With all the preparations for the Duke's obsequies and the sorting out of affairs following his death, Katherine can have had little time to mourn. Now, with the funeral behind her, she faced life alone without the man she had loved for more than thirty years.
Before she could make any decisions about her future, she had to look to her financial affairs. Immediately following the Duke's death, the royal escheators had wrongfully taken into custody her dower lands along with the Lancastrian estates, so Katherine had to petition Richard II to restore them to her, which he did promptly on 9 March. He also confirmed an annuity of £1,000 (£379,163) charged upon the Duchy lands, which had been granted to her by John of Gaunt. But on 18 March, the King did what had no doubt been in his mind for some time: without any legal pretext, he extended Henry's exile for the term of his life, and declared the Lancastrian inheritance forfeit, annexing the Duchy to the Crown, and distributing its lands among his favourites. It was a shocking turn of events, and one of the grossest examples of Richard's tyrannical rule.
The King had shed no tears for his late uncle, and had even communicated his passing to Charles VI 'with a sort of joy'. Yet his affection for Katherine and her family is evident in the measures he took to mitigate the impact of the forfeiture on them. He allowed Katherine to keep the lands left to her for her dower, and when in May his escheators — whose zeal far exceeded their competence — seized lands in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Norfolk that she had held before her marriage to the Duke, he ordered that these lands be released to her. Thereafter, she made no known protest about the forfeiture of the Lancastrian inheritance, kept very much to herself and thus managed to remain on good terms with the King.
On 20 March, Richard confirmed the annuity of 100 marks that John of Gaunt had granted in 1383 to Thomas Swynford and his wife, and the same day he compensated Thomas Chaucer for the loss of the offices granted him by the late Duke. John Beaufort was scheduled to go to Aquitaine at the beginning of April, but the King postponed his departure and kept him in attendance at court; on 16 April he was one of the witnesses of Richard's will. Perhaps John took advantage of the respite to help his mother settle her affairs, or to be a moral support to her at this time of mourning. In April, Richard provided Garter robes for Joan Beaufort and Jane Crophill, Thomas Swynford's wife. Katherine was not among those for whom such robes were provided - she would not have been expected to attend the Garter ceremonies so early in her widowhood.
Katherine did not choose to reside at any of her dower properties. She probably visited them rarely, if at all, for there is little or no trace of her at any of them, and of course she only held them for a short time; their function was chiefly to provide her with an income from rents and feudal dues. Instead, she went back to the cathedral close in Lincoln, where she had sought refuge at the time of that earlier parting from John, and which had evidently come to represent home to her. In absenting herself from London and the court, she removed herself from the turmoil of political life that had engulfed her last years with John, and hopefully in so doing found a kind of peace.
Having arranged for Thomas Swynford to take over the running of Kettlethorpe and Coleby, she leased one of the most desirable houses in Minster Yard, the one known today as the Priory. The exact date on which she took up residence there is not recorded, but it must have been early on in her widowhood; she was certainly renting the house in 1400-1, and held it until she died.7 She did not pay the rent of 46s.8d (£869) per annum, but opted instead to make repairs to the house, which may have given her something on which to focus during her widowhood.
The Priory is now a private school, and it was not known by that name until the early nineteenth century, when it housed an earlier school for young ladies, which was established by 1824; however, it will henceforth be referred to as the Priory for ease of reference. The present house is set back from the street and somewhat isolated from the other houses, standing against the fortified wall that was built around the cathedral close in the early fourteenth century, and lying to the north of the Chancery, further along Pottergate. In Katherine's day, the New Gate of the close stood outside the house, next to which was the Priory's own, smaller gatehouse, long since demolished; the cathedral's octagonal Chapter House is opposite.
As with the Chancery, a parliamentary survey, drawn up in 1649, exists for the Priory, providing us with many valuable details about the property leased by Katherine. The Priory's largely Victorian exterior conceals the core of the thirteenth-century house lived in by Katherine, which had once been a canon's residence; there had been a tenement on the site since the twelfth century. The remains of the 'fair hall 40' long and 22’ broad with walls between two and three feet thick, which dates from the late thirteenth century, are incorporated in the present house, along with sections of its walls and two of its original entrance doorways, while at the screens end there survives between two pointed-arched doors an imposing stone buffet delicately sculpted with ball flowers and a frieze of quatrefoils, which is built into the stone wall. There is also a carved basin for the washing of hands. The survey records 'a buttery or cellar at the lower end of the hall, and at the upper end a fair parlour wainscoted, 28' long and 21' broad, with a closet adjoining'. This parlour probably occupied Katherine's original solar wing at the south end of the hall, where she would have had her private chambers. Like that in the Chancery, the hall would have been open to the roof-beams in the fourteenth century, with a louvre to let out smoke from the central hearth. In this wing, there was also, in 1649, 'one other beer cellar there with pantry and buttery', and among the rooms on the second floor, above the parlour, was a 'chapel chamber', which probably dated from at least Katherine's day, for a household oratory had been licensed in 1259.
When the close wall was built, around 1316—28, a strong three-storeyed stone tower with its own spiral staircase, octagonal chimney shaft and embattled parapet was built into it, Unking it with the north side of the hall of the Priory, and forming part of the house. The parliamentary survey describes how the stone stairs led up to 'two lodging rooms', which may have been guest chambers or accommodation for household officers. The contemporary chimney shaft, rare in such houses, suggests an unusual degree of comfort and privacy for its time, while a small extension to the east side of the tower, which has traces of mediaeval windows, may have housed latrines. The ground-floor room, which has mullioned windows, was probably used as a buttery and pantry. There is now no fireplace in the first-floor chamber (now the music room), but this was clearly an important room because it still boasts windows surmounted by ogee arches on both sides, which would have been there when Katherine leased the property. It may be that all trace of the original hearth has been lost. The second-floor room has one window with an ogee arch, and a fireplace with a chamfered stone lintel that was uncovered in 1966.
