Isabella and Margaret She-Wolves: England's Early Queens

CHEERING

1953.

A coronation fit for a king.

But it's a young queen who's about to be crowned.

And the crowd roars its approval.

The fact that she's a woman attracts no comment

and she will go on to reign over us for six decades.

But England's queens haven't always been greeted with such adoration.

The first woman who sought to be crowned queen in her own right,

here in Westminster, 800 years earlier,

received a very different response.

She wasn't met by cheering crowds.

Instead, she was chased away from the capital by an angry mob.

That's because throughout our history, women and power have made an uneasy combination.

Never more so than the Middle Ages when a king was a warrior

who had to fight to win power, then battle to keep it.

But despite everything that stood in their way,

a handful of extraordinary women did attempt to rule Medieval England.

This series is about the queens who challenged male power

and the fierce reactions they provoked.

When they pursued power like kings,

these royal women were criticised and condemned.

Most graphically of all, they've been vilified as She-Wolves.

These are the stories of the She-Wolves of England.

And to explore them is to realise just how far we've come,

and how little has changed.

CHURCH BELLS PEAL

In 1308, a 12-year-old girl, Isabella of France,

became Queen of England when she married the English king.

A century and a half later, another young French girl,

Margaret of Anjou, followed in her footsteps.

These are the stories of two women who were thrust into a violent and dysfunctional foreign country.

And as their new lives unfolded,

they each felt driven to take control of the kingdom themselves.

At their weddings, Isabella and Margaret were little more than pawns

in the power play between England and France.

But as they grew into women, they became queens who dominated the board.

It was Margaret's violent pursuit of power that inspired Shakespeare

to name her "The She-Wolf of France."

Another poet, Thomas Gray, later gave Isabella the same title.

But there was no hint of the She-Wolf when Isabella first arrived in England at the age of 12.

Today this seems an extraordinarily young age to be married off,

but as a princess, Isabella had been prepared from the cradle for such a royal match.

As daughter of the King of France, Isabella came to her marriage

as the living embodiment of an Anglo-French alliance.

She had grown up amid the sophistication of the Parisian court

watching her mother act as consort to one of the most powerful kings in Europe.

She had a keen sense of her own majesty,

and she knew exactly what should await her as Queen of England.

What she found was quite different.

The signs were there from her very first public appearance,

the Royal couple's coronation.

Isabella should have been centre-stage,

but her place was taken by a handsome young man named Piers Gaveston.

He carried the king's crown into the Abbey,

and sat with Edward at the coronation banquet.

Gaveston was so magnificently dressed, one observer noted,

that "he more resembled the god Mars than an ordinary mortal."

Isabella was only 12, but she knew how a king's wife should be treated.

And it was clear that her rightful place at Edward's side had already been taken, by Gaveston.

Isabella wasn't the only one who noticed the relationship between Edward and Piers.

Her French uncles went home in a rage,

insulted that Edward had given some of their wedding presents to Gaveston.

A chronicler of the time wrote...

"I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another."

Not only was Isabella finding that there were three people in her marriage,

but Gaveston's preening and waspish presence

was having an equally corrosive effect on the king's relationship with his nobles.

A king couldn't rule without the support of his powerful nobles.

They would help him keep order in the kingdom and defend it from attack,

while the king himself offered leadership and security.

But that's just what the nobles thought Edward wasn't doing.

His father, the great warrior King Edward I,

had defended the country and earned the title "Hammer of the Scots"

for his ferocious attempt to conquer Scotland.

But these hard-won gains were now being lost by his son

and the nobles laid the blame on his obsession with Gaveston.

Eventually, seeing no other option,

a group of nobles came to parliament, armed and angry.

They demanded that Gaveston be banished,

and forced Edward to agree that 21 of them should rule on his behalf.

This was not what Isabella had signed up for when she married the King of England.

But she was still little more than a child,

and she was powerless to stop the conflict.

And to make matters worse, Edward wouldn't accept Gaveston's exile.

Within two months, they were back together again.

Isabella had, though, clearly spent at least one night with her husband.

By the spring of 1312, she was 16, and pregnant for the first time.

But instead of relishing her new status as the future mother of England's heir,

she found herself following Edward and Gaveston round the north of England,

with a hostile army of lords in hot pursuit.

Isabella was dragged around the country as Edward tried to keep his lover safe.

But the group of lords chasing them, led by the Earl of Lancaster,

were determined to capture Gaveston and end this destructive relationship for ever.

They got their chance when the royal party was separated.

