Margaret of Anjou (1430-1482), the wife of King Henry VI of England, was a heroine, not of romance and fiction, but of stern and terrible reality. Her life was a series of military exploits, attended with dangers, privations, sufferings, and wonderful vicissitudes of fortune, scarcely to be paralleled in the whole history of mankind. She was born and lived in a period during which there prevailed in the western part of Europe two great and dreadful quarrels, which lasted for more than a hundred years, and which kept France and England, and all the countries contiguous to them, in a state of continual commotion during all that time. The Queen consort of England for many years, Margaret of Anjou was one of the principal figures in the series of dynastic civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses, having led the Lancastrian faction. Due to Henry's frequent bouts of insanity, Margaret ruled the kingdom in her husband's place. It was Margaret of Anjou who, in May 1455, called for a Great Council which excluded the Yorkist faction, and thus provided the spark which ignited the civil conflict that lasted for over thirty years, decimated the old nobility, and caused the deaths of thousands of men, including her only son Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales.
Author Biography:
Jacob Abbott (1803-1879) was an American writer of children's books. A licensed minister, his career outside of writing included serving as a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Amherst College, founding the Mount Vernon School for Young Ladies in Boston in 1829, and founding (with his brothers) Abbott's Institute and the Mount Vernon School for Boys. Jacob Abbott was a prolific author, writing juvenile fiction, brief histories, biographies, religious books for the general reader, and a few works in popular science. His Rollo Books, such as Rollo at Work, Rollo at Play, Rollo in Europe, etc., are the best known of his writings, having as their chief characters a representative boy and his associates. Other works of note include Lucy Books, Jonas Books, Harper's Story Books, Marco Paul, Gay Family, and Juno Books. His brothers, John Stevens Cabot Abbott and Gorham Dummer Abbott, were also authors. His sons, Benjamin Vaughan Abbott, Austin Abbott, both eminent lawyers, Lyman Abbott, and Edward Abbott, a clergyman, were also well-known authors.