Twixt the Reawmes two England and ffraunce
Pees shal approche rest and unite.1
At the end of May 1420, the 30-year-old Henry V met the 18-year-old Catherine of Valois. According to literature and romantic legend, for him it was a case of love at first sight. Shakespeare’s princess is light-hearted, teasing and merry, speaking in soft foreign tones as she learns English to please her husband. In the eponymous play, Henry V calls her his angel, declares his love and his ineptitude as a suitor: he might win her love by performing feats of strength and endurance but he could not ‘cast out [his] eloquence’. He had no ‘cunning in protestation, only downright oaths’; he was a man of ‘plain and uncoined constancy’ with a face ‘not worth sun-burning, that never looks in his glass for love of anything he sees there’. Yet the playwright’s fictional king acquits himself well in his speech when asking for her love. The reality was far more prosaic, with a marital bargain struck to secure the marital treaty. What the young French princess thought of the king contemporaries described as looking more like a priest, she did not commit to paper. However, Philip of Burgundy claimed that since first seeing him, Catherine had ‘passionately longed to be espoused to King Henry’.
Catherine was born on 27 October 1401 in the Hôtel Saint-Pol. She was the youngest daughter of Charles VI and his wife Isabeau of Bavaria, who had borne six more children in the twelve years following the arrival of her first daughter Isabelle. By the time Catherine arrived, her elder sister had been married, crowned Queen of England, seen her husband deposed and returned home to France. Isabelle would have been back at the Hôtel Saint-Pol in time for Catherine’s birth, so one former Queen of England witnessed the arrival of another. Through her childhood, Catherine would have heard talk of the ongoing war with the English, of the terrible defeat at Agincourt and perhaps, from her brother, of the arrogance of their enemy king. Some contemporary accounts suggest that Catherine and her siblings were neglected by their mother, whose union with their uncle Louis d’Orléans only ended with his brutal assassination in the streets of Paris in 1407. With Charles VI behaving increasingly erratically, feuds with the Burgundians and her mother’s pursuit of pleasure leaving her children in financial and emotional need, there may be some truth in the story that Catherine was sent to join her sister Marie at a convent in Poissy.
Marie of Valois was eight years older than Catherine and had been destined for the Church since birth. She had entered the convent in September 1397, at the tender age of 4, though she lived in rooms suitable for a princess, at least until she took her vows on 26 May 1408. Her companion was another Marie, the daughter of author Christine de Pizan, and it is possible that during her youth, the younger Catherine spent part of her time there, under the guidance of a sister who would one day become Prioress of Poissy. The royal priory of St Louis, founded in 1304, was a Dominican convent where aristocratic girls were taught to read, write and ply their needles. It was a very wealthy establishment and Pizan described it in the 1400 Le Livre du Dit de Poissy with its carved vaulted cloisters around a garden of pines, fresh water piped through all the buildings, airy rooms and a magnificent church with glittering gold icons. The surrounding gardens were well supplied with fruit trees, deer, rabbits, birds and contained two fish ponds to furnish the convent tables. Guests were entertained in a ‘fair room’, eating meat and drinking wine from vessels of gold, while the talk was of romance. Yet, unlike her sister, the ‘fair Catherine’ had never been intended for the Church. It was the talk at the dinner table, the tales of love and adventure, to which she would be drawn.
Catherine had first been suggested as a bride for Henry as early as 1408. The idea had resurfaced on his succession but was interrupted by Henry’s demands for a large dowry, which had led to the conflict in 1415. Three years later, the king was hoping to pressure the French into making an agreement and, in response, Queen Isabeau wrote encouragingly that she and her husband were ‘desirous of preserving peace, amity and concord with you’.2 A number of meetings had been arranged and called off before November 1419, when Henry’s envoys met with Catherine’s brother, the Dauphin Charles, at Alençon. Catherine had already lost two brothers, Louis and John, as well as two others who had died in infancy. Such a high rate of mortality meant that the throne of France rested on Charles’ young shoulders and his parents were keen to see Catherine settled and providing a potential heir in the event of further tragedy striking the family. One of the conditions suggested by the English for the marriage was that Henry and his heirs should inherit the French throne, bypassing young Charles, who was then in his teens.