Gaveston took refuge in Scarborough, and Edward and Isabella, alone for once,

headed for the fortified city of York.

They were here at York Castle when they heard the dramatic news

that Gaveston had been starved out of the fortress at Scarborough

and was now a prisoner of the lords.

Edward was consumed with anxiety about the fate of his favourite.

Isabella's reaction isn't recorded,

but we might assume it was rather different.

Isabella thought Gaveston's removal might allow her to take her rightful place at her husband's side.

But it was becoming clear that only death would separate Gaveston from Edward once and for all.

Isabella was still here at York with her husband when word came of a bloody drama

that had played itself out 100 miles further south.

Some of the lords, led by the powerful Earl of Lancaster,

had seized Gaveston and sentenced him to death in a show trial.

Gaveston was taken out onto a sunny hillside near Warwick

and his head hacked from his body.

Isabella's rival was gone,

and now her position was about to become even stronger.

On 12th of November 1312, Isabella went into labour.

Shortly before six the next morning, she gave birth to a boy.

The 17-year-old queen kept her own counsel,

but she had already learned a great deal.

Her husband, she now knew, had much passion and little judgment.

His nobles were men to be reckoned with.

And now, with her son in her arms,

Isabella herself held the key that would transform her power as queen.

As a young bride

she'd been little more than a decorative accessory to a diplomatic alliance,

but as the mother of the future king of England,

she had the possibility of real power.

But what Isabella was seeking at this time

was no more than the conventional role of a queen -

not power for herself, but to support her husband.

Tradition gave the queen a formal role as a peacemaker.

Even a warrior king could show mercy

if his consort knelt before him in public to beg for peace.

Isabella's husband was no warrior king,

but she was a peacemaking queen,

and now she helped to forge a brittle truce

between Edward and his nobles.

But almost immediately her husband undermined her efforts.

In 1314 the army he led

suffered the most humiliating defeat of any English king

at the hands of the Scots.

At Bannockburn, Robert Bruce routed Edward's army.

England had lost its hold on Scotland.

Its borders were now overrun by Scot's raids

and they couldn't be defended without help from the Earl of Lancaster,

the man who had murdered Edward's beloved Gaveston.

The threat of the Scots and the rift between Edward and Lancaster,

made England a profoundly dysfunctional kingdom,

and for Isabella it was a thankless task to be its queen.

But her unhappy situation was about to become much worse.

A new favourite was emerging at Edward's court,

who would be more of a threat to Isabella than Gaveston had ever been.

Hugh Despenser was a political predator.

He had known Edward since his teens,

but unlike Gaveston, Despenser doesn't seem to have been the king's lover.

But this was small comfort to Isabella.

While she was still loyally performing her royal duty

by giving birth to two more children,

she watched as Despenser set about using his influence with the king

to build up his own wealth and power to dizzying heights -

no matter how illegal his methods, or who stood in his way.

By 1321 the lords had had enough.

They marched on London and threatened violence against Edward

and his new favourite.

In the attempt to prevent civil war

Isabella took action to support her husband

in the way only a queen could.

Isabella had just given birth to her fourth child,

and yet again she had to go down on her knees in the ritual of queenly intervention,

to persuade Edward to banish Despenser.

She won a temporary truce, but little more than two months later, with terrible irony,

it was Isabella herself who precipitated the country into civil war.

In October 1321,

Isabella was on her way to Canterbury on pilgrimage.

At the end of a hard day's ride,

she found herself at the gates of Leeds Castle,

a mighty stronghold built near the Kent coast,

seeking shelter for the night.

To welcome the queen as a guest would normally be an honour,

but the castle's lord, Bartholomew Badlesmere,

was one of the rebels who had marched on London.

His wife, left to keep the castle in his absence,

was alarmed by Isabella's sudden arrival,

and refused to let her in.

Isabella was left out in the cold, and she was furious.

She never lacked a sense of her own majesty,

and now she ordered her men to force their way in.

In response, the archers on the castle walls began to shoot,

and within minutes, six of Isabella's soldiers lay dead.

Isabella's confrontation at Leeds

gave her husband the chance to send a message to all the rebel lords.

The violent reception of his queen, Edward said, was treason,

and he sent troops and siege engines to attack the castle.

And when Lady Badlesmere threw open the gates to appeal for mercy,

she and her young children were dispatched as prisoners to the Tower,

while her men were hanged from the castle walls.

From this moment the lords who opposed Edward could be in no doubt

that the king intended the conflict to be a fight to the death.

And in March 1322, at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire,

Edward finally got his revenge for the years of humiliation

when his army defeated and captured the Earl of Lancaster.