In those days, a long range of buildings abutted the close wall between the gatehouse and the Priory itself, but all that survives are a row of corbels. In the seventeenth century, these comprised a brewhouse, stable and hayloft; they may have served as stables in Katherine's time. The surveyors mention 'an orchard and garden adjoining on the south side of the said dwelling, walled about with stone walls', which occupied about two acres, and yards of a similar size.
The Priory was largely rebuilt around 1670, when the staircase in the tower was replaced, and new windows and a porch were added in Victorian times.
Its proportions and architectural features show that, in the fourteenth century, the Priory had clearly been a house of some distinction, and after Katherine had filled it with the sumptuous beds, furnishings and treasures left to her by John of Gaunt, it would have been splendid indeed, and a fitting residence for the Dowager Duchess of Lancaster.
That Katherine enjoyed good relations with the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln during her widowhood is strongly suggested by her decision to live among them, the rich gifts she made to the cathedral, and the fact that one canon, John Dalton, left her a silver cup in his will.
There are all too few references to Katherine during the period of her widowhood. She lived out a quiet existence in Lincoln, taking no part in public life, and playing no role in the cataclysmic events that were to take place later in 1399. She seems to have retained an interest in Kettlethorpe, and it may have been she who, in the absence of Thomas Swynford, provided a new rector there, William Wylingham, on 16 July that year. Professor Goodman suggests that Kettlethorpe, with its frequently flooded meadow, may have been too damp for comfort for the middle-aged Katherine," so she may not have been there very often.
Her sons, however, were to become increasingly involved in the political life of the kingdom. When Richard II went campaigning in Ireland in June, Henry Beaufort was in his train, looking after his nephew, Henry of Monmouth. John Beaufort, meanwhile, was raising a force to take to Aquitaine, but he would soon be deploying it in England instead.
For, in seizing the Lancastrian inheritance, Richard had made a fatal blunder, spurring an outraged Henry, Duke of Lancaster, to vigorous action. With a small force of retainers, he left Paris and sailed for England, landing at Ravenspur on the Humber estuary on 4July, intent on recovering what was rightfully his and unseating the tyrannical King. He advanced unopposed through the Lancastrian lands in the north, took York, and rallied Joan Beaufort's husband, Ralph Neville, to his cause. John Beaufort, on the other hand, while secretly writing to Henry to declare his support, publicly declared for Richard and joined the army that Edmund of Langley raised to defend the King. But Henry swept all before him, and at the end of July, Richards forces surrendered to the conqueror.
At that point, an alarmed Richard returned from Ireland, but his cause was already lost. On 19 August, he was captured at Conway and taken a prisoner to the Tower. The first thing the victorious Henry of Lancaster did when he arrived in London was pay his respects at his father's tomb in St Paul's.
Henry and Thomas Beaufort, Ralph Neville and Thomas Swynford all hastened to declare their allegiance to Henry. On 29 September, Richard was forced to abdicate, and the next day, standing before his father's seat in Westminster Hall, Henry challenged the realm of England and was proclaimed King, the first sovereign of the House of Lancaster. Technically he was a usurper, but the heir nearest in blood to the throne, Edmund Mortimer, a descendant of Lionel of Antwerp, was a child of only eight, so there was no viable alternative.
The new King was crowned on 13 October in Westminster Abbey. With his accession, the great Duchy of Lancaster became vested in the Crown (and remains so today), and almost immediately afterwards Henry confirmed John of Gaunt's bequests to Katherine Swynford.1’ There had always been a deep affection between the former Henry of Derby and his stepmother; Katherine had long played a maternal role in Henry's life, and is known to have referred to him as her 'son', while he now began officially calling her 'the King's mother' — a term he was under no obligation to use — as is evidenced in a grant he made to her on 9 November, of four barrels of wine a year for life.
The affection in which Henry held Katherine and her family is evident in his generosity towards them. In 1398, Geoffrey Chaucer had resigned his office of forester and returned to London; now he and his son Thomas immediately made known their loyalty to the new King. Of course, Henry and Geoffrey were old acquaintances, friends even - only five years earlier, Henry had given the poet money and a scarlet gown fined with fur. He evidently thought so highly of him that on the very day of his coronation, he doubled his pension — a mark of high favour perhaps prompted by Chaucer's humorous 'A Complaint to his Purse', a plaintive, tongue-in-cheek plea of penury.The King also confirmed a grant made to Chaucer by Richard II in October 1398, of an annual tun of wine. On 14October, Henry IV also confirmed John of Gaunt's 1383 annuity to Sir Thomas and Lady Swynford, and on the 31st he granted Thomas custody of Somerton Castle in Lincolnshire.
Thomas Chaucer was appointed Constable of Wallingford Castle on 16 October, and made Sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1400. His impressive career in public life owed much to Lancastrian patronage and to the connection of his aunt, Katherine Swynford, with John of Gaunt. He served as Chief Butler to four monarchs - Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI - being reappointed by Henry IV in 1402. Between 1401 and 1431, he would sit as MP for Oxfordshire in fourteen parliaments, and he was Speaker four times between 1407 and 1414. A justice of the peace, diplomat, successful vintner, landowner and shrewd investor, he became 'immensely rich' and greatly respected.
Of his brother Lewis, far less is known. He is last recorded in 1403 as serving as a member of the garrison at Carmarthen Castle with Thomas Chaucer.
