The rose raileth her rode
The leves on light wode
Waxen al with wille.1
The marriage of the first Lancastrian king was made against the odds. It was a union made between those who should have been enemies, between nations and families who had long been at war. It was a match of equals, initially pursued in secret, then continued in spite of the barriers raised by its opponents to prevent it. In the end, true affection won the day, in a narrative almost worthy of a Shakespearean drama.
Since the death of Mary de Bohun in 1394, Henry had not seriously considered taking another wife. He had not lacked opportunities, however. The daughter of the Duke of Berry was proposed by the French whilst Henry was at King Charles’ court in late 1398. She was a similar age to Henry, had borne four children and been widowed twice. In addition, Mary’s father was a son of King John II of France, a duke known as ‘the Magnificent’, a collector and commissioner of illuminated manuscripts, including the Très Riches Heures de duc de Berri. However, that Christmas, word of this proposal reached King Richard, who could not allow such a lucrative match for a man he had exiled as a traitor. He intervened and when Henry tried to conclude the terms, he was informed that the union would not be going ahead. Instead, Mary married John of Bourbon in 1401. Fourteen years later, he would be captured at the Battle of Agincourt and spend the remaining nineteen years of his life in English captivity.
Henry was clearly a good catch though. Within a few months, another important European family were considering marrying one of their daughters to the ‘traitor’. According to the state papers of Milan, in May 1399, at the end of his exile, Henry had been keen to marry Lucia, daughter of the Duke of Milan. She was unmarried at the age of 26 or 27 and her father had ‘agreed that Donna Lucia should have the earl for her husband, if the earl would give one of his daughters to wed one of the duke’s sons, these negotiations taking place while the earl’s father was alive, and if she will wait until the said Earl of Derby, who is at present out of England by the king’s order, is readmitted to the king’s favour’.2 When her father suggested to Lucia that she might have a long wait until Henry was permitted to return to England, she replied that ‘if she was certain to have the Earl of Derby for her husband, she would wait for him as long as she could, to the very end of her life, even if she knew that she would die three days after the marriage’.3 As it happened, Henry would be instrumental in the arrangement of Lucia’s marriage to Edmund of Holland, Earl of Kent, and gave her away at her wedding in May 1406.
Perhaps by 1400, the dukes of Berry and Milan regretted not matching their daughters with the King of England, but by then, Henry had another woman in his sights. Now Henry chose a woman he already knew for his second wife; a woman of the same age, who had been married and produced children, and ruled as regent in her own right. Moreover, judging from her warm letters, she was clearly keen to become his wife. An attraction may already have developed between them, before either was in the position to contemplate a new match. Now, Joan, or Joanna, daughter of the king of Navarre, was to join the Lancastrian dynasty.
Joan’s history was a mixture of influences from France and what were then independent duchies of Navarre and Brittany. She had been born at Évreux in Normandy in 1368, or possibly 1370, to Charles ‘The Bad’, King of Navarre and Joan of France, daughter of King John II. As the granddaughter of a French king who had died in exile in England, actually in Gaunt’s Savoy Palace in 1364, she already had a complex relationship with the Lancastrian dynasty. Charles of Navarre had a love–hate relationship with France and England, sometimes an ally and sometimes an enemy. The Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre, straddling the mountains of the Basque region, had historically been something of a political football between France and Spain and it was to attack his old enemies that Charles had sided with Edward III. In the 1350s he had supported Parisian rioters against his brother-in-law, then changed sides for money and led the rebels into an English ambush. In the 1380s Charles had allowed Gaunt to use Navarre as a way into Castile but then married one of his sons to Henry of Castile’s daughters. At the age of 10 she was betrothed to John, heir of Castile, although this agreement was later broken, and in 1381, she and her brothers were temporarily held hostage in Paris. At 18, Joan was married to John V, Duke of Brittany, with a dowry of 120,000 livres and half that again for an annual pension.4
The English also had a recent history of involvement in Brittany, supporting the Montfort heirs in the civil war of succession. Duke John had been twice forced into exile in England, during which he was knighted by Edward III and married one of his daughters, Mary Plantagenet, in 1361. Records describe her wedding dress as made from forty-five ells of cloth of gold, trimmed with forty ermine and 600 minivers. Mary never reached Brittany; she died just weeks after her wedding. John took a second English wife in 1366. This time, his bride was Joan Holland, a daughter of Joan of Kent and half-sister to the future Richard II. They were married for eighteen years but had no surviving children. It was in September or October 1386 that the 47-year-old John married the teenaged Joan at Guérande in southern Brittany, near Nantes. The ceremony may have been held in the Gothic Collegiate church of Saint-Aubin, which still stands in the heart of the medieval town. Within weeks she had fallen pregnant.
Joan gave birth to her first child ten months after her wedding. She was in the medieval city of Nantes on 12 August 1387 when she delivered a daughter whom she named Joan or Jeanne. It is most probable that this took place at the seat of the dukes of Brittany, the central Chateau des Ducs de Bretagne on the bank of the Loire, with its thick granite exterior walls sitting amid a moat and enclosing a central courtyard. The present white Renaissance-style buildings post-date Joan’s residence but she would have known the solid thirteenth-century keep and views out across the city.
Barely five months had passed after the delivery before Joan had conceived again. She would have spent the traditional month or so lying in, as prescribed by the Church but also to ensure that her body recovered, before she was churched. The ceremony of churching signified a return to social duties and public appearances, along with a resumption of the marital debt, so, allowing for this period, Joan’s second pregnancy actually occurred four months after her return to her husband’s bed. It is not impossible that Joan chose to breastfeed her child, given the example of her contemporary Yde or Ida of Boulogne, who fiercely rejected any assistance in feeding her babies,5 but it would make her another exception rather than the rule. Allowing for a pregnancy that followed the average of forty weeks, Joan would have conceived in January 1388 to bear her second daughter, Isabelle, that October. She was not to be fortunate with her first children: both girls died in December 1388, perhaps from the same illness. Given that a fourth outbreak of plague was sweeping Europe since its arrival in the late 1340s, it is possible that this is what claimed both of Joan’s daughters.
Joan repeated the same pattern by falling pregnant again five months after her previous delivery. In March 1389, in the aftermath of her grief for her girls, she conceived again. Late that December, perhaps to celebrate the Christmas season, she was at the newly finished Château de l’Hermine, a vast edifice in Vannes recently completed by her husband. There, on Christmas Eve, she gave birth to a son, whom they named John. The little boy survived and, five months later, in May, Joan was pregnant again. John was joined by a sister, Marie, who was born in Nantes on 18 February 1391. A few years later a plan was mooted to wed Marie to Henry of Monmouth, but this came to nothing and he became her stepbrother. Five more children followed at similar intervals: Marguerite in 1392, Arthur in 1393, Gilles in 1394, Richard in 1395 and Blanche in 1397. All survived to adulthood. Joan had delivered nine children in a decade: an incredible feat of fertility and endurance in an age when pain relief and gynaecological knowledge were limited. Then, with the nursery of Brittany full, her husband John died. Joan found herself a widow at around the age of 30. By a codicil of his will, John demonstrated the extent to which he trusted his wife’s capabilities, appointing her an executor of his will and the sole guardian of their children.
