Queens Consort

by Lisa Hilton

  In the quarrel between Norfolk and Bolingbroke, Richard saw the opportunity to help himself to even more wealth. At Windsor, it was decided that the dispute should be settled in the old-fashioned way by single combat. On 16 September, at Coventry, Henry appeared in green velvet decorated with gold antelopes and swans on a white charger. His opponent faced him in crimson with silver lions. With characteristic dramatic timing, Richard waited until the men had actually started riding towards one another before calling a halt to the duel and, after two hours’ deliberation, sentenced both men to exile. Rather than having one Appellant left standing, he had decided to get rid of them both and appropriate their lands for his own use After John of Gaunt died in February 1399, Richard also took possession of his estates in council at Westminster, and parcelled up the Mowbray inheritance on the death of Edward I’s granddaughter Margaret, Duchess of Norfolk.

  Isabelle, of course, had no part to play in any of this. The majority of her time was spent at Eltham, where she continued her education with her governess, Lady de Courcy. In the spring of 1399, Richard visited her at Windsor before his departure for his second Irish campaign. The mood of the country could be gauged by the sparsity of the crowds that turned out for the splendid tournament he had arranged to celebrate St George’s Day Richard had made his will, though without nominating a successor. He played with Isabelle in the gardens at Windsor, holding her hand and picking her up to kiss her. He promised that she should join him soon in Ireland. What Isabelle did not know was that her husband had already planned for Lady de Courcy, whose extravagance was unpopular, to be commanded to pay her debts and leave for France. For all his petting, Richard did not give a thought to his nine-year-old wife’s loneliness and isolation. He did not keep his promise to send for her from Ireland. In fact, she never saw the King again.

  Richard set sail for Ireland at the end of May. By July, Henry Bolingbroke, now Duke of Lancaster, was back in England. During his French exile Henry had acquired the clandestine backing of Charles VI’s brother the Duke of Orléans (which the Duke later vehemently denied), and had been sounding out the disaffected English magnates. In the north, the men of his Lancastrian affinities began to mobilise. On 4 July, Henry landed with no more than a hundred men at Ravenspur on the Humber estuary. Five days later he was at Knaresborough, moving on to Pontefract for a muster of Lancastrian troops. At Doncaster he wasjoined by Henry Percy, heir to the Earl of Northumberland, the ‘Harry Hotspur’ of Shakespearean fame, with 30,000 men. By the time Henry reached Warwick on 24 July, his supporters were so numerous that he was obliged to send some of them home. Adam of Usk estimated that 100,000 had turned out for Lancaster. Richard’s uncle, Edmund, Duke of York, was Keeper of the Realm during the King’s absence in Ireland. He chose swiftly between his nephews. On 27 July York and Lancaster met with a certain dramatic irony at Berkeley, where the Duke assured Henry that he had no wish to fight against him.

  The King had managed to reach the coast at Milford Haven on 24 July. With a small company, he rode for Chester, where the Earl of Salisbury was waiting with an army, but by the time he arrived at Conway, his men were already deserting, helping themselves to the royal baggage as they left. Disgruntlement was so widespread that, according to one story, even the King’s greyhound defected and joined Henry at Shrewsbury. On 9 August, Henry was at Chester, his troops having laid waste to Richard’s most loyal county. The Earl of Northumberland was sent to bring Richard in. The King decided on a mad plan to meet Henry, escape and raise an army in Wales, but Northumberland took him to Flint Castle, strongly garrisoned with Lancastrian soldiers. Mindful of Richard’s passion for elegant dining, Henry courteously allowed him to finish his supper before entering the castle to arrest him, though his understanding of his cousin’s character was also evident in the refined little cruelty of not permitting Richard to change his clothes on the journey south.

