to her uncle Charles of Anjou, though she brought
herself no dowry to the king, her husband. Still more unhappily
it fell out that in carrying out this cession a fresh strife
arose; a war broke out between the two countries, in the course
of which all the French provinces, having been attached to the
English crown since the reign of Henry II., were lost to England
for ever, and attached to the French crown. There can
be no doubt that the loss of these provinces was a real gain to
England; but at that day politics was a science not sufficiently
advanced to permit even the wisest statesman to discern this
truth, and the popular pride in England was attached, in those
days, to the maintenance of the French conquests, just as it is
nowadays to that of Malta and Gibraltar; and as the popular
fury would fall hot and heavy on the administration which
should surrender or lose those costly fortalices of the national
vanity, so fell it then on the surrenderers of Maine, the losers
of Guienne and Normandy, and all foothold on the soil of
France. It was an unhappy thing again for Margaret, that the
good Duke of Gloucester should have been opposed to her
marriage with the king, and that he should thus have been
brought into more active enmity with the Dukes of Suffolk
and Somerset, since as a woman, owing her elevation in some
sort to Suffolk, whom she had personally kept abroad before her
accession, and as a woman piqued by the Duke of Gloucester's
preference for another woman to be his cousin's bride, she was
naturally more deeply engaged on the side of the bad, ambitious
rulers rather, and friends, whom she found in some sort the
masters of her own destiny; and whom, by every motive of gratitude,
judgment, and interest, she was bound to regard her
friends until she should find them otherwise. For the same
causes it is natural that she should have regarded the good Duke
of Gloucester as her enemy; and that she should have been
easily led to believe, what was of course daily dinned into her
ears by the ministers in power, that he was a traitor, secretly
conspiring the death of the king, and aiming at the succession
of the crown.
On this point I have been somewhat diffuse, because on it
have been founded the only serious charges that ever have been
brought against this high-spirited and unhappy princess, whom
the Yorkish writers naturally calumniated, as an enemy dangerous
even when conquered, and whom in after days the Lancastrians
cared not to defend, because she was loaded with popular
odium, as a detested foreigner—it seems characteristic, by
the way, of the Anglo-Saxon blood in all times and places, the
fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, England and the United
States, to detest and calumniate all foreigners, unless they are
patriot men or singing women—considering it well enough to
have a French scapegoat for the crimes of their party, when
they had criminals enough of their own to defend.
Gloucester was committed to the Tower on false charges of
treason, and a few days afterwards was found murdered in his
bed, while under the ward of his uncle the Cardinal, and the
Duke of Suffolk. The fine lines of Shakspeare will here
readily occur to all—
But may imagine how the bird was dead,
Although the hawk soar with unblooded beak;
these two noblemen, neither of whom long survived him, and
one of whom, his uncle, is said to have died in the agonies
of a guilty conscience. But I must protest against such reasoning,
or sophistry rather, as the following of Hume's, for which
I am bold to assert, as he indeed almost admits, there is not a
shadow of ground for suspicion, except the scene in Shakspeare,
from which I have quoted above, and in which, to
heighten the effect, he has introduced Margaret assisting and
sustaining Suffolk. “What share the queen had in this guilt,”
says this great, though most partial historian, “is uncertain;
her usual activity and spirit made the public conclude, with
some reason, that the duke's enemies durst not have ventured
on such a deed without her privity. But there happened, soon
after, an event of which she and her favorite, the Duke of
Suffolk, bore incontestably the whole odium.” The event
alluded to is the cession of Maine, and the loss of other provinces
consequent on it. A few words in the above I have italicised,
wishing to show how easily a writer may convey truth
by the letter, and falsehood by the meaning, and show how
easy to destroy a reputation by calumny, maintaining a show
of candor. Is uncertain, says Hume; and in one sense it is
uncertain, for there is not even an iota of pretended evidence,
or even suspicion against her. If it be uncertain whether a
person is guilty until he shall be proved innocent, few of us, it
is to be feared, shall go unwhipped of justice. With some
reason; the reason seems to be that, because she was active and
spirited, she therefore was likely to have committed a cold-blooded,
cowardly murder. But the truth is, that to grant the
spirit and activity, at that date, is to beg the question; at this
period she had displayed neither; they grew with the growth
of subsequent events. Hitherto it appears that she, the king,
triumvirate—Somerset, Winchester, and Suffolk. By the words
her favorite, the historian basely insinuates what he dare not
assert, and he can show no possible suspicion of such a ground
for calumny, that Margaret was an untrue wife of Henry; an
accusation, it needs not to say, which every action, every hour
of her life—full of devotion to himself while living, to his memory
when dead—brand with the living lie. The odium of the
loss of the French provinces she bore incontestably. True, grave
historian! most incontestably she did bear it. But read as thou
didst mean it to be read while writing it, this passage means,
and is understood by ninety-nine out of a hundred who do read
it, as meaning deserved to bear it. She was a beautiful, young,
admired girl, living with an old doting father, who kept up a
court literally of mountebanks and fiddlers, held cours plénières
des amours, and fancied himself a troubadour; and there is no
more likelihood that she should have ever known the articles
of the secret treaty made between her uncle, Charles of Anjou,
and the ambassador plenipotentiary of a foreign prince, concerning
a matter which in no earthly way concerned her, than
that the daughter of an English nobleman of the present day
should know or care anything about the articles of her own
marriage settlement, beyond the amount of her pin money, and
the magnificence of her trousseau.
