Queens Consort (56 page)

Catherine’s visibility was therefore of importance. Perhaps because she had no political role she was able to spend a good deal of time with her son when he was small, both at her preferred residences of Hertford and Waltham and at Windsor. She accompanied him to Parliament and attended his English coronation. Until 1427 she maintained a separate household, but is then found living with her son, paying for her keep with seven pounds per day at the wardrobe. This move was not, however, motivated entirely by maternal affection, because by then the government had decided that it needed to keep its eye on her.

The French commentators who so maligned Isabeau of Bavaria might well have said that Catherine was her mother’s daughter. Her presence in Henry’s household was a consequence of her inability ‘to curb fully her carnal passions’.
¹²
In 1426, Catherine had begun an affair with Edmund Beaufort, the younger brother of the Duke of Somerset. For a family whose origins were still being sneered at in the nickname ‘Fairborn’ at the end of the century, John of Gaunt’s bastards had done extraordinarily well. In the first generation, John Beaufort had been made Earl of Somerset and had married one of the Holland heiresses, a granddaughter of Joan of Kent. Henry Beaufort, cardinal bishop of Winchester, was chancellor and Thomas, the third of Katherine Swynford’s sons, became Duke of Exeter. John Beaufort died in 1410 after which his title, which became a dukedom, passed to his eldest and then second sons, Henry and John. His third son, Thomas, became Count of Perche, and his daughter Margaret, Countess of Devon. Margaret’s sister Joan scooped the jackpot, marrying James I of Scotland in 1423. Their brother Edmund, who inherited the ducal title in 1444, was therefore highly eligible, and, as a nineteen-year-old war hero, highly attractive.

James of Scotland had been a prisoner in England since he was twelve, when he had been captured for Henry IV en route to France. His regent, the Duke of Albany, found this a most satisfactory situation, and the Scots did not agree to pay James’s ransom for fourteen years. Catherine received James at Windsor and made a formal intercession for his release with her son, but given James’s relationship with Joan Beaufort, whom he married before he returned to Scotland, and Catherine’s with Joan’s brother, it is possible to think of them as forming a ‘younger set’ at Henry VI’s nominal court. Catherine herself was twenty-five, and though her marriage had been a political triumph, it has left no record of particular affection. Her son’s government was run by old men, and according to evidence of Marguerite of Anjou’s resurrection of court life when she became Queen in 1445, high society was not what it had been under Richard II. Catherine
was young and beautiful and had nothing much to do except fall in love.

Naturally, Catherine and Edmund caused a scandal. The Dowager Queen’s behaviour was wildly compromising. Given the importance of preserving the propaganda value of Henry V’s legacy, the widow of the hero of Agincourt could hardly be seen to be carrying on with a younger man. There was also the fear that Catherine and Beaufort could marry and have children. Since the King was still only five years old, there was every chance he might not reach his majority, in which case the heir in 1426 was Bedford, but a child with Plantagenet and French royal blood could prove extremely troublesome. The only Dowager Queen to have remarried an English subject was Adeliza of Louvain in the twelfth century, but she had not been the mother of Henry I’s children and had elected for a quiet life. In the fifteenth century, the government desperately needed the young King’s mother to remain respectable. In the 1427—8 session, Parliament passed a pointed bill dealing with the remarriage of dowager queens. The fact that Joanna of Navarre was still alive provided a screen of decorum, but there was no doubt at whom it was directed.

The bill determined that if a dowager queen should remarry without the consent of the King, the lands and possessions of her husband would be declared forfeit, though any children would be acknowledged as members of the royal family The latter clause is both highly pertinent to the future royal line of England and evidence of the bill’s purpose, given that Joanna of Navarre had no children by Henry IV, and any offspring would not therefore have had the status of uterine (from the same mother) siblings of the king. Since permission to remarry could only be given by the king himself when he came of age, Catherine was in theory prevented from doing so at all for some years. She was also obliged to live in Henry’s household, where her conduct could be supervised. Catherine remained there until 1432, and may have been permitted to attend Henry’s French coronation. It is not certain that she did so, but given the situation with Charles VII, it would have been surprising if her presence had not been sought to support her son’s assumption of his claim. Quite how Catherine acquired a reputation for dullness is hard to understand, since soon after the coronation she left the King’s household to do precisely what she had been forbidden to do. Evidently the loss of Edmund Beaufort had not broken her heart irreparably, because, in defiance of the bill passed four years earlier, without seeking the King’s consent, Catherine got married.