In the spring of 1420, all the parties assembled in the Roman city of Troyes. Catherine and her mother lodged ‘at the sign of La Couronne’,3 an inn in the market square surrounded by tall, narrow timber-framed buildings. Upon Henry’s arrival, they departed for a local Franciscan convent to allow the English troops to occupy the town, although they still spilled out into the villages around. Troyes had once been the centre of the Duchy of Champagne, now annexed to the French throne, but was still prominent in international trade of textiles and spices. Its location made it a convenient middle point for merchants from Italy and the Low Countries, and its bustling marketplace was full to the limit when the annual fair was held around St John’s day. It was from there that Henry rode from his lodgings to pay a brief visit to the French royal family in the convent on 20 May. The chronicler Edward Hall, writing retrospectively from the time when Catherine’s descendants sat on the throne, cast the couple’s feelings in a romantic light. Hall writes that, riding into Troyes, Henry was ‘long for the sight of his darling’ and there was a ‘joyous meeting, honourable receiving and a loving embracing of both parties’. According to the chronicler Chastellain, the king was more restrained, bowing low before the princess and ‘kiss[ing] her with great joy’. Thus impressed, he agreed for a formal meeting to ratify the peace and arrange the marriage.
The very next day, the Treaty of Troyes was signed in the cathedral and, although Charles was too unwell to attend, being ‘witholden with diverse sickness’,4 he granted the necessary powers to Queen Isabeau and Duke Philip. In Charles’ name, they agreed that Henry and his heirs would inherit the French throne and would do all they could to defend his inheritance; in return, the English king agreed to marry Catherine and ‘travaille for to put into the obedience of our said father, all manner of cities, towns and castles, countries and persons within the realm of France disobedient and rebels to our said father’. The promises were made before a large assembly, each side followed by a retinue of around 400, including Henry’s brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence and his wife. Immediately afterwards, Henry and Catherine were betrothed by the Archbishop of Sens, Henri de Savoisy.
Nor did Henry intend to wait long to claim his bride: just two weeks later they were married. The First English Life of Henry V, written a century after the events, relates how ‘the sacrament of matrimonie was solemnly sacred betwixt the most victorious Kinge Henrie of England and that excellent glorious Lady, Dame Katheryn’. The exact location of their nuptials is unclear, but it may have been the Gothic Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul at Troyes, as stated by Walsingham, where the treaty was signed, although Henry also made an offering at the church of St John. This was mentioned by French chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins, who wrote how Henry ‘willed that the ceremony should be carried out entirely according to the custom of France [in] the parish church of St John at Troyes’, and placed thirteen nobles (coins) on the book as offering, followed by a gift of 200 nobles. Local knowledge in Troyes also places the wedding at Saint-Jean-au-Marché, a stone church dating from the thirteenth century now replaced by a newer building. Henry brought sixteen singers and thirty-eight musicians to perform at the wedding, who received the payment of a salut d’or each.5 Hall drew on the writing of three French chroniclers and describes ‘such triumphs, pomp and pageants as though the king of all the world had been present’.
Following this, ‘there was a feast with wine in the accustomed manner and the blessing of the nuptial couch’. Then Henry and Catherine went to bed. As Prince of Wales, Henry had a few broken diplomatic engagements under his belt and had lived a wild life but, according to Bishop Courtney, since his father’s death, Henry ‘never had knowledge carnally of women’. If Courtney is to be believed, the king had not taken any mistresses in the last seven years. This would fit the persona he had developed of the ideal pious and chivalric monarch possessed of an abstemiousness pseudo-religious in its exemplary virtue. However, it would have run contrary to some of the medical teaching of the time, which advocated the physical benefits of marital activity among those living secular lives. If Henry had truly refrained from sex for seven long years, he did not intend to linger too long in the bedroom now. The king’s passion was more for warfare and it was this which dictated the duration of his honeymoon.