As the greatest chronicler of the reign recalled,

"The Earl of Lancaster once cut off Piers Gaveston's head

"and now by the king's command the Earl himself had lost his head.

"Thus, perhaps not unjustly,

"the Earl received measure for measure."

Isabella's husband was making very clear the dreadful penalties

that now faced anyone who dared to oppose him.

England's prisons filled with rebels' wives and children,

while aristocratic corpses were left to rot

on gallows across the country.

With the ruthless Despenser at his side,

Edward had found a way to eradicate all opposition

by turning his rule into a grasping and paranoid tyranny.

Isabella had done everything she could to be the perfect queen,

but now, to her horror,

she found that she too would be a victim of the new regime.

And it was Isabella's French heritage which left her acutely vulnerable.

In the summer of 1324

a crisis erupted between England and France.

England still held Gascony in the south of the country

but Isabella's brother, the French king, was threatening to take it.

It seemed war with France was imminent.

Edward ordered that all Frenchmen and women

living in England should be arrested as enemy aliens.

And his favourite, Despenser, seized on the opportunity to take Isabella's possessions,

intern her French servants

and separate her from her children.

Now Isabella's feelings for her husband and Despenser

turned from mistrust to loathing.

But there was one glimmer of hope.

The French king was willing to negotiate.

So Isabella cleverly put herself at her husband's disposal

as the perfect emissary to her brother, the king of France.

She had been so patient in the face of provocation

that Edward and Despenser seized on this solution,

believing she could be trusted to return like a loyal lapdog.

And so, on 9th March 1325,

Isabella left England for Paris.

Isabella successfully negotiated a truce between England and France.

Then she persuaded Edward

that their 12-year-old son, the heir to the throne,

should be sent to Paris to seal the agreement

by paying homage to the French King.

This was the moment Isabella had been waiting for.

When her son arrived on French soil, her position was transformed.

As Edward's consort, there had been little she could do.

But with her son beside her,

she could speak and act as the mother of the heir to the throne

in the face of her husband's tyranny.

She'd been waiting for her chance and now she took it.

With his son, Edward sent an instruction

that his wife should return home,

but Isabella had no intention of doing any such thing.

And we know exactly the reason she gave.

The manuscript of the greatest chronicle of the reign,

the Vita Edwardi Secundi,

is long lost - but its text has been passed down through the centuries.

And here, in this modern translation,

we hear Isabella's voice speaking for the first time.

Until now, she'd been a supporting player in the unfolding drama.

But now, she moved to the centre of the stage

as she replied to her husband with open defiance.

"I feel that marriage is a union of a man and a woman

"and someone has come between my husband and myself and is trying to break this bond.

"I declare that I will not return until this intruder is removed."

Isabella's game plan was to present herself to the world

as a wronged wife.

And until now she'd seemed more than justified in doing so.

But another player was about to enter the scene,

who would change forever the picture the world would have of Isabella.

Roger Mortimer was 38 years old, a soldier

and a politician of skill and experience.

He had joined the rebels against Edward in 1321

and escaped into exile in France.

And within weeks of Isabella and Mortimer's meeting in Paris

rumours circulated that their partnership was more than political.

There's tantalisingly little evidence of the private dynamics

of Isabella and Mortimer's relationship.

But it was clearly an all-consuming passion -

not least because of the danger into which they'd precipitated themselves.

Adultery, for a queen, was sin and treason combined.

But for Isabella there were no longer any safe options.

With her knight at her side

and the most valuable pawn of all, her son, under her control,

what move would the queen make?

Isabella took a momentous decision.

It was no longer enough to remove Despenser.

She needed to remove her husband too.

She intended to do something unprecedented in English history -

depose an anointed king.

Could she, as a woman, achieve this?

She certainly couldn't do it alone. She needed an army.

And how she got one reveals a great deal about the woman she'd become.

Now she was an independent player on the European stage

and she arranged the marriage of her son to Philippa,

daughter of the count of Hainault,

who brought troops and ships as her dowry.

On 22nd September 1326,

at the head of a hundred ships filled with soldiers,

Isabella, Mortimer and Prince Edward set sail for England.

When Isabella stepped onto the Suffolk coast,

she was taking up arms against her king and husband, with her lover at her side.

She could hardly have been more openly defying

the conventions of female virtue.

And yet she wasn't met with outrage and vilification.

Instead, she was greeted with open arms.

While there was no alternative to Edward's rule,

his people hadn't known how to resist.

