#it astounds me that there is so little academic work on her that isn't retreading 'is edmund beaufort the baby daddy?'

[une-sanz-pluis]

Catherine of Valois wrote a very affectionate letter to Henry V? (Of course, members of the royal family during that period wrote letters to each other with great affection...)

I'm very sad to say this but this letter doesn't seem to exist. I talked about it briefly in this post but it's worthwhile going into more detail since I don't know of anybody who has discussed this letter and its existence in depth.

Anne Crawford in Letters of the Queens of England says that none of Catherine's letters are known to survive today, which was repeated by Katherine J. Lewis in probably the most academic biography of Catherine to date. There are a few blogposts that reference this letter, as does Amy Licence in Red Roses, but these all reference Agnes Strickland (Licence's text suggests she's quoting the letter but she's actually quoting Strickland's summary of the letter - and incorrectly at that. This mislead me for several years into thinking this letter actually existed.)

This is the entirety of what Strickland says about this letter:

Early in the same spring Katherine wrote her warlike lord a most loving letter, declaring that she earnestly longed to behold him once more. This epistle was answered by an invitation to join him in France.

There is no footnote for this paragraph and, as you can see, there is nothing in the text itself to indicate its source. This doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence since it makes it virtually impossible to track the letter back to a source. The fact that Strickland deals with the letter in such brevity - a single sentence! - and paraphrases, rather than quoting, the letter, adds more doubt.

Strickland's reputation adds even more doubt. She was a Victorian historical writer best known for her Lives of the Queens of England series, which has proved tremendously influential and tremendously unreliable. Strickland's speculations, suppositions and imaginings were often presented as fact despite being unsupported by the historical evidence and these speculations have entered into the accepted narrative about various queens. For instance, Strickland reported how Isabella of France was greatly upset by the fact that Edward II callously gave the wedding presents he received from her father to Piers Gaveston - but while we know Edward sent these gifts to Gaveston, it does not seem like he gifted them to Gaveston but rather had Gaveston take temporary custody of them in his capacity as Edward's regent. We know nothing about Isabella's reaction to this either. Additionally, Strickland popularised and possibly invented the story that Catherine was effectively imprisoned in Bermondsey Abbey when her marriage to Owen Tudor was discovered - we do not know why Catherine entered Bermondsey Abbey, much less whether it was against her will, though we know now that the council knew about her marriage to Owen much earlier than her retirement to Bermondsey. John Carmi Parsons's essay "Eleanor of Castile (1241-1290): Legend and Reality through Seven Centuries" also details the problems with her treatment of Eleanor of Castile and is an interesting commentary on Strickland's own politics that influenced how she wrote about these queens.

Now, in the two examples I mentioned, Strickland seems to have let her speculations/imagination outstrip the evidence rather than completely inventing these narratives out of nothing so it might be unfair to claim she completely invented the letter. However, without a source for the letter, there's no way to know that the letter even existed. It's impossible to tell what Strickland is referencing - I've made the assumption thus far that Strickland is referencing a letter that actually existed but she may have referring to an earlier historian's claim or a reference in a chronicle or a history to Catherine's letter. But Catherine of Valois has not, as far as I'm aware (I would love to be proved wrong!), been the subject of any in-depth historiographical studies which would help us locate an earlier source. It may be possible to locate the source by scouring older histories ourselves but it would no doubt be a huge and potentially fruitless task.

As to your question about the affectionate terms of the letter... assuming the letter did exist, Strickland's discussion of it is so brief and includes so little detail that it's hard to tell anything about it. It is true that most medieval individuals referred to each other in terms that indicated great affection (e.g. John of Gaunt referred to all three of his wives as his "dearest consort" in his will) so it might not actually mean very much beyond convention. If Catherine's phrasing was unusual, it might tell us something of she really felt about Henry - but without the text of the letter, it's impossible to make any assessment.

I want to end by saying that it is possible that the letter, or one like it, existed. Catherine must have written many letters, not just to Henry V, that are not known to survive in the present day and perhaps still exist in private or obscure collections and records. It may seem unlikely but it was only in 2022 that historians and archivists rediscovered new records about one of the most discussed aspects of Geoffrey Chaucer's life in the National Archives.

It also seems that Catherine's life has been the subject of scholarly neglect (that is not to to say that she has not been of interest, only that this interest has almost entirely been limited to her ability to be cast as a romantic heroine or in speculating about her sex life and the "true" paternity of her Tudor children or the treatment of her corpse). It is possible, then, that this scholarly neglect has led to some records of her life going unnoticed. I hope that the rise and growth of queenship studies will continue to allow her life and tenure as queen to be reassessed and new evidence looked for and found.

Sources:

Anne Crawford, ed. Letters of the Queens of England, 1100-1547 (Sutton Publishing 1997)

Katherine J. Lewis, “Katherine of Valois: The Vicissitudes of Reputation”, Later Plantagenet and the Wars of the Roses Consorts: Power, Influence, and Dynasty (eds. J. L. Laynesmith and Elena Woodacre, Palgrave 2023)    

Amy Licence, Red Roses: Blanche of Gaunt to Margaret Beaufort (The History Press, 2017)

John Carmi Parsons, "Eleanor of Castile (1241-1290): Legend and Reality through Seven Centuries", Eleanor of Castile 1290-1990: essays to commemorate the 700th anniversary of her death: 28 November 1290 (Stamford Paul Watkins 1991)

Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest, vol. 3 (Lea & Blanchard, 1841)