Uncomfortable memories still lingered of Edward II’s wife Isabella, little more than a century before: the ‘she-wolf of France’, as Marguerite too would be dubbed, who was accused of having murdered her husband to take power with her lover. Those English, by contrast, expected their queens to take a more passive role. Her grandmother, Yolande of Aragon, in whose care she spent many of her formative years, had acted as regent for her eldest son, Marguerite’s uncle and she had been one of the chief promoters of Joan of Arc, who had helped sweep the French Dauphin to victory against the English. Marguerite’s mother, Isabelle of Lorraine, had run the family affairs while René of Anjou spent long years away on campaign or in captivity. But the English expectations of a queen were not those of a Frenchman, necessarily. Her kinsman the Duke of Orléans wrote that Marguerite seemed as if ‘formed by Heaven to supply her royal husband the qualities which he required in order to become a great king’. Vergil too wrote that Marguerite exceeded others of her time ‘as well in beauty as wisdom’ and though it is not easy to guess real looks from the conventions of medieval portraiture, it is hard not to read determination and self-will in the swelling brow and prominent nose that are evident in images of Marguerite of Anjou – in particular the medallion by Pietro di Milano. The beauty conventionally attributed to queens features in the scene where Shakespeare’s Marguerite first meets Henry VI: it was the lofty spirit that, in the years ahead, was to prove the difficulty. At the French court Marguerite had already acquitted herself well enough to win an admirer in the courtly tradition, Pierre de Brezé, to carry her colours at the joust and to allow the Burgundian chronicler Barante to write that she ‘was already renowned in France for her beauty and wit and her lofty spirit of courage’. Henry VI, if the Milanese correspondent is to be believed, saw ‘a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark’ – and not, the Milanese tactfully assured his duchess, ‘so beautiful as your Serenity’.

Blood sisters by sarah gristwood