by David Loades
11 She was also much prayed for, even during her lifetime, which suggests a charitable disposition and involvement in works of piety. Towards the end of her life, and probably after she was already ill, her children were assigned to the care of a sister of the Earl of Suffolk. This was undoubtedly intended as a snub to Owain and must have caused the ailing Queen Mother considerable distress but we have no 20
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direct evidence of her reaction. She seems to have retired to Bermondsey Abbey some months before her death and might have had some thoughts of taking the veil, but it was there, on 3 January 1437, that she died. Her will, which survives, is a very curious document. The king, who was still technically a minor, was made sole executor, her servants were to be paid, and masses said for her soul, but nothing was said either about her younger children or about her h
usband.12 Perhaps some traces of her father’s incapacity were affl icting Catherine towards the end of her life, or perhaps some rupture with her husband had put her in a state of denial. The fact that she was in Bermondsey Abbey at all suggests that something like that had happened. In any case she died as Queen Dowager and a princess of France – not as Mrs Owain Tudur.
Her death at fi rst left her husband dangerously exposed. In July he was summoned before the Council but signifi cantly declined to come without a safe conduct from the King that ‘he should come and freely go’. This was granted, but honoured in the breach rather than the observance, for on his way home he was arrested and consigned to Newgate. Later in the year, as one chronicler disparagingly put it:
One Owen, a man of neither birth nor livelihood, broke out of Newgate at searching time. The which Owen had wedded with Queen Katherine and had three or four children by her unknown to the common people until she was dead and buried …
He was re-arrested and sent to Windsor Castle, where he might have remained had not his stepson intervened. In 1439 he was pardoned and his goods and lands (valued at £137 a year) were restored to him. Henry then awarded him an annuity of £40 a year ‘by special grace’ and, although he gave him no offi ce or responsibility, Owain proved to be a loyal servant of the Lancastrian cause in the forthcoming civil strife. He was eventually captured and executed after the Yorkist victory at Mortimer’s cross in 1461. He was buried in the Greyfriars church at Hereford, where his bastard son David (an afterthought born in 1459) subsequently erected a memorial.
His sons by Catherine, Edmund, who was aged about 7 at his mother’s death, Jasper, who was 5, and the other David, who was about 3, do not seem to have been in their father’s custody at any point. Whether their allocation to the care of the Earl of Suffolk’s sister ever took effect we do not know but probably not because soon after Catherine’s death they were placed with the Abbess of Barking and later with certain ‘virtuous and holy priests’. The King assumed full responsibility for them and never attempted to deny that they were his kindred. They were educated in the royal household in a manner suitable to their status and Edmund was knighted on the 15 December 1449.
13 He was presumably
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brought up, at least in part, to be a soldier but it was in recognition of his royal blood rather than for service that he was created Earl of Richmond on 23
November 1452, with precedence ov
er all other earls.14 He was also recognized as the King’s half brother at the Reading parliament of 1453. Because of that status he was granted in that year the wardship of the 10-year-old Margaret, the daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, whom two years later he married. By 1456 he was fi ghting with the Lancastrian forces in Wales but was defeated by Sir William Herbert and died of the plague at Carmarthen in November of that year. His young bride gave birth to a posthumous son on 28 January 1457, who was subsequently to be King Henry VII. As King, Henry demolished and rebuilt the chapel at Westminster Abbey where Catherine was buried. In referring to his intention to translate the remains of his uncle, King Henry VI, to the new chapel, he also mentioned ‘the body of our Grand dam of right noble memory, Queen Katherine daughter of the King of France’ as being interred in the same place. Unfortunately, when he himself came to be buried there his ‘grand dam of right noble memory’ was disinterred and not reburied. She seems to have remained above ground until the early nineteenth century, and in the seventeenth her body was something of a tourist attraction. After this ultimate indignity it is to be hoped that she rests in peace.
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The Queen as Dominatrix: Margaret of Anjou The circumstances of Henry VI’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou could hardly have been more different from those of 1420. Then Henry V had been in control of the situation and had been able to bring his bride back to England as one of the spoils of victory. In 1444 the English were on the back foot, struggling to maintain their position in France and anxious to salvage the best peace that they could. For a few years after 1422 the young King’s uncle, John, Duke of Bedford, had maintained a semblance of dominance but failure at Orleans and the subsequent crowning of the ‘roi de Bourges’
as King Charles VII of France had turned the political tide. The Burgundian alliance was already problematic as Duke Philip reassessed his priorities and after the death of his sister Anne, the Duchess of Bedford, in November 1432, it was effectively dead. In 1435 Bedford himself died, and Philip formally came to terms with Charles at Arras. Thereafter the English were clearly on the retreat, and this was a situation not helped by divided councils. The King’s surviving uncle, Humphrey of Gloucester, was committed to the defence of the French lands, but although he held the formal precedence of Protector, his infl uence was in fact seriously challenged by Henry Beaufort the Cardinal Bishop of Winchester and large scale creditor of the Crown. Beaufort was not interested in the defence of France and as the King emerged from childhood into adolescence, he increasingly sympathized with the Cardinal’s priorities. By the end of 1443 the English were concentrating their efforts on the defence of Calais and Normandy, and Francis I, the Duke of Brittany who had his own interests to protect against the resurgent power of Charles VII, was offering to mediate peace.