Isabella wasn't challenging him in her own name -

she, after all, had no right to the throne -

but in the name of their 13-year-old son, Prince Edward.

He was too young to act alone and so Isabella acted for him.

And, with the promise of a new young king and his capable mother,

her husband's power simply melted away.

Isabella might have been an unfaithful wife and a rebel queen,

but she was also England's champion against Edward's tyranny,

no she-wolf, but the saviour of her adopted country.

When news of the queen's triumphal progress reached Edward and Despenser

they were gripped with panic.

They packed their saddlebags with gold and fled west,

where they were captured -

bedraggled figures in the Welsh rain.

Isabella had Despenser brought before her.

There's no question that she relished her moment of revenge.

Despenser was hanged, then disembowelled and castrated

when he was still alive.

The supportive queen had been transformed into

a very different figure.

Now Isabella was acting as if she were a king,

inflicting brutal punishments on her enemies.

Which of course raised the question

of what she would do with her own king.

In January 1327,

in a carefully stage-managed piece of political theatre,

it was declared in Parliament that Edward had forfeited the allegiance

of his people, and that now his son should wear the crown in his place.

In just four short months, Isabella had achieved the unthinkable.

She, a queen, had seized power to depose a crowned and anointed king

for the first time in English history.

To undo a coronation was no easy task.

Parliament had given the act a legal gloss

but, to make doubly sure, Edward was forced to sign his own abdication here at Kenilworth.

Now the deed was done,

but could Isabella rule in her son's name while her husband still lived?

The new King Edward III was still just a teenager,

so Isabella was running his government for him.

But never before had England had to contend with

the existence of an ex-king, alive and well,

while a new king, or in this case a king's mother, ruled the country.

Isabella had Edward imprisoned

in Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire.

But she knew that,

while he remained alive, he was the obvious focus for any rebellion.

Within a year, three plots to liberate him

had already been uncovered.

These documents here in Berkeley Castle give us a sense

of the extraordinary difficulty of keeping an ex-king in custody.

We can see here, from the provisions bought for him,

which included 280 eggs, or "ova" in Latin, in just three months,

that at first he was kept in some comfort.

But this account tells us of the reinforcement of the castle

with bolts and great bars and other ironwork

after Edward escaped from his guards in the summer of 1327.

It was obvious how dangerous

his continued existence was to the new regime.

We can't know just how closely

Isabella was involved in planning Edward's murder.

By its very nature, his end was a grim business

done in secrecy and shadows.

His death was announced, but not explained.

And, in the absence of an explanation,

Legend has it that he was killed with a red-hot poker

thrust into his anus to burn his intestines from the inside.

This violent detail

was immortalised more than 200 years later by Christopher Marlowe

in his play of Edward's life

when he called Isabella "that unnatural queen, false Isabel".

What's certain is that it was Edward's death -

a murder that supposedly took place in this room at Berkeley -

that sealed Isabella's reputation as a she-wolf.

Just 30 years later, the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker

portrayed Edward as a Christ-like figure,

betrayed and destroyed by a wife who was like the biblical Jezebel -

a tyrannical and sexually corrupt queen

manipulating her husband and son to impose evil on the kingdom.

But these opinions were formed in hindsight.

When Isabella knelt in prayer at her husband's funeral,

she was still seen as the saviour of the nation.

But though Isabella was a political animal through and through

there were limits to her political understanding.

And now her overwhelming sense of entitlement

began to blunt her vision.

Like so many rulers before and since

she started to run the country for her own enrichment.

Very few of the objects that Isabella owned still survive

but one that does is this exquisite casket.

It's delicately engraved with the arms of England and France

and it may have been a wedding present from her mother-in-law.

It gives us a tiny glimpse of the extraordinary luxury

with which Isabella surrounded herself.

That, of course, was appropriate for a queen -

but the problem was that Isabella didn't know where to stop.

At the helm of English government, Isabella and Mortimer

rewarded themselves not just with silver trinkets,

but with vast estates and the contents of the royal treasury.

But now they were behaving

exactly like Edward and Despenser before them.

For two years Isabella and her lover ruled the country

with a vice-like grip, meeting opposition with brutal suppression.

And all the time Isabella kept her son, King Edward III,

closely by her side, monitoring his friends

and allowing him no freedom to act alone.

Marlowe would later describe Isabella's son as "a lamb, encompassed by wolves".

But by 1330 Edward was 17, and the she-wolf was about to discover

that her offspring had claws of his own.

Isabella's day of reckoning came at Nottingham Castle.

She had already become suspicious

that her son was beginning to resist her control.

