This would be the woman Shakespeare, in Henry VI, Part 3, famously dubbed the “she-wolf” of France, her “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide.” Italian chronicler Polydore Vergil, by contrast, would look back on her as “imbued with a high courage above the nature of her sex.
From there she was carried to a local convent to be nursed, making her first English impressions ones of sickrooms and austerity. The people of Porchester, trying gallantly to provide a royal welcome, had heaped carpets on the beach, where the chilly April waves clawed and rattled at the pebbles, but Marguerite’s first shaky steps on English soil took her no farther than a nearby cottage, where she fainted. Marguerite arrived, as her new husband, Henry VI, put it in a letter, “sick of ye labour and indisposition of ye sea.” Small wonder that the Marquess of Suffolk, the English peer sent to escort her, had to carry the seasick fifteen-year-old ashore. The ship that brought her across the Channel, the Cock John, had been blown off its expected course and so battered by storms as to have lost both its masts. But no doubt as she first set foot on the English shore on April 9, 1445, her character and ambition were already there to see.
In her later courage and conviction, her energy and her ruthlessness, Marguerite of Anjou would be in part what the times and the circumstances of her life in England had made her. It was no way for a queen to enter her new country, unceremoniously carried ashore as though she were a piece of baggage-least of all a queen who planned to make her mark. O peers of England, shameful is this league,įatal this marriage, cancelling your fame
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