Cardinal Beaufort 575

Today is the 575th anniversary of the death in 1447 at his episcopal palace at Wolvesey Castle in Winchester of Cardinal Henry Beaufort.

I have posted about him and about the surviving images we have of him on this day in 2012 in Cardinal Henry Beaufort and in 2017 in Cardinal Beaufort.

Portrait now believed to be of Cardinal 

Beaufort in the early 1430s and by Jan van Eyck. 

Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna 

Image: englishmonarchs.co.uk

Cardinal Beaufort belonged to an age when aristocratic bishops combined service to both Church and Crown, yet he was unique in his position as a churchman of royal blood, who was related to several of the leading dynasties of Europe. He was also a very substantial financier to the Crown, funding campaigns in France. He was an administrator as Chancellor of the realm three times, a diplomat and negotiator who played a key role in resolving the GreatSchism in 1417 as well as in attempts to negotiate a settlement in the Hundred Years War, notably in the early 1430s. As a domestic political figure he was at thrbcentre of English politics for over forty years. A patron of building and philanthropy he was also very keen to further the careers of his nephews the Earls and Dukes of Somerset, a fact which inflamed his opponents led by his nephew Humphrey Duke of Gloucester.

If he was unique in his own time so too he is almost unique in thr history of the country. The only comparable figures of a royal Bishop and Papal Legate or indeed Cardinsl, an

ecclesiatic with financial or political power, or at least the aspiration to that are his twelfth century predecessor at Winchester Henry of Blois, Cardinsl Reginald Pole and Cardinal York. All their lives are distinct but the similarities are striking. All were notable servants of both Church and Crown in their own way.

With Beaufort there appears to have been the assurance of being of the blood royal, for all that he was illegitimate, the grand seigneur, the man to whom basically no door was closed, the resolver of diplomatic and political impasses, the first resident English cardinal with ruling relatives from Portugal to Scandinavia. A man of ability, of intelligence, effortlessly grand and yet, in the van Eyck portrait, one with a gentler side, a hint of humour.

The tomb and chantry chapel of Cardinal Beaufort in Winchester Cathedral.

Image: englishmedievalcathedrals.com