Chaucer evokes a powerful image of the coast of Brittany in The Franklin’s Tale, with its high grassy cliffs overlooking the sea and the ‘grisly feendly (fiendish) rokkes blake’. Using the form of a Breton lai, a simple narrative of Celtic themes of magic, chivalry and romance, he depicted the faithful Dorigen remaining true to her husband, resisting the suit of Aurelius by insisting she will only submit to him if he can dissolve the black Breton rocks, which he does by the aid of wizardry. This association of Breton culture and magic would prove significant in the future for the loyal Joan in ways Chaucer cannot have imagined. For the time being, this was the land over which Joan ruled as regent for her eldest son John, who was almost 10 at the time of his father’s death in November 1399. For a year and a half, until he was able to claim his majority, Joan was in sole charge of Brittany. In March 1401, she accompanied him to Rennes, where he was inaugurated as John VI, the sixth Duke of Brittany.6 By the time she married into the Lancastrian family, Joan had proved herself in terms of strength, loyalty, pedigree and fecundity.
By 1401, relations between England and France had turned hostile again. Richard II’s recent reconciliation with John II’s grandson, Charles VI, and his marriage to Isabelle, meant that his deposition led to great indignation. The deposition and subsequent death of a king was to be taken seriously, as was his young bride’s return home with her coffers empty. To indicate the new direction of Anglo-French relations, Louis, Duke of Orléans, who had once been close to Henry during his exile, now issued his old friend with a challenge in response to the ‘offensive measures’ taken against Richard II and ‘for having cruelly suffered [Isabelle] to depart from this country in despair for the loss of her lord, and robbed her of her dower’.7 Henry replied that he had ever shown Isabelle ‘kindness and friendship’ and had never acted with ‘unkindness or cruelty, towards any lady or damsel’. According to the terms of her dower agreement, claimed Henry, on leaving England, he ‘had made her such restitution of jewels and money (much more than she brought hither) that we hold ourselves acquitted’.8 Henry also received a challenge from the Count of Saint-Pol, Richard II’s brother-in-law, ‘whose destruction [Henry was] notoriously accused of, and greatly blamed for’.9 All that summer, stated Adam of Usk, ‘the fleets of England and France attacked each other much at sea.’ Thus Henry’s choice of a wife from within the ranks of the French royal family was bound to cause problems on both sides of the Channel.
When exactly Henry and Joan met is unclear. It may have been in 1396, during the celebrations for the wedding of Richard and Isabelle, when Henry was in France for a month. Descended from the French royal family, she was a cousin once removed from the bride, and as she did not bear a child that year, would have been able to attend. Equally, the meeting may have taken place in England in 1398. That spring, following the birth of her last child, Joan had accompanied her husband on a visit to London, where he requested that Richard II restore to him the title of Duke of Richmond, with its traditional Breton associations. Joan and Henry both attended the Garter ceremonies at Windsor that April and may have met again in France during Henry’s exile, which began that autumn. Froissart claims that Henry sailed for England from Brittany, but this is incorrect, as he departed from Boulogne, but it might indicate that he had been a guest at the Breton court at some time earlier in 1399.10 On all of these occasions, of course, Joan was a married woman, excluded from any plans Henry might be making to select a new wife. However, they clearly developed a liking for each other and once Joan was widowed, they were in a position to act on it. The speed with which Joan moved to secure Henry is testament to the strong mutual attraction between them.
As early as February 1400, Joan was writing to Henry in terms of intimacy and affection. Her address to her ‘dear and honoured lord and cousin’ was conventional enough but her ‘eagerness’ to hear of his ‘good estate’, which she hoped God would make as ‘good as your noble heart can desire’ and as good as she could wish for him, spoke of a more personal connection. Joan wrote that whenever she heard good news of Henry, her ‘heart rejoice[d] exceedingly’ and she heard such news to the ‘great comfort and gladness of [her] heart’. She urged Henry to let her know if there was anything she might do to help him, and she would ‘accomplish it with a very good heart according to [her] power’. The letter was carried by a Joanna de Bavelen, a trusted servant, followed by the Breton envoy Anthony and John Rhys, who bore the letters back and forth across the Channel. At some point later in 1400 or in 1401, the pair reached an agreement to wed. Given Henry’s status and Joan’s epistolary transparency, it is likely to have been a matter of mutual encouragement concluded by the king’s declaration and her acceptance. Affection aside, it was a mutually beneficial match. Both were shrewd enough to recognise the benefits it could bring them: Joan would become Queen of England and Henry may have been hoping to gain a foothold in Brittany.
Henry and Joan were aware theirs would not be a straightforward or popular match. Being related through John of Brittany’s first marriage to Henry’s aunt Mary, they required a papal dispensation. In addition, the schism in the Catholic Church meant there were currently two popes: the Bretons backed the Antipope Benedict XIII in Avignon, while the English still followed the rule of Rome, under Boniface IX. As well as receiving the dispensation for their affinity, Joan required a second pardon in order to marry and live outside the jurisdiction of Avignon. This was granted in March 1402. Two weeks later, a proxy wedding took place at Eltham Palace, witnessed by John Beaufort and the Rhys brothers. However, the French crown disapproved of the match and the Breton barons forbade Joan from taking her younger sons out of the country. She would eventually depart with her two unmarried daughters, Blanche and Margaret, leaving the boys under the care of their elder brother John VI and the Duke of Burgundy.
Joan was now Henry’s wife but she delayed departing for England. In all likelihood, she was making the final arrangements for her sons and winding up her affairs. Henry sent his half-brothers John and Henry Beaufort to collect her and they left Nantes on 26 December. They sailed from Camaret-sur-Mer on 13 January but terrible storms forced them to land on the Cornish coast at Falmouth six days later. The royal party travelled slowly across Bodmin Moor on to Exeter. There, on 30 January, she was reunited with Henry and the pair was royally entertained. From there, they travelled to Bridport and Salisbury, before arriving in Winchester where they were formally married in the cathedral, the ceremony conducted by Henry Beaufort. The king’s gift to his bride was a jewelled gold collar decorated with the letter ‘S’ and Henry’s personal motto ‘Souveigne’, which might be a reference to sovereignty or souveignez, which relates to memory, linking to Henry’s adoption of the blue forget-me-not as his symbol – a flower that had featured in the accounts of his wardrobe for a decade. Joan also received ten amulets with triangular clasps, featuring diamonds, rubies, sapphires and pearls. The wedding feast was probably held in the great hall of Winchester Castle, which had been a favourite location of Edward III for its Arthurian connections and featured an earlier round table from the reign of Edward I. The centrepiece was a group of crowned panthers made from cake, which breathed real flames, an effect medieval cooks achieved by filling the mouths with camphor and setting light to it. Also on the impressive menu were subtleties of marzipan in the shapes of crowns and eagles, probably coloured or covered with gold leaf.
A week later, Joan made her ceremonial entry into London. She was crowned on 26 January 1403 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, at Westminster. A faint image of the occasion drawn in the Beauchamp pageant, now in the British Library, shows Joan seated alone on a canopied chair atop a dais of six steps. Holding the sceptre and orb, she is the very personification of rule, in an era when queens were rarely afforded both symbols of sovereignty. Another image shows the jousting that followed, with Joan seated beside Henry in an open gallery, watching Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick joust in her honour. Henry granted his new queen an unusually large dowry of 10,000 marks as well as a tower room within the Palace of Westminster for her to use as a council chamber. As well as the majority of the estates and castles traditionally held by English queens, Joan received Lancastrian lands on the death of Katherine Swynford that May. Perhaps the most symbolic of all the new acquisitions of this new royal bride was Leeds Castle, given to her by her husband in the first flush of love after their wedding. She would return there sixteen years later, as a widow, under arrest by her stepson. It seems that the new royal pair experienced a degree of personal happiness. Walsingham wrote that Joan came from ‘smaller Brittany to greater Britain, from a dukedom to a kingdom, from a fierce tribe to a peace-loving people’. But the coming years were not to prove as full of peace as Joan may have hoped. One London chronicle, known now as Julius B II, juxtaposed news of Henry’s marriage with the appearance of a star, a stella comata, a prophetic comet, in the west. Six months after Joan’s coronation, her husband was leading a Lancastrian army in defence of their rule.