  As a precedent for the second deposition of an English king in a century, Henry had only the innovations of Isabella of France to look to. In a propaganda campaign of’bogus genealogy, false prophecy, anti-Ricardian fabrication and novel ceremonial’,21 the Process by which Llenrt Bo1ingbroke turned himself into Henry IV shared its latter two characteristics with Isabella’s routing of Edward II. Using Isabella’s strategy of serving writs in the King’s name, he summoned the estates of the realm on 19 August 1399. After convening a meeting of ecclesiastics to debate the succession, he announced his claim on 30 September. Officially, Richard, like Edward, abdicated willingly, though The Hardyng Chronicle reports that, according to the Earl of Northumberland, ‘Henry made King Richard under duress of prison in the Tower of London in fear of his life to make a resignation of his right to him.’ After hearing thirty-three ‘Articles of Deposition’, Parliament declared that there was ‘abundant reason for proceeding to deposition for the greater security and tranquillity of the realm and the good of the kingdom’. ‘Richard of Bordeaux’, as he was henceforth known, was sentenced to imprisonment.

  On 13 October, Henry [V was crowned at Westminster. He was anointed with the sacred chrism, believed to have been given to St Thomas à Becket when the Virgin appeared to him, and which had been used for the coronation of Edward II. Richard had been relieved of the oil, which he had removed in its golden eagle vessel from the Tower prior to his departure for Ireland, perhaps planning a recrowning on his return. All his life, Richard had consciously identified himself with Edward II. It was therefore appropriate that after Henry had him murdered at Pontefract Castle, probably in February 1400, he was laid to rest not with his beloved Anne, as he had requested, but in the chapel at King’s Langley built by Edward for his favourite, Piers Gaveston.

  Queen Isabelle had been waiting at Sonning in Berkshire for news of her husband, whom she was not permitted to see. During the rebellion, the house had been stormed and her attendants’ badges ripped off. In December, she received a visit from the earls of Kent and Salisbury, who reassured her that Richard was free and the imposter hiding in the Tower. Their conspiracy failed. Even as they proclaimed to the men of the west that Richard was in the field, he may already have been dead. Richard had been sent to Pontefract at the end of October, and in early February he was officially still alive, though by this time Henry’s council were discussing what to do with his body if the ‘rumours’ of his death proved to be true. Isabelle’s fear, confusion and sense of isolation can only be imagined. Henry attended Richard’s requiem at St Paul’s, but it is not certain that Isabelle was allowed to see the body.

  The Queen was now a diplomatic problem. According to the original agreement, the French argued, her dowry, the last instalment of which had been paid in 1399, ought to be returned, as she was not technically a queen dowager and had not in any case reached the age of canonical consent. Stalling, Henry sent to Paris to open discussions for a new marriage with his eldest son, now Prince of Wales, who was eventually to marry Isabelle’s younger sister Catherine. The English simply had no money to repay the dowry but they could not risk their already delicate position in France. In a treaty signed at Leulinghem in May 1401, Henry agreed that Isabelle would be repatriated with her jewels and property, though in fact he never did give back the dowry. In 1406, Isabelle was married to her first cousin Charles, Count of Angoulême, who became Duke of Orléans when his father was murdered by the Duke of Burgundy in 1407. Shortly afterwards she died giving birth to her daughter, Jeanne. Perhaps the most that can be said of Isabelle is that, like so many of Richard’s grandiose gestures, her symbolic value was huge. But as a means of retaining and governing a kingdom, she had been virtually pointless.

  PART FIVE

  LANCASTERAND YORK

  THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

  CHAPTER 14

  JOANNA OF NAVARRE

  ‘A royal witch’

  As the fifteenth century opened, what the new Lancastrian dynasty vneeded above all was money The succession was about the only thing of which Henry IV could be certain; indeed, sons were the
only thing he had plenty of. Having lost his wife, Mary de Bohun, five years before becoming king, he was short of a queen. He required a woman whose birth and connections could validate his newborn title to the crown, and, most importantly, a rich one. Once her pedigree was unravelled, the Dowager Duchess of Brittany appeared to be the perfect choice. Joanna of Navarre was born at Evreux, Normandy in 1368, to Jeanne de Valois, daughter of Jean II of France, and Charles ‘The Bad’, King of Navarre. Jeanne’s great-great-grandmother was the mother of Edward II’s Queen Isabella, Jeanne de Navarre. On the death of Jeanne’s son Louis X, his daughter, Charles’s mother, was excluded from the French succession, but renounced her claim only on condition she was able to take up her right to rule Navarre. Jeanne was thus descended on her father’s side from a queen of France and two queens of Navarre in their own right, while her mother, a daughter of France, was descended from the imperial house through her mother Bona, aunt to Anne of Bohemia and daughter of EmperorJohn I.

