On 2 June 1420, Catherine of Valois married Henry V of England in Troyes Cathedral. The wedding was the centrepiece of a treaty that made the English king heir to the crown of France and promised that the couple’s first son would one day rule both kingdoms. Catherine was eighteen years old, the daughter of a French king consumed by madness, and she had just been bound to a conqueror her family could no longer resist. The marriage was meant to end a century of war.
Instead, it set the stage for a strange afterlife that would leave the queen’s coffin lying open and exposed in Westminster Abbey for nearly three hundred years. Catherine was born on 27 October 1401 at the Hôtel Saint-Pol on the outskirts of Paris. Her father was Charles VI of France, the fourth king of the House of Valois, a royal line that had taken the French throne in 1328 when the direct Capetian line died out. Charles had come to the throne in 1380 at just eleven years old, but as he grew older he developed severe psychological problems, suffering psychotic episodes and other symptoms of mental illness.
His reign lasted forty-two years and plunged France into prolonged political weakness. That was the world Catherine grew up in. Her life was also shaped by the Hundred Years War, the conflict between England and France that had been raging since 1337. The war had its roots in the fact that English kings had controlled extensive territory in northern and western France since the eleventh century, and in 1328, when the last Capetian monarch died, Edward III of England actually had a stronger claim to the French throne than the Valois line did.
Edward was the grandson of Philip IV, who had ruled France between 1285 and 1314. In 1337 Edward began pressing that claim, and the war that followed lasted 117 years, down to 1453. The fighting went through different stages. England made huge gains in the 1340s and 1350s, then lost them in later decades.
While Catherine was growing up, the French people faced constant hardship, yet she lived a life of luxury, provided with fine clothes, toys, and religious texts, and sent to a convent to receive a quality education. The war turned decisively against France under Henry V, who came to the English throne in 1413 at the age of twenty-six. His father Henry IV had rejuvenated the English war effort, but it reached its peak under the son. On Saint Crispin’s Day in late 1415, Henry V won a devastating victory over the French at Agincourt and found himself in a strong position to impose English rule over France.
Catherine was central to his plans. In the year and a half after Agincourt, two of her brothers died, leaving only one surviving male heir to their father. Henry V pressed home his military advantage and reopened peace talks. A marriage between Henry and Catherine had been discussed in earlier years, and Henry now renewed the proposal.
Catherine was said to be very attractive, and the English king hoped that a son from the marriage would one day succeed as king of both England and France. The French were in no position to refuse. The Treaty of Troyes was agreed in May 1420, and Catherine married Henry at Troyes Cathedral on 2 June of that year. The agreement stipulated that the first son of the marriage would succeed Catherine’s father as king of France, passing over her sole surviving brother Charles.
Catherine then travelled to England with her new husband and was formally crowned Queen of England on 23 February 1421. Almost exactly nine months later, she gave birth to the son Henry hoped would unite England and France under one crown. They named him Henry, after his father. He was their only child.
By the time the infant was born, his father was back at war in France, where he died on 31 August 1422 at just thirty-five years old, most likely from dysentery. Catherine was a widow before her twenty-first birthday. English custom held that a queen dowager, the widow of a deceased king, should never remarry. This was to prevent legal claims to the throne arising from within the family of her second husband.
Her son became King Henry VI of England before his first birthday, and Catherine might have been expected to play a major role in what would be a very long regency government, lasting until Henry was fourteen. But her position was complicated. As a French princess, she was distrusted by many English nobles, and she was quickly sidelined by her brother-in-law Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who was appointed Lord Protector of England during the king’s minority. Her position was further weakened when her father, Charles VI, died in October 1422, just weeks after Henry V.
Although the Treaty of Troyes had provided for Catherine’s son to succeed to the French throne, Charles’s surviving son claimed the crown himself. Over the next decade, in alliance with Joan of Arc, he won a series of victories over the English and established his rule as Charles VII. Catherine’s marriage to Henry and the birth of their son would not unite the crowns of England and France. The French would eventually win the Hundred Years War by 1453, in large part because Catherine’s son Henry VI turned out to be as psychologically unstable as her own father had been.
