The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (4 page)

Catherine’s marriage was therefore momentous for both royal houses. French princesses had married Plantagenet kings before: indeed, it was the union between Edward II of England and Isabella of France in 1308 that had mingled rival royal blood sufficiently to provoke the Hundred Years War in the first place. Never before, however, had an English and a French dynasty come together with the specific aim of settling their two crowns on a single king, as would now be the case whenever the merciful death of the poor, demented, fifty-one-year-old Charles finally came.

The ceremony had its moments of splendour. One later chronicler recorded that on their betrothal Henry had given Catherine a beautiful and priceless ring as a token of his esteem.
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He certainly gave a generous cash gift of two hundred nobles to the church
in which they were married. French protocol was followed, so a procession would have made its way on the night of the wedding to the couple’s chamber, where the archbishop blessed the royal bed and gave them soup and wine for their supper.
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When Henry’s English guests wrote newsletters home, they referred to the celebrations in only the most cursory fashion. There were more important matters at hand. Immediately after the couple were married, the king told the knights in his company that they would be leaving Troyes directly the next day to lay siege to Sens, a day’s march to the west, where Catherine’s brother Charles, now a pretender to the throne, was ensconced with his Armagnac supporters. There would be no ceremonial jousting held to mark the royal wedding. According to a Parisian diarist of the times, Henry told his men that fighting for real at Sens was of infinitely greater value than the mock-battle of the tournament field: ‘We may all tilt and joust and prove our daring and worth, for there is no finer act of courage in the world than to punish evildoers so that poor people can live.’
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As Henry and his followers marched off to pursue their long and bloody war, Catherine was allowed to travel with her mother and father. She spent the winter watching her husband’s men move from town to town, laying sieges and either starving or slaughtering their enemies into submission. On 1 December 1420 she watched as her father accompanied Henry on his first formal entry into Paris, where the treaty of Troyes was formalised and the official process of disinheriting her brother – referred to in official English documents as ‘
Charles
, bearing himself for the
Dauphin
’ – was completed.
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Two months later Catherine set sail from Calais for Dover, leaving behind the country of her birth to begin a new life across the sea. She landed on 1 February 1421 and immediately prepared for her coronation.

The England in which Catherine arrived early in 1421 was a strong, stable realm, more politically united under Henry’s leadership than perhaps at any time in its history.
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During the long centuries of Plantagenet rule, English kings had steadily increased the scope of their power, governing in (usually) fruitful consultation with their great magnates, barons, the commons in parliament and the Church. England was unmistakeably a war state, taxed hard to pay for adventure overseas, but in the aftermath of Agincourt and the steady succession of victories that followed, the realm endured its financial burdens buoyed by a strong sense of triumph. Although Thomas Walsingham, a monastic chronicler based in St Albans, Hertfordshire, wrote that the year preceding Catherine’s arrival had been one ‘in which there had been a desperate shortage and want of money … even among the ordinary people scarcely enough pennies remained for them to be able to lay up sufficient supplies of corn’, he noted that it was also ‘a year of fertile crops and a rich harvest of fruit’.
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The most common medieval analogy for a state was the literal body politic, with the king as the head. ‘When the head is infirm, the body is infirm. Where a virtuous king does not rule, the people are unsound and lack good morals,’ wrote the contemporary poet and moralist John Gower.
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In this respect, England and France could not have been more different. Henry was without doubt a virtuous – perhaps even a virtuoso – king and his realm had accordingly flourished. He had enjoyed a thorough political education in adolescence that in adulthood manifested itself in strong and capable kingship based confidently on his birthright. He was personally charismatic, liked and trusted by his leading nobles, and successful enough in war to create a tight-knit military fraternity. He had three loyal and able brothers: Thomas duke of Clarence, John duke of Bedford and Humphrey duke of Gloucester, all of whom were of great value both in governing the realm and in pursuing the war abroad. Henry met with the
approval of the English Church for his vigour in hunting out Lollards, a heretical sect who followed the teachings of the scholar John Wycliffe and held unorthodox views about the dogma of the Catholic Church and the validity of her teachings. He taxed his realm relentlessly, but his personal household expenses were markedly frugal, his exchequer competently run and his war debts relatively controlled. He pleased the people in the shires of England with a tough but impartial drive to re-establish the rule of royal law and stamp out the disorder that had bedevilled his father’s reign. Criminals were often drafted into military service, where their violent instincts could be safely satisfied pillaging and burning among the villages of France.
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So went a popular song of the time – and with good reason, for the prosperous kingdom of England reflected all the virtue of its mighty ruler.

Catherine’s place in her new realm was established immediately on her arrival. The French chronicler Monstrelet heard that she was ‘received as if she had been an angel of God’.
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The nineteen-year-old queen was provided with a personal staff of her husband’s choosing. The information that reached Walsingham from court was that the queen’s household consisted almost entirely of noble Englishwomen. ‘Nor did any Frenchman remain in her service except for three women of good birth and two maidservants.’
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On 24 February she was crowned at the church of St Peter in Westminster, and celebrated with a feast attended by most of the English nobility and James I, king of Scotland, a long-term captive at the English court. ( James had
been seized by pirates off the English coast in 1406 when he was twelve and had inherited the crown during his captivity, over the course of which he also received a full education and was generally treated as an honoured guest.) The feast was a showcase for English cuisine. Since it was Lent, no meat was served, but the tables groaned with eels, trout, salmon, lampreys, halibut, shrimps and prawns, great crabs and lobsters, whelks, jellies decorated with fleurs-de-lis, sweet porridges and creams. The ‘subtleties’ – non-edible but visually extraordinary dishes that announced each course of the meal – featured pelicans, panthers, and a man riding on the back of a tiger. In each subtlety the new queen was represented as St Catherine with her wheel, defending the honour of the Church.
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After the coronation, Catherine left Westminster and joined the king on a tour of the midlands. She travelled through Hertford, Bedford and Northampton on her way to Leicester, where she celebrated Easter with Henry. She found England a profitable and hospitable country. ‘From the cities thus visited the king and queen received precious gifts of gold and silver from the citizens and prelates of each town,’ wrote the chronicler John Strecche.
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But Henry did not tarry long in England. Shortly after Easter he received news that his eldest brother, the duke of Clarence, his deputy and lieutenant in France, had died fighting in Normandy. The war would not wait, and in June 1421 the king and queen crossed the channel again for Calais. Catherine was three months pregnant.

