Catherine of Valois – How the daughter of a mad king founded the Tudor dynasty
You hear the lance before you see it. The iron point strikes the iron helmet. A squire has dropped it. The metallic sound is actually small; the Le Mans forest absorbs the sound like wet wool. But the man on the white horse hears it. He is 23 years old and has been riding for three days through the murderous heat. The brain inside his helmet is no longer the same brain that embarked on the journey. He turns. He draws his sword. They are only a few meters behind him and see his face the moment his horse rears. There is no recognition in it—not for the boy, not for the knights, not for the four men who will be dead before the others can drag him to the ground. The brain in that helmet will found the Tudor dynasty, not through rule, but through a rupture, passed down through a daughter to a son who, 61 years later, will be unable to rise from his dinner.
The man on horseback is Charles VI of France. The date is August 13, 1392. The chronicler Michel Pintoin would later write that the king attacked his own knights as if they were traitors. What follows is what the laws of the realm forgot to print, what Westminster Abbey inscribed incorrectly in its stone, and what Shakespeare deliberately omitted from his plays. It is the documented life of a queen whose only surviving voice is heard on a will dictated three days before her death.
Four men are dead, the king is overpowered and taken back to Paris in a litter. Nine years later, in a Parisian palace called the Hôtel Saint-Pol, this man’s wife will give birth to their youngest daughter. She will become Queen of England. She will be the biological grandmother of the Tudor dynasty. Her body will lie above ground in Westminster Abbey for 275 years. None of this will ever be her own choice.
The version of her story you probably know is Shakespeare’s in Henry V, Act 5, Scene 2. The English king is victorious, the French princess charming. He speaks no French, she no English. They flirt their way to a peace treaty. The play ends with a wedding kiss in the spring of 1420. But Shakespeare omits the reality: Her father had been insane for 28 years by this time. Pope Pius II recorded that the king believed his body was made of glass. He wept often and had iron bars sewn into his clothes so he wouldn’t shatter. The princess Henry intended to marry was the daughter of a man who wore iron bars under his shirt to prevent himself from being broken.
Her name was Catherine de Valois, born on October 27, 1401, married on June 2, 1420. It was more of a contract than a wedding. Crowned in Westminster Abbey eight months later, widowed at 20, mother of a king of two countries before the heir to the throne could even walk. In the decades that followed, the daughter of a glass king would become the biological vessel for his madness. A Welsh servant would end up in the bed of a queen forbidden to marry, and her body would remain unburied for almost three centuries until a stranger kissed her on his birthday in 1669. None of this was her plan. The plan was made by others. She was merely the document they all signed.
The real plan was the Treaty of Troyes of May 21, 1420. In Troyes Cathedral, Henry V signed the document that disinherited his future wife’s brother and made himself heir to the French throne. Henry, fresh from the Battle of Agincourt, was the most powerful man present. The treaty handed France over to him in stages: marriage, becoming regent, inheriting upon the king’s death, and fathering a child who would wear both crowns. This child was the sole purpose of the entire undertaking. The marriage was purely a formality.
Catherine and Henry married 12 days later. She was 18, he 33. Their honeymoon consisted of a series of military sieges. By autumn, she was pregnant. She traveled to England in February 1421 and was crowned alone in Westminster Abbey. This was the only ceremony in her life arranged so that the moment belonged solely to her. Four months after the coronation, Henry left England for France. He would never meet his son. The boy was born on December 6, 1421, in Windsor—the only place where Henry had explicitly forbidden her to give birth. She did so anyway.
Twenty months later, Henry V died of dysentery in Vincennes. He had reigned for nine years and been married to Catherine for 26 months. She was 20 years old. The baby in the cradle was nine months old and King of England. Two months later, her father died in Paris. The baby was now also King of France. Catherine had been given to England as part of a treaty; she was now neither wife nor regent. She was the link that still held the two crowns together. The English court didn’t know what to do with her, so it did the safest thing: it kept her near her son.
The Council’s logic was simple: a widowed queen mother of a minor king was a dangerous weapon. Marry her to an English nobleman, and his family would become royalty in the next generation. Marry her to a Frenchman, and the war would reignite. Send her home, and the boy would lose his claim to France. The cleanest outcome was for her not to remarry at all. But she was only 21. In 1425, a name surfaced: Edmund Beaufort, a nephew of the Bishop of Winchester. A marriage between a Beaufort and a Valois queen would have made the next generation of Beauforts royals in two countries. The Beauforts lobbied the House of Commons for permission, but the nobility said no.
What Parliament wrote next has no precedent in English law. The Parliament of 1427/28 passed a statute stating that a widowed queen could not remarry without the king’s consent. The consent had to be given by the king personally. However, the king had to be of age. Henry VI, the consenting king, was six years old at the time. The law did not directly prohibit remarriage; it made it administratively impossible—a locked door whose only keyholder was too young to turn it. The penalty for marrying without consent was the forfeiture of all the husband’s lands and possessions to the crown. It was the medieval equivalent of confiscating a man’s property while leaving the contract intact. The marriage itself would, oddly enough, be valid, the children legitimate. The architecture was designed to ruin the husband without erasing the dynastic effect of the union.
This statute later mysteriously disappeared from official records. English bureaucracy was good at many things for over 600 years, but forgetting Catherine de Valois was what it did best. Yet Catherine did not remain imprisoned. Sometime between 1428 and 1432, she began a relationship with a man from her own household. His Welsh name was Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur. He owned no estate. The penalty of the statute meant nothing to him, as he had nothing to lose. She married him secretly in May 1432. She had at least four children with him: Edmund, Jasper, Edward, and a daughter who died young.
This is the part no one wrote down. She left no letters, no diary, no documented private speeches. The only text in her own voice is her will. In it, she names only Henry VI. She mentions neither Owen nor Edmund nor Jasper. The mother of three boys, on her deathbed, still acted by the rules of a law that pretended she didn’t exist. She died on January 3, 1437, at the age of 35. Her funerary effigy, a painted wooden figure in her coronation robes, can still be seen today. She was buried in the old Chapel of Our Lady in the abbey, but did not remain there for long.
Sixty-six years later, her grandson, Henry VII, decided to demolish the chapel to build a more magnificent one. Catherine’s coffin was lifted, the lid partially detached. Her body was mummified inside, intact from the waist up. Henry VII, gazing into the face of the grandmother whose secret marriage had given him his name and his crown, did not order the coffin closed. He had it placed beside the tomb of Henry V. There it remained above ground for 275 years. The Tudor dynasty came and went, but the body in the open coffin outlived them all.
On February 23, 1669, his 36th birthday, the official Samuel Pepys visited the abbey. He was permitted to touch the queen’s body. Pepys lifted her torso and kissed her on the mouth. He wrote in his diary: “I held the upper part of her body in my hands and kissed her mouth… that on my 36th birthday I kissed a queen for the first time.” He was not horrified; he was delighted. The cruelty lies not in what Pepys did, but in how insignificantly history treated her. She was a coronation figure, a secret wife, and ultimately, an exhibit.
While her body lay there, the consequences of her bloodline had already unfolded two centuries earlier. In August 1453, her son Henry VI was sitting at dinner when he suddenly stopped speaking. He no longer recognized anyone, could not feed himself, and did not respond to any questions. The stupor lasted 17 months. During this time, his son was born, but he did not even seem to register his presence. The kingdom had a king who could not rule and an heir whom no one was allowed to name. Within two years, the country was engulfed in civil war—the Wars of the Roses.
Modern historians still puzzle over Henry’s illness: catatonic schizophrenia or depressive psychosis. The simplest explanation, however, is the long shadow cast by his grandfather, the Glass King. Catherine de Valois, the daughter of a man who believed himself to be made of glass, gave birth to a son who, at the same age as his grandfather, succumbed to mental derangement.
The Treaty of Troyes was meant to unite crowns, but it also united medical records. Henry VI lost his throne, regained it, and was ultimately assassinated in the Tower of London. His son had been killed shortly before. The Lancastrian line, which Catherine had brought to England, ended in bloodshed.