Medieval Shrewsbury, about 10 miles east of the Welsh border, was a flourishing town of around 3,000 residents. It was surrounded by stone walls and housed an abbey, a castle and significant industry in leather, wool, flax and clothing. In the summer of 1403, as the glovers and tanners opened their shops and the Grey Friars knelt in prayer, as the fields around were weeded in anticipation of the harvest and women hung out washing to dry on bushes in the town’s gardens, Shrewsbury unexpectedly assumed importance as a strategic location. Riding towards it were two opposing forces; that of Henry’s loyal Earl of Stafford and the rebellious Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, who wished to displace him.
It had begun with a letter. Henry IV was at Kennington Palace in Lambeth in late June or early July when he received an ominous letter from the Earl of Northumberland. The first earl and his son Hotspur had been charged by the king with accepting the surrender of Ormiston Castle in Scotland and wrote to request financial assistance, which they felt was long overdue. Having dug deep into the coffers in order to fund his own marriage and find dowries for his two daughters, Henry simply did not have the money to pay them. The letter contained a veiled threat, referencing Mattathias Maccabeus, a biblical kingmaker and questions of chivalry and honour, sufficient to cause Henry alarm and prompt his departure north. The Percys were an established, powerful northern family who had assisted Henry to take the throne in 1399; their connection went way back to his childhood, when Henry Hotspur had been part of the Lancastrian nursery, and the boys were knighted together alongside Richard in April 1377.
Then, a shocking rumour arose. As Henry travelled, reports reached him that Hotspur was claiming that king Richard was still alive, raising an army under the claim of fighting for the deposed king. But Henry had brought his cousin’s corpse to London in March 1399, where it was exhibited at St Paul’s Cathedral for two days, face exposed. Henry had carried the pall himself. From there, it was taken through the city streets and was on public display for two hours at Cheapside, before masses were conducted for his soul at Westminster. However, the remains of Richard II were not initially placed in the tomb he had prepared for himself in the abbey; they were buried at King’s Langley. It was Henry’s son, Henry of Monmouth, who would return Richard to Westminster to lie beside Anne of Bohemia. There was no question that Richard was dead. To suggest otherwise was treason.
Henry was no stranger to treason; he had been fighting to retain the crown from the very start. Just two months after his coronation, while Richard II was still alive, Henry’s own brother-in-law, John Holland, had joined a group of conspirators planning to depose and kill him during a joust at Windsor. On that occasion, the king was forewarned and the ringleaders were rounded up and executed. Later the same year, Henry had been in Scotland when dissent broke out in Wales as a result of land disputes between friends of Henry and local magnate Owen Glendower. Declaring himself Prince of Wales, Glendower married his daughter Catrin to Edmund, Earl of March, and there had been a cluster of minor skirmishes between him and the king’s men. Then, Henry had relied on the powerful Percy family to help quell his enemies, but support for the cause combined with an historic loyalty to Richard II meant that by 1403, Glendower was holding court at Harlech Castle. At some point in 1403, the ambitious Northumberland and Hotspur had decided to back the rebels. They signed a treaty with Mortimer and Glendower, called the Tripartite Indenture, by which they agreed to divide up England and Wales between them once they had ousted Henry.
Around the middle of July, Henry heard that Hotspur and his troops were in Chester and planned to march south to meet with the armies of Glendower and Northumberland. He had to intervene to prevent their forces combining into what would have been a formidable army, so he decided to head Hotspur off at Shrewsbury. Henry knew he had little chance of reaching the town first, so he sent word to the Earl of Stafford, who marched into Shrewsbury and closed the gates against the enemy. When Hotspur arrived, he found himself unable to enter, caught between the town and its river, with the king’s troops rapidly advancing from the east. He was unable to call on the support of Glendower or Northumberland, and had little choice but to turn and fight. Waiting to hear news of her husband, Joan’s situation was a difficult one. Having only been a wife and queen for six months, she faced the very real possibility that, like her niece Isabelle, she would be returning home a widow to an uncertain future. Richard II’s wife had only been a child, but as a mature ex-queen of England, Joan’s situation would have been difficult.
Estimates of the size of Hotspur’s army have been greatly exaggerated, with chroniclers like Waurin and Dieulacres citing 80,000 and 60,000 men respectively. A more realistic figure, supported by the accounts of Walsingham and John Capgrave, is around a quarter of this. Henry attempted to negotiate and avoid battle, but Hotspur responded with accusations of financial ineptitude and perjury, and that the king had starved Richard to death. His enemy committed and defiant, there was no choice but to fight. Henry led his main army, with Stafford leading the vanguard and archers and the 16-year-old Henry of Monmouth to the south. The site where they met, to the north of the town, is now marked by the church of St Mary Magdalene, which was erected six years later, over one of the mass graves where 1,600 of the fallen were buried. The vanguard of Henry’s army was soon destroyed and Stafford was killed. According to Waurin, Henry then ‘threw himself into the battle’ with many a ‘fine feat of arms’ and ‘slew thirty of his enemies’. Both sides were using the longbow and modern estimates suggest that experienced archers could loose up to fifteen arrows a minute, producing a continual hail down upon the enemy. The 16-year-old Prince of Wales was struck in the face by an arrow when his visor was raised, but he remained on the field to encourage his men with what could have been a mortal wound. Hotspur prepared to launch a charge against the king but was cut down by royal troops as Henry fell back. Seeing the death of his adversary, Henry knew he had won the battle, but there was still work to be done to secure his position. As his son was treated for his wound, and his life saved, Henry rode north to confront Northumberland, who was forced to abase himself in order to avoid execution. Rymer’s Foedera or Treaties claimed that 16,000 men died on that day but exact numbers are difficult to pinpoint. A percentage of the property confiscated from the Percys was given to Joan, including Northumberland’s house on St Martin’s Lane in Aldgate. Owen Glendower was beaten for the moment but he continued to foment rebellion against Henry, employing guerrilla tactics against his rule and its representatives until he disappeared in 1414.
Yet more resentment was brewing. Despite the defeat at Shrewsbury and the loss of Hotspur, the problem of Northumberland remained. Henry had been lenient in 1403 because the earl had not directly taken part, but he had been stripped of the title of Constable of England, which he had been granted on Henry’s succession. In the summer of 1405, Northumberland drew on existing family ties with Richard le Scrope, Archbishop of York, to rebel against Henry again. On this occasion, one of the king’s brothers-in-law played a key role in talking Scrope into disbanding his army, allowing him to be arrested. Gaunt and Katherine’s daughter Joan had been married to Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, since 1396 and she had already borne him at least four of the fourteen children they would have together. It was Westmorland’s negotiations with Scrope that led directly to the failure of his uprising. He was executed on 8 June in a field outside the city and buried in York Minster. Pope Innocent VII, in Rome, excommunicated Henry for this, but two years later the king was pardoned by Innocent’s successor, Gregory XII. Again Northumberland escaped justice by fleeing to Scotland. He mounted his final rebellion in 1408, when his army was defeated in Yorkshire and the earl was killed in battle.
