The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (8 page)

On St George’s Day, 23 April 1430, a massive expedition left the ports of Sandwich and Dover, bound for Calais. This was essentially a mobile court, complete with hundreds of servants, cooks, clergymen, clerks, soldiers, doctors, the king’s teachers, eight dukes and earls, and the king himself. After a short stay in Calais, the court moved slowly to Rouen, and bided their time until the route up the Seine to Paris was thought safe enough for the king to travel.

They would wait more than a year. After heavy fighting, aided by large numbers of soldiers sent from England at vast cost, a route was finally cleared. The process was helped immensely by the capture by Burgundian forces of Joan of Arc on 23 May 1430 during a skirmish outside the besieged town of Compiègne. Although she attempted several times to escape from prison, she was always recaptured. She was finally sold to the English and tried as a heretic, in deeply partisan proceedings underpinned by the occupiers’ desire for revenge on a woman who had humiliated them for many years. Just over a year after her capture Joan was burned to death in the market square at Rouen on 31 May 1431. Her ashes were scooped up and thrown in the Seine.

In early December Henry made his way north-east to Paris. It remained impossible to crown him in Reims, but the ceremony could just as well be held at the cathedral of Notre-Dame, where all Anglo-Burgundian France could gather with sufficient magnificence. The king entered the city beneath a giant azure canopy decorated with fleurs-de-lis, and rode along dirty streets sanitised by being draped with linen. One was turned into a river of wine, thronging with mermaids, while seasonal Christmas plays were performed on an outdoor stage by citizens in elaborate disguise. A giant lily spouted milk and wine for the crowds to drink. In a presentation to the king at the Châtelet (a seat of government on
the right bank of the Seine), a pageant was displayed on a stage decked with gold, tapestries and the dual arms of England and France: a lookalike Henry VI sat centre stage in state, wearing a scarlet hood, while actors playing the dukes of Bedford and Burgundy held up to him more English and French arms, along with various documents advertising the king’s ‘rightwiseness’.
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All of this pageantry was highly amusing and agreeable even to the most sceptical observers. Yet there was heartbreak amid the festivities: Isabeau of Bavaria, widow of the mad king Charles VI, grandmother of the young king and mother of the dauphin, was present in the city, staying in the Hôtel St Pol. An eyewitness wrote: ‘When she saw the young king Henry, her daughter’s son, near her, he at once took off his hood and greeted her, and she immediately bowed very humbly towards him and then turned away in tears.’
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On a freezing Sunday 16 December 1431, Henry’s second coronation finally took place. Despite all the grandstanding, it did not strike observers as anything like as impressive an occasion as that which had taken place in Westminster. It was carried out in a hurry, and the Parisians felt peeved that Cardinal Beaufort performed the coronation, rather than a native bishop. Due to the crush of people, pickpocketing was rife. The hall prepared for the banquet was too small, and the food, wrote an eyewitness, was ‘shocking’. It had been cooked too far in advance and was not even considered suitable to be sent as leftovers to the city’s paupers.
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The court enjoyed Christmas in Paris, but Henry was whisked back to Rouen by the first week of the new year, and left Calais for Dover on 29 January 1432. It was noted that he left Paris without carrying out any of the usual bequests of a new king: releasing prisoners, cutting taxes and offering a few legal reforms. Henry was the first king ever to be anointed as ruler of the two realms. But it was very clear which one he preferred.

He returned to London on a bright, windy Thursday in March and was greeted with a now familiar scene. ‘He came to London, and there was worshipfully received of the citizens in white gowns and red hoods,’ wrote one chronicler.
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The sheer volume of public display and spectacle announcing the child’s all-conquering status was visually dazzling, technically impressive and very expensive. It also spoke to the seriousness with which Henry’s polity on both sides of the Channel took his claim to the dual monarchy, and how fervently they were willing to protect his father’s legacy. Yet at the same time, it demonstrated the hollowness of the two crowns. The louder the English shouted about Henry’s hereditary right to rule over France, the more obvious was their basic insecurity. As long as the dauphin lived, an anointed rival with a separate centre of political gravity and claim to rightful kingship, English propaganda was just that: parchments and pageantry inflicted on an increasingly uneasy populace.

