MARGARET OF ANJOU, QUEEN OF HENRY VI. THE history of Margaret of Anjou, from the cradle to the tomb, is a tissue of the most striking vicissitudes, and replete with events of more powerful interest than are to be found in the imaginary career of any heroine of romance; for the creations of fiction, however forcibly they may appeal to our imaginations, fade into insignificance before the simple majesty of truth. René of Anjou, the father of Margaret, was the second son of Louis II., king of Sicily and Jerusalem, duke of Calabria and Anjou, and count of Provence by Yolante of Arragon. In 1420 René was, in his thirteenth year, espoused to Isabella, the heiress of Lorraine, who was only ten years old at the period of her nuptials. This lady, who was the direct descendant of Charlemagne, in addition to her princely patrimony, brought the beauty, the high spirit, and the imperial blood of that illustrious line, into the family of Anjou. Her youngest daughter, Margaret, was in all respects a genuine scion of the Carlovingian race; she also inherited her father's love of learning, and his taste for poetry and the arts. Scarcely had Margaret of Anjou entered her teens, when her precocious charms and talents created the most lively sensations at the court of her aunt, the queen of France. "The report of these charms," according to a learned, but somewhat imaginative, French author, "first reached Henry VI., the young bach elor king of England, through the medium of a gentleman of Anjou, named Champchevrier, a prisoner at large (belonging to sir John Falstolf), with whom king Henry was accustomed to converse occasionally; and he gave so eloquent a description of the rare endowments which nature had bestowed on the portionless daughter of the impoverished king of the Two Sicilies, that Henry despatched him to the court of Lorraine, to procure a portrait of the young princess." Champchevrier obtained a portrait of Margaret, painted by one of the first artists in France, who was employed by the earl of Suffolk. This is not unlikely, for Suffolk was the ostensible instrument in this marriage; but the real person with whom the project for the union between Henry VI. and Margaret of Anjou originated, appears to have been no other than cardinal Beaufort, the great-uncle of the king. The education of Henry having been superintended by the cardinal, he was fully aware of the want of energy and decision in his character, which rendered it desirable to provide him with a consort whose intellectual powers would be likely to supply his constitutional defects, and whose acquirements might render her a suitable companion for so learned and refined a prince. In Margaret of Anjou all these requisites were united with beauty, eloquence, and every feminine charm calculated to win unbounded influer.ce over the plastic mind of the youthful sovereign. She was, moreover, at that tender and unreflective age, at which she might be rendered a powerful auxiliary in the cardinal's political views. Under these circumstances, there can be little doubt that Champchevrier had received his cue from the cardinal, when he described to Henry, in such glowing colors, the charms and mental graces of the very princess to whom he had determined to unite him, both for the reasons we have before stated, and as a means of concluding a peace with France. Henry VI. was then in his four-and-twentieth year, beautiful in person, of a highly cultivated and refined mind, wholly pure in thought and deed. When the proposal was made in form, to the father of the young Margaret, he replied, in the spirit of a knight-errant, "That it would be inconsistent with his honor to bestow his daughter in marriage on the usurper of his hereditary dominions, Anjou and Maine;" and he de |