CHAPTER 15
‘Very handsome, of high birth and of the most engaging manners’
Samuel Pepys was a great one for the glamour of royalty. On 23 February 1669, the celebrated diarist noted that he had viewed the embalmed body of Catherine de Valois on the anniversary of her coronation at Westminster, ‘and here we did see by particular favour the body of queen Katherine of Valois, and had her upper part of her body in my hands. And I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a queen.’ The macabre eroticism of this image says a good deal about Samuel’s own tendencies, but it also recalls that Catherine, whose body continued to be periodically displayed at the abbey until the eighteenth century, was a queen whose sexuality, both sanctified and transgressive, had dominated not just her own life but that of the royal dynasty of England.
Traditionally, one of the most glamorous English royal marriages began with two young men arguing about the size of their balls. In the second year of his reign, Henry V sent
to France two Ambassadors in State, a Bishop, two Doctors and two Knights in fitting array. They deliberated with the King of France and his council concerning a marriage to be celebrated between King Henry of England and the noble Lady Catherine, daughter of the King of France, but these envoys of the English King had only a brief discussion with the French on this matter, without arriving at any conclusion consistent with the honour or to the advantage of our King and so they returned home.1
Henry’s honour was apparently insulted by a gift of tennis balls from Catherine’s brother the Dauphin, who said that he could play with the ‘little balls’ until he had come to a man’s strength. Henry countered that he ‘would play with such balls in the Frenchmen’s own streets’, or, as Shakespeare told it, until he had ‘turn’d his balls to gun-stones’. There is no French confirmation for this story, though it is corroborated by four English chronicles, but beneath the relish for thumping innuendo, it shows something of the mood that surrounded Henry’s eventual marriage to Catherine in 1420, and perhaps something of Henry’s self-projection as England’s most celebrated warrior king since Richard the Lionheart.
At the coronation banquet held for Catherine de Valois in February 1421, even the pudding was political. The dessert course, or ‘subtleties’, featured four angels each bearing a ‘reason’ as to why the Queen’s marriage had ended the French wars. The conflict was not over, but its purpose - the provision of an heir to both England and France - was the final resolution to a century of violence. The tennis-ball anecdote highlights Henry’s masculinity, his virility, emphasising (not to put too fine a point on it) that he will prevail not just through his balls of steel, but through the seed they carry. After the siege of Harfleur in 1415, Henry offered to settle the succession to France once and for all in single combat with the Dauphin. Even then, it was a slightly absurd gesture, but the story also foregrounds the element of personal challenge in Henry’s ambitions for conquest, casting himself and Louis as rival knights, with Catherine the waiting maiden in the tower. Many chronicles concur that Henry, as King, had undergone a remarkable change of character since his days of ‘riot and wild governance’2 as Prince of Wales. According to the Brut Chronicle, one of his first acts was to assemble his companions from his drinking and whoring days, reward them and dismiss them. From then on, until his marriage to Catherine, he reputedly remained chaste. Potency thus becomes a condition of abstinence, vigour dependent upon purity. The symbolism of Catherine’s coronation pageantry was therefore both pious and romantic: her queenship, as well as creating her role as peace-weaver and mother to the future King, was confirmation that God had smiled on Henry, her true knight.
*
Catherine de Valois was the youngest daughter and eleventh child of Charles VI of France and Isabeau of Bavaria - the younger sister, by fourteen years, of Richard II’s second queen, Isabelle. Isabelle died in 1409, the same year that the marriage was first proposed, when Catherine was eight. Talks and battles continued for a decade, but in 1419 Catherine was granted the unusual opportunity of meeting her future husband when she travelled with her mother and Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy to rendezvous with Henry at Meulan.
