English and French Claims to the Throne of France
After Louis X of France died suddenly in 1316, his queen gave birth to a son, Jean I, who lived for just five days. The king’s only remaining child was his four-year-old daughter by his first wife. That marriage had been annulled on suspicion of her adultery. Both his daughter’s young age and the question marks over her parentage made her a less than ideal heir to the throne, and the crown was taken instead by Louis’s brother, Philippe V. When he too died without sons, the precedent of his own case was used to secure the succession of his brother, Charles IV, rather than one of his daughters. When Charles then also died leaving only daughters, the crown passed to his male cousin, Philippe VI, beginning the line of Valois succession.
But Edward III of England, the son of Charles IV’s sister Isabella, disputed the developing custom that the crown could not be inherited by or through a woman, and claimed that the French throne was rightfully his. This was the basis on which he began what was later named the Hundred Years War, winning great victories at Sluys in 1340, Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. It was also the basis on which Edward’s great-grandson Henry V sought to emulate his military success in France and to secure the French crown for himself.
In early fifteenth-century France, meanwhile, the combination of these fourteenth-century precedents with the urgent need to invalidate the English claim to the French throne produced the enduring myth that female royal succession was forbidden by an ancient ‘Salic Law’.
The Valois Kings of France
The Dukes of Burgundy
The Plantagenet Kings of England