  So Joanna’s blood was of the purest, and better yet was the promise of her money. Charles the Bad had fought on the right side in the French wars and was enormously wealthy. His reputation, however, was unfortunate, a career as a murderer and reputedly a sorcerer having ended with him being sewn up in a sack and set on fire. In 1386, a year before this alarming event, Charles had provided a dowry of 120,000 livres with an annual pension of 60,000 for the marriage of his eighteen-year-old daughter Joanna to the Duke of Brittany He also pushed a hard bargain with his forty-seven-year-old son-in-law, demanding one third of the Duke’s assets as Joanna’s dower. The dowry had not been paid in full when Charles met his grisly end, but the dower, which was renegotiated in 1396, remained unchanged, and when Duke Jean died in 1399, thirty-one-year-old Joanna found herself a very rich woman.

  As a descendant of female rulers, she appeared to relish her independence, and governed Brittany competently as regent for her eldest son Jean until he assumed his title in 1401. When Henry IV proposed for her early the next year, her of fspring proved to be one of the first of several difficulties. Of the nine children Joanna had given Duke Jean, seven were still living in 1402: thirteen-year-old Jean, Artur, Gilles and Richard, aged nine, eight and seven respectively, and two girls, ten-year-oid Marguerite and fiveyear-old Blanche. A third daughter, Marie, was already married to the Duke of Alencon. Jean could not leave his duchy, but although Marguerite and Blanche would be permitted to travel to England, the Breton magnates objected to the prospect of Joanna taking the younger boys out of the country and she found she would be obliged to leave them under the guardianship of the Duke of Burgundy. The other problems were canonical. Henry and Joanna would require a papal dispensation to marry as they were related within the prohibited degrees. Joanna had been Duke Jean’s third wife: his first had been Henry’s aunt, Edward Ill’s daughter Mary, and his second Joan Holland, daughter of Henry’s aunt-by-marriage Joan of Kent. This already complex situation was further complicated by the papal schism in which Europe was still embroiled. The division that the marriage of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia had been supposed to heal had passed into a new generation with the see of Rome occupied by the English-supported Boniface IX and that of Avignon by the French-and Burgundian-backed Benedict XIII. Notwithstanding their political disputes with France, the Bretons supported Benedict, so another dispensation was required for Joanna and her daughters to go and live among schismatics.

  Despite these obstacles, both Henry and Joanna at first pursued the match urgently Joanna’s envoy Anthony Rhys was sent to the English King on 14 March 1402, and the papal dispensation granted less than a week later. In April, Henry underwent a proxy ceremony at Elthain, swearing fidelity unto death to the papal envoy Legally, the couple were now married, but Joanna waited until December to set out for England. Why the delay? The most obvious answer is that Joanna was making suitable arrangements for her young sons and the handover of the government to her eldest, but might she have wished to change her mind? What were her motivations for the match in the first place? So little is known of Joanna’s early life that it is impossible to get any sense of her character other than retrospectively Aside from her place of birth and payments made to the convent of Santa Clara at Estella in Navarre, where she was educated, she is virtually absent from the records until her first marriage. As a well-dowered ducal mother, why did Joanna want to get away from Brittany so badly that she was prepared to leave her sons behind? Some clue may be found in her later political affiliations, but the simplest explanation is perhaps that, as a rich and marriageable (if not, by the standards of her day, young) woman, she, like Eleanor of Aquitaine after her divorce, was extremely vulnerable. As Queen of England Joanna would not only have one of the most powerful protectors in Europe, but also the unique legal position of a consort. It was this determination to maintain control of her own affairs which would lead to one of the most extraordinary situations in the life of any English queen: her imprisonment on suspicion of witchcraft in 1419.

