The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [72]
Their meeting was destined to be further delayed, however, because soon after arriving at Southampton Margaret fell ill again and was taken to another convent to be nursed. Henry wrote to the Lord Chancellor: ‘Our dear and best beloved wife the Queen is yet sick of the labour and indisposition of the sea, by occasion of which the pox been broken out upon her, for which cause we may not in our own person hold the feast of St George in our castle of Windsor.’ Fortunately, Margaret recovered within a few days, and spent her convalescence planning her trousseau with the dressmaker. The King, meanwhile, rewarded the master of the Cock John with an annuity of twenty-one marks for life for having ‘conveyed his beloved consort safely to England’.
8
The Daisy Flower
Despite his efforts, Henry had raised very little money to pay for his wedding. He had pawned the crown jewels, but then realised he needed them for the ceremony, and was forced instead to pawn some of his personal jewellery and plate to retrieve them.
On 23 April 1445 Henry VI married ‘the most noble Lady Margaret’ in a quiet ceremony at the abbey of the Premonstratensian monks at Titchfield in Hampshire. The ‘venerable Master William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury’ and confessor to the King, officiated and gave the young couple his blessing. Henry placed on Margaret’s finger a ring set with an enormous ruby which had been given to him at the time of his coronation by Bishop Beaufort. Margaret also received an original wedding gift from an unknown admirer – a lion, which was brought to her at the abbey and then promptly dispatched at considerable expense to the royal menagerie at the Tower of London.
After the wedding the King and Queen spent several nights at Titchfield Abbey, and the Charter Rolls record that the abbot and convent were well rewarded for their hospitality. The chronicler John Capgrave, for whom Henry VI could do no wrong, predicted that ‘this marriage will be pleasing to God and the realm, because that peace and abundant crops came to us through it’. The marriage itself looked not to be so fruitful. Henry was twenty-three, Margaret sixteen; their wedding night is not likely to have seen the flowering of any grand passion, since the King’s confessor, Bishop Ayscough, had warned him against self-indulgence and having his ‘sport’ with his bride, advising him not to ‘come nigh her’ any more than was necessary for the procreation of heirs. As Margaret did not produce an heir for eight years, we may conclude that Henry took his confessor’s advice to heart.
Others were not so immune to his wife’s charm, for all contemporary sources agree that Margaret was beautiful. Chastellain called her the exemplification of ‘all that is majestic’ in woman, and one of the most beautiful women in the world. ‘She was indeed a very fair lady, altogether well worth the looking at, and of high bearing withal.’ She had, he added, excellent manners. A Milanese envoy described Margaret as ‘a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark’. Whether he meant her hair – which was very long – or her skin is not clear, but the surviving manuscript illustrations of Margaret portray her as blonde or auburn-haired; the ambassador, however, had seen her, the illustrators had probably not.
The best surviving representation of Margaret of Anjou is a head and shoulders profile relief on a medal struck in 1463 by Pietro di Milano and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A copy is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Both show Margaret with upswept hair wearing a crown. This sitter bears more than a passing resemblance to a noble lady painted by René of Anjou in a tournament scene in his manuscript Le Livre de Tournois, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale. This lady is evidently of high rank, for she is attended by a bevy of well-dressed ladies, and is shown standing at the right of the page, inspecting the helms of jousters. Did