Mistress of the Monarchy (20 page)

There is no record of Katherine being in Constance’s household until March 1373, but given the fact that the King and John of Gaunt were helping her financially in the spring of 1372, and her being in attendance when Constance bore a child probably in the summer of that year, it is likely that she was engaged with her sister when the Duchess’s establishment was set up between January and April. Katherine’s former experience as a long-term, much-loved member of the Duchess Blanche’s household would have left her uniquely qualified to serve the young Constance, and the fact that she was chosen to convey news of the birth
of Constance’s child to the King suggests that her position was of some prominence.

Philippa Chaucer’s appointment to the Lancastrian ménage while her husband remained in royal service, and the fact that she was now to be often resident at Hertford Castle or Tutbury Castle, and would remain with the Duchess for some years to come, meant that henceforth she and Geoffrey would see much less of each other. This may be a further indication that their marriage was unhappy and also that Philippa had done with child-bearing. Having spent most of her life at court, she probably preferred the social cachet conferred on her by her return to royal service to living in obscurity as the wife of a royal esquire; she had perhaps not liked living in London, where foreigners were regarded with suspicion and even hostility. Chaucer himself may have welcomed this new arrangement with amicable resignation, seeing his wife when their duties permitted and agreeing to pool their financial resources; from 1374, he went in person to collect Philippa’s pension from the Exchequer.
⁵⁵

On 30 January, Edward III’s council formally recognised John of Gaunt as King of Castile and León; from henceforth, John would be known as ‘Monseigneur d’Espaigne’ rather than ‘Monseigneur de Lancaster’; he would sign his letters in regal Castilian style as
Nos el Roy
(‘We, the King’) and his seal would bear the royal arms of Castile and León impaling those of England. John would now be deferred to as if he were a reigning sovereign, and the etiquette observed at his court would have reflected this.

John’s zeal for winning a foreign kingdom for himself was to cost him much trust and popularity in England, where people suspected him of disloyalty to the Crown and speculated that his ambitions might not be satisfied with the throne of Castile. Unlike him, many lacked the foresight to see that with an English king reigning in a friendly Castile, France would lose a valuable ally, Castilian naval raids would cease, and England’s chances of achieving some success in the war would be vastly improved. Furthermore, for many years to come, John was to subordinate his dynastic ambitions in order to give priority to prosecuting the war with France on England’s behalf, and not only because there was no money to pay for an offensive against Castile. Only time would prove that his loyalty to the English Crown was never in doubt, but to many of the xenophobic and increasingly nationalistic commons, to whom all foreigners were ‘strangers’ and therefore suspect, he was at best pursuing personal aggrandisement, and at worst a traitor.

This would not have mattered so much had not John become the chief influence over the King. Because of Edward III’s escalating physical and mental decline, the Black Prince’s infirmity and the death of Lionel of Antwerp in 1368, John was now the most important and powerful man in the realm. It was to him that men looked for political leadership, at a time when England’s great victories against the French were long past and the war was going disastrously. There were frequent enemy raids on the south coast and consequently disruptions to trade, while a population ravaged by plague was increasingly burdened with the crippling taxes that were needed to pay for the war. At the same time, Edward III’s once-brilliant court was degenerating into corruption. It would not be long before both lords and commons looked about them for a scapegoat and pointed a finger at John of Gaunt. Hence he would become widely hated throughout the kingdom, and that would ultimately have repercussions for Katherine herself.

John’s unpopularity was unfairly linked in the public mind to that of the King’s mistress, Alice Perrers, the married daughter of a Hertfordshire knight, who was now queening it over the court. Edward had first taken her to his bed perhaps as early as 1364, when she was one of Queen Philippa’s
damoiselles
and soon, despite her not being beautiful and lacking a good figure,
⁵⁶
‘Alice had been preferred in the King’s love before the Queen’. Since Philippa’s death, Alice had gained ascendancy over her royal lover, who was now descending into a child-like dotage and was rarely seen in public; claims that his decline resulted from the gonorrhoea with which she had infected him have never been substantiated. She bore her royal lover a son and two daughters, and over the years wheedled out of him jewellery worth at least £375 (£105,723), an annuity of £100 (£28,193), twenty-two manors, land in seventeen counties and a London townhouse.
⁵⁷
It is not surprising therefore that she has been seen as the model for the acquisitive and corrupt Lady Meed in William Langland’s poem,
The Vision of Piers Plowman
:

By 1372, Alice’s reputation was notorious; she was shameless, rapacious and ruthless, and exploited to the full her dominance over the senile King. She persuaded him to let her wear the queen consort’s jewels, presided with him over a tournament in Smithfield, decked out as the ‘Lady of the Sun’, controlled the flow of royal patronage to the benefit of her favourites, and caused outrage by overseeing the proceedings at the Court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall from the sovereign’s marble throne, intervening to secure favourable judgements for her friends. ‘This Lady Alice de Perrers had such power and eminence that no one dared prosecute a claim against her.’ The public were scandalised, and some accused Alice of using witchcraft to achieve her aims, as they were one day to accuse Katherine Swynford. ‘It is not fitting or safe that all the keys should hang from the belt of one woman,’ fulminated Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester, while Thomas Walsingham castigated Alice as ‘a shameless doxy’, ‘an infamous whore’ and ‘a thoroughly bad influence’. Alice’s career illustrates just how influential — and ruinous to a prince’s reputation — a royal mistress could be, a salutary lesson from which Katherine Swynford’s conduct when she herself came to be a royal mistress suggests she had learned much.

Before Alice Perrers, the mistresses of English kings had made only fleeting appearances in history. Their names are more often than not the stuff of legend or passing references in official documents, and none was particularly influential. Even fair Rosamund de Clifford, for whom Henry II planned to divorce Eleanor of Aquitaine in the twelfth century, played a passive role. Prior to the fourteenth century, such women lived obscure lives, enjoying brief liaisons with monarchs, bearing royal bastards and occasionally meriting a mention in a chronicle.

