Mistress of the Monarchy (16 page)

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 un-deserved, 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 secretly 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.
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In November 1366, Sir Hugh Swynford received letters of protection commanding him to join the Duke of Lancaster in Guienne.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This is manifest in the Inquisition taken to establish Thomas Swynford’s age between 22 June 1394 and 22 June 1395.
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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.
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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 title, should any question of bastardy have arisen, but there is no evidence that any ever did.
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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.
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Richard of Bordeaux was the second son of the Prince and Princess, the elder, Edward of Angoulême, 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.’
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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,
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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.
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