Catherine of Valois

Catherine was born 27 October 1401, daughter of Charles VI of France. In 1420 she married Henry V of England as part of a treaty meant to place him on the French throne and close the Hundred Years' War. She became Queen of England and gave birth to a son, Henry VI. The plan collapsed when Henry V died in 1422. Though her son was later crowned in Paris, the war ground on. Widowed at twenty-one, Catherine quietly married Sir Owen Tudor, a Welsh courtier — a union that lifted the Tudor family from obscurity and made her the grandmother of Henry VII, the man who would found a dynasty. She died 3 J…