Authors: Lisa Hilton
Joanna was never tried for witchcraft, but that meant she could never
be acquitted. Her rank offered no protection against the ruthless exploitation of her fortune. Since queens’ power was consensual and customary, rather than constitutional, her abrupt fall from grace also illustrates the inherent vulnerability of even the most powerful woman in the land. Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of France had been imprisoned for political offences, and their sex and status had arguably preserved them from the sterner punishment that such behaviour in a man would have merited, but Joanna’s only crime was having her own money and, given the nature of the charge, not even the legal protections afforded her council could save her. If she had pushed for a trial, she risked losing her life as well as her fortune, and though Henry could not have been expected to go as far as to burn an anointed queen at the stake, there were other, more discreet methods available to silence a troublesome woman. Divine right had proved no ultimate aid to Edward II or Richard.
So Joanna went quietly. From Havering she was taken to Rotherhithe, then to Pevensey, where she spent the first months of 1420, and finally on to Leeds Castle. There she remained, in the custody of Sir John Pelham, until six weeks before the King’s death. The conditions of her captivity indicate, though, that even the royal council tacitly acknowledged their accusations were spurious. In the first months of her imprisonment at Pevensey, the average expenditure for Joanna’s upkeep was thirty-seven pounds a week, including twelve to sixteen shillings for her stables (which suggests she had the freedom to ride out), wages for nineteen grooms and seven pages, a harp, aquavit to keep up her spirits and a cage for her songbird. She also continued to dress in royal style, ordering furs, silks and delicate linens from Flanders. She had a gold girdle, silver gilt buckle, gold chains, a gilt basin, silver gilt knives, a silver candlestick and a gold rosary. Medicines were ordered from her Portuguese physician Pedro de Alcoba. The period after March 1420 shows Joanna less well provided for, with an average expenditure of eleven pounds per week, but she still had her carriage and was able to enjoy delicacies such as green ginger, rosewater (which was used as a cosmetic as well as in cookery) and cardamom. Among the foodstuffs and household goods recorded in the accounts are ‘wheat, barley, beans, peas, oats, wine, ale, cows, calves, sheep, lambs, pigs, little pigs, capons, hens, poultry, geeses, ducks, pheasants, partridges, coneys, salt and fresh fish … hay, litter, coals, firewood, rushes’.
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She was also able to keep up with some business matters. She employed a clerk, Thomas Lilbourne, and two sergeants-at-law were paid to pursue claims for queens-gold.
There is even a tiny hint that Joanna prof ited from her unusual privacy
and seclusion. At Leeds, she received her stepson Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. Wine was provided for the guests and they were entertained with music by Joanna’s minstrel, Nicholas. Another visitor was Thomas, Lord Camoys, who enjoyed his stay so much he prolonged it for ten months, from April 1420 to January 1421. Camoys is discreetly described as a ‘close friend’, and when he died shortly after leaving Leeds, in March 1421, mourning clothes were ordered for the Queen: seven yards of black cloth at 7s 8d per yard, a satin cape and fur for a collar. It was once assumed that these luxury garments were purchased for the death of Henry V, but that did not take place until the following year. Their richness suggests that Camoys was a very close friend indeed.
The exchequer certainly profited from the scurrilous treatment of the Queen. In total, Joanna cost the crown only 1,000 pounds per year during her imprisonment, while 8,000 pounds was realised from her dower for the period June 1421 to August 1422 alone. Even so, the King remained terribly short of money. Adam Usk reports the ‘unbearable extortions’ to which Henry resorted, and comments darkly on the prof ound ‘though private’ resentment they provoked. In 1420 and 1421 the King was too wary of his critics to risk asking Parliament for yet more subsidies for the war, and in 1421 no new taxes were collected and Parliament was pushing for the King to return to England. If Joanna could not have been expected to have much sympathy for her stepson’s predicament, her condition was clearly weighing on Henry’s mind, because before his death he paid her dower arrears and restored her lands and, in July 1422, the King’s
carissima mater
was freed.
It seemed, though, that the devil was not done with Joanna. In 1429, she took the unusual step of leaving the accoutrements of her chapel to the mistress of her stepson Humphrey of Gloucester. Eleanor Cobham had been Gloucester’s lover for some years, and in 1431 his marriage to Jacqueline of Hainault was annulled and he married Eleanor. The 1429 bequest indicates that Joanna knew Eleanor well and was publicly attached to her, despite her irregular status at the time. After the deaths of Henry IV’s second and third sons, Thomas, Duke of Clarence in 1421 and John, Duke of Bedford in 1435, Gloucester became the next heir to the throne in the event that Henry V’s son did not produce a child, and thus Eleanor was prospectively the next Queen of England. In 1441, a whispering campaign began against the Duchess of Gloucester, accusing her of using witchcraft to seduce her husband. Ultimately, Eleanor was arrested for procuring potions from a witch named Margery Jourdemayne and of
employing two corrupt priests to cast spells to predict whether Humphrey would succeed to the throne. Eleanor and her fellow sorcerers were tried, and the Duchess supposedly admitted to some of the charges against her, though she pleaded pathetically that a wax effigy produced as evidence was only a charm she superstitiously hoped would help her bear a child.