Little is known about Joan’s life as queen during these difficult years. Her years of experience and her understanding of governance, drawn from her regency in Brittany, qualified her to support Henry through these challenges. It was a period of turmoil during which she cannot have been certain of her future or that of the Lancastrian dynasty. She had chosen to give up the life she had known, close to her children, and to defy her family in the full knowledge that it may not be a smooth ride. Joan and Henry not only shared mutual affection but a shrewd understanding of politics. Given the nature of Henry’s journey to the throne, they would have been naïve to anticipate a quiet future. In 1404, between the rebellions, she was visited by her second son, Arthur, who was granted the titular earldom of Richmond in recognition of the fact that the position had been held by his father and had historic links with Brittany, although the actual earldom would be bestowed on Henry’s son John. Arthur was only 10 years old and his guardian, the Duke of Burgundy, regent of France would die that April at the age of 62. Arthur may also have brought news of his brother John, who was then in conflict with the French.
The year 1406 marked an important point for both of Joan’s stepdaughters. The match of Blanche of England and Louis III, Elector Palatine, had been arranged before that of her father, with a dowry of 40,000 nobeln. Early in 1402, she had departed for Germany and the wedding took place at Cologne Cathedral on 6 July. In her trousseau was the Palatine Crown, now in the treasury of the former residence of the Bavarian royal family, in Munich, but most likely made in Bohemia in the 1370s for Queen Anne. A delicate gold circlet, it features twelve fleurs-de-lys, six large and six small, alternately spaced and decorated with pearls, rubies and sapphires. In 1406, news reached England that the 14-year-old Blanche had borne a son named Rupert; she would fall pregnant again in 1409 but died in childbirth at the age of 17. Blanche’s younger sister Philippa, who had been living with her brother John under the care of Hugh de Waterton at Berkhamsted Castle,11 would have spent more time at court once the queen’s household had been established. She was 12 in 1406 when she married Eric of Pomerania at Lund Cathedral dressed in white silk and ermine. The following year, Joan’s daughters were provided with husbands: they were married on the same day, 26 June, Margaret marrying Alain IX, Viscount of Rohan and Blanche becoming the wife of John IV, Count of Armagnac.
Further snippets of Joan’s life as queen appear in the court rolls. In January 1406, her secretary, John de Boyas, was granted safe conduct to England along with two merchants who were charting a ship containing ‘lampreys and other things’ for her use.12 That October, she may have played a role in Henry’s promise of security to Breton fishermen in the Channel and the proclamation read in Bristol and other locations in the West Country that no harm was to be done to the Duke of Brittany or his subjects. The same year, safe conduct was provided for Tristan de la Lande, the Governor of Nantes, who was travelling to England to visit the queen, and in July a one-year peace was settled between England and Brittany. On another occasion, Joan was issued with a licence to send six ‘fothers’ of lead to her son John, Duke of Brittany. Joan was also thinking of the honour of her late husband: a tomb was commissioned for Duke John V in England, made from alabaster by stone merchants Thomas Colyn, Thomas Holewell and Thomas Poppehowe. Early the next year, they were granted safe conduct, along with the merchant John Guychard, to convey the tomb to Nantes, where it was placed in the middle of the choir. A drawing of the tomb from 1700 depicts the duke in generic style, dressed in armour, with a long trailing moustache and hands clasped together in prayer.
As Joan was thinking of a tomb for her first husband, the health of her second was deteriorating. In June 1405, on the same day as Archbishop Scrope was executed, Henry had become ill for the first time, with what appears to have manifested as a skin complaint. Joan was probably not with him when he stayed overnight at Green Hammerton, on his way north from York. He woke screaming in the night, crying treason and believing himself to be on fire. There was no fire but his skin was burning and he presented symptoms described by some as pustules. Henry appears to have recovered from this attack after a week’s rest but there were further outbreaks to come, in April 1406 and in the summer and winter of 1408. Some contemporaries described his illness as leprosy, which had emotive connotations of punishment for Scrope’s death, but although Henry regularly consulted physicians and experienced outbreaks of skin disease, his symptoms do not appear to conform to the usual progress of the disease.
What exactly the king was suffering from is unclear. The skin condition might suggest psoriasis, but Henry also suffered from seizures or fits, which could indicate the presence of more than one illness. The question is whether these were part of the same condition, or a combination of more than one disease, which modern historians have speculated may have been epilepsy or heart disease. However, the initial suggestion of psoriasis might be sufficient to cover the range of Henry’s ailments as, in its most acute form, rapidly developing pustules appear on the body in conjunction with fever, chills, weight loss and fatigue. Erythrodermic psoriasis causes the skin to burn and, through depletion of bodily fluids and proteins, can lead to heart failure. Sufferers experience cycles of attacks, which appears to fit Henry’s pattern of illness and Adam of Usk’s description of a ‘rotting of the flesh, a drying up of the eyes and a rupture of the intestines’. Henry was forced to delay his presence in Parliament in April 1406, as a sudden illness had attacked his leg at Windsor, accompanied by burning skin and a fever, so that his doctors had ruled he was not safe to ride. After these outbursts, Henry’s health went into sporadic decline. Increasingly he was forced to delegate many of his duties to the 20-year-old Prince of Wales. This may well have been against his wishes, even against his better judgement.
Prince Henry may also have been giving his father cause to doubt his fitness as a future king. According to the anonymous poem the ‘Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti’, the young man was an ‘assiduous cultivator of lasciviousness … passing the bounds of modesty he was the fervent soldier of Venus as well as Mars; youthlike he was fired by her torches and in the midst of worthy works of war found leisure for excesses common to ungoverned age’. This implies quite a life of dissipation and in 1406 the Parliamentary Speaker urged the prince to reside more regularly in Wales, in order to keep an overview of the disruption and rebellion there, suggesting that Henry had been neglecting his duties. As he grew older, more serious problems emerged. In 1412, allegations were made that he had appropriated the wages of his garrison at Dover and, according to Walsingham, he was maintaining a household ‘larger than any seen before these days’. The chronicler implies that the prince was unhealthy and overweight and that he enjoyed a certain promiscuity, by later comparing his behaviour before and after 1413. Joan must have watched over her stepson with a degree of unease, attempting to smooth out quarrels between him and his father as their relationship became difficult. The prince was angry not to have been chosen to lead an expedition to Aquitaine in 1412 and, given his military prowess and experience, it is interesting that the king opted against this. That summer, rumours circulated that the prince was planning to rebel and overthrow his father, but the letter he wrote in indignation from Coventry in June repudiates this and reaffirms his loyalty. Prince Henry’s reputed repentance at his father’s deathbed is perhaps the clearest indicator that his behaviour had been less than ideal and that it had put his father, and Joan, under considerable strain.
