Margaret of Anjou, Queen to Henry VI.

As Shakespeare shows in Henry VI this Frenchwoman was one of the most brilliant leaders in 15th century England, offsetting the failures of her incompetent husband, though ultimately losing power disastrously to the Yorkists. Shakespeare was so fascinated by her that she appears in all four plays of his first tetralogy (Henry VI-Richard III) and her total of lines in that series gives her more than he wrote for any other female role (approximately 849 lines). Illumination from the manuscript presented to Margaret upon her marriage by John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. Picture (photograph by Bob Whitehead of Perth, Australia) and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia).