“The story of Queen Joan’s reputed sorcery has often been told before; but it may be well to recall the main facts. Joan, or Joanna, of Navarre, Duchess of Brittany from 1386 to 1399, became in 1403 the second wife, and the Queen of Henry IV, King of England.
The new Queen was received with great pomp and a dowry of 10,000 marks (%6,666 13s. 4d.) per annum was bestowed on her. The royal favour thus shown to her continued throughout the reign of Henry IV; and not only was she on good terms with the King, but her relations with all her step-sons and step-daughters appear to have been friendly throughout her husband’s lifetime.
After his death she seems to have continued for several years on very amicable terms with King Henry V; but in 1419 there came a sudden change. On the 27th September, 1419, the royal council a made an order depriving her of her dowry and all her other revenues and posessions; and four days later she was arrested and taken from her own manor-house of Havering-atte-Bower in Essex to the royal manor-house of Rotherhithe, in Surrey.
The reason, so it was stated in parliament, was that her confessor, John Randolf, a Franciscan friar of Shrewsbury, had accused her “of compassing the death and destruction of our lord the king in the most treasonable and horrible manner that could be devised ”.
Contemporary chroniclers said more bluntly that she had tried “by sorcery and necromancy for to have destroyed the king.(…)”
His royal mistress enjoyed a happier fate. She was, it is true, kept a prisoner for nearly three years, and all her servants and property were taken away from her. But during his last illness, Henry V regretted his treatment of his step-mother, and ordered the restoration of her freedom and her property.
Moreover, her imprisonment was not by any means a burden some one. Other attendants were appointed to replace those who had been removed and for the first few months of her captivity she was given the variety of a certain amount of travel; during that period she was lodged at Rotherhithe, Dartford, Rochester, and possibly other places besides!
This frequent change of residence was, however, probably made to suit the convenience of the government; for during the last two years of her imprisonment she appears to have been at Leeds Castle, in Kent, the whole of the time.(…)
The leniency with which she was treated is even more apparent from an inspection of the list of gifts and rewards, and the expenses for wardrobe and chamber. To allow the Queen at least nineteen grooms and seven pages to wait on her would have been a curious policy if it had been really believed and proved that she had been practising witchcraft in a dangerous manner.
Still more remarkable would it have been to permit her so many clothes for herself and her servants, especially as these clothes were not inexpensive garments of homespun. The materials for them included minever and other choice furs, tartarin (a rich silk stuff), silk laces, cords, and thread, sindon and Flanders linen (both fine linen fabrics), and cloth of various kinds which were all of such a price that they must have been of very good quality.
And it was not only in the matter of clothes that Queen Joan was suffered to gratify her desires. Other purchases for her included chains, rosary, and girdle, all of gold; an ewer, a buckle and pendant, and table-knives, of silver-gilt; l and a candlestick of silver. She bought a wide variety of medicines, often of an expensive kind, doubtless prescribed by the Portuguese physician of Henry IV, (…), who had been appointed to attend her.
(..) A fragment of a Great Wardrobe book, now in the Public Record Office (Exch. Accts. 40714, f. 12a), (…), shows that Queen Joan was still treated in such a generous - manner that she was able to bestow gifts liberally on her numerous servants, both men and women.
The absence of any allowances for the stable does not necessarily mean that she was no longer permitted to ride out at all; she may have been allowed to use the horses and the carriage (if any) of her governor. She was able to buy considerable quantities of wine, of various kinds-Gscon, Rochelle, and Rhenish; and her menu was good enough for her to entertain from time to time some distinguished visitors, whose standards in gastronomy were high.
The Archbishop of Canterbury came once to dinner, on the 1st April, and the Duke of Gloucester twice to supper, on the 14th April, 1420, and the 10th February, 1421. The Bishop of Winchester, one of the richest Englishmen of his day, spent a short week-end at Leeds Castle in August, 1420, from Friday, the 9th, until Sunday, the 11th. (…)
The impression one gets from these household accounts is that a degree of consideration unusual in the case of a person charged with treason by means of witchcraft was shown towards Joan throughout her imprisonment; and this is in harmony with the other facts known of her captivity.
There is no suggestion anyivhere that she was ever tried for her reputed witchcraft, or even that any further investigations were made after the first alarm in September and October, 1419; and from the letter which Henry V issued during his last illness, ordering the restoration of her freedom and her dowry, it is plain that he regretted by that time the action taken against her in 1419.
(…) She had a little difficulty in recovering her dower, in spite of Henry V’s command; but that was merely because so much of it had been granted away to other persons, and she was eventually compensated fully by other royal grants for these unobtainable revenues formerlv part of her dowry.a Henceforward, she led a very easy and peaceful existence.
Her grandson, Gilles de Bretagne, became a great friend of Henry VI during his stay in England from 1432 to 1434; it is likely that in consequence Joan was viewed with favour by the young King, who certainly treated her with respect and consideration.
He gave her, for example, a valuable New Year’s gift in 1437, consisting of a tablet of gold, garnished with four balas-rubies, eight pearls, and in the midst a great sapphire.
When she died in the July of the same year at Havering-atte-Bower, he saw to it that she was buried with all honour by the side of her second husband, in St. Thomas Becket’s chapel behind the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral.
(…) the commons had resented in parliament in 1415 a petition, which the King had accepted, prayins for the a pulsion of all Bretons, both within the Queen’s household and without, from the realm, as a statute of 7 Henry IV had ordered, on the grounds that these Bretons made it their aim to find out the secrets of the realm, and reveal them to their compatriots, “qe sount les greindres enemyes de vostre Roialme”, and also to carry money and jewels out of the country, to the prejudice of the King and the damage of the whole land.
There was a long-standing enmity between the seamen of Ensland and Brittany and this was liable to kindle periodical outbursts of national resentment against Queen Joan and her Breton children, servants, and connexions, from 1404 (only a year after her marriage to Henry IV), until at least 1426.
There are firm grounds for supposing that the compelling motive for keeping her a prisoner two years more was a financial one, a motive which may, indeed, have weighed with the government in making her arrest.
From the renewal of the war with France in 1415, parliaments had voted suppIies with unusual generosity; but by 1420 the drain on the exchequer was becoming formidable, and the government may have feared the outbreak of popular murmurings, of which Adam of Usk speaks in 1421, if the burden of taxation were increased any further at that moment.
To deprive Queen Joan of her dowry of 10,000 marks a year would be an important addition to the resources of a badly insolvent government, whose regular income amounted at this time to only just under 256,000 a year. Joan’s dowry had always been a heavy burden on the royal finances, which in the Lancastrian period were in a state of chronic deficiency. (…)”.
Source: MYERS, A.R. “The Captivity of a Royal Witch: The Household Accounts of Queen Joan Of Navarre. 1419-1421.”
Fancast: Naomi Watts/Charlize Theron as Queen Joan, gifs credits to @catherineofbraganza.