If it mean anything, this charge would go to imply—like the
mad howl raised by the brute terrorists and insane canaille of
Paris against the Austrian Marie Antoinette—that it was her
object to dismantle England for the benefit of her native country,
and to stamp upon her, what was then in her adopted
country held a stigma, the name of Frenchwoman. But let it
go for what it is worth, I have noted it more to show how
history is written, and to let my readers judge how it ought to
of view as requiring justification or defence. If Mr. Hume
meant to say that Margaret was privy to the murder of the
Duke of Gloucester, it was his duty as an historian to declare
her aloud a murderess; if he meant to assert that she was Suffolk's
paramour, it was his duty as a man to hold her up as an
object of abhorrence to all pure and virtuous women; if he
was prepared to show that she merited the odium which fell on
her for traitorously surrendering the Anglo-Gallican provinces,
it was his duty as a patriot to pronounce her a traitress. But,
as he dared not say that there was a shadow of reasonable
suspicion against her on any of the three points, he had no
right to insinuate, and by fair words produce false impressions.
If it be an author's duty “naught to extenuate, nor aught set
down in malice,” it is certainly one of his blackest sins to set
down the truth so as to make it convey a monstrous and malicious
lie.
Now it was barely two years after this, Winchester being
dead, and Richard, Duke of York, the last Regent of France,
now deprived of his occupation, was beginning to stir in England,
that at the time when Hume himself admits that “the
people considered Margaret as a Frenchwoman, and a latent
enemy of the kingdom,” the House of Commons impeached
Suffolk, and accused him of high treason, on some score of false
and absurd charges, one of which was that “he had persuaded
the French king to invade England with an armed force, in
order to depose the king.” Is is needless to say that no such
invasion was ever contemplated, and that even Margaret was
herself fighting for her husband's crown, and actually setting
squadrons in the field; she either never attempted, or never
was able to effect, a French co-operation landing. It is also
curious that when the Commons abandoned their false charges
himself, before the peers and commons, pronounced sentence of
banishment against Suffolk, a sentence which Margaret could
incontestably have prevented, had she chosen, and must have
chosen to prevent had she loved him, for whatever she could do
with the wily Beaufort, the able Somerset, and the shrewd Suffolk,
she certainly could wind the weak Henry to her will,
though she did so only, so far as history shows, for his own
good.
Suffolk was banished, however, without the queen's moving
in his favor; and as he went to France for refuge, “a captain
of a vessel was there employed to intercept him in his passage;
he was seized near Dover, his head struck off on the side of a
long boat, and his body thrown into the sea. No inquiry was
made after the actors and accomplices in this atrocious deed of
violence.” An admission which does not go far to inculpate
Margaret, as she incontestably had frequently thereafter the
power both to inquire after and to punish both actors and accomplices,
had she cared to do so; and the weakest point of
her character was that she was not one wont to let vengeance
sleep, when the power was in her hand to avenge.