The Welshman was fleeing through Warwickshire, heading in the direction of north Wales, when messengers sent from the royal council caught up with him. He had left the capital in a hurry, acutely aware that his liberty depended on getting out of England as quickly as possible. He was travelling light, because he had packed in haste, and also because he had had very little to pack in the first place. The valuables in the baggage train that accompanied his small party were a hotchpotch of treasure and trinkets: a dozen expensive gold cups and a few silver salt cellars, vases, a pair of candlesticks, spice-plates, chapel ornaments and – rather strikingly – two basins decorated with roses and heraldic arms in the bottom and smaller gilt roses around the rims. This haul was later valued at £137 10s 4d – a decent sum, but hardly a fortune for a man who had until recently been living in regal comfort.
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The messengers told him he was to travel swiftly back to London, and he would be protected on his journey by a grant of safe-conduct. This was a promise which the man looked upon with great scepticism, telling the messenger ‘that the said grant so made sufficed him not for his surety’.
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He had seen enough of English politics to know that a Welshman’s safety was never entirely guaranteed when he ventured east of the borderlands. But the messengers insisted. So the man turned back, heavyhearted, towards London.

His name, to English tongues at least, was Owen Tudor. His ancestors were famous in their homelands, the ancient principality of Gwynedd in north Wales, which included the rugged, chilly mountains of Snowdonia and the fertile isle of Anglesey.
They were known as a line of administrators, priests and soldiers who had given loyal service both to the native princes and to the English kings who had conquered Gwynedd in the late thirteenth century. Tudur was a popular name for the men of the family: Owen’s great-great-grandfather was called Tudur Hen; his grandfather was known as Tudur ap Goronwy, and his father was Maredudd ap Tudur (‘ap’, in Welsh, means ‘son of’). In Wales Owen had therefore been known as Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur – until confused English attempts to normalise the barbaric and strange Celtic language came up with ‘Owen Fitz Meredith’, ‘Owen Meredith’, ‘Oweyn Tidr’ and, eventually, ‘Owen Tudor’.

The generations of distinguished Welshmen from whom Owen Tudor sprang had established a dynasty with land and plenty of local prestige. But Owen’s father and uncles had fallen into disgrace after allying with their cousin Owain Glyndwr against King Henry IV during the great Welsh revolt that broke out in 1400 and raged until 1415. Owen was born around the beginning of the revolt, so he grew up in a family embroiled in more than a decade’s plotting and violence, and who suffered accordingly when the rebels’ fortunes began to fail. Glyndwr was commanding guerrilla-style raids between 1409 and 1412 but by September 1415 he had disappeared into hiding and retirement. He probably died the following year, and although his son and successor was pardoned by Henry V in 1417, many others who had fought in the revolt on the Welsh side were dealt with severely: stripped of their lands, banned from officeholding and replaced by loyalists. Maredudd ap Tudur had his estates confiscated for bearing arms against the crown, and Maredudd’s brother Rhys was executed for treason in Chester in 1412.
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The stain of rebellion and treachery had lain upon Owen almost since birth. It was in his blood.

Despite all this ignominy, however, Owen Tudor had done something extraordinary in the thirty-seven years or so that he
had been alive. He had not merely raised himself up to the status of gentleman and Plantagenet associate that had been enjoyed by his predecessors, but had gone well beyond – embedding himself in the very heart of English royalty. For the last decade, he had been the lover, husband and secret companion of Catherine de Valois, queen dowager of England.

Catherine’s life in England had not been quite what she expected when she married Henry V in Troyes. A twenty-year-old widow within two years of her arrival in the foreign realm, for much of the next decade Catherine was defined principally by her motherhood. Her life was arranged around the needs and occasional public appearances of the infant king. She travelled everywhere with him, and her income – drawn from the generous dower settled upon her by parliament – contributed handsomely to the running costs of the king’s household, at the rate of £7 a day. She was a prominent figure on religious feast days and at great occasions of state – which included sitting in pride of place next to the altar at Henry’s English coronation in 1429. When the king was taken to France she accompanied him as far as Rouen, although she returned to England long before his Paris coronation, which spared her the uncomfortable sight of seeing her son crowned in direct rivalry to her brother, Charles VII. But when the king came home, Catherine’s role diminished. From 1430 the queen ceased to live with her son. Their households became formally and financially separate, never to be reunited. She continued to describe herself in letters as ‘Catherine, queen of England, daughter of King Charles of France, mother of the king of England, and lady of Ireland’, but she travelled on her own itinerary and joined the royal court only on ceremonial occasions.
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Otherwise, her life was her own.

