Catherine of Valois The French Princess Who Became the Mother of the Tudor Dynasty

On the 20th of May 1420, King Henry V of England met with Charles VI of France, a mentally ill king who was convinced he was made of glass. The meeting occurred in the city of Troyes and ended in the French accepting an agreement whereby Henry would marry Charles' daughter, Catherine, and their future son would become the heir to the French throne. Catherine would give birth to one King of England in the years ahead and start another family that rose to power decades later in 1485. Who was this French princess?

This is the story of Catherine of Valois and the birth of the Tudor dynasty. The woman known to history as Catherine of Valois was born on the 27th of October 1401 in the Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris. Catherine's father was Charles VI, King of France from 1380 to 1422. He had married Isabeau of Bavaria in 1385, a daughter of Duke Stephen III of Bavaria-Ingolstadt. Charles and Isabeau had twelve children, of whom Catherine was the tenth. Of these, four died in infancy and

childhood, while several more died in their late teens. Though she would not live to be an old woman herself, Catherine would ultimately outlive all except two of her siblings. Catherine's entire life, and indeed the life of her children and grandchildren, was shaped by a war that had started 64 years before she was born. All the way back in 1337, King Edward III of England had gone to war with the French. Initially this conflict was simply another episode in clashes between the rulers of England and France that had occurred intermittently ever since the Norman Conquest of 1066. The war that began in 1337,

and which became the Hundred Years War, took a different turn in 1340 when Edward began to press his claim to the French throne, arguing that he had a better right to the crown of France than did King Philip VI, Catherine's great-great-grandfather, who had claimed the throne in 1328 as the first ruler of the House of Valois after the Capetian line of French kings died out. Initially the war was a great success for the English. A series of victories in the 1340s and 1350s resulted in the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, whereby Edward reacquired many

lands in western France which his forbears had lost in the thirteenth century. The peace was short-lived in the end and a second phase of the war between 1369 and 1389 was much less decisive, with both sides suffering from the sheer attrition of heavy taxes. The war had petered out as Edward III's grandson and successor, King Richard II, faced growing opposition to his rule in England. In an attempt to shore up his political position and secure an alliance with the French, however short-lived it might be, Richard had married Catherine's older sister, Isabella, in 1396,

but he was overthrown by his first cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, in 1399, who claimed the throne as King Henry IV for the House of Lancaster, so named after his father, John of Gaunt's title as Duke of Lancaster. Yet the accession of Henry IV quickly led to a rebellion in Wales led by Owain Glyndŵr, a leading lord who was proclaimed as Prince of Wales in 1400. With the English distracted in this way throughout the 1390s and 1400s, the Hundred Years War was effectively in abeyance, but it was not over. The resumption of it in the late 1410s would shape Catherine's life.

There is surprisingly little known about Catherine's childhood. Government records are limited for many parts of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and it was not until the sixteenth century that the practical idea that governments should store and keep their state papers began to transform the historical records in countries like France. This aside, we know that her youth must have been difficult. The French crown was in a very poor position, as decades of war had left it impoverished and the rise of the Duchy of Burgundy in eastern France

and the Low Countries had created a new rival to the monarchy. To add to the family's misfortune, Catherine's father was very psychologically disturbed. It is not certain what the source of his illness was. His symptoms were indicative of various maladies such as schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis or porphyria, the latter being caused by a build-up of toxins in the system in a way that frequently results in psychological deterioration. Whatever caused his condition, the way it manifested could be highly unusual. During one bout of illness in the

mid-1390s, Charles became convinced he was the reincarnation of St George. Later he developed glass delusion, the perception that he was made out of glass and could shatter if he was hit or fell over. All of this made for an unusual upbringing for Catherine at the royal court at the Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris, where the palace was dilapidated and the few remaining courtiers ignored the king, who often wandered around his apartments barefoot and only half dressed. Catherine only really begins to emerge into the historical record in her own right in the 1410s

when the issue of who she might marry became central to French royal diplomacy. As early as 1408, the year Catherine turned seven, Henry IV of England suggested to the French that a marriage to his son and heir, the future King Henry V, who was already in his early twenties, could be arranged in future years in order to cement the newfound peace between England and France. That idea arose repeatedly thereafter through the final years of Henry IV's reign and the eventual succession of Henry V in 1413. Initially the discussions were informal, but gathered pace