At a later period than this, in 1551, further machinations
took place for the overthrow of the Duke of Somerset, and
after the rebellion of Cade, which all men judged to have been
instigated by Richard, Duke of York, he himself took up arms
and marched to London; but finding the gates shut against him,
he fell back, disbanded his army, and retired to Wigmore, where
no attempt was made by the queen, or her friends, to avenge
the wrongs of Suffolk, or to punish her enemy York. It is
certain that the true hereditary right to the crown of England
was not in Henry VI., and that it was in Richard, Duke of
York. Still Henry was not himself an usurper; he had inherited
reigns, from his grandfather, to whose accession the
parliament of England had assented. It is true, again, that not
only Richard of York, the true heir to the throne, but that
Henry was as incapable, weak, and as unfit to govern as the
unhappy Richard, whom his own ancestor, Harry of Bolingbroke,
had dethroned and succeeded; and that, of consequence,
the same right of revolution—if one may coin such a right—
which justified Harry of Bolingbroke in discrowning, and the
Parliament in superseding the imbecile Richard II., would
justify Richard of York in dethroning, and the Parliament in
deposing the no less imbecile Henry VI.
Still a king de facto can never be to blame for defending the
crown which he has in possession, especially if that possession
came to him in regular line of succession. This is a maxim
which in the worst times, save the Wars only of the Roses, is of
universal application; nor can his adherents be held guilty of
treason for succoring or maintaining him.
Margaret was called to the English throne by competent
authorities, was acknowledged queen by the parliament, received
as queen by the people, and she had every right, nay, it was
her special duty, to defend in every way befitting her, the kingdom
of her husband, of herself, and their posterity. That age
deemed the direct appeal to arms, a course befitting woman.
And ill-mated as she was, to a womanish lord, she appealed to
them, and used them manfully, if in vain. The narrative of
her personal adventures is full of interest and excitement.
She was a great, high-hearted, brave, and noble woman; if she
was something masculine and unsparing, it was an age that
needed manhood, and there was no man on the throne but she;
it was an age of ruthlessness and vengeance, and she had great
wrongs to avenge. Her bravery in peril, her constancy in the
may, Margaret of Anjou will be held, and in old Roman phrase
jure habeatur, one of the heroines of England.
Thus far we have considered the life and character of
this great-minded and heroical woman, rather in a general than
in a particular light, and with a view rather to elucidating the
questions of that disputed right of succession to the English
throne, on which the bloody struggle of the Roses was founded,
and of the accusations brought against her by her enemies,
than of entering at large into her great energies, wonderful
perseverance, and eminent manly virtues—the virtues, by the
way, which were most requisite to her in the stormy times
among which her lot was cast. We now come to the period at
which those virtues began to display themselves the most signally,
the period namely, at which commenced the deadly civil
strife, which was not brought to an end until thirty years of
almost incessant warfare—and that of the bloodiest and most
pitiless nature—had deluged England, from her metropolis to
her remotest provinces, with knightly and patrician gore.
We showed, that in truth the House of York had the true
title to the throne as lineal descendants—through Anne, Countess
of Cambridge, and sister of the last Earl of March, who was
the mother of Richard Duke of York—of Philippa, only daughter
of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III. of
England. The line of Edward the Black Prince, eldest son of
that warlike king, became extinct with Richard II., who was
murdered in Pontefract castle, leaving no issue legitimate or
illegitimate, in 1399. Henry, Duke of Lancaster, who deposed
and succeeded Richard, under the title of Henry IV., was descended
directly from the Duke of Lancaster, third son of Edward
III., and therefore could of course lay no claim, founded
on birthright, to the throne, so long as any heirs of the second
there were in the persons of Richard of York and his family of
sons, which was numerous.
In reply to this it was stated that Richard II., son of the
Black Prince, of the eldest house, had been dethroned by an
unanimous vote of the Parliament, on account of his total
incapacity to govern; and that the vacant throne had been conferred
by the same power, in whom it was competent to confer
it, on Henry of Lancaster, surnamed Bolingbroke, of the third
son; which house, though confessedly second of the family,
were by that act of Parliament, and by quiet possession of the
throne during two reigns, and the peaceful transmission of it to
a third prince, in direct succession, thus rendered first of the
realm; and if not right heirs, at least right owners of the
throne.