In 1428, six years after Henry V’s death, Catherine broke with tradition. Although there was no law prohibiting it, it was considered customary for a queen dowager never to remarry. She married Owen Tudor, a Welsh nobleman, despite threats from the English Parliament that they would strip him of his lands and wealth if he went ahead with the marriage. The match caused disputes with her brother-in-law and many senior English nobles.
But Henry VI was just a boy of six, and Catherine was still the king’s mother, so Owen Tudor was protected against efforts to take his lands from him. The marriage produced a flurry of children in the first half of the 1430s. There were at least four: three boys and a daughter, and possibly another child or two, though it is hard to be certain, as Owen seems to have had an illegitimate child at the same time. Two of the sons, Edmund and Jasper, proved extremely significant.
Edmund was the father of Henry Tudor, who in 1485 would claim the English throne and become King Henry VII, founding the Tudor dynasty. Jasper was a great advocate of his nephew’s cause in the early 1480s. Catherine was thus the grandmother of Henry VII and great-grandmother of the infamous Henry VIII. Catherine died before her son from her marriage to Henry ever really began to rule in his own right, and before any of her other children grew up.
She seems to have had an underlying illness for several years, and one of her pregnancies compounded the situation. She died on 3 January 1437, at just thirty-five years old. Her passing initiated a bizarre saga around her remains that lasted 440 years. The English nobles immediately moved to prosecute Owen Tudor for having married the queen dowager and placed him under detention.
They also decided that it was unbecoming for a woman who had dishonoured her royal husband in the manner Catherine had to be laid to rest alongside him. So her remains were interred in the Lady Chapel at Westminster in 1437, not in the royal crypt beside Henry V. A wooden effigy of Catherine was carved and placed alongside her husband in Westminster Abbey instead. Things took an even stranger turn half a century later.
Catherine’s remains were left undisturbed in the Lady Chapel for several decades, until her grandson from her second marriage, Henry Tudor, rose to the English throne as Henry VII in 1485. Much of Henry VII’s reign was concerned with reconciling the houses of Lancaster and York following the Wars of the Roses, which had torn England apart in the decades after Catherine’s death, in large part because of a crisis caused by her son. As part of these efforts, Henry VII developed plans to knock down the Lady Chapel, where his grandmother’s remains lay, and build a new, grander chapel to house the remains of several recent monarchs, including Henry VI. This necessarily involved disturbing Catherine’s tomb, which was opened during the construction work.
Henry VII never got around to finishing his project at the Lady Chapel. Instead, Catherine’s coffin and her remains were simply removed to the grounds of Westminster Abbey, where Henry V had been interred. Visitors in the early sixteenth century would have seen a battered coffin simply lying on the ground. Surprisingly, nobody thought to remove it or inter it in a proper way.
It was just left there, and it remained there for approximately 280 years. Over time, Catherine’s coffin became a subject of some interest. Part of it had broken off, revealing the remains within, and people came to look at it. It does not appear to have occurred to anyone in a position to do something about it that they should remedy the situation.
The macabre sense of a tourist attraction is furthered by the fact that Samuel Pepys, the naval administrator who kept a famous diary through the 1660s, visited the tomb himself. On Shrove Tuesday, 1669, he wrote of going to the Abbey and seeing the body of Queen Catherine of Valois. He had the upper part of her body in his hands, kissed her mouth, and reflected that he had kissed a queen on his birthday. By the eighteenth century, Catherine’s remains had been left lying around in Westminster Abbey in an open, damaged coffin for so long that local schoolboys had even disturbed them.
Finally, in 1778, the Dean of Westminster, John Thomas, ordered the removal of her coffin and whatever little remained of her body to the vault of the Percy family, one of England’s oldest and most esteemed aristocratic lines. At that stage, they had been lying open in Westminster Abbey for nearly three hundred years. The journey was not over quite yet. A century later, during the reign of Queen Victoria, a decision was taken that Catherine should finally be interred where she should have been placed 440 years earlier, alongside her late husband the king.
In 1877, her remains, a few bones and some bits of ashes and dust, were taken from the Percy vault and placed under the stone slab in King Henry V’s vault. Four hundred and forty years after her death, and nearly four hundred years after her grandson had her tomb in the Lady Chapel opened, Catherine was finally laid to rest. The wooden effigy that had been placed next to Henry V in 1437 is now displayed in the gallery of Westminster Abbey.
