Catherine of Valois, the Salic Law, and Elizabeth I's claim

Henry V

Catherine of Valois -- who became queen consort to Henry V of England during the last two years of his reign -- was the direct ancestor of Queen Elizabeth I. However, the line of descent was not as straightforward as it might seem from the earlier queen to the later: between Henry V and Elizabeth I fell the Wars of the Roses, and the jockeying for position of the Houses of York (Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI) and Lancaster (Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III). Elizabeth I was descended from Catherine but not from Henry V -- instead, Catherine and her second husband, the Welshman Owain ap Tudor, begat Edmund Tudor, who begat King Henry VII, the first monarch of the Tudor dynasty. Henry VII was Elizabeth's grandfather -- Catherine of Valois was therefore her grandfather's grandmother.

The Salic Law discussed in Shakespeare's Henry V was designed by the Frankish monarchs (Clovis, Charlemagne) to prevent females from inheriting a throne. The Salic Law was never uniformly imposed in England, where other medieval systems (Gavelkind, Brehon Law, and others) were active in different regions. In general England exhibited male-preference primogeniture, meaning that female monarchs were not explicitly ruled out, but males were preferred. Before the sixteenth century, there had been only one female monarch in England, Matilda, who ruled during the anarchy of civil war. The distinction between English and Salic inheritance procedures which Shakespeare uses at the opening of Henry V was a real phenomenon. We can see a good example after Shakespeare's time, from the 18th and 19th century Hanoverian monarchs: George I, II, III, and IV of England were also kings of the German state of Hanover, but Queen Victoria of England was barred by Salic Law from inheriting the Hanoverian territory because she was female.

Since the Salic Laws were primarily about excluding female heirs, it is possible that Shakespeare intended some contemporary resonance with this element of Henry V. After all, Elizabeth's older half-sister Mary I (aka "Bloody Mary") had been the first female monarch in England since the questionable reign of Matilda -- and moreover in 1558, Mary I had lost the city of Calais, England's last remaining territorial possession in France. This is roughly 40 years before Shakespeare wrote Henry V, a play which is focused on territorial squabbling between the thrones of France and England, but shows that this squabble had continued from Henry V's time to Shakespeare's own century.

But was Henry V intended to reflect upon Elizabeth's claims to the throne? The difficulty here is that other issues beyond Salic Law were involved in Elizabeth's legitimacy as a monarch: for a start, she had been designated Henry VIII's heir apparent by a special act of Parliament which also declared her half-sister Mary illegitimate (the First Succession Act of 1534), then she herself had been declared a bastard and unable to inherit the throne by another special act of Parliament (the Second Succession Act of 1536). Finally the Third Succession Act of 1543 restored both Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession after their half-brother Edward, who in 1553 tried to prevent either of them from inheriting his throne by designating Lady Jane Grey as his heir. The English Reformation complicated the succession because Mary I remained Roman Catholic but Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth were all Protestant. As a result, Elizabeth's legitimacy hinged largely upon her Protestantism and also her virginity, which allowed temporary flirtations and hints at alliance through marriage. Indeed, the Duc d'Alencon -- who was made heir apparent to the French throne in 1574 -- wooed Elizabeth seriously in the period from 1579 to 1581. (D'Alencon was 24 at this time, and Elizabeth was a cougarish 46.) This is a mere 20 years before Shakespeare wrote Henry V, suggesting the dream of a unified Anglo-French throne was active earlier during Elizabeth's reign.