By 1363, Katherine de Roët had entered her teens, and her beauty, which would one day be so famous, was becoming evident. The epitaph on John of Gaunt's tomb in Old St Paul's Cathedral, which was lost in the Great Fire of 1666, described Katherine as eximia pulchritudine feminam —'extraordinarily beautiful and feminine'. This epitaph was not contemporary but was placed on the restored sepulchre in the reign of Henry VII, who was desirous of restoring the good reputation of this rather dubious ancestress. It is unusual to find words of this kind in an epitaph — the emphasis is usually on virtue and good works - but since Henry VII could hardly laud Katherine's virtue, it is possible that he ordered reference to be made to her beauty because it was one of the things that people did remember her for, and it may even have been referred to in the original tomb inscription, which had been destroyed well within living memory.
It has long been claimed that there are no adequate surviving pictorial representations of Katherine. The only one we can say for certain is meant to be her is Dugdale's crude seventeenth-century sketch of her lost brass in Lincoln Cathedral, done before the desecrations of the Civil War. In no way could this be described as a portrait. It is a formalised line drawing of a woman in a widow's veil and wimple.'
Two tiny carved heads in the Pulpitum in Canterbury Cathedral, each no bigger than a walnut and dating from around 1400, have been identified — on questionable grounds — as Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt. They are said to have closed eyes to indicate that both had passed away, but this may be a fanciful interpretation because pupils were not always incised in facial sculpture of the period. Two of John of Gaunt's sons were later buried in the cathedral, but in both cases some while after the probable date of these carvings, so no link is feasible.
Even if this identification were correct, neither head could be said to be a portrait.
Because we have a good idea of what John of Gaunt looked like, we might search for evidence of physical features perhaps inherited from Katherine in the surviving tomb effigies of three of their children. These may be fairly accurate likenesses, for from the fourteenth century, sculptors attempted to portray their subjects realistically: the effigies of Philippa of Hainault, Edward III (which was based on his death mask), Richard II and Anne of Bohemia are good examples. It has been claimed that a portrait of a cardinal by Jan Van Eyck is Katherine's son, Henry Beaufort, and while that attribution cannot be proved, the face is round and fleshy, whereas John of Gaunt's was long and thin, with aquiline features and a straight nose that were inherited by his daughter Elizabeth and his great-granddaughter, Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII. By contrast, the effigies of Katherine's children all have round or oval faces, which they perhaps inherited from their mother.
Writers and historians have long — and fruidessly — searched the poems of Chaucer for allusions to his famous sister-in-law, Katherine Swynford. Silva-Vigier, in her biography of John of Gaunt, thought it was not fanciful to suggest that the young Katherine was the model for the beautiful Virginia, the heroine of The Physician's Tale'.
The maiden was fourteen, on whose array
Nature had spent her care with such delight.
For, just as she can paint a lily white,
Redden a rose and teach it to unfurl
Her petals, so she touched this noble girl
Ere she was born; her limbs so lissom she
Had touched with colours where they ought to be;
Phoebus her mass of tresses with a gleam
Had dyed in burnish from his golden stream;
And if her beauty was beyond compare,
Her virtue was a thousand times more rare.
Sadly, there is nothing in these lines specifically to link them to Katherine. By the time they were written, her affair with John of Gaunt was notorious, and her reputation such that Chaucer could hardly have got away with that last line. Nor does the poem tell us much about Virginia save that she was beautiful and golden-haired, attributes that could probably have been possessed by several young girls Chaucer knew.
Yet Katherine too may have been golden-haired, and we may indeed possess something approaching a likeness of her. An early-fifteenth-century illuminated frontispiece to a manuscript of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde’ shows the poet reciting his work to the court of Richard II. The identity of the courtiers ranged about him has been the subject of much learned discussion: one of the figures is clearly supposed to be King Richard (with the face rubbed out); his first queen, Anne of Bohemia, is said to be next to him, wearing a pink gown; one of the five well-dressed men in the foreground is probably John of Gaunt; and a lady in a blue gown trimmed with ermine, kneeling in the front, has been tentatively identified as Joan of Kent, the King's mother.5 It has also been suggested that the lady seated next to her, who is attired in a flowing blue gown called a houppelande, which has long hanging sleeves, a wide stand-up collar fined with white fabric, and a gold girdle clasped beneath the breasts, is Katherine. She has a round face, fashionably high forehead and blonde plaits coiled high above each temple and roped around the crown of her head.
There are problems with this theory. Chaucer wrote Troilus and Criseyde probably between 1385 and 1388, by which time Joan of Kent was dead. Even so, the manuscript was not produced until early in the fifteenth century, so it would be likely to depict courtiers who were prominent towards the close of Richard II's reign. The lady in pink next to the faceless man identified - probably correctly - as Richard may actually be his child-queen, Isabella of Valois; it was common for children to be represented as adults in an age that did not fully understand realism or perspective. Almost certainly John of Gaunt is one of the five well-dressed men, probably the dignified bearded man in striking red robes standing to the left. At the end of Richard's reign, Katherine was his duchess, and as such the second lady in the land; thus the prominent female figure in the ermine-and-gold-trimmed tight-fitting blue gown, whose dress clearly marks her out as being a royal lady of some importance, must be her. The fair girl in blue to the left, hitherto tentatively identified as Katherine Swynford, looks too young to be a woman of at least forty-six; her position next to Katherine Swynford, who has an arm around her, and in front of the man who may be John of Gaunt, suggests she was perhaps their daughter, Joan Beaufort; indeed, her image bears a close resemblance to Joan Beaufort's tomb effigy, which suggests that the painter had seen his subjects.
Other evidence supports this identification: in the fifteenth century, the manuscript was owned by Joan's daughter, Anne Neville, Countess of Stafford, having probably been bequeathed to her by Joan, Chaucer's own niece, for whom it had almost certainly been made.7 It would therefore be natural for Joan's parents to be conspicuously depicted in it, and for Joan to be shown with them. Later evidence (which will be discussed elsewhere) strongly suggests that Joan was committed to rehabilitating Katherine's reputation, and emphasising her mother's importance as second lady in the realm by having her portrayed as the most prominent female figure in the picture would be a logical consequence of this.
Bearing this in mind, there are sound reasons for believing that this ermine-and-blue-clad lady in the Troilus frontispiece is Katherine, and thus we may have come, at last, face to face with her. If so, she was fair-haired and buxom, with a tiny waist, high stomach and wide hips, a woman ideally proportioned to suit fashionable notions of the female figure in that era. Her neck was long, her face round with a high forehead, and her hair elegantly swept up and pinned beneath a golden coronet, which in itself identifies her rank. If she looked as voluptuously handsome as this when she was in her late forties, it is easy to see why John of Gaunt had been so taken with her charms a quarter of a century earlier, and why her beauty became legendary.
Much of what we can glean of Katherine's character and interests has to be inferred from the fragmentary sources that have come down to us; we have to look beyond the scathing criticisms of monastic chroniclers shocked by her liaison with the Duke to the sounder evidence to be found in less sensational records. It is noteworthy that her worst critics, Thomas Walsingham and the anonymous author of the Anonimalle Chronicle, were men who did not know her personally, while Walsingham had an ulterior motive for reviling her, as will become clear. Henry Knighton, the Leicester chronicler whose house was under the patronage of John of Gaunt, and who may well have met Katherinc, has nothing really bad to say about her personally, and it is clear that she maintained good relations with the Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral throughout her adult life, and that they were happy to lease a house to her during the years of her ill fame.
In fact, most of what we can surmise or know of Katherine Swynford suggests she was a remarkable, attractive, fascinating and sympathetic woman. An early request for a private altar strongly suggests a devout religious faith instilled in childhood. By contrast, her long love affair with John of Gaunt implies allure, sensuality, charm, loyalty, emotional depth, and perhaps forwardness and a degree of ambition. She must have relished the material benefits that were to come her way as a result of John's devotion, but she does not seem to have been the most demanding of mistresses, and it is doubtful if she was driven very much by mercenary motives: her love for John was to survive concealment, long separations, social ostracism and public vilification, which argues that it was deep and true. Her admirable discretion and tact helped smooth the path of the lovers, and when tragedy and loss struck, she had sufficient wisdom and strength of character to survive with dignity. We will learn that she cherished strong family ties and was concerned about how others saw her. She was to prove capable, responsible, caring and successful in nearly all her enterprises.
A warm and kindly heart may be evident in Katherine's lasting love for John, and in her apparent affection for children, her own and all those who came into her orbit. She was clearly good with the young, and had, it seems, an innate sensitivity that made it possible for her to create unity from disparity - witness the successful bonding of the legitimate heirs of the House of Lancaster with Katherine's own children, her bastards by John of Gaunt, and the Chaucers, bonds that surmounted the barriers and taboos created by adultery, death, rank and illegitimacy. Much of this wasdoubtless due to the powerful influence of the Duke, but Katherine herself must surely also take a great deal of the credit for it.