In the light of this, Henry’s ill health must have been an increasing concern for Joan. Having nursed one husband through his final years, she had witnessed the effects of debility and physical decline, which had transferred a degree of power and authority into her own hands. Her first husband’s death had made her regent of Brittany, overseeing her son’s inheritance and competently managing the financial and administrative aspects of rule. Then, she had still been comparatively young, young enough to remarry, and her widowhood had left her in a position of strength. The illness of Henry IV, however, was a different matter. She could expect no similar authority in the event of his demise; during his periods of incapacity she would have been sensitive to the mood of the court, of councillors looking to the future and preparing to transfer their allegiance to the Prince of Wales. Joan was a foreigner at the English court, no matter that she was also its queen. Power had been vested in her by virtue of her marriage and her personal relationship with Henry. During this uncertain time, she may have wondered about her future in the event of the king’s death. No doubt she prayed for him, sought out the best medical advice and soothed him the best she could. Certain events of the winter of 1406 certainly gave her a taste of her own vulnerability, a foreshadowing of things to come.
Henry and Joan spent Christmas at Eltham, but the festivities were overshadowed by cuts and financial restrictions imposed by Parliament, which Henry may have been unable to fight due to his poor health. One of them was aimed at Joan, specifying that she must surrender part of her income whilst living in the king’s household, meaning that she did not have to spend money on her own upkeep. When they were apart, she was afforded sufficient income for her household but Parliament was keen to cut the royal budget, perhaps in response to a shortfall in the coffers following the outlay required by her wedding, coronation and income. It was an undignified and restrictive move for a woman of her position. She was probably with Henry at Hertford Castle the following February and March, in an attempt to live more cheaply, and again that summer as he moved between Lancastrian properties.
Early in 1407, Henry’s weakened position may have led him to suggest, or at least sanction, the bill introduced by Archbishop Arundel, which confirmed the legitimisation of his Beaufort half-siblings but introduced a clause to bar them from inheriting the throne, to help clarify the future line of succession. However, it did not prove a popular move among his half-siblings, causing a rupture in the family that increasingly pushed the Beauforts to favour Henry, Prince of Wales over his father. The strong Henry of his youth would have dealt with these challenges, but his health was worsening and in June 1408 he fell into a coma. Although he recovered, there had been doubt about whether he was alive or dead, so a new doctor was summoned and his death was anticipated for the remainder of that year. Henry certainly believed that his end was imminent as he made his will in January 1409. He entrusted the archbishop with the payment of Joan’s dower when she became a widow. However, against expectations, he gradually improved and by the end of March was writing to Arundel that he was ‘in good health’. It must have come as a great relief to Joan.
The Close Rolls for this period give some idea of Joan’s business activities. In November 1408 she made arrangements for her properties at Odiam, near Southampton, and the following February she appears again in connection with her properties in and around Bristol. Some of these transactions also help locate Joan at specific times. On 28 May 1409, she was at Hertford Castle, where she arranged the tenancy of her manors in Wooton; and on 9 April 1410, she was at Chertsey Abbey, where the tenancy of her manor at Langley, in Kent, ‘by her castle of Ledes’, was given to a Thomas Lillebourne and Thomas Gloucester. By February 1411 she was at Langley in person, assigning manors to her esquire Thomas Chaucer, son of the poet, who had died around 1400. Thomas had made a successful marriage and received a large pension in 1399, as well as being chief butler to Henry IV and High Sheriff. That November, she signed grants for the keeping of Nottingham Castle whilst at Westminster Palace and early the following February was conducting business at Eltham.13
The Rolls also introduce some of the members of Joan’s household. In December 1408, John Fowler, clerk of the queen’s closet, was awarded an annual income of 100s, while the following spring William Porter was appointed as the yeoman ranger of her forests for life at a daily pay of 3d, and Robert Tyndale, her yeoman of the bed, was appointed parker of her Devizes estates. On 5 May 1411, Joan’s yeoman of the spicery, Richard Botiller, was awarded a robe, his keeping at the privy palace of Westminster and a daily salary of 6d, while the following February she made a grant to Henry Maiet, one of the clerks of her almonry. In March 1412, the queen was at Chertsey when she rewarded the steward of her household, Hugh Luttrell, with various offices, including that of Constable, the keeping of two forests and a castle: Sir Hugh was a descendant of Edward I and part of the family that had commissioned the famous Luttrell psalter eighty years before. A close friend of Anne of Bohemia and cousin to both Richard and Henry, he had been Joan’s steward since 1410. Joan also remembered those servants who had come with her to England from Brittany, in particular the Perians or Peryans, John and Joan. In December 1411, a grant was made to the Breton-born John Peryan, ‘for his services to the King and Queen’ and the following year a second grant was made to his wife Joan, ‘born in Brittany, one of the damsels’ of the queen’s household.14 A grant was also made by Joan to ‘her damsel’ Pernell Aldrewyche, who may have been another Breton. This belies the tension that had arisen as a result of her large retinue and its expenses: parliamentary demands for the expulsion of foreigners in the queen’s household were a regular challenge. In 1404, Joan agreed that ‘all French persons, Bretons, Lombards, Italians and Navarrese … be removed out of the palace from the King and Queen, except for the queen’s daughters’15 and also the removal of five key servants, Maria St Parensy, Nicholas Alderwyche and his wife, and John Perian and his wife. This was brought into effect at once, although the Lords permitted her to retain a number of existing staff, including a cook, chambermaids and nurses. It was not enough. The wider sense of distrust in Joan and her foreign favourites would never go away and ‘great discontents were engendered in the minds of all classes of men on account of the influx of foreigners which the king’s late marriage had introduced into the realm’.16
At some point in 1409 or before, Joan’s son John, Duke of Burgundy was married to Joan of France, a sister of Richard’s queen Isabelle, daughter of Charles VI. This aligned him with Henry’s enemies. The long-standing Anglo-French antagonism had reared its head again soon after Joan’s arrival in England: there was an attack upon Plymouth in August, merchant ships seized in the Channel that autumn and in December the Count of Saint-Pol, who had been married to Joan of Kent’s daughter, Maud Holland, joined with the French to attack the Isle of Wight. This assault was repelled but it did not prevent the French from continuing to raid the south coast through the spring of 1404. Then, in May, a fleet of around 300 ships from Brittany arrived off the coast near Blackpool Sands, under the command of William du Chastel. In response, the local people gathered by the causeway on the beach and repelled the invaders with arrows and stones; prisoners were taken and du Chastel was killed. A service of thanksgiving was held at Westminster Abbey but this continual sparring only contributed to the existing mood of hostility and resentment towards the French, of which Joan must have been very aware. Having acted as regent for her son in Brittany and then married Henry against the odds, her loyalties must have been torn. In spite of the raids that year, she sent John 76,000 livres raised from her rents in Normandy and her brother, Charles of Navarre. Early in the following year, she influenced Henry ‘with mediation and earnest solicitation’17 to forgive and release the Breton captives held in Dartmouth.
Joan’s role was also to oversee and arrange the futures of young people in her care. In 1408 she was granted the marriage of Humphrey, son of the late Earl of Stafford, who was only a year old when his father died at Shrewsbury and was made a royal ward. He would be married in 1424 to Anne Neville, Katherine Swynford’s granddaughter and Henry’s cousin once removed. Joan was also able to intercede and ask for mercy in specific cases: at her request, a pardon was granted to John Boys of Higham on 24 October 1409 for all his treasons, insurrections, felonies and trespasses ‘on account of the sincere affection which the king bears to his lieges’. This may have been the same John Boys who appears as a London mercer in the records for the non-payment of debts. Joan’s specific connection with him is unclear.18
Another mystery arises in 1412, concerning one of Joan’s younger sons. On 20 May 1412, safe conduct was granted for her third son, Gilles, to visit her to ‘tarry and return’ with twenty men and horses. Gilles was then 18 and would die that July: the cause of his death is unknown and it is unclear whether he was already ill and wanted to be reunited with his mother or if he even arrived in England at all. Wherever he was at the time, the news of Gilles’ death would have been a terrible blow to his mother. This was also the year in which Joan sent a gift to her eldest son, Jean: a jewelled tableau depicting the Trinity, which had been part of Anne of Bohemia’s trousseau. Four stories tall and made from gold overlaid with white enamel, it included images of Christ and a range of saints set amid sapphires, rubies and pearls.
