Katherine Swynford

Katherine Swynford was John of Gaunt's mistress for twenty-five years, married him at the end of them, and is an ancestor of every English monarch since Henry VII. She was the daughter of a herald from Hainaut who had come to England in Queen Philippa's household, served in Gaunt's first wife Blanche's household, and married a Lincolnshire knight, Hugh Swynford, who died in 1371. The relationship with Gaunt began around then and produced four children, surnamed Beaufort after one of his French lordships. It was public and it was a scandal - the chronicler Thomas Walsingham was savage about her, and during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, with Gaunt's palace burning, he repudiated her publicly and did penance. They resumed. When his second wife Constance of Castile died he married Katherine in Lincoln Cathedral in 1396, which was a genuine shock: a duke of royal blood marrying his own children's governess and long-standing mistress had no precedent anyone could name. Richard II and the pope both legitimated the Beauforts the following year. Henry IV, Gaunt's son by Blanche and Katherine's former charge, later added a clause barring them from the succession, whose legal force was arguable and which mattered enormously a century later: Margaret Beaufort's claim, and so Henry VII's and the whole Tudor line, descends from Katherine. Her sister Philippa was married to Geoffrey Chaucer. She outlived Gaunt by four years and is buried near him in Lincoln Cathedral, in a tomb damaged in the civil war. Anya Seton s 1954 novel about her has kept the name in circulation. Her son Henry Beaufort became a cardinal and financed the English crown for decades.

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