Late in October, the former King Richard was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, and soon afterwards he was taken to Pontefract Castle, spending a night en route at Katherine's castle of Knaresborough. At Pontefract, Sir Thomas Swynford, Henry IV's highly trusted former comrade-in-arms, was one of his guardians. John Holland, who had remained loyal to his half-brother, Richard, was deprived of the dukedom of Exeter, and on 3 November, John Beaufort, who had also publicly supported the former King, was deprived of the marquessate of Somerset, being relegated to the rank of earl. There were calls for his execution, but Henry produced the private letters that John had sent him, expressing his fidelity, and on 7 November he made him his chamberlain during his pleasure, 'trusting in his loyalty and prudence', and admitted him to the royal Council. On the18th, Thomas Beaufort was granted three manors by the King, and in 1400 he would be made a Knight of the Garter. Under Henry IV, the Beauforts - to whom the King would officially refer as his brothers and sister" — would rise to ever-greater heights and prosper accordingly.
Joan Beaufort and her husband Ralph Neville were always on good terms with Henry. In 1400, Joan bore her first child, the Richard Neville who would grow up to be the famous Earl of Salisbury and the father of Warwick the Kingmaker, his namesake. Fourteen other children were born of the marriage, the eldest daughter being called Katherine, and by 1450, through a successful series of alliances, the Nevilles - and the Beauforts too — would be linked by blood or marriage to every noble family in England.
On Christmas Eve 1399, Katherine's brother-in-law, Geoffrey Chaucer, now nearing sixty, took a fifty-three-year lease on a house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, overlooking the garden of the Lady Chapel. The length of this lease suggests he must have been in apparent good health and expected to live for some time yet to enjoy his new home, which he got rent-free, thanks to the generosity of the King. But on 21 February 1400, he was to collect his pension in person for the last time, and in June the final payment of it was delivered to his representative. It seems he had fallen ill and was unable to go to the Exchequer himself. He died at Westminster, with only twenty-three of the planned 160 Canterbury Tales completed, probably on 25 October 1400, and, as a tenant of the Abbey, was buried in the south transept of the church near the entrance to St Benedict's Chapel; a leaden plate bearing his Latin epitaph was hung on a pillar nearby. The elaborate tomb erected by the poet Nicholas Brigham to Chaucer's memory near his burial place, in what was to become Poets' Corner, was not built until 1555-6.
Early in 1400, the disaffected John Holland was found to have been involved in a plot to assassinate Henry IV and restore Richard II, and soon afterwards, he was captured by the Countess of Hereford at Pleshey, Essex, and there beheaded on her orders. His widow, Elizabeth of Lancaster, had remarried by 12 December following; her third husband was the gallant John Cornwall, Baron Fanhope, who had dazzled her with his performance in a tournament at York that July. Rumour had it that the amorous Elizabeth had not only gone to bed with him before the wedding but had also failed to obtain the King's licence for their marriage. Yet Henry IV indulgently forgave his wayward sister and thus avoided yet another public scandal; in 1404, he even allowed her a dower from Holland's forfeited estates.
It is probably no coincidence that Richard II, whom Holland had sought to restore, died soon afterwards, in February 1400, in Pontefract Castle - deliberately starved, it is thought, by his gaolers on the orders of the King. Adam of Usk says he perished 'miserably... as he lay in chains ...tormented by Sir N. Swynford with starving fare', but this must be a reference to Sir Thomas Swynford, who was one of the former King's custodians. Swynford, says Usk, was 'the chief agent' of Richard's death. This grim insight reveals the darker side of Sir Thomas's character and how zealous he was in the service of Henry IV. Further evidence to suggest Sir Thomas's involvement in the probable murder is to be found in a payment made by the Exchequer 'to a valet of Sir Thomas Swynford, coming from Pontefract to London, to certify to the King's council of certain matters which concern the King's advantage, including the hire of one horse for speed'. We have no means of knowing whether Katherine ever learned that her son was responsible for Richard's death, but she must have known of his role as gaoler at Pontefract, and like everyone else she would have heard the news of the former King's timely demise, so she may have speculated, or been suspicious, as to what had taken place.
Whether he was to any degree responsible for the former King's murder or not, Sir Thomas Swynford prospered under Henry IV: in 1401, he was made Sheriff of Lincolnshire, and by 15 May that year he had been granted the stewardship of the Lancastrian honour ofTickhill, while in 1402Henry IV chose him as one of his chamber knights, a position that brought him into close personal contact with the King.
On 12 February 1400, Henry IV granted Katherine the manor of Laughton-en-le-Morthen near Tickhill in Yorkshire, to augment her dower. He also, around this time, assigned her £200 (£74,495) a year from Duchy lands in Huntingdonshire and 700 marks(£86,911) per annum from those in Lincolnshire, and confirmed her allowance of £1,000 from her late husband. Katherine was now enjoying an income of at least half a million pounds in modern terms, without even taking into account the issues from the dower properties that John of Gaunt had left her. That made her a substantially wealthy woman, yet apart from living in some state at the Priory, there is no evidence that she used her wealth to finance a lavish lifestyle, or that she travelled outside Lincoln and its environs, or that her hospitality became renowned; all these factors may suggest that she was in poor or declining health during her widowhood, or so devastated by the loss of the Duke that she became reclusive, and lost interest in material things. The only other reference to her during the year 1400 concerns a grant that was made to her at Kettlethorpe on 13 October, so evidently she was still capable at that time of looking after her son's manors in his absence.