The circumstances in which Catherine de Valois met and fell in love with Owen ap Maredudd ap Tudor are obscure. What is clear, despite Henry VII’s best efforts to demonstrate otherwise at the end of the
century, is that, compared with the Queen, he was absolutely nobody The earliest reference to Owen, after 1483, places him as a servant in Catherine’s chamber. The origin of this story could be one Owen Meredith (a possible anglicisation of his name) who travelled to France in the retinue of Sir Walter Hungerford, Henry V’s steward, in 1421. That he was in some way connected with Catherine’s household is suggested by one of the most popular versions of their meeting which has him collapsing merrily into her lap at a ball. Owen himself supposedly alluded to this when he died and, writing after Owen’s death in 1461, Robin of Anglesey described the incident: ‘He once on a holiday clapped his ardent humble affection on the daughter of the King of the land of wine.’ This luscious description of Catherine sounds as though she was less averse to the effects of her vinous inheritance than was her first husband. The sexiest version of the story has the Queen catching sight of her young Welsh servant stripped to go swimming. Intrigued, she disguises herself as a maid and arranges an assignation, but when Owen, mistaking her status, takes the liberty of kissing her cheek, she recoils, wounded (does he bite her?). Owen, seeing the mark on her face when he serves her at dinner later, realises her true identity and understands that she loves him.

What became essential to Catherine’s grandson Henry Tudor was that no one doubted the legitimacy of Catherine and Owen’s marriage. His father, Henry VI, certainly accepted it. It is suggested that Catherine selected a commoner as a means of circumventing the council’s threats to her husband’s estates, which had successfully deterred the ambitious Beaufort. Owen Tudor could hardly have been worried about forfeiture since he had nothing to forfeit. But if Catherine’s choice was a calculated one, she had neglected one important factor, which was that Owen Tudor was Welsh. From 1394 to 1400, the Welsh, unified under Owen Glyndwr, had once again resisted the English, initially with marked success. In 1402, Henry IV had enacted penal statutes against them, elaborated in the Charter of Brecon after Henry V’s successful Welsh campaign. Welshmen were prohibited from carrying arms, assembling, living in certain towns, owning land to the east of the ancient border of Offa’s Dyke or holding government office and denied the liberties of Englishmen under the law. However, ‘Queen Catherine, being a Frenchwoman born, knew no difference between the English and the Welsh nations until her marriage being published Owen Tudor’s kin and country were objected, to disgrace him’.
¹³
In the May Parliament of 1432, Owen was given the status and rights of an Englishman, which suggests that wherever and whenever the marriage had taken place, the council had been obliged to acknowledge
it as fact and make some provision for the preservation of the wayward Queen’s dignity. The Tudor antiquary John Leland claimed to have seen a genealogy which Catherine had been required to produce in Parliament to prove Owen’s descent.

Two years after Owen was naturalised, Catherine gave him custody of her lands and the crown profit on the marriage of John Conway, an important landowner. She clearly trusted her husband and was attempting to give him a measure of financial independence. Catherine and Owen had four children in six years, and the timing of their births indicates that she may have been pregnant with the first one before her wedding, in which case Parliament’s decision was even more explicable: according to the Charter of Brecon, any man who was not judged to be English or to have an English father would be subject to the penal statutes, potentially an embarrassing position for the brother of the King. The proximity of the births of Edmund, Jasper, Owen and a daughter who died in infancy point to the marriage being a happy one, at least in bed, but little evidence survives of the circumstances in which the couple lived. Catherine was apparently surprised that Owen came from such a very different culture: ‘He brought to her presence John ap Maredudd and Hywel ap Llewelyn ap Hywel, his near cousins, men of goodly stature and personage, but wholly destitute of bringing up and nurture, for when the Queen had spoken to them in diverse languages and they were not able to answer her, she said they were the goodliest dumb creatures that she ever saw.’
¹⁴

Incidentally, this anecdote casts doubt on one reason offered for Catherine’s political inactivity during her reign: that she found herself ‘linguistically isolated’
¹⁵
in a court that increasingly identified itself as, and spoke, English. The description of her meeting Owen’s Welsh relatives implies that she knew several languages other than French; moreever, given that she had been betrothed to Henry on and off for much of her life, and had lived in England for a decade, it would be surprising if she did not have some grasp of English.