Freed from the daily responsibilities of motherhood, Queen
Catherine’s position was thus now a curious one. England’s other dowager queen – Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre – was over sixty, coming to the end of a life that had petered out on the fringes of aristocratic importance, her reputation tainted by false and outrageous accusations of witchcraft cooked up against her in 1419 by her own confessor. Catherine, by contrast, was young, wealthy and endowed with estates spread far and wide across England and Wales. In a world bonded by landed power, she was an attractive woman, and according to the tittle-tattle of one English chronicler, she was ‘unable fully to curb her carnal passions’.
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This phrase rings with the same sort of snide misogyny that had been hurled at Catherine’s mother, Isabeau of Bavaria, but all the same, it reflected the fact that Catherine had – by virtue of her sex and sexuality – the potential to influence English politics if she should remarry. And indeed, after young Henry’s coronations, the queen mother’s sexual conduct became a matter of high intrigue.

Queens dowager did not, as a rule, marry Englishmen. If they wedded at all, they did so out of the country, to make a clean break from the politics of the crown.
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A queen mother who married into the English nobility could give her husband an invaluable position of proximity and access to the king. For a strong, self-possessed, adult king this would not necessarily be a concern, but these were not the conditions of the minority. Those who had read enough royal history to recall the dark days of the 1320s knew that upon the accession of fourteen-year-old Edward III the queen dowager, Isabella of France, had ruled for three years in her son’s name, and that her rule had been perverted by her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer, who used his easy access to power for tyrannical ends. Mortimer had taken advantage of his position to order the murder of the king’s father and to stage the judicial murder of the king’s uncle. He convinced the king to agree to a shamefully one-sided treaty with the Scots, then rewarded himself
with the grand new title of earl of March, sustained by a massive land-grab on the estates of disaffected English noblemen, many of whom were forced into exile for fear of their lives. Mortimer had only been removed when the teenage king ordered a violent coup to reclaim control of his own crown. One hundred years on, the English council could ill afford a repeat performance.

In the mid-1420s, however, it was rumoured that Catherine had formed an attachment to Edmund Beaufort, count of Mortain, the young nephew of Cardinal Beaufort. He was five years younger than her and an ambitious soldier whose elder brothers had seen service in France and spent long spells in French imprisonment. He was also of Plantagenet birth – a grandson of John of Gaunt with a keen sense of his own high blood and chivalric status. In spite, or perhaps because, of this the rumours of his familiarity with the queen provoked sharp alarm among the royal council, and particularly in Humphrey duke of Gloucester. There could be no more worrying situation to Gloucester than for the king’s mother to marry into the circle of his Beaufort rivals, a scenario that the protector felt was not only to the detriment of national stability, but also a personal threat.

It seemed that Gloucester’s fears of a union between Catherine and Edmund Beaufort were well founded when, at the Leicester parliament of 1426, a petition was introduced asking the chancellor ‘to grant to king’s widows permission for them to marry at their will’.
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There was no direct reference to Catherine, but it could hardly have referred to anyone else. The petition was deferred by the chancellor for ‘further consideration’, but at the next parliament, which opened in Westminster in the autumn of 1427, an unambiguous response was given. A statute was made that expressly forbade queens from remarrying without the ‘special licence’ of an adult king. It claimed to seek ‘the preservation of the honour of the most noble estate of queens of England’; in effect, its purpose was to prevent Catherine from being wedded
to an Englishman for at least a decade. The wording of the legislation made it clear that the cost of marrying the queen dowager was nothing short of financial ruin. ‘He who acts to the contrary and is duly convicted will forfeit for his whole life all his lands and tenements.’