But Catherine’s secret marriage to the penniless Welshman Owen Tudor brought salvation. Her grandson, Henry Tudor, defeated Richard III at Bosworth and ended the war. The dynasty he founded would separate the English Church from Rome, defeat the Spanish Armada, and lay the foundations for a global empire. All this was based on a private marriage that no parliament had sanctioned. What survived was the marriage no one was meant to enter into and the body no one took care to bury.
It wasn’t until 1878 that Catherine de Valois was finally laid to rest. The inscription on her tomb contains two errors in her dates of birth and death. After 600 years of administrative scrutiny, the English bureaucracy still hasn’t managed to correctly state her year of death. She was crowned by a treaty, married in secret, forgotten by a statute, and kissed by a stranger two centuries after her death.
The plan to bind France to England failed, but the Tudors who repaired the damage owed it all to a woman whose own voice was silenced in history. In the only document she ever wrote, she didn’t even mention it. She heard the lance before anyone else did, but the records preserved only her signature and never her words.
You hear the lance before you see it. The iron tip strikes the iron helmet, a sharp, dry clang that cuts through the damp air of the Le Mans forest like a whip crack. A page dropped it, a stupid little mistake that will change the course of world history.
The sound is actually insignificant; the Augustinian trees absorb sound like heavy, wet wool. Yet the man on the white horse hears it with an intensity no sane person can comprehend. He is twenty-three years old, he has been riding for three days through murderous heat, and the brain inside his gilded helmet is no longer the same brain that began the journey in Paris. He turns, his eyes wide, an animal cornered. He draws his sword.
At that moment, all reason remained within him, only the naked, glassy fear of a man who believed himself surrounded by enemies. Four men of his own bodyguard would be dead before his companions could forcibly drag him from his horse. This man was Charles VI of France, “the Madman,” and the shadow he cast would stretch for centuries, reaching into the beds of English kings and deep into the blood of a dynasty that did not yet exist.
It is an irony of history that the most magnificent empires are often built on the ruins of a broken mind. Charles VI was not only a sick man; he was a symbol of the fragility of power. He believed at times that he was made of glass, a fragile vessel that could shatter at the slightest touch. He had iron bars sewn into his magnificent robes to artificially hold his body together, lest he would break into a thousand sharp shards if he moved too quickly.
Amidst this bizarre nightmare of paranoia and physical torment, a daughter was born who would bear the fate of two nations on her narrow shoulders. Catherine de Valois entered a world already ablaze. France was torn apart between rival dukes and the relentless advance of the English under their charismatic warrior king, Henry V. Catherine was not a child raised to love; she was a piece of diplomatic currency, a pawn to be moved around the negotiating table of power to secure territories and end wars.
The version of her story that we find in textbooks today, or that William Shakespeare serves up in his brilliant verses, is a sanitized lie. In Shakespeare’s version, she is the charming princess who wins over Henry V in a scene full of wit and awkward flirting.
He speaks no French, she barely any English, and in this linguistic vacuum, a romance blossoms, sealing the Peace of Troyes. But reality was far less lyrical. The Treaty of Troyes in 1420 was not an act of reconciliation, but an act of total submission. Henry V was the most powerful man in Europe, a coldly calculating tactician who knew perfectly well that he could not hold the French crown through battles alone.
He needed legitimacy, and that legitimacy lay in the womb of a Valois princess. Catherine was the price of peace, the living document that sealed the dispossession of her own brother, the Dauphin. She became the bridge over which English blood would flow into the French throne, a biological instrument for creating a dual kingdom.
The wedding took place on June 2, 1420, and Catherine was barely eighteen years old at the time. Her husband was a thirty-three-year-old soldier whose life consisted of sieges, executions, and strategic maneuvers. There was no honeymoon in the conventional sense. Instead, Catherine followed her new husband from one besieged city to the next. She was pregnant while, around her, the walls of Melun trembled under the barrage of catapults.
Her entire existence was geared towards producing an heir, a child who would heal the wounds of two nations. But while she carried the heir to the throne, she also carried something else within her: her father’s invisible legacy, the dark seed of madness waiting to blossom in the next generation. It is a chilling thought that, at the very moment she was crowned queen in Westminster Abbey, the splendor of the ceremony was merely a mask for the impending decay.