Catherine may have anticipated a period of getting to know the husband she had only set eyes on a few days before. Following the custom of royal weddings, there were plans to hold a joust, but Henry declined because he intended to leave the very next morning, to continue his campaign of warfare. He was taking his commitment to the terms of the Treaty of Troyes seriously. On the morning of 3 June, after rising from the marital bed, he departed to lay siege to Sens, saying ‘there we may all tilt and joust and prove our daring and courage, for there is no finer act of courage in the world than to punish evildoers.’ The war was against his new brother-in-law, the disinherited Dauphin, and Catherine was present when Sens surrendered on 11 June. After that, she returned to her parents while Henry continued to cut a swathe through the French countryside, laying siege to Melun, which did not fall until November. Exactly how much time she spent with her new husband over the next six months is unclear but in early December, she and Henry, along with her parents, returned to Paris.
The city turned out in welcome to see the two kings riding side by side, to kiss the saints’ relics and pray in the Cathedral of Notre Dame; Catherine and her mother entered later, with ermine cloaks carried in front of the royal litter. In his typical self-deprecating style, the chronicler Hall refused to give specific details whilst simultaneously painting a picture of the magnificence of the occasion:
if I should declare to you the great giftes, the costlie presents, the plenty of vitaile [food] that was given to the King of England, or rehearse how the conduits [fountains] abundantly spouted out wine of divers colours, or describe the costly pageants, the pleasant songs or swete that were shewed, sung and played at divers places of the citie, or shewe the grete gladness, the hearty rejoicing or the grete delight that the common people had at this concord and peace finall, I should rehearse [so] many things that you would be wearied both with the reading and hearing.
Catherine and Henry, along with the king’s brothers, set up court at the Louvre, then a twelfth-century castle where now stands an eighteenth-century palace and art museum.
Catherine’s new home for the season was palatial in comparison to the penury her parents were living in at Saint-Pol. The Louvre was a square structure of four wings around a courtyard, with ten towers along its outside walls, all surrounded by a moat. An illustration of the castle can be found in the Très Riches Heures de Duc du Berri: a white fantasia of turrets in true fairy-tale style, rising many storeys high, topped by tall chimneys and grey-blue roofs. Monstrelet describes ‘the feasts and ceremony and luxury of their court’ to which French subjects ‘came from all parts in the greatest humility to do the king honour’. They also came in recognition that since the Treaty of Troyes, when Henry had been named as Charles’ heir, their allegiance was due to the English king. As it happened, the unstable Charles, now in his fifties, was suffering poor physical health and would only live to enjoy one more Christmas. His incapacity and volatile behaviour would have made the martial, competent Henry a far more attractive alternative; he also represented a future concord between the two nations. Not all of Charles’ subjects were as welcoming to Henry as Hall might have claimed; Chastellain recorded that the English knights had made Paris into ‘a new London, no less by their rude and proud manner of conversation and behaviour as by their language … glorying at the shame and misfortune of the French whose blood they had shed in such quantities’. Memories of Agincourt or the damaging siege of Rouen would not be so easily erased by this marriage.
Nor were Henry’s English subjects pleased. In the latest session of Parliament, concerns had been expressed about the absence of their king and his apparent prioritisation of France over England. News of this reached Henry at some point over the Christmas festivities and he departed with Catherine as soon as he could, arriving in Rouen on 27 December. From there, they travelled to Amiens and on to the coast, where they crossed the Channel without incident. According to Walsingham, they arrived at Canterbury on 1 February, and passed a few days there before proceeding to Eltham Palace in what is now south-east London. There, Catherine was allowed to rest in advance of the celebrations, finding herself in Joan of Navarre’s old favourite palace, surrounded by a deep moat and drawbridge, with its octagonal hearth set in the great hall, bathroom with tiled floor and glazed windows and garden with vines.