One of the properties that formed part of Katherine's jointure was the town of Aylsham in Norfolk, which had been granted to John of Gaunt by Edward III in 1372; John rebuilt its parish church around 1380. Like Katherine's other dower properties, Aylsham was to revert to the Crown on her death. Curiously, in the eighteenth century, the antiquarian Francis Blomefield, in his monumental history of Norfolk,3' refers — without citing his source - to Aylsham being held at this time by 'Katherine, wife of John Leeches [sic]',which has led some writers, notably Walter Rye in the1920s, to conclude that, during her second widowhood, Katherine married a third time, to a member of the Leech family, who were prominent in local society and (according to Rye) were tenants of the Duchy of Lancaster and bore arms. This supposition cannot be correct, for had Katherine remarried, she would have had to surrender her substantial jointure, which in fact did not revert to the Crown until her death. The few references we have concerning her in the years of her widowhood all show her based in the vicinity of Lincoln.
Furthermore, the use of the style 'Dame Katherine, Duchess of Lancaster' in Katherine's tomb inscription suggests that she had become a 'vowess' in widowhood, that is, taken a vow of perpetual chastity before a priest or bishop. Vowesses were not nuns: they remained in the world and could dispose of their property. If Katherine had taken such vows, she was following a fashionably pious trend that had emerged in the last quarter of the fourteenth century and would not die out until the Reformation. Both her daughter, Joan Beaufort (who bequeathed to her son a gold ring 'with which I was sworn to God'), and her famous descendant, Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, became vowesses, Margaret whilst still married to her fourth husband, with his permission.
Katherine owned a number of other dower lands and properties in Norfolk, and also a house in Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn) called Wesenham Place, which had been granted to her by John of Gaunt at an unspecified date, he having purchased it from John Wesenham, a wealthy Lynn merchant, financier and oft-elected mayor who had strong links with the court. The grant is known only through an entry on the Duchy of Lancaster enrolment book for the period October 1399 to September 1405, and the reference therein indicates occupancy of the house by Katherine at some time, although given that there is no other evidence for her being there, she is unlikely to have stayed there often. Unfortunately, there is no surviving evidence as to where the house stood or what it looked like.
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,35and after the King came south in September, John Beaufort accompanied him on a tour of North Wales, while Thomas was appointed Sheriff of Oxfordshire. John was granted the lands of the Welsh rebel Owen Glendower in November, 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.
In 1401, John Beaufort was appointed Captain of Calais, an office he would hold until his death, and that same year he was chosen to escort Richard IPs grieving young widow, Queen Isabella, back to France. 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).
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. 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, 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.
That month, John Leventhorpe, the King's trusted Receiver-General of the Duchy of Lancaster, travelled to Lincoln to speak with Katherine. 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; 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 tide 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. 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. 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.
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. 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:
Ici gist dame Katherine Duchesse de Lancastre jadis feme de le tresnoble et tresgracious prince John Duk de Lancastre fils a tresnoble roy Edward le tierce, la quelle Katherine mourust le X jour de May l’an du grace MCCCC tiers de quelle alme dieu eyt merci et pitiee. Amen."
This translates as:
Here lies Dame Katherine, Duchess of Lancaster, once the wife of the very noble and very gracious Prince, John, Duke of Lancaster, son to the very noble King Edward III, the which Katherine died the 10th day of May in the year of grace 1403, on whose soul God have mercy and pity. Amen.
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.34 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.35 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; 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." 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.
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.
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, 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. John was buried in St Michael's Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral, near his uncle the Black Prince and the shrine of St Thomas a Becket, a resting place probably chosen for him by Henry IV, who was himself buried nearby in 1413.
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. In1418, 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. 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, but there is no evidence to support that claim.
There is a fine effigy of Cardinal Beaufort, wearing his red robes and wide-brimmed hat, on his tomb, and a stone head of him at Bishop's Waltham Palace, Hampshire. It has recently been suggested that a portrait of a cardinal by the celebrated Flemish artist Jan Van Eyck may also portray him. The sitter was once thought to have been Cardinal Niccolo Albergati, but his well-fleshed appearance and fur-trimmed robe does not ride with what we know of the ascetic Albergati. Henry Beaufort was in Ghent in 1432, at the time this portrait is thought to have been painted, and clearly the sitter was an important man. Could this cardinal, with his closely shaven face, large nose, keen brown eyes and pleasant, playful smile, have been the son of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt?
The very able Thomas Beaufort also had a distinguished career in royal service. In 1403, soon after his mother's death, he was made Admiral of the Northern Fleet, and on 21 July that year he fought under the future Henry V at the Battle of Shrewsbury. He again served as admiral in 1408-9,and in 1410, he reached the pinnacle of his career when he was appointed Chancellor of England, as well as Captain of Calais. He resigned the chancellorship in 1412, the year he was created Earl of Dorset, and in which he saw military service in France, Henry V having abandoned the peace policy of his grandfather, John of Gaunt, and resurrected England's ancient claim to the French throne. Thomas was the King's Lieutenant in Aquitaine in 1413, and in 1415, with his cousin Thomas Chaucer, he wielded his sword for Henry V in the French campaign that ended with the jubilant English victory at Agincourt. The town of Harfleur was also taken, and Thomas Beaufort was made its captain. He was appointed Lieutenant of Normandy in 1416, and created Duke of Exeter on 18 November that year. Two years later, he took an active part in Henry V's ruthless push to conquer Normandy, and was created Count of Harcourt on 1 July.
Thomas was widely renowned for his highly developed sense of chivalry, his moral rectitude, his Christian piety, and his charity to the poor and to travellers. He was impervious to corruption, refusing all gifts and rewards, and he forbade swearing, tale-bearing and lying in his household. It is tempting to wonder if he had been deeply humiliated by the irregularity of his birth and his former bastardy, and if all this stiff propriety was a subconscious attempt to compensate for those stigmas.
