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The trouble with Lancastrian Royal widows

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Page 69 of Ashdown-Hill’s Royal Marriage Secrets indicates that an Act of Parliament was passed in 1427, forbidding the re-marriage of a royal widow without the consent of an adult king. It has also been clearly established that Catherine de Valois, the widow of Henry V at whom the legislation was surely aimed, died in January 1437 whilst her son Henry VI did not attain his majority until later in 1437.

Henry IV had died in 1413 and was survived by Joan of Navarre, the second wife he took in 1403 and thus the stepmother of Henry V. In 1419, she was convicted of using witchcraft in an attempt to poison the latter and imprisoned at Pevensey for four years, eventually being released to live at Nottingham Castle where she outlived Catherine de Valois by five months.

It is highly likely that Joan’s 1419 trial was fresh in the minds of the Parliament of 1427 that passed this legislation and the Leicester Parliament of the previous year that considered something similar.

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11 responses to “The trouble with Lancastrian Royal widows”

  1. red squirrel Avatar
    red squirrel

    Joanna of Navarre’s 1419 trial was in no one’s mind in 1427; she had no trial, and as such, was never “convicted” of anything. Which was probably by design; a conviction for witchcraft against the king could have had resulted in only one sentence. Henry V (or his ministers or courtiers who concocted these charges) were after the 10,000 marks per annum in dowry that Joanna was costing the Treasury, not her life. She was freed in 1422 by a remorseful Henry V on his own deathbed; it’s doubtful he would have done this had he believed her guilty.
    There’s no evidence Joanna of Navarre was planning to marry anyone, and Henry V was an adult at his father’s death, so I don’t see the connection to the 1427 Act.

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    1. super blue Avatar
      super blue

      Sorry, I assumed she had been tried but her stepson was Lancastrian.
      Also, in the same chapter of “Royal Marriage Secrets” (pp.66-8), Ashdown-Hill narrates the 1441 witchcraft case of Eleanor (nee Cobham), Duchess of Gloucester. She was condvicted of seeking to have Henry VI’s death foretold and for obtaining potions. Although her agent, Margery Jourdemayne, was executed, Eleanor was merely imprisoned for life. So a king’s aunt by marriage was not executed in 1441, any more than his step-grandmother was in 1419.
      Ironically, Humphrey of Gloucester was the Regent of England who had Joan of Navarre released. He died childless, six years after his wife’s imprisonment confirmed this status.

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  2. sighthound6 Avatar
    sighthound6

    Humphrey of Gloucester’s fall is very interesting. It appears to have been brought about by what can only be called a Lancastrian court plot, and some of his lands were actually given away more or less the minute he was arrested. Now those nice Lancastrians are not supposed to have done things like that! Who was a principal benefactor? Why, Somerset! Humphrey probably had a stroke or a heart attack, but if he had not, it’s almost certain he would have been executed, as various important people had a stake in his not being acquitted. No wonder York was nervous, outside the clique and with lots of nice, tempting property.

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  3. red squirrel Avatar
    red squirrel

    Joanna of Navarre’s “accusor” (probably under torture) in the affair was a Franciscan friar of Shrewsbury Greyfriars named John Randolf, referred to as the queen’s confessor. He was also accused of being the active agent of the said witchcraft (and died in the Tower years after Joanna was freed). There’s no evidence of him being a witch, or even the queen’s confessor; what is certain is that he was an astrologer to the rich and famous, an occupation that always carried the risk of accusation of sorcery. One of his astrological tables survives to this day, in the library of the man who commissioned it: guess who? Humphrey Duke of Gloucester. If the case against the foreign-born dowager queen had been more successful, perhaps the real plan was to use Randolf as a weapon against a more prominent target…

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  4. sighthound6 Avatar
    sighthound6

    From what I can gather, astrology was OK, but there was a very fine line between it and sorcery/necromancy which if crossed could get a person into big trouble. Apparently it was pretty much the norm among the upper classes to consult astrologers. Where the Duchess of Gloucester went wrong was to ask someone to cast Henry VI’s horoscope – this was regarded as ‘imagining the king’s death’ which was high treason on some interpretations. There was some other dodgy stuff as well, but I have as yet not come across a satisfactory account that makes everything clear. As for Joanna of Navarre, Henry V apparently had her on his conscience and acquitted her on his death bed. His motive seems simply to have been to steal her money. Strangely, this is rarely held against him by historians. Oh, and anther interesting snippet – after Gloucester’s death, Eleanor Cobham was declared legally dead. Another thing the Yorkists didn’t invent.

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    1. super blue Avatar
      super blue

      … and there was a different fate for commoners (eg Margery Jourdemayne, burned for treason and her male accomplices drawn, hanged and quartered) and noblewomen (eg Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Cobham).

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  5. red squirrel Avatar
    red squirrel

    An ode to Margery Jourdemayne, from “The Mirror for Magistrates:”

    There was a Beldame called the wytch of Ey,
    Old mother Madge her neyghbours did hir name
    Which wrought wonders in countryes by heresaye
    Both feendes and fayries her charmyng would obay
    And dead corpsis from grave she could uprere
    Suche an inchauntresse, as that tyme had no peere.

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  6. white lily Avatar
    white lily

    I think what I gather from this whole discussion is that any dowager Queen of England had to be especially careful, obviously don’t be a financial burden, and for a foreign-born princess that is especially delicate considering you don’t have English lands or an affinity upon which to sustain yourself. Perhaps that is the real motivation behind the 1427 Act of Parliament, because if you are a drag on the Exchequer, your dowry’s going to be susceptible to disenfranchisement. The dear lady can only hope her former homeland will take her back…

    But from a constitutional viewpoint, there is a reason to control the womb of a dowager Queen. There was a type of murky, unsettledness about another Lancastrian. John of Gaunt who later married his mistress Katherine Swynford, and from that all sorts of Parliamentarian contortions had to be made to settle, clarify, and denounce their offspring’s future claims to the throne. This took not only the exerted efforts of Henry IV’s parliament, but also an expensive foray into the Papal curia to obtain all the proper adoption papers. etc. Of course, John of Gaunt wasn’t even the king; he was just an exceedingly powerful duke. Imagine what the transaction costs would have been if it had been a dowager Queen to sort out a similar mess. And, perhaps, knowing the experience of Portugal (and Spain) with all their various bastard and step-sibling hereditary lines (and internecine wars), it might have been a matter of legal practicality to say to any widowed queen of an English king, that you cannot just willy-nilly marry and start a family simply because your loins are telling you to. The constitutional balance is likely to be tremendously upset or incredibly distracted at a time when it’s not convenient (and expensive).

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  7. super blue Avatar
    super blue

    Another example is the Earl of Somerset’s daughter, Joan “Beaufort”, who married James I. She was widowed in 1437 and remarried, to Sir John Stewart of Lorne in but was imprisoned at Stirling.

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