Henry V never saw his son. He died of dysentery in August 1422, far from his wife and child, in a tent near Vincennes. Catherine was a widow at the age of twenty. Her son, Henry VI, was just nine months old and already king of two kingdoms. The political landscape of England was a shark tank, and Catherine suddenly found herself in a position of extreme isolation. She was the queen mother, but she possessed no real power.
The young king’s regents, the powerful uncles of the House of Lancaster, regarded her with deep suspicion. She was a Frenchwoman in a country that had hated France for generations. They feared she might remarry and create a new power bloc that would threaten the stability of the realm. To prevent this, Parliament created a law so bizarre and specific that it is unparalleled in English legal history. It forbade the Queen Mother from remarrying without the express consent of the King—a King who, at that time, was still in diapers and had no idea what a marriage contract was.
In this time of isolation and strict surveillance by the English court, the unthinkable happened. Catherine, the woman sacrificed as a political pawn, began an affair with a man who barely existed in the social hierarchy of the court. Owen Tudor was Welsh, a descendant of rebels who had fought against the English crown. He was not a duke, not an earl, not even a significant landowner.
He was a servant, a man responsible for her wardrobe or perhaps for tasting her food. Legend has it that he fell into her lap when he stumbled during a dance, or that she watched him swimming in the river and was struck by his physical presence. Whatever the trigger, their union was an act of rebellion against the entire structure of medieval society. They married in secret, far from the eyes of spies and councilors, and began to build a family that, officially, was not supposed to exist.
While Catherine secretly bore her children with Owen Tudor—Edmund, Jasper, and others—her firstborn son, Henry VI, grew up in the cold splendor of the English court. And it was here that the legacy of the Glass King began to manifest itself. Henry VI was not like his father. He possessed no military ruthlessness, no political acumen. He was a gentle, almost saintly man, often lost in deep prayer as his kingdom crumbled around him.
In 1453, at the same age his grandfather Charles VI had suffered his first collapse in the Forest of Le Mans, Henry VI also lapsed into a state of complete apathy. He was sitting at dinner when suddenly he was gone. Not physically, but mentally. He didn’t respond to voices, he didn’t recognize his wife, he didn’t even take note of the birth of his own son. The Glass King had returned, this time to the English throne, and the consequences were catastrophic.
The king’s madness was the spark that ignited the Wars of the Roses. With the throne occupied by a man who could neither lead nor decide, the rival houses of Lancaster and York tore each other apart. It was a thirty-year nightmare of blood and treason that wiped out the entire English aristocracy.
But while the rightful heirs slaughtered each other, the seeds sown by Catherine and Owen Tudor grew in the shadows. Edmund Tudor, their son from the forbidden marriage, became the father of a boy named Henry, who would later rewrite English history as Henry VII. It is a fascinating twist of fate: the official, legitimate union between Valois and Lancaster led to madness and ruin, while the illegal, despised union between a queen and her servant produced the most stable dynasty England has ever seen.
Catherine de Valois died in 1437 at Bermondsey Abbey, ill and exhausted from a life of constant extremes. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, but even in death she found no peace. The English bureaucracy that had so constrained her in life neglected her in death. When her grandson Henry VII built the magnificent Tudor chapel, her tomb was opened without care.
Her body, naturally mummified by the unique conditions of the tomb, was not reburied. Her open coffin was simply placed in a shed, where it served as a macabre tourist attraction for over two centuries. The body of the woman who was the mother and grandmother of kings became a spectacle for anyone who paid a few coins to the abbey’s sacristans.
The story of Samuel Pepys kissing her on his birthday in 1669 is more than just a bizarre anecdote. It is the ultimate symbol of the objectification of a woman who, throughout her life, was never allowed control over her own body or her own destiny. Pepys wrote in his diary that he held the “upper half of a queen” in his hands and kissed her mouth. It was an act of disrespect disguised as a strange form of adoration.
