Daughter of Charles VI of France whose marriage to Henry V under the Treaty of Troyes was meant to join the English and French crowns; mother of Henry VI and, through her secret marriage to Owen Tudor, grandmother of Henry VII.
Catherine of Valois was the youngest daughter of Charles VI of France and the wife of Henry V of England, whom she married in 1420 as part of the Treaty of Troyes. The treaty disinherited her brother, the dauphin Charles, and made Henry heir to the French throne, so that the son of Henry and Catherine would rule both kingdoms.
That son, Henry VI of England, was born in 1421 and became king of England before his first birthday. Catherine's second life, her secret union with the Welsh squire Owen Tudor, produced the half-brothers of Henry VI from whom the Tudor dynasty descended.
Catherine was born at the Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris on 27 October 1401, the youngest daughter of Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria, in the years when her father's recurring madness left France to the rival factions of Burgundy and Armagnac. Her marriage was discussed as early as 1414, when Henry V demanded her hand with a huge dowry. After the Battle of Agincourt and his conquest of Normandy, the match became part of the settlement between Henry, Charles VI and Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.
Catherine left little testimony of her own, and contemporaries described her mainly through beauty and ceremony. The Burgundian chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet recorded Henry's delight on meeting her at Meulan in 1419, and her entry into London and coronation in 1421 were celebrated with pageants. Her political role was slight: after Henry's death she was given no place on the council that governed for her son, and her importance lay in being his mother.
Her later choices show a young widow determined to have a private life. Her attachment to Edmund Beaufort in the mid-1420s alarmed the council so much that Parliament passed a statute forbidding a queen dowager to remarry without the king's consent, and she then married Owen Tudor, a Welshman of her household, in secret. The secrecy was a response to that law, and the marriage, never publicly acknowledged in her lifetime, produced several children.
Henry and Catherine were married at Troyes on 2 June 1420, twelve days after the treaty was sealed. She was crowned at Westminster in February 1421 while Henry toured England raising money for the war, and on 6 December 1421 she gave birth to their only child, Henry, at Windsor Castle. Henry V died at the Château de Vincennes on 31 August 1422 without seeing his son again, and Catherine accompanied his body back through France to Westminster.
Around 1430 Catherine married Owen Tudor, probably without the council's knowledge, and they had at least three sons and a daughter, among them Edmund Tudor, later Earl of Richmond, and Jasper Tudor, later Earl of Pembroke, whom their half-brother Henry VI raised to the nobility in 1452. After her death Owen was imprisoned for breaking the statute, escaped, and was eventually pardoned; he was beheaded after the Yorkist victory at Mortimer's Cross in 1461.
Catherine withdrew, ill, to Bermondsey Abbey in 1436 and died there on 3 January 1437. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, but when Henry VII rebuilt the Lady Chapel her coffin was disturbed and her embalmed body lay exposed for centuries; the diarist Samuel Pepys recorded in 1669 that he had kissed her. She was reburied in the abbey only in 1878.