All this suggests that Katherine learned much from the examples and influence of Queen Philippa and the Duchess Blanche. Froissart said of her in later life that she was 'a woman of such bringing up and honourable demeanour' that she was 'well-deserving' of the respect of those about her. The undoubted esteem in which she was held in the Lancastrian household, and by three kings of England, argues that her integrity and other qualities were recognised, and that she was skilled in courtly accomplishments, sophisticated in her tastes, sociable, courteous, literate, intelligent and a good conversationalist. She would have needed to have been most of these things to become such a respected member of the Duchess's entourage, and later to attract and hold the attention of the Duke. She would also have absorbed the cultivated ambience of the ducal court, in which John of Gaunt actively promoted the education of women and encouraged a love of learning in his wives and daughters.9
It was not unusual for members of royal households to marry each other, nor was it surprising that the husband chosen for Katherine de Roët, a servant of the Duchess of Lancaster, should have been a retainer of the Duke of Lancaster. His name was Sir Hugh Swynford, and he was lord of the manors of Coleby and Kettlethorpe in Lincolnshire. The choice of Hugh Swynford suggests that the marriage was arranged by the Duke himself at his wife's instance. Possibly Queen Philippa was consulted, for it was she who had placed the Roët girl with the Lancasters. Marriage to one of John of Gaunt's retainers would certainly have strengthened Katherine's ties to the House of Lancaster.
The Swynford family was an old one, although claims that its ancestry could be traced back to Anglo-Saxon time are unsubstantiated. Hugh's forebears probably came from Swinford - originally Swine's Ford — in Leicestershire, but there is no record of them there in Domesday Book. The family had many branches, and there are numerous references in mediaeval records to its early members, but attempts to discover their exact relationships and make any sense of the family genealogy prior to the fourteenth century have so far proved largely fruitless.
The only one of Hugh's forebears of whose relationship to him we can be certain is his father, Sir Thomas Swynford, who was probably the son of Sir Robert de Swynford of Burgate, Suffolk, whose arms were the same three gold boars' heads on a field of silver as Sir Hugh Swynford displayed. By 1343, Sir Robert Swynford had sold the manor of Burgate; this would have left his heirs landless, and might well explain why, in August 1345, Sir Thomas Swynford acquired from the de Cuppledyke family'4 the manor of Coleby in Lincolnshire, which he held in chief of the King and in part of John of Gaunt, in whose Honour of Richmond it lay.
Sir Thomas married Nichola, the widow of Sir Ralph Basset of Weldon. From the mid-1340s until 1356, we find him appointed in turn to the shrievalties of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Rudand, while in 1344 he was a Commissioner of the Peace in Bedfordshire, and in 1345-7 an escheator for that county and for Buckinghamshire.'7 Far from keeping the peace, he appears to have rather thrown his weight about: in 1356, he and his falconers caused chaos hunting pigeons on the manor of Barton, in defiance of the reeve's protests.
That year, Thomas bought from John de la Cray (or Croix) the manor of Kettlethorpe in Lincolshire, which was to become the chief seat of the Swynfords until 1498; it would also be Katherine's marital home and become forever associated with her. Kctdethorpe was not far from Coleby, which Thomas had held since 1345. In 1357, Thomas and Nichola settled permanently in Lincolnshire, where Sir Thomas again served as a Commissioner for the Peace.
Hugh Swynford - who is incorrecdy named as Otes Swynford in Weever's description of the inscription on Paon de Roët's tomb in St Paul's, in which Philippa de Roët is erroneously called Anne — had been born in 1340 at the latest; his father's Inquisition Post Mortem of December 1361,taken in Lincoln, gives his age as twenty-one years and more.2' This made him at least a decade older than Katherine, and possibly the same age as his master the Duke.
Hugh was a soldier by profession — 'a shrewd and terrifying fighter'" — and would appear to have begun his career in royal service as a retainer of the Black Prince, for in 1356, he had fought under the Prince at Poitiers, and perhaps been knighted afterwards. It was probably after the Black Prince removed to Aquitaine in 1361 that Hugh had transferred to the retinue of his feudal overlord, the Duke of Lancaster, to whom he owed knight's service. It was as well he did so, for when his father, Sir Thomas Swynford, died on3 November 1361, Hugh came into only a poor inheritance, and would have badly needed the money he received as the Duke's retainer and any profits he could make from campaigning. He would also, almost certainly, soon have begun looking about him for a wife to bear him heirs and hopefully boost his social standing and his finances. He had little to offer beyond his knightly status, so Katherine de Roët, the alluring object and recipient of royal esteem and favour, with her family connections and her inheritance in Hainault, would probably have appeared an ideal choice.
For a long time, basing their conclusions on the likely birth date of her son, historians assumed that Katherine was married to Sir Hugh Swynford around 1366—7. Yet we know that she was the mother of a daughter called Blanche, who was old enough to be placed in the train of the Lancastrian princesses before 1368, and it appears that Katherine was probably also the mother of one Margaret Swynford, who was of sufficient age to become a nun in 1377. Of course, girls sometimes entered convents in their tender years - witness Mary, a daughter of Edward I, who became a novice at Amesbury Abbey in 1284, aged six; or Bridget, the youngest daughter of Edward IV, who was perhaps seven when she was placed in Dartford Priory around 1487. But it was more usual for girls to be adolescents of thirteen or fourteen at the time of their reception.26 It would seem that there was a tradition of offering Roët daughters to God - witness the cloistering of Elizabeth de Roët and the eldest daughter of Katherine's sister Philippa; therefore, if Margaret became a nun at the usual age, and Blanche was the eldest child of Katherine and Hugh, the Swynfords are likely to have been married no later than 1362, not long after Hugh came into his inheritance and Katherine reached marriageable age. Certainly they were joined in wedlock before 24 January 1365, as an entry of that date in Bishop Buckingham's register refers to Katherine by her married name. Their marriage may have taken place in one of the ducal chapels - even perhaps the magnificent chapel of the Savoy.
Once married, Katherine's arms of three silver wheels on a red background would have been displayed impaling those of her husband, which were three golden boars' heads on a black chevron with a silver background. These are the arms that appeared on her seal ofc. 1377, which no longer survives.
It used to be said that Katherine married into an ancient landed aristocratic house. Although it is true that the Swynford family was old-established in Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, Essex and Suffolk, it was hardly landed and certainly not aristocratic, for its members never rose above the rank of knight. In fact, Hugh was impoverished. He held only two manors, neither of which was profitable, and both had been recently acquired by his father3' — hardly ancient wealth by any reckoning, as Katherine was to find out when Hugh first took her to his manor house atKettlethorpe, which after his marriage he held jointly with his new wife of the King and John Buckingham, Bishop of Lincoln.
Kettlethorpe was to become inextricably linked to Katherine in her own lifetime; for forty years she was known as the Lady of Kettlethorpe, and her memory is very much alive there today for the many visitors who make the journey — some would say pilgrimage — to this pretty, quiet but rather isolated Lincolnshire village, which is situated about twenty feet above sea level, and lies twelve miles west of Lincoln, just north of the border with Nottinghamshire. The River Trent flows west of Kettlethorpe, and the Fossdyke meanders along its eastern and northern boundaries. It is 'a romantic spot, embowered by trees'.33
The manor took its name from a Viking who is said to have settled there in the ninth century, Lincolnshire being part of the Danelaw in Saxon times. His name was Ketil, and the place he lived in became known as Ketil's Thorpe (or village), which over time became corrupted to Kettlethorpe. There is no mention of the settlement in Domesday Book, so it must have been very small, if indeed it still existed in 1086, in which case, the story of the Viking settler may have been an oral tradition preserved in local places such as nearby Newton-on-Trent, which is on record as a Domesday village. In fact, there is no mention of Kettlethorpe in historical documents until 1220. The de la Cray family had come into possession of it by 1287.
The present Kettlethorpe Hall incorporates fragments of the mediaeval house that Katherine knew, and is still surrounded by a moat. All that survives of the original hall are interior walls in the two barrel-vaulted cellars, the remains of a passage from those cellars that is reputed to have led to the church opposite, a blocked fourteenth-century doorway and some stonework on the southern elevations, a few carved heads and, standing apart, a ruined yet imposing fourteenth-century embattled and buttressed stone gatehouse with sunken mouldings, a survival probably from the 1370s,when Katherine was converting Kettlethorpe into a residence of some magnificence. The gatehouse was reconstructed in the early eighteenth century, but not entirely successfully: the lower stones were reassembled authentically enough, but the upper parts owe much to the imagination of the builder who carried out the restoration. To the left is a mediaeval mounting-block, three steps high.We might imagine Katherine standing by it with a stirrup cup, bidding Sir Hugh farewell as he rode off to war.