And so Edmund Beaufort’s dalliance with Catherine came to an abrupt, legalistic end. We do not know if Edmund and Catherine continued to have a physical relationship, or if indeed they ever had one. If so, then Beaufort in particular would have been taking a massive personal risk, of the sort that he would in later life show every inclination to avoid. In any case, by 1431 the queen had defied parliament’s ruling by another means – not by marrying a Beaufort, but by falling in love with a charming Welsh squire by the name of Owen Tudor.

Quite how Tudor came to meet Queen Catherine remains a mystery, the truth buried beneath a number of romantic and comic stories spread in the centuries that followed – some designed to laud Owen’s memory, and others to deride it. Certainly Catherine had links with Owen’s homeland: the lands assigned to her after Henry V’s death comprised great swathes of north Wales including Beaumaris, Flint, Montgomery, Builth and Hawarden. It is also possible that Owen had links with the queen’s home country. In his late teens or early twenties he may have gone to war in France: a man listed as ‘Owen Meredith’ served alongside Henry V’s steward Sir Walter Hungerford in 1421, and since Hungerford was later the steward of young Henry VI’s household, we can reasonably suggest that this may be how Owen found his way into Catherine’s domestic sphere. More than that is hard to say. Mischievous stories dating from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries variously claim that he was the son of a tavern-keeper or a murderer, that he fought at Agincourt, that he became the queen’s servant or her tailor, that he and Catherine fell in love because she caught sight of his naked body while he
swam in a river, or that they were smitten after he got drunk at a dance and fell insensible into her lap. Whatever the case, they met around 1430 and Catherine decided that this lowly Welshman, born of a family of rebels, was the man she would take as her second husband.

Her second marriage could scarcely have been more different from her first. A later writer suggested that the queen did not realise she was marrying so far below her station: ‘Queen Catherine being a French woman born, knew no difference between the English and Welsh nation …’
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But it would have been an astonishingly unobservant woman who lived in English royal circles for a decade without realising the pariah status of the Welsh – even those who, like Tudor, could boast impressive ancestry. Penal laws passed in 1402 forbade Welshmen from owning property, holding royal office, convening public meetings or wearing armour on the highways. Welsh law was suppressed and Welsh castles were to be garrisoned only by pure-blooded Englishmen, who could not be convicted of a crime on the testimony of a man of Wales.
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These penal laws applied equally to Welshmen and Englishmen who married Welsh women: it had long been clear that the mingling of blood was unacceptable, and Catherine would have been not simply a foreigner but a fool not to have noticed.

The most likely explanation is that Catherine, chafing against the council and parliament’s ban on her remarrying, decided to take a husband who was a political nonentity: one who already possessed so few rights to property and rank that the threat of legal ruin meant very little. Nevertheless, their marriage was contracted in secret, probably while most of the English court were abroad for the king’s French coronation in Paris. Shortly afterwards their first son was born, at the manor of Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, the great timber-framed country palace belonging to the bishops of London. The boy was named Edmund. It has been suggested that this was because the real father was Catherine’s
old flame Edmund Beaufort – implying that the queen married Owen Tudor as an expedient to prevent the law’s cruel ruin falling upon her real lover. This seems very unlikely.
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Catherine’s marriage was kept discreet during her lifetime. It was a matter of privileged court gossip, rather than public knowledge. But those who saw the queen – particularly Cardinal Beaufort and his followers, with whom she remained close – could be under no illusion. More children were born in quick succession: a second son, Jasper was born at Bishop’s Hatfield in Hertfordshire; there was probably a third son, Owen, who was entrusted to the monks of Westminster and lived a long, quiet life as a monk, and a daughter, called either Margaret or Tacine, who may have died young, for nothing certain is known of her.
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All came before 1436 – and as many as four full pregnancies in little more than five years could not possibly have been concealed. Had the father been a man with any independent political status or ambition, the birth of children who were half-siblings to the king would have caused a crisis. But as it was, Catherine and her new young family managed to live quietly and uneventfully and Owen was accommodated formally into the realm. Letters of denizenship were granted to him in the parliament of 1432, conferring on ‘Owen Fitz Meredith’ the status of a faithful Englishman for the rest of his life.
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Two years later he was granted interests in the queen’s lands in Flintshire, reflecting his family’s ancient position in north Wales. Yet although Owen Tudor enjoyed a degree of protection from the law, his security was completely dependent on his wife.