Henry IV of England - Marriage and Issue

Marriage and Issue

The date and venue of Henry's first marriage, to Mary de Bohun, are uncertain but her marriage licence, purchased by Henry's father, John of Gaunt, in June 1380 is retained in the Public Record Office. The accepted date of the ceremony is 5 February 1381, at Mary's family home of Rochford Hall, Essex. Alternately, the near-contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart reports a rumor that Mary's sister Eleanor de Bohun kidnapped Mary from Pleshey Castle and held her at Arundel Castle, where she was kept as a novice nun in order to keep her half of the de Bohun inheritance under Eleanor's control (and consequently her that of her husband, Thomas of Woodstock, 1st Duke of Gloucester). There Mary was persuaded to marry Henry. They had six children:

• Henry V of England (1386–1422)
• Thomas of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Clarence (1388–1421)
• John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford (1389–1435)
• Humphrey of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447)
• Blanche of England (1392–1409) married in 1402 Louis III, Elector Palatine
• Philippa of England (1394–1430) married in 1406 Eric of Pomerania, king of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Mary died in 1394, and on 7 February 1403 Henry married Joanna of Navarre, the daughter of Charles d'Évreux, King of Navarre, at Winchester. She was the widow of John V of Brittany, with whom she had had four daughters and four sons; she and Henry had only one son Edmund, called Labourde, who was born and died in 1401. The fact that in 1399 Henry had four sons from his first marriage was undoubtedly a clinching factor in his acceptability for the throne. By contrast, Richard II had no children and Richard's heir-presumptive Edmund Mortimer was only seven years old. The only two of Henry's six children who produced children to survive to adulthood were Henry V and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Henry IV's male Lancaster line ended in 1471 during the War of the Roses, between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, with the deaths of his grandson Henry VI and his son Edward, Prince of Wales. Henry IV's son, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, is an ancestor of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, queen consort of George VI and mother of their daughter Elizabeth II.