The year 1402 was a pivotal transitional period for Joan. Her secretive matrimonial negotiations with Henry IV resulted in their proxy marriage in April. From that point she was effectively his bride and queen consort, yet their marriage needed to be formalised by her physical presence in the realm to undertake the ceremonies of a royal wedding and coronation which marked her installation into the queen's office as well as consummation of the marriage to make it fully valid. Yet she could not leave to start a new life as England's queen until her role as Brittany's duchess and regent was completed, which took her until the end of the year; the winter was not an ideal time to attempt a Channel crossing. Indeed a party headed by Henry's half-brothers Henry Beaufort, the bishop of Lincoln, and the earl of Somerset, as well as the earl of Worcester, had been sent to Brittany to collect Joan at the end of autumn 1402, but the bishop wrote from Plymouth on 9 December that they had to abandon the voyage and return to port as “le vent soit si contrarie” (“the wind was so contrary”).1 While Joan might have had a reasonable crossing similar to the smooth late-summer sailing up the Bay of Biscay for her first wedding if she had left in the summer of 1402 when Henry expected her, by the time she actually left in January 1403, she faced stormy seas—perhaps an omen of the challenges she would face as Henry's consort.
Joan's journey began when she left Nantes on 26 December—she passed the new year in Vannes, a location where she had spent a considerable amount of time, one of Jean IV's primary residences and the birthplace of her eldest son, now Jean V. Joan and her party, including the courtiers who were accompanying her to England and her two youngest daughters, Marguerite and Blanche, then travelled on to the extreme northwestern point of the duchy, at Camaret, near Brest, where they took ship with the English fleet sent to bring the new queen to England on 13 January. Yet what should have been a brief journey ended up being an extended and challenging one—the party finally landed on 19 January at Falmouth, directly north across the Channel in the West Country, rather than Southampton, the centrally located port city just south of Winchester, where the wedding was set to take place. This necessitated Henry to rush westward to meet his bride at Exeter on 30/31 January and the entire royal party made a long and somewhat expensive journey overland via Bridport, Dorchester, and Salisbury to Winchester, where the wedding finally took place on 7 February.2
Henry IV's wedding to Joan at Winchester Cathedral was a deliberately impressive occasion. Winchester was strategically chosen for several reasons—on a practical level it was near the port of Southampton, the bride's intended landing site. Symbolically, it was a location with a very long history of royal events—from baptisms and burials to coronations and of course weddings as the former capital of Wessex and England. As Henry was a king who was not entirely stable on this throne—the first of a new dynasty, whom many believed was a usurper, connecting himself with centuries of royal history was a way to stress his legitimacy and continuity with the past. He was not the only king to use this strategy—Henry VII deliberately chose Winchester for the site of the birth and baptism of his heir Arthur in 1486 to reinforce the establishment of his own new dynasty. The first regnant queen Mary Tudor also chose Winchester as the location for her own wedding in 1554 for similar reasons to Henry IV—proximity to the coast and connections to the past to strengthen her position, which had already been challenged by a usurping cousin and Wyatt's Rebellion. In Mary's case, she may have also chosen Winchester as it was far from the capital to avoid any potential backlash from Londoners against her new Spanish husband and his sizable foreign entourage on his arrival. While Henry IV may have been less concerned about a negative reaction to his Iberian-Breton bride, she too had a large number of foreigners accompanying her, so he may have felt it safer to bring her to London for her coronation once she had been firmly established as his new wife.
Henry was determined to welcome his bride to England with style—as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 7, he spent considerable sums on jewels and gifts for his bride as well as cloth of gold for her dresses. The event itself was also splendid, with expenditure for a runner of striped cloth to process down in the cathedral, which had been magnificently enhanced by the current bishop, William of Wykeham. The feast after the event, which likely took place in the bishop's palace next door, featured several courses of delicacies such as cream of almonds, pears in spiced syrup; a range of meats including cygnets, pheasants, and roasted venison; an equally splendid three-course fish menu for the clerics in attendance; and elaborate subtleties, effectively edible sculptures, in shapes such as a crowned eagle, a symbol repeatedly used by Henry which features on the couple's joint tomb at Canterbury.3 The feast cost £522 12s—indeed Henry spent so much on the event that he needed loans of 500 marks from William Wykeham, the bishop of Winchester, and another 200 from Thomas Nevyle, the prior of the cathedral.4 Yet the expenditure was all a necessary part of projecting majesty—through a lavish royal wedding and Joan's coronation at Westminster which followed later in the month, Henry was not only affirming her place as his bride and queen, but reaffirming his own standing as the rightful monarch of England.
The couple stayed for a few days in Winchester after the wedding and then headed towards the capital on 10 February, travelling slowly with their entourage and staying one night at Bishop Wykeham's impressive castle at Farnham with its recently renovated Great Hall. Their immediate destination was not the city of London itself but Henry's favourite residence at Eltham to the east—Henry's development of the palace, including the additions he made for his new wife, will be discussed in detail in Chapter 7. While still at Winchester, summons had been sent out to the nobility to attend the new queen's coronation on 25 February at Westminster.5 The couple travelled the short distance from Eltham to Westminster on the day before her coronation, where she appears to have made a formal entry according to a near contemporary source which notes:
she [Joan] was brought to london And there the Maire and the Aldermen resceyved hyre in the moost worthy wyse that they coude and rood with hyre thurgh london to Westmynster And there she was crowned queen And there the king made a solempne feste in the worship of hire and of all the straungers that come with hyre.6
While this account comes from a sixteenth-century chronicle and thus was not an eyewitness account of the event, it does suggest that Joan was received in London and crowned with considerable pomp and ceremony. A comprehensive contemporary record of the coronation event itself is also lacking, but we can surmise a great deal from the Liber Regalis, a fourteenth-century manual for royal ceremonial which served as a foundation for the later medieval English monarchy.7 If Joan was garbed according to the instructions of the Liber Regalis, she would have been wearing a purple tunic and robe “of one texture without any other working on it”, with her hair loose and unbound, despite the fact that the twice-married queen was no longer a maiden. The key elements of the coronation are prayers said over the queen, the anointing with chrism or holy oil, and the conferral of the queen's regalia: the crown, ring, sceptre, and rod—although Joan is pictured holding an orb as well in the near contemporary illustration of her coronation in the Beauchamp Pageant manuscript.8
The Beauchamp Pageant manuscript also shows the festivities after the ceremonial, depicting a tournament in which Richard Beauchamp acted as the queen's champion, with Joan herself shown in the royal box watching the display of arms. Nor was Richard the only Beauchamp to be involved in Joan's coronation—his mother Margaret, countess of Warwick, appears to have served as chief pantler at Joan's coronation.9 It was not unusual for a Beauchamp to fill this role at a coronation feast as they had a traditional hold on this honour, which was associated with whomever held the manor of Kibworth-Beauchamp. Margaret's husband, Thomas, had been chief pantler at Henry IV's coronation and Walter de Beauchamp served as pantler for Eleanor of Provence's coronation in 1236, the first mention of this role in English records of such a feast.10 However, the fact that Margaret was a woman made it unusual—she may have been allowed to undertake this role as she held the manor after her husband's death in 1406, or there is the possibility that Joan was served by women at her feast as John, Lord Latymer, was paid 40 marks to release the almoner's dish and his family's traditional occupation of the almoner's role at Joan's coronation. It is thus possible that a woman occupied this position as well, creating an unusual feminine twist on these important ceremonies to install the new queen.11
Another tradition associated with the queen's coronation was initiating her role as intercessor, a central facet of medieval queenship. John Carmi Parsons notes that a new queen was “expected to perform” acts of grace and ask for pardons as Eleanor of Provence did on her coronation in 1236 and as French queens did, as they were “specifically granted the power to pardon criminals as part of their coronation honours”.12 Queenly intercession was seen as a key aspect of the female component of monarchy and an expected way for royal women to engage politically, following the models of the biblical queen Esther and the Virgin Mary, the ultimate mediatrix. Joan's predecessors had been active in this regard—the intercession of Philippa of Hainault and Anne of Bohemia was both significant in number and in popular memory, taking on quasi-legendary overtones in contemporary representations.13 While this has been dismissed by some scholars as either a face-saving mechanism for the king or a purely traditional ritual which did not signify queenly agency, Anthony Musson notes that “it underestimates the numbers of people for whom the queen routinely sought to intercede” and the means through which her role as intercessor and influence on the king gave her enhanced political standing at court as her mediation was greatly valued and sought after.14 As we have seen in the previous chapter, Joan already had experience in this regard during her marriage to Jean IV and immediately became involved in intercession and petitioning, both for the benefit of others and for herself. She also continued to intercede in Brittany even after leaving the duchy, leveraging her position as dowager duchess and mother of the current duke to ask for the pardon of Guillaume Berthelemer, in conjunction with Yolande of Aragon, in December 1405.15
Joan's supplication can be broadly placed into two categories: a means of addressing/righting wrongs or crimes and as a means of securing benefits or acting as a patron. Her first act of intercession came before she even arrived on England's shores in early January 1403 and involved seeking assistance for Navarrese merchants whose ships had been captured by an English captain—it was noted that on Joan's special request, restitution should be made to the merchants and any who refused to do so would be arrested.16 Shortly after her wedding and coronation, Joan also secured several pardons for John Bayly, Thomas Gilmyn of Tetbury in Gloucester, and for Henry Ade, who was accused of being a counterfeiter.17 In 1404 she secured some significant pardons, one for Thomas, the abbot of Beeleigh, one for Geoffrey, the abbot of St John, and another for Maud de Vere, countess of Oxford, who had all been involved in a conspiracy against Henry IV based on the premise that Richard II had survived and would return to retake his crown.18 James Ross has suggested that Joan may have intervened in these cases as the conspirators had been “duped by her kinsman, the duke of Orleans” who they believed would assist them, or that Henry may have encouraged Joan to get involved in these cases to increase her popularity.19 Alternatively, Joan may have intervened on her own initiative to demonstrate her political engagement and influence in a prominent case, as well as securing a more tangible benefit, the goods and chattels of Abbot Geoffrey which he had forfeited as a part of his prosecution, which she petitioned for in connection with the pardon.20
While Joan did not ask for a large number of pardons, she continued to seek them throughout her husband's reign, asking for the pardon of Thomas Barker in October 1406, John Boye of Higham in October 1409, and John Saghier in October 1411—it is possible that the timing of these pardons was linked to the anniversary of Henry IV's coronation, which took place in October 1399.21 One particularly interesting case in February 1408 involved pardons for several of her own tenants in Thorpe Satchville, Leicestershire.22 In this particular case, Nicholas Holt, William Bate, Richard Barsby, John Dalby, William Cook, and John Green were all arrested and tried for the death of Richard Bradford and Robert Webster. The two victims had been invited to dine with Nicholas Holt but were then taken prisoner and put in chains, and then the group, “taking upon themselves the royal power and without any legal authority”, effectively tried and condemned Bradford and Webster, beheading them and sending their heads to Leicester.23 Yet Joan interceded to secure their release both as queen and as their liege lord as they were tenants on her dower lands.
This connects with another element of Joan's intercessory activity, acting as a patron or as an aspect of “good ladyship” to secure benefits for others, or again for herself. In chapters 6 and 7 we will explore this further in terms of the gifts, lands, annuities, and positions that Joan used her influence to obtain for those in her service or affinity. She also interceded to help those who were not directly connected to her gain benefits as well, acting as an effective patron. There are two excellent examples of this in 1403 at the start of her tenure: a license granted at her supplication for the king's clerk William Aghton, parson of St Peter's Cornhill in London, and three others to found a perpetual fraternity and guild, and another petition on behalf of the “chancellors, doctors, masters, bachelors and other graduates in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge” to sue for benefices in England, Wales, and Ireland.24 She also wisely interceded to assist those who could help her, such as Sir John Tiptoft. At Joan's request, the revenues of the prévôté of Entre-deux-Mers in Gascony were given to Tiptoft in September 1408, and the following year, as we will see in Chapter 5, Tiptoft argued strenuously to rectify the queen's difficulties with her dower to stabilise the finances of her household.25 Beyond her efforts on behalf of others, Joan frequently petitioned on her own business, of which we will see considerable evidence in the next two chapters, to complain about insufficient returns from her dower, to petition for wardships, to defend her rights to lands and prerogatives that she felt belonged to her, and to ask for lands or goods forfeited by those condemned, such as her request for the Isle of Wight and Carisbrooke Castle, which belonged to the disgraced duke of York, in 1405.26
In addition to adapting to her new position as queen of England, Joan also had to take on another new role, that of stepmother to Henry IV's children by his first wife, Mary de Bohun, who had died in 1394, well before his accession. Both Joan and Henry had four sons nearly identical in age: Prince Henry (b.1386), Thomas (b.1387), John (b.1389), and Humphrey (b.1390). Henry had only two daughters—the eldest was Blanche, who was born in 1392, the same year as Joan's daughter Marguerite who came with her to England; however, as Blanche left in 1402 to wed Louis of Bavaria, the two stepsisters never met. Joan's own daughter Blanche also came to England, and it is possible that Marguerite and Blanche of Brittany formed some kind of relationship with Henry's youngest daughter, Philippa, who was born in 1394, putting her between the two Breton sisters in age. Philippa, along with her brothers John and Humphrey, attended their father's wedding to Joan in 1403, and the two boys gave their new stepmother a gift on the day. While Prince Henry did not attend, he did send his father a letter noting “that I moste desirid of the whyche to see that joyfulle day of youre mariage had ben on” and wished the new couple well “Besechyng Godde in all wyse my sovereign lorde to save ande kepe you body ande sowle ande sendde you in thys blissid sacrament of mariage joye, prosperite, longe to endure”.27
While Joan was now the matriarch of a combined group of 15 children and stepchildren, she and Henry had no children of their own during their ten-year marriage. Indeed, contemporary chronicles noted this, such as Thomas Walsingham who commented,
In 1403 after the feast of the purification a new queen came to England. She came from smaller Brittany to greater Britain, from a dukedom to a kingdom, from a fierce tribe to a peace-loving people, and I hope her coming was a good omen. She had formerly been married to the noble John (IV) de Montfort, duke of Brittany, to whom she had borne children of both sexes. But to Henry, king of England, whom she now married, she bore no children at all.28
However, another contemporary account of the royal marriage from the anonymous “Northern Chronicle” claims that Joan “genuit duos abortivos”, perhaps two miscarriages or stillbirths, although there is no additional evidence to confirm this claim.29 Yet, the lack of children to the royal couple could be seen as a blessing. If Joan had children with Henry, it might have complicated the succession, creating a cadet line which might have later used the idea of porphytogeniture, or preference given to children born in the reign of their father, and their fully royal blood to contest the rights of Henry's de Bohun sons. While this was unlikely, as porphytogeniture had never been applied to the English succession, on a simpler level, a surfeit of royal children was expensive to maintain, title, and/or dower, thus the lack of issue to the couple was in a way a boon given Henry IV's already challenging finances. In later chapters we will reflect on how Joan's status as a stepmother of kings, rather than a dynastic progenitor, impacted upon her both during her lifetime and her legacy after her death.
No sooner had Joan been married, crowned, and welcomed into her new family than a series of challenges emerged which would endure in various ways throughout the couple's marriage and define her husband's reign. These issues included the internal challenges of rebellions against Henry's rule and pressure from Parliament to reform royal expenditure, external political issues with Joan's relatives both in Brittany and regarding the increasing division between the Orleans and Burgundian factions in France, and other family strains, including divisions, health difficulties, and deaths. The remainder of the chapter will chart these issues over two periods, that of 1403–7 and the latter years 1408–13. As noted in the introduction, it is impossible to fully capture the complexity of the political landscape of Henry IV's reign and the Hundred Years War here; instead of recounting the detail of these events we will focus on how they affected Joan and her engagement in them.
While February 1403 had been replete with celebration for their wedding and Joan's coronation, “barely had the celebrations finished before Henry was back at work” dealing with the continued issue of rebellions against his rule, concentrated primarily in the North and in Wales headed by Owain Glyndwr.30 What made the situation more challenging is that Glyndwr had allied himself with two other prominent noblemen who were also alienated from Henry IV, Sir Edmund Mortimer and Harry “Hotspur” Percy, with a goal to dethrone the king and replace him with Mortimer's nephew, the young earl of March who had a claim to the throne via descent from Edward III. Henry fought and won against the rebels at Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403, catching the rebels before the forces of Glyndwr and Northumberland arrived to support them—Hotspur was killed and the earl of Worcester was captured and executed, but Prince Henry suffered a grievous injury to his face and the rebellions against Henry were far from over.
