John Beaufort, the first of the Beaufort's, a family base born was highly regarded and gave good service to the crown. He was a diplomat and performed a number of official roles. He escorted his niece Blanche to Cologne for her marriage, and Joan of Navarre from Brittany into England for her marriage to the king. Regardless of his royal position he had little to show for it, there were no estates or money to inherit, and what land he held was granted by Richard II and Henry IV.
The Beaufort family were the children born to Katherine Swynsford and John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III. They were given the name of Beaufort from Gaunt's castle in Champagne, in north-east France. Following the death of his second wife in 1394 Gaunt married Katherine in the February 1396. The following year Richard II acknowledged the children as members of the royal family and addressed them as consanguineos sous - his cousins. Just under one hundred years later, the last of the Beauforts would use this family connection to assert the Lancastrian's right to the throne of England, a claim that had no basis, as the Lancastrian king Henry IV had excluded them from the line of succession. This made no difference of course, if Henry IV claimed the throne by murder and usurpation then the son of the last remaining Beaufort could take it by conquest.
It seems John Beaufort was out shined by nearly all of his family, most had a role in an event that history remembers, John Beaufort is only really remembered as the bastard offspring of an adulterous affair. He died of an unknown illness on the 16th March 1410 at just forty years of age. Even in death he shares his tomb with his wife and her second husband in Canterbury Cathedral.
RSS Feed
