Catherine de Valois was the queen consort of England from 1420 until 1422 as the wife
of King Henry V of England.
A daughter of a king of France, Catherine de Valois married a king of England, and gave
birth to his heir.
All in a plan to place her husband the English king, on the throne of France in an effort
to end what is now known as, the Hundred Years War.
But although her son was later crowned in Paris the overall plan was doomed to fail.
Even though she was the daughter of a king, Catherine de Valois had a miserable childhood.
She was born in Paris on Oct. 27, 1401 and grew up as the lonely and neglected youngest
daughter of King Charles VI of France and Isabelle of Bavaria.
Her father, known as “Charles the Mad,” experienced tragic bouts of mental illness,
during which he killed four of his own knights and thought he was made of glass.
Catherine’s mother, meanwhile, has been credited with selfishness, sexual promiscuity,
and political ineptitude during her time as regent in her husband’s emotional and mental
absence — though many of these qualities were ascribed to her after her death, probably
for political reasons.
Catherine’s older sister, Isabella, was briefly Queen of England through her marriage
to King Richard II, but she returned home once Henry IV seized the English throne.
In 1413, Henry IV died and his son, the 26-year-old Henry V was crowned king; Catherine was only
11.
As the new king, Henry V assumed control of the country and asserted a pending English
claim to the French throne. True to this claim, Henry V proceeded to send King Charles VI
of France, an ambitious list of demands — including demanding Charles' daughter's hand in marriage,
accompanied by an enormous dowry. In 1415, he set sail for France to embark on war with
France in the ongoing Hundred Years' War between the two nations.
Henry V’s skillful victory at the Battle of Agincourt became the stuff of legend, and
according to Shakespearean tradition, brought France to its knees.
It took five more years of military campaigns for Henry to defeat the French, conquer Normandy,
disinherit the Dauphin and be named as the heir to the French throne – and marry Catherine.
On June 2, 1420, the 33-year-old King of England and the 18-year-old princess, Catherine de
Valois, finally married in the French village of Troyes.
We know very little about the nature of their relationship, but as this was an arranged
marriage of dynastic alliance, and brought about by the military defeat of her father
and disinheritance of her brother, it is unlikely that Catherine was immediately smitten with
her new husband.
At this point, Catherine left her home of France and traveled to England. Her coronation
ceremony at Westminster Abbey took place on February 23, 1421.
But her time with her husband at their new home was short-lived. After Henry’s younger
brother Thomas was killed in battle in France, Henry V was determined to avenge his death.
He returned to France in June 1421, leaving Catherine pregnant with their first child.
Catherine gave birth to a baby boy named Henry on Dec. 6, 1421.
She decided to return home to France to join her husband, and left her infant son in the
care of his uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. She arrived in France in May 1422.
Tragically, Henry V would never meet his son because he contracted dysentery during the
months-long Siege of Meaux and died at the age of 36, on Aug. 31, 1422.
Catherine was now a widow and her son, less than nine months old, was proclaimed King
Henry VI of England. A few months later, Catherine’s father King Charles VI died, which, according
to the Treaty of Troyes, made her young son also the King of France.
The new king’s uncle Humphrey,and Catherine’s brother-in-law, were concerned that if she
remarried, her new husband would have too much control over matters of state as the
stepfather of the king.
He therefore passed a preventative new law that forbade the Dowager Queen from remarrying
without the consent of the king and his council.
As Dowager Queen and mother to the king, Catherine was said to have participated in state processions,
with the infant king seated on her lap, but she played no formal role in government.
She was not named regent & Humphrey ruled in her son’s stead as Lord Protector.
At first, Catherine lived at Windsor Castle, and later moved to Baynard’s Castle in London
where a handsome young Welshman of obscure birth named Owen Tudor became the young widow’s
head of household.
Rumors began to circulate that he was her lover.
During the course of their relationship, they had three sons and two daughters.
It is highly unlikely that a French princess and Dowager Queen of England would risk the
scandal of illegitimate children, and it has long been supposed that Catherine and Owen
secretly married in 1429, though no documentation of this clandestine ceremony exists.
Regardless, Catherine was determined to find her own happiness in life, and bravely built
a new life with her partner of choice.
But by 1436, rumors of Catherine’s marriage and new, secret family reached court, and
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had Owen imprisoned.
Catherine retired to Bermondsey Abbey and grew ill from heartbreak at being separated
from her husband and children. She died shortly after childbirth in a state of political disgrace
on Jan. 3, 1437 and was buried at Westminster Abbey.
Ironically, it was not her first marriage to King Henry V and the son she bore him,
the future Henry VI, that shaped Catherine's legacy.
Henry VI’s reign was riddled with bouts of mental illness, likely inherited from Catherine’s
father, and the English kingdom was ripped apart by the civil war known as the War of
the Roses.
By the time Henry VI died in 1471, he had lost most of the land that his father had
conquered on the continent.
Instead, it was her second secret marriage to the seemingly irrelevant Welsh squire that
would change England’s future. Eventually, Catherine and Owen’s son Edmund Tudor was
elevated to Earl of Richmond, and in 1457 his young wife Margaret Beaufort gave birth
to a baby they named Henry.
Eventually, this same Henry Tudor founded the Tudor dynasty as King Henry VII, after
winning the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
To distance himself from his questionable birth, Henry VII had his grandmother’s memorial
removed. It was not until 1878 that Queen Victoria had Catherine’s remains properly
re-interred, and her wooden effigy still survives to this day at Westminster Abbey.
The inscription reads:
Under this slab (once the altar of this chapel) for long cast down and broken up by fire,
rest at last, after various vicissitudes, finally deposited here by command of Queen
Victoria, the bones of Catherine de Valois, daughter of Charles VI, King of France, wife
of Henry V, mother of Henry VI, grandmother of Henry VII, born 1400, crowned 1421, died
1438.