Concurrent with these campaigns came war on a completely different front which was more directly impactful to Joan—the beginning of an extended conflict between Brittany and England. This erupted only months after her marriage to Henry IV which theoretically should have brought the two realms together through the new familial bond. While the conflict was not a direct result of the marriage, it could be said that the simmering tensions and lengthy pirate-style raiding across the Channel was inflamed by the negative reaction of the Breton lords to Joan's marriage and their concern that Henry IV might try to leverage the connection to interfere in Brittany. Matters intensified when the English raided the Breton coast in late June 1403—Joan was immediately drawn into this conflict, as one of the members of her Breton network of service, a William Piedre or “Pedrewe” from Nantes, had his boat le Seynt Croys with a cargo of wine taken by an English crew from Wareham. In his petition for the restitution of his ship, William noted his connection to “la Roigne dengleterre”, which triggered a commission headed by Richard Drax to look into the claim “especially as the said William asserts himself to be a liege man of the king's consort the queen, and if it be true to make restitution”, which the master of the English ship was quickly ordered to do.31
The conflict developed into a series of raids on the Bretons and counterattacks largely focused on the southwest coast of England. The Bretons quickly responded to the June raid with a reprisal attack on Plymouth, the Isle of Wight, and the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey in August 1403, led by Guillaume de Chastel (or du Châtel).32 William Wilford of Exeter then was charged with organising a force to respond to the Breton threat and his small fleet seized an impressive number of ships and their cargo and conducted damaging raids near Penmarch, southwest of Quimper. The following year saw another attack headed by de Chastel on Dartmouth, which culminated in the Battle of Blackpool Sands on 14 April 1404, where even the women took part in defending the town—it was a crushing defeat for the Bretons and the “impetuous” and “intrepid” de Chastel, who died shortly after the battle.33 In an unusual twist, it appears that Joan was given the king's share of the ransom for the prisoners taken at Dartmouth—oddly giving her a potential financial benefit from the defeat of those who were, until very recently, her subjects as regent of Brittany.34
As the chronicler Adam Usk noted, the Breton issue was connected to Henry's wider difficulties both with internal rebellions and politics with Joan's Valois relatives as they sent forces to support Glyndwr's rebellion as well:
The king took as his wife the widow of the Duke of Brittany, who was also the sister of the King of Navarre, hoping through her to gain some assistance. His hopes were promptly dashed, however, because the Bretons, disapproving of the marriage, allied themselves with the French under the command of the count marshal of Aquitaine and the lord of Hugueville in Normandy, and took a large force to Wales to help and support Owen, devastating the entire march with fire and sword and inflicting substantial losses on the English.35
While Usk is amalgamating several issues in this brief comment, he does rightly note that Henry's marriage to Joan had resulted in conflict, rather than alliance with her French and Breton relatives, the opposite of the normal scenario with a royal marriage. Another reversal of expectations which would have made Joan less popular with her English subjects is that she did not bring a substantial dowry with her, or indeed any dowry at all. In fact, her original dowry for her marriage to Jean IV had never been fully paid by her father before he died, and in 1404 Joan formally gave Jean V the wherewithal to pursue this with her brother Carlos III—a dispute which rumbled on for several years and ended up in the Parlement de Paris, doing little to improve harmony between the various branches of Joan's family.36
The English Parliament of 1404 proved to be another problem for Henry IV to deal with. The members of Parliament effectively took Henry to task for excessive expenditure, both in terms of the household and military matters regarding the vast sums spent quelling uprisings, fighting a cross-Channel war with Brittany, and with threats on nearly every frontier. Thomas Wright summarises the sentiment of the parliamentarians who appear to have felt that “the King had dissipated his revenues and spent too much on his household, while paying insufficient attention to the defence of the realm and so placing it in great peril”.37 Alan Rogers’ research on Henry's financial difficulties echoes Wright's sentiment and notes how concern over these issues led to disaffection with the queen: “In the restlessness of the period, Henry's marriage to Joan of Brittany turned out to be a mistake. Not only did it fail to produce political results; the size of her dower and the large foreign personnel of her retinue provided an excuse to the opposition to attack the king's household in detail”.38 In Chapter 6 we will explore this situation further, discussing the petitions from the parliaments of 1404 and 1406, which sought to expel the foreigners from Joan's household, both to reduce excessive royal expenditure and to purge “aliens” from the court. This concern, particularly regarding the sizeable number of Bretons who continued to serve Joan, was clearly tied to the escalation of hostilities with Brittany—these servitors were seen by some as potential enemy agents at the English court.
The first half of 1405 saw Henry fighting rebels and plots on all sides. In February, there was a plot to capture the young earl of March, Edmund Mortimer, and his brother, to use them as rival claimants by the rebels to unseat Henry IV. The boys were briefly liberated but apprehended again near Cheltenham. While the plot appears to have been masterminded by the king's first cousin, Constance, lady Despencer, who implicated her brother, the duke of York, in her testimony, one contemporary chronicle, the Eulogium, claims the boys had been abducted by the queen's ladies, who then blamed the duke of York.39 Even though this account is clearly erroneous, it may reflect either confusion over which woman was involved or be an attempt to further disgrace the queen's household, which had already been under attack for its excessive cost and number of foreigners.