It is easy to see that the question is an intricate one, and difficult
to be solved; and, though it is evident that the hereditary
right was in the house of York, that there was no valid reason
why the wearer of the crown, administrator of the government,
and king de facto, should not defend the realm to the
possession of which he had come by direct succession from
father and grandfather; the right of the former being assured
by no less an authority than that of the two houses in Parliament
assembled. All jurists hold that the adherents of a king
de facto, such as was Henry VI., Charles II., and the First and
Second Georges of England, cannot be held liable to charges of
treason for the maintenance of existing royalties; and, though
the bloody character of the age and the fierce partisan spirit,
which succeeded to the extinction of chivalry, and not yet mitigated
by the regular systematic principles of modern warfare,
led to the perpetration of savage slaughters and sanguinary
reprisals during the reign of the unhappy Henry, the officers of
Charles I. for treason, until after the deposition and decapitation
of Charles, when the Republic and the Protectorate had in their
turn become the governments de facto. In the two lamentable
affairs of the '15 and the '45, it is needless to say that neither of
the pretenders ever attempted to hold an adherent of the house
of Hanover, the actual kingly house, as traitors; though they
had never suffered their own claim to fall into abeyance, as it
appears the house of York had done, through the reigns of
Henry IV. and Henry V., but had continually adhered to the
title of kings of England, and ever kept up the semblance of a
court at St. Germains, under the protection of Louis XIV.
If, therefore, the adherents to the possessor of such a title to
the throne as Henry VI. held, cannot be held amenable on the
charge of supporting, much less can the possessor himself be
held amenable or culpable for defending, his title. Such a possessor
was Henry VI. of Lancaster beyond all question—and
taking into consideration his imbecility of character, amounting
almost to pious idiotcy, not far removed from that of the sixteenth
French Louis, it was not only justifiable, but right and
glorious in Margaret, to defend the inheritance of her father
and her children, against those whom she had ever been taught
to believe, and probably did believe, in all sincerity, to be the
traitors and usurpers of her husband's and his house's power.
The case of the deposition of Richard II. and the accession
of Henry IV. in his place, is in every way precisely analogous
to that of James II. and William III. of England, except that
the former revolution was performed in a more cruel, and martial,
and less deliberative age than the latter. It may be added
that Henry IV. rather received the confirmation of the popular
voice to a crown which he had grasped, while William was
called to the defence of religion and liberty, and was rewarded
however, rather nominal than real, and it cannot be disputed
that although the claim of the Yorkists was the truer by
descent, that of the Lancastrians was at this period true enough
by possession, and they had been both fools and cowards had
they not striven to the last in defence of an inheritance so
splendid, even then, as the diadem of England. It is not the
least strange thing concerning this strange succession of struggles,
during which men of the highest birth and eminence
changed their opinions as they did their coats—almost daily,
with as little reason asked, or reproach incurred—that in the
final conflict the Lancastrian claimant, Henry of Richmond,
Duke of Brittany, was a double usurper, possessing no title de
jure, and none of course de facto, to the seat from which he
ejected Richard III., the last heir male of the house of York
—though, thanks to Shakspeare, he has come down to us as the
gallant asserter of good rights, and righteous avenger of foul
wrongs done to the lawful line of English majesty.
We have dwelt on this so long, in order that, after having
previously shown that the claim of the Lancastrians to the
throne as right owners is entirely worthless, we may not be
charged with inconsistency for defending Margaret of Anjou in
her maintenance of her husband's and son's title to the crown
in dispute; and having, we trust, made this apparent to the
understanding of every intelligent reader, proceed at once to
the narration of stirring events and striking scenes, throughout
which she conducted herself through all adversities and spites
of fortune, if not as a very amiable or very gentle, at least as a
true-hearted, masculine-minded, great, and glorious woman,
wife, and mother.
Richard, Duke of York, the first claimant in the order of
time to the crown of England, had served under the Government
succeeded the great Duke of Bedford; and subsequently as
commander of Ireland—which unhappy country was, as it has
ever been within the memory of recorded history, distracted, turbulent,
and ready for rebellion—and by holding such offices under
the crown had virtually admitted its authority. While he
was still in Ireland, Cade's well known Kentish rebellion had
occurred, and had in the end been defeated, and to this it was
believed that Richard was at the least privy, if he were not
actually instigator of it; the court were, however, too weak to
punish or impeach him openly, and perhaps lacked evidence
whereby to show his connexion with the rebels. From this
time, however, it is certain that his friends and partisans began
to lay claim for him to the throne by right of descent; and
soon after, in 1452, he actually levied an army, and advanced to
the gates of London, demanding a reformation and the dismissal
of the Duke of Somerset—then the minister—from all authority
and power. He found, however, to his great surprise
the gates shut against him, and on his retreat into Kent was
pursued by Henry with very superior force, and compelled to
go into retirement; his own popularity, no less than the weakness
of the court, and it may be, the imbecile good nature of
the king, rendered it unwise or impossible to attaint or punish
him. It is to be observed, however, that at this period he laid
no claim to the kingly title, professing merely to be the redresser
of the wrongs of the people, and the champion of a popular
reformation. During this period he lived in retirement at his
seat of Wigmore, on the borders of Wales, awaiting the advent
of times more propitious to the undertaking, which kept him
till he was too weary of tarrying for their coming.