When Katherine came to Kettlethorpe, after living in luxurious royal palaces since her childhood, she must surely have been dismayed by its poverty. The place was in serious disrepair. Even in 1372, after she had lived there on and off for the best part of a decade, it was 'ruinous, and the land sandy and stony and out of cultivation'; the only crops it would support were hay, flax and hemp, while the meadow was frequently flooded by the overflow from the nearby River Trent.
As lord of the manor, Hugh had the right to appoint priests to the twelfth-century parish church of St Peter and St Paul that stood to the north of the house, a privilege that Katherine herself would one day exercise; in March 1362, Hugh presented one Robert de Northwood as rector. Katherine would have had frequent dealings with Northwood, who may have acted as her confessor when she was at Kettlethorpe; and because the manor population was small, she probably came to know everyone else quite well too.
Kettlethorpe had appurtenances in the nearby villages of Laughterton, Newton-on-Trent and Fenton, all of which lay about a mile distant in different directions. In all, the Swynford holdings in the area comprised around three thousand acres, most of which was forest — prime hunting ground for the lords of the manor.35 And we may be certain that when she was not pregnant, Katherine, like most ladies of rank, rode out with her husband and helped to put food on the table.
Kettlethorpe was Sir Hugh Swynford's chief residence, but not far off was his manor of Coleby, which was spectacularly perched high up on the Lincoln Cliff escarpment, and commanded beautiful views of the Witham valley. It lay seven miles south of Lincoln, to the west of Ermine Street, the old Roman road that ran from London to Lincoln and York. The manor, which Hugh and Katherine now held jointly, was divided into two equal parts, each comprising roughly ninety acres of land and fifteen acres of pasture. In 1367,it was recorded that the part of this manor known as the South Hall, or Southall, which yielded 54s.4d £785) each year in rents paid by free tenants, was held of John of Gaunt as Earl of Richmond by service, or rent, of 2s (£29) per annum or 'a sorrel sparrowhawk'.The other part of the manor, the North Hall, or Northall, was held in chief of the King, by service of half a knight's fee; as far back as 1086, the manor of'Colebi' had been recorded in Domesday Book as the property of the Crown. Earlier, likeKettlethorpe, it had been a Danish settlement, under a man called Koli, from whom it took its name; and earlier still, it may have been colonised by the Romans, for it is near Ermine Street and Roman coins have been found in the vicinity. Much later, in the twelfth century, the manor had been held by William the Lyon, King of Scots. At that time, a Gilbertine priory dedicated to St Katherine was established in the village. A windmill - probably one of several — was in existence in 1361.
Hugh could never have relied on receiving the rents due from his Coleby tenants, for there was little prospect of any yield, let alone a surplus, from the land, which was poor. In 1361, when he inherited it, Coleby was a dismal place, worth only 37s.10d (£601), less than a third of its value when Sir Thomas Swynford had bought it in 1345. 'The soil is hard, stony and uncultivated because of its barrenness, the dovecote and windmill are in ruins', and no profit could be raised from them until they were repaired; the meadow was hard, choked with brambles and too dry to be of any benefit. Given these circumstances, Hugh's tenants may not always have found the means to pay their rents, which might explain why, a decade later, in 1372, the manor was still barren and impoverished and worth nothing.
Apart from the Saxon church with its later mediaeval additions -the spire is fifteenth century — no buildings from Katherine's time survive in Coleby. The earliest is Old House in the High Street, which is Tudor. The original manor house was the North Hall, which lay two hundred metres north of the village, and had been built in the eleventh century by the then lady of the manor, Judith of Boulogne, Countess of Northumbria and Huntingdon, a niece of William the Conqueror and the ancestress of William the Lyon. The present Coleby Hall, built in 1628, stands on the site of the North Hall, and its walls were raised on the stone foundations of the earlier building. In 1372, in a royal writ assigning Katherine her dower, the North Hall was described as having at the west end of its great hall 'a chamber called the West Chamber', a wardrobe for the storage of clothes, jewels and other personal items, and 'le faux chambre', which literally translates as 'the false room'; one is tempted to wonder if this was just an alcove (which is not a proper room) or if there was a concealed room leading off the West Chamber. Underneath these chambers were cellars for the storage of provisions. There was a kitchen, which was perhaps at the eastern end of the hall, a cowhouse and an adjoining croft known as Belgarthes: 'the fair sward’. The western chambers of the hall overlooked part of the garden. Nearby was the Saxon church of All Saints." It was a far cry from the Savoy.
Only a few miles from Kettlethorpe and Coleby lies the great city of Lincoln, which Katherine came to know — and probably love — very well: her husband's family was well known in its civic society, she herself would reside there for several years, and at least one of her children was born there.
In the fourteenth century, Lincoln was a rich and prosperous city, dramatically situated on a high ridge. It was dominated by its castle, which had been built by William the Conqueror in 1068, and its spectacular cathedral. Between the two lay the upper town centre - 'the Bail' - and surrounding the cathedral was the walled close with its substantial clergy houses and splendid twelfth-century Bishop's Palace, which boasted three halls. The close was accessed from the Bail through the now-ruined Exchequer Gate. Just beyond the gate, Steep Hill sloped dizzyingly down to the lower parts of the town, which were known as 'the City', and on that hill stood two twelfth-century Norman houses, one of them the famous Jew's House, as well as several other notable buildings. The mediaeval Guildhall stood near the bottom of Steep Hill. Lincoln was a great trading centre, annually hosted six fairs, and boasted fifty churches.
Lincoln Castle, in which extensive Norman buildings still survive within the walls, was then surrounded by deep ditches and high banks. Its main entrance was to the east, facing the Exchequer Gate, while the western gate of the castle led to open countryside. The shell keep was known as St Lucy's Tower, and stood on a mound raised around 1200. In the thirteenth century, a vaulted, horseshoe-shaped tower known as Cobb Hall had been inserted into the north curtain wall of the castle. In Katherine's day, the castle precincts were part of the Bail.
Lincoln Cathedral was at that time the third largest in England. The original Norman structure had been destroyed by a fire in 1141 and an earthquake in 1185, and had been rebuilt from 1192 onwards in the Early English style by St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln. In Katherine's time the cathedral was a massive edifice with three Perpendicular towers and a magnificent west front adorned with myriad sculptured figures; solid on its high hill, it soared majestically over the city and could be seen for miles around. Pilgrims came flocking to make their devotions at the wondrous silver shrine of St Hugh, a masterpiece of intricate stone tracery encrusted with precious metals and gems, which reposed in the beautiful Angel Choir at the cathedral's east end; this choir had been built in the 1260sand was named after the carved angels with which it was lavishly decorated. For Hugh Swynford, the shrine of his patron saint must have been a very special place, to be visited often, while for Katherine, the cathedral had an altar to her own name-saint, and housed two precious objects of special devotion: a finger that had reputedly belonged to St Katherine, and a chain with which the saint is said to have bound up the Devil.
John of Gaunt also had strong links with Lincoln. At the age of two, he had been granted the earldom of Richmond, which incorporated lands in Lincolnshire. At three, he had come to Lincoln Cathedral with the King his father and his brother the Black Prince, and been admitted to its confraternity, a group of lay benefactors who were prayed for by the cathedral clergy in gratitude for their gifts; John was to prove very generous to the cathedral over the years, and in his will would refer to 'a certain devotion' he~ cherished for its patroness, the Virgin Mary. In the Angel Choir lay the visceral tomb of his great-grandmother, Eleanor of Castile, the beloved wife of Edward I. At twenty-one, John had acquired the earldom of Lincoln itself, with its vast estates, in right of his wife Blanche; in this capacity, he grew familiar with the great and gentle families of the shire, and numbered several of their members among his retinue. He would in time forge even closer links to Lincoln and the surrounding area through his involvement with Katherine Swynford.
As Earl of Lincoln, John was hereditary Constable of Lincoln Castle, yet it is not known if he ever lodged in the castle on his brief visits to the city, or if he stayed in the Bishop's Palace, a house in the cathedral close or one in the town. It was perhaps the latter, since the castle could only offer somewhat outdated accommodation.
