A Sweeping Historical Love Story

I knew at once that Catherine de Valois would make a fascinating heroine for my novel, The Queen’s Lover.

It wasn’t just because she married England’s greatest king, Henry V, as he conquered her country, (though it’s what made Shakespeare write about her, with considerable charm, in his play, Henry V). 

I was first drawn by quite the opposite emotion – pity. For, despite the apparent glamour of her life, this medieval French princess endured more trials and tribulations than most modern women could probably bear – with great grace, too.

Although Catherine had the luck to be born with royal blood, which you’d think might ensure her an easy life, she was born into the most dysfunctional of royal families. Her father, the French King Charles VI, went mad before she was born. He’d sink into states of delusional paranoia, in which he believed he was made of glass, or could fly. He killed servants. He attacked his wife.

All this soon plunged France into civil war. Catherine and her brother Charles were half-forgotten in the confusion, especially after the English took advantage of the French turmoil to invade.

I can hardly imagine what it must have been like for Catherine, when, as part of peace negotiations handing her country to this victorious enemy, she was then married off to the conquering Englishman, Henry V, as part of a deal that Henry, not Catherine’s brother Charles, would be the next King of France. Charles, who’d fallen out with his mother, retreated south to fight against the English, and his sister. It struck me, right from the start, that it would be hard for a teenage girl to marry the man who had destroyed her country and worsened the splits in her family – and was also twice her age. 

Nor did things get easier when Catherine reached the peace of England, even when she’d given birth to a son. Her husband died within two years. She was left the helpless mother of a child king, watching her son, Henry VI, for signs of her father’s madness, and caught in a tug-of-war for power between uncles and cousins – the very situation she’d grown up with in France, which had brought war. What’s more, one of the uncles, Humphrey of Gloucester, expressly closed off her possibilities of remarriage – the only escape she might realistically have hoped for – by passing a law forbidding her to marry again without the permission of the Council of England. All in all, this seemed a terrifying life – one likely to traumatize and incapacitate a person forced to live it. 

Yet Catherine somehow survived. Her solution was oddly modern. She chose personal fulfillment instead of royal duty. She took a second husband, whose blood was emphatically not royal, and gave up her place on the royal stage. She retired quietly with her second husband, with whom she had five or six children.

Catherine’s belief that these children would never be royal – and that by choosing love she’d extinguished the hopes of a crown that her royal blood should have brought them – was eventually, triumphantly proved wrong.

For Catherine’s second husband, her Welsh servant, was called Owain Tudor. And, two generations later, their grandson, Henry Tudor, became Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England.

By the time I’d finished, I’d stopped feeling pity for Catherine. Instead, I was overcome with admiration for the audaciousness with which she escaped her troubles, and by the proof her life provides of what every romantic heroine must believe – that, if you want it to enough, love really can conquer all.