Margery was burned, one of the priests hanged and the other died in prison, while Eleanor was forced to do public penance, walking barefoot and bareheaded through London with a candle. Her marriage was dissolved by the archbishop of Canterbury and she spent the rest of her life shut up in prison of the Isle of Man. Her conditions were much less comfortable than Joanna’s had been: she was permitted only twelve attendants and an annual allowance of one hundred marks. Like Joanna, Eleanor had been the highest-ranking woman in the land before her disgrace, and like Joanna she was powerless to help herself. Eleanor was unpopular, but the campaign against her seems to have been no more than an attempt to curb her husband’s aspirations before the marriage of Henry VI.
The use of allegations of witchcraft as a means of curtailing the power of prominent women continued throughout the fifteenth century After the battle of Edgecote in 1469, Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, the mother of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, was accused of sorcery by Thomas Wake. Wake was a servant of the Earl of Warwick, who was at this point holding King Edward IV prisoner. Though Warwick was determined to smash the rule of the Woodville family, Wake’s accusations couched Jacquetta’s witchcraft ‘loyally’ in terms of a plot against the King and Queen. He claimed he had discovered a model of a man-at-arms, smashed and bound with wire. The case was dismissed when the witnesses withdrew their evidence, but Jacquetta was charged once more — posthumously, in 1483 -this time for supposedly having used the black arts to procure her daughter’s controversial marriage to the King. Polydore Vergil has Richard III accusing Elizabeth Woodville herself. Richard claimed he was unable to eat or sleep, and that his arm was wasting away, ‘which mischief verily proceedeth from that sorceress Elizabeth who with her witchcraft has so enchanted me that by the annoyance thereof I am dissolved’. Any gains from the allegations against Elizabeth and Jacquetta were propagandist, rather than financial, as in Joanna’s case. What all their stories illustrate is the potency of rumours of witchcraft to tap into contemporary anxieties about the ‘unnaturalness’ of powerful women, a suspicion to which queens, that legal anomaly, were acutely prey.
There was little time for Joanna to restore relations with Henry V before his death, though he did make her a rather cursory gift of cloth for
five or six gowns. Prior to her arrest, Joanna had appeared as Queen on ceremonial occasions, but this role was now taken by Henry’s widow, Catherine, and for the rest of her life Joanna lived in semi-retirement, first at Langley, until the palace burned down in 1431, and then at Havering. Though she was not active at his court, Henry VI treated her courteously, presenting her, for example, with a New Year gift of jewellery in 1437.
Joanna was perhaps more interested in business than cultural matters. Her council continued to be active on her behalf in the management of her estates and she was apparently frustrated by the poor management of Havering Manor, but aside from the innovations in the queen’s administration, she left no remarkable legacy, with the exception of her signature as ‘Royne Jahanne’ — the first of any English queen to survive. During Henry IV’s lifetime she had shown some interest in the promotion of scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, and in her captivity she possessed at least two books, a mid-thirteenth-century psalter and a contemporary book of hours, but she made no major foundations and was not a notable patron. She is more remarkable for what she suffered than what she achieved. On her death in 1437, a woman who had been among the wealthiest of English queens was living on 500 marks a year. She was the first in a line of fifteenth-century consorts whose careers were to prove that while queenship made a woman exceptional, it by no means rendered her invulnerable.
CHAPTER 15
CATHERINE DE VALOIS
‘Very handsome, of high birth and of the most engaging manners’
S
amuel Pepys was a great one for the glamour of royalty. On 23 February 1669, the celebrated diarist noted that he had viewed the embalmed body of Catherine de Valois on the anniversary of her coronation at Westminster, ‘and here we did see by particular favour the body of queen Katherine of Valois, and had her upper part of her body in my hands. And I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a queen.’ The macabre eroticism of this image says a good deal about Samuel’s own tendencies, but it also recalls that Catherine, whose body continued to be periodically displayed at the abbey until the eighteenth century, was a queen whose sexuality, both sanctified and transgressive, had dominated not just her own life but that of the royal dynasty of England.