Tradition long had it that John of Gaunt owned a palace in Lincoln, an ancient stone mansion that stood to the west of the High Street in Wigford, a southern suburb of the city. The 'palace' was situated on the west side of the churchyard of the Guild of St Anne, which adjoined St Andrew's Church. According to an engraving of 1726 by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, it was a mediaeval house with stone pinnacles and windows of the Decorated period; beneath a gable in the centre of the extended battlemented front facade was affixed a carved freestone shield bearing the arms of John of Gaunt, surmounted by his helm and mantling. Another old print reveals that the south range of this house was built in the later Perpendicular style, possibly in the fourteenth century. It boasted buttresses, a battlemented cornice, and square-headed two-light windows.
All this would be commensurate with the house having existed in John's lifetime; probably it had been altered during the centuries since his death. Buck tells us that 'the castle was his, but standing much exposed to cold winds, and a place of office for the public service'; because of these drawbacks, 'that Prince probably built this below the hill for warmth, and for the use of his family and domestics, while he resided in this most ancient city'. Buck claims that John stayed here mainly in his latter years, and unsurprisingly, Katherine Swynford is also said to have had the use of the house.
There is little contemporary evidence to connect John of Gaunt with this building; nor did the early-sixteenth-century antiquarian John Leland associate him with it; instead, he says this 'goodly house' belonged to the Suttons, who were the richest and most prominent mercantile family in Lincoln in the late Middle Ages and held lands of the Duke in the county. However, in 1586, the house was called 'John of Gaunt's Palace’ by William Camden, the Elizabethan antiquary who spent fifteen years researching the historic buildings of England, and both Buck and the antiquary William Stukeley, writing in the 1720s, refer to it by that name. But later, in 1784, a Swiss artist called Samuel Hieronymous Grimm labelled his drawing as 'the pretended house of John of Gaunt at Lincoln'. Today, historians are inclined to believe that it did not have any connection with the Duke.
John of Gaunt never stayed in Lincoln for long enough to justify the building of a residence there, and there is no reference to this house in his registers, but these are of course incomplete. Yet it was certainly his coat of arms that Buck engraved, and it is indeed possible that it was for reasons of comfort that John lodged in this house whenever he was in the city. That does not mean it belonged to him; the evidence suggests that he probably stayed there as a guest of his vassal, John de Sutton, who died in 1391, and then of Sutton's son Robert. John de Sutton, who was Mayor of Lincoln in 1387, certainly knew Katherine Swynford, because that year he witnessed a grant to her;45 he was probably the owner of the house in Wigford, and was no doubt proud to display on it the arms of his overlord and honoured guest. It may be significant that the mansion boasted some of the innovative Perpendicular architectural features that were becoming fashionable at the end of the fourteenth century, the period when Buck says the Duke stayed there mostfrequently. One would expect to find such novel features only in the house of some great and wealthy man, who was eager to offer his lord the best accommodation that money and influence could provide.
These were the places that Katherine now called home: the impoverished manors of Kettlethorpe — for which she nevertheless conceived an enduring affection — and Coleby, where no trace of her remains, suggesting — perhaps understandably, in view of its penury — that she was rarely there. And of course Lincoln, where she was to live in far greater luxury than she could ever have dreamed at the outset of her marriage to Hugh Swynford.
What can we know or surmise about the marriage of Katherine and Hugh? Katherine was very young when they were wed, and Hugh was a soldier who would serve abroad on campaigns for long periods. There is no evidence to show whether the couple were happy or unhappy, although it is unlikely that Katherine found with her husband the kind of love that was between John of Gaunt and his Duchess. Marriages such as Katherine and Hugh's were matters of business or policy that took little account of personal feelings. Hugh wasn't wealthy — far from it — but he could provide Katherine with his knightly rank and social standing; on the other hand, living in poverty may well have put a strain upon the relationship. But although Hugh is unlikely to have got much of a dowry with Katherine, if any at all, for him there was the advantage of a connection with a noble family, which would surely have inspired respect for his wife, and the prospect of her inheritance in Hainault, which may still have been in the hands of her father or brother at this time, for Hugh is not known to have attempted to take possession of it; and even if it had come to him on his marriage to Katherine, he was preoccupied with war and with rescuing his own estates from ruin, and would probably not have had the resources to administer and farm land in another country.
For Katherine, though, Kettlethorpe must have come as a shock after years of living in royal households where comfort and a laden table were taken for granted. It would appear that she faced this challenge with equanimity and resource, taking her responsibilities as lady of the manor seriously, which argues a certain strength of character. She would also have had to learn to juggle the demands of being the chatelaine of a knightly household and serving in the Lancastrian menage with successive pregnancies and a growing family. Being married at such a young age, like many girls of her caste, she had immediately to face the sometimes brutal realities of childbirth, living as she did in an era of high maternal and infant mortality; in this respect, she appears to have been quite hardy, for she was to survive at least seven or eight pregnancies with no apparent ill effects.
So in every aspect that mattered, Katherine made a success of her marriage. She clearly did her duty as a wife; she actively immersed herself in the life of the manor of Kettlethorpe, to such an extent that for many years she would be known primarily as the Lady ofKettlethorpe; she fitted seamlessly into her husband's social circle in Lincoln and the county at large, doubtless rnixing too with his Swynford relatives and their connections by marriage; and she dutifully bore her husband the children that all men of property desired.
Their eldest child was probably Blanche, who is known to history through references in a papal petition, the Duchy records and a grant of wardship in John of Gaunt's Register. She was old enough by 1368 to be placed in the chamber of the Lancastrian princesses, probably as a playmate, and in view of the likely date of birth of her younger sister Margaret, must have been born no later than 1363. Margaret was the daughter who became a nun in 1377, and she probably arrived in 1364; Katherine was in attendance on the Duchess Blanche in January 1365, and later that year she perhaps became pregnant with her third child.
Margaret may have been named for Margaret of Hainault, her grandfather's patroness. There is no actual record of her parentage, but several factors point to her being the daughter of Katherine and Hugh Swynford: first, her surname; second, the fact that she became a nun at Barking, one of the most exclusive abbeys in the land, and was nominated by the King himself, which suggests the influence of John of Gaunt, who was then the lover of Katherine Swynford; third, that the King, at the same time, nominated to St Helen's Priory in London Elizabeth Chaucer, who was probably the eldest daughter of Katherine s sister Philippa -which suggests a link between the two girls, and more influential manoeuvring behind the scenes; fourth, the possibility that Elizabeth Chaucer was later transferred to Barking because her cousin Margaret Swynford was there; fifth, there is evidence that two of Katherine's sons by John of Gaunt patronised Barking Abbey, in which Margaret, who was probably their half-sister, lived;49 and last, the likelihood of Margaret's birth occurring at a time when Katherine was bearing children to Hugh Swynford.
It has been suggested that there was a third daughter, Dorothy. According to Thomas Stapleton, writing in 1846, Dorothy married Thomas Thimelby of Poolham near Horncastle, Lincolnshire, who was Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1380 and died in 1390, but that claim is usually dismissed on the grounds that the name Dorothy was not used in England until the sixteenth century. That is incorrect: although uncommon, there are instances of English girls being named after the fourth-century Christian martyr St Dorothy of Cappadocia in mediaeval times, and she features in stained glass and screen paintings in England, particularly in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In fact, her legend had been known in England since Saxon times. St Dorothy's feast day is 6 February, which was perhaps the birthday of Katherine's daughter (who was possibly born in 1366), and might account for the unusual choice of name.
Evidence to support Stapleton's unsubstantiated claim is perhaps to be found in Irnham Church, where the coats of arms of the Thimelbys, the Belesbys, the Luttrells and Sir Hugh Swynford are to be found in abundance on tombs and in stained glass. All were prominent Lincolnshire families, and all were linked by marriage. Given the armorial evidence in the church, it is not therefore beyond the bounds of possibility that Thomas Thimelby married Dorothy Swynford, the daughter of Hugh and Katherine, nor that he had children by her, for there were Thimelbys still living at Poolham in the early seventeeth century.
The dates of birth of the Swynford girls are not recorded — those of royal daughters born in this period are hard enough to come by, let alone those of knightly birth. It was often the mediaeval married woman's lot to bear a child each year, there being no effective birth control, so it was easily possible for Katherine to have borne Hugh four children in up to a decade of married life, even taking into account the periods he spent abroad. Since many children died in infancy, and the young were seen as marriageable assets, it was thought desirable, among the landed classes, to have as many as possible, so perhaps Katherine had unrecorded infants who did not survive.
