Mistress of the Monarchy (35 page)

It may be too that, knowing Katherine as they had done since before
she became the Duke’s mistress, the canons realised that she was a woman of greater integrity than most people gave her credit for — and, of course, she was now no longer living in sin. One canon, John Dalton, left her a silver cup when he died in 1402; another made provision for prayers to be said for her soul and that of the Duke in the Chapel of Spital in Lincolnshire. Evidently she was held in some regard by her new neighbours.

The Chancery is still lived in by the Chancellor today, and a substantial amount of it survives from Katherine’s time. Although the redbrick front façade with its gatehouse and great chamber dates only from the early Tudor period,
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the north gable of the street range, and the stone-and-timber wing projecting northwards at right angles from the street, which incorporates Katherine’s solar and chapel and the screens passage from her great hall, are of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century respectively. The great hall itself does not survive, but once extended across what is now the garden, lying parallel with the gatehouse; in Katherine’s day it had courtyards on either side, and the central hearth was possibly on the site of the present ornamental pond. We know the hall was timber-framed because the parliamentary surveyors who inspected the property for Oliver Cromwell in 1649 mistook the derelict structure for a ‘large shed open to the roof’; this last detail probably refers to a mediaeval
louvre
that allowed the smoke from the fire to escape. Fortunately, the commisioners recorded the measurements of this building: at 40’ by 28’, this was no shed, but a mediaeval hall of imposing proportions, with entrance doors on either side. Unfortunately for posterity, it was demolished in 1714.

The dais where Katherine would have presided at table over her household, and sometimes entertained John of Gaunt, has long disappeared therefore, but the surviving screens passage boasts three fine doorways, each adorned with corbel heads of a king and a bishop. The left one led to the buttery, which still has a fourteenth-century window, and the right gave access to the pantry and the kitchen beyond (which also had a
louvre
), while the middle door opened on to a straight flight of stairs leading up to the chapel, where Katherine would have worshipped and heard Mass. The small chapel has a fourteenth-century triple-lancet window, an aumbry for the Blessed Sacrament, and a
piscina
with a delicately sculpted ogee arch. The windows and floor date mainly from the late fifteenth century.

Katherine’s solar, a private first-floor apartment built around 1300 and located between the Tudor frontage and the chapel anteroom, is unrecognisable today, having been divided into bedrooms and corridors. Like the adjacent chapel, it was open to the roof beams in her day. The solar was the chamber in which she had her bed (the most expensive item of
furniture she would have owned), received visitors informally, sought refuge from the world, and perhaps bathed in a wooden tub lined with white cloth and filled with scented water.

The small anteroom to the chapel has a fourteenth-century squint, permitting the observation of Mass in private. Such squints were sometimes used to enable people excluded from services, such as lepers, to be present without infecting others, but they were also used to facilitate the sight of one altar from another, ensuring co-ordination in the administering of communion, so it could be that the chapel was too small to accommodate all Katherine’s household at Mass, and that some people were obliged to worship in the anteroom. An alternative theory is that the anteroom, which was adjacent to her solar, may have served as Katherine’s private oratory; we know that she had twice before received permission to have portable altars, so evidently she had a penchant for solitary devotion. Possibly she preferred to participate in services apart from her household.

Katherine’s great chamber, the ‘lord’s chamber’ of 1343, where she — and perhaps the Duke on occasion — formally received visitors, was long ago demolished to make way for the Tudor wing fronting the street. Above the pantry and kitchen to the north of the property, according to the 1649 survey, were six lodging chambers with garrets above, now also long gone. Possibly these chambers had once provided accommodation for Katherine’s children and guests, with the servants upstairs in the attics.

Below the fourteenth-century wing and the gatehouse were cellars for storage. We cannot be sure that the brew-house and wood-house that adjoined the kitchen in 1649 and had servants’ quarters above were there in Katherine’s time. The parliamentary survey also records a stableyard with stone stables incorporating three bays, a hayloft above and a tiled roof, but given Katherine’s status and the likely size of her household, her stables were probably larger, for in 1391, we will find her keeping twelve horses in John of Gaunt’s stable-block. In 1649, the three gardens (or ‘courts’) belonging to the Chancery contained fruit trees.
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To assert, as Lucraft does, that there is ‘much evidence’ that John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford were ‘very much still together’ in the 1380s (a decade in which he was in fact abroad for over three years) is perhaps to overstate the case. In order to determine the nature of their relationship in the period from 1381 to 1396, we have to look for clues in just two dozen or so references to Katherine in records of this period (some of which have nothing to do with John of Gaunt). It is important to remember that these official records give us no more comprehensive a picture
of relations between John and Katherine than do those that are extant for the period during which they are known to have been lovers. For these records are not complete — less so than before, in fact, for
John of Gaunt’s Register
survives only up to 1383. It is circumstantial evidence that suggests that the Duke had less frequent dealings with Katherine than he had prior to 1381.

There can be no question, though, that Katherine continued to play a part — possibly an important one — in his life, nor that other people were aware of this. John continued to provide generously for her and their children, and sent her gifts, as before; moreover, it is clear that he was seen to be her protector. They obviously remained on good terms and mutually supportive, she lending him money when he needed it, and he showing marked favour to her family. Both the Dean and Chapter at Lincoln on the one part, in 1381, and Richard II on the other, in 1383, 1384, 1387, 1388 and 1389, recognised that, if they wanted to please the Duke and retain his powerful support, they should show favour to Katherine Swynford. And Katherine herself continued to be a woman of influence and standing, which must be attributed to her connection with John of Gaunt.