in 1413 as the idea of an Anglo-French royal marriage became more urgent in the autumn of 1413, six months after Henry became king. The English had entered into marriage negotiations with Duke John of Burgundy to see if one of his unmarried daughters might become Queen of England, a negotiation that may have been a ploy to place additional pressure on the French to agree to a marriage alliance. Realising how weak the position of the French crown was, Henry V's government pushed for large concessions as part of the proposed marital alliance, demanding the ceding of

extensive French territories back to the English crown, including the Duchy of Normandy, and a dowry of two million écus. By the spring of 1415 the negotiations had become serious, as Henry was now preparing to launch an invasion of France and resume the Hundred Years War. Negotiations between French diplomats at Winchester in England in early July ended with an agreement that Catherine would marry Henry in return for a dowry of 850,000 écus and territorial concessions. Henry's impatience proved to be the stumbling block on this occasion and when the French did not agree to hand over

the lands immediately, he decided to go to war instead. In August 1415 he crossed the English Channel and invaded Catherine's homeland. The campaign that followed is amongst the most famous in all of English and British history, acclaimed for the Battle of Agincourt, which was fought on St Crispin's Day, the 25th of October 1415, in northern France. It was one of the greatest feats of English arms, even though there were little more than 20,000 men on the field of battle, with the English outnumbered nearly two to one. What carried the day for Henry

V was the devastation unleashed by the English longbowmen on the massed French forces. Thousands of French knights and soldiers were killed or captured, with minimal English casualties. This once again changed the complexion of the negotiations surrounding the proposed marriage to Catherine. The English king now viewed the military campaign as a means of acquiring an even more attractive marriage contract from the French, as the government of Charles VI was so weakened after Agincourt. Negotiations took place in Calais in September 1416, where the issue of

the size of the dowry was once again discussed. Half a year later, Catherine's world shifted violently as Count Bernard VII of Armagnac, who was the Constable of France and the de-facto head of the royal government during periods when Catherine's mentally-unstable father was unable to rule by himself, separated Catherine's mother, whom he deemed to be a political threat, from her children. Negotiations then resumed between the English and French in October 1418. The outcome of this was that Catherine and Henry finally met in person at a diplomatic gathering at

Meulan on the 2nd of June 1419. By then Catherine was soon to turn 18 and 32-year-old Henry was seemingly smitten by his prospective bride. Thereafter he was determined to marry her. The political landscape was continuing to shift in these years in ways that facilitated the marriage of Catherine to Henry. Two of Catherine's brothers had died in 1415 and 1417 and this now meant that her brother Charles was her only remaining brother, casting the succession into question. As well as this, Count Bernard of Armagnac and Duke John of Burgundy were killed in 1418 and

1419, part of a long-running war between these two noble lines. John had secured control of Paris in 1418, further highlighting the powerlessness of the crown after nearly four decades of weak rule by Catherine's father. With chaos enveloping France and the English threatening to escalate the war again, the French were more anxious to strike a deal with the English king and secure the French crown's position before it deteriorated any further. Thus, a fresh conference was convened at the city of Troyes on the 20th of May 1420. The treaty that was signed there the next day was

essentially a complete capitulation on the part of the French. Catherine would marry Henry and by agreement their future son would become the heir to the French throne, bypassing Catherine's sole surviving brother, Charles, who was the rightful heir. Two weeks later, on the 2nd of June, Catherine married Henry in the parish church in Troyes. This does not mean that the war ended, as by now Henry was fighting a host of largely independent French lords, but it did bring about a sufficient alliance between the English and French crowns that Henry was able to

enter and occupy Paris at the start of December 1420. That Christmas, he and Catherine presided over the Christmas festivities from the Louvre Palace as though Catherine's new husband were king of both England and France. splendour of Henry and Catherine's court at the Louvre stood in sharp contrast to the poverty and strangeness of the festivities at the actual royal court in the Hôtel Saint-Pol nearby, the King of England and his new bride left for Calais and crossed over the English Channel at the end of January 1421. After a long progress through southern England, they arrived at London on the

