Mistress of the Monarchy (44 page)

In June, the King granted his uncle a charter of liberties for the Duchy of Lancaster, and proposed that his future Queen’s sister, Michelle of Valois, be married to John’s grandson, Henry of Monmouth.
⁴⁸
Richard also supported John in forbidding Henry of Derby to brave the dangers of a campaign in Friesland with the Duke of Gueldres.
⁴⁹

John’s worsening health may account for his fears for the safety of his heir, who had been on perilous expeditions in the past, some financed by his father;
⁵⁰
yet his anxiety did not apparently extend to his younger son, John Beaufort, who went crusading against the Turks in Hungary and Bulgaria in 1396, and in September was present at the siege of Nicopolis, a campaign that ended in the mass capture and slaughter of the Christian army and left Bulgaria under Muslim domination for five centuries. John Beaufort, fortunately, came home to tell the tale.

Before long, the storm that followed upon her marriage abated, and Katherine became accepted at court and within the royal family. This probably had a lot to do with Richard II’s support and his improving relations with John of Gaunt, but it was undoubtedly due in no small part to Katherine’s own personal qualities, her discretion and dignity, and her well-bred understanding of how to conduct herself as a duchess. ‘The lady herself was a woman of such bringing up and honourable demeanour that envy could not but in the end give place to well-deserving.’
⁵¹
Above all, ‘she loved the Duke of Lancaster and the children she had with him, and she showed it’.
⁵²
None could have impugned her sincerity.

In July 1396, with the conclusion of the new treaties between England and France, preparations were set in train at last for the King’s marriage to Isabella of Valois. Early in August, John apparently went to Calais with the King for a meeting with the Duke of Burgundy, returning to England by the 23rd.
⁵³
Some time before Michaelmas, perhaps at Katherine’s request, the Duke arranged for two pipes of wine to be conveyed from London to the abbey of Barking, and there given to her daughter Margaret Swynford;
⁵⁴
and before 15 September, he took Katherine to St Albans Abbey to visit Abbot Thomas de la Mare, who was dying after ten years of chronic ill health brought on by an attack of the plague.
⁵⁵
The Abbot had been a friend of the Black Prince and the exiled King John II of France, and would have shared many memories with John of Gaunt.
⁵⁶
The purpose of the visit was no doubt to ask for the Abbot’s blessing and say a sad farewell. Later that month, the Duke and Duchess were at Hertford Castle, where they had probably been lodging for most of the month.

Meanwhile, on 1 September, in Rome, Boniface IX had pronounced their marriage valid:

He then proceeded to pronounce on the legitimacy of their children:

This clearly refers to the Beauforts and to any other children that might be born to the couple — obviously the Pope had no idea that Katherine was about forty-six and highly unlikely to become pregnant again. But he had provided for that contingency anyway, and he concluded his letter with the warning that anyone presuming to question the validity of the marriage would incur ‘the indignation of Almighty God’.
⁵⁷
That, of course, was sufficient to silence any critics, and John and Katherine would doubtless have been quite relieved to receive this dispensation. It may have arrived in England before they left for France, which was shortly after 7 October.

The King having already crossed the Channel, Henry of Derby and Joan Beaufort accompanied their father and Katherine when they travelled to Calais in October. On the 27th, at a lavish ceremony near the town, attended by much pomp and pageantry (the wedding celebrations were rumoured to have cost Richard £200,000, more than £81 million in today’s values), the two kings met; Charles VI had already experienced attacks of the madness that was to blight his life and reign, but he was enjoying a lucid interval on this occasion, and cordial pleasantries were exchanged.

On the 28th, with John and Katherine and a host of other lords and
ladies looking on, little Isabella was carried to her father’s pavilion and formally handed over by Charles VI to her bridegroom, who thanked him ‘for so gracious and honourable a gift’ and kissed the little girl. He then ‘commended her to the Duchesses of Lancaster and Gloucester’ — the senior royal ladies — ‘and the Countesses of Huntingdon and Stafford and other ladies’, including Joan Beaufort, who all received her with great joy before escorting her to Calais in twelve packed chariots.
⁵⁸
Evidently the Duchess of Gloucester had abandoned her resolve to have nothing to do with Katherine, while the latter’s prominent role in the ceremonies demonstrates how quickly she had been accepted by the establishment and how respectable she had become.

The little Queen had already been assigned a French
gouvernante
, Lady de Coucy,
⁵⁹
and it was this lady who took charge of her and who was her sole companion in her richly appointed chariot on that ride to Calais. Of course Katherine was one of the chief ladies in attendance on Isabella and would have joined the other noble ladies in assisting the bride in her wedding preparations. But her association with Isabella was not limited to that, for Froissart, who was well informed about events at Richard II’s court at this time, later stated that she ‘had been some time the companion of the young Queen of England’, and that she remained so until the late summer of 1397. She evidently took on this role at the time of Isabella’s marriage and her influence would have been invaluable during the period immediately following it, when the court was travelling back to England and Isabella was being initiated into her new position. Who better to act as her companion and mentor than the Duchess of Lancaster, the second lady in the land, who had had experience of looking after royal princesses, and who was clearly good with children?

Katherine, along with her daughter Joan Beaufort, the Duchess of Gloucester and the Countess of Huntingdon, was given a gold livery collar to wear at the royal wedding.
⁶⁰
A heavy chain denoting rank, worn to proclaim the wearer’s affiliation to some king or great lord, it might have been adorned with the Lancastrian SS links, but is more likely to have been bestowed by the King and to have incorporated his white hart emblem, and perhaps fleurs-de-lis in honour of the bride.