The French royal family was in crisis. The four elder sons of Charles and Isabeau had died, and Catherine’s younger brother Charles had become Dauphin in 1417. Since 1403, Isabeau had been the head of the regency council formed to govern when the King ran mad, but she was not well equipped to deal with the factionalism of the French magnates. According to her detractors, she had demonstrated her support for the Armagnac side during the civil war by sleeping with both Louis de Valois and Bernard, Count of Armagnac, but Armagnac ambition eventually led to her being imprisoned at Tours for six months in 1317 on charges of corruption. Isabeau was rescued by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy (who was also accused of being her lover), by which time the Armagnacs, supported by the Dauphin, had control of both Paris and the King. In 1418, John of Burgundy succeeded in ejecting them from the capital. While not actively pro-English at this juncture, John saw it was in his interests to allow Henry V’s armies to continue their ongoing conquest of northern France. Charles VI was in no condition to be useful, so it was left to Isabeau to try to broker a deal with Henry at Meulan through which the capital might be recovered. A king of Henry’s chivalric reputation could do nothing less than fall in love at first sight, and the ‘flame of love’ duly blazed in his ‘martial heart’.3 But not quite fiercely enough, it seems, as the talks collapsed and he went back to making war in Normandy. In August, the Dauphin played neatly into his hands by murdering John the Fearless, while Rouen fell to the English. Much of northern France was now under English control and Paris was exposed. Henry was prepared to make an alliance with John’s heir, Philip the Good, so the French faced the prospect of seeing their kingdom eaten up between England and Burgundy. In 1521, a monk showed the broken skull of John the Fearless to the then King François I, explaining that this was the hole through which England had entered France.
Anti-Isabeau writers maintain that she now betrayed her son Charles by casting doubts on his paternity and persuading her husband to repudiate him in order to hand the kingdom to Henry. In fact, Charles had been disinherited by his father before the treaty of Troyes was ratified on the grounds that his ordering of the Duke of Burgundy’s murder proved him unfit to govern.On 20 May 1420, Henry V and Philip of Burgundy arrived at the camp of the displaced and diminished French court at Troyes. The treaty was ratified in the cathedral of St Peter, where the English conquerors embarrassed their dingy hosts with the splendour of their accoutrements. In Charles VI’s name, Isabeau agreed that on his marriage to Catherine, Henry and not her son, would become his heir, and that the French crown would duly pass to their offspring. The treaty does not declare that the Dauphin was illegitimate, and the single allusion to him refers only to the moral grounds for his disinheritance. But it was Troyes that destroyed the reputation of Catherine’s mother for future French historians as her signature on the treaty perpetuated the claim that she was solely responsible for giving France away. In truth Isabeau was only fulfilling a decision made earlier by her husband (and confirmed by him in a joint lit de justicehe held with Henry V in Paris in December that year), and her presence without him at the signing was necessary simply because he was in no state to appear in public. Isabeau is another example of the dangers to which foreign royal brides were susceptible, the complexities of her situation subsumed beneath the treacherous disloyalty to which, because she was not French, she was seen as inevitably subject. French historians, it is suggested, have found it ‘safer and more emotionally satisfying to blame all the trouble on foreign women rather than take sides among internal factions that often manipulated queens as their puppets’.4
For the English, at least, Troyes was naturally a triumph. Henry kissed Catherine’s hand ‘joyfully’, as well he might, and on 2 June ‘the King of the English married Lady Catherine and he willed that the ceremony should be carried out entirely according to thecustom of the France’.5 Henry gave 200 nobles to the church of St John, and the bride and groom were feasted before being ceremonially put to bed, but Henry was in such a hurry to get back to his war that he didn’t bother with a tournament to mark the occasion.