In 1396, whilst affirming to the Pope that he had not committed adultery with Katherine during the lifetime of her husband, John of Gaunt revealed that he had stood godfather to one of her daughters by Hugh: ‘Duke John had lifted from the sacred font a daughter of Katherine, begotten by another man.' In so stating.John was admitting an impediment to his marriage to Katherine, the creation of a fraternal bond of brotherhood, or compaternity, that effectively made them spiritually brother and sister. John also affirmed that 'the impediment of the aforesaid compaternity' was 'not notorious but rather occult', meaning that it was private or secret. This secrecy has seemed puzzling to some, since it suggests there was some sinister reason for preventing John's sponsorship from becoming public knowledge, and one conclusion that several writers have reached was that he was the baby's real father. This is highly unlikely. Apart from it being plainly stated in the petition that the baby had been 'begotten by another man', and the fact that a man could not stand godfather to his own child, John was later willingly to acknowledge four bastards by Katherine, who were all given the surname
Beaufort; why therefore should he not have acknowledged a fifth, and given it too that name? Even if this child had been born before the others, in Hugh's lifetime, there was no reason for concealment in 1396, and anyway, in his petition to the Pope, John admitted everything about his relationship with Katherine, even his own adultery: he kept nothing back.
In the circumstances, it would have been foolish and incomprehensible to do so. This petition was of the utmost importance. John wanted the Pope to confirm his marriage to Katherine and so legitimise their children. Had he lied in that petition, it would have been self-defeating and catastrophic, for he risked receiving a flawed judgement from the Pontiff that would have nullified the validity of both the marriage and the legitimation process, not to mention imperilling his immortal soul by the anathema that would automatically have been visited upon him for lying. It is unthinkable that an intelligent and honourable man such as the Duke, who was clearly setting his affairs in order and safeguarding the future of his children — and who would have known what was at stake, both materially and spiritually — should have deliberately misrepresented his case to the Pope and courted damnation by so serious an omission. For even in the educated mediaeval mind, the prospect of divine judgement, purgatory and hell itself loomed large and terrifying. For this reason we must accept what John wrote in that petition as the truth.
The reason for keeping John's private sponsorship of Katherine's child a secret surely lies in the fact of the compaternity that resulted from it: by becoming her infant's godfather, he effectively placed himself within the forbidden degrees of affinity to Katherine, for compaternity bound parents and sponsors together in kinship, and created a barrier to them marrying or having sexual intercourse. His sponsorship would initially have been a kind gesture on the part of a good lord, an example of the patronage he extended to those who served him and his family well; it may have followed on from Katherine giving birth at one of the ducal residences, perhaps prematurely; it might have been at Blanche's request. And we may suppose that the baptism was only relatively ('rather') occult, a private affair attended just by the Duke and Duchess, a few members of their households, and the proud parents. It was only later, when Katherine became John's mistress, that the compaternity became a matter for concealment, for the lovers were no doubt aware that it laid upon them an additional burden of sin above that of adultery, and could only have intensified the scandal their affair was causing.
It has been convincingly suggested that it was Blanche Swynford to whom John stood godfather. In this capacity, he bound himself to take some responsibility for her spiritual needs and her material well-being, and his exalted rank would have conferred on her a special status. John seems to have ably fulfilled his obligations: in 1375, he granted Katherine the wardship of the heir of Sir Robert Deyncourt and the marriage of that heir for her daughter Blanche, thus effectively providing for Blanche's future as she approached marriageable age. And if the Duke was her godfather, the name Blanche, in honour of his wife - who might well have stood godmother - was a natural choice. The Duchess Blanche too seems to' have taken a special interest in the little girl, for before 1368, she placed Blanche Swynford in the chamber of her own daughters. All these factors suggest that Blanche was the eldest child of Katherine and Hugh.
Like other married couples in the Lancasters' service, the Swynfords divided their time between the ducal court and their own estates, which were run by stewards and other feudal officials in their absence. Hugh would spend a considerable part of their married life campaigning in France and Spain, while Katherine — in between confinements — continued to serve the Duchess. Given the familial nature of the Lancastrian household, she would have been permitted to have her growing children with her, to be brought up in company with the ducal children.
Caring for the infants of the Duke and Duchess was probably a large part of Katherine's duties as a chamber servant.58 Young Philippa and Elizabeth were growing sturdily. The elder John was probably dead by April or May 1366, when his brother and namesake was born: on 4 May that year, one Robert de Walkyngton was lavishly rewarded with £6.13s.4d
(£2,237) for bringing the news of the second John's birth to his grandfather the King.59 But the second John also died young - probably after April 1367 — as did Edward of Lancaster, who had been born around 1365 and named probably for the King, and who departed this life soon afterwards. With the Duchess frequently pregnant, recovering from childbirth, or grieving over the loss of an infant, Katherine would have been kept busy. And she would surely have been caught up in the emotional life of the household, rejoicing in the births of new babies to the Duke and Duchess, sharing in their pain when their infants died, and doubtless observing the enduring love and devotion between them.
That Katherine had a genuine religious faith cannot be doubted. Shortly before 24 January 1365, John Buckingham, Bishop of Lincoln from 1363 to 1398, granted her, as ancille to the Duchess of Lancaster, the privilege of having divine Service — the canonical offices of the Church - celebrated privately until Pentecost of that year, whenever she visited Leicester.01 The bestowal of such a privilege, by a bishop who had doubtless come to know Katherine since she had married Sir Hugh Swynford and become prominent among the Lincolnshire gentry, proves that she was not only pious but was an important and well-respected member of the Duchess's household. The performance of the divine offices would necessitate her having some personal space to facilitate it, such as a chapel, an oratory or even a private chamber, and she would have needed too a portable altar — a luxury item in those days. Servants in royal and noble households in the fourteenth century lived communally, sleeping in dormitories or in the chambers of their lords or ladies; privacy was the preserve of the rich. The fact that Katherine was granted this privilege and enjoyed sufficient privacy to take advantage of it, together with the Duke acting as godfather to her child and later rewarding her for good service to his wife, singles her out as one who was very highly favoured by her employers.
That said, it is unlikely that Katherine got to exercise her pious privilege. The ducal household was at Bolingbroke in Lincolnshire until 18 April 1365, then it moved south to the Savoy; it was still in residence there on 4 June, and did not arrive at Leicester until 14June, some time after Pentecost, and too late for Katherine to have her private services.
By 12 September 1366, Philippa de Roët, Katherine's younger sister, had become the wife of Geoffrey Chaucer, now a Yeoman of the Chamber to Edward III; Chaucer must have been newly appointed to this post because his name does not appear in a comprehensive list of members of the royal household compiled in the summer of 1366; he was to hold it until 1372.
On that 12 September, Edward III issued letters patent granting a life annuity of ten marks (£1,119) to be paid twice yearly — to Philippa 'Chaucy'. A Chancery warrant of the same date describes her as 'Philippa Chaucer, one of the damoiselles of the Chamber of our very dear companion the Queen'.
Like Katherine and Hugh Swynford, the newly married Chaucers were both busily employed in a royal household; as we have seen, marriage between royal servants was not uncommon. Philippa's duties increasingly involved looking after the ailing Queen, while Geoffrey, when not serving the King on a personal basis, was to be entrusted with several sensitive diplomatic missions. On 20 June 1367, Edward III granted 'our beloved yeoman' Geoffrey Chaucer a pension of twenty marks (£1,926) a year for good service. His status is variously described, but the tides used - yeoman, valet (Latin, valettus, valettorum) or esquire (French, esquier) of the King's Chamber - were interchangeable at that time, and all meant the same thing: a civil servant who performed confidential duties for his master as well as a wide range of tasks including the purveying of goods, the conveying of money, the making of beds, setting of tables or fighting of torches, as directed by the Chamberlain of the Household. Chaucer's manifold talents were already held in high regard by the royal family, and the likelihood is that his role as yeoman encompassed more responsible duties; there is evidence that in the spring of 1366, the year before he took up his new post, he had been sent to Spain on a secret diplomatic mission that was probably connected with dynastic turmoil in Castile, a matter that was to bear heavily on the fortunes of John of Gaunt. And in 1368, Chaucer was sent to France on official business. We might conclude, therefore, that his duties at court were by no means limited to domestic chores.
Geoffrey was remarkably clever and possessed of great charm, but his appearance belied that. Surviving pictures of him in later life show a rotund little man of about 5'6"with brown hair, a forked beard and dusty black garments. He was wise, tactful, discreet, shrewd and observant, and his understanding of human nature was profound. A well-read, objective scholar, a curious observer of life, he loved delving into the mysteries of science, astrology, philosophy and religion.
Thanks to his abilities and his discretion, Chaucer was to be able to use his talents in a variety of capacities, and would often be rewarded handsomely; his marriage to the daughter of a knight, a girl who was above him in station, was a measure of his early success. He knew Latin, Italian and French, and would undertake seven more diplomatic missions abroad for the King in the 1370s; in Italy, during that decade, he would perhaps meet those great literary colossi Petrarch and Boccaccio. In England, his royal service, and his marriage, gave him privileged access to the royal family.
