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daughter of the King of France’ as being interred in the same place. Unfortunately, when he himself came to be buried there his ‘grand dam of right noble memory’ was disinterred and not reburied. She seems to have remained above ground until the early nineteenth century, and in the seventeenth her body was something of a tourist attraction. After this ultimate indignity it is to be hoped that she rests in peace.
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    The Queen as Dominatrix: Margaret of Anjou
    The circumstances of Henry VI’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou could hardly have been more different from those of 1420. Then Henry V had been in control of the situation and had been able to bring his bride back to England as one of the spoils of victory. In 1444 the English were on the back foot, struggling to maintain their position in France and anxious to salvage the best peace that they could. For a few years after 1422 the young King’s uncle, John, Duke of Bedford, had maintained a semblance of dominance but failure at Orleans and the subsequent crowning of the ‘roi de Bourges’
    as King Charles VII of France had turned the political tide. The Burgundian alliance was already problematic as Duke Philip reassessed his priorities and after the death of his sister Anne, the Duchess of Bedford, in November 1432, it was effectively dead. In 1435 Bedford himself died, and Philip formally came to terms with Charles at Arras. Thereafter the English were clearly on the retreat, and this was a situation not helped by divided councils. The King’s surviving uncle, Humphrey of Gloucester, was committed to the defence of the French lands, but although he held the formal precedence of Protector, his infl uence was in fact seriously challenged by Henry Beaufort the Cardinal Bishop of Winchester and large scale creditor of the Crown. Beaufort was not interested in the defence of France and as the King emerged from childhood into adolescence, he increasingly sympathized with the Cardinal’s priorities. By the end of 1443 the English were concentrating their efforts on the defence of Calais and Normandy, and Francis I, the Duke of Brittany who had his own interests to protect against the resurgent power of Charles VII, was offering to mediate peace.
    Charles, for his part, was willing to negotiate. His recent agreement with the Duke of Burgundy was already beginning to unravel and it seems that he was anxious to put the English war on hold while he dealt with Philip, in alliance with Duke Renée of Anjou. Renée was motivated by the desire to liquidate his obligation to pay Philip the balance of the enormous ransom that had been demanded on his release from Burgundian captivity in 1437. Although titular king of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem and strongly connected at court, Renée was not in fact a particularly imposing ally but he was conveniently 24

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    available – and he had a motive. Moreover Marie, Renée’s sister, was Charles’s queen. Since the King of England was unmarried, and of a marriageable age, it was natural for the King of France to seek that route to peace with England, and it seems that the original proposal came from the French side. Because Charles had no desire to give any pretext for a son of the marriage to renew his claims to the French throne, his own daughters were not on offer and the bride suggested was Margaret, the 14-year-old second daughter of his ally, Duke Renée. Margaret was suitable from the English point of view because she was of royal blood, the right age, and came of a proven breeding stock – she had several brothers as well as an older sister. She was appropriate from the French point of view precisely because she was not a great heiress and carried almost no political baggage. Although the military situation was not at that point particularly threatening, in January 1444 the English council decided to negotiate and at the beginning of February