Queens Consort (53 page)

Henry’s respect for Joanna’s status was demonstrated practically as well as symbolically. In 1403, he dowered her to the immense sum of 10,000 marks, payable from the exchequer until such a time as rents could be collected from her assigned lands in the duchy of Lancaster holdings. This was far more than the government could afford, even though the rents had to be supplemented for a further six years. Eventually, Joanna received many traditional queens’ lands, including the manors of Woodstock, Ludgershall, Geddington, Langley, Havering, Gillingham and Rockingham and the castles of Bristol, Hertford, Nottingham and Leeds. She also received a reversion from the Lancaster estates after the death of Gaunt’s last duchess, Katherine Swynford. Joanna’s administration of these properties represented a significant new direction for the of fice of the Queen’s Council. With the absorption in 1399 of the lands, but not the independent practices of the Lancaster duchy, into the crown estates, it was possible to establish a certain continuity for the management of the queen’s dower which, throughout the fifteenth century, derived in the main from Lancaster. On 10 December 1404, Joanna was granted the use of a new tower opposite the main palace gate to house her council, directed by her treasurer, John Chandeler, who became bishop of Salisbury, her receiver-general, William Denys, her chancellors, John Tubbay and John Mapleton, and her steward, Henry Luttrell. Working closely with the council of the duchy of Lancaster, these of ficials kept Joanna’s accounts, met to determine policy and preserved the Queen’s charters and records.
Much of their business was concerned with Joanna’s Breton holdings, for despite Henry’s hopes of her fortune, Joanna had brought him no dowry and continued to manage her dower. The King did not get a penny.

Joanna’s management of her revenues presents her as ‘a woman bent on exercising a significant degree of fiscal self-determination’.
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Lobineau’s
Chronicle of Brittany
notes that she continued to take payments from the Breton dower as set out in 1396, including 12,000 crowns from the sale of the rents of Nantes to Olivier de Clisson. She also received deliveries of provisions from her former home at Vannes. Perhaps Henry was allowed to sample them. If so, they were the only tangible benefit he obtained from the marriage. Joanna’s financial independence might have been laudable, but it smacks of miserliness, and while Henry may have felt that her symbolic value was worth the vast expense of her dower, his subjects disagreed. Anti-Breton feeling ran high. With Joanna’s sons in the custody of the Duke of Burgundy, there was little chance of England increasing its influence in Brittany, and in a matter of months after the marriage the two states were at war. Yet Joanna’s loyalties remained firmly with her son. In 1404 she delivered up to him 6,000 livres of Norman land rents and claims to 70,000 which remained due from her first marriage. As had so frequently been the case with foreign queens, she attracted hostility for the size and cost of her Breton entourage. In the same year as she made the grants to Duke Jean, Parliament heard a petition that ‘all French persons, Bretons, Lombards, Italians and Navarrese be removed out of the palace’. Joanna was initially permitted to retain only her daughters Blanche and Marguerite and one lady-in-waiting, Marie de Parency, though the lords eventually relaxed enough to let her keep twelve others, including her daughters’ nurse.

The Queen maintained close links with her distant children. Her son Artur visited England in 1404, and in 1407 she negotiated the marriages of her daughters, Marguerite to Alain, Viscount Rohan, and Blanche to Jean, heir to the Count of Armagnac. Blanche and Jean visited her in 1409, as did her son Gilles. She disseminated the work of English artisans, sending an alabaster monument to the cathedral of Nantes in 1408 and a jewelled reliquary, which may be seen today in the Louvre, across the Channel for her eldest son, but politically as well as financially she was pro-Breton. Having persuaded Henry to give her custody of a group of Breton sailors who had been captured raiding the Devon coast near Dartmouth, she then provoked more English hostility by releasing them without claiming a ransom. Her influence has also been identified in the two Anglo-Breton truces negotiated in 1407 and 1417, but her later peace-weaving
efforts had to contend with the suspicion and dislike she had aroused from the start.

The main focus of this was Henry’s over-generous provision for her dower, which had been a source of dispute since 1404 and which gathered force after his death in 1413. As a couple, Joanna and Henry appear to have been happy, if not extravagantly so. It might be posited that theirs was a companionable rather than a passionate marriage: they spent a good deal of time together and she was able to establish amiable relations with her stepchildren. A letter to Henry IV’s third son, John, Duke of Bedford, written from Langley in 1415, describes him as ‘our dearest and best beloved son’ and concludes: ‘If there be anything on our part that we can do to your pleasure, be pleased to signify it, and we will accomplish it with a very good heart, according to our power.’ Joanna was also on excellent terms with her eldest stepson, Henry, with whom she shared a love of music, but this did not stop him conspiring to cheat her of her rights.

