Mistress of the Monarchy (51 page)

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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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 Beaugé 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’,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 III’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’.
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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 from 16 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.
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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.’
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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.
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As Bishop Beaufort was a supervisor of his sister’s will, he may have been responsible for the commissioning of her tomb.
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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,
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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 sinful-ness 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.
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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 in 1455 at the Battle of St Albans. His son, Henry Beaufort, the third Duke, another prominent Lancastrian, was executed in 1464, and
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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.
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