Mistress of the Monarchy (50 page)

The fact that Katherine possessed houses in Lincoln, Boston, Grantham and King’s Lynn, all flourishing ports, and is known to have had dealings with merchants from some of those towns, suggests that she had long had mercantile interests — possibly in the wool trade — that have gone unrecorded. We know she had inherited from her father some property in Hainault, which was perhaps managed by stewards who assisted her in her business ventures, for Hainault was a major wool-trading centre. Investing money in such enterprises may have been one way in which, prior to her marriage to John of Gaunt, she had sought to expand the Swynford inheritance.

It is unlikely that — with the exception of Bishop Beaufort, who was based at Lincoln Cathedral, a stone’s throw from the Priory — the widowed Katherine saw much of her sons. In the summer of 1400, John and Thomas Beaufort accompanied Henry IV on a military expedition to Scotland,
³⁵
and after the King came south in September, John Beaufort accompanied him on a tour of North Wales,
³⁶
while Thomas was appointed Sheriff of Oxfordshire. John was granted the lands of the Welsh rebel Owen Glendower in November,
³⁷
and he was in London in December for a council meeting and to prepare for the coming visit of the Byzantine
Emperor Manuel II. At this time, Katherine was again looking after affairs at Kettlethorpe: in a deed dated there on 13 October, Thomas Aylemere of Kettlethorpe confirmed to her, as Duchess of Lancaster and Lady of Kettlethorpe, the grant or purchase of a small garden plot.
³⁸

In 1401, John Beaufort was appointed Captain of Calais, an office he would hold until his death,
³⁹
and that same year he was chosen to escort Richard II’s grieving young widow, Queen Isabella, back to France.
⁴⁰
Later, he was in Calais negotiating a truce with the French. On 26 November 1401, the King gave further evidence of holding John in high favour by standing godfather to his eldest son, who was named Henry in his honour, and by granting the infant a generous annuity of 1,000 marks (£121,492).
⁴¹

It is unlikely, with all this going on, that John Beaufort had much leisure to visit his mother, and from Michaelmas 1401, Katherine was even more isolated because Henry Beaufort was at Oxford for most of the academic year.
⁴²
Then, in May 1402, he went to court, where — thanks to his royal blood and his clever brain — he soon became one of the chief statesmen of the realm. In the month of his arrival there, he and his brother Thomas witnessed the appointment of proctors for the proposed marriages of Henry of Monmouth, now Prince of Wales, and his sister Philippa,
⁴³
and in the autumn, Bishop Beaufort was appointed to the King’s Council.

Henry IV remarried in 1402: his bride was Joan of Navarre, and John Beaufort was present at the proxy wedding that took place on 3 April at Eltham. In June, John was entrusted with escorting the King’s daughter, Princess Blanche, to Germany for her marriage to Rupert, Duke of Bavaria and King of the Romans.
⁴⁴

That month, John Leventhorpe, the King’s trusted Receiver-General of the Duchy of Lancaster, travelled to Lincoln to speak with Katherine.
⁴⁵
We do not know the nature of their business, and it was not unusual for Leventhorpe to leave his office in London and travel about the Duchy estates in the course of his work. It is possible that Katherine realised that her health was beginning to fail and that she wished to put some of her affairs in order.

Thomas Beaufort received his first military command as Captain of Ludlow Castle on the Welsh Marches in August 1402;
⁴⁶
that year, Henry IV confirmed John of Gaunt’s bequest of an annuity to him. In November, however, the King refused to accede to a parliamentary petition that John Beaufort be restored to his former rank of marquess; both Henry, and indeed John Beaufort himself, felt that that particular title was ‘alien’, too closely associated with Richard II and with Robert de Vere, for whom it had been created.
⁴⁷
John was sent to Brittany that month to escort Queen
Joan to England; their party docked at Falmouth in February 1403, and on the 7th, Bishop Beaufort officiated at the royal wedding in Winchester Cathedral.
⁴⁸
There is no record of Katherine attending, nor does she seem to have been present at the new Queen’s coronation on 26 February, which suggests that her health did not permit her to travel far these days, for these were great state occasions for most of the nobility, and as Dowager Duchess of Lancaster she would have occupied a position of honour at them.

