Blood Royal. Vanora Bennett
by writing love poems he was too shy to deliver. At last, the lady’s husband sent for her to go home, and the boy fell into despair. It was only when his cousin took pity on him and told the lady of his love that she understood why. She was flattered and touched, and hesitantly wrote to him to tell him she loved him too.
… The pair began, secretly and blissfully, to meet and talk…. but finally, feeling her honour compromised, the lady told the lover to leave her. The lover fainted on getting her letter and was as distraught as she. He was ready to go and die overseas if she wished; but stop loving her he never could. He set off abroad … but their love would never change …
There was a great tenderness in Owain’s heart as he closed the little book. He wound a cloth carefully round it and slipped it into the saddlebag. Perhaps, after all, Christine hadn’t condemned him utterly for falling victim to an impossible love. Perhaps she’d understood him better, all along, than he’d realised.
He’d never know. He wouldn’t see her again, or know the illusory happiness of these past weeks. The answers he thought he’d found here were too easy.
There was only sorrow ahead. He couldn’t bear to think of Catherine. Not yet. Not till he’d got away.
But at least he wanted to believe this gift was a gesture of forgiveness.
The Queen looked at Catherine, standing in the church, trying not to cry as her red-eyed brother was betrothed to Marie of Anjou. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you stopped seeing so much of that disagreeable Madame de Pizan,’ Isabeau whispered, too loudly. It wasn’t really a question. When the litters reached the Hotel Saint-Paul, Catherine saw her possessions were being moved into her mother’s house. The days of picnics with Christine were over. She’d stopped being a child.
Catherine knew that moving in with her mother meant there’d be less escape than ever before from the Queen’s simmering hostilities with Louis (though, since Isabeau had forced Louis to retract his written request for the Duke of Burgundy to bring an army to liberate Paris from his mother, and in return had let him cut off his allowance to his wife Marguerite, whom he’d sent to live in poverty at Saint-Germain, the heat had gone out of that hatred – at least for now). Still, Catherine wasn’t altogether sorry for the change.
She’d been mortified by her last conversation with Christine. She knew Christine had meant to be as subtle and sensitive as one of the clever attendants in her love poems when she’d sidled up to Catherine just before the betrothal ceremony and begun, in roundabout fashion, to give her a little talk about blood and what it meant to be royal. Charles’ marriage was good, because a royal union, in spite of all his fears and tears. Catherine, one day soon, could also look forward to a royal union, a marriage of equals. Royal blood was a compact with God. Princes were the finest of the fine. Their blood was not to be diluted; tainted; made impure by contact with lesser mortals, or God would be angered. Catherine had heard it before. She didn’t want to hear it now.
So she could think of nothing to say back. She just shook her head and nodded, over and over, until the nods and shakes got muddled and her eyes screwed up with the effort of politeness. When Christine didn’t stop, Catherine had eventually just walked away. ‘I have to go to Charles,’ she’d muttered.
Whatever had possessed her, to think that any wilful action on her part could change her fate? Dashing off into the forest; discussing the possibility of the English marriage with her sister; talking so much with Owain; letting Owain … letting herself … the heat of that embrace …
It was too painful to dwell on. She knew better now; knowledge was branded humiliatingly on her. There was nothing she would ever be able to do to change her circumstances. She wasn’t a Christine, or an Owain, whose lives could be altered by determined acts of will or thought. She shouldn’t try. She was nothing but a receptacle for her royal blood. Her duty as a princess was decorously to do nothing. It was a bitter lesson. Now she needed time to make her peace with herself. And time on her own was the only thing that being a nearly forgotten part of her mother’s eccentric household would guarantee her.
Christine’s Jean, who (God willing) had found a permanent professional home with Chancellor Henri de Marle, was put to work on negotiating the English marriage. The stories he came home with, as the summer of 1414 curdled into a miserable winter, horrified his family, especially Christine.
The new King of England’s negotiating style was a ruthless mixture of threat and promise. As Christine had feared, he was turning the negotiations into the pretext for full-scale war on France.
Henry of England was claiming as rightfully his all the French lands that last century’s English kings had fought for, and which, after capturing old King Jean the Good, had been granted on paper – a third of France. But this Henry wanted even more than the rightful kings of England had: he was also demanding the duchy of Normandy, which once, centuries ago, had belonged to the ancestors of the English kings, and all the lands in the south and west that had ever been controlled from England – he wanted even the lands that English kings had explicitly given up claims to a hundred years ago.
Jean de Castel wrinkled his forehead as he told his mother the list of demands. Henry of England wanted the lordships of Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine. He wanted the homage of Brittany and Flanders. He wanted full sovereignty over the duchy of Aquitaine, not just the little strip of Gascony that the English still actually held, along with Poitou, Quercy, the Limousin and the Agenais. In the north, he wanted to add to the English territory of Calais and its march the counties of Ponthieu, Guisnes and Montreuil. He also wanted northern lands between the Somme river and Gravelines; half the county of Provence in the south; and the castles and lordships of Beaufort and Nogent.
On top of that, he wanted eight million crowns in cash – a fantasy figure.
Once he was satisfied on all these counts, he would marry Princess Catherine and make peace.
‘Impossible,’ Christine said flatly.
‘Of course it’s impossible,’ Jean agreed. ‘He must know that. How can he expect anyone to think he’s negotiating in good faith? If we said yes, there’d be nothing left of France.’ He rested weary head in hands. ‘Still,’ he added bitterly, ‘we are supposed to say yes, somehow. The Queen’s in charge. And this is what she says she wants.’
During the winter, the King of France recovered from his illness enough to take negotiations with the English into his own hands. The eventual French counter-offer, made the next spring, was more lands in the south, bordering English holdings in Aquitaine, and 800,000 crowns, with dresses, jewels and furniture for Catherine.
‘It’s more than he deserves,’ Christine said, as ambassadors set off in both directions.
‘It still won’t work,’ Jean replied.
It didn’t. The French ambassadors were sent back from London. The English ambassadors returned from Paris without agreeing to anything.
On 7 April 1415, Henry of England wrote to the King of France to say again that he was so determined to have peace with France, and to marry Princess Catherine, that he was willing to settle for less than what justice demanded. But why, he added, all injured innocence, had the King of France sent ambassadors to London who had told him that they didn’t have full powers to agree to all England’s demands? Could the French King kindly hurry and send some proper ambassadors?
On 12 April 1415, Henry of England called a council meeting that placed England on a war footing. He set the rates of pay for soldiers in an expedition to an unnamed location in France.
On 15 April 1415, before King Charles of France could have had time to reply to his letter, Henry of England wrote again. He said he was sending a safe conduct for a new French embassy of 360 people. He demanded they come quickly, so that the peace he so desired could swiftly take shape.
Jean de Castel tried to avoid being part of the French delegation. ‘I don’t want to be humiliated,’ he said. But Christine reasoned with him. She told him he must do all he could to avoid a war. She used the word ‘hope’. She ignored the set look on her son’s