Traditionally, one of the most glamorous English royal marriages began with two young men arguing about the size of their balls. In the second year of his reign, Henry V sent
to France two Ambassadors in State, a Bishop, two Doctors and two Knights in fitting array. They deliberated with the King of France and his council concerning a marriage to be celebrated between King Henry of England and the noble Lady Catherine, daughter of the King of France, but these envoys of the English King had only a brief discussion with the French on this matter, without arriving at any conclusion consistent with the honour or to the advantage of our King and so they returned home.
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Henry’s honour was apparently insulted by a gift of tennis balls from Catherine’s brother the Dauphin, who said that he could play with the ‘little balls’ until he had come to a man’s strength. Henry countered that he ‘would play with such balls in the Frenchmen’s own streets’, or, as
Shakespeare told it, until he had ‘turn’d his balls to gun-stones’. There is no French confirmation for this story, though it is corroborated by four English chronicles, but beneath the relish for thumping innuendo, it shows something of the mood that surrounded Henry’s eventual marriage to Catherine in 1420, and perhaps something of Henry’s self-projection as England’s most celebrated warrior king since Richard the Lionheart.
At the coronation banquet held for Catherine de Valois in February 1421, even the pudding was political. The dessert course, or ‘subtleties’, featured four angels each bearing a ‘reason’ as to why the Queen’s marriage had ended the French wars. The conflict was not over, but its purpose — the provision of an heir to both England and France — was the final resolution to a century of violence. The tennis-ball anecdote highlights Henry’s masculinity, his virility, emphasising (not to put too fine a point on it) that he will prevail not just through his balls of steel, but through the seed they carry. After the siege of Harfleur in 1415, Henry offered to settle the succession to France once and for all in single combat with the Dauphin. Even then, it was a slightly absurd gesture, but the story also foregrounds the element of personal challenge in Henry’s ambitions for conquest, casting himself and Louis as rival knights, with Catherine the waiting maiden in the tower. Many chronicles concur that Henry, as King, had undergone a remarkable change of character since his days of ‘riot and wild governance’
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as Prince of Wales. According to the
Brut Chronicle
, one of his first acts was to assemble his companions from his drinking and whoring days, reward them and dismiss them. From then on, until his marriage to Catherine, he reputedly remained chaste. Potency thus becomes a condition of abstinence, vigour dependent upon purity. The symbolism of Catherine’s coronation pageantry was therefore both pious and romantic: her queenship, as well as creating her role as peace-weaver and mother to the future King, was confirmation that God had smiled on Henry, her true knight.
Catherine de Valois was the youngest daughter and eleventh child of Charles VI of France and Isabeau of Bavaria — the younger sister, by fourteen years, of Richard II’s second queen, Isabelle. Isabelle died in 1409, the same year that the marriage was first proposed, when Catherine was eight. Talks and battles continued for a decade, but in 1419 Catherine was granted the unusual opportunity of meeting her future husband when she travelled with her mother and Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy to rendezvous with Henry at Meulan.
The French royal family was in crisis. The four elder sons of Charles
and Isabeau had died, and Catherine’s younger brother Charles had become Dauphin in 1417. Since 1403, Isabeau had been the head of the regency council formed to govern when the King ran mad, but she was not well equipped to deal with the factionalism of the French magnates. According to her detractors, she had demonstrated her support for the Armagnac side during the civil war by sleeping with both Louis de Valois and Bernard, Count of Armagnac, but Armagnac ambition eventually led to her being imprisoned at Tours for six months in 1317 on charges of corruption. Isabeau was rescued by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy (who was also accused of being her lover), by which time the Armagnacs, supported by the Dauphin, had control of both Paris and the King. In 1418, John of Burgundy succeeded in ejecting them from the capital. While not actively pro-English at this juncture, John saw it was in his interests to allow Henry V’s armies to continue their ongoing conquest of northern France. Charles VI was in no condition to be useful, so it was left to Isabeau to try to broker a deal with Henry at Meulan through which the capital might be recovered. A king of Henry’s chivalric reputation could do nothing less than fall in love at first sight, and the ‘flame of love’ duly blazed in his ‘martial heart’.
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But not quite fiercely enough, it seems, as the talks collapsed and he went back to making war in Normandy. In August, the Dauphin played neatly into his hands by murdering John the Fearless, while Rouen fell to the English. Much of northern France was now under English control and Paris was exposed. Henry was prepared to make an alliance with John’s heir, Philip the Good, so the French faced the prospect of seeing their kingdom eaten up between England and Burgundy. In 1521, a monk showed the broken skull of John the Fearless to the then King François I, explaining that this was the hole through which England had entered France.