Catherine of Valois
Catherine of Valois was the daughter of a mad king of France, the wife of the English king who had beaten her country at Agincourt and been made its heir, the mother of the English king who lost it all, and, by a second marriage the council never sanctioned, the grandmother of the first Tudor. She was born in Paris in 1401, the youngest daughter of Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria, and grew up in a court run by whichever faction held her father during his lucid intervals. Henry V asked for her, with Normandy and two million crowns, before he invaded in 1415, and got her by the Treaty of Troyes in May 1420, which disinherited her brother the dauphin and made Henry regent and heir of France; they married at Troyes on 2 June and she was crowned at Westminster in February 1421. She bore Henry VI at Windsor in December 1421 and never saw her husband again: he died of dysentery at Vincennes in August 1422, and her father died two months later, so that her son of nine months was king of both countries. The council kept her from any part in his government. She was twenty-one and rich, and by 1427 parliament had passed an act that a queen dowager who remarried without the king's consent, a consent a child could not give, would forfeit her lands; the act was aimed at Edmund Beaufort. Some time before 1430 she married, or lived as married with, Owen Tudor, a Welsh squire of her household, and bore him at least four children before anyone in authority noticed. She retired to Bermondsey Abbey, ill, in 1436, made a will that mentioned none of it, and died in January 1437 at thirty-five. Owen was arrested and escaped; her son the king made the Tudor boys his half-brothers and earls, Edmund married Margaret Beaufort, and their son took the crown at Bosworth. Her coffin, opened, was a curiosity at Westminster for three centuries and Pepys kissed it on his birthday.
- Lived: 1401 CE – 1437 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: queen, consort