Charles, for his part, was willing to negotiate. His recent agreement with the Duke of Burgundy was already beginning to unravel and it seems that he was anxious to put the English war on hold while he dealt with Philip, in alliance with Duke Renée of Anjou. Renée was motivated by the desire to liquidate his obligation to pay Philip the balance of the enormous ransom that had been demanded on his release from Burgundian captivity in 1437. Although titular king of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem and strongly connected at court, Renée was not in fact a particularly imposing ally but he was conveniently 24
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available – and he had a motive. Moreover Marie, Renée’s sister, was Charles’s queen. Since the King of England was unmarried, and of a marriageable age, it was natural for the King of France to seek that route to peace with England, and it seems that the original proposal came from the French side. Because Charles had no desire to give any pretext for a son of the marriage to renew his claims to the French throne, his own daughters were not on offer and the bride suggested was Margaret, the 14-year-old second daughter of his ally, Duke Renée. Margaret was suitable from the English point of view because she was of royal blood, the right age, and came of a proven breeding stock – she had several brothers as well as an older sister. She was appropriate from the French point of view precisely because she was not a great heiress and carried almost no political baggage. Although the military situation was not at that point particularly threatening, in January 1444 the English council decided to negotiate and at the beginning of February Henry sent the Earl of Suffolk to France to represent him. Suffolk was the King’s personal choice and it was not a wise one as the Earl himself appreciated. He had been involved in Anglo-French peace feelers before and fo
r that reason the French had specifi cally asked for him but the numerous French contacts that he had already established left him short of credibility in the eyes of Gloucester’s supporters. They suspected that he would prove a ‘soft touch’ and he was worried lest a successful mission should be seen in that light.
It was already a concession on the English side to be discussing Margaret at all, not least because her dowry was likely to be negligible and any further concessions would seriously undermine the credibility of the whole exercise. Nevertheless, that is what happened. By 20 May it was clear that the English would be able to secure neither a full peace nor recognition of their existing position in France. Given his apprehensions of precisely such an outcome, Suffolk should probably have broken off the negotiation and come home. However, perhaps because he knew the King’s mind, he settled for a two-year general truce in order to secure the marriage. His thinking seems to have been that once Margaret was in England as Queen, it would be relatively easy to turn the truce into a full peace. In any case, there had not even been a truce since Henry V’s death, so that was an achievement of a kind. On 22 May a formal betrothal ceremony took place in St Martin’s cathedral at Tours, presided over by the papal Legate, the Bishop of Brescia, and in the presence of Charles, Renée, their wives and a large concourse of French nobility. Suffolk acted as proxy for the King of England. The Earl and his entourage returned to England immediately after the ceremony, and were greeted by Henry with extravagant enthusiasm. It was not the least of that monarch’s many misjudgements to have undervalued himself in such a fashion but Suffolk was generously rewarded and in September raised
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to a marquisate. Towards the end of the year the new marquis led a much larger and more formal mission back to France, including a number of noble ladies led by Jaquetta of Luxembourg, the dowager Duchess of Bedford, for the purpose of escorting Henry’s bride to her new kingdom.
1 He was also charged to resume the peace negotiations, which had been suspended with the conclusion of the truce. It was to prove an expensive and protracted mission, which lasted until the following April, but the peace negotiations made no further progress and that was to prove an ominous failure. Suffolk found the French Court at Nancy in December, from where Charles was busying himself about the siege of the Duke of Burgundy’s stronghold at Metz. Both the French king and his ally may have been distracted by this circumstance, because it was February before Margaret fi nally put in an appearance. The delay caused rumours to circulate in England that the young queen was being withheld in order to extract further concessions from the pliable Suffolk. Specifi cally he was later accused of having promised to cede Henry’s claims to Anjou and Maine to Duke Renée. There appears to have been no truth in these innuendoes, which were spread by Suffolk’s political enemies, and relations continued to be friendly, but the long delay in Margaret’s arrival inevitably aroused suspicions. Once she appeared, however, affairs proceeded with reasonable expedition. The wedding was celebrated at Nancy on 2 March, with Suffolk again standing in for Henry, and then the English set off for home.
2 The journey was slow and the bride tearful at the prospect of leaving her family and friends. The party reached Pontoise on 18 March and that was the last Valois held town on their route. There they were met by Henry’s lieutenant and governor in France, the Duke of York and most of the French contingent said their farewells. A few, including of course several young women, were to accompany the Queen to England. Margaret may already have been suffering from homesickness, or possibly chagrin, and she did not appear either at Rouen or at Harfl eur on the way, although state entries had been arranged at both. She was still suffering from some indeterminate ailment, which was probably made worse by seasickness, when she landed in England on 14 April. It is claimed that Henry, in an unaccustomed gesture of chivalric enterprise, bore a letter to her disguised as a squire immediately after her landing. She did not, of course, recognize him (never having set eyes on the King of England) and he was apparently less than impressed.