Geoffrey's greatest gift, of course, was the ability to write wonderful rich, witty, earthy verse in the English language, a departure from the usual French poetry beloved in courtly circles. Yet the classical and allegorical themes of some of his works show that they were indeed meant to be circulated, read and enjoyed at court by a cultivated audience, and it would appear that by 1368 at the latest, Geoffrey had already earned himself a reputation as a maker of verses, and that his compositions were admired by John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster. His younger contemporary, the poet John Gower, tells us that 'in the flower of his youth', Chaucer was already enthralling the country with 'ditties and glad songs'. He was not the first to write verse in English - although he was the first to use iambic pentameter, 'the golden couplet' - but it was he who was responsible for popularising poetry in the vernacular and he who, in so doing, ensured that in the decades to come, English would become the accepted literary language in England.
Geoffrey and Philippa were probably married well before September 1366. Their first child was almost certainly the daughter who would enter St Helen's Priory, London, in 1377; her name at that time was recorded as 'Elisabeth Chausier'. Her parentage is indicated by her surname (there was no regularity of spelling then), her likely date of birth, her placement in a convent that lay a stone's throw from her father's lodgings in Aldgate, and the fact that in 1381, John of Gaunt most generously dowered an 'Elizabeth Chaucy', who was almost certainly the same person, to the highly select Barking Abbey at a time when her aunt, Katherine Swynford, was his mistress. Elizabeth may even have been named after another aunt, the nun Elizabeth de Roët; as has been noted, the placing of Elizabeth de Roët, Margaret Swynford and Elizabeth Chaucer in convents may well indicate a family tradition of offering Roët daughters to God.
Given that she first became a nun in 1377, Elizabeth was presumably born no later than 1365, the year after Chaucer perhaps returned from Ireland. Thus her parents had probably married in 1364, possibly as soon as Philippa de Roët reached twelve, the minimum canonical age for girls to marry and have sex. The marriage was probably arranged by the Queen herself, who doubtless felt responsible for seeing the younger Roët girl safely disposed in wedlock and her future provided for. Within two years of it, Chaucer became a wealthy man, for his father died in 1366, leaving him all his property.
There was just possibly a second daughter of the marriage, and improbably a third. An Agnes Chaucer, who may have been a daughter or granddaughter of Geoffrey and Philippa, and was perhaps named for Chaucer's mother, is listed as one of the damoiselles of the Queen at the coronation of Henry IV in 1399; however, Henry IV was a widower at the time of his coronation, and his second wife, Joan of Navarre, was not crowned until February 1403, so there is something amiss here. And it was not until the seventeenth century that it was asserted that Chaucer had a daughter called Katherine - there is no contemporary record of her, so it is unlikely that she existed.
Living with a genius cannot always have been easy for Philippa. Geoffrey owned sixty books — an amazing number for a man in his position — and he spent much of his leisure time reading them or foraging about in the many libraries in London. It has been suggested that he drew on his own experience when he depicted the frustrated Wife of Bath ripping up and burning her husband's books so that he would have more time for sexual dalliance. Yet although Geoffrey claimed to be primarily a bookish man, he was also a career civil servant, and perhaps came to have less and less time to spare for his wife. He could be devastatingly cynical, and a passage in The Boke of the Duchesse suggests he was also a compulsive worrier who would lie awake at night fretting. Thus the married life of Geoffrey and Philippa may not have been particularly harmonious. Late in life, after Philippa had died, Chaucer composed a humorous poem, 'L'Envoy a Bukton' (c.1396), for a bachelor friend of his, warning him of'the sorrow and woe that is in marriage'. It was, he claimed, a deadly peril for all men, and he expressed the wish that his warning would prevent Bukton from rushing madly into the dire captivity of wedlock:
God grant you your life freely to lead
In freedom — for full hard it is to be bond.
From his tone, we might conclude that he had many regrets about his own marriage upon which he did not like to dwell. He ends by saying he is resolved not to fall into 'the trap of wedding' again.
We might infer from this, and other circumstances yet to be revealed, that his marriage had not been happy, a theory that may be supported by internal evidence from Chaucer's own verse. He is not known to have dedicated a single poem to Philippa, and most of his allusions to married life are cynical, ironical and disrespectful, hardly what one would expect from a man who enjoyed a loving relationship with his wife. Furthermore, Chaucer tells us in The Boke of the Duchesse, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls andTroilus and Criseyde (to name a few) that he has no experience of love apart from what he has learned from books — 'I know not love in deed' — and his image of himself is that of an unprepossessing failure as a lover, one who is devout and chaste because he has been banished from love's courts. This self-deprecating portrayal may not be entirely truthful — how many men would wish to portray themselves as hopeless in bed? - and it could be merely the product of Chaucer's ironic humour, while his literary take on marriage might just reflect prevailing trends in popular humour. For in 'The Man of Law's Tale', he reveals that, despite his protestations elsewhere, he knows just how spiritually transcendental love between a man and a woman can be:
And such a bliss is there betwixt them two
That, save the joy that lasteth evermore,
There is none like that any creature
Hath seen or shall, while that the world may endure.
These read like the words of a man who has experienced such joy, yet although they refer to marital love, it is unlikely that Geoffrey and Philippa themselves enjoyed that kind of relationship, especially since Chaucer makes it clear he thought marriage a burden to be borne. No, his experience of love was of another kind entirely. In The Boke of the Duchesse, written probably in 1368, he reveals that he has been possessed with a great passion for an unnamed lady for no fewer than eight years. If this is true — and one theory will be discussed in the next chapter — then this passion must have pre-dated his marriage, and may well have contributed to its failure.
All we know of Philippa herself is that, according to her countryman Froissart, she had a fine sense of protocol, which she must have learned in the course of her upbringing in the Queen's household, and which would have served her well at court. Given the differences in their status, she may have looked down on her husband and inwardly despised his humbler birth; after all, he was just the son of a vintner, while she was the daughter of a knight, and in her veins there probably ran the blood of ancient royalty. Her sister Katherine had married a knight, and Philippa perhaps felt she had not done as well. The fact that she married beneath her is another argument in favour of her being the younger sister.
Philippa Chaucer may have been discontented with her marital lot to begin with, or she might gradually have become disillusioned.The demands of their official duties dictated that she and Geoffrey were frequently apart, and both possibly came to welcome this. Philippa was perhaps shrewish and sharp-tongued, for in The House of Fame, Chaucer has himself worshipping at the shrine of St Leonard, patron saint of hen-pecked husbands. And he speaks of a dream in which he is seized by an eagle's talons and awoken by the eagle's insistent cry, 'Awake!', which it speaks
Right in the same voice and pitch
That useth one I could name;
And with that voice, sooth for to say,
My mind came to me again,
For it was goodly said to me,
So has it never wont to be.
We might infer that the voice that awoke the poet was that of his wife. For once, though, she has spoken kindly to him, unlike her usual tone. In 'The Franklin's Tale', Chaucer may have been thinking of the deterioration of his marriage, and perhaps of a continual battle for conjugal supremacy, when he expresses the opinion that
Love is a thing as any spirit free. Women, of kind, desire liberty, And not to be constrained as a thrall; And so do men, if I sooth say shall. Look who that is most patient in love, He is at his advantage all above.
Of course, Chaucer, like many writers, may not have based his works on his own life and experiences, but on his observations of others, the books he had read or his own imagination. In assessing the nature of his marriage, we are entirely in the realms of speculation and educated guesses, and can conclude nothing concrete.
Marriage to Philippa de Roët must inevitably have brought Chaucer into contact with his sister-in-law, Katherine Swynford, and also, no doubt, with the Lancastrian household. He was, of course, already known to the Duke and Duchess, and we might infer fromThe Boke of the Duchesse that he was on friendly if formal speaking terms with both of them. There is also some evidence to suggest that for much of his life, Chaucer enjoyed John of Gaunt's patronage. Although there is no evidence to show that he was ever employed by the Duke, he later received a pension from him, in addition to the one he received from the Crown, and he may well have owed some, if not most, of the preferments that came his way to John's influence. His connection by marriage to Katherine Swynford, as well as his own talents and character, must in time have accounted to some degree for the Duke's favour.
The marriage of her sister to a valued member of the King's household would inevitably have strengthened Katherine's ties with the court. And she would certainly have benefited personally from a close kinship with Chaucer, whose wisdom, humanity and erudition cannot but have made an impact on her young and impressionable consciousness. Her mind would have been broadened by his verses and tales, her imagination aroused, and her understanding of life challenged by his thoughtful insights.