The queen’s condition meant that she did not stay long in France. She left Henry campaigning against her brother and returned to England to give birth to a rival heir to the French crown. For good fortune on the perilous journey through childbirth Catherine brought with her a treasured relic: the foreskin of the Holy Infant,
which was known to be a valuable aid to women in labour.
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With its help she delivered a healthy baby boy in the royal palace at Windsor on 6 December, the feast day of St Nicholas. Every bell in London was rung at once to celebrate the news, and Te Deums were sung in the city’s churches.
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Inevitably, the child was named after his father. But the two Henries were never to meet.

Henry V’s heroic victories on the battlefield had enabled him to manufacture a situation in which he could claim to be the rightful king of two realms. The task of turning this into a political reality, however, strained every fibre of his formidable being. His intervention in French politics had deepened the rift between the Burgundians and Armagnacs, since to the latter the war now appeared to be nothing less than a struggle for existence. Forces loyal to the dauphin dug in, garrisoning castles wherever they could, determined to resist Henry at any cost. Conquest, it was clear, would be a slow and increasingly draining endeavour.

From October all through the winter of 1421–2, Henry led an operation to besiege Meaux, a small town a few miles north-east of Paris. Meaux was heavily fortified and its defenders put up a fierce resistance. The siege began late in the year, lasted for more than six months, and was a miserable experience for both sides: the garrison was slowly starved while the besiegers outside suffered the horrible privations of winter warfare. It was a long and ugly way to fight a war, but if Henry was to force the whole of France to observe his rights under the treaty of Troyes, he would have to break the most entrenched of the resistance to his rule.

Towards the end of May, Catherine returned to France to visit her husband, leaving her baby son at home in England, under the care of his nurses. She spent a few weeks at his side, along with her parents. But it was clear as summer arrived that not all was well with the king. At some point, probably in the squalor of the siege of Meaux, Henry V had contracted dysentery. The ‘bloody flux’, which brought the agonies of intestinal damage and severe
dehydration to the sufferer, was very often fatal, and Henry knew it. He was an experienced soldier and would have seen many of his men suffering the same fate. Henry was cogent and pragmatic enough as the illness worsened to make a detailed will, outlining his wishes for the political settlements in England and France after his death. He died in the royal castle at Vincennes between two and three o’clock in the morning on 31 August, a little more than two weeks short of his thirty-sixth birthday. With the same bewildering swiftness that had characterised his life’s every action, England’s extraordinary warrior-king was gone. At home a baby not quite nine months old was set to inherit the crown, the youngest person ever to become king of England.

If the new king were to live beyond infancy – and of this there was no guarantee – England would now face the longest royal minority in its history. Precedent was not promising. Three English kings since the Norman Conquest had inherited the crown as children, and all had endured very difficult times. Henry III was nine years old when he became king in 1216, and in his early years he was dominated by overbearing ministers who used royal power to enrich themselves and their followers. Edward III had been thrust upon the throne at fourteen in 1327 after the forced abdication of his father, Edward II, and for the next three years power had been greedily and murderously wielded by his mother, Isabella of France, and her feckless lover, Roger Mortimer, until they were deposed in a bloody palace coup. Richard II was the most recent king to have inherited the crown as a child, in 1377, when he was ten years old. An attempt had then been made to govern as if the boy-king was a competent adult. It was a dismal failure. Within four years of his accession England’s government had almost been brought down by the Peasants’ Revolt – the great popular rebellion of 1381 – and Richard’s subsequent path to adulthood was beset by political faction and upheaval. He bore the psychological scars to his death.
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The book of Ecclesiastes
expressed perfectly England’s experience of immature monarchs: ‘Woe unto thee, O land, when thy king is a child …!’
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Matters grew even more complicated when, on 21 October 1422, Charles VI died. He was fifty-three and probably died from causes connected to his longstanding illness. The infant Henry of Windsor was now not merely the new king of England. He was also, under the terms of the treaty of Troyes, the heir to the English kingdom of France, a political entity that was still the subject of a furious war. The French king’s body was laid to rest in the mausoleum at the abbey church in St Denis. His queen Isabeau would continue to live in the Hôtel St Pol in what was now effectively occupied Paris. Once a powerful, if controversial, force in guiding the realm during her husband’s bouts of lunacy, her political days were now over. The English spread scurrilous (and most likely false) stories of her outrageous promiscuity and claimed, all too conveniently, that the dauphin was not really the son of Charles VI. As far as the conquerors from across the sea were concerned, the death of the mad king left them in charge of France. At Charles VI’s funeral, Henry V’s eldest surviving brother, John duke of Bedford, had the sword of state carried before him, a gesture intended to demonstrate that he was now, as his nephew’s representative, the effective power in the realm.

Yet for all the grandstanding and triumphalism, there was no getting away from the truth, which was that the first king of the dual kingdom was a tiny, helpless baby. An unprecedented and extremely delicate military situation would have to be managed for nearly two decades without a competent hand to guide the way. Only disaster, surely, could await.