The following year, after a gleam of transient success (during
which Bordeaux and a portion of Gascony were recovered for
their leader Shrewsbury slain, and all hopes of the recovery of
the French provinces totally extinguished and for ever. At
about the same time a son, Edward, was born to Henry by
Margaret, the Frenchwoman, who was already accused by the
people in general of the treacherous surrender of the English
conquests. Again, the birth of an heir male to the crown, by
excluding the house of York from all chance of a peaceful succession,
rendered its partisans more zealous and urgent for
instant action. Within a brief space Henry, always incapable
and imbecile, fell into such a fit of melancholy moodiness that
he became unable even to go through the pageantry, and support
the semblance of royalty. The Queen and Council were
unable to resist the voice of the peers and great barons, yielded
perforce, and saw Somerset sent to the tower, and Richard
Duke of York appointed Lieutenant of the kingdom, with
almost all the authority of royalty, which his friends, and perhaps
the Parliament itself, would not have been unwilling to
see him assume in style and title, as for the moment he had it
in reality. But Richard, though he was not “without ambition,”
was, as it seems, “without the illness should attend it;”
and by his moderate and amiable conduct during his possession
of the regency discouraged his own party, without gaining any
gratitude from the court; and perhaps, in spite of his good intentions,
in the end caused rather evil than good to England
by his very virtue, since he allowed his enemies to draw to a
head, and gather both force and animosity for a struggle which
even then the most far-sighted men perceived to be inevitable.
It was but a short time before, emboldened by the partial recovery
of Henry, and by the timidity or conscientiousness of
the Duke of York, the Queen's party recovered the ascendency,
of the Duke.
Then indeed Richard felt his danger, and saw that it was
time to act; or that he must fall, and his house perish with him.
He took arms, though still without claiming the title of king,
advanced on London, and the Lancastrians advancing to meet
him, gave them battle near St. Albans—the first in which blood
was shed in this disastrous struggle—and, with small loss to
himself, beat them decidedly, five thousand persons being slain
on the field; among whom were the Duke of Somerset, the
Earls of Northumberland and Stafford, and the gallant Lord Clifford,
by whose son so fierce and revengeful a part was played in
these wars theretofor. The king fell into the hands of the
duke, who treated him with the utmost courtesy and respect,
and the question now seemed at rest for ever. But the duke
again hesitated, and was contented with the restoration of his
protectorates, and indemnity to all the Yorkists, and the revocation
of all the grants which had been made by the crown
since the death of Henry V.
Margaret, however, perceiving doubtless that the termination
of these measures must inevitably be the ultimate exclusion of
her son from the throne, should the House of York hold the
authority, influence, and resources of the crown, during the life
of Henry—whether the latter nominally held the throne or no—
resolved on a bold and instant stroke for supremacy, and early
in the following year produced the king, again somewhat improved
in health, before the houses, and caused him once more
to resume the government, which the Duke of York did not
oppose, and all things once again seemed settled on a sure and
amicable foundation, terms being assented to by both parties,
and an outward reconciliation patched up for the time, which,
however, no one endowed even with common understanding
breathing-pause of doubt, hesitation, and deception, a paltry
chance affray, as it is termed in history—though in all probability
got up on purpose by the Lancastrians, who at the time
were in the ascendency—between an attendant of the king
and one of Warwick's followers, kindled a flame, which was
quenched only in the best blood of England.