Catherine had a honeymoon of sieges. Henry, who had now taken over from Isabeau as head of the French regency council, was now effectively fighting a civil war against his new brother-in-law the Dauphin. That was certainly the opinion of the English Parliament, who felt that from now on the conflict should be financed by Henry’s French subjects. Catherine was with the King for the surrender of Sens on 11 June, then returned to her parents at Troyes while Henry starved her brother’s prisoners to death in trenches dug around the besieged fortress of Melun. On 1 December the King and Queen of France returned to Paris with their new son-in-law, his brothers Bedford and Clarence, Philip of Burgundy and Catherine. They processed from the St Denis gate to Nôtre Dame through brightly decorated streets filled with Parisians wearing celebratory red. The Christmas festivities again highlighted the mortifying differences in circumstances between the two kings. At the Hôtel de St Pol, Charles VI received ‘a small number of old servants and persons of low degree’,6 while over at the Louvre Henry and Catherine kept the holiday in style: ‘It is scarcely possible to tell in detail of the state they kept that day, the feasts and ceremony and luxury of their court.’7 On 27 December, Catherine accompanied Henry on his ceremonial entry into Rouen, the Conqueror’s capital, and then they moved on to Amiens and Calais before embarking for England.
If Parliament was complaining about the expense of the whole business, Henry’s subjects were in rapture. The Brut Chronicle claims that 30,000 people were waiting to greet the King and Queen when they arrived at Blackheath to process to London in February. Finally, here was a queen to worship. Anne of Bohemia had been poor, Isabelle de Valois a child, Joanna of Navarre an expensive widow, but Catherine was a beautiful blonde virgin who brought the kingdom of France as a dowry. If contemporary descriptions bear any relation to the truth, Henry and Catherine were almost divinely lovely. Henry was tall, fair-haired and clear-skinned, with an athletic body and white teeth (truly an extraordinary attribute in medieval times). Catherine, who took after her father in his better moments, was slim and fair. In the Bedford Hours, Catherine and Henry are pictured with golden hair, wearing red gowns covered with blue cloaks, a combination of colours in which the Virgin was most frequently illustrated, the red representing her ‘worldly’ nature and the blue its ‘heavenly’ counterpart. Blonde hair was something of an ideal, particularly for queens, as it carried implications of spirituality (the light of the halo) and fertility (the colour of ripe wheat). Since the beginning of the thirteenth century, in both Italian and northern European painting, the Virgin had been depicted with golden hair, and in another example of the myriad Marian associations of idealised queenship, all four of Catherine’s fifteenth-century successors were shown with bright blonde locks, though Marguerite of Anjou, at least, was almost certainly a brunette.
Catherine rode to her coronation on 23 February through streets lined with cloth-of-gold. Henry did not attend, but his absence did not stem from a waning of affection, as has sometimes been suggested, but as a result of a more sophisticated concept of the significance of the public body of the king. Traditionally, English kings did not attend their predecessors’ funerals as, until the corpse was entombed, the public body of the monarch was contained in the funeral effigy lying upon the coffin. Since there could never be more than one king, the new king could not appear beside the effigy of the old.8 In the fifteenth century, it has been suggested it was at the point of coronation that the queen became part of the king’s public body, as she was anointed with the holy oil, and therefore the king could not be simultaneously visible.
After the celebrations were over, Henry turned his mind to his greatest love, the war. Catherine stayed behind as he departed on a fund-raising progress through Bristol, Kenilworth and Coventry, and joined him for Easter at Leicester. This was the period when Catherine became pregnant with her son, though Henry was not inclined to linger in her company and set off again soon afterwards for Lincoln and York. Catherine returned slowly to London through Stamford, Huntingdon, Cambridge and Colchester, receiving gifts of gold and silver to contribute to the war effort. In June, by which time the Queen was aware of her pregnancy, Henry left once more for France.
Catherine spent just five months in England with her husband during a marriage that lasted a total of twenty-six, for much of which time Henry was away on campaign. It is posited that ‘Catherine had beauty to recommend her, but neither intelligence nor personality to captivate for long a man of Henry’s qualities’.9 The fact that Henry preferred fighting to his wife does not necessarily confirm that she was boring and stupid, as Henry was fonder of war than of anything else. (If they didn’t get on, it was perhaps because Catherine, judging from her later behaviour, was a rather jolly person, whereas Henry in his post-Prince Hal incarnation was notably abstemious, if not something of a prig.) They certainly had one thing in common, which was an appreciation of music. Henry had learned the harp as a boy, and in October 1420 new harps were ordered for both the King and his wife. The royal chapel was a celebrated centre for the development of English music, and Henry’s clerks of the chapel, who included the composers John Cooke, Thomas Damett and Nicholas Sturgeon, produced celebrations of Agincourt, the royal marriage and the treaty of Troyes in Mass pieces and motets. Henry brought thirty-eight musicians and sixteen singers to perform at his wedding, and Sturgeon may have accompanied him when he returned to France in 1421.
