Queens Consort

by Lisa Hilton

  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 preffered 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 Prankish 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 Winds
or. 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 chi
ldren 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; moreever, 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.