At the end of February, Henry Beaufort was appointed to the high office of Chancellor of England, a post he would hold under three successive sovereigns. The following month, John Beaufort was sent to take up his command in Calais, where he seems to have remained until June.
⁴⁹
That March, work on John of Gaunt’s new chantry in St Paul’s was completed — the chantry priests were established there in July — and on the 8th, Henry IV granted licence to his late father’s executors to found the chantry for Constance for which the late Duke had made provision in his will.

The next reference to Katherine is ominous. At Eltham, on 12 April 1403, in response to a petition by her, the King granted that two of the four tuns of wine received by her each year could be sent instead to Thomas Swynford and his wife.
⁵⁰
Because this petition was made so close to her death, it is more than possible that Katherine was ill and knew she would no longer need so much wine for her household, and so asked for half of it to be given to her son.

In May we find Thomas Beaufort still serving as Captain of Ludlow. Sadly, neither he nor his brother John, abroad in Calais, would ever see their mother again. She died, perhaps unexpectedly soon, probably in the solar wing of the Priory, on 10 May 1403, aged about fifty-three.
⁵¹

She was buried in Lincoln Cathedral, in the Angel Choir, on the south side of the sanctuary, in the western arch of the two bays near the high altar. As Duchess of Lancaster, she was entitled to such an honourable burial place, and no doubt her son, Bishop Beaufort, saw that she got it; he probably officiated at the funeral — for which no information survives — and may well have commissioned his mother’s table tomb, or carried out instructions she had left for it in her will. Harvey makes a good case for its being designed by Thomas Prentys, a master sculptor from Chollaston in Northamptonshire, for Katherine’s tomb has similarities to others he is known to have designed.
⁵²
Silva-Vigier romantically suggests that Katherine’s heart was buried with John of Gaunt in St Paul’s, but that is highly unlikely, since heart burial had become virtually obsolete in England by this time.

Katherine’s fine tomb chest of Purbeck marble, with its moulded plinth
and lid, had armorial shields encircled by garters along each side; it was surmounted by a canopied brass depicting Katherine in her widow’s weeds, and bearing her arms impaled with those of John of Gaunt, while above it was raised a vaulted canopy with trefoiled arches, cusped lozenges and miniature rose bosses. The canopy and associated stonework would have been painted in bright colours. Her epitaph, recorded by Lancaster Herald, Francis Thynne, around 1600, was as follows:

This translates as:

On 27 June 1403, annuities amounting to £1,300 (£416,705) that had been paid to Katherine out of the issues of the Duchy of Lancaster were transferred to Queen Joan.
⁵⁴
The late Duchess’s passing had apparently occurred virtually unnoticed, for no chronicler comments on it, and there is no record of court mourning. She died as she had lived during those sad years of her widowhood, quietly and without any stir, almost as a private person. Certainly the wording of her epitaph does not reflect the grandeur of her own position, but rather emphasises her husband’s rank and lineage and her need for divine mercy; this emphasis on humility and an awareness of the innate sinfulness of human nature, as well as specific sins, was typical of the age, and probably derived from the ageing Katherine’s own feelings about herself and her life.

Lucraft has pertinently pointed out that we would know more about the latter if Katherine’s will had survived, but there is no trace of it, either in Lincoln or in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury records.
⁵⁵
We know that a will was made because not long after her death, the Lincoln Chapter’s Clerk of the Common rode to Liddington in Wiltshire to discuss the proving of her testament with Bishop Beaufort;
⁵⁶
and in her own will of 1440, Joan Beaufort bequeathed to her eldest son a psalter willed to her by ‘the illustrious lady and my mother, Lady Katherine, Duchess of Lancaster’, which she directed should go to each of her sons in turn,
clearly intending it to be an important family heirloom.
⁵⁷
Of the will’s other provisions, there is the likelihood that Katherine bequeathed Gisors Hall in Boston to Thomas Beaufort.