Catherine entered London on 21 February. The accounts in the city’s Company of Grocers show that minstrels were sent out to meet her at Blackheath and pageants were prepared. Painters, carvers and joiners worked through the night to construct the giant’s head that sat on London Bridge, and two men were set to guard it when it was complete. The mayor and guildsmen met her, dressed in white gowns and hoods. Catherine only just missed being formally welcomed by the famous Dick Whittington, then in his late sixties, whose fourth term of office had come to an end the previous October. His replacement was a grocer, William Cauntbrigge, although it is likely that Whittington was present in some capacity, as an alderman or representative of his guild. Catherine stayed the night in the Tower then, the following day, was escorted by members of the grocers’ guild to Westminster. Along the way, she saw the specially made effigy of St Petronella, who had been associated with the French royal family since the days of Charlemagne, and heard the singing angels placed near the giant’s head on London Bridge.6
Catherine’s coronation took place on 23 or 24 February, the latter being identified by Hall as St Matthew’s day. According to his account, she was conducted on foot between two bishops under a rich canopy from Westminster’s great hall to St Peter’s church. As was customary, Henry did not attend, allowing the full glare of public attention to fall on his wife, rather than upstaging her with his greater status. It was also an important political moment. At the banquet that followed, the new queen sat enthroned at a marble table, her diplomatic position reinforced by the food and decorations, with one of the carved marzipan subtleties bearing the banner ‘par mariage pur, ce guerre ne dure’, emphasising the role of their ‘pure marriage’ in ending the Anglo-French war. Catherine was a symbol of unity, a reminder of the king’s successes on the battlefield and in diplomacy, and representative of the future. With her arrival, the English could look forward to a time when they would rule over France. The expenses and losses of the past and the endeavours at Harfleur and Agincourt, Rouen and Melun were vindicated in the hope that Catherine brought England peace and prosperity.
Catherine was now, literally, centre stage. As a king’s daughter, she was no stranger to being the focus of attention but, on the occasion of her coronation and banquet, the focus was upon her alone and her audience were not fellow Frenchmen but the nation by whom they had been defeated. She had been married just days after meeting her husband, who had immediately rushed away to war. It is impossible to know whether she felt confident at this high point of her success, this culmination of her education, or if there were nerves concealed behind the regal façade. The majority of positions in the household with which she had been provided had been filled with English women. Her position as a foreign queen married to a stranger made her unique in the country and there is a sad irony to the fact that the one woman who might have been able to sympathise and support Catherine was her cousin Joan of Navarre. Joan’s birth into the Valois family, coupled with her experience of politics and the English people, would have made her an ideal friend and role model for Catherine, had the older queen still been a presence at court. Joan was out of sight, but to what extent was she out of mind? Catherine was aware of her existence, if not the circumstances of her present life, and her absence at key moments of court ceremonials precluded this relationship from developing. For the time being, though, Catherine’s position was one of strength. This was the zenith of the Lancastrian dynasty to date: a victorious and powerful king and a newly married queen, of French blood, crowned in Westminster Abbey. As if that were not enough, weeks after her coronation, Catherine fell pregnant.
Then bad news arrived from France. In his absence, Henry had left his younger brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence as lieutenant in his place. The second son of Henry IV and Mary de Bohun, Thomas had married Margaret Holland, his uncle’s widow, and had fought against the French under his brother’s lead. The wording of the Treaty of Troyes made it clear that in the event of Henry and Catherine failing to produce a child, the French throne would pass to Gaunt’s other sons, so Thomas was next in line. At the end of March, he had led a charge against the combined forces of the disinherited Dauphin and the Scots at the Battle of Baugé but may have underestimated the size of his opponents. Despite fighting bravely, he had been unseated from his horse and killed. It was a personal blow but the political significance of his death was huge. With the Dauphin seeking to capitalise on his victory, Henry needed to reassert his position across the Channel as soon as possible but, after his previous campaigns and his wedding, he lacked the necessary funds. Leaving Catherine behind in London, he embarked on a fundraising tour around the country, after which she travelled north to join him at Leicester for Easter. From there, they went on to Nottingham, Pontefract and York, where Catherine remained while Henry went on pilgrimage to Bridlington and Beverley; this may well have been to the shrine of St John at Bridlington, who had died as recently as 1379, a 5ft silver-gilt shrine dedicated to the eighth-century St John located in Beverley Minster. Apart from bearing the same name as his deceased grandfather, the saint at Beverley was already important to Henry for he had fought at Agincourt on the anniversary of John’s translation and gave him credit for his victory. Early in June, just as she was beginning to be certain of her pregnancy, Henry sailed for France.
