‘History is seldom quite just to historical women’ wrote Charles Kirk in his biography of Charles the Bold, yet he too paid scant attention to his hero’s third wife.1 Margaret has been particularly unfortunate in her treatment by history. She was neither a queen nor a saint and her story was not grand enough to merit a nineteenth century biography, while the twentieth century has had little time for the biographies of great ladies. Nor does her life fit tidily into the packages preferred by historians. In English history she appears merely as a pawn in Edward IV’s foreign policy and a thorn in the flesh of Henry VII. She disappears into the chasms which have been excavated between the fifteenth century and the early Tudors and between English and European history. Belgian historians have been more generous, but even here she was unfortunate to live in the neglected transitional period between the Burgundian age and the Habsburg age. She has been confused with another English Princess Margaret, who married Duke John II of Brabant in the late thirteenth century.2 In spite of this there has been a continued interest in the English Dowager and she has been the subject of one full scale biography, several monographs and one Europalia exhibition.
One aspect of this interest has been the various efforts which have been made to find her tomb. In 1937 and again in 1955, during work on the old church of the Recollects, now an exhibition centre, it was thought that some of her remains had been discovered.3A coffin containing some female bones was found beneath the threshold of the choir in the exact location recorded by the sixteenth century scholar. However a thorough re-examination of the bones in 1970 established that they were not of the correct period.
Once more, Margaret had eluded her investigators. To a very large extent Margaret will continue to elude history. She may assert her existence in her bold autograph and in the few words which she added to her official letters. Some of her gifts and books have survived. The various possible portraits provide little more than conventional images of the great lady of the fifteenth century. There is the fashionable melancholia, the pious gloom which led the far from gloomy Olivier de La Marche to adopt as his device ‘tant a suffert La Marche’ (‘so much has La Marche borne’).4 There are also the symbols: the marguerites, the coats of arms, the devices, the initials and the white roses which were all integral to her political existence. There are, however, few signs of her vigour, determination and intelligence, which were very significant indeed for the Duchy of Burgundy and for the crown of England.