As far as their contemporaries were concerned, Catherine and Henry had a fairytale marriage, and its perfection was crowned with the birth of the heir to England and France, Henry VI, at Windsor on 6 December 1421. Catherine crossed to France the following May, escorted by the Duke of Bedford, and though by July the King had fallen ill, he did not send for her. She spent some time near Paris and visited the tombs of her ancestors at St Denis, then joined her parents at Senlis. Even when Henry knew he was dying, Catherine was not summoned, and she was not present at his deathbed at Vincennes on 31 August. This certainly suggests that something had soured between them, or perhaps that, like Richard I, Henry was so preoccupied with his battles he was largely indifferent to his wife. The Queen travelled back to England with her husband’s embalmed body from Vincennes to Dover, a journey which took over two months. The hearse was accompanied by the King’s entire household, wearing black and white mourning, surveyed by his life-sized effigy laid upon the coffin. In England, there was another week of solemn ceremony before the funeral. By the time Henry was finally buried at Westminster in November, Charles VI of France was also dead. On 22 October 1422, Catherine’s ten-month-old child became King of England and France.
The matter of Catherine having a role in the regency during Henry’s minority was barely discussed. The last English queen to serve as regent while her husband was abroad had been Eleanor of Provence, and only Isabella of France had assumed the office as Dowager Queen, during the minority of Edward III. In the cases of the two kings who succeeded as children before and after Edward, Henry III and Richard II, the government was directed by a regency council until they came of age. Catherine’s mother’s experience as regent had hardly been a success and, like Isabeau’s, Catherine’s foreign status might well have made her a suspect choice given that England was still at war with her brother. Before leaving on his last journey for France, Henry had made provision for government by council, and Catherine, as Queen Mother, showed no wish to challenge his arrangements, leaving the management of the country to Henry’s brothers. John, Duke of Bedford was the senior regent, with governance over France and the pursuit of the continuing war, while Humphrey of Gloucester was the first member of the council while his brother was out of England.
In terms of her own resources, Catherine was able to profit from the new administrative arrangements for the queen’s council inaugurated for Joanna of Navarre. Like Joanna’s, her dowry had been set at 10,000 crowns (40,000 marks) on funds derived from the Lancaster estates. Initially, Catherine’s income was provided from the sequestration of Joanna’s, her ladies receiving ‘ten livres apiece out of the funds of Queen Joan’10 and her confessor John Boyars twenty. Catherine was given Anglesey, Flintshire, Leicester, Knaresborough and the castles and manors of Wallingford, Hertford and Waltham. Since, after her release from custody, Joanna was obliged to live on a reduced income and in 1332 Catherine’s was over 3,000 marks short of what had been promised to her, it appears that even the hugely wealthy Lancaster estates were not sufficient to provide full dower assignments for two queens.
Catherine’s personal rather than her political life has been emphasised during the period of her widowhood and second marriage, but her dynastic importance remained crucial to the English in the period between 1422 and 1431. Her brother Charles refused to cede his claim to the French crown (which, if Salic law were applied, was stronger than Henry VI’s), though his activities after Troyes were at first concentrated south of the Loire. In 1429, thanks to the miraculous efforts of Joan of Arc, the tide of English success was reversed, and after the fall of Orléans and the battle of Patay, Charles was crowned King of France in July 1429. Paris, though, was still held for Henry VI, and a reassertion of the English claim was now vital. After his English coronation in November 1429, the boy king was proclaimed in the French capital in 1431. The challenge to the English government under Bedford post-1429 was to assert the justice of Henry’s claim to France while selling its advantages to the English, propaganda efforts in which the Queen Mother was essential.