Catherine gave birth at Windsor Castle on 6 December 1421. Her child was a son, whom she named after her husband. Henry himself was not present. He was laying siege to Meaux, which had continued to resist since that October. Terrible epidemics were rife among the English soldiers, even affecting Henry himself with what was probably dysentery, so the news from home came as a boost to their weary morale. While Catherine lay in recovery, the baby was christened with the king’s cousin Henry Beaufort and his brother John, Duke of Bedford as godfathers and as godmother Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault, the wife of Henry’s other brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The baby’s nurse was Joan Asteley, whose husband Thomas was in the king’s service. For her role in his upbringing she received an annuity of £20, which rose to £40 in 1424. Henry ordered that the women in her service, an unknown Alice, Joanna Belknap, Joanna Courcy and Joanna Troutbeck, were to receive payments of £10 each, while her confessor John Boyers had £20 and a Guillemote, ‘damsel of the bedchamber’, was given 100s, to be taken out of the dower payment of Joan of Navarre.7
Yet Catherine longed for her husband’s company. That spring she wrote to him saying that she ‘earnestly desire[d] to see him once more’,8 prompting arrangements for her to travel to France. She had not seen Henry for almost a year when she sailed from Southampton in May 1422. Under the protection of John, Duke of Bedford, she was accompanied by a retinue of ladies, some of whom are named in the minutes of a council meeting from 30 March. The first was Lady Margaret Roos or Ros, wife of the sixth Baron Ros, who had been a favourite of Henry IV. They had married in 1394 and had nine children, and in recognition of her status and age, the council awarded her a payment of 100 marks for the trip. There was also Elizabeth FitzHugh, wife of Henry, third Baron FitzHugh, who had served as Chamberlain of the Household to Henry V. Elizabeth had borne fourteen children and was then approaching 60: she was awarded £20 for accompanying the queen, and she and her husband would stay with Catherine when she returned to England sooner than expected. The third woman named was an Elizabeth Chideock, daughter of Baron Fitzpayn, who appears to have been younger than the others. Although her birthdate is unknown, her brother was born in 1401 and her youth and unmarried status are probably reflected in the 40 marks she was offered by the council.9 If so, she would have been close to Catherine in age and, perhaps, more of a friend and companion than her other motherly guardians.
Catherine and her ladies departed from Southampton and travelled to Rouen, and were welcomed and presented with gifts along the way. On 29 May, she arrived in the Bois de Vincennes outside Paris to the south-east, where she was reunited with Henry. The First English Life of King Henry V describes Catherine being received as joyously by her husband ‘as if she had bin an Angell from God’. Again Henry and Catherine were lodged in the Louvre while her parents stayed at Saint-Pol. A mystery play about the passion of St George was staged for their entertainment the following day 10 and Catherine also took the opportunity to visit some of the graves of her ancestors.11 On the feast of Pentecost, Henry and Catherine ‘satt together at there table in the open hall at dynner, marvelouslie glorious, and pompiously crowned with rich and precious diadems’. They dined among dukes and prelates, on food that was ‘marvelouslie rich and abundant in sumpteous delicate meats and drinks’, the court open to ‘all who would come to the feast’.12 Yet Henry was keen to be off again, making plans with Duke Philip III to lay siege to castles along the Loire Valley. The time the royal couple had spent together as man and wife was brief: in a marriage that lasted only two years, a whole year had been spent apart, raising the question of whether some rift had opened between man and wife, or whether Henry simply prioritised war over his bride. Despite his initial praise of Catherine, neither party was under any illusion that their union had been conducted for anything other than political gain. Quite simply, Henry was embracing the conditions of the Treaty of Troyes, by which he had sworn to defend his father-in-law’s inheritance, in order to preserve the kingdom for himself and the Lancastrian line. Until the summer of 1422, Henry could not have anticipated the severity of his illness. As a young, strong and healthy king, he had little reason not to anticipate spending the years ahead with his wife.
