Authors: Lisa Hilton
Anti-Isabeau writers maintain that she now betrayed her son Charles by casting doubts on his paternity and persuading her husband to repudiate him in order to hand the kingdom to Henry. In fact, Charles had been disinherited by his father before the treaty of Troyes was ratified on the grounds that his ordering of the Duke of Burgundy’s murder proved him unfit to govern. On 20 May 1420, Henry V and Philip of Burgundy arrived at the camp of the displaced and diminished French court at Troyes. The treaty was ratified in the cathedral of St Peter, where the English conquerors embarrassed their dingy hosts with the splendour of their accoutrements. In Charles VI’s name, Isabeau agreed that on his marriage to Catherine, Henry and not her son, would become his heir, and that the French crown would duly pass to their of fspring. The treaty
does not declare that the Dauphin was illegitimate, and the single allusion to him refers only to the moral grounds for his disinheritance. But it was Troyes that destroyed the reputation of Catherine’s mother for future French historians as her signature on the treaty perpetuated the claim that she was solely responsible for giving France away In truth Isabeau was only fulfilling a decision made earlier by her husband (and confirmed by him in a joint
lit de justice
he held with Henry V in Paris in December that year), and her presence without him at the signing was necessary simply because he was in no state to appear in public. Isabeau is another example of the dangers to which foreign royal brides were susceptible, the complexities of her situation subsumed beneath the treacherous disloyalty to which, because she was not French, she was seen as inevitably subject. French historians, it is suggested, have found it ‘safer and more emotionally satisfying to blame all the trouble on foreign women rather than take sides among internal factions that often manipulated queens as their puppets’.
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For the English, at least, Troyes was naturally a triumph. Henry kissed Catherine’s hand ‘joyfully’, as well he might, and on 2 June ‘the King of the English married Lady Catherine and he willed that the ceremony should be carried out entirely according to the custom of the France’.
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Henry gave 200 nobles to the church of St John, and the bride and groom were feasted before being ceremonially put to bed, but Henry was in such a hurry to get back to his war that he didn’t bother with a tournament to mark the occasion.
Catherine had a honeymoon of sieges. Henry, who had now taken over from Isabeau as head of the French regency council, was now effectively fighting a civil war against his new brother-in-law the Dauphin. That was certainly the opinion of the English Parliament, who felt that from now on the conflict should be financed by Henry’s French subjects. Catherine was with the King for the surrender of Sens on 11 June, then returned to her parents at Troyes while Henry starved her brother’s prisoners to death in trenches dug around the besieged fortress of Melun. On 1 December the King and Queen of France returned to Paris with their new son-in-law, his brothers Bedford and Clarence, Philip of Burgundy and Catherine. They processed from the St Denis gate to Nôtre Dame through brightly decorated streets filled with Parisians wearing celebratory red. The Christmas festivities again highlighted the mortifying differences in circumstances between the two kings. At the Hotel de St Pol, Charles VI received ‘a small number of old servants and persons of low degree’,
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while over at the Louvre Henry and Catherine kept the holiday in style: ‘It is scarcely possible to tell in detail of the state they kept that day, the feasts and
ceremony and luxury of their court.’
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On 27 December, Catherine accompanied Henry on his ceremonial entry into Rouen, the Conqueror’s capital, and then they moved on to Amiens and Calais before embarking for England.
If Parliament was complaining about the expense of the whole business, Henry’s subjects were in rapture. The
Brut Chronicle
claims that 30,000 people were waiting to greet the King and Queen when they arrived at Blackheath to process to London in February. Finally, here was a queen to worship. Anne of Bohemia had been poor, Isabelle de Valois a child, Joanna of Navarre an expensive widow, but Catherine was a beautiful blonde virgin who brought the kingdom of France as a dowry. If contemporary descriptions bear any relation to the truth, Henry and Catherine were almost divinely lovely. Henry was tall, fair-haired and clear-skinned, with an athletic body and white teeth (truly an extraordinary attribute in medieval times). Catherine, who took after her father in his better moments, was slim and fair. In the
Bedford Hours
, Catherine and Henry are pictured with golden hair, wearing red gowns covered with blue cloaks, a combination of colours in which the Virgin was most frequently illustrated, the red representing her ‘worldly’ nature and the blue its ‘heavenly’ counterpart. Blonde hair was something of an ideal, particularly for queens, as it carried implications of spirituality (the light of the halo) and fertility (the colour of ripe wheat). Since the beginning of the thirteenth century, in both Italian and northern European painting, the Virgin had been depicted with golden hair, and in another example of the myriad Marian associations of idealised queenship, all four of Catherine’s fifteenth-century successors were shown with bright blonde locks, though Marguerite of Anjou, at least, was almost certainly a brunette.