21st of February, where the people of the English capital had their first sight of their new queen. Two days later, after many expensive pageants and celebrations in the city, Catherine was crowned Queen of England at Westminster by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele. As was customary in situations where a queen consort was crowned on a different day from the king regnant, King Henry largely absented himself from the celebrations so that Catherine would be the focus of attention. The event was held at the beginning of the Lenten season and there was no meat served. The menu has

actually survived, indicating that 45 different dishes were prepared with a bewildering array of different types of fish and shellfish, plus the interspersing of sweet and savoury dishes in a manner which is unusual to the modern mind. Indeed, sweet and savoury were often mixed together. One sweet porridge with almonds included whale meat in it. Symbolism also ran high, with pies containing fish and figs decorated with the royal arms on the crust, to indicate the union of the House of Plantagenet and the House of Valois. A two-month long tour of the kingdom followed,

with Catherine and Henry travelling to Bristol, the Welsh border and the north before returning to London. By then Catherine was pregnant. On the 6th of December 1421, a year after she and Henry had entered Paris in such a triumphant fashion, she gave birth to a baby whom they named Henry. Catherine's husband never met their son. After their royal tour of England in the spring of 1421, he had crossed back to France to campaign against the many groups there who were unwilling to accept the terms of the Treaty of Troyes. Catherine briefly joined him there in the early summer,

though she left the infant heir behind in England. While she was there, the king's health began to deteriorate. As with any illness in medieval times, historians can only conjecture about what might have been the cause of the sickness, as doctors had limited medical knowledge and there was little way of accurately confirming a condition, however it is generally accepted that he had contracted dysentery while campaigning in the winter in France. By June he was sent to Paris to rest. Then he had to move to Vincennes, as a wave of smallpox swept through the French

capital and made it perilous to remain there. In the weeks that followed, Henry tried to return to leading his men into combat. This resulted in a desperate situation in mid-August where he had to be removed from his horse and carried by litter back to Vincennes, where he died on the 31st of August 1422. He was only 35 years of age, though the more consequential fact was that his son and heir was less than nine months old when he became King Henry VI. To further complicate matters, Catherine's father died seven weeks later in Paris. Under the terms of the Treaty of Troyes,

Henry VI should then have succeeded to the throne of France as well, but there was zero possibility that the French would accept an infant King of England as their monarch, and Catherine's younger brother, Charles, made evident his determination to press his own claim to the throne, regardless of his weak position in the autumn of 1422. He would eventually do so successfully and become King Charles VII. While the French were manoeuvring to see how their political circumstances would change after the death of Charles VI, the English lords were

also scheming. A very long minority government was about to come into existence and the most senior aristocrats viewed this as an opportunity to become the de-facto rulers of the kingdom for the next twenty years and to potentially shape the reign of Henry VI, in a way that benefited them into the new king's adult years. As a Frenchwoman who had only recently arrived in England to become queen consort, Catherine was not in a powerful position, nor did she have a faction of supporters of her own at the court. Therefore, unlike other mothers of English kings who ascended as minors,

she was not able to exert much influence over the formation of the minority government. Regardless, her deceased husband had left clear instructions on his deathbed. His younger brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was to serve as Lord Protector of England until his nephew was of an age to rule by himself, while Henry V's other brother, John, Duke of Bedford, was to govern the English lands in France and manage the war there. Henry V had been well aware that Catherine's brother would try to press his claim to the throne, irrespective of the terms of the Treaty of Troyes,

and so Henry had left clear instructions that any agreement which was reached in future times with Charles VII should insist on the English retaining full control over the Duchy of Normandy and other lands in France. These were the dead king's wishes, but they were not honoured and after Catherine returned to England with his remains, to be interred at Westminster Abbey, the lords of England moved to limit the power of Gloucester. Instead, a large regency council was established. While Gloucester and Bedford were senior within this, it also included many of the most powerful

nobles and ecclesiastical officeholders of England, including Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, and Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. Crucially, the Beauforts were the great-uncles of King Henry VI, as they were the sons of John of Gaunt's relationship with Katherine Swynford, his longstanding mistress, whom he married later in his life. In many ways the minority government as Catherine's son was growing up, was characterised by a factional struggle between Henry V's brothers and the Beauforts. Although Catherine had very little formal power

within this system, she was the mother of the king and lived in proximity to him at Windsor Castle and elsewhere in the years after her husband's death. A chief concern, as far as the queen dowager was concerned, was the issue of financing her household in the aftermath of Henry V's death. Her dower, under the terms of the Treaty of Troyes, had guaranteed her a large income of 40,000 crowns annually, a dispensation which parliament confirmed. This made her one of the wealthiest people in England, yet this was wealth without power. The records of the era might be far

less numerous than for the royal governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but even so, it is entirely evident from the minutes of the royal council and governmental records of that nature, that Catherine had almost zero role in policy formation, including many of the decisions around her own son's upbringing. What was worse for Catherine was that she was so young. Tradition held that the widow of a king should not remarry, as it would dishonour the deceased monarch. In Catherine's case this would require a woman in her early twenties,

