Blanche of Lancaster

Blanche of Lancaster brought John of Gaunt the greatest inheritance in England, died at about twenty-six, and is the subject of the first substantial poem Geoffrey Chaucer wrote. She was the younger daughter of Henry of Grosmont, first Duke of Lancaster, a soldier and diplomat of European standing who left no sons; her elder sister Maud died childless in 1362, so the whole Lancastrian estate - some thirty castles and land in most English counties - came to Blanche and through her to Gaunt, who was created duke in her right. That inheritance is what made him the richest subject of the crown and made his descendants a dynasty. She married him in 1359 when both were teenagers and had seven children, of whom three survived: Philippa, who became queen of Portugal; Elizabeth; and Henry Bolingbroke, who deposed Richard II in 1399 and reigned as Henry IV. She died in September 1368, probably of plague, at Tutbury. Gaunt commissioned annual commemorations for her for the rest of his life, thirty-one years, and asked to be buried beside her rather than beside Constance of Castile or Katherine Swynford; the alabaster tomb in old St Paul's was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and survives only in Hollar's engraving. Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, written soon after her death, is an elegy in the form of a dream in which a knight in black describes a woman called White. It is the earliest of his major poems. Her father had founded the Savoy palace that the rebels burned in 1381. The duchy title had been created for him and was recreated for Gaunt. Froissart also wrote a poem on her death.

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