So when the royal party took up residence here

they had the guards redoubled about them.

But Edward's plans had been well laid.

Under cover of darkness, a group of young knights made their way

through these secret tunnels into the castle.

Mortimer and Isabella were surrounded before they knew what was happening.

Isabella was forced back into her bedchamber

and Mortimer was disarmed and overpowered in a matter of moments.

After three years, the rule of Isabella and her consort was over.

There was no doubt about Mortimer's fate.

He was sentenced to a traitor's death for killing the last king

and usurping the power of the new one.

He was hanged at Tyburn like a common thief.

More than 20 years of brutal political experience told Isabella

that Mortimer's fate was inevitable.

But what would hers be?

She was, after all, the King's mother

and, once Mortimer was dead, the story could be spun

that she had been diverted from her royal duty by his machinations.

Presumably she mourned for him, but she'd always been a realist

and she took care to leave no public traces of her grief.

Her son might have acted against her because of the way she'd ruled,

but Isabella was still his mother.

She had to surrender her vast estates,

but Edward gave her an income of £3,000 a year.

She could no longer intervene in politics

but she would have a sumptuous, if compulsory, retirement.

Isabella had an extraordinary life.

She showed, for a brief moment,

that female leadership could represent the legitimacy of the Crown

forcefully enough to depose an anointed king.

But the exercise of power by a woman turned out to be a different matter,

and particularly a woman like Isabella,

who enriched herself rather than nurturing her people.

In retrospect, the death of her husband came to define Isabella

not as the saviour of England,

but, in the words of the poet Thomas Gray,

as the "She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs

"That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate".

This is how Isabella has been remembered.

Certainly many of her actions were violent and self-serving.

But then, so were those of the men around her.

And the vitriol heaped on her by history

draws on an image of female power as grotesque, savage and immoral.

Over the next hundred years,

England and France were almost constantly at war

and out of this conflict

emerged the woman that Shakespeare dubbed a she-wolf.

By 1444 the English were on the back foot and ready to make a truce.

All hopes for peace rested on the young shoulders of Margaret,

daughter of the Duke of Anjou.

She would marry the English King, Henry VI,

and seal a treaty between the warring countries.

Margaret grew up in this impressive castle in Angers

and her childhood here gave her a useful lesson

in the limitations of royal power.

Margaret's father had many grand titles -

in theory, he was king of Sicily, Naples and Jerusalem -

and he spent most of her childhood

fighting to turn those paper crowns into real power.

In the meantime, Margaret, here in Anjou,

was brought up by her formidable mother and grandmother.

The message to Margaret was clear -

royal power had to be fought for,

and a woman could rule if a man was absent.

When Margaret left Angers at the age of 15

to marry a man she'd never met,

she couldn't have known how valuable these lessons would prove to be.

23-year-old Henry probably struck Margaret as a reassuring presence.

He had an unworldly, childlike air -

more a naive innocent than a grim-faced soldier.

But, if that made him a gentle husband,

Margaret was about to discover that it also made him a disastrous king.

Henry VI had come to the throne as a nine-month-old baby

and England had been governed by a council of noblemen.

But now, at the age of 23,

Henry seemed no more capable of ruling than he had as a baby.

It's not clear exactly when

Margaret realised how utterly incapable her husband was,

but what happened seven years into their marriage

left no room for doubt.

To Margaret's delight, in 1453 she gave birth to her first child,

a healthy boy named Edward.

But Henry took no part in the celebrations.

Ten weeks before the birth,

his fragile mental faculties had disintegrated completely

and he'd fallen into a catatonic trance.

Henry was oblivious to their son's arrival,

but Margaret had good reason to be jubilant.

With the heir to the throne in her arms,

she discovered, just like Isabella before her,

that she had a direct stake in the power play that surrounded her.

The question now was how far she would go in using it.

The answer wasn't slow in coming.

Just three months after her son's birth,

a well-informed observer in London reported that the Queen...

..desires to have the whole rule of this land

as well as the right to appoint all other officers

that the King should make.

Margaret was proposing that she should act as Regent

for her helpless husband.

This dramatic piece of self-assertion

was the first step on a road that would eventually lead to

Shakespeare's lacerating portrait of Margaret as the "She-wolf of France".

But, if we look behind the caricature,

there was much more to Margaret's position than unthinking aggression.

The times invited her to act.

Margaret stepped onto the political stage

as the country stood on the brink of civil war.

After years without royal leadership,

English politics was in the grip of a destructive rivalry

between the two most powerful nobles in England.