3 Although one contemporary (admittedly French) declared that ‘there was no princess in Christendom more accomplished than my lady Marguerite of Anjou [who] was already renowned in France for her beauty and her wit’, most evidence does not confi rm that she was a great beauty. Nevertheless, preparations for her second and fi nal wedding proceeded apace, 26
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the precaution having already been taken to secure a dispensation for a marriage in Lent, and duly took place at Titchfi eld Abbey on 22 April. The celebrant was William Aincough, Bishop of Salisbury, and this time the King spok
e for himself.4 To mark the occasion the new Queen was apparently presented with a lion, which was promptly consigned to the menagerie at the Tower in the care of two grooms and at a cost of £2 5s 3d. As soon as the ceremony was over Henry headed back to Westminster to prepare for her entry into London and coronation, leaving Margaret in the care of Cardinal Beaufort, Suffolk’s friend and a warm supporter of the peace with France. She proceeded to Eltham by comfortable stages and entered London on 28 May. Her reception had been carefully orchestrated as a celebration of peace and concord, with the Queen herself as the dove. She was crowned at Westminster two days later. As with Catherine, a quarter of a century earlier, the King did not appear, leaving his consort as the focus of all attention. Given that she was in a strange land and only 16 years old, she seems to have coped remarkably we
ll.5 However, in using his bride in this way, the King was giving hostages to fortune. Supposing that the peace negotiations did not succeed? In that event there was a risk that his dove of peace would turn into a raven of discord. Even the Marquis of Suffolk was sceptical of success and took pains to warn the House of Commons on 2 June that a favourable outcome was by no means assured.
6 He was also anxious to refute the claims that were already being made, that he had offered unauthorized concessions. He had, he insisted, made no such offers but had confi ned himself strictly within the limits set out in the King’s instructions. As a precaution, he insisted that his protestation be minuted, which was duly done (and is the reason why we know about it). At the same time, the feuding within the English Council was refl ected in a public discourse that represented the Queen as symbol of surrender and mocked her father who, for all his extravagant pretensions, was unable to provide a suitable dowry for his daughter. As the duration of the truce ticked away the negotiations became increasingly urgent, but all that they achieved was an extension of the truce. The discussions were friendly enough but the negotiating positions on both sides were intractable. Militarily, the French had the upper hand and were not disposed to make any concessions; specifi cally they would not admit English claims to Normandy. The English, on the defensive, were caught between Henry’s urgent desire for peace and the political storm that any further concessions would arouse. They could not yield ground either. The embassies came and went. A meeting between the Kings was promoted, agreed, postponed and postponed again. Meanwhile Margaret, whose personal investment in a successful outcome was considerable, was doing her best. Writing to her uncle in December 1445, she offered to ‘employ
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herself effectually’ in the cause of peace ‘in such wise that you and all others, ought herein to be gratifi ed’.
7 On 22 December, Henry proceeded to make the unilateral gesture that is usually attributed to Margaret’s infl uence. He renounced his claim to the duchy of Maine in favour of Renée. This was not done through formal negotiation and undermined the position that his delegates were trying to sustain; moreover it brought peace no nearer and served merely to confi rm the impression in England that the French were not interested in a settlement on any reasonable terms. Margaret was blamed for this surrender and those who had seen her arrival as symbolic of submission appeared to be justifi ed. As her arch criti
c, Thomas Gascoinge, wrote: this king of England, Henry VI, granted and gave Maine and Anjou at the request of his Queen, Margaret, daughter of the Duke of Lorraine who calls himself King of Sicily …
and that aforesaid Queen of ours begged the King of England that [they] so be given to her father at the urging of William Pole, Duke of Suffolk and his wife who earlier had promised to re
quest it.8 This was written well after the event and was a slander on Suffolk but it expresses a widely held view, both at the time and later. By the end of 1445, the Queen’s traditional function as a mediatrix between her husband and her father’s kindred had turned sour indeed. The harder she tried and the more successful her efforts, the more unpopular she was likely to become. Had she fulfi lled her primary duty and started bearing Henry children the criticism might have been more muted but that did not happen. There does not appear to have been anything wrong with their relationship. Despite Henry’s later mental problems and his reputation for extreme piety, at this stage his health and his sexual interest in his wife appear to have been entirely normal. It was just that she did not conceive – and this of course provoked the gossips no less than her peacemaking activities. There is little doubt that during the early days of her marriage, Margaret was a victim of Henry’s political enemies, because apart from some ineffectual attempts to promote the peace negotiations, she had no public role. The surrender of Maine in return for an extension of the truce was critical in this respect. Not only was the Queen now represented as dominating her feeble husband but she was also using that control to diminish his honour rather than to enhance it. Shortly after it was being publicly said
