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| 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.