  Henry’s enthusiasm for the marriage is perhaps easier to understand. He was reputedly very attracted by descriptions of Joanna and, in addition to the status and funds with which he believed she would provide him, there was also the possibility of benefit to English trade and military operations through access to Breton ports, of an increased English influence in the duchy and of an Anglo-Breton alliance against the French. Joanna’s importance to Henry is reflected in the status accorded her in the depiction of her coronation, an amalgamation of traditional Marian associations of queens consort with the sense of a new definition for English monarchs adopted from Richard II’s self-fashioned kingship.

  After the now-traditional rough crossing, Joanna arrived at Falmouth at the end of December 1402 and met her husband at Exeter. Their marriage took place at Winchester on 8 February 1403, and she was crowned at Westminster on 26 February. In spite of the fact that she was a widow, Joanna wore her hair loose at her coronation to signify virginity, also an identification with two potent images of the Virgin, Mary, Queen of Heaven and Maria mediatrix. The connection of the consort with the merciful intercession of the Virgin was one that she had already enacted as Duchess of Brittany: in a well-known incident she had intervened in her husband’s arrest of the French ambassador. According to the Chronicle of St Denis, a pregnant Joanna, ‘setting aside her womanly modesty … taking her children in her arms … entered the chamber of the Duke’, and on her knees ‘earnestly pleaded that he reconsider’, if only for the sake of their children, who would require French support after his death. As in the case of Philippa of Hainault at Calais, Joanna’s plea permitted her husband to pursue the course of action it was necessary for him to take without risking the concomitant embarrassment of appearing to change his mind. The ‘spontaneity’ of such gestures was by this point more theatrical than emotional, as has been observed, notably in the case of Anne of Bohemia’s intercession for London, yet though the autonomous political agency of the intercessory gesture was reduced, Joanna’s invocation of it shows it retained a meaningful symbolic power outside the conventions of male-directed action.

  Joanna’s coronation ceremony was ‘unusually extravagant’.1 An illus tration of the event shows the Queen seated alone on a throne under a canopy with the archbishop of Canterbury and the abbot of Westminster beside her, instead of the more conventional position enthroned below the King. This gestures towards Joanna’s individual authority as the descendant of so many rulers, as does the orb she holds in her left hand. Before Philippa of Hainault, queens were depicted with only a sceptre, or virga, in the right hand, but in the funeral effigy commissioned by Richard II for his double tomb with Anne of Bohemia, there is an orb between the couple, implying a novel degree of shared authority. The presence of the orb projects a queenly participation in a more explicit relationship between England and the Mother of Christ, that of the realm itself as the Virgin’s dowry.

  In the Wilton Diptych, Richard 11 is pictured in red and cloth-of -gold robes decorated
with rosemary (one of Anne’s emblems) and eagles, the symbol of the empire. To the King’s right are the Virgin and Child, with one of eleven angels prof fering a banner topped with an orb and cross, which have been painted over with a larger orb. Examination of the painting has shown that the first orb contains a tiny illustration of a green island with a boat at sea and a white tower, an image that connects the Wilton orb with another (now lost) depiction of Richard made in Anne’s lifetime. Details of this painting, part of a five-panelled Roman altarpiece, survive only in seventeenth-century descriptions, in which Anne, in a cope emblazoned with imperial eagles, stands beside Richard, five saints and the Virgin. St John is introducing the couple to the Virgin, and they are presenting her with a globe on which is a map of England: ‘This is your dowry, O Holy Virgin, wherefore, O Mary, may you have rule over it.’ In terms of Richard’s conception of his destiny after Anne’s death, the Wilton Diptych has been interpreted as the King giving his realm over to the Virgin and then receiving it back from her in the form of her dowry, evoking a spiritual marriage between Mary and England in his person. The implications of this for Richard’s possible commitment to chastity have been discussed, but there is also a connection between the map in the Rome altarpiece, the Wilton orb, Joanna’s coronation portrait and the Lancastrian adoption of the concept of England as the Virgin’s dower.