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B.M. Cron’s thoroughly researched biography offers a reassessment of Margaret of Anjou’s life, her character, her aims and her dealings with the men around her. Margaret of Anjou was a French princess, the niece of King Charles VII of France who won the Hundred Years War and she was the wife of the last Lancastrian King of England, Henry VI, who lost it. She was also the first queen during the Wars of the Roses, the struggle between the Houses of Lancaster and York and again she was on the losing side. Raised in Anjou Margaret was trained to fill the traditional role of a noble lady, to be subservient to her husband and bear many children. Margaret was unable to do either. She had the misfortune to marry a pacifist king who refused to fight to save his throne. After the birth of her only child, Edward of Lancaster, Prince of Wales, Margaret was forced to compensate for King Henry’s failings by assuming a political role, for which she was ill suited, first to protect and then to try to recover Prince Edward’s inheritance, the crown of England. In her resistance to the rival House of York she came up against two of the most impressive and formidable men in late fifteenth century England: the Earl of Warwick, now known as the Kingmaker and King Edward IV, the first Yorkist king. Historians do not agree on the origin or causes of the Wars of the Roses. Margaret has been blamed for exerting a pernicious influence over her husband, for promoting faction in England and for ‘meddling’ in foreign policy. The Yorkist version of the last ten years of King Henry’s reign to 1461, and the part Margaret played in them, is still accepted, but that does not make it true.