Catherine was no longer a person at that moment; she was an artifact, a piece of history that could be touched and defaced. It wasn’t until the reign of Queen Victoria that anyone took pity on her and finally laid her remains to rest under a dignified gravestone – even if the dates of her birth and death were incorrectly carved on the stone, a final administrative error in a life filled with misunderstandings.
When we look today at the legacy of the Tudors—at the majestic Elizabeth I, the monumental Henry VIII, the break with Rome, and the founding of the British Empire—we are really looking at the legacy of Catherine de Valois. Everything the Tudors achieved was based on the tenacity of a woman who refused to be just a clause in a contract.
She broke the rules of her time to find love in a life that had imposed only duties upon her. That this forbidden union led to the salvation of England after the Wars of the Roses is proof that history often takes its own unpredictable course. Her father’s madness destroyed the House of Lancaster, but her own rebellion created the House of Tudor.
Silence surrounds her own voice. We have no diaries to tell us how she felt the first time she felt the iron bars in her father’s shirt. We don’t know if she hated or admired Henry V, or if Owen Tudor was merely an escape or the true love of her life.
She exists in the gaps between official documents, in the lines Shakespeare didn’t write, and in the statutes Parliament tried to destroy. Yet her blood flowed through the veins of the most powerful monarchs in world history. She was the biological link between the old world of Valois and the new world of Tudors, a woman who began as the Glass Princess and ended as the mother of a new era.
The Wars of the Roses finally ended on the battlefield of Bosworth, where her grandson Henry Tudor found the crown in the bushes. At that moment, the circle that had begun in the Forest of Le Mans was completed. The instability unleashed by the Glass King’s madness was healed by the descendants of the woman who had brought that madness to England.
It is a story of fragility and strength, of silence and power. Catherine de Valois may never have been the regent people wanted her to be, but she was the architect of modernity, simply by virtue of her existence, her love, and her survival, even if her name often remained just a footnote in men’s chronicles.
Sometimes one wonders what would have become of England if the abbey’s attendants had closed the coffin again in 1503. Would we have forgotten her then? Probably not, for blood does not lie. The Tudors’ features, their temperament, their will to power—all of it originated in the daughter of the mad Charles. She was the silent constant in a time of total upheaval. And while the world kept turning, while dynasties fell and religions changed, she lay there in Westminster, unburied and unforgotten, a silent testament to the fact that the greatest changes often happen in secret, in a clandestine marriage or in a moment of madness in a distant forest.
Ultimately, her story is a reminder that power is fleeting, but biology endures. The Treaty of Troyes, which was meant to bind France to England forever, is now nothing more than a yellowed piece of parchment. The conquests of Henry V were lost within a few years. Yet the descendants of Catherine de Valois changed the world forever. She was the vessel through which history flowed, and although attempts were made to confine her within statutes and treaties, she broke free from all those shackles. Her life was no fairy tale; it was a tragedy with a triumphant aftertaste, proof that even from the deepest darkness of a broken spirit, something new and radiant can emerge.
We shouldn’t remember her merely as Shakespeare’s French princess or as the woman who provoked a law. We should see her as the woman who forged her own path in a world of iron and glass. Her silence in the historical record is perhaps her greatest refuge, the only place where she could truly be herself, far removed from the demands of kings and the greed of the nobility. Catherine de Valois remains one of the most enigmatic and influential women in European history, a queen who only truly became visible to us through her death and the bizarre journey of her body. Her legacy lives on, in every stone wall of Westminster and in every drop of blood that shapes the history of the British monarchy to this day.
Perhaps this is what fascinates us so much about her: this mixture of extreme vulnerability and unimaginable resilience. Like her father, she may often have felt as if she were made of glass, ready to shatter under the pressure of the world. But unlike him, she did not break. She became a diamond, hard enough to etch history and leave her mark long after the swords of Agincourt and Bosworth had rusted. Her silence is not a sign of weakness, but a space we can fill with admiration. She heard the lance fall, she saw the madness coming, and she chose to continue anyway, step by step, through the corridors of power, until she became the mother of a world she herself could scarcely have imagined.