Both parties flew to arms: and after one fruitless effort at
a rising, rendered abortive by the treachery of Sir Andrew
Wallop, which compelled Warwick again to retreat beyond the
sea, that great soldier landed in Kent with the Earl of Salisbury
and the Earl of March, the eldest son of Richard, afterwards
Edward Duke of York, and thereafter Edward IV. of
England; received by the Archbishop of Canterbury he entered
London in triumph, and shortly afterwards once again utterly
defeated the royalists at Northampton, partially owing to the
treason of Lord Grey de Ruthin, who commanded the king's
van, and deserted to the enemy in the very heat of action. In
this action fell, as usual, many of the flower of the nobility, to
whom throughout these wars little quarter was given by their
fellow nobles, in the shock of battle, in the pursuit, or in cold
blood after capture; and in it likewise was first shown the laudable
example of sparing the common people, which was set
here by Warwick and the Earl of March, but which continued
as much to be the rule of conduct during the struggle of the
rival Roses, as did the merciless and wanton butchery of
knights and nobles.
Nor is it easy to explain this, contrary as it has been at every
other period of English history to the habits and character of
that people; for it cannot be accounted for by any system of
reprisals or vengeance for kindred blood; for, with a habit and
versatility unprecedented among Englishmen, and since equally
side, even to the princes of the blood themselves, who did not
change his party several times, and fight shoulder to shoulder
with those whose hands were yet reeking with the gore of their
children, their brethren, or their parents. We can only seek
for a solution of these two strange peculiarities of this individual
civil war, in the fact not only that it was a rude, but that
it was a transition age; that ancient landmarks were all
broken down, and no new ones erected in their places; that the
principles, the amenities, the courtesies, of the chivalric era had
fallen into disuse, while the rules of a strict social morality,
of obedience to the laws as paramount to all private passions,
and a legitimate and civilized warfare, had not yet been invented.
Add to this the disturbance of men's minds by the constant
recurrence of revolutions and the love of innovation, riot, and
rebellion for the mere sake of rebellion, which it seems to be
their inevitable tendency to produce. The king once more fell
into the hands of his opponents, who as usual treated him with
gentleness and respect, perhaps themselves affected by the simplicity
and innocence of his life; perhaps fearing to deal with
him summarily, owing to the repute for sanctity which these
qualities had procured for him with the people who seem to
have adored him.
In this instance, however, the respect shown to him was
limited to his person, not extended to his power; for Richard
of York, though he sought not even now violently or perforce to
dethrone him, laid claim to the regal title and authority before
the house of Peers, who debated the question tranquilly and
gravely for several successive days, and at length decided that
the title of the house of York was good, but that in virtue of
Henry's peaceful succession to the throne and quiet tenure of it
during thirty-eight years, he should be allowed to retain the title
and future inheritance of the crown being in Richard and his
heirs. A more temperate and equitable, or, at the same time,
a more inexpedient or temporizing decision could not have been
come at—as if it could be even imagined that a princess of the
genius, energy, resources, spirit, and perseverance—added to an
almost more than masculine courage—of Margaret, would have
submitted to so weak a compromise, leaving an empty symbol
of command “to be,” as Scott has written of a greater exile,
From which our strength has wrenched the brand.”
hand, she had levied a royal army in Durham, after the defeat
of Northampton, having fled thither with her infant son, and
was already at the head of twenty thousand men, when the
Duke of York, fancying himself about to crush the incipient
rebellion, marched at the head of five thousand to meet her,
and madly disdaining to take shelter behind walls from a
woman's war, came out into the open field and delivered battle.
But Margaret was not the woman, nor Clifford who commanded
under her the leader, to be treated with so foolish a punctilio.
The army of the Yorkists was totally defeated, the duke himself
slain in action; his son, the Earl of Rutland, an amiable
youth of seventeen, taken prisoner and savagely slaughtered by
Warwick, and the Earl of Salisbury with many other captive
nobles beheaded at Pomfret castle. The dead body of the duke
was decapitated and his head set on the gates of York, covered
with a paper diadem in derision of his title, by Margaret's express
command; and on this has been founded a prevalent charge
against her—amounting well nigh to a total condemnation—of
savage and unusual ferocity. It was a bad deed, in truth; and
must not be unduly magnified or set down in malice. The age
was rude and cruel, the war unusually savage, and this deed has
been too much mixed up with the murder of Rutland, in which
there is no evidence whatever that Margaret bore any part.