The Plantagenet claim deriving from Isabella of France had been contested in the Hundred Years War whereas Henry’s claim, through Catherine and Charles VI, had been ratified at Troyes. As early as 1423, Bedford commissioned a set of verses from Lawrence Cabot to accompany an illustrated genealogy designed to be exhibited in churches throughout northern France. The family tree shows Henry’s dual descent from St Louis of France and Edward I of England, concluding with portraits of Henry V and Catherine de Valois and a miniature of the boy king receiving two crowns from two angels, one from each royal house. This image is another example of the Lancastrian adoption of Ricardian symbolism, as well as an allusion to French traditions of the divine presentation of the crown to Clovis. At Richard II’s coronation in 1377, a castle had been erected by the guild of goldsmiths on Cheapside from which a mechanical angel descended to present a crown to the King. The Bedford Hours contains a version of the popular French story of Clovis, the fifth-century Frankish King who united the country, converted to Christianity and founded the Merovingian dynasty, receiving the Fleur de Lys from St Clotilde. In Henry’s coronation banquets, as at his mother’s, the ‘subtleties’ featured pastry ‘reasons’, showing, among other images, Edward I and St Louis, with Henry as the ‘inheritor of the Fleur de Lys’ and St George and St Denis, the patron saints of the two countries, presenting the King to the Virgin and Child as ‘Born by descent and title of right/Justly to reign in England and in France’. This attentiveness to French, as well as English royal traditions is testament to the English administration’s ‘determination that Henry VI’s French antecedents should receive all possible publicity’.11 Catherine was certainly not the least of these antecedents, and the political symbolism invoked by the English to bolster Henry’s claim to the dual monarchy was significantly dependent upon the Queen’s role in having provided the resolution to the promises of Troyes.
Catherine’s visibility was therefore of importance. Perhaps because she had no political role she was able to spend a good deal of time with her son when he was small, both at her preferred residences of Hertford and Waltham and at Windsor. She accompanied him to Parliament and attended his English coronation. Until 1427 she maintained a separate household, but is then found living with her son, paying for her keep with seven pounds per day at the wardrobe. This move was not, however, motivated entirely by maternal affection, because by then the government had decided that it needed to keep its eye on her.
The French commentators who so maligned Isabeau of Bavaria might well have said that Catherine was her mother’s daughter. Her presence in Henry’s household was a consequence of her inability ‘to curb fully her carnal passions’.12 In 1426, Catherine had begun an affair with Edmund Beaufort, the younger brother of the Duke of Somerset. For a family whose origins were still being sneered at in the nickname ‘Fairborn’ at the end of the century, John of Gaunt’s bastards had done extraordinarily well. In the first generation, John Beaufort had been made Earl of Somerset and had married one of the Holland heiresses, a granddaughter of Joan of Kent. Henry Beaufort, cardinal bishop of Winchester, was chancellor and Thomas, the third of Katherine Swynford’s sons, became Duke of Exeter. John Beaufort died in 1410 after which his title, which became a dukedom, passed to his eldest and then second sons, Henry and John. His third son, Thomas, became Count of Perche, and his daughter Margaret, Countess of Devon. Margaret’s sister Joan scooped the jackpot, marrying James I of Scotland in 1423. Their brother Edmund, who inherited the ducal title in 1444, was therefore highly eligible, and, as a nineteen-year-old war hero, highly attractive.
James of Scotland had been a prisoner in England since he was twelve, when he had been captured for Henry IV en route to France. His regent, the Duke of Albany, found this a most satisfactory situation, and the Scots did not agree to pay James’s ransom for fourteen years. Catherine received James at Windsor and made a formal intercession for his release with her son, but given James’s relationship with Joan Beaufort, whom he married before he returned to Scotland, and Catherine’s with Joan’s brother, it is possible to think of them as forming a ‘younger set’ at Henry VI’s nominal court. Catherine herself was twenty-five, and though her marriage had been a political triumph, it has left no record of particular affection. Her son’s government was run by old men, and according to evidence of Marguerite of Anjou’s resurrection of court life when she became Queen in 1445, high society was not what it had been under Richard II. Catherine was young and beautiful and had nothing much to do except fall in love.