It was around this time that Henry experienced an attack of conscience regarding his stepmother. In March 1422, Joan of Navarre had been moved back to Leeds Castle, where she enjoyed better living conditions than she had been at Pevensey. She was able to entertain guests with wine and music from her own minstrel, Nicholas, and was supplied with rosewater, cinnamon, a pot of citrus and nineteen ells of cloth for her ‘stewing’ clothes, the smocks she would wear in the bath.13 The wardrobe accounts show that her clothing was predominantly black, as befitted a widow. At Easter 1421, she was provided with 7yd of black cloth at a cost of 7s 8d a yard and a seamstress was paid 1s 6d to assemble it into a gown. Joan also had three dozen shoes at 6d a pair, 400 clasps and a black satin cape with squirrel fur. In July a Walter Fylly was commissioned to bring rabbits to Joan’s household and in November, permission was issued to the clerk of her household, Thomas Lilbourne, among others, to supply her with essentials such as food, drink and firewood. Lilbourne was clearly a good servant, as Henry had agreed to uphold the annual £10 Joan had granted him for his service. In June 1421, Lilbourne drew £1,300 from the Exchequer to fund Joan’s household until the following summer, making an allowance of around £19 a week.14 Other rewards that Joan had made – land at Havering to Pernel Androwiche and a pardon for debts to Beatrice, Lady Talbot for ‘her good service’ – were also honoured by Henry in 1421.15 Whilst in Paris, something changed Henry’s mind about his stepmother. Perhaps it was his illness and a desire to settle the question fairly, or else his position as heir to the kingdom of France guaranteed him sufficient wealth that he no longer required her to live in straightened circumstances. Perhaps his wife had intervened and asked for mercy for her aunt. Henry paid Joan’s dower arrears and sent instructions to England that she was to be freed. At last, in July 1422, Joan was given back her liberty.
Across the Channel, Henry was fading fast. He and Catherine remained in Paris until the feast of Corpus Christi, before moving on to Senlis where King Charles and Queen Isabeau were staying. The exact details are unclear, but it seems that Catherine remained there with her parents while Henry attempted to resume his campaign despite his worsening health. He is likely to have contracted dysentery, an inflammation of the intestine, during the siege of Meaux and as he weakened, he had to be carried by litter. Henry was at Vincennes Castle, south-east of Paris and around 50km away from Senlis, when he died on 31 August. Most historians have rejected Monstrelet’s suggestion that Catherine and her mother were at Vincennes, or that Henry was at Senlis, in the belief that Henry did not send for his wife, although we cannot be certain. Since he died between two and three in the morning, and allowing for the speed a messenger may travel between the two locations, Henry’s queen would have been notified the same day.
Catherine returned to England with Henry’s body. Immediately after his death, it had been disembowelled, boiled and spiced and set in a lead casing before a first service was held on 15 September at Saint-Denis, followed by another at Rouen. From there, he progressed slowly towards the Channel, surrounded by the weeping English entourage dressed in white carrying burning torches, and his household all in black. Henry’s corpse was pulled on a chariot, surrounded by a boiled leather effigy, wearing a gold crown and holding a sceptre and golden bowl, his face open to the sky.16 The banners of the Trinity, St George and the Virgin were carried alongside Henry’s own arms and those of England and France. Eighteen carts carried his possessions, while Catherine’s belongings were piled on to four.17 According to The First English Life of King Henry V, Catherine followed at a distance of two miles, and was ‘right honourably accompanied’. As they travelled slowly towards the coast, news reached Catherine of the death of her father Charles VI, which had taken place on 22 October. In two months she had lost her father and husband. The news also meant that her 9-month-old son would now inherit the kingdoms of both England and France.
