4 - Holding Hands: Gesture, Sign, Sacrament

Summary

Katherine Clifton’s first marriage was brief, childless and seemingly uneventful. Her husband, Ralph Green, was a member of the Northamptonshire gentry, an esquire to the body of Henry IV, and a dutiful servant for the house of Lancaster. Ralph’s quiet and uncontroversial life lies in stark contrast to the spectacular rise and fall of his father, Sir Henry Green, Richard II’s unpopular minister who was summarily executed during Henry Bolingbroke’s invasion of 1399. It was perhaps the memory of Sir Henry’s disgrace that prevented his son from attaining a knighthood, despite having served as a Member of Parliament, sheriff and justice of the peace. Ralph’s marriage to Katherine, the daughter of Sir John Clifton and granddaughter of Ralph, first Lord Cromwell, may have been an attempt to enhance his standing within the local community. Their union, however, was cut short after no more than three and a half years: Ralph died in October 1417, probably a casualty of the second invasion of Normandy. As we saw in chapter three, Katherine soon remarried the Norfolk landowner Sir Simon Felbrigg, allowing her to return to the county in which she had been raised. Her second marriage lasted for more than twenty years, preceding a widowhood of almost equal duration. In the middle of the fifteenth century Katherine was the wealthiest person in Norwich, residing in the Music House and contributing to the rebuilding and aggrandisement of a number of city churches. Shortly before her death in 1460, Katherine requested that her body be buried in the choir of the Norwich Blackfriars, next to her second husband.

Katherine’s short and childless marriage to Ralph Green might have been forgotten altogether were it not for their magnificent memorial, which has survived to this day in the parish church of Lowick (Northants.) (Fig. 71). On St Valentine’s Day 1419, Katherine entered into a contract with Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton, two sculptors based at the alabaster quarry of Chellaston (Derbs.), to make a tomb for herself and her first husband. Prentys and Sutton led a workshop of national importance, specialising in the production of alabaster tombs; the choice of these distinguished sculptors hints at Katherine’s ambitions for her monument.