Of course, this could all have stemmed from the fact that she was the mother of the Duke’s children. Yet few royal mistresses had ever achieved such status, and the fact that Katherine did is surely evidence of his continuing esteem and love for her — as, of course, is the fact that he later married her, in an age when it was virtually unheard of for princes to wed the mothers of their bastards. But love can be expressed in many different ways, and it looks very much as if, until 1389 at least, John kept his word and refrained from her bed.

The soundest argument in favour of their relationship remaining platonic, at least for the present, is that Katherine is not known to have borne any more children. She was only in her thirties, and had conceived fairly frequently during her years with John and her marriage to Hugh; nor was there any effective contraception that might have facilitated the secret continuance of sexual relations.

Then there is the fact that no chronicler — and Walsingham in particular was quick to censure the Duke — even so much as hinted that the affair was still going on after the public renunciation; given its notoriety beforehand, we might expect people to have been on the lookout for signs that the erstwhile lovers had fallen from grace. But there was no further scandal. No, the picture we have, at least for the 1380s — as will become clear — is one of affection and mutual support, driven and cemented by the common bond of the couple’s children.

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From 1381 to 1386, John of Gaunt remained at the forefront of the English political scene. He dominated the Council and Parliament, and played a leading role in diplomacy. At the same time, he was pursuing his quest for the Castilian crown, vigorously promoting ‘the way of Spain’ as England’s best chance of defeating the French. Knighton says that, after the perils he had endured, the honour in which he was now held was a great consolation to him; and he seems to have achieved some peace of mind and conscience too, for at length ‘joy came to the Duke, and to those who were dear to him’. ‘He drew such strength from his virtue that he sought no revenge, but patiently forgave the offences of anyone who sought forgiveness.’
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Only two men were brought to trial for having assisted in the destruction of the Savoy.

It was John who met the new Queen, Anne of Bohemia — ‘so good, so fair, so debonair’, according to Chaucer — as she disembarked at Dover, and John who escorted her through the streets of London prior to her wedding to Richard II in January 1382 at Westminster. (It was Anne who introduced the horned headdress, or ‘moonytire’, into England, a fashion that Katherine Swynford may well have worn.) At the end of that month, John asked Parliament for a loan to finance an expedition to Castile, but the response was generally unenthusiastic.
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John of Gaunt never rebuilt the Savoy. Instead, he left the blackened ruin as it was, a stark reminder of the violence done to his property;
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the site would remain derelict until Henry VII built the Hospital of the Savoy on it over a century later. The Duke concentrated instead on making Kenilworth the Lancastrian showpiece, and when he was needed in London, he resided at Hertford Castle — its roof was restored in 1383 with lead from the Savoy
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— or in the Bishop of London’s palace at Fulham, or at La Neyte (also known as the Neate), the country residence of the Abbot of Westminster, located by the River Tyburn in the area that is now Bayswater and Hyde Park.
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Historians have long debated the implications of the quitclaim that John of Gaunt issued to Katherine Swynford on 14 February 1382 in London. Its text is as follows:

Confusion has long reigned as to the purpose of this document: was it drawn up to protect John’s interests or Katherine’s? The answer lies in understanding what a quitclaim deed actually was. Since mediaeval times, it has been a document in which the granter relinquishes all rights and interests in a property to the grantee. The granter is the person who has sold or transferred a piece of property, or an interest in it, and the grantee is the person who has received it. Thus, in issuing a quitclaim, the granter ‘quits’ any claims to the property referenced in the deed. To quote a simplistic example, in the fourteenth-century poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, the knight, referring to a weapon, says: ‘I quit claim to it. He shall keep it as his own.’

And that was exactly what John of Gaunt was doing when — on behalf of himself and his heirs — he quit all claims to the property and other assets he had granted Katherine Swynford. Which is a very far cry from asserting — as many writers have done — that he intended that neither she nor her children were ever again to have any claim on himself and his heirs. On the contrary, it was a most generous and loving gesture intended to protect the interests of Katherine and the Beauforts and ensure they were handsomely provided for.
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I am indebted to Joan Potton for pointing out the significance of the document being issued on St Valentine’s Day. In the late fourteenth century, it was believed that birds paired up and mated on that day; the custom of choosing a ‘Valentine’ did not emerge until the fifteenth century, but the connection of lovers with St Valentine may go as far back as the emergence of the cults of two Roman martyrs of that name, and the tradition probably became popular with the development of the mediaeval concept of courtly love. Thus there was a clear association between love and St Valentine’s Day in 1382, when John of Gaunt issued the quitclaim deed, and the choice of this date — surely no accident — was perhaps to reassure Katherine that the Duke still secretly cherished deep feelings for her, even if they could not be lovers as before.

Other evidence shows that he was still very protective of her welfare and determined to be a good lord to her family. On 20 February 1382,
he sent Katherine a gift of two tuns of Gascon wine, one from Bristol, the other from Rothwell.
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John of Gaunt’s Register
shows that by 1382, young Thomas Swynford was already a member of the Duke’s retinue, serving as a soldier and shield-bearer, which suggests that John had taken him into his service as soon as he was old enough to be useful and promoted him quickly; Silva-Vigier credibly suggests that he had willingly assumed a fatherly role in the boy’s life. Now, in 1382, he placed Thomas, aged fifteen, in the retinue of Henry of Derby, a youth of his own age, to whom Thomas seems to have acquired a lifelong attachment.