The quashing of this plot and the favourable outcome of a series of battles in 1405 finally gave the king the upper hand—defeating the Welsh rebels in the battles of Grosmont and Usk (or Pwll Melyn) in the spring and bringing the northern rebels to heel in the battle of Shipton Moor shortly after. While the execution of one particular rebel, Richard Scrope, the archbishop of York, would continue to haunt him, Henry's situation was beginning to stabilise after a very intense and chaotic period following his marriage to Joan; “by the summer of 1405, it must have seemed as if Henry had perfected the art of falling and falling without ever hitting the ground”.40
A calmer situation may have enabled the royal couple to spend more time together and with their family. The royal couple appear to have remained together a reasonable amount given the political turmoil of the early years of their marriage—Joan had travelled with Henry around the country, and was with him in Cirencester in November 1403 as well as accompanying him to the Midlands, including Leicester and Kenilworth, in the summer/autumn months of 1404.41 The couple were joined by the king's children at Kenilworth for All Saints Day and kept Christmas at their favourite residence at Eltham with the family in high style. Deborah Codling argued that “the lavish Christmas festivities may have been a way of showing that the king was still very much in control” after his rule had been tested by rebellions, raids, and parliamentary petitions—as well as a bout of ill health shortly after Shipton Moor, which some accounts ominously linked to the execution of the archbishop.42
Yet their family was also suffering losses during this period—Joan's sister Maria passed away in 1405 and her two daughters returned to Brittany. While both events would have been difficult for Joan to bear, her daughters’ return was likely driven by three elements—pressure in the English court to reduce the expenditure on and number of foreigners, the ongoing hostilities between England and Brittany, and plans afoot to marry the two princesses in a double wedding in June 1407 as discussed in the previous chapter.43 Nor were they the only princesses or royal women to be married around this time—there were several important weddings which Joan and Henry attended or were connected to. The most significant perhaps was the departure of Henry's daughter Philippa for Scandinavia to marry Erik of Pomerania in August 1406—Henry and Joan travelled with Thomas and Humphrey to King's Lynn to see her off with family feeling as well as the pomp and circumstance needed to underscore the importance of the alliance.44 While this marriage was diplomatically significant, it highlighted two chronic issues—first, there had been considerable expenditure for the bride's trousseau, proxy wedding, and departure at a time when Henry was struggling with criticism of the royal finances in the “Long Parliament” of 1406, where once again the queen's household was targeted to expel remaining foreigners.45 Second, Henry had suffered another bout of serious illness with his leg in late April, which had reduced his ability to attend some of the sessions of Parliament—in connection with the trip to King's Lynn for Philippa's departure, Henry visited the shrines of Walsingham and the relics of St Oswald at Bardney Abbey, both sites associated with healing miracles.46
Henry and Joan also attended two splendid weddings with international brides in this period, that of Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, with Beatriz of Portugal, the stepdaughter of Henry's sister Philippa, queen of Portugal, in November 1405, and the wedding of Edmund Holland, earl of Kent, and Lucia Visconti of Milan, a woman who was once a possible bride for Henry himself, in January 1407.47 Another Beatriz who married in this same period was Joan's niece, who married Jacques de Bourbon, a French lord who was a supporter of the duke of Burgundy—Carlos of Navarre had also been using his daughters Blanca and Juana to contract beneficial “anglófilo” alliances in both the French and Iberian orbits with the heir of the king of Aragon and the count of Foix.48 Joan's familial connections in the region were of potential political benefit to Henry as well—viewing them in the round, his half-sisters Philippa and Catherine (or Catalina) were the queens of Portugal and Castile respectively, while Joan's family gave him connections to Navarre, Aragon, Foix-Béarn, and Armagnac, filling out the Iberian peninsula and giving connections in the Pyrenean region close to the English holdings in Gascony. Another family marriage with regional significance in this period was that of Joan's cousin, Carlos de Beaumont, the alferez of Navarre and chamberlain of her household, whose career will be discussed further in Chapter 6. Beaumont married Anne de Curton (Anna de Guiche) in 1407, a Gascon heiress whose lands reinforced the territory Beaumont had been granted in Mauleon and Soule and Anglo-Navarrese relations, as well as the entrenchment of Navarrese lords in the region.49
Returning to the Anglo-Breton relations, the cross-Channel conflict began to improve in 1406. In March there was a flurry of activity related to Joan's network of service in Brittany, making payments and gifts due to them and confirming the powers and prerogatives of some of her officials, a possible indication of greater communication between Jean V and Joan or at least greater cooperation between them.50 On 11 July a breakthrough in relations came when a one-year truce was signed between Henry and his “well beloved son the duke of Brittany”.51 This pause in hostilities led to negotiations designed to rebuild relations and secure a more durable peace; Henry issued a proclamation on 30 May 1407 in the West Country, which had seen the bulk of the fighting on the English side, that no harm should come to Jean V's subjects while the Breton duke was negotiating with the king.52 Safe conducts were also issued by Jean V in the same period for Breton and Englishmen to negotiate or send goods for the payment of ransoms for men who had been taken prisoner during the conflict and for Joan's officials to undertake their business.53 Joan herself appears to have influenced the peace negotiations as Jean V states at the beginning of his acceptance of the Anglo-Breton truce that he was willing to sign the document
as our very dear and very redoubtable lady and mother, the queen of England, has signified to us several times her desire for all good tranquillity between the very high and excellent prince, and my very redoubtable lord and father, Henry king of England and lord of Ireland, her lord and spouse on one part and ourselves on the other.54
While this statement might be a face-saving exercise for the young duke, leveraging the expectation that queens and royal women were peacemakers to belie his own need to negotiate a peace to put an end to a destructive period of conflict, it is extremely likely that Joan did intercede between husband and son to encourage them to renew their truce and rebuild diplomatic relations. She would have had every motive to do so, given not only her personal ties to the two men but her connection to both realms—the destruction caused in both her new kingdom and the duchy she herself had recently governed, which had been partially caused by her second marriage, would have been difficult for her. Moreover, as we have seen, improved relations between both realms improved her access to her Breton dower lands and their revenues—a situation which will be explored further in Chapter 5. Thus, it is quite likely that Jean's statement that he was encouraged to sign the Anglo-Breton truce by his mother's desire for peace was entirely accurate.
While this truce signified a healing between the English and Breton branches of Joan's family, another event in 1407 created a devastating rupture, the assassination of her cousin, Louis, the duke of Orleans, brother of Charles VI, on 23 November by adherents of another cousin, Jean “sans peur”, the duke of Burgundy.55 The tension between the dukes of Orleans and Burgundy had been a long-standing issue at the French court, with each seeking to direct the realm given the king's frequent bouts of mental illness. The assassination of Orleans ratcheted the conflict to another level, threatening to convulse France in a civil war and forcing both Henry and Joan's brother Carlos III to consider their alliances carefully. For Carlos, the loss of Orleans was keenly felt as he was a proponent of the Avignonese anti-pope whom Carlos also supported—the death of Orleans pushed him into the Burgundian camp. As a Prince of the Blood, Carlos was also drawn into resolving the conflict as a member of the family and to protect his own interests and territories in France; accordingly, Carlos entrusted the governance of Navarre to his wife, Leonor de Trastámara, and his heir, Juana, countess of Foix, and travelled to France in July 1408, where he remained until early 1411.56 For Henry, the next few years would see him courted by Joan's relatives in the Burgundian and the Orleans-Armagnac factions, who both sought his support.
