CATHERINE OF VALOIS queen of Henry V. of England, daughter of Charles VI. of France by Isabel of Bavaria, was born in Paris on Oct. 27, 1401, and was educated in a convent at Poissy. Af ter negotiations for a marriage between Henry, prince of Wales, afterwards Henry V., and each of her two elder sisters, had broken down, Henry IV. proposed that his son should marry Catherine in 1413, and Henry V. renewed this proposal when he became king in March of the same year, de manding at the same time a large dowry and the restoration of Normandy, and other territories in France. War broke out, on the rejection of these demands, but finally, after the treaty of Troyes, Henry and Catherine were betrothed on May 21, 1420, and married at Troyes, June 2, 1420. Catherine was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Feb. 23, 1421, and gave birth to a son, afterwards Henry VI., in the following December. In May 1422 she joined Henry in France, and after his death in the follow ing August, she returned to England. Her name began to be coupled, now, with that of Owen Tudor, a Welsh squire, and when in 1428 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, secured the passing of an act to prevent her from marrying without the consent of the king and council, she seems already to have been married to Tudor. In 1436 Tudor was imprisoned and Catherine retired to Bermondsey Abbey, where she died on Jan. 3, By Tudor Catherine had three sons and a daughter; the eldest son, Edmund, created earl of Richmond in 1452, was the father of Henry VII.
See Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, vol. iii. (1877).