The exact day when Henry was buried in Westminster Abbey has sometimes been confused; William Worcester places Henry’s funeral as early as 7 November, but Monstrelet and The First English Life place it on the day before St Martins, which fell on 11 November. However, this confusion may have arisen from the fact that Charles VI’s funeral took place on the latter date. The royal party landed at Dover on or around 31 October. From there, it proceeded through Canterbury up to the north Kent coast and Ospringe, Rochester and Dartford, to rest in St Paul’s Cathedral. They reached London on 5 November. Waiting in the freshly swept streets, the mayor and aldermen were dressed all in white to accompany the king’s body across the bridge to the sound of the hymn ‘Venite’. It rested overnight in St Paul’s before beginning the procession to Westminster, the coffin draped in black velvet, topped with a white satin cross and cloth of gold. Catherine herself would undertake to pay for the construction of Henry’s tomb of Purbeck marble topped with a wooden figure plated in silver with angels and beasts.
As was customary, Catherine did not attend. She may have remained nearby, or else retreated to Windsor to be with her son. Although he had not summoned her to his bedside, Henry had provided for her in his will, to which he had added a final codicil on 22 August. She would receive a number of domestic items, ornaments and jewels, along with the dower payments which would be drawn from their French estates and those of Lancaster. Now though, with the release of Joan of Navarre, the dynasty’s budget would have to stretch to meet the needs of two widowed queens. That may have been the least of Catherine’s concerns. A widow at the age of 21, her position would now be a largely maternal one as she struggled against opposition to her youth, gender and nationality to participate in the raising of her young son. Along with the guidance of Richard, Earl of Warwick and Henry’s two surviving brothers, John, Duke of Bedford and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Catherine oversaw the female half of her son’s world to various degrees until his coronation in 1429. Yet her heart yearned for something more. She longed for love and was not afraid to pursue it.
The situation for the young unmarried Catherine differed vastly from that of Joan when she had been widowed in 1413. Catherine was still of childbearing age and the possibility of her remarriage was debated in Parliament for the Lords feared the political power that such a union would give to any husband she might choose. At some point in the mid-1420s, Catherine embarked on an affair with Edmund Beaufort, the grandson of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, who was born in 1406. Just how far this went, or how long it lasted, is unclear, but the danger seemed sufficient to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester to introduce a statute forbidding dowager queens from remarrying without the permission of the king and Parliament. Although the wording was left open so that Joan of Navarre was also included, Henry IV’s widow was then in her late fifties and there seemed to be little doubt about who the change in law was aimed at.
Joan may have raised a wry smile at the new statute, living out her days quietly at Nottingham Castle. It would remain one of her main residences until the end of her life, and she enjoyed reasonable comfort in the solid Norman castle built upon rock. She also lived at Langley before the palace burned down in 1431, after which she used Havering more often. Her larder would have been supplied by the royal forests around and her wardrobe accounts for 1427–28 include ten kirtles and seven gowns, sixteen pairs of hose and trimmings of miniver, sable and ermine.18 She had endured a period of injustice, false accusations and imprisonment at the hands of a man she should have been able to trust on two counts, as her king and as her stepson, and she had outlived him. Quiet stoicism and endurance had won the day for Joan, whose victory must have been sweet. As was often the case with the narrative of the white swan, it was a matter of patience, of accepting the dominance of the red rose, until such time as the wheel of fortune turned again.
After her release, Joan commissioned a joint tomb to be made for herself and Henry IV in Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral. Joan may have been thinking of her own mortality, but the mind of her sister queen was fixed on more temporal matters.
1 Poem attributed to John Lydgate.
2 Dockray.
3 Allmand.
4 From the ‘Treaty of Troyes’, 1420, reproduced in Rymer’s Foedera.
5 Hall.
6 Allemand.
7 Strickland.
8 Ibid.
9 Nicolas.
10 Allemand.
11 Hilton.
12 Anon.
13 Woolgar.
14 Myers.
15 CPR, Henry V, 1421.
16 Monstrelet.
17 Allemand.
18 Woolgar.