in a foreign land, and with her access to her own infant child now a political issue, to also refrain from any further relationships. This would prove problematic before too long. The events of the mid-1420s are the most contentious of Catherine's life, as they are poorly documented, and, if Catherine's accusers were correct, she would have been trying to act clandestinely. In 1427 suspicions arose that she was engaged in a secretive relationship with Edmund Beaufort. In theory there was nothing to cover up here. While tradition held that royal

widows should not remarry and should accept a chaste life instead, where they merely looked back fondly on their marriage to the king, there was no law prohibiting a widowed queen from remarrying in England. Furthermore, Edmund, who had just entered his twenties, was not married. However, this was a politically complex situation. Beaufort was a grandson of John of Gaunt and a great-grandson of King Edward III. The Beaufort line had been legitimised in 1396 and 1397 by Papal dispensation and parliamentary statute, but a new royal decree in 1407 blocked them from

laying claim to the English throne. Everyone was nonetheless concerned about the implications of a former queen consort potentially marrying one of the Beauforts. The peculiar thing is that nobody to this day can be sure if Catherine and Edmund ever were involved with one another. Regardless, the mere suspicion was enough for the lords and parliament to intervene. They did not place a ban on widowed queens from remarrying, perhaps because they perceived that Catherine's son, Henry VI, when he grew up, would one day view anyone involved in such an aggressive move

against his mother poorly. Instead, the statute blocked the would-be suitor, stating that any man who sought to marry a queen dowager, would have to obtain a special licence from the reigning king and that anyone who entered into such a match without licence, did so on pain of forfeiture of his estates. It is a genuinely strange facet of Catherine's life that this statute was passed to block her alleged relationship with Beaufort, even though the 'relationship' might actually have been nothing more than a rumour. It is quite possible that Catherine's involvement

with Edmund Beaufort merely existed in the minds of the English lords who were concerned about its implications. What certainly did exist in reality was her subsequent relationship with Owen Tudor. Tudor was a Welshman, born around 1400 and actually named Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur when given his full Welsh name. His family had been involved in the long-running revolt of Owain Glyndŵr in Wales throughout the reign of Henry IV. In a sign of his political acumen, Owen was the member of the family who emerged out of the wreckage of the revolt with his

career intact and in the 1420s he had become an official within the royal establishment in England. The course of events is not fully known, though it is believed that Tudor became the keeper of Catherine's household or wardrobe after she became Queen. As to when their acquaintance became a relationship of some kind, it is hard to establish the dates here too. Ironically, though, the accepted window for this to have happened is usually pinned to either 1428 or 1429, just after the parliamentary statute had sought to restrict Catherine from remarrying. It's plausible

that her choice of a Welsh lover was specifically due to these political circumstances, and that Catherine was of the view that the revelation of a relationship with a Welshman would be perceived as being far less problematic than her alleged earlier entanglement with Beaufort. Catherine may have married Owen as early as 1428. On the other hand, the marriage could have been entered into in 1429 or 1430. No one can be sure because the ceremony was performed in secret and there is no record of the date, place, witnesses or even who performed the ceremony.

Tudor could not really be punished according to the recently-passed statute because he had no large estates that could be forfeited. Thus, while there was plausibly some initial disquiet about what Catherine had done, it died down and in 1432 the English parliament granted Tudor a letter of denization, which acknowledged him as an Englishman. In fact, the prevailing sense was that contemporaries were relatively unconcerned by Catherine's marriage to Tudor, in contrast to the unrest which her potential marriage to Beaufort had elicited. By 1432 Catherine and

Owen had been openly living together for several years and had children. As with so much else in Catherine's life, the details are disputed even about how many children she and Owen had or what happened to them. For instance, some studies claim that they had as many as six children. This is not impossible, though it does require accepting the existence of one of these, named Edward, whose existence most historians doubt. Another theory, proposed by Gerald Leslie Harriss many years ago, claimed that their eldest son together, Edmund, could have actually been fathered by Edmund