On 19 May 1403, sixteen days after Katherine had died, the Priory was leased to Canon Richard of Chesterfield, but he withdrew from the agreement on 29 June ‘on account of fear of the Queen’; it seems that Joan of Navarre, with the King’s consent, had promised the house to Elizabeth Grey, the widow of Philip, Lord Darcy, who lived in a house nearby. Katherine had probably known her, given their close proximity and the fact that Elizabeth Grey’s daughter-in-law, Margaret Grey, the present Lady Darcy, later became Sir Thomas Swynford’s second wife; Elizabeth Grey could well have been a friend of Katherine’s, indeed, Katherine may even have asked Queen Joan to arrange for Lady Darcy to lease the Priory after her death. Be this as it may, the King did grant it to her.
⁵⁸

Plans for the foundation of the chantry chapel at Lincoln for which John of Gaunt had obtained a licence in 1398 were shelved: three times, in 1400, 1402 and 1413, the Duke’s executors acknowledged their failure to carry out his wishes.
⁵⁹
Not until 1437 do we hear that an altar had been set up, but even then no formal foundation had apparently been made.
⁶⁰

Katherine’s chief legacy to history was her Beaufort children. John Beaufort continued to serve as Captain of Calais until 1404 or 1405, when Sir Thomas Swynford was acting as his deputy. In 1407, John Beaufort asked Henry IV to clarify the status of himself and his siblings, whereupon the King, on 10 February that year, confirmed the statute of 1397 that legitimised them, but added the words
excepta dignitate regali
(‘excepting the royal dignity’) in his Letters Patent, denying them the right of succession to the Crown,
⁶¹
an act of dubious legality that would be called into question in the years to come, for it was never approved by Parliament, and the original Act had been left unamended. There has been speculation that Henry IV had always privately feared the implications of the Beauforts being legitimised, and while he himself had four strapping sons and must have known that John Beaufort’s loyalty — and that of his siblings — was beyond question, he could not rely on the fealty of subsequent generations; so this clause probably reflects his determination to pre-empt any future threat to the senior Lancastrian line.

John Beaufort died on Palm Sunday, 16 March 1410, aged only thirty-seven, in the Hospital of St Katherine-by-the-Tower, a royal charity founded in 1148 by Matilda of Boulogne, the wife of King Stephen, to offer spiritual comfort and alms to the poor; given the fact that its patrons
had always been royal ladies, that John Beaufort died there, and that John of Gaunt had founded a chantry in the hospital, as well as its connection with her name-saint, it is highly likely that the hospital had been under Katherine’s patronage when she was Duchess of Lancaster.
⁶²
John was buried in St Michael’s Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral, near his uncle the Black Prince and the shrine of St Thomas à Becket, a resting place probably chosen for him by Henry IV, who was himself buried nearby in 1413.
⁶³

John was succeeded as Earl of Somerset by his eight-year-old son, Henry. His widow, Margaret Holland, became the wife of Henry IV’s third son, Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and in due course she and her second husband were interred in the same tomb as John Beaufort, with the effigy of Margaret recumbent between those of her two spouses. The latter are similar, but John’s effigy is shorter and his face, distinguished by its Plantagenet nose and heavy-lidded eyes, may well be an attempt at a likeness.

Henry Beaufort was the most dynamic of Katherine’s sons. In 1404 he was translated from the See of Lincoln to that of Winchester. He stood high in the counsels of Henry IV and his son, Henry V (who succeeded his father in 1413), was one of the chief mainstays of the House of Lancaster, and played a prominent role in the history of England during the first half of the fifteenth century, becoming enormously rich and influential in the process; it has been said that he was probably the greatest royal creditor of the age.
⁶⁴
In 1418, he narrowly missed being elected Pope. Three years later, he was nominated godfather to Henry V’s only son, and when that infant became Henry VI in 1422, he was entrusted to the care of Henry and Thomas Beaufort. During the minority of Henry VI, Bishop Beaufort was a leading figure on the regency Council, and in 1426 was made a cardinal, achieving one of the highest accolades the Church could bestow. In 1431, he was one of the judges who condemned Joan of Arc to be burned at the stake. He died at Wolvesey Palace, Winchester, in the spring of 1447, aged seventy-two, and was buried in the chantry he had founded in Winchester Cathedral; his parents were among those for whom he had requested that perpetual prayers be said there.
⁶⁵
He had one bastard child, a daughter called Joan. It has often been stated that her mother was Eleanor FitzAlan, daughter of the Earl of Arundel,
⁶⁶
but there is no evidence to support that claim.
⁶⁷