The latter years of Henry IV's reign could be seen as calmer than the chaos which had marked the first years of his and Joan's marriage. The Gloucester Parliament of 1407 had been far kinder to him than the Long Parliament of 1406 which had put considerable pressures and constraints on the king, particularly in terms of his finances.57 Henry had also had a stroke of luck when James, the heir to the Scottish throne, fell into his hands in the spring of 1406—the death of his father Robert III shortly after meant that he had the king of Scots in his keeping. In early 1408, Henry had another positive development when the earl of Northumberland and Lord Bardolf were defeated and killed in the Battle of Bramham Moor, which meant that the rebellions and uprisings in the north were finally ended.
Yet only months later Henry suffered a major reversal, a serious bout of ill health which began in June 1408 when he collapsed at Mortlake while visiting his friend and close political ally Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, after mopping up the last of the northern rebels. As his biographer Given-Wilson notes, “Henry IV's great misfortune was to become sick just at the moment when he appeared to have won his dynasty a measure of security”.58 The exact nature of Henry's illness, or indeed illnesses, as he appeared to be suffering from several different ailments, has long baffled historians.59 Based on the symptoms connected with a disfiguring skin disease described in contemporary accounts as leprosy, it has been suggested that he was suffering from some kind of pox, psoriasis, Hansen's disease, or even syphilis. He also had problems with his leg which had been troubling him in 1406, which may have been connected to circulatory issues or even some kind of coronary or rheumatic heart disease. Whatever the case, Joan would have doubtless been extremely concerned about her husband's poor health—in his youth he had been celebrated as an athletic and attractive prince, but now he was a middle-aged invalid who was becoming increasingly immobile and disfigured. Henry's health, which continued to be poor for the rest of his life, not only debilitated the king personally but led to instability in the government—as Peter McNiven notes, there was an ongoing concern as to what extent Henry would be able to exercise the governance of the realm.60 Yet Henry himself argued that his mind remained sharp even though his concern about this health, and past sins, weighed upon him—provoking him to make a will and make provisions to ensure the stability of Joan's finances after his death.61
Henry's ill health and the possibility that he may indeed die sooner rather than later brought his son and heir, and the prince's followers, into the government of the realm. This led to an effective changing of the guard around the end of 1409 and early 1410, as the treasurer, Sir John Tiptoft, who had supported the queen in stabilising her finances, was dismissed, and Henry's great friend and ally, the archbishop of Canterbury, resigned as chancellor. While there is insufficient space here to discuss the political factions in the government around the two Henrys, from Joan's perspective, managing the familial tension between father and son over the direction of internal and foreign policies would have been difficult. Nor were these the only difficulties in the wider family across the Channel—Henry's daughter Blanche had passed away in 1409 and tensions were high in Joan's Valois and Navarrese family over the Council of Pisa, which sought to heal the Papal Schism and the fallout from the assassination of Louis of Orleans.
Joan's son Jean V “emerged … as a critical player” and an “astute politician” in this family drama in early 1408 when the duke of Burgundy entered Paris and gave a public defence of the assassination of Orleans.62 Jean V brought Breton forces with him to Paris to support the king and queen and publicly demonstrated his polite hostility to the duke of Burgundy's defence of his actions and desire to interpose himself into the centre of power. While Burgundy's father, Philip “the Bold”, had briefly been Jean's guardian after Joan's remarriage and departure, Jean had broken with his cousin, Jean “sans peur”, when he allied himself with the Penthièvres in 1406. This resulted in Jean V moving into the Orleanist camp—the marriage of his sister Blanche to the Armagnac heir in 1407 gave him a link to the anti-Burgundian faction after Orleans himself was assassinated. On 9 March 1409, the family attempted to heal the breach through a public reconciliation at the cathedral of Chartres, but it did nothing to stop what had long since escalated from a family crisis into a burgeoning civil war.
Greater cooperation could be seen between England and Brittany at this point, which made a significant change to the earlier cross-Channel conflict. In 1408 English troops under the command of Thomas Holland, the earl of Kent, were brought in to support Jean V against his enemies the Penthiévres—not to demand payment for Joan's Breton dower as Wylie had previously suggested.63 The assault on the isle of Bréhat by English troops during this campaign appears to have been particularly brutal, and Holland was killed as a result of injuries sustained in the attack, leaving Lucia Visconti, whom he had recently married, a widow. While this created consternation in certain quarters in Brittany and might have provoked renewed hostilities with England, Jean V was keen to keep the peace, renewing the truce in 1409 for two years and sending an embassy to England regarding homage for the long-disputed earldom of Richmond.64 In 1411, negotiations took place to extend the truce further to ten years, signalling not only a desire to prevent conflict restarting between Brittany and England but perhaps a return to the more Anglophile political leanings of Jean V's father.65 Indeed the following year, in May 1412, Jean dispatched the lord of Châteaugiron to negotiate a full alliance with England, beginning his justification for the alliance by noting the significance of his familial connection through Joan:
For the cause of the proximity and connection that we have between the very high and powerful prince my most redoubtable lord and peer Henry, king of England, and for the affinity that is between him and ourselves from the marriage between him and our most redoubtable lady and mother the queen of England.66
Ironically then, while Joan's marriage to Henry had initially been a cause for conflict between England and Brittany, it had been invoked, from the truce of 1407 which Joan was credited for inciting, in this proposed alliance of 1412 as a reason for promoting greater harmony and affinity between the two neighbours.
