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each eight ells of blue-coloured cloth, with two furs made of three hundred bellies of miniver, and one hundred and seventy garter stripes to correspond, to make them robes, furred and embroidered with the military order of the Garter, all alike, as the gift of the king. Henry, on this occasion, presented cloth and fur to a chosen number of the great ladies of the court, as well as to the princes of the blood-royal and the knights of the Garter, that they might all appear in the robes of their order, to grace the high festival of that year.' Henry was induced to conclude a truce with the duke of Bretagne, as he himself specifies, "at the prayer of Joanna," whom he styles "that excellent and most dear lady, the queen our mother." This was in the year 1417.

King Henry directed his collectors of the port of London, July 1418, to allow three sealed cases of money, sixty pipes of wine, seven baskets of lamps, two bales of cloth of Joscelin, and one barrel of anchovies, coming to his dearest mother, Joanna queen of England, at her need, in the ship called the St. Nicholas of Nantes, to pass without collecting any impost or due. The same day he directs the authorities of the ports of Plymouth and Dartmouth to admit, free of all duty, Johan de Moine from the ports of Bretagne, with eight great barrels of wine of Tyre and Malmsey for his dearest mother, Joanna queen of England, from her son the duke of Bretagne. The St. Nicholas of Nantes appears to have been constantly employed by her royal owner in trading-voyages between the ports of London and Bretagne, for the exchange of the manufactures and commercial imports of those countries duty free, a privilege of which the thrifty dowager of England and Bretagne doubtless made great pecuniary advantage. On one occasion, however, the freight of the St. Nicholas is of a different description, or at least that on which the most important stress is laid in the king's gracious permit for safe and free export to Bretagne, consisting, among other valuables,

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3 Rymer's Fœdera. The cloth was a species of linen manufacture, much of the nature of Holland; it was the finest of that linen called Rennes cloth, for which Bretagne was famous in the middle ages. Rennes sheets were often left by will as costly luxuries; they figure in sir John Falstaff's household inventory.

of a curious selection of live-stock, for presentation to the young duchess of Bretagne, Joanna's daughter-in-law; viz. Jacotin de Hasse, horse-buyer to our lady the queen, with four horses, three palfreys and their trappings, a certain organplayer, and a pape geay' (popinjay), meaning a parrot. With this amusing cargo Joanna also sends a present of "cloth of London" to the Breton duchess, a presumptive evidence that the manufactures of the English metropolis were held in some esteem by the foreign queen, and considered acceptable and suitable offerings to a royal daughter of France.

While the queen-dowager was thus harmlessly, and perhaps, with regard to her patronage of cloth of London, may be added usefully employed, she was suddenly arrested at her dowerpalace of Havering-Bower, by the order of the duke of Bedford, the regent of England. These are Walsingham, a contemporary historian's words:" The king's step-mother, queen Johanne, being accused by certain persons of an act of witchcraft, which would have tended to the king's harm, was committed (all her attendants being removed) to the custody of sir John Pelham, who, having furnished her with nine servants, placed her in Pevensey-castle, there to be kept under his control." Joanna's principal accuser was her confessor, John Randolf, a Minorite friar; though it seems Henry had had previous information that the queen-dowager, with the aid of two domestic sorcerers, Roger Colles of Salisbury and Petronel Brocart, was dealing with the powers of darkness for his destruction. John Randolf was arrested at the isle of Guernsey, and sent over to the king in Normandy, where his confessions seem to have determined Henry to pro

1 Rymer's Fœdera.

"Also

* Likewise Holinshed, Speed, Stowe. Parliamentary Hist. of England. The Chronicle of London, a contemporary also, gives this account: this same year frère Randolf, a master of divinity, that some time was the queen's confessor, at the exciting of the said queen, by socery and necromancy wrought for to astroy the king; but, as God wolde, his falseness was at last espied, wherefore by common parliament the queen forfeited her lands." This Chronicle makes the circumstance contemporary with the siege of Rouen. Otterbourne merely says, Joanna committed an infamous maleficium, and was taken from her family, and given to the charge of lord John Pelham in the castle of Pevensey. He notes it in the events of 1419.

Holinshed.

Ibid. Parliamentary Records.

ceedings of the utmost rigour against his royal step-mother, who was, as stated before, arrested with the suspected members of her household, and committed as a close prisoner,first to the castle of Leeds, one of her own palaces, and afterwards to that of Pevensey. She was, by Henry's order, deprived not only of her rich dower-lands and tenements, but of all her money, furniture, and personal property, even to her wearing-apparel. Her servants were dismissed, and others placed about her by the authority of her gaoler, sir John Pelham. These circumstances are all set forth in the following extract from the Parliamentary rolls for 7th Henry V. :