Further bad news was expected that summer as the king’s health took another sharp decline. Having been forced to place power in the hands of his son in Parliament, Henry retreated from public life for a period of recovery through the end of 1410 and first half of 1411. By the summer, he had rallied enough to consider an invasion of France. Ships were even ordered to be ready to sail that September, but Henry’s health, or his fears that Parliament might challenge him in his absence, led him to call the venture off. One source suggests that the Prince of Wales asked his father to abdicate in his favour at this juncture, though this cannot be verified, as a second account places this event in 1413. If the prince did request this in 1411, even if the king felt his son capable of it, with the backing of the Beauforts, it would have been reason enough for him to remain in England to preserve his position. A letter the young prince Henry sent the king in June 1412 denied claims that he was ‘affected with a bloody desire for the crown’ and was planning ‘an unbelievably horrible crime and would rise up against my own father’, but the fact that he needed to refute this at all might imply that such claims were circulating and that the Prince feared the king would believe them. At the end of the month they were publicly reconciled at Westminster, where the Prince of Wales knelt before his father, who was confined to a chair.
Henry spent Christmas 1412 with Joan at Eltham. In the New Year, he was too ill to attend Parliament and at the end of February he was transported by river to Westminster Abbey to make an offering at the shrine of Edward the Confessor. There, taken ill, he was conducted to the Jerusalem chamber inside the abbot’s lodgings. Several chroniclers, including the French Monstrelet and Waurin, along with the English Capgrave, recount that Prince Henry was summoned to his father’s side as he lay dying. Joan must either have accompanied her husband on that day, or been close at hand, for as she was at his side when he died on 20 March at the age of 45. Henry’s body lay in state in Westminster Abbey before being taken down to Canterbury, where it was buried in the Trinity Chapel on 18 June. Joan’s tenure as queen was over, but it was the start of a new chapter of her life.
The very day after Henry’s death, his son made an ominous move against his stepmother. Back in November 1412, a case had arisen regarding the manor of Halloughton in Nottinghamshire. The house was a narrow two- or three-storey building built by the nearby church in the thirteenth century with a tower and fourteenth-century glass in the window of the great hall. The manor had been granted to Joan by her husband, but this had been disputed by the heirs of one Ralph Harselyn and had gone to court. Joan had been represented by attorney Thomas Smyth, but she had also attended in person in order to state that she had ‘the manor by the grant of Henry IV by letters patent’. The matter had been settled in her favour but now, on the first day of Henry V’s rule, those letters were revoked.19 That October, Henry overturned another of his father’s rulings, by which Joan lost the rents from the manor of Michelhampton. If Henry took with one hand, though, he gave with another, assigning Joan an income from a number of priories across the country the following January, but it was a sign that her property and estates were no longer securely within her grip.
Joan still had a ceremonial role to perform. Not only was she the ‘king’s mother’ but, in the absence of a new queen, she was still the first lady of the land. On 9 April, amid unprecedented storms and snow, her eldest stepson was crowned Henry V, and his coronation was followed by the usual feasting and jousting. Two years later, he took his formal leave from her before sailing for France and she was part of the celebrations for his return from Agincourt. Her emotions must have been mixed though, as her own son Arthur had been wounded and taken prisoner by the English. No doubt Joan attempted to intercede on his behalf but Arthur would remain in custody for the next five years. The battle had also left her daughter Marie a widow with five small children, with the death of her husband Jean, Duke of Alençon, and claimed the life of Joan’s own brother, Charles of Navarre.
Joan did not marry again. To do so would have brought her the protection of a husband but it would also have lowered her status. As a queen dowager, and in her mid-forties, she would have had to find a suitor of royal status in order to maintain her position, yet she was a desirable prospect for an older husband. Eighteenth-century historian and author Horace Walpole identified a set of verses by Joan’s contemporary, Edward, Duke of York describing her in the tradition of courtly love. Although the subject of the poem is the Queen of England, York’s death date of 1415 make it clear that these must refer to Joan. In alliterative praise, she was a ‘bright blossom of benignity, of figure fairest and freshest of days’. He continues:
Your womanly beauty delicious
Hath me all bent unto its chain
But grant to me your love gracious
My heart will melt as snow in rain
If ye but wist my life and knew
Of all the pains that I y-feel
I wis ye would upon me rue
Although your heart were made of steel.20
Yet remarriage does not appear to have been a priority for Joan. As was the case with many royal widows, she may have intended to live out her life in quiet devotion, at Hertford, Leicester or the traditional queen’s dower property of Havering atte Bowe. It was a wise and dignified move, but, as it happened, her future turned out to be far quieter than she planned.
On 18 October 1414, Joan was at the traditional Lancastrian base of Hertford Castle, a place full of memories of happier times with her husband, but she was not to enjoy the property for long. The following year, she was given the manor of Langley ‘in recompense of the castle of Hertford which Henry IV granted her for life and which the king with her assent has taken into his hands’. Joan may have given her assent to the swap but it is difficult to know just how happy she was with it. Clearly, she was expecting a change in her status but, in the absence of a new queen, she had little reason to anticipate that she would be removed from her home so quickly. However, when Henry was preparing to invade France in June 1415, he did give permission for ‘the king’s mother Joan, queen of England, to dwell with her men, servants and minsters within the castles of Windsor, Wallingford, Berkhamsted and Hertford while the King is on his present voyage beyond the seas’.21 This implies that Joan was still able to visit Hertford even though her ownership had been revoked. It is not clear from these entries whether Joan was better or worse off in terms of property, or the circumstances under which she agreed to surrender Hertford Castle, or the reasons Henry gave for it. The action her stepson was to take four years later, though, left no doubt of his hostility or his motivation.
By 1419, Henry V was determined to marry. Negotiations with France for a suitable princess had been dragging out for years and he was now 33. To marry, he required a dowry of 40,000 crowns from an already overstretched treasury, and he turned to underhand methods in order to obtain it. There had been a long literary association between Brittany and witchcraft, in romances and Breton lais, and a continuing hostility between the two countries. From rumours that Louis, Duke of Orléans caused Charles VI’s madness through sorcery, to the eleventh-century necromancer priest Alberic of Brittany, from Arthurian legends and the Lais of Marie de France to the later reputation of Gilles de Rais, Breton culture abounded with tales of magic, werewolves and fairies. The widowed Joan was an easy target. On 25 September, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, who had been in the position since the death of Arundel in 1414, sent instructions to English priests to pray for the king, who was in danger from the ‘suspicious deeds of necromancers’. At the time, Joan was at Havering atte Bowe in Essex, a small but well-situated property that had been part of the queen’s dower for the last century and a half. She may well have been in mourning for earlier that year she had received the news of the death of her youngest daughter, Blanche, Countess of Armagnac. Blanche passed away at the age of 23 or 24, some time before her husband remarried that May. The door had also been closed on an earlier generation that spring when Henry IV’s first mother-in-law, Joan de Bohun, had died around the age of 72. This breach with the past, coupled with her stepson’s callous actions, made this year a turning point for Joan.
