Adam's The History Sale Tuesday 24th April 2018

44 Tuesday 24th April 67 A 15TH CENTURY CARVED STONE HEAD ATTRIBUTED TO BE THE HEAD OF CATHERINE DE VALOIS 23cm high, the entire 44cm wide Provenance:Stackallen Co.Meath. See Elizabeth Hickey Journal ofThe Royal Society of Antiquaries.(JRSAIVol. 115, (1985): 140-145) € 20,000 - 30,000 During some building work being done near Stackallen in county Meath in the 1970’s, a land- owner came across a finely carved head of a woman amongst some stone rubble being used for in-fill. Spurred on by curiosity, contact was made with historian, Elizabeth Hickey who undertook to investigate the stone head’s history. Her findings were published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, (JRSAIVol. 115, (1985): 140-145). Hickey claimed that the head in question was the daughter of the King of France, Catherine deValois, who was married for two years to England’s HenryV, theVictor at Agincourt. Catherine’s marriage to Henry had been arranged under the terms of theTreaty ofTroyes in 1420. In 1421, she gave birth to a son who became the future King HenryVI, the last Lancastrian and a pious but ineffectual ruler who founded Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. Her husband died in 1422. Left to her own devices as a young widow, Catherine fell in love with the clerk of her wardrobe, OwenTudor, who ‘belonged to a barbarous clan of savages’, whom she married and with whom she had four children. It was through this line that Catherine was to have her most enduring impact. She was the grandmother of the later HenryVII and great grandmother of HenryVIII. This stone head formed part of the decoration of the east window of Stackallen Church, most likely partnering another similarly sized head.The church itself was demolished in 1960 and some of its decorative features were removed to nearby Slane Protestant Church. The medieval Stackallen Church, it is believed, was established by the Dexter family as they may have owned Stackallen in the late 14th century/early 15th century and are thought to have built a church on their lands. It was built on the site of an early Christian establishment. In the summer of 1958, Inspector of National Monuments, OPW architect and antiquarian Dr. Harold Leask visited Stackallen, making notes and taking photographs of the soon to be demolished building.According to Hickey he concluded that the Church most likely dated to the 16th century, was possibly pre-reformation but that it included decorative stones from an earlier church. One of his photographs shows a 16th century window with a hood moulding and a crowned head at each stop. Hickey states that the decoration, vine leaf and tendril forms, seen in the old photograph corresponds closely to the decoration on the head of the Queen Consort. Overgrown ivy sadly obscures the detail of the actual heads in the photograph. Hickey described the carving thus : “It is a very beautiful piece of carving, the delicate, almost life- sized, features of the young woman tapering to the chin, are carved to be looked up at from below. Her lips bear that elusive smile typical of 15th century portraiture; her hair is fringed and plaited and on her head she wears a crown of fleur-de-lis. On grounds of style and fashion I would date this head to the early part of the 15th century and say that it represents a queen. I would suggest that it came from the medieval church and was re-used when that church was rebuilt early in the 16th century and, with the window, survived the 18th century rebuilding.” In medieval times churches in the Pale had their Gothic windows adorned with heads, in each case a king and a queen at the stops of the moulding, and with a bishop at the apex.This seems to have been a conventional arrangement with the Pale gentry honouring the reigning king of England from whom they held their lands, and his consort.The date of the marriage of Catherine and Henry in early 1421 ties in directly with the beginning of the Succession List of the Clergy in 1421 and the generally agreed date of the building of the 15th century Stackallen Church thus seemingly