The birthplaces of Catherine’s children indicate that she and Owen continued to reside in and around her dower properties in Hertfordshire. Edmund was born at the bishop of London’s manor at Much Hadham, and Jasper at Hatfield, the house of the bishop of Ely, locations that also suggest the couple had attained a degree of social acceptance. Yet after Catherine’s death in 1437, Owen had to confront the consequences of his impudence. John of Bedford having died in 1435, Humphrey of Gloucester was next in line for the throne, and Owen was so fearful of the Duke that he took sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. He appeared before the regency
council, which acquitted him of breaching the 1428 statute, but as he tried to return to Wales, he was arrested and his possessions, including a small fortune in gold and silver plate, were confiscated. Imprisoned in Newgate Jail, with only his confessor and a servant for company, Owen made a botched attempt at escape and was committed to custody at Windsor in 1438, where he remained for a year before being released on bail the following July and pardoned in November 1439. His sons Edmund and Jasper were taken into the care of Katherine de la Pole, the sister of the Earl of Suffolk, who was abbess at Barking Abbey (the third boy, Owen, became a monk at Westminster), until 1442.

The Tudor luck turned when Henry VI decided to take an interest in his half-brothers. At twenty-one, the sensitive, pious young King was lonely. Jasper and Henry were invited to join his household and, ten years later, Henry decided he wished to ennoble them. He had married Marguerite of Anjou in 1445, but as yet the couple had no children. On 5 January 1453, Edmund was invested as Earl of Richmond and Jasper as Earl of Pembroke by the King at the Tower of London. In March they took their seats in Parliament, where a formal acknowledgement of their position as the King’s uterine brothers was heard. On 24 March, Henry gave the wardship and marriage of ten-year-old Margaret Beaufort to his brothers. It was one of the few independent decisions of his life, and it provided the means by which the grandson of a Welsh servant ascended the throne of England. Margaret was the greatest marital prize of her generation, the sole heiress of John, first Duke of Somerset and through him to the Holland fortune of her grandmother Margaret. After John’s death in 1444, Margaret’s wardship had been given to the Earl of Suffolk who, shortly before his death in 1450, married her to his own heir, John de la Pole. Henry VI dissolved the marriage in 1453 and Margaret was swiftly married to Edmund Tudor. Henry’s wife, Marguerite of Anjou, was actually in the early stages of pregnancy at this time, but it is possible that even the Queen herself was unaware of this, as it is considered likely that Henry was considering adopting Edmund as his heir in right of Margaret’s descent from Edward III through John of Gaunt.

A chance for a Tudor grab at the crown receded with the birth of Henry’s own son, but Edmund and Jasper were still in an extraordinarily advantageous position, given the circumstances of their birth. In 1455, as the conflict which became known as the Wars of the Roses began to rumble, Edmund was made the King’s deputy in Wales and he and Margaret moved to Lamphey in Pembrokeshire. Edmund seems to have been more concerned with ensuring a lifelong interest in Margaret’s
money than with the health of his wife, as he slept with her as soon as she attained the canonical age of twelve. Shortly after Margaret ascertained that she was pregnant, he was captured by the forces of the Duke of York and imprisoned at Carmarthen Castle, where he died of plague on i November 1456. Margaret took refuge with her brother-in-law Jasper and her child, ambitiously named Henry for his uncle, was born at Pembroke Castle in January 1457. In the coming years, Jasper’s loyalty would prove a vital asset to the Lancastrian cause, while Henry VI’s gift of a few essential drops of Plantagenet blood saw the Tudors to the throne.

Thus, as predicted by the treaty of Troyes, Catherine de Valois was the ancestress of a great royal dynasty — if not quite in the form Henry V had planned. In the manner of her death, though, she appeared to be looking to the past rather than the future. Some months before she died, Catherine had elected to enter Bermondsey Abbey, returning in this to a tradition of pious queenship shared with Adeliza of Louvain, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Eleanor of Provence, a tradition she had so daringly flouted with her second marriage. Catherine knew she was unwell. Given the mental illness of her father, and later of her son, it is possible that the ‘long and grievous malady’ from which she suffered was mental rather than physical in origin. As a child she had prayed with her brothers and sisters at Mont St Michel for their father’s recovery, and perhaps she hoped that in the convent her mind would be spared long enough to bring her closer to God.