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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1999-03 > 0920442498


From: John Carmi Parsons <>
Subject: Re: Re:Subject: Re: Catherine of Valois' second marriage?
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 01:28:18 -0500 (EST)


On Tue, 2 Mar 1999, Chris Bennett wrote:

> This is a fascinating thread (what I have seen of it), and it is unfortunate
> that it has developed some acrimonious overtones. At the risk of diverting
> the main discussion, I wonder if one of you could amplify the following
> statement, which is news to me:

>> There were grave doubts over Henry's paternity of Edward Prince of Wales,
>> but Henry never showed any signs of being aware of this either. <snip>

> What was the reason for these "doubts", who held them, and who was supposed
> to have been Edward's father?

The "doubts" were, like so much else in this saga, politically motivated
and came chiefly from the camp of Henry VI's cousin Duke Richard of York.
By the time Prince Edward was born in 1453, Henry and Margaret of Anjou had
been married for 8 years without producing any issue. The succession to the
throne was extremely shaky, for there were no living descendants of any of
Henry IV's younger children (other than OOW children of John of Bedford--if
any still survived--and Humphrey of Gloucester). The descendants of John of
Gaunt's younger children, Beauforts included, could not rightly claim to be the
next heirs to Henry VI as king because John of Gaunt himself had never been
king of England. In any event two of Gaunt's daughters had married foreign
kings (Castile and Portugal) and recognizing any of their issue as potential
heirs to the throne would have meant importing a foreigner as king; the English
descendants of Gaunt's second daughter Elizabeth were technically still under
attainder for treason that dated back to the reign of Henry IV, and their
claims to the throne accordingly weak. As has been noted many times on this
list, the Beauforts' position as potential royal heirs was uncertain. Thus had
Henry VI died childless the throne would be perilously vacant, and in this
complex situation Richard of York had begun to put himself forward as the
senior representative descendant of Edward III and the most likely heir
to the throne in the event of Henry VI's death without issue.

The birth of Prince Edward in 1453 frustrated York's hopes, and it is not
altogether surprising that he and/or his supporters soon put about stories
that Henry was not the true father. Henry's physical frailty, his strict
religious observances including abstention from his wife's bed on many
religious feasts, and his mental collapse earlier in 1453, some months before
the prince's birth, gave the rumors credence. If it is true that, when Henry
was first shown his son after he recovered from his mental episode, he cried
out that the boy must have been fathered by the Holy Spirit, he obviously
didn't help matters much.

The individual singled out as the "real" father was I believe one of the
Beauforts, with whom Margaret of Anjou was politically allied.

Consult Bertram Wolffe's *Henry VI* (London/Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1981).

John Parsons

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