Catherine rode to her coronation on 23 February through streets lined with cloth-of-gold. Henry did not attend, but his absence did not stem from a waning of affection, as has sometimes been suggested, but as a result of a more sophisticated concept of the significance of the public body of the king. Traditionally, English kings did not attend their predecessors’ funerals as, until the corpse was entombed, the public body of the monarch was contained in the funeral effigy lying upon the coffin. Since there could never be more than one king, the new king could not appear beside the effigy of the old.
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In the fifteenth century, it has been suggested it was at the point of coronation that the queen became part of the king’s public body, as she was anointed with the holy oil, and therefore the king could not be simultaneously visible.
After the celebrations were over, Henry turned his mind to his greatest
love, the war. Catherine stayed behind as he departed on a fund-raising progress through Bristol, Kenilworth and Coventry, and joined him for Easter at Leicester. This was the period when Catherine became pregnant with her son, though Henry was not inclined to linger in her company and set off again soon afterwards for Lincoln and York. Catherine returned slowly to London through Stamford, Huntingdon, Cambridge and Colchester, receiving gifts of gold and silver to contribute to the war effort. In June, by which time the Queen was aware of her pregnancy, Henry left once more for France.
Catherine spent just five months in England with her husband during a marriage that lasted a total of twenty-six, for much of which time Henry was away on campaign. It is posited that ‘Catherine had beauty to recommend her, but neither intelligence nor personality to captivate for long a man of Henry’s qualities’.
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The fact that Henry preffered fighting to his wife does not necessarily confirm that she was boring and stupid, as Henry was fonder of war than of anything else. (If they didn’t get on, it was perhaps because Catherine, judging from her later behaviour, was a rather jolly person, whereas Henry in his post-Prince Hal incarnation was notably abstemious, if not something of a prig.) They certainly had one thing in common, which was an appreciation of music. Henry had learned the harp as a boy, and in October 1420 new harps were ordered for both the King and his wife. The royal chapel was a celebrated centre for the development of English music, and Henry’s clerks of the chapel, who included the composers John Cooke, Thomas Damett and Nicholas Sturgeon, produced celebrations of Agincourt, the royal marriage and the treaty of Troyes in Mass pieces and motets. Henry brought thirty-eight musicians and sixteen singers to perform at his wedding, and Sturgeon may have accompanied him when he returned to France in 1421.
As far as their contemporaries were concerned, Catherine and Henry had a fairytale marriage, and its perfection was crowned with the birth of the heir to England and France, Henry VI, at Windsor on 6 December 1421. Catherine crossed to France the following May, escorted by the Duke of Bedford, and though by July the King had fallen ill, he did not send for her. She spent some time near Paris and visited the tombs of her ancestors at St Denis, then joined her parents at Senlis. Even when Henry knew he was dying, Catherine was not summoned, and she was not present at his deathbed at Vincennes on 31 August. This certainly suggests that something had soured between them, or perhaps that, like Richard I, Henry was so preoccupied with his battles he was largely indifferent to his wife. The Queen travelled back to England with her husband’s embalmed
body from Vincennes to Dover, a journey which took over two months. The hearse was accompanied by the King’s entire household, wearing black and white mourning, surveyed by his life-sized effigy laid upon the coffin. In England, there was another week of solemn ceremony before the funeral. By the time Henry was finally buried at Westminster in November, Charles VI of France was also dead. On 22 October 1422, Catherine’s ten-month-old child became King of England and France.