As Prince of Wales, Henry had a famously difficult relationship with his father, though their differences were more substantial than is implied by the older man’s disapproval of the roistering ‘Prince Hal’ of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
Elevated to the full heir’s apanage of Wales, the duchies of Cornwall, Lancaster and Aquitaine and the earldom of Chester in 1399, Henry was given a seat on his father’s council in 1406. In 1410 the King fell seriously ill, and for a year his son acted as regent. At the time, France was involved in a civil war prompted by the mental instability of Charles VI and the consequent struggle between the Duke of Burgundy, who had assumed the regency in 1392, and the house of Orléans, headed by the Count of Armagnac, for control of the provisional government. In 1407, Charles VI’s younger brother, Louis of Orleans, was assassinated by the Duke and his son, Charles, made a second marriage to the daughter of Bernard VII of Armagnac in order to raise a league against Burgundy. Joanna had both political and personal connections with the Armagnac wars. Brittany had long been at odds with Burgundy, and her son Duke Jean supported the Armagnacs. Moreover, her daughter Blanche was now sister-in-law to Charles of Orleans. As head of the council, Prince Henry had supported Burgundy, but once his father regained control he switched his allegiance to Armagnac. Although Joanna advised a neutral policy, which she was well placed to do, when it came to choosing sides, she supported Prince Henry against her husband.

In March 1413, Henry IV died in the Jerusalem chamber at Westminster. The King had particularly desired to be buried at Canterbury,
where Joanna commissioned the tomb she would eventually share with him. Poor Mary de Bohun, who had given Henry her fortune and nine children, was relegated to the relatively humble church of St Mary, Newark. Henry might have gained no material advantages from Joanna, but he emphasised the value of his royal bride even in death. At first, it seemed that Henry V was prepared to honour his father’s provisions for Joanna, but his commitment collapsed in the face of his ambitions in France. Henry was intent on reviving the Plantagenet claim to the French crown, on the grounds that his rights had been systematically denied through the series of truces and alliances that had obtained since Edward Ill’s death. In almost every one of the opening addresses to Parliament he made during his reign, the just cause of the war was stressed, and Henry insisted until the end of his life that he had only ever been trying to bring peace after more than thirty years of failed diplomacy. Since the French had betrayed the 1360 treaty of Bretigny by encroaching on English sovereignty in Aquitaine, Henry asserted that he had every entitlement to pursue his great-grandfather’s claim to the crown.

In August 1415, Henry left England at the head of the largest invasion force to have been mustered since the time of Edward III. Before his departure, he had granted the castles of Wallingford, Berkhamsted and Windsor to Joanna, and his formal leave-taking of the Queen Dowager was, according to
The London Chronicle
, one of the of ficial ceremonies prior to his embarkation, between offering at St Paul’s and praying at the shrine of St George. On arriving in France, the English spent five weeks successfully besieging Harfleur and then marched towards Calais. Henry had left with a force estimated at 9,000 to 12,000 men, but by October, ravaged by fever and dysentery, this number had sunk to between 6,000 and 8,000. On 24 October, they found their route blocked by a huge French army, commanded by the constable of France (Charles VI was mad again) and the leading magnates of the Armagnac faction. Half-starved, sick and freezing, there was nothing the English could do but stand and fight.

Agincourt is the
ne plus ultra
of medieval battles, immortalised by Shakespeare and romanticised on film. The reality was muddy, brutish and short. For three hours the two armies glared at one another across a sodden wheatfield, then, as the French van moved, Henry advanced in an avalanche of bow fire. The arrows devastated the oncoming French, who had little room for manoeuvre and found themselves immured in the mud. Henry charged his cavalry over the first corpses, using the bodies as duckboards, while his men-at-arms heaped up the dead to serve as improvised
forts. When the French rearguard rallied and pushed forward, all the prisoners, including the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon were promptly slaughtered, an order which has compromised Henry V’s chivalric reputation ever since. The Marquise de Sevigne callously commented in the seventeenth century that the only consolation for the French was that, unlike at Crécy, relatively few of the dead prisoners were ‘born’. Practically, Agincourt achieved very little, as Henry lacked the men and resources to make good his advantage and merely pressed on to Calais, but historically, it was priceless.