Naturally, Catherine and Edmund caused a scandal. The Dowager Queen’s behaviour was wildly compromising. Given the importance of preserving the propaganda value of Henry V’s legacy, the widow of the hero of Agincourt could hardly be seen to be carrying on with a younger man. There was also the fear that Catherine and Beaufort could marry and have children. Since the King was still only five years old, there was every chance he might not reach his majority, in which case the heir in 1426 was Bedford, but a child with Plantagenet and French royal blood could prove extremely troublesome. The only Dowager Queen to have remarried an English subject was Adeliza of Louvain in the twelfth century, but she had not been the mother of Henry I’s children and had elected for a quiet life. In the fifteenth century, the government desperately needed the young King’s mother to remain respectable. In the 1427-8 session, Parliament passed a pointed bill dealing with the remarriage of dowager queens. The fact that Joanna of Navarre was still alive provided a screen of decorum, but there was no doubt at whom it was directed.
The bill determined that if a dowager queen should remarry without the consent of the King, the lands and possessions of her husband would be declared forfeit, though any children would be acknowledged as members of the royal family. The latter clause is both highly pertinent to the future royal line of England and evidence of the bill’s purpose, given that Joanna of Navarre had no children by Henry IV, and any offspring would not therefore have had the status of uterine (from the same mother) siblings of the king. Since permission to remarry could only be given by the king himself when he came of age, Catherine was in theory prevented from doing so at all for some years. She was also obliged to live in Henry’s household, where her conduct could be supervised. Catherine remained there until 1432, and may have been permitted to attend Henry’s French coronation. It is not certain that she did so, but given the situation with Charles VII, it would have been surprising if her presence had not been sought to support her son’s assumption of his claim. Quite how Catherine acquired a reputation for dullness is hard to understand, since soon after the coronation she left the King’s household to do precisely what she had been forbidden to do. Evidently the loss of Edmund Beaufort had not broken her heart irreparably, because, in defiance of the bill passed four years earlier, without seeking the King’s consent, Catherine got married.
The circumstances in which Catherine de Valois met and fell in love with Owen ap Maredudd ap Tudor are obscure. What is clear, despite Henry VII’s best efforts to demonstrate otherwise at the end of the century, is that, compared with the Queen, he was absolutely nobody. The earliest reference to Owen, after 1483, places him as a servant in Catherine’s chamber. The origin of this story could be one Owen Meredith (a possible anglicisation of his name) who travelled to France in the retinue of Sir Walter Hungerford, Henry V’s steward, in 1421. That he was in some way connected with Catherine’s household is suggested by one of the most popular versions of their meeting which has him collapsing merrily into her lap at a ball. Owen himself supposedly alluded to this when he died and, writing after Owen’s death in 1461, Robin of Anglesey described the incident: ‘He once on a holiday clapped his ardent humble affection on the daughter of the King of the land of wine.’ This luscious description of Catherine sounds as though she was less averse to the effects of her vinous inheritance than was her first husband. The sexiest version of the story has the Queen catching sight of her young Welsh servant stripped to go swimming. Intrigued, she disguises herself as a maid and arranges an assignation, but when Owen, mistaking her status, takes the liberty of kissing her cheek, she recoils, wounded (does he bite her?). Owen, seeing the mark on her face when he serves her at dinner later, realises her true identity and understands that she loves him.