While 1411 and 1412 saw the construction of a longer-term peace with Joan's son in Brittany, more broadly these were fairly turbulent years with significant developments in terms of both internal and international political affairs and continued tensions within her English and Valois family. Over the spring of 1411 envoys arrived from both the Burgundian and Orleans-Armagnac factions who sought English support against the other. While Joan had familial links on all sides, according to one contemporary source she supported the Burgundian embassy—possibly sharing her brother Carlos III's sympathy with that faction, although Carlos as always had a foot in and, like Joan, a tie to both camps and had previously supported Orleans. According to the pro-Burgundian Livre des Trahisons de France envers la maison de Bourgogne, Joan asked Henry not to involve himself in the quarrel between the two factions in any way which would be harmful to Burgundy and wrote a letter to the duke of Burgundy, informing him of the embassies of her cousins of Berry and Orleans to the English court.67 This particular source paints a picture of Joan as a very active agent and intercessor in the affair—“never ceasing” to push the Burgundian case with both her husband and the great lords at court.
While we cannot be certain that this account was completely accurate, this contemporary impression of Joan's influence at court and engagement in politics is worth noting—particularly as this has often been misconstrued or downplayed by modern historians in conjunction with her wider omission from the narrative of the period as noted in the Introduction. While the author of Le Livre des Trahisons may have featured Joan as a more central figure to make Henry look weaker or dominated by his wife, there is also the possibility that given Henry's ill health, the queen may have assumed a more substantial role at court to fill the gap, in the same way that Prince Henry did. Yet, there is no sense in these passages that Henry was a henpecked husband, rather that Joan was fully a part of the political discussions around England's position vis-à-vis the Orleans/Armagnac-Burgundian dispute, which she would have had a natural interest in given her familial connection to all parties. Instead of Joan, Prince Henry is often credited as being the key Burgundian proponent at the English court in this period—Anthony Tuck claims that this was almost in spite of Joan's support, rather than being in concert with her, as “he was likely to prove impervious to the queen's intervention”, perhaps looking at their relationship in the light of their later estrangement, although there is nothing to suggest that the prince and his stepmother were on bad terms at this point.68 In spite of the queen's views, Henry IV was reluctant to offer support to the Burgundians at this point; however, the prince appears to have gone around his father by despatching a force sent out in autumn 1411 under the command of the earl of Arundel, whose archers helped secure a victory over the Orleans-Armagnac forces at St Cloud in November.69
This led to two key developments—the first of which was Henry IV reasserting his royal authority and his ability to rule by calling Parliament in early November 1411, dismissing the suggestion of the prince and Bishop Beaufort that he should abdicate on health grounds and replacing the prince's men in government with his own, including Archbishop Arundel, who returned to his previous post as chancellor. The second development was a shift to support the Orleans-Armagnac faction, who offered to not only fully recognise him as king of England but to support his rights in Gascony—both the Burgundian and Orleans-Armagnac proposals included a potential marriage for Prince Henry as well to seal the pact.70 Again contemporary accounts note Joan's engagement in these events and stress the importance of her familial ties—Monstrelet's chronicle notes that the negotiators had letters of accreditation from Joan's uncle, the duke of Berry. One of these letters was specifically for Joan, calling her “my very redoubtable and honored lady and niece” and Monstrelet comments that while they were all signed by Berry, Joan's letter included two additional handwritten lines to her—perhaps trying to win her help to influence Henry or abandon her Burgundian sympathies.71
These negotiations, which on the French side had been pushed forward by Joan's son-in-law the count d’Alençon, led to the signing of the Treaty of Bourges on 18 May 1412, and preparations for a major expedition to support their new Orleans-Armagnac allies led by Henry's son Thomas instead of the pro-Burgundian Prince Henry.72 Thomas had been gaining increasing prominence, given his controversial marriage to Margaret Holland in late 1411, and the bestowal of the titles of duke of Clarence and earl of Aumale in July 1412, where he was noted as “praecarissimus filius”.73 If Thomas was indeed the favourite son—in contrast to Humphrey, who appears to have been Joan's favourite stepson, as will be discussed in the following chapter—the simultaneous rejection of Prince Henry's men and his pro-Burgundian stance with the promotion of Thomas would have certainly been to blame for “a dangerous escalation of the rivalry between the king's two eldest sons” and serious discord in the Lancastrian family, with the heir withdrawing from court to his own estates to brood.74 While the two Henrys were eventually reconciled after the prince returned to London to ask for the punishment of those who claimed he was trying to undermine Thomas's expedition to France, the notion of tension between the king and his heir has become embedded in popular culture, thanks to William Shakespeare's two Henry IV plays—in which Joan is mysteriously absent, although in reality she must have been a key witness to this family drama.75
The negotiations of the Orleans-Armagnac faction with England had triggered an angry response from Charles VI and the duke of Burgundy, who attacked the lands of both Alençon and Joan's uncle, the duke of Berry, the leading forces behind the Orleans faction and the English treaty. Alençon was forced to seek the help of his brothers-in-law in Brittany—Joan's son Arthur de Richemont came to his aid with 1,600 men. Yet, Joan's family was bitterly divided—while both Jean V and Carlos III were prevaricating between the Orleanist and Burgundian camps at this point, most of her Breton and Valois family were on opposing sides. Joan's third son, Gilles, was in the Burgundian camp and “exchanged ‘high words’ when Gilles visited his brother [Arthur] in the hope of detaching him from the Armagnac cause”.76 Bourges, the city for which the Anglo-Armagnac treaty had been named, even though it had been signed in London, was a stronghold of Joan's uncle the duke of Berry, and became the central focus of the campaign against the Orleans-Armagnac faction as the site of a prolonged siege in the summer of 1412. The Burgundian camp became infected with dysentery and tragically both Joan's son Gilles and her brother Pedro, count of Mortain, were victims of the ravaging illness. Ironically, earlier that year in May, Gilles had been granted a safe-conduct to come to England to see his mother or perhaps argue the Burgundian cause, but it is unclear if he was able to make his visit given the political maelstrom that he was being sucked into at the time.77 Gilles’ body was taken back to Nantes and buried near the tomb in the cathedral that Joan had recently had installed for his father, Jean IV.
