Epilogue

‘Thus lay in ashes that most venerable Church, one of the most ancient pieces of early piety in the Christian world’.

John Evelyn, 7 September 1666

The lid of the alabaster tomb, immaculately designed and constructed by Henry Yevele, depicted likenesses of Blanche of Lancaster and John of Gaunt with their eyes peacefully closed, their left hands raised as if in prayer and their right hands lovingly clasped together. After forty days, Gaunt’s body was laid to rest in the tomb he had commissioned after the death of his first wife. The tomb, of such emotional significance to John of Gaunt, has been lost to eternity. In 1666, almost 300 years after his death, the Great Fire of London began only one mile away, in Pudding Lane, and swept through St Paul’s Cathedral. Today, the dome of the cathedral pierces the skyline of London, replacing the edifice Gaunt knew and loved, one of many great buildings that stood in his lifetime and are now vanished or crumbling around the country: emblems of an age of war, chivalry and innovation. Stone speaks of longevity, but over centuries of fires, revolutions and storms, it too can be lost.

As John of Gaunt lay on his deathbed at Leicester Castle in 1399, he was in agony at the thought of his life’s work – the cultivation of his father’s dream alongside his own vision of a great European dynasty – crumbling into history, to be forgotten. However, it was after his death that his vision was finally realised and etched into eternity. His youngest daughter, Catherine, became Queen Consort and then Regent of Castile, and through her came the most famous alliance of the sixteenth century: the marriage between her great-granddaughter, Catherine of Aragon, and the King of England, Henry VIII. This union brought the dynasty full circle, for in 1485 Henry VIII’s father, Henry VII, landed on the coast of Pembrokeshire and took the throne in the name of Tudor, through his mother, Margaret Beaufort. His victory at Bosworth and marriage to Elizabeth of York ended the War of the Roses between York and Lancaster, resolving the bloodshed between cousins that had begun with Bolingbroke’s seizure of a throne he was not next in line to. Through the dynasty and European alliance he worked tirelessly to create, John of Gaunt became the father of a long line of famous monarchs, who dust the pages of history books to this day.