What became essential to Catherine’s grandson Henry Tudor was that no one doubted the legitimacy of Catherine and Owen’s marriage. His father, Henry VI, certainly accepted it. It is suggested that Catherine selected a commoner as a means of circumventing the council’s threats to her husband’s estates, which had successfully deterred the ambitious Beaufort. Owen Tudor could hardly have been worried about forfeiture since he had nothing to forfeit. But if Catherine’s choice was a calculated one, she had neglected one important factor, which was that Owen Tudor was Welsh. From 1394 to 1400, the Welsh, unified under Owen Glyndwr, had once again resisted the English, initially with marked success. In 1402, Henry IV had enacted penal statutes against them, elaborated in the Charter of Brecon after Henry V’s successful Welsh campaign. Welshmen were prohibited from carrying arms, assembling, living in certain towns, owning land to the east of the ancient border of Offa’s Dyke or holding government office and denied the liberties of Englishmen under the law. However, ‘Queen Catherine, being a Frenchwoman born, knew no difference between the English and the Welsh nations until her marriage being published Owen Tudor’s kin and country were objected, to disgrace him’.13 In the May Parliament of 1432, Owen was given the status and rights of an Englishman, which suggests that wherever and whenever the marriage had taken place, the council had been obliged to acknowledge it as fact and make some provision for the preservation of the wayward Queen’s dignity. The Tudor antiquary John Leland claimed to have seen a genealogy which Catherine had been required to produce in Parliament to prove Owen’s descent.
Two years after Owen was naturalised, Catherine gave him custody of her lands and the crown profit on the marriage of John Conway, an important landowner. She clearly trusted her husband and was attempting to give him a measure of financial independence. Catherine and Owen had four children in six years, and the timing of their births indicates that she may have been pregnant with the first one before her wedding, in which case Parliament’s decision was even more explicable: according to the Charter of Brecon, any man who was not judged to be English or to have an English father would be subject to the penal statutes, potentially an embarrassing position for the brother of the King. The proximity of the births of Edmund, Jasper, Owen and a daughter who died in infancy point to the marriage being a happy one, at least in bed, but little evidence survives of the circumstances in which the couple lived. Catherine was apparently surprised that Owen came from such a very different culture: ‘He brought to her presence John ap Maredudd and Hywel ap Llewelyn ap Hywel, his near cousins, men of goodly stature and personage, but wholly destitute of bringing up and nurture, for when the Queen had spoken to them in diverse languages and they were not able to answer her, she said they were the goodliest dumb creatures that she ever saw.’14
Incidentally, this anecdote casts doubt on one reason offered for Catherine’s political inactivity during her reign: that she found herself ‘linguistically isolated’15 in a court that increasingly identified itself as, and spoke, English. The description of her meeting Owen’s Welsh relatives implies that she knew several languages other than French; moreover, given that she had been betrothed to Henry on and off for much of her life, and had lived in England for a decade, it would be surprising if she did not have some grasp of English.
The birthplaces of Catherine’s children indicate that she and Owen continued to reside in and around her dower properties in Hertfordshire. Edmund was born at the bishop of London’s manor at Much Hadham, and Jasper at Hatfield, the house of the bishop of Ely, locations that also suggest the couple had attained a degree of social acceptance. Yet after Catherine’s death in 1437,Owen had to confront the consequences of his impudence. John of Bedford having died in 1435, Humphrey of Gloucester was next in line for the throne, and Owen was so fearful of the Duke that he took sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. He appeared before the regency council, which acquitted him of breaching the 1428 statute, but as he tried to return to Wales, he was arrested and his possessions, including a small fortune in gold and silver plate, were confiscated. Imprisoned in Newgate Jail, with only his confessor and a servant for company, Owen made a botched attempt at escape and was committed to custody at Windsor in 1438, where he remained for a year before being released on bail the following July and pardoned in November 1439. His sons Edmund and Jasper were taken into the care of Katherine de la Pole, the sister of the Earl of Suffolk, who was abbess at Barking Abbey (the third boy, Owen, became a monk at Westminster), until 1442.