This was the beginning of what would become known -

thanks to Shakespeare, and later art and literature -

as the Wars of the Roses.

Margaret watched as the nobles divided.

On one side was the Duke of York, the King's cousin,

who claimed to speak for the good of the whole country.

On the other was the Duke of Somerset,

who acted for the House of Lancaster,

the line from which Henry descended.

Both claimed the right to rule in the King's absence.

And now their rivalry threatened to spill onto the battlefield.

It was amid this tension and fear that Margaret made her bid to rule.

From Margaret's own perspective, she was the obvious candidate to safeguard her husband's kingdom,

just as her mother had governed Anjou in her father's absence.

But Henry was only mentally, not physically, absent,

and to the English nobles it seemed as though their French-born queen

was trying to exceed her proper powers.

To Margaret's distress, the nobles turned to a council of their own,

under the leadership of the Duke of York.

On his orders, his rival, the Duke of Somerset,

was confined to the Tower of London.

But on Christmas Day 1454

Margaret was suddenly presented with a way forward.

16 months after he had last shown

any sign of knowing who or where he was,

King Henry suddenly returned to his senses, such as they'd ever been.

As Margaret introduced her toddling son to his astounded father

for the first time, the Duke of York's caretaker regime fell apart.

Somerset was released from the Tower

and it seemed that the political merry-go-round was turning again.

But, by this time,

York and Somerset's rivalry had become a deadly enmity.

Margaret believed that Somerset supported her husband

and for the moment he had the King by his side.

But York was intent on having the King under HIS control.

And now the other great noble families were taking sides.

And in May 1455, when the two armies came face to face

in the unassuming market town of St Albans,

political confrontation finally became civil war.

The first battle of the Wars of the Roses was fought

through the streets and houses of the town.

In these confined spaces, probably a hundred men died.

King Henry took no part in the Battle of St Albans.

He just sat under his banner in the market square

while his greatest nobles fought to the death in these streets all around him.

Nothing could have made it clearer that he was only a pawn

in this increasingly brutal and dangerous game.

When the fighting was over,

it became clear that the Duke of York's army had won the day.

And his enemy, the Duke of Somerset, was dead.

Henry was now in York's control. The battle changed everything.

And for Margaret it was a turning point.

York still claimed to be Henry's loyal subject

but, in Margaret's view,

loyal subjects didn't set out to capture their king in battle.

And York's closeness to the royal line of succession

now made him a threat to her son.

If Henry wasn't able to fight for their son's future,

then Margaret would do it for him.

But Margaret knew that her next move would have to be made carefully.

For now, she left London for her castle at Tutbury in Staffordshire.

But this wasn't a retreat from the political frontline.

Instead, it was an attempt to match the Duke of York

with a territorial power base of her own.

Margaret had the castle at Tutbury enlarged and improved.

It was an imposing residence for an increasingly imposing queen.

Margaret was clearly demonstrating to anyone who cared to look

that she was prepared to fight to defend her husband and son.

But in doing so she provoked a reaction.

And, as ever, a woman in power

was vulnerable to sexual as well as political slurs.

Rumours began to speak of the little Prince as a bastard or a changeling

and to suggest that, in private, Henry's queen might not be as loyal as she seemed.

The implication was that unnatural impulses were at work,

both inside and outside the royal bedchamber.

Margaret knew that York's supporters were taking every opportunity to slander her

but she was made of stern stuff.

It would take more than words to defeat her.

By the summer of 1456 it was clear where the fulcrum of power now lay.

A contemporary wrote...

My Lord of York waits on the Queen,

and she upon him.

Despite attempts to find a lasting peace,

the country divided behind Margaret and York.

For Margaret this meant raising an army

in the name of her husband and son.

This beautiful object, known as the Dunstable Swan Jewel,

probably dates from about 1400.

The swan was one of the emblems of the Prince of Wales,

and so it was a badge with this image,

of a swan with a crown around its neck,

that Margaret began to distribute to her loyal supporters

in the name of her small son.

She was determined to defend the rights of her husband and son

by any means necessary.

Margaret saw no middle ground in this conflict.

Anyone who wasn't with her, she believed, was an enemy of the Crown.

But that didn't mean her task would be easy.

In September 1459, the two sides met at Blore Heath in Staffordshire.

After four hours of bloody fighting,

2,000 men lay dead on the battlefield.

The Yorkists had defeated an army, which was supposedly King Henry's,

but everyone knew where the power really lay.

One chronicler described it as an army of "the Queen's gallants".

But three weeks later the two sides met again

and this time it was York's army that was defeated.