Queen Joanna took part in Henry’s victory procession in London on 24 November 1415, but she cannot have been wholeheartedlyjoyous. Her son Artur had been one of the lucky prisoners to survive Agincourt, but her son-in-law, Marie’s husband Jean d’Alençon, had been killed, as was her brother, Charles of Navarre. The highly nationalistic mood at the time of the triumph had also manifested itself in another attack on her household, this time in the form of accusations that Breton spies were eavesdropping and selling government secrets (which suggests that, though the Duke of Bedford, not Joanna, acted as regent while Henry was in France, she was still closely associated with the centre of power), and that they were trafficking in stolen money and jewels. Hatred of Bretons persisted until 1425, when a petition was made for their definitive expulsion.

Joanna’s connection with Agincourt also produced an unusual piece of anti-Lancastrian propaganda in the mid-fifteenth century. Afterwards her son Artur took the opportunity to visit her and, according to an account by Guillaume Gruel, Joanna played a rather cruel trick on him, installing one of her ladies in her place and then berating him when he failed to recognise that she was not his mother. They ‘both began to cry because they were so dear to each other. And the Queen his mother gave him a thousand nobles … and also gave him shirts and garments, and he did not lf afterwards dare to speak to her or visit her, as he would have wished.
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If this odd story is true, it figures Joanna as a callous mother, who torments her ‘abandoned’ child and then palms him off with gifts. Rather paltry gifts, considering that the previous year Artur had lost his title to the earldom of Richmond, associated with the ducal family of Brittany since Norman times, to John, Duke of Bedford. The writer, Guillaume, served Artur when he became constable of France after 1324, which suggests that Artur may have conveyed this bitter memory personally. But there is another, more stylised interpretation of the story. At the time Guillaume was writing, Henry V’s son was not only of ficially failing to make good his inheritance of the French crown, but was struggling to maintain his
right to his English one. The ‘recognition trick’ is a classic device of French romance, invoked, for example, in the legend of Joan of Arc’s identification of Charles VII at Chinon. Artur’s inability to recognise his mother thus becomes an indictment of the Lancastrian dynasty, as he is not able to discern which woman is the ‘true queen’. Since Joanna could not be distinguished by the ineffable aura of royalty, it follows that Henry IV, and therefore his grandson, were not ‘true’ kings.

Henry V was not troubled by such doubts, but he was concerned at the exorbitant cost of the renewal of the French wars. For years, the Dowager Queen’s dower had been a source of contention, and in 1419 the financial pressure was increased by the need to find 40,000 crowns to dower Henry’s betrothed, Catherine de Valois. So, in September that year, Joanna was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft. On the twenty-fifth of the month, the archbishop of Canterbury wrote a circular requiring English priests to pray for the safety of the King, who was at risk from the ‘superstitious deeds of necromancers’. Fear of witchcraft was a perennial anxiety. Twenty years before, Queen Isabelle’s secretary, Pierre Salmon, had reported a conversation with Richard II at Woodstock in which the King claimed that Charles VI’s madness had been conjured by the sorcery of his brother the Duke d’Orleans. Richard, Salmon claimed, offered a handsome reward if the secretary could make a ‘drink’ for Orleans that would prevent him from further harming Charles or anyone else. In a deeply religious and superstitious culture, witchcraft seemed very real, but it was also invoked as a political weapon. A person accused of ‘necromancy’ could be easily deprived of his rights. The archbishop’s letter, designed to create an atmosphere of rumour in which the accusations against Joanna would seem more plausible, was followed up on 27 September by an order from the royal council depriving the Queen of her dower and possessions on the basis of evidence from John Randolf, a friar in her household. Randolf claimed Joanna had ‘compacted and imagined the death and destruction of our lord the King in the most high and horrible manner that could be recounted’. On 1 October, Joanna was arrested at Havering for ‘treasonous imagining’, or, in the words of
The London Chronicle
, for seeking ‘by sorcery and necromancy to have destroyed the King’. No one appeared to know precisely what form Joanna’s magic had taken, and the ‘witnesses’, Randolf himself and two other members of Joanna’s household, Peronell Brocart and Roger Colles, were swiftly imprisoned, but the end had been achieved. Joanna lost not only her dower, but also her servants and property.