In 1366, an event took place in Castile, a kingdom that spread across much of what is now Spain, which was to have far-reaching consequences for
John of Gaunt, and for Katherine Swynford too. That event was the deposition of King Pedro I, known as 'the Cruel'. His nickname was not undeserved, for he was a hard and sinister man of uncontrollable passions. Since his accession in 1350, he had ruled as an autocratic and bloody tyrant, determined to crush the power of his volatile and anarchic feudal nobles. He caused much scandal by protecting Jews and keeping a Jewish mistress, and by employing Infidels as his personal guard, predictably making many enemies in the process.
In 1353, Pedro had married Blanche of Bourbon, sister-in-law of the future French King, Charles V. Immediately after the wedding, though, Pedro repudiated their marriage, immured Blanche in a dungeon, and continued his long-standing liaison with his mistress, Maria de Padilla, whom he now claimed to have secredy married before he went through the ceremony with Blanche; so persuasive was he that the Castilian Cortes did in fact recognise Maria's children as his heirs, but sadly their only son, Alfonso, died aged eleven in 1362, his mother passing away the same year. Blanche had died in suspicious circumstances in 1361, and the evidence strongly suggests that the King had her poisoned. That was certainly what people were saying at the time, and if true, it was an ill-judged deed, for her death alienated the French and prompted the Pope to excommunicate Pedro for the murders of his wife and his many political opponents. These factors drove him to seek the friendship of the English.
It availed him little to begin with, because in 1366 he was overthrown by his bastard half-brother, Enrique of Trastamara, backed by Charles V of France, who saw in Enrique a future ally against England. The newly crowned Enrique II, a vigorous, able but unscrupulous man, was one of ten children born to Pedro's father, Alfonso XI of Castile, by his powerful mistress, Leonor de Guzman, whom Pedro had executed as soon as his father succumbed to the Black Death in 1350. Thus Enrique had good cause to seek vengeance, and of course he was not the only man who had a score to settle with this 'vile evil-doer', as Walsingham called him.
Pedro fled to Corunna, whence he sent a desperate appeal to the Black Prince for aid. The Prince responded, determined not so much to uphold Pedro's legitimate claim to his throne and restore him by force, as to crush the alliance between France and Castile, which placed Aquitaine under threat from both north and south, and England at risk of invasion by the powerful Castilian navy. Edward III readily sanctioned such an enterprise, and John of Gaunt offered military support. The two princes — mindful of the prophecy that the leopards of England would one day flutter over the battlefields of Spain — now prepared to make war on- the usurper, raising armies in Aquitaine and England.
Meanwhile, Pedro and his three daughters by Maria de Padilla —
Beatrice, thirteen, Constance, twelve, and Isabella, ten — had taken refuge at Bordeaux in Aquitaine, where they were accorded every courtesy by the Black Prince, and accommodated in the Abbey of St Andrew. Pedro showed himself exceedingly grateful, and solemnly promised the Prince, on oath, that once he was restored to his throne, he would reimburse him for the entire costs of the venture; he would leave his daughters at Bordeaux as surety for this.
In November 1366, Sir Hugh Swynford received letters of protection commanding him to join the Duke of Lancaster in Guienne. In September, John of Gaunt had arrived at Bayonne in Gascony with a thousand archers and men-at-arms, and in November he travelled through Aquitaine to rendezvous with his brother the Black Prince. Soon afterwards, Hugh must have taken ship from England to Gascony and caught up with the Duke's army.
Both the Duchess Blanche and Katherine Swynford were pregnant when their husbands rode off to war. They would not see their lords again for more than a year. By Christmas 1366, Blanche had established herself at Bolingbroke Castle, four miles west of Spilsby and twenty-six miles east of Lincoln, where the King joined her for the Yuletide festivities. The twelfth-century castle lay in the hilly Lincolnshire wolds, in what is now the village of Old Bolingbroke, and Katherine would almost certainly have visited it at some time as part of the Lancastrian entourage. At seven months pregnant, with her lord overseas and her home not far away, she may well have been in attendance on the Duchess at Bolingbroke on this occasion. The castle had become part of the Lancastrian patrimony in 1311; it was a strong square fortress, with round towers at each corner, a moat fed by springs, a 'very stately' entrance 'over a fair drawbridge', and an imposing Norman church nearby, the south aisle of which had been built by John of Gaunt in 1363. The Duchess and her retinue would have been accommodated in the comfortable timber-framed domestic range of buildings in the courtyard.
Katherine had moved to Lincoln by the middle of February 1367. It was in a house there that she bore Hugh a son and heir, who arrived on 24 February 1367, the feast of St Matthias the Apostle, and was baptised Thomas after his grandfather and one of his sponsors, Thomas de Sutton, a cathedral canon, who was doubtless a relative of the powerful John de Sutton; the other male sponsor was John de Worksop, also a canon of Lincoln. Hugh's Inquisition Post Mortem of June 1372 states that his son Thomas was then four, so it is often claimed that his birth took place in February 1368, but Hugh probably did not return to England until October 1367, so that is hardly possible. As has been demonstrated, dates of birth recorded in Inquisitions Post Mortem are often inaccurate.
This is manifest in the Inquisition taken to establish Thomas Swynford's age between 22 June 1394 and 22 June 1395. No fewer than twelve witnesses came forward to declare that he had been born in 1373, fifteen months after his father's death and a year after he had been described as four years old in Sir Hugh's Inquisition Post Mortem. All had apparently been present at young Thomas's baptism, which took place on 25 February 1367, the day after his birth, at the Church of St Margaret in the cathedral close. This is the first record of an association between Katherine Swynford and Lincoln Cathedral and its close, with which she was often to be linked in the future, and the choice of two members of the Cathedral Chapter as sponsors suggests that she was already well known to, and highly regarded by, that body.
The eleventh-century church of St Margaret no longer survives, having been pulled down around 1780. It stood on a green in the precinct of the Bishop's Palace, between Pottergate and the cathedral, opposite the house in the close in which Katherine would one day reside. The church was surmounted by a squat Norman tower and had an Early English window at its east end.
The witnesses at the baptism included John Liminour of Lincoln, who may have been a limner (a painter of miniatures in illuminated manuscripts) for he recalled bringing a missal and another book to the church and selling them there to John de Worksop; John Plaint and John Balden, servants to Thomas de Sutton; Roger Fynden, chamberlain to John de Worksop; John Sumnour, Nicholas Bolton and Richard Colville, all of Lincoln, the last of whom had been charged by Katherine's steward to bring home twenty-four bows for distribution to members of her household, doubtless for archery practice, skilful strategic use of the longbow being one of England's great strengths in the war with France; Henry Taverner, who recalled the occasion well because his first son was baptised on the same day; and Gilbert de Beseby, Katherine's chamberlain. The testimony of these people provides interesting details about a mediaeval baptism: we see Thomas Boterwyk, the parish clerk, reverently conveying the holy oil, or chrism, from the altar to the stone font; John Plaint carrying a flame to light the candle; two men holding basins of water and towels so that the godfathers and godmother (her identity remains unknown) could wash their hands after the ceremony; William Hammond, a servant of John de Sereby of Lincoln (who would sell land to Katherine in 1387), falling and breaking one of the two jars of red wine he was carrying into the church, and being beaten for it by his master; and Katherine's chamberlain bearing cloths of silk and cloth of gold in which to wrap the baby after his christening. Such fabrics were extremely costly, and their appearance at this ceremony perhaps suggests that they had been generously provided by the Duchess Blanche; certainly an impecunious knight such as Hugh Swynford could not have afforded them.
There may be another explanation, though. This information was all provided in 1394-5, about twenty-eight years after Thomas's birth, and the witnesses were to a man inaccurate in one important detail, for it has been demonstrated that Thomas could not have been born in 1373. We should consider, however, that in 1394-5 most of these witnesses were in their fifties, sixties and even seventies - old by mediaeval standards — and some may have been forgetful, or followed the testimony of the rest, or — which may be significant — even confused Thomas's baptism with another that did take place in 1373, in the same church. And that later baptism may have been of John Beaufort, the eldest of Katherine Swynford's children by John of Gaunt, for which rich cloths would undoubtedly have been provided. Certainly, as Cole points out, none of these witnesses intended that their testimony should in any way impugn Thomas Swynford's legitimacy. Their main purpose was to demonstrate that he was now over twenty-one and able to take up his inheritance as his father's heir. There were plenty of Swynford relatives to challenge his tide, should any question of bastardy have arisen, but there is no evidence that any ever did.
The birth of a Swynford heir must have been a great triumph for Katherine, especially after bearing two or perhaps three daughters; it meant that if the baby survived, Hugh's family name would be carried on and his lands inherited by his son.
