Queens Consort (52 page)

PART FIVE

LANCASTERAND YORK

THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

CHAPTER 14

JOANNA OF NAVARRE

‘A royal witch’

A
s the fifteenth century opened, what the new Lancastrian dynasty vneeded above all was money The succession was about the only thing of which Henry IV could be certain; indeed, sons were the only thing he had plenty of. Having lost his wife, Mary de Bohun, five years before becoming king, he was short of a queen. He required a woman whose birth and connections could validate his newborn title to the crown, and, most importantly, a rich one. Once her pedigree was unravelled, the Dowager Duchess of Brittany appeared to be the perfect choice. Joanna of Navarre was born at Evreux, Normandy in 1368, to Jeanne de Valois, daughter of Jean II of France, and Charles ‘The Bad’, King of Navarre. Jeanne’s great-great-grandmother was the mother of Edward II’s Queen Isabella, Jeanne de Navarre. On the death of Jeanne’s son Louis X, his daughter, Charles’s mother, was excluded from the French succession, but renounced her claim only on condition she was able to take up her right to rule Navarre. Jeanne was thus descended on her father’s side from a queen of France and two queens of Navarre in their own right, while her mother, a daughter of France, was descended from the imperial house through her mother Bona, aunt to Anne of Bohemia and daughter of EmperorJohn I.

So Joanna’s blood was of the purest, and better yet was the promise of her money. Charles the Bad had fought on the right side in the French wars and was enormously wealthy. His reputation, however, was unfortunate, a career as a murderer and reputedly a sorcerer having ended with him being sewn up in a sack and set on fire. In 1386, a year before this alarming event, Charles had provided a dowry of 120,000 livres with an annual pension of 60,000 for the marriage of his eighteen-year-old daughter Joanna to the Duke of Brittany He also pushed a hard bargain with his forty-seven-year-old son-in-law, demanding one third of the Duke’s assets
as Joanna’s dower. The dowry had not been paid in full when Charles met his grisly end, but the dower, which was renegotiated in 1396, remained unchanged, and when Duke Jean died in 1399, thirty-one-year-old Joanna found herself a very rich woman.

As a descendant of female rulers, she appeared to relish her independence, and governed Brittany competently as regent for her eldest son Jean until he assumed his title in 1401. When Henry IV proposed for her early the next year, her of fspring proved to be one of the first of several difficulties. Of the nine children Joanna had given Duke Jean, seven were still living in 1402: thirteen-year-old Jean, Artur, Gilles and Richard, aged nine, eight and seven respectively, and two girls, ten-year-oid Marguerite and five-year-old Blanche. A third daughter, Marie, was already married to the Duke of Alencon. Jean could not leave his duchy, but although Marguerite and Blanche would be permitted to travel to England, the Breton magnates objected to the prospect of Joanna taking the younger boys out of the country and she found she would be obliged to leave them under the guardianship of the Duke of Burgundy. The other problems were canonical. Henry and Joanna would require a papal dispensation to marry as they were related within the prohibited degrees. Joanna had been Duke Jean’s third wife: his first had been Henry’s aunt, Edward Ill’s daughter Mary, and his second Joan Holland, daughter of Henry’s aunt-by-marriage Joan of Kent. This already complex situation was further complicated by the papal schism in which Europe was still embroiled. The division that the marriage of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia had been supposed to heal had passed into a new generation with the see of Rome occupied by the English-supported Boniface IX and that of Avignon by the French- and Burgundian-backed Benedict XIII. Notwithstanding their political disputes with France, the Bretons supported Benedict, so another dispensation was required for Joanna and her daughters to go and live among schismatics.

Despite these obstacles, both Henry and Joanna at first pursued the match urgently Joanna’s envoy Anthony Rhys was sent to the English King on 14 March 1402, and the papal dispensation granted less than a week later. In April, Henry underwent a proxy ceremony at Elthain, swearing fidelity unto death to the papal envoy Legally, the couple were now married, but Joanna waited until December to set out for England. Why the delay? The most obvious answer is that Joanna was making suitable arrangements for her young sons and the handover of the government to her eldest, but might she have wished to change her mind? What were her motivations for the match in the first place? So little is
known of Joanna’s early life that it is impossible to get any sense of her character other than retrospectively Aside from her place of birth and payments made to the convent of Santa Clara at Estella in Navarre, where she was educated, she is virtually absent from the records until her first marriage. As a well-dowered ducal mother, why did Joanna want to get away from Brittany so badly that she was prepared to leave her sons behind? Some clue may be found in her later political affiliations, but the simplest explanation is perhaps that, as a rich and marriageable (if not, by the standards of her day, young) woman, she, like Eleanor of Aquitaine after her divorce, was extremely vulnerable. As Queen of England Joanna would not only have one of the most powerful protectors in Europe, but also the unique legal position of a consort. It was this determination to maintain control of her own affairs which would lead to one of the most extraordinary situations in the life of any English queen: her imprisonment on suspicion of witchcraft in 1419.