Beaufort. The lack of certainty that Catherine and Beaufort were ever romantically involved aside, the timing of this theory does not add up. It is reasonably certain that Edmund was born in 1430, too late for him to have been Beaufort's son. Edmund was the most important of Catherine and Owen's children together, along with his younger brother, Jasper, who was born at Hatfield late in 1431. A third son appears to have been born and a daughter, but there is no certainty even of their names, let alone what happened to them. Stray references in works like the Anglica Historia,

a history of England written by the Italian scholar, Polydore Vergil, in the early sixteenth century, suggest that both of these younger children entered monastic life. In any event, when it comes to the later political history of fifteenth-century England and the rise of the Tudors, it is Edmund and Jasper who were the two consequential children. The politics of the wider English realm were shifting greatly as well throughout this decade between the mid-1420s and mid-1430s. When Henry V had died the English were in a very

strong position in France. Gradually, though, in the 1420s the French fought back, culminating in 1429 in the relief of the city of Orleans by Joan of Arc and the coronation of Catherine's brother as King Charles VII at Reims in July 1429. In response, the English organised for Henry VI to be crowned as King of France in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris on the 16th of December 1431, just after his tenth birthday. His coronation as King of England had already taken place at Westminster in November 1429, with Catherine present at what would ultimately be the last

major state event she was central to. Conversely, she did not accompany her son and the royal party to Paris in 1431. It was all in vain anyway. Beginning with the Treaty of Arras in 1435, through which the Burgundians abandoned the English alliance and reconciled with the French king, the English war effort began to collapse in France. A year later Paris defected to Charles VII and he formally took possession of the city in 1437, commencing the last stage in the Hundred Years War as the French crown began to reassert its authority over the country after a century of crisis. All of this had implications in England too.

Bedford died in France in 1435, and with Gloucester's power waning further owing to the collapsing war, the Beauforts were on the ascent from the mid-1430s onwards. Catherine paid little heed. She had removed herself from the centre of politics and did not make the trip to the continent for her mother's funeral when she passed away in 1435. If she did give birth to five or six children after marrying Owen, the constant series of pregnancies might explain her decision to withdraw to Bermondsey Abbey in 1436 for a period of respite. She was, in any event,

evidently seriously ill, and when she dictated her will on the 1st of January 1437, she described herself as suffering from "a long, grievous malady, in which I have been long, and yet am, troubled and vexed by the visitation of God." This could imply that she was actually suffering from some psychological ailment, which would be in keeping with both her father's long-endured mental illness and the later mental frailties of her son, Henry VI. Alternatively, her marriage to Owen might have become deeply unhappy, something which is surely plausible given that she failed

to mention either her second husband or their children in her will, although perhaps this was due to the marriage being so politically delicate. She died two days after the will was written down and her funeral was held at Westminster Abbey five weeks later on the 8th of February after a procession through London, though as we will see, her remains were to have a bizarre afterlife. It was only once Catherine was dead that Owen Tudor felt the full wrath of the English lords. He was summoned before the regency council and was imprisoned at Newgate Prison. He then escaped in

1438 and was recaptured before the king, who was now nearing his eighteenth year and beginning to express his political will more forcefully, pardoned him. Thereafter Owen and his two elder sons, Edmund and Jasper, became committed adherents of Henry VI and the Lancastrian cause, even after Henry suffered a complete psychological collapse in the late summer of 1453 after news of the final defeat of the English in France arrived at court. Even before this, the political community had begun to split into a Lancastrian faction that supported the king and

the Yorkists, a faction led by Richard, Duke of York, a great-grandson of King Edward III. The Wars of the Roses erupted into open conflict in 1455, violence which resumed intermittently over the next 16 years. At the end of it, Henry VI was killed in 1471 on the orders of York's son, Edward, who had first assumed the throne as King Edward IV in 1461, the same year Owen Tudor was killed after being captured in the fighting. Edmund had predeceased him, after contracting the plague in 1456. However, despite his premature death, before he died, he had married Margaret

Beaufort, a woman who bestowed a very small claim to the English throne on their son, Henry Tudor, as Margaret was descended from Edward III and John of Gaunt. It was Henry Tudor who in 1485 would emerge as King of England after raising an army in France and defeating King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, aided by his uncle, Catherine's son, Jasper. Hence, Catherine was the grandmother of King Henry VII, who established the Tudor dynasty as the rulers of England in 1485. Ironically the woman who Henry V married with the goal of securing the crown of France for the

English royal family ended up as the progenitor of an entirely different English royal family, one of Welsh and French origin on the Tudor side, although the claim to the throne did ultimately come from Margaret Beaufort. The politics of England in the decades after Catherine's passing had an impact on how she was buried and what happened to her remains. This is one of the strangest stories in English royal history, a saga that ultimately dragged on for 440 years. Upon her death, there was resistance to the idea of burying Catherine alongside her first

husband, Henry V, in his royal tomb in Westminster Abbey. This was the typical practice by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for both kings and queens, though numerous monarchs and consorts of the earlier centuries are buried in France and other locations on the continent for a variety of reasons. While it may have been an established tradition by 1437, the view was that Catherine had so dishonoured her first husband by marrying Owen Tudor that she should not be interred alongside Henry's remains. Instead, she was laid to rest at the old Lady Chapel at Westminster.