Witchcraft was a real and present danger in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Court records show that peopled actually believed that crops and animals could be blighted, infants might fail and die, wars be lost and milk curdle as the result of a witch’s curse. Most of the cases from this period deal with the concept of maleficium, meaning mischief or evil doing with intent to cause death or harm property. Yet this fear was also a convenient political tool. Powerful women in particular could become the target of witchcraft charges, when there were no other means, moral or legal, with which to attack them. In Joan’s case, the deciding factor was that she lacked the support of a powerful husband. No one would have dared level such accusations during the life of the previous king, but now, as a widow far from her home country, speaking with an accent of one of England’s enemies, Joan was vulnerable. She may have protested her innocence and loyalty, or decided it was wiser to remain quiet and not antagonise her stepson further, when he was holding all the cards. The ‘evidence’ against Joan had been given by a friar from her household, a man by the name of John Randolf, who claimed she had imagined the king’s death ‘in the most high and horrible manner that could be recounted’. This added an accusation of witchcraft to that of treason. The exact form of Joan’s supposed betrayal is unclear: whether she was meant to have spoken indiscreetly in the confessional, or hired a necromancer or actively planned against Henry. Tellingly, if these details were specified, they have not survived: it was in Henry’s interests to preserve their ambiguity. Two days later, the royal council seized Joan’s possessions and dowry properties, estates and lands. On 1 October, troops arrived at Havering and she was arrested.
In the interests of fairness, the possibility of Joan’s guilt must be considered. Removing from the equation the anachronistic question of the existence of magic, what is the likelihood that Joan had actually wished for Henry’s death, in any real sense, or expressed such in any indiscretion? The use of a friar as witness against her was a clever move for it implied that such secrets might have come out in the confessional, making the charges more likely to stick. It would seem implausible that the widowed Joan was attempting to raise an army against Henry from her dower properties, or speaking openly of her longing for his demise. In a practical sense, it was upon Henry V’s goodwill that Joan’s present life depended. As the new king, he had her welfare in his hands and, judging from their history, she should have been able to expect fair treatment from him. If she had hoped for his death, who exactly would she have wished to see replace him? Short of a full-scale foreign invasion, the only realistic alternative was Edmund Mortimer, fifth Earl of March, then in his late twenties. Mortimer had already been the figurehead of one plot, just four years earlier, but he had informed Henry of the plans and his co-conspirators in the Southampton Plot had been executed. This may have been the background to Henry’s misplaced fear that Joan was plotting against him. Yet what could she have possibly gained from it? It seems more likely that this was a cynical move by the king intended to exploit a widow’s position to raise the necessary funds for his marriage.
At the time of her arrest, an inventory of Joan’s possessions was made. Its details shed light on the blend of religious and secular wealth in the dowager queen’s household, as well as her personal tastes and the potential wealth her stepson may have intended to liquidise for his use. Taken from Joan’s possession were a gold tablet bearing the images of virgins, St Katherine and St John the Baptist; tablets for celebrating mass with a crucifix and images of the Virgin Mary and St John; a chalice with the image of the Trinity and a Sarum Missal containing religious texts. She also owned two cameos, or carved stones from Israel, set in gold, with two gold chains and twelve pearls; three pairs of gold beads, coral set in silver, a silver serpent ring, an amber ring, a stone the colour of the sea and another ring with amber and beryl ‘knit’ together with a thread, a single silver buckle. Two gold spoons in a silk case embroidered with the arms of Brittany spoke of her past life and her ties to her sons. Those possessions with secular symbolism may have been gifts from her first husband, or from Henry, including a gold chain with a florette inscribed with the motto ‘amer et servier’ [sic] (to love and serve) and a gold brooch in the shape of a heart, inscribed ‘à vous me lie’ (binds me to you).
Joan’s household contained a silver sconce, or candle holder, decorated with pelicans. She kept her pens in a silver and gilt ‘penner’ attached to her girdle, which bore the motto ‘God make us goode men’. She had silver cups with enamelled green lids, or decorated with leaves and acorns, stars and roses; small silver bottles in leather cases lined with silk; a silver tester for rose water; silver forks with dragon’s heads; an engraved ivory tablet. The only item of superstitious value was an ‘adamant’ stone, a very hard stone like a diamond, sometimes used in medieval times to confuse or block magnets.22
Joan’s wardrobe was sombre, suitable for a widow and suggestive of religious devotion. There was one russet gown and a russet coat of narrow shape lined with polecat fur costing 13s 4d, an ancient russet cloak, two lambskins, a black mantle with lambskin worth 20s and a matching black gown, an ancient kirtle of black russet and a surcoat of black lyre. One splash of colour could be found in the red nightcap made in the Breton style. There was also a mattress and a number of blankets, a bedding set of red worsted with a single canopy, coverlet and two curtains, and another of green worsted with three curtains, two covers and a coverlet. Also listed were a white and red tapestry covering and a green cushion, coffers, table cloths, napkins, linen and towels of Paris work. Finally, the inventory included four quires of paper and various other quires and books on ‘art and other sciences’.23
Joan was never given a trial. She was imprisoned in turn at Rotherhithe, Dartford, Rochester and Leeds Castle before being moved to Pevensey Castle, a remote moated location on the Sussex coast, where a Roman fort had been constructed on a spit of land. Joan was permitted to live with a degree of luxury as befitted her status as a former queen, with a harp and songbirds, gold girdles for her dresses, rosaries and chains, eating green ginger with silver gilt knives. Her clothing was of silk, fur and good-quality Flanders linen, she drank Gascon and Rhenish wine and she owned at least two books: a thirteenth-century psalter in which she wrote her name, and a Book of Hours now in the Philadelphia Free Library, which has been associated with her.24 There were probably more in her collection. She was also allowed visitors, entertaining her brother-in-law the Duke of Gloucester, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the wealthy Bishop of Windsor. One guest in particular enjoyed his visit so much that he stayed for nine months. Was this simply because he was Joan’s friend, or is there a possibility that the widowed queen indulged in a discreet love affair during her captivity?
Joan’s ‘close friend’, as he is described in the records, was Thomas de Camoys, first Baron Camoys. His connection with the dowager queen went back to the first days of her arrival in the country, and with him she would have been able to recall happier times. Born in the early 1350s, he had served in France and Scotland as a young man before transferring his loyalty to Henry IV, who had trusted him to accompany Joan to England from Brittany. He had fought at Agincourt, commanding the rear of the army and, the following April, was made a Knight of the Garter in recognition. Camoys had been married twice, his second wife being the widow of Henry Hotspur, and owned estates and property in Oxfordshire and West Sussex. His second wife, Elizabeth, had died in April 1417, so Camoys had been a widower for three years by the time he arrived to stay under Joan’s roof on Friday 9 April 1420. He did not leave until Friday 21 January 1421. Five days later he was back for another week’s visit. It may well be that Joan was able to derive some comfort from the companionship of Camoys: two old friends, now both bereft of their spouses, enjoying simple pleasures together. If the relationship developed into anything else, the two people involved left no record of it. The only clue to Joan’s feelings is her donning of mourning cloths in the wake of Camoys’ death on 28 March, just two months after leaving her company. In recognition of the loss of her ‘close friend’, she was issued with 7yd of black cloth, with satin and fur for her cape and collar. By this time, Camoys would have been aged around 70, but even so, his death may not have been anticipated, for a record from 1422 suggests he died without having made a will.
