Margaret of France, Queen of England and Hungary

Margaret of France (1157 – aft. 10 September 1197) was, by her two marriages, queen of England, Hungary and Croatia.
She was the eldest daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife Constance of Castile. Her older half-sisters, Marie and Alix, were also older half-sisters of her future husband.

First marriage

She was betrothed to Henry the Young King on 2 November 1160. Henry was the second of five sons born to King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was five years old at the time of this agreement while Margaret was three. Margaret's dowry was the vital and much disputed territory of Vexin.

Her husband became co-ruler with his father in 1170. Because Archbishop Thomas Becket was in exile, Margaret was not crowned along with her husband on 14 July 1170. This omission and the coronation being handled by a surrogate greatly angered her father. To please the French King, Henry II had his son and Margaret crowned together in Winchester Cathedral on 27 August 1172. When Margaret became pregnant, she did her confinement period in Paris, where she gave birth prematurely to their only son William on 19 June 1177, who died three days later on 22 June.

She was accused in 1182 of having a love affair with William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, although contemporary chroniclers doubted the truth of these accusations. Henry may have started the process to have their marriage annulled, ostensibly due to her adultery but in reality because she could not conceive an heir. Margaret was sent back to France, according to E. Hallam (The Plantagenets) and Amy Kelly (Eleonore of Aquitaine and the Four Kings), to ensure her safety during the civil war with Young Henry's brother Richard the Lionheart. Her husband died in 1183 while on campaign in the Dordogne region of France.

By virtue of her marriage to Young King Henry, duke of Anjou, she was installed as the duchess. The coronet he and she would have worn was chronicled in about 1218 as "the traditional ring-of-roses coronet of the house of Anjou". Margaret may have taken her coronet to Hungary in 1186 when she married King Bela III. A ring-of-roses coronet was discovered in a convent grave in Budapest in 1838, which may be the same one.

Second marriage

After receiving a substantial pension in exchange for surrendering her dowry of Gisors and the Vexin, she became the second wife of Béla III of Hungary in 1186. The difficult delivery of her only known child in 1177 seems to have rendered her sterile, as she had no further children.

Later life

She was widowed for a second time in 1196 and died on pilgrimage to the Holy Land at St John of Acre in 1197, having only arrived eight days prior to her death. She was buried at the Cathedral of Tyre, according to Ernoul, the chronicler who continued the chronicles of William of Tyre.

Fictional portrayal

Margaret was portrayed by Lucy Durham-Matthews (as a young girl) and Tracey Childs (as a teenager) in the 1978 BBC TV drama series The Devil's Crown, which dramatised the reigns of Henry II, Richard I and John.

Ancestry