Mistress of the Monarchy (11 page)

The Duke did not take kindly to criticism or to being contradicted. When provoked, he was quick to explode with anger or act on impulse, being ‘jealous of honour, sudden and quick in quarrel’. He was capable of using ‘great harsh words’ in Parliament,
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and could be peremptory when giving orders: ‘Get this done without any slip-up,’ he once commanded, or ‘Make sure this is done in such a manner, understanding that, if it is disrupted, we would not wish to impute the blame to you; and do not neglect this, as you wish to avoid upsetting us.’
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His grand manner often made him appear haughty, autocratic, aloof and even intimidating, which did not endear him to his envious contemporaries, and alienated a number of his fellow nobles. But he cared little for that — public opinion was rarely of concern to him. Because of his wealth and power, he had no need to court favour or heed resentment.

Chaucer, however, found John to be a ‘wonder and well-faring knight’ who was ‘so treatable, right wonder skilful, and reasonable’ that he put the poet at his ease ‘and got me acquaint with him’.
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This suggests that John was more relaxed and outgoing amongst those he knew well. He could be engagingly self-deprecating, candidly confessing to his own faults, such as having ‘a head and memory feeble at remem-bering’.
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And he was willing to be flexible, and to heed advice that ran contrary to his own inclinations.
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John was undoubtedly ambitious. His birth, connections, wealth and landed status made him an important player, not only on the English political stage, but in the arena of European politics, where he was to carve out for himself a major role. In the future, ill-informed people in England, misled by his overbearing hauteur and distrustful of his vast power and wealth, would often express suspicion of John’s ambition and where it might lead him; whereas abroad, it was a different story, for these very characteristics made him widely admired throughout Europe. But the distrust was misplaced, for his loyalty to the Crown, and his patriotism, were astonishingly unshakeable, and he was, all his life, a mighty champion and defender of royal authority and prestige. ‘The King had no more faithful servant than himself, and he would follow wherever he would lead.’
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John’s loyalty and steadfastness extended to his friends also, and it was evident even when such friendships compromised his reputation, as was the case with John Wycliffe. He was true and decent to his family too, and set much store by ‘the natural ties of kinship’. He clearly held his parents and siblings in deep affection and respect; he became a devoted and caring father, and he was to prove steadfast in love for many years to two women in turn. He was generous to them, and to those close to him: much of the money in his privy purse went on personal gifts carefully chosen by himself.

Although he was not violent by nature — unlike his brother the Black Prince — John was a courageous, dedicated and energetic soldier. ‘His campaigns were always physically arduous to himself,’ wrote Froissart. He was also a competent and prudent commander who was at his best when laying siege to a town. But for various reasons, not all his fault, military success continually eluded him, and he was to prove far more fortunate and productive in the fields of diplomacy and politics than as a military leader, for he possessed ‘admirable judgement’ and ‘a brilliant mind’.
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Nonetheless, Froissart ranked him with Edward III, the Black Prince and Duke Henry among the ‘valiant
chevaliers
’ of the age.

‘The pious Duke’, as the admiring Knighton calls him, was a devout Catholic with orthodox views, and as conventional in his observance of religion as he was in all other things. He evinced a deep devotion to his patron saint, St John the Baptist, St Cuthbert and the Virgin Mary.
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A hugely generous benefactor, he endowed monastic houses, collegiate churches and friaries — the Carmelites were especially favoured by him, and he chose all his confessors from their Order.
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He was also a munificent patron of St Albans Abbey, and in its ‘Liber Benefactorum’, it is recorded that ‘this Prince had an extreme love and affection for our monastery and Abbot, and greatly enriched the church
with his magnificent and oft-repeated oblations’.
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He sent food and firewood to poor parish priests in his domains, rebuilt their churches and parsonages, and ensured they were kept in repair. However, his concern about abuses within the Church and his resentment of the corrupt power of wealthy ecclesiastics led him to adopt an anti-clerical stance that was to prove controversial.

In his leisure hours, John loved above all to go hunting; he owned numerous chases, forests and parks, and took great pains to keep them well maintained, and his itinerary was usually tailored to availing himself of their sport at the appropriate season.
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He was equally passionate about falconry, and his mews, stocked with costly birds, were renowned throughout Europe.
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Where indoor pursuits were concerned, John enjoyed games of dice, and like Blanche, he had literary interests. He was indeed an intelligent, cultivated and accomplished man with refined and sophisticated tastes. In youth, Chaucer tells us, he had studied ‘science, art and letters’.
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He shared an interest in astronomy with Chaucer himself and with Joan of Kent, and in 1386 Nicholas of Lynn dedicated his
Kalendarium
to John.
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The Duke patronised artists, funded poor scholars at the universities, was an active patron of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and appointed masters to grammar schools.
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He loved music, and employed talented choristers, musicians and minstrels in his chapel and household. To judge by their names, his company of minstrels were of Flemish or Hainaulter origin. His musicians played on the pipes, clarions and ‘nakers’, an early form of kettle drum, the drumsticks being of silver.
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According to Chaucer, John, in his youth, wrote songs that he himself admitted ‘fell short’.
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He spoke Norman French on a daily basis, read French with ease, had a good grasp of English — in 1363, he became the first person ever to open Parliament in that language — and must have learned some Flemish from his mother, but he was also apparently well tutored in Latin, and enjoyed reading the classics as well as contemporary romance literature;
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we have seen that he kept a library at the Savoy, although there is no surviving record of its contents. He is not known to have directly patronised Chaucer, but he would have been familiar with his works, for reasons that will shortly become clear, and Chaucer probably wrote
The Boke of the Duchesse
with him in mind, knowing that he and his circle would appreciate its literary significance and understand its allegorical and mythological allusions. Chaucer later addressed a short poem entitled ‘Fortune’ to ‘three or two’ princes — probably John and his brothers Edmund of Langley and Thomas of Woodstock — in the knowledge that they would know who he was talking about when he referred to Socrates; and it was
claimed in the fifteenth century, by the copyist John Shirley, that John himself had commissioned another of Chaucer’s poems, ‘The Complaint of Mars’,
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although this cannot be substantiated.

It has been suggested too that it was John who commissioned the epic courtly poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, which was written in York or the northern Midlands, in Lancastrian territory, possibly around 1375, but again, there is no proof to support this claim. John could certainly discriminate between good and bad poetry — when a monk, Walter of Peterborough, seeking a reward, dedicated a dreadful piece of doggerel to him in 1367, the Duke pointedly ignored it.
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This was the ‘magnificent lord’ whose wife Katherine now served, and whose children she would care for. She must have seen and perhaps conversed with him frequently when he was at home and visiting the Duchess’s apartments, or presiding over meals in the great hall, and doubtless she was as in awe of him as most people were. She was, after all, just a young teenager at the time. She may well have found him attractive and admired him from afar, yet there is nothing to show that she was anything to him at this time. Quite the contrary, for the evidence we have strongly suggests that he had eyes only for his beautiful wife. Katherine could therefore never have dreamed that the Duke’s fancy would one day fix itself upon her, and anyway, she had other things to preoccupy her mind, not the least of which was marriage.

B
y 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 pulchri-tudine 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 fruitlessly — 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’.

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
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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.
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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 lined with white fabric, and a gold girdle clasped beneath the breasts, is Katherine.
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She has a round face, fashionably high forehead and blonde plaits coiled high above each temple and roped around the crown of her head.