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T U D O R Q U E E N S O F E N G L A N D
    direct evidence of her reaction. She seems to have retired to Bermondsey Abbey some months before her death and might have had some thoughts of taking the veil, but it was there, on 3 January 1437, that she died. Her will, which survives, is a very curious document. The king, who was still technically a minor, was made sole executor, her servants were to be paid, and masses said for her soul, but nothing was said either about her younger children or about her h
    usband.12
    Perhaps some traces of her father’s incapacity were affl icting Catherine towards the end of her life, or perhaps some rupture with her husband had put her in a state of denial. The fact that she was in Bermondsey Abbey at all suggests that something like that had happened. In any case she died as Queen Dowager and a princess of France – not as Mrs Owain Tudur.
    Her death at fi rst left her husband dangerously exposed. In July he was summoned before the Council but signifi cantly declined to come without a safe conduct from the King that ‘he should come and freely go’. This was granted, but honoured in the breach rather than the observance, for on his way home he was arrested and consigned to Newgate. Later in the year, as one chronicler disparagingly put it:
    One Owen, a man of neither birth nor livelihood, broke out of Newgate at searching time. The which Owen had wedded with Queen Katherine and had three or four children by her unknown to the common people until she was dead and buried …
    He was re-arrested and sent to Windsor Castle, where he might have remained had not his stepson intervened. In 1439 he was pardoned and his goods and lands (valued at £137 a year) were restored to him. Henry then awarded him an annuity of £40 a year ‘by special grace’ and, although he gave him no offi ce or responsibility, Owain proved to be a loyal servant of the Lancastrian cause in the forthcoming civil strife. He was eventually captured and executed after the Yorkist victory at Mortimer’s cross in 1461. He was buried in the Greyfriars church at Hereford, where his bastard son David (an afterthought born in 1459) subsequently erected a memorial.
    His sons by Catherine, Edmund, who was aged about 7 at his mother’s death, Jasper, who was 5, and the other David, who was about 3, do not seem to have been in their father’s custody at any point. Whether their allocation to the care of the Earl of Suffolk’s sister ever took effect we do not know but probably not because soon after Catherine’s death they were placed with the Abbess of Barking and later with certain ‘virtuous and holy priests’. The King assumed full responsibility for them and never attempted to deny that they were his kindred. They were educated in the royal household in a manner suitable to their status and Edmund was knighted on the 15 December 1449.
    13 He was presumably

T H E Q U E E N A S T R O P H Y
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    brought up, at least in part, to be a soldier but it was in recognition of his royal blood rather than for service that he was created Earl of Richmond on 23
    November 1452, with precedence ov
    er all other earls.14 H e was also recognized as the King’s half brother at the Reading parliament of 1453. Because of that status he was granted in that year the wardship of the 10-year-old Margaret, the daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, whom two years later he married. By 1456 he was fi ghting with the Lancastrian forces in Wales but was defeated by Sir William Herbert and died of the plague at Carmarthen in November of that year. His young bride gave birth to a posthumous son on 28 January 1457, who was subsequently to be King Henry VII.
    As King, Henry demolished and rebuilt the chapel at Westminster Abbey where Catherine was buried. In referring to his intention to translate the remains of his uncle, King Henry VI, to the new chapel, he also mentioned ‘the body of our Grand dam of right noble memory, Queen Katherine