Henry’s enthusiasm for the marriage is perhaps easier to understand. He was reputedly very attracted by descriptions of Joanna and, in addition to the status and funds with which he believed she would provide him, there was also the possibility of benefit to English trade and military operations through access to Breton ports, of an increased English influence in the duchy and of an Anglo-Breton alliance against the French. Joanna’s importance to Henry is reflected in the status accorded her in the depiction of her coronation, an amalgamation of traditional Marian associations of queens consort with the sense of a new definition for English monarchs adopted from Richard II’s self-fashioned kingship.

After the now-traditional rough crossing, Joanna arrived at Falmouth at the end of December 1402 and met her husband at Exeter. Their marriage took place at Winchester on 8 February 1403, and she was crowned at Westminster on 26 February. In spite of the fact that she was a widow, Joanna wore her hair loose at her coronation to signify virginity, also an identification with two potent images of the Virgin, Mary, Queen of Heaven and Maria mediatrix. The connection of the consort with the merciful intercession of the Virgin was one that she had already enacted as Duchess of Brittany: in a well-known incident she had intervened in her husband’s arrest of the French ambassador. According to the
Chronicle of St Denis
, a pregnant Joanna, ‘setting aside her womanly modesty … taking her children in her arms … entered the chamber of the Duke’, and on her knees ‘earnestly pleaded that he reconsider’, if only for the sake of their children, who would require French support after his death. As in the case of Philippa of Hainault at Calais, Joanna’s plea permitted her
husband to pursue the course of action it was necessary for him to take without risking the concomitant embarrassment of appearing to change his mind. The ‘spontaneity’ of such gestures was by this point more theatrical than emotional, as has been observed, notably in the case of Anne of Bohemia’s intercession for London, yet though the autonomous political agency of the intercessory gesture was reduced, Joanna’s invocation of it shows it retained a meaningful symbolic power outside the conventions of male-directed action.

Joanna’s coronation ceremony was ‘unusually extravagant’.
¹
An illus tration of the event shows the Queen seated alone on a throne under a canopy with the archbishop of Canterbury and the abbot of Westminster beside her, instead of the more conventional position enthroned below the King. This gestures towards Joanna’s individual authority as the descendant of so many rulers, as does the orb she holds in her left hand. Before Philippa of Hainault, queens were depicted with only a sceptre, or virga, in the right hand, but in the funeral effigy commissioned by Richard II for his double tomb with Anne of Bohemia, there is an orb between the couple, implying a novel degree of shared authority. The presence of the orb projects a queenly participation in a more explicit relationship between England and the Mother of Christ, that of the realm itself as the Virgin’s dowry.

In the Wilton Diptych, Richard 11 is pictured in red and cloth-of -gold robes decorated with rosemary (one of Anne’s emblems) and eagles, the symbol of the empire. To the King’s right are the Virgin and Child, with one of eleven angels prof fering a banner topped with an orb and cross, which have been painted over with a larger orb. Examination of the painting has shown that the first orb contains a tiny illustration of a green island with a boat at sea and a white tower, an image that connects the Wilton orb with another (now lost) depiction of Richard made in Anne’s lifetime. Details of this painting, part of a five-panelled Roman altarpiece, survive only in seventeenth-century descriptions, in which Anne, in a cope emblazoned with imperial eagles, stands beside Richard, five saints and the Virgin. St John is introducing the couple to the Virgin, and they are presenting her with a globe on which is a map of England: ‘This is your dowry, O Holy Virgin, wherefore, O Mary, may you have rule over it.’ In terms of Richard’s conception of his destiny after Anne’s death, the Wilton Diptych has been interpreted as the King giving his realm over to the Virgin and then receiving it back from her in the form of her dowry, evoking a spiritual marriage between Mary and England in his person. The implications of this for Richard’s possible commitment to chastity
have been discussed, but there is also a connection between the map in the Rome altarpiece, the Wilton orb, Joanna’s coronation portrait and the Lancastrian adoption of the concept of England as the Virgin’s dower.

As a new dynasty, legitimacy was essential for the Lancastrians. The marriage between Henry and Joanna was part of establishing this, as was the conscious appropriation of Ricardian symbolism. In a letter to the bishop of London in 1400, Thomas Arundel states: ‘We are the humble servants of her own inheritance and liegemen of her especial dower, as we are approved by common parlance, ought to excel all others in the fervour of our praises and devotions to her.
²
By Henry V’s reisn’ England was being referred to as the
Dos Mariae
(dowry of Mary), the title by which the Roman altarpiece was known. The globe in the Roman painting establishes the idea, the Wilton orb elaborates it, the tomb of Richard and Anne reiterates it. Thus the orb held by Joanna of Navarre associates the queen, already linked to the Virgin, with this new contribution to England’s unique destiny; even, it would not be going too far to say, casting her, in her marriage with the king, as its conduit.