The new duke of Clarence left with his forces in mid-August 1412, landing on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy at a site which “had probably been agreed in advance with the count of Alençon and Arthur de Richemont”—Thomas's stepbrother-in-law and stepbrother through Joan, familial connections which reinforced the political alliance.78 The three stepbrothers joined their forces at Fougères on the border of Jean V's lands and the English forces helped Alençon to regain some of his territories lost to earlier Burgundian attacks. Yet Thomas's expedition to support the Orleans-Armagnac side arrived too late to relieve the siege of Bourges and his erstwhile French allies were now under pressure from Charles VI to repudiate the Anglo-Armagnac treaty altogether. Thomas and his army moved south, looping through the Loire region, leaving a path of destruction in its wake; a deal was negotiated to pay the English a hefty sum of 210,000 gold écus to leave French territory, after which Thomas headed south to English Gascony and based himself in Bordeaux.79
Once in the Midi, Thomas was in close proximity to many of Joan's relatives, including her cousin Carlos de Beaumont's Gascon holdings and the lords of Foix (married to her niece Juana) and Armagnac (whose son was married to Joan's daughter Blanche). The latter two had a long-standing regional rivalry, magnified by Foix's Burgundian allegiance and Armagnac's alliance with Orleans. Bernard d’Armagnac sought Thomas's support against Foix and signed a pact with Thomas which reaffirmed the treaty of Bourges in a more limited fashion in return for armed support for Armagnac.80 Thomas also made contact with Joan's brother, Carlos III of Navarre, who had continued to “maintain good relations with the English court” throughout the recent Orleans-Burgundian crisis.81 Like Henry IV, Carlos was also wooed by both sides, but as a French Prince of the Blood, Carlos had to move with extreme caution due to his close ties to all parties and to prevent the loss of his French territories or an attack on Navarre itself if he chose the wrong side. In sum, while Thomas's expedition was driven by the political decisions of his father and impacted by the continually shifting nature of the crisis, he could leverage bonds of blood and marriage which he possessed through his stepmother Joan to smooth his path and reinforce alliances with her sons in the north and her brother and wider familial network in the south as well.
Back in England, Henry IV's precarious health was failing fast—Henry and Joan spent their last Christmas together at Henry's favourite residence of Eltham, where they had passed most of the yuletide seasons over their marriage, “with as much cheerfulness as he could muster” given his continuing illness.82 While Henry had returned to Westminster, he was too ill to attend the opening of Parliament in February 1413, and collapsed in Westminster Abbey on 20 March while making an offering to the shrine of Edward the Confessor. Famously, he died in the Jerusalem Chamber in the abbot's lodging, fulfilling in an odd way a prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem, although he had never made good on his intention to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.83 It is unclear how much Joan was with him in his final hours and moments but even if Henry's body was as brutally ravaged as some contemporary accounts indicate, it is highly likely that she would have been at his side at his death, as she had been for the majority of the last ten years of their marriage.84 A lack of detailed accounts of Henry's funeral and interment also means that it is impossible to ascertain Joan's role in events, or whether she accompanied his body from London to Canterbury. However, as will be discussed in the final chapter, much more can be said about her role in commissioning their joint tomb there, although it would be several decades after Henry's own death until Joan joined him in their final resting place.
In this chapter we have seen how Joan transitioned from duchess to queen, crossing the Channel from Brittany to England to take on not only a new royal role but a new husband and stepfamily. She took up the role of queen actively, engaging with ceremonial, petitioning, and politics to make her influence felt at court. All the evidence seems to affirm that Henry and Joan's ten-year marriage was personally strong, given their general tendency to remain together, the lack of even the slightest hint of marital discord or extramarital affairs, and, as we will discuss further in Chapter 5, Henry's desire to dower her generously and support her robustly when she had financial difficulties. While some accounts have assumed that she struggled as a stepmother, given the problems between Joan and her stepson Henry in the latter years of his reign, which will be discussed in the following chapter, there is no indication of any tension or disharmony between her and her stepchildren during this period.85 Joan also built connections within the court and realm through her network of service, which will be explored in Chapter 6.
In spite of the positive relationships that she forged with her husband, stepfamily, and courtiers, a theme of this chapter has been the constant conflict and continual challenges which Henry and Joan faced together, both within the realm and with their neighbours, and Joan's wider family on the Continent. While Joan's familial connections could be an asset and leveraged to make peace or support alliances and campaigns, a factor which would have made her attractive to Henry as a potential bride, her familial connections could not prevent, or could even be a cause for, conflict, given the negative initial reaction of her Breton and Valois family to her remarriage. The maelstrom of the Orleans-Burgundy crisis offered Joan no familial advantage as she was related to all parties—indeed, as we have seen, her relations were estranged from one another as they chose sides in the conflict, and two of her loved ones, her brother Pedro and her third son, Gilles, died as a result of the fighting. Joan was also affected by Henry's political troubles, with rebellions dominating his attention in the early years of their marriage and later, just as things appeared to stabilise on some fronts, Henry's debilitating illness had a devastating impact on the latter years of his reign and undoubtedly cast a dark cloud over the last years they spent together. In March 1413, Joan was widowed for the second time and transitioned from a consort to a dowager queen—a role which she would retain for the remaining 24 years of her long life. However, as the next chapter will reveal, this final stage of her life and political career was anything but a quiet retirement—Joan would witness the reigns of two further Lancastrian kings and play an important role in the continuing chaos of both English politics and the Hundred Years War.