Moreover, it does not appear that Margaret was ever guilty of
any special act of cruelty, apart from the relentless and cold-blooded
policy common to both parties, which had become, as
I have stated, the rule of the war, and for which she must not
be blamed. To persons engaged in the desperate game of war,
involving the liberties, the lives, the happiness of thousands,
perhaps millions, and through countless generations, single and
ridiculous acts become trifles—perhaps may be the result of a
pardonable and even merciful policy. The senseless clay of
York could not feel the blow which decapitated it—the disembodied
spirit must be far above, or far below, the degradation
of an insult offered to the shell—and if Margaret fairly believed,
as she well might do at that period, that such derision, not of
the dead York, but of what she deemed the dead York's usurped
title, could favorably affect her son's claim, there was in truth
much less cruelty in mutilating one dead body, than in slaying
or causing the slaughter of many hundred thousand living men.
But the former case offends our delicacy, shocks our nerves,
awakens our individual sympathies, and therefore we shriek—
as Carlisle would say—horror over it; the latter is sensual,
legitimate, and performed to the sound of martial music and the
applauding cries of admiring nations, and therefore we throw up
our caps, and instead of shrieking over the corpses of the
slaughtered millions, cry, glory! glory! We are no great
admirers of either; but we do think that Margaret, as the world
goes now, would be held justified in fighting for her own and
her son's royalty—much more was she in the then opinion of
if she had a right to risk the lives of tens of thousands to win or
retain that which philosophy calls a bauble, but which no philosopher
we ever heard of refused to wear, it matters very little
whether she stuck a paper crown on York's cold head or not.
It was not a very womanly deed, it is true; but Margaret takes
no claim for being a very womanly woman. On the whole, a
great deal too much has been made of the matter, as there has
of many individual acts of the great Napoleon. Individual
leaders, sporting with the destiny of nations, and squandering
human blood like rain-water, must be judged by wholesale, by
the righteousness of their causes, the sincerity of their convictions,
the truth of their principles, and the inward meaning of
their character—not by single deeds, which, if the whole be good,
were necessary to the producing of that good; if evil, are but as
raindrops in the ocean of iniquity.
This terrible defeat of the Yorkists effected no permanent
good, however, to the Lancastrians, for after several other
fierce actions, in which victories, defeats, and cruelties were
pretty equally balanced between the parties, Margaret fell back
into the north, while Edward, by his father's death Duke of
York, entered London, and was at once proclaimed King of England,
under the title of Edward IV., in the year 1461. Still
the fierce energy of Margaret failed not, and in the north she
speedily collected an army of sixty thousand men, which encountering
Edward and the Earl of Warwick on Towton field
near Tadcaster, met with a rout and slaughter, in which thirty-six
thousand men fell in the action or in the pursuit, and among
them half the remaining nobility of the Lancastrians.
The ex-king and Margaret again escaped; the latter into
Scotland and thence into France, from both which kingdoms
she obtained succors, and only three years later than the rout
Edward at Hexham, in Northumberland, and again suffered a
defeat so disastrous, that her army was utterly scattered and
herself separated from all her attendants, and forced to seek
asylum in the depths of Hexham forest.
Here she gave as singular an example of personal intrepidity
and of the effect produced by high-born magnanimity in adverse
times over low and even malignant nature, as she had before
given of royal perseverance and indefatigable energy. Having
fallen into the hands of robbers, she was despoiled of her ornaments,
and treated with the utmost indignity; but while they
were quarrelling or carousing over the booty, she made her
escape from them at the dead hour of midnight, and concealing
herself and the young prince in a brake, awaited the coming
morn. With the first light she was surprised by a single pursuer,
and taking desperate counsel in desperate affairs, she threw
herself on his generosity, which argues in herself the possession
of a generous mind.
“This is the son of your king,” she cried; “to your charge I
commit him, be his guardian and his savior.”
Nor was her generosity deceived, for he did protect and save
her, and by his means she escaped to Flanders, and thence to
the small provincial court of her poor powerless father, King
René of Provence, where she dwelt many years in deep seclusion,
but without ever resigning the hope, or rather the determination,
of returning and striking another blow for England's royal
crown. Less fortunate, Henry was taken, and though treated
with some show of courtesy, was immured in the tower. Less
fortunate, all her noble friends who survived the rout of Hexham,
suffered forthwith upon the scaffold; and surely the
sceptre seemed to have departed from the house of Lancaster.
