Let us now turn from King Henry's College to the other royal foundation of his reign which claims his consort, the Lady Margaret of Anjou, as its foundress. The poet Gray in his "Installation Ode," speaking of Queen Margaret in relation to Queens' College, calls her "Anjou's heroine." But those Shakespearean readers who have been accustomed to think of his representation of the Queen, in _The Second Part of King Henry VI._, as a dramatic portrait of considerable truth and historic consistency, will hardly recognise the "heroic" qualities of Margaret's character. Certainly she is not one of Shakespeare's "heroines." She has none of the womanly grace or lovableness of his ideal women. A woman of hard indomitable will, mistaking too often cruelty for firmness, using the pliancy and simplicity of her husband for mere party ends, outraging the national conscience by stirring up the Irish, the French, the Scots, against the peace of England, finally pitting the north against the south in a cruel and futile civil war, with nothing left of womanhood but the almost tigress heart of a baffled mother, this is the Queen Margaret as we know her in Shakespeare and in history. But "Our Lady the Queen Margaret," who was a "nursing mother" to Queens' College, seems a quite different figure. She has but just come to England, a wife and queen when little more than a child, "good-looking and well-grown" (_specie et forma præstans_), precocious, romantic, a "devout pilgrim to the shrine of Boccaccio," delighting in the ballads of the troubadour, a lover of the chase, inheriting all the literary tastes of her father, King René of Anjou. The motives which led her to become the patroness of a college are thus given by Thomas Fuller:-- "As Miltiades' trophy in Athens would not suffer Themistocles to sleep, so this queen, beholding her husband's bounty in building King's College, was restless in herself with holy emulation until she had produced something of the like nature, a strife wherein wives without breach of duty may contend with their husbands which should exceed in pious performances."[56] Accordingly we read that in 1447 Queen Margaret, being then but fifteen years old, sent to the King the following petition:--