But Alice Perrers broke the mould. With Edward III’s blessing and the backing of her allies, William, Lord Latimer, John, Lord Neville of Raby and the powerful London financier, Richard Lyons, she controlled not only access to the King, but also the flow of royal patronage, and thus secured for herself a position of the greatest influence. John of Gaunt may not have liked her, but along with many other eminent figures of the day, including the Pope himself, he respected her abilities and tolerated her for his father’s sake — indeed, he was later to protest that he was powerless in the face of her hold over the King — and in May 1373 we find her serving the Duchess Constance alongside Philippa Chaucer at the Savoy, and receiving gifts from the Duke.
⁵⁸

On 10 February 1372, Constance made her state entry into London and was formally welcomed as Queen of Castile by the Black Prince, who had risen from his sickbed and struggled onto a horse for the occasion.

He was accompanied by ‘several lords and knights, the Mayor of London and a great number of the commons, well-dressed and nobly mounted’, who conducted the new Duchess ‘through London in a great and solemn procession. In Cheapside were assembled many gentlemen with their wives and daughters to look at the beauty of the young lady.’ This statement suggests that Constance’s physical charms were already renowned.
⁵⁹
‘The procession passed in good order along to the Savoy’, where John of Gaunt was waiting to greet his wife.
⁶⁰
The Black Prince’s welcome gift to his sister-in-law was a golden brooch or pendant depicting St George, adorned with sapphires, diamonds and pearls, while the King presented her with a golden crown set with diamonds and pearls.
⁶¹

Soon afterwards, Constance took up residence at Hertford Castle, where her three Lancastrian stepchildren were sent to join her; in 1372, they shared a common chamber, or household, for which their father allocated 300 marks (£33,471) annually to cover their expenditure. Henceforth, they would be attended and attired as befitted the children of a king.
⁶²
The appointment of Alyne Gerberge as a
damoiselle
to Constance
⁶³
suggests that she was still looking after Philippa of Lancaster. By now, Katherine Swynford and Philippa Chaucer were probably also part of the Duchess’s household, and both are likely to have had their children with them. Once again, Katherine’s duties probably involved helping to care for the ducal children, who must have known her well, and had perhaps welcomed her back warmly.

In March and April 1372, John of Gaunt made a generous settlement on his wife, assigning her 1,000 marks (£111, 569) per annum for the expenses of her wardrobe and chamber. He also presented her with costly gifts: rich furs, lengths of cloth of gold, nearly four thousand loose pearls (probably for embellishing her gowns and making buttons), a small circlet of gold encrusted with emeralds and balas rubies, a golden filet set with four balas rubies, and twenty-one pearls set in gold rubies. All were delivered by the Clerk of the Wardrobe to Alyne Gerberge.
⁶⁴

This was no more than any royal duke would be expected to do for his bride. But John’s generosity might have been prompted by his conscience, for despite his recent marriage, he had taken a mistress: on 1 May 1372, at the Savoy, he gave Katherine Swynford the handsome sum of £10 (£3,347), his first recorded gift to her.
⁶⁵
This and other evidence strongly suggests that the love affair that was to change the course of English history had begun.

We do not know for certain when John and Katherine became lovers, but their affair had certainly begun by the late spring of 1372. In determining the date of the birth of John Beaufort, the first of the children
born to them, we may also discover the likeliest date for the commencement of their relationship. According to the grant of an annuity made to him by Richard II on 7 June 1392, John Beaufort was then in his twenty-first year;
⁶⁶
thus he was supposedly born between June 1371 and June 1372. But the dates are problematical. John of Gaunt went to Aquitaine in late June 1370, and did not return until November 1371. To have been born within the stated period, John Beaufort would have to have been conceived between September 1370 and September 1371; however, his father was abroad for the whole of that period, and in September 1371 he married Constance of Castile.

It could be conjectured that Katherine had joined Hugh Swynford overseas, once it was known that he expected to be in Aquitaine for some time, and that the attraction between her and John of Gaunt flourished in the south of France. But that is an unlikely scenario. The wives of soldiers rarely accompanied them abroad; only laundresses and prostitutes followed armies, and any other woman who did so was putting her reputation at risk. And Katherine was the wife of a landed knight, however poor; her task during his absence was to oversee his estates in England and rear their young family.
⁶⁷

Even if Katherine had been in Aquitaine with Hugh, there is virtually watertight evidence that her affair with John did not begin until after she was widowed. In John and Katherine’s petition to the Pope of 1 September 1396, they asserted that some time after John had stood godfather to Katherine’s daughter, ‘the same Duke John adulterously knew the same Katherine,
she being free of wedlock
[author’s italics], but with marriage still existing between the same Duke John and [his wife] Constance, and begot offspring of her’.
⁶⁸
The compelling reasons for accepting the statements in this letter as the truth have been previously stated, and therefore we must accept that Katherine was no longer married to Hugh when she became John’s mistress and conceived a child by him, although he was already married to Constance.
⁶⁹

That means that they could not have become lovers until November 1371 at the earliest, and it makes a nonsense of claims that they had begun their affair in the lifetime of the Duchess Blanche,
⁷⁰
and of Froissart’s assertions that Katherine ‘had been mistress of the Duke both before and after his marriage with the Princess Constance’ and while Hugh Swynford was alive. ‘Both during and after the knight’s lifetime [he claims] Duke John of Lancaster had always loved and maintained this Lady Katherine.’ Since Froissart incorrectly states in the same passage that John and Katherine had three children, not four, his sources can hardly have been reliable.
⁷¹
He was, after all, writing long after these events.