This is one of around a dozen chapels within the Abbey, depending on how they are counted, though there are around 20 if sub-chapels are included. In laying her to rest in the Lady Chapel rather than with her first husband, the church and the political establishment were surely making a statement about Catherine's alleged wrongdoing in choosing to remarry after Henry V died. Then, as a kind of proxy, perhaps to conciliate Henry VI, who after all did not want to see his mother excessively dishonoured either, her funeral effigy was displayed in Westminster Abbey to act as a

marker of her role as his wife in life. That was how affairs stood for the next 65 or so years. The saga of Catherine's remains genuinely took a peculiar turn at the start of the sixteenth century. At that juncture, her grandson, Henry VII, decided to tear down the old Lady Chapel and build a new, more elaborate one in its place. As part of this process, the coffin that held Catherine's remains in the Lady Chapel was taken and placed next to the royal tomb alongside Henry V. This makes sense in terms of Henry Tudor attempting to correct the dishonour cast on

his grandparents. However, the bewildering thing was that Catherine's coffin and remains were not fully interred here. For reasons which historians still struggle to explain, the first Tudor monarch did not have his grandmother properly laid to rest and his son and grandchildren did not correct this either throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century. Instead, the coffin lay resting there, with the upper parts of it breaking off to reveal Catherine's mummified remains inside. This is how things stood for over two and a half centuries, during which time Catherine's coffin and corpse became a macabre visitor attraction in Westminster.

The naval administrator, Samuel Pepys, whose famous diary is a rich source of evidence for life in Restoration England, noted that on his 36th birthday, in 1669, he visited the Abbey and, quote, "had the upper part of her body in my hands, and I did kiss her mouth." It was only in 1778 that the dean of Westminster decided that it was not right to have a former queen's remains lying around in this way and he ordered that what was left of her bones and the coffin should be placed out of public view in St Nicholas' Chapel, the crypt of the Percy family. Finally, almost exactly 100 years later, in 1877, Queen Victoria

ordered her coffin to be moved once again. This time it was placed under a new altar purposefully built in her husband's chantry. As a final indignity, when she was laid to rest properly, the Latin memorial accidentally dated her death to 1438, rather than 1437. Still, at least she was finally interred in a respectful manner alongside her husband 440 years after her death. Catherine of Valois died when she was 35 years old and there are extensive stretches of her comparatively short life for which there is very little information, notably her childhood years

and a lot of her later life. It is, for instance, very strange that there is no certainty about how many children this former queen consort of England had with her second husband. The unusual gaps in our information about Catherine aside, it is safe to say that she had a huge bearing on English history, despite only being Queen of England for slightly under or over two years, depending on whether her accession is dated from her coronation in 1421 or her marriage to Henry in France in 1420. In that time, she produced the one thing that was expected of a medieval queen,

a healthy male heir. Or at least one that was healthy in body; it is quite possible, though not provable, that Catherine passed on some form of hereditary illness to Henry VI which accounted for his psychological collapse in the 1450s and which had plagued her father's life decades earlier. If this is so, Catherine played a role in the civil wars that wracked fifteenth-century England long after she herself was dead. What was more, the children from her second marriage played a decisive role in ending those civil wars. Her eldest son with Owen Tudor, Edmund,

fathered a son, Henry, who inherited a very slim claim to the throne of England from his mother, Margaret Beaufort. Although Edmund died months before Henry was even born, it is hard to imagine that Henry Tudor could ever have built up the support needed to win the throne from the Yorkists in 1485 had it not been for the astute advice and aid of another of Catherine's sons, Jasper, who had risen to become one of the great lords of Wales in the middle of the fifteenth century. Thus, the woman who was married to Henry V in 1420 with the goal of ending the Hundred Years

War and placing a member of the English royal family on the French throne once and for all, ended up having children in England who fought a completely different set of wars over the English crown itself. In this sense, the fate of her remains in Westminster Abbey for 440 years after her death perhaps reflected the strange twists which her own life took when she was alive. What do you think of Catherine of Valois? Should she have concentrated on preparing her son, Henry VI, to become an effective King of England one day instead of starting another family which

ultimately complicated the dynastic struggles of England, or was she right to remarry after being unfairly sidelined by the regency government after her first husband died? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.