John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset

John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, was the eldest surviving son of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford. Born before his parents’ marriage, he and his siblings were later legitimised by papal and royal acts, although Henry IV added a restriction excluding them from the crown. John served Richard II and Henry IV in military and diplomatic roles and founded the Beaufort line from which Margaret Beaufort and Henry VII descended.

John appears in Anya Seton’s Katherine and in historical fiction about John of Gaunt and the origins of the Beaufort family. His life gives novelists a way to follow the transformation of a socially ambiguous child into an accepted member of the royal dynasty. The later Tudor claim makes every detail of Beaufort legitimacy politically significant in retrospect.