Catherine de Valois — How a Mad King's Daughter Built the Tudors
A king goes mad in a French forest in August 1392. This is medieval history the textbooks skip — sixty-one years later, his grandson, King of England and son of his daughter Catherine, sits down to supper at Clarendon Palace, stands up an unfamiliar man, and does not speak again for seventeen months. The Wars of the Roses begin. The Lancastrian dynasty dies. And from a private marriage no Parliament had been allowed to record, a Welsh squire's grandson rides out at Bosworth in 1485 and founds the Tudor line.
This is the story of Catherine de Valois — one of the most consequential women in history that no one talks about. Daughter of a glass king. Queen of England at eighteen. Mother of a king of two countries before her son could walk. Secret wife of a man with no estate. Grandmother of every Tudor monarch from Henry VII to Elizabeth I. Her royal history was buried by a missing statute, a misdated tomb, and six hundred years of administrative silence — until now. Her body sat above ground in Westminster Abbey for 275 years. On his thirty-sixth birthday, the diarist Samuel Pepys lifted what was left of her into his hands and kissed her on the mouth.
This is history explained from the documents themselves. The Treaty of Troyes was meant to give France to England. Instead it gave England the madness that destroyed the dynasty that signed it. The Tudors who fixed the damage owed everything to her — to a marriage no Parliament had approved, between a queen who left no letters and a man who owned no land. From the era of the Hundred Years' War to the rise of the house of wisdom that would defeat the Spanish Armada, the king and queen who shaped a nation never met as adults — and the woman who connected them was erased from the record three times over.
If you fall asleep to history, this is one of those royal history stories made for slow listening — bed time history with the chronicles intact, sleep history with primary sources on screen. Learn history while you sleep, or stay awake for the parts the textbooks skipped. Either way, this is a history story uncovered from the documents royal bureaucracy spent six hundred years trying to lose.
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⏱ CHAPTERS
00:00 The Forest at Le Mans, 1392
02:48 Catherine: The Documented Life
03:43 The Treaty of Troyes
05:40 What to Do with a Widowed Queen
06:45 The Statute That Could Not Be Obeyed
08:26 Owen Tudor: The Welshman with No Estate
10:14 Death at Bermondsey Abbey
10:43 The Coffin That Would Not Stay Closed
12:19 Samuel Pepys, by Particular Favour
13:27 The Stupor at Clarendon, 1453
15:20 The Murder in the Tower
15:45 The Head on the Block at Hereford
16:18 Bosworth, 1485 — The Tudors Rise
17:09 What the Treaty Actually Did
17:52 Three Centuries of Reburials
18:50 The Refrain of Particular Favour
19:27 She Heard the Lance Before Any of Them
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📚 ACADEMIC SOURCES
Famiglietti, R.C. Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI, 1392–1420. New York: AMS Press, 1986.
Griffiths, R.A. The Reign of King Henry VI. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Griffiths, R.A. "Queen Katherine of Valois and a Missing Statute of the Realm." Law Quarterly Review 93 (1977): 248–58. Reprinted in King and Country: England and Wales in the Fifteenth Century. London: Hambledon, 1991.
Griffiths, R.A., and R.S. Thomas. The Making of the Tudor Dynasty. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.
Johnson, Lauren. Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI. London: Head of Zeus, 2019.
Jones, Michael. "Catherine [Catherine of Valois]." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Edited by R.C. Latham and W. Matthews. Vol. IX, 1668–69. London: Bell & Hyman, 1976.
Pintoin, Michel (Religieux de Saint-Denys). Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, contenant le règne de Charles VI. Edited by M.L. Bellaguet. 6 vols. Paris, 1839–1852.
Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini). Commentarii rerum memorabilium quae temporibus suis contigerunt. c. 1462.
Sayles, G.O. "The Royal Marriages Act 1428." In Scripta Diversa. London: Hambledon, 1982: 285–89.
Speak, Gill. "An Odd Kind of Melancholy: Reflections on the Glass Delusion in Europe (1440–1680)." History of Psychiatry 1, no. 2 (1990): 191–206.
Stanley, A.P. "On the Deposition of the Remains of Katharine de Valois, Queen of Henry V, in Westminster Abbey." Archaeologia 46 (1881).
Tatton-Brown, T., and R. Mortimer, eds. Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003.
Jenkins, S., and K. Blessley. "Royal Wooden Funeral Effigies at Westminster Abbey." Burlington Magazine 161 (January 2019): 30.
"The Text in Neglect: Katherine de Valois." Chapter in The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700–1900. Cambridge University Press.
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