“Be it remembered, that upon information given to the king our sovereign lord, as well by the relation and confession of one friar John Randolf, of the order of Friars-Minors, as by other credible evidences, that Johanne queen of England had compassed and imagined the death and destruction of our said lord the king, in the most high and horrible manner that could be devised; the which compassing, imagination, and destruction have been openly published throughout all England: So it is by the council of the lord the king advised, assented, and ordained, that, amongst other things, all the goods and chattels of the said queen, and also all the goods and chattels of Roger Colles of Salisbury and of Petronel Brocart, lately residing with the said queen, who are notoriously suspected of the said treason, in whose hands soever they may be, which the said queen had (or the said other persons before named) on the 27th day of September last past and since, and also all the issues, rents, &c. of all castles, manors, &c., which the said queen held in dower and otherwise, should be received and kept by the treasurer of England, or his deputy for the time being, who should have the custody of the said goods and chattels, &c., and that letters-patent should be passed under the great seal in that behalf; and that the said treasurer or his deputy should provide for the support of the said queen and the servants assigned to her honestly, according to the advice of the council, openly read in this parliament. And because it was doubted whether persons bound to pay rents, &c. to the queen could be surely discharged, it is ordained in this present parliament, at the request of the commons assembled, all such persons, upon payment to the treasurer, should be protected against the said queen in all time to come."

In the Issue roll for the same year' is the following entry:

"27th November. To sir John Pelham, knight, appointed by the king and council for the governance and safe custody of Joan queen of England: In money paid to him by the hands of Richard le Verer, her esquire, in advance, for the support and safe custody of the queen aforesaid, 1667. 138. 4d. Master Peter de Ofball was appointed the said queen's physician."3

White Kennet asserts that Joanna was brought to a trial, that she was convicted, and forfeited her goods by sentence of parliament; but of this there is not the slightest proof. 1 Holinshed. Parliamentary Records.

27th Henry V.

3 Devon's Extracts from Pell Records, p. 362.

On the contrary, it is quite certain that she never was allowed an opportunity of justifying herself from the dark allegations that were brought against her. She was condemned unheard, despoiled of her property, and consigned to years of solitary confinement, without the slightest regard to law or justice. Her perfidious confessor, Randolf, while disputing with the parson of St. Peter's-ad-Vincula, was for ever silenced, by the combative priest strangling him in the midst of his debate.' The fury with which the argument was pursued, and its murderous termination, would suggest the idea that the guilt or innocence of their royal mistress must have been the subject of discussion. Be this as it may, the death of Randolf under these circumstances leaves undetailed the "high and horrible means" whereby the royal widow was accused of practising against the life of the king. He was the only witness against her, and by his death the whole affair remains among the most inscrutable of historical mysteries.

There is, however, among the unpublished papers of Rymer, a document which seems to throw some light on the affair, by evidencing the previous attempts of Henry V. to extort from Joanna the principal part of her dower in loans; for we find that, in the beginning of the year she was arrested, he enjoins "his dear chevalier, William Kynwolmersh, to send all the sums of money he can possibly borrow of the dower of Johane the queen, late wife of our sovereign lord and sire the late king, whom God assoil! Let these sums be sent from time to time without fail, leaving her only money enough for her reasonable expenses, and to pay any annuities she might have granted." In all probability, Joanna's resistance of this oppression was answered by her arrest, on the frivolous accusation which afforded the king a pretence for replenishing his exhausted coffers at her expense.

It was one of the dark features of the age, that the ruin and disgrace of a person against whom no tenable accusation could be brought might readily be effected by a charge of

1 Bayley's History of the Tower. Speed. Holinshed.

"Faire bouez" is the expression used by the king.-Unpublished MSS. of Bymer, 4602; Plut. cxiii. v.

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sorcery, which generally operated on the public mind as effectually as the cry of mad dog' does for the destruction of the devoted victims of the canine species. If Joanna had been a female of less elevated rank, she would, in all probability, have been consigned to the flames; but as the daughter, sister, and widow of kings, and the mother of a reigning prince, it was not possible for her enemies to proceed to greater extremities than plundering her goods and incarcerating her person. When these strange tidings reached her eldest son, the duke of Bretagne, his political apathy was sufficiently dispelled by the outrage that had been offered to his royal mother to impel him to send the bishop of Nantes and some of the principal persons in his court to Henry V., who was then at Melun, to expostulate with him on the injurious treatment of the widowed queen, and to demand her liberation. This remonstrance was offered, however, in the humble tone of a suppliant rather than the courageous spirit of a champion, ready to come forward to vindicate his mother's honour, according to the chivalric usage of the times, at swords' points with her accuser. But the feeble son of John the Valiant acted according to his nature in tamely submitting to Henry's haughty disregard of his expostulations, and thus substantiated the sarcastic observations addressed to him by the duke of Orleans, when reproaching him for having beaten his consort Joanna of France, "that the lion in his heart, was not bigger than that in the heart of a child of two years old."1 Soon after the unsuccessful embassy of the duke of Bretagne to his royal step-brother, Joanna was deprived of any hope she might have founded on the efforts of her first-born for her deliverance, by his falling into the hands of his mortal enemy the count de Penthièvres, and she had the grief of bewailing in her dismal prison-house the captivity of both her sons.

The return of the royal victor of Agincourt with his beautiful and illustrious bride, brought no amelioration to the condition of the unfortunate queen-dowager and her son. Katherine of Valois was nearly related in blood to Joanna

1 Monstrelet.

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