The Tudor luck turned when Henry VI decided to take an interest in his half-brothers. At twenty-one, the sensitive, pious young King was lonely. Jasper and Henry were invited to join his household and, ten years later, Henry decided he wished to ennoble them. He had married Marguerite of Anjou in 1445,but as yet the couple had no children. On 5 January 1453, Edmund was invested as Earl of Richmond and Jasper as Earl of Pembroke by the King at the Tower of London. In March they took their seats in Parliament, where a formal acknowledgement of their position as the King’s uterine brothers was heard. On 24 March, Henry gave the wardship and marriage of ten-year-old Margaret Beaufort to his brothers. It was one of the few independent decisions of his life, and it provided the means by which the grandson of a Welsh servant ascended the throne of England. Margaret was the greatest marital prize of her generation, the sole heiress of John, first Duke of Somerset and through him to the Holland fortune of her grandmother Margaret. After John’s death in 1444, Margaret’s wardship had been given to the Earl of Suffolk who, shortly before his death in 1450, married her to his own heir, John de la Pole. Henry VI dissolved the marriage in 1453 and Margaret was swiftly married to Edmund Tudor. Henry’s wife, Marguerite of Anjou, was actually in the early stages of pregnancy at this time, but it is possible that even the Queen herself was unaware of this, as it is considered likely that Henry was considering adopting Edmund as his heir in right of Margaret’s descent from Edward III through John of Gaunt.
A chance for a Tudor grab at the crown receded with the birth of Henry’s own son, but Edmund and Jasper were still in an extraordinarily advantageous position, given the circumstances of their birth. In 1455, as the conflict which became known as the Wars of the Roses began to rumble, Edmund was made the King’s deputy in Wales and he and Margaret moved to Lamphey in Pembrokeshire. Edmund seems to have been more concerned with ensuring a lifelong interest in Margaret’s money than with the health of his wife, as he slept with her as soon as she attained the canonical age of twelve. Shortly after Margaret ascertained that she was pregnant, he was captured by the forces of the Duke of York and imprisoned at Carmarthen Castle, where he died of plague on 1 November 1456. Margaret took refuge with her brother-in-law Jasper and her child, ambitiously named Henry for his uncle, was born at Pembroke Castle in January 1457. In the coming years, Jasper’s loyalty would prove a vital asset to the Lancastrian cause, while Henry VI’s gift of a few essential drops of Plantagenet blood saw the Tudors to the throne.
Thus, as predicted by the treaty of Troyes, Catherine de Valois was the ancestress of a great royal dynasty - if not quite in the form Henry V had planned. In the manner of her death, though, she appeared to be looking to the past rather than the future. Some months before she died, Catherine had elected to enter Bermondsey Abbey, returning in this to a tradition of pious queenship shared with Adeliza of Louvain, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Eleanor of Provence, a tradition she had so daringly flouted with her second marriage. Catherine knew she was unwell. Given the mental illness of her father, and later of her son, it is possible that the ‘long and grievous malady’ from which she suffered was mental rather than physical in origin. As a child she had prayed with her brothers and sisters at Mont St Michel for their father’s recovery, and perhaps she hoped that in the convent her mind would be spared long enough to bring her closer to God.
One picture of medieval women, now thankfully dismissed, presents them as scarcely more than ‘animated title deeds’,16 their existence entirely determined by the transmission of property. Catherine’s queenship, more than that of any of her predecessors, might be said to be contained by this very limited concept. She did very little as a consort except to transmit the kingdom of France, a claim whose vanity was to prove devastating for her son. Yet in this Catherine may also be seen as the model for the perfect princess, the royal heroine who waited patiently for her true knight and confirmed God’s grace in her offspring. As a woman, however, Catherine was considerably more interesting. She was courageous, independent-minded and astonishingly audacious in the pursuit of her desire. Hers was an extraordinarily vivid life, blighted by war and madness, elevated by marriage to the hero of the age and a love affair which really did change the course of history. It is a pity, perhaps, that only hints of the colour of that life can be found beyond the stilted, jewel-like radiance of her portraits as the beautiful bride of England’s greatest warrior prince.