When old King René married his daughter Margaret of Anjou to Henry VI., he did what many modern fathers do, and spent upon the festival a sum which would have served the bride and bridegroom for household expenses for a year. Margaret possessed little but the clothes in which she stood; and she remains known as the most indifferently clad and the worst-fated of all our sovereign ladies. But she was a woman of too much heart and intellect to care more about coifs and kirtles than they deserved. It was one of her maids of honour, Elizabeth Woodville, who shared the throne of Edward IV.,—a _mésalliance_ in every respect, and unfortunate to all parties. She however astonished the good people of Reading by the “bravery” of her attire, when she first appeared there as England’s Queen. Anne of Warwick’s whole reign with Richard III. was one of almost uninterrupted sickness, and she more often wore the garb of the invalid than the costume of a queen. The daughter of Elizabeth Woodville, the good Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII., was a lady who was never better dressed than at her coronation banquet in Westminster Hall, where the King was a spectator and not a guest. She sat in a kirtle of purple velvet, furred with ermine bands in front; and the Lady Katherine Gray and Mistress Ditton went under the table, and sat at the Queen’s feet; while the Countesses of Oxford and Rivers knelt on each side, and now and then “held a kerchief before her Grace.” The milliners especially prayed for benison on this Queen, and justly; for never had the dressmakers so fair and so faithful a patroness. She was provident of what she well paid for; and Elizabeth did not think it beneath her to pay sixteen pence to her tailor, Robert Addington, “for _mending_ eight gowns of divers colours, for the Queen’s Grace, at 2d. apiece.” She also occasionally pawned her plate, when she was pressed for money; but altogether she was not an improvident Queen. Elizabeth’s young daughter, Mary, sometime Queen of France, but who ultimately died Duchess of Suffolk, was a sportive child in a cumbrous dress. At four years of age she was provided, according to a warrant still existing, with kirtles of tawny damask and black satin; gowns of green and crimson velvet, edged with purple tinsel; and, as if to show that only outside appearance was cared for, lined with nothing more costly than simple black buckram. She was the widow, almost as soon as she was the wife, of Louis XII.; and, after a marriage of some two months’ duration, she expressed her grief by retiring to the Hôtel de Cluny, where, clothed in white, and confined in a darkened apartment lighted by wax tapers, she kept mourning state during six long, heavy weeks.