by Dan Jones
At dawn on 6 May, another Armagnac assault began, driven by a new zeal, which seemed almost visibly to radiate from the person of the Pucelle. As the English siege positions came under fierce attack, she rode around in the centre of the fighting, her white standard fluttering as blood sprayed up around her. At one point the blood was her own: an arrow fired from an English-held tower sliced through the flesh of one of her shoulders. God, however, was smiling upon his appointed agent, and Joan staggered on, almost oblivious to her wound, spurring the Frenchmen forward. Relieving troops and liberated citizens alike swarmed over the English positions, capturing them one by one, slaughtering enemies and sending waves of sheer panic through the living. At night, bells of celebration clanged and jangled from the churches of Orléans, rung with glee by men and women who knew that they were winning their freedom. Within three days the French had fully relieved Orléans, and the English were retreating up the Loire at such speed they were forced to abandon their cannon and heavy weaponry as they went.
The loss of Orléans began a serious collapse in the English position. Reinforcements were sent, but more strongholds began to fall along the Loire. On 18 June 1429 the confused English army was drawn into a battle at Patay, just north of Orléans, for which they were totally unprepared. They were annihilated by the French vanguard: more than two thousand men were killed and every captain save Fastolf was captured. In a matter of months, fortunes in occupied France had been dramatically reversed. The dauphin’s forces marched through Anglo-Burgundian territory, towns falling before them without a fight. On 16 July the dauphin entered Reims, and the following day he was anointed with holy oil and crowned King Charles VII, with Joan of Arc standing proudly by the altar. All the genealogical propaganda in the world could not obscure the fact that France now had a ceremonially anointed king – and that he was not called Henry.
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The dreadful news from France was described in the minutes of the English privy council as ‘diverse great and grievous adversities’. It demanded an urgent response.15 There was one obvious course of action. In the first week of November 1429, after a period of very hasty preparation, London and Westminster welcomed the young king, still only seven years old, to his English coronation.
The ceremony by which kings were crowned was one of the most important spectacles in English political life, and it had become increasingly elaborate over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. In 1423 a book outlining the order of service for crowning French kings had come into the duke of Bedford’s hands, and the English ceremonial had been upgraded once again to give it Frankish pomp. Events took place over several days. The first stage was Henry’s formal entry to the capital. ‘The Friday, the third of November, the King with his lords … rode from Kingston over London Bridge,’ wrote the author of the Brut Chronicle. ‘And the Mayor and the Aldermen, all in scarlet hoods, rode to meet the King.’ The citizens accompanied him to the Tower of London where, the next evening, Henry sat in splendour to receive thirty-two young noblemen, who were ritually washed and dubbed knights of the Order of the Bath. On Sunday he proceeded out of the Tower to parade before his subjects, and to make his way to Westminster Abbey for the coronation proper. He rode bareheaded through the cramped streets of the city accompanied by his great lords, who were dressed for the most part in gold. Inside Westminster Abbey a great scaffold had been erected, to allow a good view to the congregation. Henry’s mother Catherine and her ladies sat in pride of place near the altar, near the king’s cousin Pedro, prince of Portugal, who had returned in haste to the country he had visited earlier in the decade, in order to attend the ceremony.16
The earl of Warwick carried Henry into the church, then led him up the scaffold to his seat in the centre, from where he surveyed the crowds around him, according to Gregory’s chronicle, ‘sadly and wisely’. Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, addressed the assembled realm, telling them Henry had come before God and the Holy Church, ‘asking the crown of this realm by right and descent of heritage’. The congregation gave a roar, throwing their hands in the air and crying ‘ye, ye’, while young Henry walked before the great altar and prostrated himself for a long time before it.
What followed took hours. Throughout the ceremony bishops gave readings and sang anthems over the king’s body, while he was made to lie down, stand up, lie down and stand up again, as well as being undressed, redressed and paraded around in the most elaborate costumes: first girded with the spurs and swords of a warrior, then in a bishop’s robes and sandals, before finally being arrayed in gleaming cloth of gold, with Richard II’s crown placed on his head since the traditional crown of Edward the Confessor was deemed too weighty for a seven-year-old. At the heart of the ceremony was the anointing: the most mysterious and permanent part of kingship, a rite that could never be undone. Henry stood in his undershirt while his little body was touched systematically with a miraculous oil said once to have been given by the Virgin Mary to St Thomas Becket. Holy oil was poured from a golden eagle-shaped ampulla onto Henry’s breast ‘and the midst of his back, and his head, all across his two shoulders, his two elbows [and] his palms of his hands’.17 These were then dabbed with a soft white cotton cloth, while a white silken coif was placed on his head. It was to be worn for eight days, at the end of which a group of bishops would ceremonially clean Henry’s head with lukewarm white wine. (This was one of the least comfortable aspects of the coronation: Henry’s grandfather, Henry IV, had developed head lice after he was crowned in 1399.) After many hours of such solemn proceedings, capped by the celebration of the mass, the newly crowned king processed from the abbey to Westminster Hall for a feast in which every dish carried messages about the splendour of Henry’s dual kingship. The first course featured (edible) fritters decorated with fleurs-de-lis and a decorative ‘subtlety’ showing Henry being carried by St Edward the Confessor of England and St Louis of France – his two holiest royal ancestors. The second course saw more tarts dusted with fleurs-de-lis. The subtlety brought out with the third course featured Henry presented to the Virgin and Child by St George and St Denis. A poem accompanied its presentation, praising the young king, ‘Born by descent and title of right / Justly to reign in England and in France’. Then, as soon as the festivities at Westminster were over, preparations began to take the young king to his much-advertised second kingdom.
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 gian
t 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’.18 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.’19
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.20
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.21 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.
4 : Oweyn Tidr
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.1 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’.2 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 1412.3 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.
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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.4 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’.5 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.6 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.