Marie of Anjou

Marie of Anjou (1404–1463) was the daughter of Louis II of Anjou and Yolande of Aragon and became queen of France through her marriage to Charles VII. She had been brought up in close contact with Charles during the political crisis of the early fifteenth century and married him at Bourges in 1422, the year he succeeded to the disputed French crown. Their long marriage produced a large royal family, including the future Louis XI, and tied the Valois monarchy closely to the influential Angevin household of Marie’s mother.

Marie’s queenship coincided with the recovery of Valois power during the later Hundred Years’ War. She maintained her own household and religious patronage and at times exercised governmental responsibilities while Charles was absent, although her political visibility was often overshadowed by Yolande of Aragon and, later, by Charles’s powerful favourite Agnès Sorel. Marie nevertheless remained queen throughout the reconquest and the consolidation of royal authority that followed it. She survived Charles VII by two years and died in 1463.

Deryn Lake’s The King’s Women uses Marie as one of the women through whom the personal and political life of Charles VII is explored, alongside Isabeau of Bavaria, Yolande of Aragon, Joan of Arc and Agnès Sorel. The novel gives emotional detail and private relationships a prominence that the documentary record cannot support in the same form, but Marie’s marriage to Charles and her place within the Angevin-Valois political network are historical.