Margaret's enemies, the Duke of York, his son, Edward, and nephew, the Earl of Warwick,

scattered to Ireland and France.

In their absence, Margaret seized her moment

to declare her enemies guilty of treason.

But they were not yet destroyed in person -

and Margaret now found that the power base she'd built for herself in the North

had alienated her husband's subjects in the South.

And in July 1460, when York's son Edward and nephew Warwick

returned with troops to face her army at Northampton,

the result, for Margaret, was a calamity.

She lost both the battle and the person of the king.

Margaret was left helpless,

as the Duke of York took her husband as a prisoner to London.

The Pope later observed that the King was...

More timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit and spirit.

The contrast with his forceful wife was obvious.

News reached Margaret that York was now claiming the crown for himself.

He argued that his royal line of descent

made him the rightful king, rather than Henry.

It was a convenient version of history,

but for the moment he couldn't get the nobles to back him.

Instead, a compromise was reached - Henry would keep his crown,

but, when he died, York would succeed him.

For Margaret, this was no settlement, but a nightmare.

Her son, for whose rights she'd fought since the moment of his birth, would be disinherited.

She threw herself into the task of raising support

from Scotland and the English lords still loyal to her.

Now, this was a fight to the death.

Success for Margaret came much more swiftly than she could ever have hoped,

when the Duke of York was ambushed and killed by Margaret's troops

at Wakefield, in Yorkshire, in December 1460.

She ordered that his head be set on a spike on Micklegate Bar in York,

dressed in a paper crown to mock his pretensions of majesty.

Now Margaret's greatest enemy was dead, but victory was not yet hers.

There were still men prepared to fight for the Yorkist cause

and York's son Edward and nephew Warwick wanted revenge.

It was once again at St Albans that the two sides met.

While Margaret's army fought Warwick's,

the Queen waited impatiently for news here in the abbey.

The outcome was a triumph.

The Yorkists were defeated, and their prisoner, King Henry,

was released, and reunited with Margaret.

Husband and wife were back together,

but this was hardly a romantic reunion.

Margaret's triumph lay in the fact

that the power of the royal triumvirate - King, Queen and Prince -

was once again at her disposal.

But the war wasn't yet won.

Margaret had now been fighting for eight long years.

She, a woman alone, had kept the royal cause alive.

Henry might be a hopeless case, but if she could keep fighting

then surely their son would one day

get his chance to become a glorious king.

But, even though her greatest enemy, the Duke of York, was dead,

it turned out that she now faced an even greater threat -

his 18-year-old son, Edward.

Edward was tall, handsome, charismatic and precociously able.

He looked more like a king than anyone had seen in years

and a king was exactly what he was claiming to be.

Just as his father had done before him,

he argued that his royal descent trumped Henry's own.

The difference was that this time London agreed

and rapturously acclaimed him as King Edward IV.

Nine days later his forces set out to defeat Margaret once and for all.

The two sides met at Towton in Yorkshire.

And Margaret, Henry and their seven-year-old son

took refuge behind the city walls at York.

This 15th-century screen at York Minster

shows all the kings of England

from William the Conqueror to Margaret's husband, Henry VI.

For Margaret, the last eight years

had been devoted to securing her son's place in this unbroken line.

And now she could do nothing but pace restlessly, here at York,

while her soldiers did their work.

Eight hours later, thousands upon thousands of men were dead

and it was Margaret's army that had shattered.

As the light began to fade on this bloodiest of battlefields,

Edward of York stood unchallenged,

now King of England in fact as well as name.

And Margaret, her husband and son fled north,

no longer the Royal Family but hunted fugitives.

It was the bitterest of blows.

Margaret had invested every ounce of her strength to animate the cause of an inert king

but, as a woman, she couldn't simply inhabit the role her husband had left so damagingly vacant.

Now she had to watch as Edward, a golden boy in a golden crown,

occupied the throne as if he'd been born to it.

But still she wouldn't give in.

She tried to raise support from the Scots and the French.

But in England, as a foreign-born queen,

Margaret was damned twice over,

for the country of her birth and her sex.

According to a poem of the time...

She and her wicked affinity certain

Intend utterly to destroy this region.

Nor would she capitulate when her husband was finally captured

and imprisoned in the Tower of London in the summer of 1465.

With nowhere else to turn,

Margaret and her son fled across the Channel,

where the King of France allowed her to set up

a tiny and impoverished court in an obscure corner of his kingdom.