Joan may have been able to enjoy a little company but she had lost control of her dower and estates, to say nothing of her own personal liberty. The bill for her upkeep in confinement amounted to an annual £1,000, which was nothing in comparison with the revenue Henry now derived from seizing her dower lands. Over the course of the next three years, her former properties appear in the Close Rolls: Cossham, Lugdarsale Manor and the Priory of Clatford, all in Wiltshire, in February 1420; Wedon Pinkeneye, Northampton, in June; the Lincoln Priory of Spalding in July; the Hundred of Ongar in Essex and Hoggeston in Buckinghamshire in November; the Priory of Creting and Everdon in December; and many more, all ‘lately assigned in dower to Joan, Queen of England, and now seized into the king’s hands for certain causes.’ Those ‘certain causes’ were the wooing of a French princess.
The injustice of this treatment seems obvious to a modern readership. It may have then, too. This was a time when the status of women was so low that the Church was undecided over whether or not they possessed souls; when women were defined by their male relatives, domestic violence was encouraged and male-dominated gynaecological teaching held women up as permanently sexually frustrated. Yet there were many examples of strong women defying the odds, running businesses, leading families and entering traditionally male professions. Women do appear in court records to argue against matters of law, although they are usually represented by a male attorney; they did defy their parents to marry where they chose. Equally, it was common for widows who did not intend to remarry, especially those of noble rank, to accept a quieter life, taking on practical roles of childcare and support, or to adopt a religious path by entering a nunnery or living as a vowess. This sometimes helped the next generation financially, as assets could be transferred and wealth utilised, as in the cases of Elizabeth Wydeville and Cecily Neville a century later. However, the inclusion of the charge of witchcraft against Joan indicates that she would not have gone willingly, or that Henry was looking for a pretext to strip her of her assets.
It is difficult to know just how Joan felt about this process. She had gone from having the status of a queen of England to that of a prisoner, and may have understood that this was purely for financial reasons. It was quite common for widows, even former consorts, to adopt a quiet retirement, but that was a function of, and served to increase, the respect they were held in. It also raises questions about Joan’s former relationship with Henry V, which had given every appearance of being harmonious, even warm. Because she never had a trial, Joan was never given the opportunity to defend herself against what was a damaging charge with potentially lethal consequences. The stigma of her imprisonment would be attached to her name forever, a permanent slur on her good name. And in this era, a good name, or good fame, was everything. While the life she led in confinement may not have vastly differed from the frugal life of a widow, Joan’s mobility was impaired and she was denied her freedom. Some historians have interpreted the inclusion of stables in her Pevensey household as a sign that she was able to travel, but every household significant enough to reside in a castle would have had horses to enable the delivery of messages or the transportation of supplies. During this period, Joan was denied the opportunity to return to Brittany, had she wished to do so, although she did later elect to spend her remaining years in England. It is also unclear exactly how widely the news of Joan’s arrest spread: it would have been the perfect opportunity for her eldest son John V to capitalise on existing Anglo-Breton hostilities, or for her younger sons to object. Perhaps Joan decided, stoically and pragmatically, to sit out the injustice, in the hope that her stepson came to his senses. In reality, she had little choice.
Joan’s imprisonment is a stark reminder of the status of women and their complete legal, financial and practical dependence upon men. Medieval society followed an Aristotelian model of thought that explained the female body in terms of imperfect masculinity, so that women were men with certain aspects lacking, relegating them to the rank of inferior beings. Even a queen was defined by her marital status, subject to the authority of her husband, who might choose to exercise physical, sexual or mental cruelty, and controlled every aspect of her life, including her purse strings. A married woman was legally a chattel of her husband, unable to own any possessions and forbidden from making a will. The exceptions in the power struggle were women who had entered the Church or widows, who could exercise considerably more control over their destinies, even enter trade guilds, although widows were still defined by the rank of their late husband. In theory, Joan’s former status should have protected her. She could not rise higher up the social scale than queenship and that placed her above every other person in the country. Except one. Her gender still made it impossible for her to defend herself against the attack of a powerful man when that man was a king. In terms of protocol, she was accorded the respect that her position demanded but it was no real protection once Henry had decided to act against her.
At almost every instance in the history of the Lancastrian dynasty to this point, the narrative of the white swan is dominated by that of the red rose. The medieval world, with its male-centric culture, its prescriptive canon and religious law, continually acted to suppress the ability of women to speak, to stand on their own two feet or to challenge inequality. Indeed, since female inferiority was dictated by the Bible, it was the case that women frequently accepted their lot as the only one they knew. Those who did speak up, identified as different or attempted to take male roles were treated with suspicion, even demonised, like Joan of Arc and the visionary Margery Kempe. Yet women can hardly be blamed for not being feminists in advance of the concept, for not stepping outside their time frame or not possessing an anachronistic sense of their own worth. There had been times in Joan’s life when she was able to exert her will, to shape her destiny, when the letters she wrote to Henry IV before their marriage briefly forced the female narrative to the fore, and her actions helped direct the course of national history. Nevertheless, she was powerless to speak in her own defence as an imprisoned widow, pointing towards the conclusion that any power exercised by women was something of an illusion, which they enjoyed because their men gave them permission to do so. The female experience was inevitably one of restriction created by a structure catering to the empowerment of men.
But this presents an unnecessarily negative view of women’s lives. While the men may have held all the political cards, this interpretation underestimates the abilities of women to make their voices heard in a number of arenas, particularly behind the scenes, in the case of Lancastrian wives and queens. The dynasty is full of examples of powerful partnerships, of strong and successful marriages where each partner adopted the allotted gender role and complimented each other. Where men granted their women the ability to influence them, it was in recognition of their abilities and wisdom, of their personal skills and the different perspective they could offer. While history records the processes of masculine decision-making, of laws and courts, of Parliaments and petitions, coronations and battlefields, it has not retained the nature of the female influence, which has been essentially an oral tradition, through the personal interaction of man and wife, mother and son. Women made their opinions felt at the dinner table, in the chamber, in bed, and the nature of their relationships determined the extent of their influence. Joan’s case reveals that for all her status, her power was essentially embodied in her person; the love of her husband placed her in a position of strength which was lost upon his death and the end of their relationship. She had no comparable power over her stepson, whose desire to marry was greater than the respect she elicited in him. And often it was the case that one woman’s fortunes fell as another’s rose, due to circumstances beyond their control. The arc of the female narrative is a complex one, often delineating solitude rather than solidarity, as was the case with Joan of Navarre and her successor Catherine of Valois, her niece and the next English queen. Joan had to accept that the wheel of fortune had turned for her and her decline was a function of another woman’s rise.
1 Poem attributed to John Lydgate.
2 CSP, Milan, 1399.
3 Ibid.
4 Hilton.
5 Gathorne-Hardy.
6 Lawrance.
7 Monstrelet.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Mortimer.
11 Rymer.
12 Ibid.
13 CCR, Henry IV, 1408–11.
14 Ibid.
15 Strickland.
16 Ibid.
17 Rymer.
18 CCR, Henry IV, October 1409.
19 Ibid., 1412.
20 Strickland.
21 Patent Rolls, Henry IV, 1414, 1415.
22 Myers.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.