British History related to Leicester / shire

[davieG]

On January 13, 1396, John of Gaunt married Katherine Swynford in Lincoln Cathedral. Half the peerage stayed home.

He was the richest man in England, uncle to King Richard II, and the son of Edward III. She was the widow of a minor Lincolnshire knight who had died fighting in Aquitaine. They had been lovers for roughly 25 years.

She had come into his household in the 1360s as a governess to his daughters. His second wife, Constance of Castile, was still very much alive at the time, and so was Katherine's own husband, Hugh Swynford. When Hugh died in 1371, the affair with Gaunt was already underway.

Four children followed. Three sons and a daughter, born while Constance held the title of Duchess of Lancaster and Katherine held the man. Gaunt gave them the surname Beaufort, after one of his French lordships, and raised them openly.

The scandal was loud. Chroniclers like Thomas Walsingham called Katherine a witch and a whore. Gaunt publicly renounced her in 1381 after the Peasants' Revolt, when his palace at the Savoy was burned to the ground and his unpopularity became politically dangerous.

The renunciation didn't take. They kept seeing each other quietly.

Constance of Castile died in 1394. Within two years, Gaunt did something nobody expected a prince of the blood to do. He married his mistress.

Richard II petitioned the Pope to legitimize the four Beaufort children. The papal bull arrived in September 1396, and Parliament confirmed it the following year. The children were now legally the sons and daughter of a prince, with full rights of inheritance, except for one later clause that barred them from the throne itself.

That clause turned out to be worth very little.

John Beaufort, the eldest, became Earl of Somerset. His great-granddaughter was Margaret Beaufort. Her son was Henry Tudor, who took the crown at Bosworth in 1485 and became Henry VII.

Every English and British monarch since has descended from Katherine Swynford. Henry VIII. Elizabeth I. Charles II. Victoria. Elizabeth II. Charles III.

Gaunt died in 1399, three years after the wedding. Katherine outlived him by four years and was buried beside him in Lincoln Cathedral, where their tombs sat together until the Reformation damaged them.

The mistress half the peerage wouldn't acknowledge became the ancestor of every monarch who followed.

 

 

AI

Connection to Leicester

Inheritance: He inherited Leicester Castle in 1361 through his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, and it became his preferred residence among his many properties. [1]

Death: He died at Leicester Castle at the age of 58. His death prompted King Richard II to disinherit his son, Henry Bolingbroke, which led to Bolingbroke’s invasion and his accession as King Henry IV. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Local Landmarks:

John O’Gaunt’s Cellar: A medieval structure near the site of Leicester Castle's Great Hall.

The John O’Gaunt Pub: A former community pub built in 1956 on Somerset Avenue (the Stadium estate) that closed in 2018.

John O’Gaunt (Hamlet): A small locality in Leicestershire named after a former 19th-century railway station and local fox covert. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]