When the King's brother, Thomas, Duke of Clarence, was defeated and killed at the Battle of Beauge in 1421, Thomas Beaufort was taken prisoner by the French; he was released the following year. Soon afterwards, Henry V died, having entrusted the guardianship of his heir, the infant Henry VI, to his 'dear and true Duke of Exeter, full of all worthyhood', whereupon Thomas returned to England to share responsibility for the upbringing of his nephew with his brother, Bishop Beaufort. From 1424, their cousin, Thomas Chaucer, was also a member of the regency Council.
Thomas Beaufort died on 31 December 1426, and was buried in the Lady Chapel of the abbey of Bury St Edmund's in Suffolk. He left no heir, his only son Henry having died young. In his will, he made provision for Masses to be celebrated for the souls of his parents, and left a silver-gilt cup to his half-brother, Sir Thomas Swynford. His tomb was lost when the Lady Chapel was pulled down in 1538 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1772, a lead coffin thought to be Thomas Beaufort's was found by workmen on the supposed site of its altar. The remains it contained were well preserved in cerecloth, and were reburied in a wooden casket near the north-east crossing pier.
Thomas Chaucer, who had turned down a knighthood, died on 14 March 1434 and was buried at Ewelme. His only daughter Alice married William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, and thus became a duchess, the highest rank to which a woman could aspire outside the royal family. Her son, John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, was to marry Edward IV's sister Elizabeth of York, and their son, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was acknowledged as heir to the throne by Richard III after the latter's son died in 1484. Thus the descendants of Geoffrey Chaucer, the son of a London vintner, were raised to the highest echelons of the nobility and might, but for a turn of fate, have become kings of England - and it was all largely due to Geoffrey's sister-in-law having become the mistress and later wife of the mighty Duke of Lancaster.
Joan Beaufort proved to be a strong-willed, formidable lady, with wide literary interests — she liked pious works, romances and histories, and the poet Thomas Hoccleve dedicated a book to her. Yet she also demonstrated a deep religious piety that embraced the mysticism of Margery Kempe, the holy woman of Lynn. In 1404, Joan's husband, Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, conscious of his lady's royal connections and dynastic importance, disinherited his legitimate son by his first wife in favour of Joan's children, provoking a legal wrangle that would drag on for years, but in which the ruthlessly determined Joan would ultimately triumph.
In 1424, Joan's daughter Cecily Neville married Ralph Neville's ward, Richard, Duke of York. York was the grandson of Edmund of Langley, fifth son of Edward III and younger brother of John of Gaunt, and he was also descended, through Philippa of Clarence and the Mortimers, from Lionel of Antwerp, Edward Ill's second surviving son. Thus he had a strong claim to the throne, which he would assert in 1460 during the Wars of the Roses, insisting that he had a better right to rule than Henry VI. York was killed that same year at the Battle of Wakefield, but his claim was inherited by his son, Edward, Earl of March, the eldest of the fourteen children born of his marriage to Cecily Neville.
Ralph Neville died in 1425, and was buried in Staindrop Church, County Durham, beside his first wife. His effigy may be seen there today, lying between those of both his ladies, but although Joan founded a chantry at Staindrop for herself and her husband in 1437,she was never to be buried with him. Either she disdained to lie for eternity near his first wife, or she wanted to be with her mother: in her will, dated 10 May 1440, the thirty-seventh anniversary of Katherine's death, she asked if the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln would enlarge her tomb enclosure so that she, Joan, could be interred 'in the same altar where the body of Lady Katherine, Duchess of Lancaster, my mother, is buried'. On 28 November 1437, she had obtained a royal licence for her second foundation, a perpetual chantry in Lincoln Cathedral for the souls of both her parents, finally fulfilling their wishes almost forty years after John of Gaunt had obtained licence to found such a chantry 'for the good estate of himself and Katherine his wife'.The foundation, which dated from16 July 1439, was to be formally called 'the Chantry of Katherine, late Duchess of Lancaster, in the cathedral church of Lincoln'. Two chaplains were appointed to celebrate Mass each morning at 7 a.m. at the altar beside the tomb, and Joan made provision for prayers to be offered for Henry IV, Henry V and her late husband, Ralph Neville, as well.
Joan herself died on 13 November 1440, at Howden, Yorkshire, aged fifty-nine, and was buried with Katherine as she had wished; their two table tombs stood side by side, and Joan's also had a memorial brass and arms encircled by garters and Lancastrian collars of SS. Her epitaph, engraved on a brass plate, was recorded by Sandford in the seventeenth century; unlike Katherine's, it depicted its subject in heroic vein, asserting, 'The whole nation mourns her death.’ It was after Joan's interment, when the tomb space was enlarged, that an ornamental wrought-iron grille was set up to enclose it, as she had requested.79 As Bishop Beaufort was a supervisor of his sister's will, he may have been responsible for the commissioning of her tomb.
I am indebted to Jackie Goodman, the wife of Professor Goodman, for sharing her interesting theory concerning Joan Beaufort. There is a miniature of Joan and her daughters in the Neville Book of Hours,8' and in it there appears a scroll on which is written the first verse of Psalm 50:'Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great Mercy. 'This rather echoes the sentiments in Katherine Swynford's epitaph, and expresses a similar humility, awareness of sin, and penitence. But verse 6 of the Psalm says, 'For behold, I was conceived in iniquities: and in my sins did my mother conceive me.' If Joan was responsible for this psalm being quoted in the miniature, which is possible, then Jackie Goodman may be making a very valid point when she suggests that Joan's sense of her own sinfulness derived from the circumstances of her birth and her early awareness of her bastardy, and that to some extent she bore the burden of her mother's guilt, which she attempted to expunge all her life by religious observance and the study of contemplative literature, just as her brother Thomas had sought to occupy the moral high ground. Hence her desire to share Katherine's sepulchre, honour her memory and secure for her eternal salvation.
We have seen how, by 1450, through advantageous marriages, Joan's Neville children came to be related to nearly every peer in the realm. But there was greater glory to come. In 1461, her grandson, Edward, Earl of March, deposed Henry VI and seized the throne as Edward IV, first sovereign of the House of York. Henry was briefly restored in 1470 through the machinations of the man who had once been the mainstay of Edward's throne, Warwick the Kingmaker — another of Joan's grandsons. When Henry VI was murdered in 1471, the direct line of the royal House of Lancaster, the kings descended from John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, became extinct. In 1483, Edward IV himself died, and yet another of Joan's grandsons, his brother, Richard III, ascended the throne. Thus did Katherine, the herald's daughter, become the great-grandmother of kings.
Of course, John of Gaunt had many other descendants; indeed, he could justifiably be termed the 'grandfather of Europe'. In the Iberian kingdoms, and among the Burgundian Habsburgs, his memory was long honoured as a noble progenitor of dynasties. In 1406,his grandson, Catalina's son, Juan II, succeeded to the throne of Castile. In 1469, Juan II's daughter, Isabella, Queen of Castile, would marry Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and thus unite Spain as its joint sovereigns. Their youngest daughter, Catalina of Aragon, born in 1485, was named for her great-grandmother, Catalina of Lancaster (who had died paralysed in 1418), and became — with her name anglicised as Katherine of Aragon - the first wife of Henry VIII of England, and by him the mother of Mary I. Thus the bloodline of John of Gaunt was continued in the royal families of Spain and, through intermarriage, Austria, and was carried back into the English royal family.
It flowed in Portugal, too, where Philippa of Lancaster died of plague in 1415. In 1433, her son Duarte I succeeded to the Portuguese throne, and for the next two hundred years, her descendants would rule there. Her sister, the spirited Elizabeth of Lancaster, Katherine Swynford's other erstwhile charge, died in 1426 and was buried in Burford Church, Shropshire, where a fine painted effigy graces her tomb.
John and Katherine had many descendants in the Beaufort line. John Beaufort's eldest son, Henry, Earl of Somerset, died young at seventeen in 1418, when he was succeeded by his fourteen-year-old brother John.
Their sister, another Joan Beaufort, married James I, King of Scots, in 1424, and thus Katherine's granddaughter became a queen. Through Queen Joan, the sovereigns of the royal House of Stewart (later Stuart) traced their descent from John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford.
In 1443, the younger John Beaufort was created Duke of Somerset by Henry VI, the second of Katherine's descendants to achieve ducal rank. That year, his wife, Margaret Beauchamp, bore their only child, a daughter, the Lady Margaret Beaufort. John Beaufort did not long enjoy his dukedom. He died, perhaps by his own hand, on 27 May 1444, and was buried in Wimborne Minster, Dorset, leaving his daughter as his heiress. In 1450, the young Lady Margaret was the unwitting focus of a plot by William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk (the husband of Alice Chaucer), to marry her to his son and make her Queen of England upon the murder of Henry VI - a treasonable plan that cost the Duke his head. Yet it was proof enough that a Beaufort claimant to the throne was a viable prospect to some.
In October 1455, Margaret Beaufort, aged only twelve, was married to Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the twenty-five-year-old son of Henry V's widow, Katherine of Valois, by Owen Tudor, with whom she had formed a misalliance — some say a marriage, although there is no proof of that - in the late 1420s and 1430s. Margaret's marriage did not last long, for Edmund died in November 1456, leaving his young wife pregnant. Their son, Henry Tudor, was born on 28 January 1457. After the deposition of Henry VI in 1461, Henry Tudor was deprived of the earldom of Richmond, and was forced to spend most of his youth in exile.
From the 1450s onwards, the Beauforts were prominent in public life. John Beaufort's brother Edmund succeeded to the dukedom of Somerset and was a mainstay of Henry VI — and one of the chief rivals of Richard, Duke of York - at the onset of the Wars of the Roses, before his death in1455 at the Battle of St Albans. His son, Henry Beaufort, the third Duke, another prominent Lancastrian, was executed in 1464, and his brother Edmund lost his head in 1471, after fighting for Henry VI at the Battle of Tewkesbury; another brother, John, fell in the battle. Thus the male line of the Beauforts died out. Henry, the last Duke, had never married, but he left a bastard son, Charles Somerset, born around 1460. He was later created Earl of Worcester, and died in 1526, in the reign of Henry VIII. The present Duke of Beaufort, whose dukedom was created in 1682 by Charles II — in recognition of his 'most notable descent from King Edward III by John de Beaufort, eldest son of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford' — is descended from him. There is an amusing but apocryphal story of how Henry Charles FitzRoy, 8th Duke of Beaufort, showed Queen Victoria documents containing proof that John of Gaunt had married Katherine and fathered John Beaufort before the birth of Henry IV, thus rendering spurious the claims of every English sovereign after 1399; Victoria is said to have thanked him for bringing the papers to her attention, then promptly thrown them into the fire.
From the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, the possibility that the Beauforts might have a claim to the throne began to be taken more seriously. Henry IV had barred them from ever succeeding, but on dubious legal grounds, a matter that exercised not a few legal minds. In the 1470s, the exiled Henry Tudor clearly regarded himself as Henry VI's heir and the rightful Lancastrian claimant to the throne, and when Richard III usurped the throne in 1483, after having almost certainly eliminated Edward IV's sons, the so-called Princes in the Tower, Henry Tudor vowed to marry the Princes' sister, Elizabeth of York, and take the English throne. In retaliation, Richard III publicly asserted that Henry had no true claim to it because the Beauforts had been 'gotten in double adultery', an assertion that was only half-true, but has been accepted by many as a fact. We have seen, however, that the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Katherine Swynford was a widow when she became the mistress of the married John of Gaunt.
In August 1485, Henry Tudor invaded England and defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, where the latter was killed. In October, the victor was crowned Henry VII, first sovereign of the House of Tudor, and in January 1486 he married Elizabeth of York, thus uniting the Houses of Lancaster and York. Henry and Elizabeth were both Katherine Swynford's great-great-grandchildren. In 1485, in Henry VII's first Parliament, Richard II's statute of 1397, which removed the stigma of bastardy from the Beauforts, was re-enacted.
Notwithstanding this, the Tudor sovereigns made very little of their descent from Katherine Swynford, which is perhaps understandable; her notoriety had not dimmed — witness Richard Ill's libel, which clearly presupposed that people would know what he was talking about - and her ancestry left something to be desired. It may be for this reason that Katherine merits barely a mention in Tudor chronicles. Much as he had glossed over scandal in an epitaph for his grandmother, Katherine of Valois, when it came to providing a new inscription for John of Gaunt's tomb in St Paul's, Henry VII laid emphasis on Katherine's beauty rather than her virtues, as has been noted. It is unlikely that his fourth daughter, Katherine, born at the Tower a century after Katherine Swynford's death, was named after her, as some have suggested; probably she was so called after the Queen's sister, Katherine of York, or Katherine of Valois.
In the reign of Henry VIII, who succeeded his father in 1509, Katherine was still discreetly omitted from the royal pedigree. In a pageant given at Leadenhall in 1520 to honour the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, an actor representing John of Gaunt sat at the foot of a tree, from which rose many branches representing all the kings and queens who could claim lineage from him. Some were sprung from Katherine too, but she was not alluded to. Again, in plans drawn up for Henry VIII's funeral by the Garter King of Arms, reference is made tantalisingly to 'a banner of Lancasterwith the marriage', which probably refers to the union of Henry VII and Elizabeth ofYork rather than that of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford. Thus Katherine was virtually erased from history, and the fleeting references that were made to her by historians over the centuries usually referred disparagingly to her immorality or made a brief mention of her being the ancestress of the Tudors. Until 1954, that is, when Anya Seton's Katherine was published, and people began taking a more sympathetic and romantic view of its heroine.
After Katherine died, the Swynfords lived on at Kettlethorpe, and for a time her son Sir Thomas continued his career in royal service, being involved in 1404-6 in peace negotiations with France and Flanders. From 1406, he was retained by his half-brother, Thomas Beaufort, and there is no further record of his being employed by the Crown. He does not appear to have fallen from favour, though, for in 1411, when Thomas was having problems laying claim to 'divers inheritances in the county of Hainault' that had 'lately descended' to him 'from the most renowned lady Katherine de Roelt, deceased, late Duchess of Lancaster, his mother', Henry IV stepped in to assist 'our beloved and truly trusted knight'. And Thomas was in need of such help, having recently been declared an outlaw on account of being in debt to a London draper.
We do not know who was then in possession of those lands in Hainault, which Katherine had clearly owned — it was possibly Roët relatives who had entrenched themselves thinking their tenure would not be disturbed by their English kinsfolk. But whoever it was, 'certain persons in those parts' were determined not to be ousted: they had expressed their doubts that Sir Thomas Swynford 'was begotten in lawful matrimony', and had 'not permitted the said Thomas to possess the said inheritance or to receive the farms, rents or issues thereof.The implication was surely that Thomas was Katherine's bastard son by John of Gaunt, their affair having become notorious on the Continent as well as in England. But Henry IV was quick to set the matter straight: in October 1411, he issued a mandate under his Great Seal firmly attesting Sir Thomas's legitimacy:
Be it known unto you all that the aforesaid Thomas is son and heir of the aforesaid Katherine, begotten and born in lawful wedlock, and that a certain writing of the said Thomas, to these our present letters annexed, sealed with his seal of arms, is his deed; and that he and his father, and all his paternal ancestors, have in times past borne the said arms and used the like seal.
We hear no more of the matter, or whether Thomas was successful in his claim. Possibly his absence from royal service can be accounted for by his need to visit Hainault to pursue it and perhaps set his affairs there in order. In 1426-7 there is a record of him reclaiming Kettlethorpe; possibly he had needed to lease or mortgage it to finance himself while he was living abroad.
Thomas's wife, Jane Crophill, died between 1416 and 1421. She had borne him two known children: his heir, Thomas, around 1406 (he was twenty-six when his father died in 1432), who spent his youth in the service of his uncle, Thomas Beaufort, and a daughter, named Katherine after her grandmother. This Katherine had married Sir William Drury of Rougham, Suffolk, by 1428, and bore him six children before dying in 1478. By 1427, Cardinal Beaufort had secured an heiress, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Beauchamp of Powick, as a bride for young Thomas Swynford.
Before July 1421, Sir Thomas Swynford had married a second time, his bride being Margaret Grey, daughter of Henry, Lord Grey de Wilton, and widow of John, Baron Darcy.95 There was one son of this marriage, William Swynford, to whom Cardinal Beaufort left £400 (£181,426) and some silver plate in his will. Sir Thomas died on 2 April 1432, and was probably buried in Kettlethorpe Church, although there is no proof of that, since the church has long been rebuilt and there are no records of the mediaeval memorials. His widow, Margaret, survived until 1454. Because he had enfeoffed his estates to trustees, he died effectively landless.
His son, the younger Sir Thomas, did not long outlive him: he was dead by 8 January 1440, when his heir, Thomas Swynford III, was aged four or five. In 1468, this latter Thomas conveyed Kettlethorpe and Coleby to his uncle, William Swynford, the son of the first Sir Thomas by his second wife; William passed away before 1483, having willed those properties back to his nephew. When Thomas Swynford III died childless on 3 May 1498, the male line of Hugh and Katherine Swynford's descendants came to an end, and Kettlethorpe and Coleby passed to the heirs of Thomas's daughter Margaret, the wife of Thomas Pauncefote.
Kettlethorpe descended in turn to the Beaumonts, the Meryngs and others before coming into the possession of the Amcotts family in the eighteenth century. Their arms are still displayed above the front door. In the mid-seventeenth century, the brick walls that still encircle the gardens were built, while the hall itself was largely remodelled in 1713, at which time the fourteenth-century gatehouse was probably reconstructed. A drawing by J. Claude Nattes of the refurbished house, then called Kettlethorpe Park, survives from1793, and shows it to have been a large but undistinguished residence. In the early nineteenth century, the hall was allowed to fall into a decline; in 1857, Weston Cracroft-Amcotts had it demolished and built a plain redbrick Victorian house, into which was incorporated some of the mediaeval fabric surviving from Katherine's time.
That is the house that stands today, in seventeen acres of grounds.Traces of Katherine Swynford's deer park also survive. In 1983, Kettlethorpe was purchased by the Rt Hon. Douglas Hogg, QC, MP, Viscount Hailsham, whose coat of arms, like that of the Swynfords who once inhabited the manor, bears three boars' heads.
In the second half of the fifteenth century, during the Wars of the Roses, the tomb of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster was defaced and the original painted alabaster effigies destroyed. It was John and Katherine's descendant, Henry VII, who in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century had the tomb restored and a new epitaph set up to 'the illustrious Prince John, named Plantagenet, King of Castile and Leon, Duke of Lancaster, Lieutenant of Aquitaine, Grand Seneschal of England'. This is the epitaph in which it is incorrectly stated that it was Constance, and not Blanche, who was buried with the Duke, and in which Katherine's beauty rather than her virtue was emphasised: 'His third wife was Katherine, of a knightly family, and an extraordinarily beautiful and feminine woman; they had numerous offspring, and from these came the maternal family of King Henry VII.' The chief function of the epitaph was to publicise the Duke's illustrious descendants and connections. New effigies, wearing Tudor costume and armour (the Duke in a surcoat emblazoned with his arms, the Duchess in an ermine-trimmed mantle), with hands clasped in prayer, were placed on the tomb, probably in the 1530s, since Blanche's headdress is of that date; an earlier headdress would have had longer lappets.
During the Reformation, the chantry founded for the souls of John and Blanche was dissolved and its endowments appropriated by the Crown. Little damage appears to have been done to the tomb itself, which was described in 1614 as 'a most stately monument'. A drawing of it was made in c.1610; Wenceslaus Hollar did an engraving, as did Sir William Dugdale, Garter King of Arms, then Richard Gaywood
(around 1664-5) for the royal genealogist Francis Sandford.These pictures show an arcaded tomb chest with trefoil motifs and a fine triple-arched canopy with a tabernacle screen, on which the Duke's armorial achievements — his lance, cap of maintenance and shield — were displayed. The canopy or tabernacle was defaced during the Civil War, and never repaired.
On 4 September 1666, when Old St Paul's Cathedral was destroyed during the Great Fire of London, John of Gaunt's tomb 'suffered the violence of the late conflagration' and was irrevocably lost, 'burnt to ashes'. It is unlikely, therefore, that the corpses of John and Blanche were among those that were dragged from the ruins and propped up in Convocation House Yard for passers-by to gawp at.
Katherine's tomb, and that of her daughter Joan, standing side by side, were described by John Leland in the early sixteenth century,"1 and were also engraved by Dugdale around 1640. Today, those tombs stand end to end, with Joan's, the smaller, apparently cut down at some stage, at the foot of Katherine's. There are matrices where the canopied brasses once lay, and Katherine's tomb has indents to show where armorial shields were originally displayed. The patterned vault of the heavily restored canopy, its east and west abutments and the wrought-iron grille on its buttressed stone plinth are all that survive of the chantry chapel that once housed the tombs."3
The perpetual chantry set up by the Countess Joan lasted until the mid-sixteenth century. It was dissolved during the reign of Edward VI, at which time it was valued at £13.6s.8d (£4,203), and contained two chalices, two silver cruets (for holding holy water and communion wine), a silver pax and a silver sacring bell.
In 1644, the tombs were defaced, the brasses ripped off and stolen, and the stonework of the chantry badly damaged during the sacking of Lincoln Cathedral by Cromwellian soldiers in the Civil War; a 'bargeload' of spoils was floated down the River Witham to the sea, and the brasses and other tomb furniture may well have been on it. By 1672, the tomb chests had been moved into their present positions and the canopy clumsily restored."7 A nineteenth-century plan for a 'Gothic' restoration of the monuments was fortunately abandoned. Of the tombs of John of Gaunt's three wives, Katherine's is the only one to survive. Claims on the internet that the tombs are empty and that the remains of Katherine and Joan were despoiled by the Roundheads are unsubstantiated; there is no record of the bodies being disturbed, and they are probably still in a vault under the pavement beneath the tombs.
On 10 May each year, Katherine's name is always included in the obit prayer offered up during Evensong in Lincoln Cathedral. She is worthy of remembrance, and not only because of the famous and illustrious people who have descended from her and John of Gaunt — among them the present Queen Elizabeth II, who is also Duchess of Lancaster, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, and nearly every monarch in Europe; five American presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George W. Bush; Sir Winston Churchill, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, 'besides many other potent princes and eminent nobility of foreign parts'. Her memory is also honoured because she is a unique figure in the annals of mediaeval England, a royal mistress who became a duchess and the foundress of the Tudor dynasty, and above all a lady, as Chaucer said, so 'well deserving' of the fame that is still hers today.