The matter of Catherine having a role in the regency during Henry’s minority was barely discussed. The last English queen to serve as regent while her husband was abroad had been Eleanor of Provence, and only Isabella of France had assumed the office as Dowager Queen, during the minority of Edward III. In the cases of the two kings who succeeded as children before and after Edward, Henry III and Richard II, the government was directed by a regency council until they came of age. Catherine’s mother’s experience as regent had hardly been a success and, like Isabeau’s, Catherine’s foreign status might well have made her a suspect choice given that England was still at war with her brother. Before leaving on his last journey for France, Henry had made provision for government by council, and Catherine, as Queen Mother, showed no wish to challenge his arrangements, leaving the management of the country to Henry’s brothers. John, Duke of Bedford, was the senior regent, with governance over France and the pursuit of the continuing war, while Humphrey of Gloucester was the first member of the council while his brother was out of England.
In terms of her own resources, Catherine was able to profit from the new administrative arrangements for the queen’s council inaugurated for Joanna of Navarre. Like Joanna’s, her dowry had been set at 10,000 crowns (40,000 marks) on funds derived from the Lancaster estates. Initially, Catherine’s income was provided from the sequestration of Joanna’s, her ladies receiving ‘ten livres apiece out of the funds of Queen Joan’
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and her confessor John Boyars twenty. Catherine was given Anglesey, Flintshire, Leicester, Knaresborough and the castles and manors of Wallingford, Hertford and Waltham. Since, after her release from custody, Joanna was obliged to live on a reduced income and in 1332 Catherine’s was over 3,000 marks short of what had been promised to her, it appears that even the hugely wealthy Lancaster estates were not sufficient to provide full dower assignments for two queens.
Catherine’s personal rather than her political life has been emphasised during the period of her widowhood and second marriage, but her dynastic importance remained crucial to the English in the period between 1422 and 1431. Her brother Charles refused to cede his claim to the
French crown (which, if Salic law were applied, was stronger than Henry VI’s), though his activities after Troyes were at first concentrated south of the Loire. In 1429, thanks to the miraculous efforts of Joan of Arc, the tide of English success was reversed, and after the fall of Orléans and the battle of Patay, Charles was crowned King of France in July 1429. Paris, though, was still held for Henry VI, and a reassertion of the English claim was now vital. After his English coronation in November 1429, the boy king was proclaimed in the French capital in 1431. The challenge to the English government under Bedford post-1429 was to assert the justice of Henry’s claim to France while selling its advantages to the English, propaganda efforts in which the Queen Mother was essential.
The Plantagenet claim deriving from Isabella of France had been contested in the Hundred Years War whereas Henry’s claim, through Catherine and Charles VI, had been ratified at Troyes. As early as 1423, Bedford commissioned a set of verses from Lawrence Cabot to accompany an illustrated genealogy designed to be exhibited in churches throughout northern France. The family tree shows Henry’s dual descent from St Louis of France and Edward I of England, concluding with portraits of Henry V and Catherine de Valois and a miniature of the boy king receiving two crowns from two angels, one from each royal house. This image is another example of the Lancastrian adoption of Ricardian symbolism, as well as an allusion to French traditions of the divine presentation of the crown to Clovis. At Richard II’s coronation in 1377, a castle had been erected by the guild of goldsmiths on Cheapside from which a mechanical angel descended to present a crown to the King. The
Bedford Hours
contains a version of the popular French story of Clovis, the fifth-century Prankish King who united the country converted to Christianity and founded the Merovingian dynasty, receiving the Fleur de Lys from St Clotilde. In Henry’s coronation banquets, as at his mother’s, the ‘subtleties’ featured pastry ‘reasons’, showing, among other images, Edward I and St Louis, with Henry as the ‘inheritor of the Fleur de Lys’ and St George and St Denis, the patron saints of the two countries, presenting the King to the Virgin and Child as ‘Born by descent and title of right/Justly to reign in England and in France’. This attentiveness to French, as well as English royal traditions is testament to the English administration’s ‘determination that Henry VI’s French antecedents should receive all possible publicity’.
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Catherine was certainly not the least of these antecedents, and the political symbolism invoked by the English to bolster Henry’s claim to the dual monarchy was significantly dependent upon the Queen’s role in having provided the resolution to the promises of Troyes.