But still solitary and secluded, in poverty, obscurity, and
and determined. At length the time arrived, and the man.
Warwick, the king-maker, unjustly and ungratefully treated by
Edward, came over to Margaret's side, and after many a year
of negotiation and intrigue with France and Burgundy, obtained
succors, which enabled him to invade England, and in eleven
days after his landing, he who had made had unmade, and
Edward, himself dethroned, was in turn a fugitive from his
crown and country.
Edward, however, with energy equal to the emergency, himself
obtained succor in Burgundy and Zealand, landed in Yorkshire,
outmanœuvred Warwick who had advanced to meet
him at Leicester, entered London, and again became master of
Henry's person and his briefly born authority. A few days
later a fearful action was fought at Barnet, in which Warwick
would have won but for one of those blind chances which often
decide the fate of battles. The cognizance on Edward's banner
was the Sun of York, that of De Vere, Earl of Oxford, a
merlet, or five-rayed star, and in the confusion and dust of the
melée the latter nobleman, who commanded the Lancastrian
reserve, was in the act of bringing them up to a decisive
charge, when he was charged by mistake and driven off the
field by his own friends, and while all were in disorder, Edward
restored the fight and won the day. Warwick fell with his
brother Montacute. No quarter was given by the victors, and,
with small loss to the Yorkists, the Lancastrian cause was annihilated.
On that very day Margaret with her son, now a youth
of eighteen years and of singular promise, landed at Weymouth,
and learned but too soon the fatal news of Warwick's death
and her husband's renewed captivity. For a moment she was
paralysed, but her indomitable spirit could not even now be
defeated on her last field at Tewksbury. All her adherents who
survived the rout and had taken sanctuary in a neighboring
church, were dragged out and instantly beheaded—meet prelude
for what was to follow.
Margaret and her son were brought captives before Edward,
who addressed the brave boy insultingly. “How dare you,”
he cried, “enter my realm with lifted lance and banner flying?”
“To recover my father's kingdom,” replied the youth, undauntedly,
“and his heritage from his grandfather and father
to him, and from him to me lineally descended.”
Edward, pitiless and conscious of no generous feeling, smote
him in the face with his gauntlet; his brothers George and
Richard, Clarence and Gloucester, aided by Hastings and Sir
Thomas Gray, stabbed him to death with their daggers almost
before the face of his devoted mother. That mother was
thrown into the tower, in which her husband died but a few
days afterwards, not without strong suspicion of having been
murdered—even by the hand, as it has been stated, though probably
without foundation, of the Duke of Gloucester. Here
she languished for four years, until ransomed by Lewis XI. of
France, the most politic, the most despotic, the least generous
and most avaricious prince in Europe—of such strange composition
are men made—for 50,000 crowns. He gave her an
asylum in his realms, and she died, but not until 1482, “the
most unhappy queen, wife, and mother in Europe,” says Voltaire;
and perhaps, had it not been for that very Voltaire,
there had never died one more unhappy in the person of Marie
Antoinette of France, who possessed much of the spirit though
none of the genius of Margaret; while their husbands were distinguished
by so total a lack of both, that it is necessary to keep
constantly in mind their passive domestic virtues, before we
their fortunes and most cruel fate.
To conclude with a few short words. In her after reputation,
Margaret of Anjou seems to us to have been even more unhappy
than in her life. Less fortunate even than “those brave men
who lived before Agamemnon,” as Horace sings, “but who
all fell unwept and lie entombed in endless night, because they
found no bard divine,” Margaret of Anjou lives for ever
branded with black reproach, because she found the divinest
bard of all, immortal and inimitable Shakespeare.
Faultless she was not—who is, or has been?—womanly she
was not, according to our ideas of womanhood in these days
when our young men are not ashamed to be ladylike—but for
her own day, she was every inch a woman, every inch a queen,
and every inch an English queen. Though she feared death as
little as the boldest of her barons, she never unsexed herself by
wearing arms or doing actual battle—she was neither traitoress,
adulteress, nor murderess, as it has pleased Shakspeare to portray
her, and the world to believe on his portraiture—but a
true wife; a devoted mother; a great, brave, gallant woman.
Her faults were those of her age; her virtues were her own.
Whither she is gone we know not; but of this we may rest
well assured, that wheresoever she now is the tongue of detraction
can pierce or rend her heart no longer.
| Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England | |