Margaret of Anjou

Margaret of Anjou (1430-1482), the wife of King Henry VI of England, was a heroine, not of romance and fiction, but of stern and terrible reality. Her life was a series of military exploits, attended with dangers, privations, sufferings, and wonderful vicissitudes of fortune, scarcely to be paralleled in the whole history of mankind. She was born and lived in a period during which there prevailed in the western part of Europe two great and dreadful quarrels, which lasted for more than a hundred years, and which kept France and England, and all the countries contiguous to them, in a state of continual commotion during all that time. The Queen consort of England for many years, Margaret of Anjou was one of the principal figures in the series of dynastic civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses, having led the Lancastrian faction. Due to Henry's frequent bouts of insanity, Margaret ruled the kingdom in her husband's place. It was Margaret of Anjou who, in May 1455, called for a Great Council which excluded the Yorkist faction, and thus provided the spark which ignited the civil conflict that lasted for over thirty years, decimated the old nobility, and caused the deaths of thousands of men, including her only son Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales.