After John of Gaunt: Katherine Swynford’s Last Four Years

The Priory Katherine’s home for the last years of her life 

John of Gaunt died on 3 February 1399. Katherine Swynford did not.

For more than twenty years their lives had been intertwined. Their relationship had survived scandal, separation and political upheaval, produced four children and, eventually, ended in marriage. When Katherine married John at Lincoln in January 1396, the former wife of a Lincolnshire knight became Duchess of Lancaster.

Three years later she was a widow again.

It is at this point that Katherine often seems to disappear from her own story. Accounts of her life naturally concentrate upon her relationship with John of Gaunt and then move rapidly from his death to Katherine’s own death in May 1403. Yet those four years deserve rather more attention. They took place during one of the most dangerous political periods of her lifetime and may allow us to see something of Katherine acting independently of the man who had dominated so much of her adult life.

Her return to Lincoln, in particular, deserves another look. It may have represented familiarity and homecoming, but in the unsettled months following Gaunt’s death it may also have offered Katherine something more immediate: distance, security and protection.

A widow in a dangerous position

Katherine had experienced widowhood before. Hugh Swynford died in 1371, leaving her with young children and responsibilities connected with the Swynford estates. Her position in 1399 was entirely different. She was now the widow of a royal duke, Duchess of Lancaster, mother of the legitimised Beaufort children and stepmother to Henry Bolingbroke.

Those titles brought prestige, but in early 1399 they did not necessarily bring security.

John of Gaunt’s death came at a particularly dangerous moment for his family. His son Henry Bolingbroke had been exiled by Richard II the previous year. Following Gaunt’s death, Richard extended Henry’s exile and took control of the vast Lancastrian inheritance rather than allowing the absent heir to succeed normally.

Katherine could hardly have failed to recognise the implications.

Her own interests were affected when officials dealing with the Lancastrian estates also interfered with property to which she was entitled. Katherine had to seek the restoration of her rights. Richard did restore them, an important fact which prevents us from presenting the king as engaged in some personal persecution of Katherine. Nevertheless, the experience demonstrated how vulnerable even the Duchess of Lancaster could become once her powerful husband was dead.

She occupied an uncomfortable position. She was the widow of John of Gaunt, stepmother of the exiled Bolingbroke and mother of his Beaufort half-siblings. Her daughter Joan was married to Ralph Neville, another man with strong Lancastrian connections. Katherine herself may not have been politically active, but it would have been impossible to separate her completely from the family whose power Richard was now attempting to control.

Against that background, Lincoln begins to look like a very sensible place to be.

Why Lincoln?

Lincoln already had deep connections with Katherine’s life. Nearby Kettlethorpe had been her home during her marriage to Hugh Swynford, and Lincoln Cathedral belonged to the landscape she had known for decades. Most significantly, it was at Lincoln that Katherine and John of Gaunt had finally married in January 1396.

There were therefore powerful personal reasons for her return.

There may also have been practical ones.

We cannot prove that Katherine went to Lincoln specifically because she feared Richard II, and it would be wrong to present speculation as fact. Yet it is reasonable to wonder whether safety and political caution formed part of her thinking. The royal court was hardly an attractive place for Gaunt’s widow during the spring and summer of 1399. Her stepson had been excluded from his inheritance, Lancastrian property was in royal hands and Katherine had already experienced interference with her own rights.

Lincoln offered distance from all this.

It was familiar territory, close to her Swynford connections and away from the immediate pressures surrounding Richard’s court. Her son Henry Beaufort was Bishop of Lincoln, adding a significant family connection to an already important ecclesiastical centre. Katherine’s association with the cathedral close placed her within a very different environment from the increasingly dangerous political world surrounding the king.

Her withdrawal to Lincoln can therefore be read in more than one way. It may have been the natural retirement of a widow returning to a place she knew well. It may equally have been an exercise in prudence by a woman who had spent enough of her life close to royal politics to recognise when remaining quietly out of sight was advisable.

Perhaps it was both.

Katherine and the revolution of 1399

Any hope of a peaceful first year of widowhood was shattered by events.

Henry Bolingbroke returned to England in the summer of 1399. His stated purpose was initially the recovery of his Lancastrian inheritance, but events moved rapidly. Richard II was captured, forced from the throne, and Bolingbroke became Henry IV.

For Katherine, this extraordinary revolution was also a family crisis.

The new king was her stepson. Her Beaufort children were his half-brothers and half-sister. Thomas Swynford, her son by Hugh, was also closely associated with the Lancastrian world. Few women could have been more intimately connected with the family now taking possession of the throne.

Yet Katherine herself remains remarkably difficult to find in the political story.

There is no convincing evidence that she took an active role in Henry’s return or Richard’s deposition. We do not have a letter revealing her views, nor a chronicler recording Katherine’s reaction to the fall of one king and accession of another. Her silence matters because it warns us against turning family connection into political participation.

Indeed, her apparent absence may itself be revealing. Katherine had survived long enough at the edge of royal power to know its dangers. During the crisis she seems to have allowed the men of the Lancastrian family to fight their political battles while she remained away from the centre of events.

That may not have been passivity. It may have been good judgement.

The king’s stepmother

Henry IV’s accession transformed Katherine’s position once again. The woman who had once been condemned as John of Gaunt’s mistress was now the stepmother of the King of England.

Relations between Katherine and Henry might easily have been uncomfortable. Katherine had been his father’s lover while Gaunt was married to Constance of Castile, and her Beaufort children were Henry’s half-siblings. Later she had become Gaunt’s wife and Duchess of Lancaster.

Yet Henry’s treatment of Katherine after becoming king suggests acceptance rather than hostility. Her financial position was protected, and she continued to enjoy royal favour and provision.

One of the benefits associated with her later years was an annual allowance of wine from the royal supplies at Kingston upon Hull. To modern eyes such grants can seem like minor administrative details, but medieval relationships were frequently expressed through precisely this kind of patronage. Land, money, annuities, gifts and privileges tell us a great deal about status and favour.

Henry’s treatment of Katherine acknowledged her established position within the Lancastrian family.

It also meant that by the end of 1399 Katherine occupied a position she could scarcely have imagined as the young wife of Hugh Swynford. She was Duchess of Lancaster, stepmother of the king and mother of men and women firmly established among England’s elite.

Katherine without John

There is a temptation to describe these years purely as the aftermath of Katherine’s great relationship with John of Gaunt. Doing so, however, risks repeating the very problem that has so often obscured her.

Widowhood could provide medieval aristocratic women with freedoms that marriage did not. Katherine had her own income, household and rights. She no longer existed legally or socially simply as the wife of a husband whose enormous household and political position overshadowed almost everyone around him.

The surviving documents do not give us the intimate portrait we might wish for. Katherine did not leave a diary or collection of private letters explaining how she spent her days in Lincoln. We encounter her instead through grants, property arrangements and administrative records.

Yet even these fragments suggest a woman who did not attempt to recreate a great Lancastrian court around herself. Her later life seems quieter and more localised.

Lincoln became the centre of her widowhood.

This does not necessarily mean withdrawal from her family. Her children were increasingly important figures, and the connections between the Swynford and Beaufort branches continued. What appears to have changed is Katherine’s own relationship with public power. She had spent decades close to it. In the final years of her life she seems to have stepped away.

Still a Swynford mother

One particularly revealing document comes from the final weeks of Katherine’s life and concerns not one of the famous Beauforts but her son Thomas Swynford.

Katherine had been entitled to four tuns of wine annually from the royal supply at Hull. In April 1403 she requested that two of them should instead be delivered to Thomas and his wife.

Less than a month later, on 10 May, Katherine died.

It is easy to make too much of such a record. We cannot know whether Katherine was already seriously ill or whether the arrangement had any emotional significance. It may simply have been sensible household management.

Even so, it is worth noticing.

After everything that had happened since her marriage to Hugh Swynford — her relationship with Gaunt, the birth of the Beauforts, the years of scandal, her eventual marriage to the duke and her elevation to the highest ranks of English society — Thomas remained part of her world.

The earlier family had not been erased by the later one.

This small transaction also offers a pleasing contrast with the great political events surrounding Katherine. Historians naturally follow kings, inheritances, rebellions and dynasties. Katherine’s surviving records occasionally bring us back to something much more ordinary: a mother making provision for her son.

Her final home

Katherine died at Lincoln on 10 May 1403 and was buried in Lincoln Cathedral on the south side of the Angel Choir.

Her burial there connected several different versions of Katherine Swynford. The Lincolnshire wife of Hugh Swynford, the woman associated with Kettlethorpe, the lover of John of Gaunt, the woman who married him in Lincoln Cathedral and finally the widowed Duchess of Lancaster all came together in the same place.

Her tomb proclaimed the dignity she had eventually achieved. She was buried as Duchess of Lancaster, not defined in death by the scandal that had once surrounded her relationship with Gaunt.

Her daughter Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, was later buried beside her. The two women lie together at Lincoln, although their monuments suffered badly in the seventeenth century.

There is something particularly appropriate about that. Joan’s descendants would become central to the political history of fifteenth-century England, but at Lincoln she remained Katherine’s daughter.

Survival rather than retirement?

Katherine’s final years are sometimes characterised as a peaceful retirement. Perhaps, after the upheavals of her earlier life, that is partly what they became.

But the word “retirement” may be too simple.

When Katherine first returned to Lincoln after Gaunt’s death, England was moving rapidly towards political crisis. Her stepson was in exile, his inheritance had been seized, and Katherine’s own property rights had briefly become vulnerable. She had every reason to keep away from Richard II’s increasingly unstable court.

Lincoln offered familiarity, family connections and the protection of an important cathedral community. Once Henry IV seized the throne, the immediate political danger changed, but Katherine remained there.

Her retreat to Lincoln may therefore have begun partly as an act of self-preservation and gradually become the settled home of her widowhood.

That interpretation cannot be proved. Katherine left us too little of her own voice for that. But it fits the circumstances better than an image of a grieving duchess simply choosing somewhere peaceful in which to spend her final years.

Katherine had spent most of her adult life navigating a world dominated by powerful men and dangerous politics. She had survived the death of Hugh Swynford, the scandal surrounding her relationship with Gaunt, their separation, reconciliation and eventual marriage. In 1399 she survived another profound change, while the political order around her collapsed.

Perhaps the decision to make Lincoln her refuge tells us something about how she had survived for so long.

Katherine standing alone

It is impossible to tell Katherine Swynford’s story without John of Gaunt. Their relationship shaped both their lives and had consequences neither could have foreseen. Their descendants would eventually sit upon the English throne.

But Katherine’s story did not end when John died.

For another four years she lived as a woman of considerable status in her own right: Duchess of Lancaster, mother of Swynfords and Beauforts, stepmother of a king and a woman with her own property and household.

Most intriguingly, she seems to have known when to remove herself from danger.

The great Lancastrian story continued around her. Henry IV fought to secure his throne. Her sons pursued careers in church and government. Joan Beaufort and her Neville descendants would become increasingly important to the politics of the next generation.

Katherine remained at Lincoln.

We should perhaps resist seeing those years simply as the quiet ending to a great love story. They may instead show us something that is harder to see elsewhere in her life: Katherine making practical decisions for herself, protecting her position and her family, and living independently of John of Gaunt.

In 1399, returning to Lincoln may have offered safety.

By 1403, it had become home.

Katherine Swynford’s Forgotten Children: The Family Before the Beauforts

When we think of Katherine Swynford as a mother, it is almost inevitably the Beaufort children who come to mind. John, Henry, Joan and Thomas Beaufort were the children of Katherine’s long relationship with John of Gaunt, and their later legitimisation gave them an extraordinary place in English history. Through Joan Beaufort came the Nevilles and, eventually, the Yorkist kings; through John Beaufort came Margaret Beaufort and Henry VII. Katherine’s descendants would sit upon the thrones of England and Scotland.

Yet before there were Beauforts, there were Swynfords.

Katherine had already been a wife and mother before her relationship with John of Gaunt began. Her marriage to Sir Hugh Swynford is often treated merely as the opening chapter of the more famous story: Hugh serves abroad, Hugh dies, and Katherine’s relationship with Gaunt takes centre stage. His children can disappear almost as quickly.

They deserve rather more attention, not least because they reveal a side of Katherine that is easily lost beneath the story of royal love, scandal and dynasty.

Katherine Swynford before the Beauforts

Katherine de Roët married Sir Hugh Swynford, a Lincolnshire knight associated with the household of John of Gaunt. Precisely when they married remains uncertain, although Katherine was certainly known as Katherine Swynford by the mid-1360s.

The marriage brought her particularly close to Lincolnshire. The Swynfords held the manors of Kettlethorpe and Coleby, but they were not enormously wealthy landed magnates. Their estates had only comparatively recently come into Swynford hands, and surviving valuations suggest that the properties were not uniformly prosperous. Parts of the land were poor, buildings required repair, and Kettlethorpe itself was vulnerable to flooding.

This was the setting in which Katherine first became a wife and mother. It is also where we encounter a surprisingly difficult question: how many children did Katherine and Hugh actually have?

Modern family trees often give reassuringly precise answers, but the medieval evidence is less obliging. Two children can be identified with considerable confidence: Thomas Swynford and Blanche Swynford. There is also a strong case for a daughter named Margaret, who later became a nun at Barking Abbey, although her parentage is not explicitly stated in the surviving record. She therefore belongs in the category of probable rather than proven children.

That distinction matters. One of the recurring problems in Katherine’s story is that details repeated often enough can begin to look like established fact when the evidence is actually more uncertain.

Thomas Swynford

Thomas is the Swynford child about whom we know most. When Hugh Swynford died in 1371, the inquisition held after his death identified Thomas as his son and heir and described him as about four years old. That places his birth around 1367–68. Whatever later speculation arose about his parentage, the records surrounding Hugh’s death treated Thomas straightforwardly as Hugh Swynford’s legitimate heir.

Thomas grew up in circumstances that were anything but ordinary. He was the son of Katherine and Hugh Swynford, but his mother later became the acknowledged mistress of one of the most powerful men in Europe. His younger half-siblings were John of Gaunt’s children, while Gaunt’s legitimate son Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, became in effect Thomas’s stepbrother.

Such a family arrangement might easily have produced division. Instead, the evidence suggests that Thomas became firmly integrated into the Lancastrian world. By the early 1380s he had entered John of Gaunt’s retinue, and in 1390 he served with Henry Bolingbroke on his expedition to Prussia. He married Joan Crophill and later received an annuity from Richard II.

John of Gaunt continued to remember Katherine’s son. When the duke died in 1399, Thomas received a substantial bequest of 100 marks. That is worth noticing because it shows that Gaunt did not simply provide for the four children he had fathered with Katherine. Thomas Swynford, the son of Katherine’s first husband, remained inside his circle.

The Beauforts did not replace the Swynfords. They joined them.

Thomas and the death of Richard II

Thomas Swynford also acquired a darker place in history after Henry Bolingbroke returned to England in 1399, deposed Richard II and became Henry IV. Richard was eventually imprisoned at Pontefract Castle, where he died in early 1400.

Thomas has often been described as Richard’s gaoler and sometimes implicated directly in the manner of the deposed king’s death. Here, however, caution is necessary. The chronicler Adam of Usk refers to a Swynford in connection with Richard’s custody, but the identification is not as straightforward as later retellings sometimes suggest.

That does not remove Thomas from the political world that destroyed Richard II. He was unquestionably a Lancastrian supporter and subsequently prospered under Henry IV. What cannot safely be done is to move from that fact to the confident claim that Thomas personally caused Richard’s death.

This is another reminder that Katherine’s family accumulated stories in much the same way that she did.

Katherine the mother

One document from the end of Katherine’s life gives us a particularly valuable glimpse of her relationship with Thomas.

After becoming king, Henry IV continued to treat his stepmother generously. Among Katherine’s benefits was an annual allowance of four tuns of wine from the royal supply at Kingston upon Hull. On 12 April 1403, Katherine petitioned the king asking that two of those four tuns should instead be delivered to Thomas Swynford and his wife.

Katherine died less than a month later, on 10 May 1403.

We cannot know precisely why she made the request. Perhaps she was already ill and knew that her own household would no longer require the full allowance. Perhaps it was simply a practical redistribution within the family. Even so, the record is striking.

One of Katherine Swynford’s last recorded actions concerned her Swynford son, Thomas. At the end of a life so often described through her relationship with John of Gaunt and the extraordinary success of the Beauforts, she was still acting as a mother to the child of her first marriage.

For anyone interested in finding Katherine the woman behind Katherine the royal ancestress, it is a small but important piece of evidence.

Blanche Swynford

Thomas had at least one sister whose existence can also be securely connected with Katherine and Hugh. Her name was Blanche.

We know something particularly interesting about her because John of Gaunt was her godfather. When Gaunt later sought papal permission to marry Katherine, their existing spiritual relationship created a problem in canon law. By becoming godfather to a daughter born to Katherine by another man, Gaunt had acquired a form of spiritual kinship with Katherine.

That evidence is valuable because it confirms that Katherine and Hugh had a daughter for whom Gaunt stood godfather, and other surviving material allows her to be identified as Blanche.

The choice of name is suggestive. It is tempting to assume that she was named for Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt’s first wife, in whose household Katherine served. That is entirely plausible, although it remains an inference rather than something stated in a contemporary document.

In 1375 Gaunt also made provision involving the wardship of the young Robert Deyncourt, granted to Katherine in connection with her daughter Blanche. Wardships could be financially valuable, and the arrangement appears to have been intended to help secure Blanche’s future, possibly with marriage in mind.

After this, Blanche becomes much harder to trace.

What happened to Blanche?

The traditional conclusion has often been that Blanche died young, and that remains possible. There is, however, another intriguing possibility.

In 1381 a woman named Blanche married Sir Thomas Morrieux, one of Gaunt’s retainers, and received generous wedding gifts from the duke. Froissart describes this Blanche as an illegitimate daughter of John of Gaunt by a woman named Marie de St Hilaire.

The difficulty is that Froissart is not infallible, and there is no independent evidence that conclusively establishes this woman’s parentage. It has therefore been suggested that Blanche Morrieux might instead have been Blanche Swynford.

There are suggestive details. Gaunt arranged handsome gifts for Blanche Morrieux, while Morrieux himself received generous rewards from him. Katherine Swynford also appears in the same wider network of patronage. Most importantly, there is no surviving record in which Katherine’s daughter Blanche and Gaunt’s supposed daughter Blanche can clearly be shown to exist as two separate women.

None of this proves that they were the same person. It does, however, mean that the easy statement that Blanche Swynford “died young” should not be treated as established fact.

Sometimes leaving a question open is more historically honest than providing a tidy answer.

Margaret Swynford: Katherine’s forgotten daughter?

The most intriguing possibility concerns Margaret Swynford.

In 1377, at the beginning of Richard II’s reign, the Crown nominated a young woman of that name for entry into Barking Abbey. The record does not identify Margaret explicitly as the daughter of Hugh and Katherine Swynford, and that must be made clear. Nevertheless, there are reasons for thinking she may have been.

Her likely age would fit comfortably with a daughter born during the earlier years of Katherine’s marriage. There were also connections between Barking and Katherine’s wider family. An Elizabeth Chaucer was associated with the abbey, and John of Gaunt made a substantial payment connected with her admission. If Elizabeth belonged to the family of Katherine’s sister Philippa Chaucer, then two young women from the interconnected Swynford-Chaucer family may have entered the same prestigious religious community.

Margaret Swynford eventually became Abbess of Barking in 1419 and remained in office until her death in 1433. Other later connections between Barking and members of the Beaufort family make the identification still more attractive, although not conclusive.

I find the possibility persuasive, but persuasive is not the same as proven. For now, Margaret is best described as probably Katherine Swynford’s daughter.

If that identification is correct, Katherine’s first family becomes even more interesting. One daughter may have married into Gaunt’s affinity, another may have entered one of England’s most important female religious houses, while Thomas pursued the secular life of a Lancastrian knight.

One family, not two

Perhaps the most important thing the Swynford children reveal is that we should stop imagining Katherine’s life as a sequence of separate compartments: first Hugh, then John; first the Swynfords, then the Beauforts.

The surviving evidence suggests something more complicated and more human. Thomas remained close to the Lancastrian family. John of Gaunt patronised him. Henry IV rewarded him. The Beauforts continued to assist members of the Swynford family in the next generation. These were not two families divided neatly according to their fathers.

They behaved like one extended family.

That may tell us something important about Katherine herself. It would have been easy for the extraordinary circumstances of her later life to obscure the comparatively modest Lincolnshire marriage with which her adult life had begun. By 1396 the former wife of Hugh Swynford had become Duchess of Lancaster. Her Beaufort sons were moving rapidly into the highest ranks of church and state, while Joan Beaufort had married into the great Neville family.

Yet Katherine’s earlier life was not erased. Kettlethorpe remained part of her story, and Thomas remained her son. In April 1403, with only weeks of her life remaining, she was still making provision for his household.

For all the fascination of kings, dukes, scandal, legitimisation and royal descent, that modest administrative record may bring us closer to Katherine than many of the grander events associated with her name.

Before Katherine Swynford became the mother of a dynasty, she had already become a mother. The Swynford children should not be allowed to disappear beneath the Beaufort family tree.