On 4 November, in the church of St Nicholas at Calais, Isabella was married to Richard II by Thomas Arundel, the new Archbishop of Canterbury; she was then not quite seven years old, and not a little precocious — ‘it was pretty to see her, young as she was, practising how to act the Queen’.
⁶¹
The ceremony was followed by sumptuous feasting.

The King and Queen (her dolls packed away with her trousseau) and all their party, including John and Katherine, crossed back to Dover in
November, the voyage taking just three hours. They dined and slept at Dover Castle the first night, then made their way towards London via Canterbury, Rochester, Dartford and Eltham, where the Duke and Duchess of Lancaster and the other lords and ladies presented costly gifts to Isabella before taking their leave of the royal couple and hastening ahead to make ready for the young Queen’s state entry into London.

On 13 November, Isabella made her way in triumph to the Tower, and on the following day, she was ceremoniously conducted to the King at Westminster; such were the crowds in the capital that nine people were crushed to death.
⁶²
It appears she was never crowned — a summons to her coronation on Epiphany Sunday 1397 survives,
⁶³
and an unreliable London chronicle states she was crowned on 8 January,
⁶⁴
but there is no other evidence for such a momentous event. John and Katherine entertained her at their London ‘hostel’ — Ely Place — probably late in 1396 or early in 1397, the Duke presenting her with a massive gold cup and basin, while Katherine gave her a much smaller cup, more suitable for a child to use.
⁶⁵
Isabella spent most of what was to prove a short married life in the care of Lady de Coucy at Windsor Castle or Eltham Palace, indulgently treated by her husband, of whom she became inordinately fond.

Papal confirmation of the marriage of John and Katherine not only put paid once and for all to the nasty rumours and backbiting, but also had an enormously beneficial impact on the lives of the Beauforts. Joan Beaufort had recently been widowed — her husband, Robert Ferrers, died some time between May 1395 and November 1396 — and she was evidently now viewed as a highly desirable bride, for in November 1396, probably as soon as her parents returned to England, the powerful northern baron, Ralph Neville, 6th Baron of Raby, married her as his second wife. John of Gaunt, who was clearly pleased to have the thirty-two-year-old Neville as a son-in-law and ally, settled a handsome annuity of £206.13s.4d (£89,914) on the couple for life.
⁶⁶
Neville’s estates were in Durham and Yorkshire, and Joan was to make her home there. His first wife, Margaret Stafford, who had died in June that year, had borne him twelve children, so Joan, at just nineteen, became stepmother to a sizeable family on her marriage; yet those children, as will be seen, would have little cause to love her in the future.

It was probably at the request of John of Gaunt that in January 1397, the Pope issued a Bull appointing Henry Beaufort Dean of Wells Cathedral in Somerset, launching the twenty-year-old cleric on what was to prove a spectacular and meteoric career in the Church. John also pressed the King, with whom he was now on the best of terms, and
who was desirous of his continuing support against the war lobby, to regularise the position of the Beauforts, and on 6 February, ‘yielding to the prayers of your father’, Richard issued Letters Patent formally legitimising them in law:

It was a gesture calculated to ensure the Duke’s continuing friendship and loyalty. For the Pope’s brief legitimising the Beauforts, although morally satisfactory, carried no weight under the laws of inheritance in England: it was purely a spiritual expunging of the stain of bastardy, and could not lift the legal bar to them inheriting lands or titles. What was required was an Act of Parliament confirming their legitimacy in common law, and this Richard secured.
⁶⁸

The King’s Letters Patent were read out on 6 February 1397 in Parliament by Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury;
⁶⁹
then, on the 9th, it appears that a ‘mantle ceremony’ was performed in the Parliament chamber, with the Duke and Duchess and their four offspring standing together beneath a mantle known as a ‘care cloth’; normally, when the single parents of bastards married, they and their children stood under the care cloth during the wedding ceremony. Even so, only the Church recognised them as legitimate; feudal inheritances were strictly safeguarded from bastard interlopers, and under English common law, up until 1920, ‘mantle’ children could not inherit property. In the case of the Beauforts, the care cloth was used symbolically,
⁷⁰
while an Act — unique in English history — was passed confirming their legitimisation and declaring them fully capable in law of inheriting ‘whatsoever dignities, honours, pre-eminences, status, ranks and offices, public and private, perpetual and temporal, feudal and noble there may be, as fully, freely and lawfully as if you were born in lawful wedlock’.
⁷¹

Being formally declared legitimate facilitated the full acceptance of the Beauforts into the royal House and removed all barriers to their preferment in the peerage and the Church, and further improved their prospects, literally overnight in the case of the chivalrous John Beaufort, for on 10 February the King created him Earl of Somerset, himself girding him with the sword and placing on his shoulders a cloak of velvet, ‘a garment of honour’.
⁷²
That April, John Beaufort would be made a Knight of the Garter. Formerly, he had borne a shield of blue and white (the Lancastrian livery colours, and now his own too) differenced by the red bend sinister of bastardy charged with the arms of Lancaster; now he took for his arms the quartered leopards and lilies of England with a segmented border in blue and white. It was probably at this time too that he adopted the famous portcullis badge that would later feature so prominently in Tudor heraldry.
⁷³
Katherine, the herald’s daughter, must have felt wonderfully gratified to see her children legitimised and her son a belted earl. The wits of Richard II’s court, however, derisively referred to the Beauforts as ‘Fairborn’, an interpretation of their name that was still being used ironically a century later,
⁷⁴
proof that the taint of bastardy still clung to the family. Notwithstanding this, the legitimisation of the Beauforts was to have massive implications for the future of the monarchy, and indeed for the history of England itself.