Margaret's son was ten when they moved to France

and, as he grew into manhood, Margaret doggedly fought on

in the attempt to secure his future as King of England.

She watched hawkishly for any chink in the Yorkist regime

and constantly petitioned the crowned heads of Europe for help,

but it was a fruitless task.

For Margaret and her little band of loyalists, the outlook was bleak.

Margaret never gave up,

but well-informed observers knew her cause was hopeless.

That, however, was to reckon without the Yorkist regime's

extraordinary capacity for self-destruction.

Edward's cousin, the Earl of Warwick,

is known to history as the Kingmaker.

And that, it turned out, was how he saw himself.

He had been the driving force behind Edward's campaign for the throne

but, now Edward was king, Warwick discovered

he couldn't control him and they'd fallen into a bitter rivalry.

To bring down this Yorkist king,

Warwick needed another candidate to wear the crown

and the only viable alternative

was the House of Lancaster - Margaret, her husband and son.

This was the moment for which Margaret had been waiting nine long years.

But it came at a terrible price.

To seize this chance to regain her son's inheritance,

Margaret had to take the hand of the Earl of Warwick,

a man she despised and mistrusted.

For Margaret this was an agonising decision.

Warwick had been one of the architects of her husband's fall

and the disinheritance of her son.

He'd led armies against her on bloody battlefields.

But now he offered Margaret her only chance to ensure her son's future.

On the 22nd July 1470,

here at Angers, Margaret came face to face with Warwick.

They were enemies divided by a river of blood

but now they were about to become allies.

Margaret's distaste was such

that she kept Warwick on his knees in front of her for 15 minutes.

But the deal was done.

It was a treaty sealed with a kiss,

when Margaret's 17-year-old son married Warwick's daughter.

In return for this stake in the royal dynasty,

Warwick set sail for England, to challenge Edward

and restore Henry to the throne.

Margaret stayed in France, waiting to hear that England was won

before she or her son stepped on English soil again.

And good news reached her startlingly quickly.

Edward was surprised by Warwick's attack.

With his forces unprepared, he fled to the Netherlands,

leaving Warwick to free the bewildered King Henry from the Tower.

With her husband back on the throne

and her son ready to step into his shoes,

England was once again within Margaret's grasp.

So on Easter Sunday, the 14th April 1471,

after a difficult voyage,

Margaret and her son at last set foot on the English coast

and at that moment their world fell apart.

Their timing was disastrous.

Edward too had returned to England with a small band of soldiers,

and just hours before Margaret landed,

in a bitterly fought battle at Barnet, north of London,

Edward defeated and killed Warwick.

Suddenly Margaret found herself exposed and vulnerable.

All her carefully laid plans were falling apart

and now, once again, the future would be decided on a battlefield.

Margaret had support and reinforcements in the west of the country

and she made her way to join them.

Edward set out to intercept her, warning that death would be

the penalty for anyone who helped Margaret.

Everything now depended on this race across the country.

The two armies met at Tewkesbury -

and it was here, in this beautiful abbey, that Margaret was once again left to wait for news.

But this time, she was alone.

For the very first time, at the age of 17,

her son was on the battlefield.

Today, he would either win his father's crown, or lose his life.

The end, when it came, was quick.

Margaret's son died where he fell in the rout of the Lancastrian army.

Margaret didn't try to run.

She had nowhere to go, and no-one left to fight for.

And when Edward made his victorious entry into London,

the captive queen followed in a chariot,

straight-backed and blank-faced, staring at nothing.

The following day King Henry's body was brought out of the Tower.

The Londoners were told he had died of "pure displeasure and melancholy"

at the news of his son's death,

but few doubted that Edward had ordered his killing.

Margaret was 41. And, without her husband and son, her life was over.

She was no longer a threat to Edward,

so he had no need to kill her.

Instead, he imprisoned her for four years in England

before allowing her to return to France, penniless and purposeless.

And when she died at age of 51

her death went unnoticed by the crowned heads of Europe.

Margaret and Isabella had each stepped forward

to become a queen who dominated the political chessboard.

Their forceful leadership shaped the power play around them

but it also exposed them to vitriolic criticism.

Their self-assertion, that would have seemed natural in a man,

was deemed unnatural, even monstrous, in a woman.

As a result, they've gone down in history condemned as she-wolves.

In the next programme, we'll see what happened when England was faced

not with inadequate kings, but no kings at all.

When Edward died there was no-one left to claim the title of King of England.

For the first time in English history,

all the contenders for his crown were female.

So would the Tudor queens succeed as England's first female kings.

Would England finally accept the rule of a woman alone?

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