Meanwhile, John of Gaunt had joined the Black Prince and his army at Dax on 13 January, having paused briefly in Bordeaux to pay his affectionate respects to his sister-in-law, the Princess Joan, and to greet her new son, Richard, to whom she had given birth there on 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany.8’ Richard of Bordeaux was the second son of the Prince and Princess, the elder, Edward of Angouleme, having been born on 27 January 1365; Edward, of course, was the next heir to England after his illustrious father.
In February, in bitter cold and heavy snow, the two armies made the hazardous crossing of the Pyrenees into Castile, where on 3 April 1367, they won a spectacular victory over Enrique of Trastamara at the Battle of Najera, near Burgos, during which John of Gaunt, in command of the vanguard, acquitted himself very courageously; according to Chandos Herald, 'the noble Duke of Lancaster, full of virtue, fought so nobly that everyone marvelled at beholding his great powers and at how, in his high daring, he exposed his person to danger'. Earlier, he had earned stout praise for his alacrity in repelling a surprise attack by the French in the Pyrenees. After Najera, when sixteen thousand men lay dead in the field, the Black Prince wrote to his wife: 'Be assured, dearest companion, that we, our brother of Lancaster, and all the great men of our army are, thank God, in good form.'
Doubtless the Duchess Blanche also would have been relieved to receive this news. On the very same day as the victory, she bore John of Gaunt a healthy son at Bolingbroke, who was named Henry in honour of her illustrious father. The choice of name suggests that his elder brother John was still alive. It is unlikely, given that her own baby was less than two months old, that Katherine Swynford attended the Duchess in her confinement, and she was probably then at Kettlethorpe or still in Lincoln. The house in Lincoln in which she gave birth has not been identified; given that she later occupied two properties in the cathedral close, and that her son was baptised in the church in the close, it was probably in that area, and she was perhaps staying there as the guest of one of the cathedral canons.
On 2 May, the Black Prince and the Duke of Lancaster entered Burgos, the chief city of Castile, in triumph. Pedro was formally restored to his throne, and the English princes and their troops settled down to wait for payment of the money he had sworn to pay them. They waited in vain, for Pedro repeatedly refused to keep his promise, much to the Black Prince's fury; all that was handed over in reimbursement was a large, uncut ruby.87 The delay was ultimately to prove disastrous, for in the burning heat of that summer, there was a fearful outbreak of amoebic dysentery in the English encampment, with the Prince himself being fatefully struck down, and four fifths of his men perishing. By the autumn he was no better, and also suffering from dropsy, while his surviving soldiers were thoroughly demoralised. To add to his troubles, Enrique was busily laying waste to Gascony, so the Prince and John of Gaunt had no choice but to return there. John arrived back in England at the beginning of October, and with him, we may presume, was Hugh Swynford. Both men must have been pleased to be reunited with their wives and delighted to make the acquaintance of the sons that had been born in their absence.
Around 1367-8, Philippa Chaucer also bore a son, another Thomas, whose paternity has been the subject of much debate. In the late sixteenth century, Thomas Speght reported that 'some hold opinion (but I know not upon what grounds) that Thomas Chaucer was not the son of Geoffrey Chaucer, but rather some kinsman of his whom he brought up’. This is unfortunately too vague to constitute convincing evidence of Philippa's infidelity, but in recent years, it has been suggested that she, as well as her sister Katherine, was John of Gaunt's mistress, and that he was the father not only of Thomas Chaucer, but also of Elizabeth Chaucer.
The grounds for this are threefold. First, only the arms of Philippa de Roët feature in the twenty shields that adorn Thomas Chaucer's tomb at Ewelme in Oxfordshire; those of Geoffrey Chaucer are nowhere to be seen, and the Roët arms are quartered with those of Thomas Chaucer's wife, Maud Burghersh.
Second, in 1381, John of Gaunt paid a very handsome dowry to the prestigious Barking Abbey to cover the expenses of admitting Elizabeth Chaucer. As with Blanche Swynford, some writers have concluded that the Duke was making generous provision for the future of his bastard child.9' Barking Abbey was a most exclusive house; its abbess was foremost among all the abbesses in the realm, and enjoyed the status of a baron — but for her sex, she could have sat in the House of Lords. Places in the novitiate at Barking were therefore much sought after for the daughters of noble families, but admittance usually depended on large sums changing hands and a royal recommendation. For the daughter of a mere civil servant, who could hardly have afforded the required dowry, to be accepted was a rare achievement, hence the interest it has attracted among historians.
Third, there is the matter of John of Gaunt's generous gifts to Philippa Chaucer. On three recorded occasions, each at New Year - when gifts were customarily exchanged — in 1380, 1381 and 1382, he presented her with beautiful silver cups.
Advocates of the theory that John of Gaunt was the father of Philippa Chaucer's children would have us believe that he took first one of the Roët sisters, Philippa, as his mistress, presumably around the period 1364-7 or thereabouts, and later the other, Katherine. If so, Philippa would have been very young at the time the liaison began, probably no more than twelve or thirteen, hardly old enough to be of much interest to the twenty-four-year-old Duke. It has also been suggested that she was married off to a complacent Geoffrey Chaucer to give her a veneer of respectability and that Chaucer was willing to play the father to the Duke's bastards; this would explain why his marriage to Philippa was not overtly happy. It would also mean that John was persistently unfaithful to Blanche over a period of perhaps four years, which is at variance with what we know of their marriage, for not a breath of scandal touched it at the time, and there is no evidence of any infidelity on his part. Nor did he ever acknowledge any of Philippa's children as his own, although he did recognise Katherine's bastards and Marie de St Hilaire's daughter. And he was not in the habit of marrying off his mistresses so that he could conceal his paternity of their children.
Most pertinently, any sexual relationship with Philippa Chaucer would have placed John even more firmly within the forbidden degrees of affinity to Katherine Swynford, rendering his relationship with her scandalously incestuous, in an age in which incest was a criminal act for which some offenders were burned at the stake. If such a relationship had existed, it is astonishing that no disapproving chronicler made political capital out of it, or even mentioned it, for there were those who were continually to castigate the Duke for his immorality, and who would have pounced gleefully on any scandal involving him. Furthermore, the only canonical impediment that John asked the Pope to dispense with in 1396 was the compaternity created by his being godfather to Katherine's child. Again, it is unlikely that he would have imperilled his immortal soul, and Katherine's, by courting automatic excommunication. He also risked nullifying the dispensation he was seeking by not declaring to the Pope such a serious impediment as incest; John, a man of the world, would have known that divine law prohibited him from marrying his mistress's sister. No dispensation had ever been granted in a case like this, so there was no question that such a marriage would have been incestuous and invalid. Hence we must conclude that John was not the father of Philippa Chaucer's children, that he had never had sexual intercourse with her, and that Thomas Chaucer and his sister Elizabeth were Geoffrey's children.
Interestingly, of those twenty shields on Thomas Chaucer's tomb, the only male ones are those of the Beauforts, the sons of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford. The other seventeen are those of female relatives from some of the greatest families in the land. We can conclude, therefore, that Thomas Chaucer, and no doubt his daughter Alice (the wife of William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk), who was responsible for the building of his tomb, preferred to stress their royal and noble connections rather than the mercantile ones, and since Thomas's mother had been the sister of the Duchess of Lancaster, it was natural that he should place the Duchess's arms on the tomb, and omit those of his father, who, for all his literary reputation, had no claim to nobility.
The dowering of Elizabeth Chaucer should be seen as an act of generosity on the part of John of Gaunt to his mistress's niece, who was also the daughter of two people who had given excellent service to his family. Such liberality was a mark of the Duke's character. Clearly he thought highly of Philippa Chaucer, who had served his mother so devotedly and would later render the same good service to his wife, and his philanthropic gesture to Philippa's daughter should therefore be viewed with no more suspicion than the Countess Margaret's dowering of Elizabeth de Roët.
With regard to John's gifts to Philippa, these were probably innocent tokens of. appreciation of the good service rendered to his mother and his duchess by a lady who was not only the wife of a man he liked and admired, but also the sister of his beloved mistress, whose other relatives also enjoyed his favour. Katherine seems to have been fond of her sister - Philippa was to live in her house in later years - and John's favour to Philippa may have been prompted by her. Other ladies of his wife's household, and members of his own, received similar gifts from the Duke, so there is nothing particularly special or significant about his gifts to Philippa. And while John of Gaunt was extremely generous to his acknowledged bastards, he was far less munificent to Thomas Chaucer, which would have been strange had Thomas really been his son.
Thus there are no credible grounds to substantiate the theory that John of Gaunt committed the sin of incest: that when he took Katherine Swynford as his mistress, he had already enjoyed a sexual relationship with her sister.