Mistress of the Monarchy (28 page)

In 1376, probably at the intercession of John of Gaunt, the Pope granted permission (an ‘indult’) for ‘Catherine de Swynford’, in the diocese of Lincoln, to have a portable altar in her lodgings,
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which is surely further testimony to her piety, although we might wonder if the Pontiff was aware
of her adulterous relationship with the Duke, or if her conscience was ever troubled by it. Could she have gone to confession, knowing she was committing a sin in the eyes of the Church every time she slept with him? Or did she confess these transgressions, sincerely intending each time not to commit them again, but failing miserably? We have no way of knowing.

Katherine’s disappearance from the records during the turbulent latter months of 1376 was probably occasioned by advancing pregnancy: it is likely that she bore her third child by John in the early months of 1377.
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This was a dramatic and highly publicised period in the Duke’s life, but nowhere is there any mention in the chronicles of Katherine, who may well have been in seclusion at Kettlethorpe or elsewhere at this time. It might be significant that, on 25 February, Edward III licensed John to grant to Katherine for her lifetime the ducal manors of Gringley and Wheatley in Nottinghamshire, which were jointly worth more than £150 (£52,428) per annum;
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this grant perhaps marked the birth of a third child, and the rents from these manors were possibly intended to provide for its upbringing, as might have been the profits from the Sauneby wardship, granted by John the previous July when the pregnancy would have been confirmed. The Duke also presented Katherine with a tun of wine at this time.
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Armitage-Smith opines that it was Thomas Beaufort who was born early in 1377, but this third child was probably Katherine’s only daughter by John, Joan Beaufort, perhaps named in honour of the Dowager Princess of Wales, who was demonstrating such kindness and friendship to the Duke at this critical time. The usual date given for Joan’s birth is 1379, but that would mean that she was barely fourteen when her first child was born around 1393, and the pattern of grants is not repeated in 1379. An earlier birth date of 1377 is probably more realistic.

Joan may have been born at Kettlethorpe, but given the political situation at this time, her birth perhaps took place elsewhere. For John of Gaunt was so hated in the country that anyone connected with him was at risk — as would be proved dramatically in February 1377 — and Katherine, as his mistress, was especially vulnerable. Professor Goodman, who places Joan’s date of birth in 1379 with reservations, has suggested that she was delivered at Pleshy in Essex, the residence of Joan FitzAlan, Dowager Countess of Hereford, Essex and Northampton. The Countess was the daughter of Eleanor of Lancaster, a sister of Duke Henry, and she, like her late husband, Humphrey de Bohun (pronounced Boon), enjoyed an enduring friendship with John of Gaunt. Her elder daughter Eleanor had just married Thomas of Woodstock, John’s youngest brother, who would be created Earl of Buckingham on 16 July 1377. Given the fact that the
latest Beaufort was christened Joan, and was later welcomed into the household of the Countess’s younger daughter Mary, it is indeed pos sible that she was born at Pleshy Castle near Chelmsford, and that the Countess acted as her sponsor.
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The King confirmed the grant of Gringley and Wheatley at Sheen on 4 March 1377.
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The acquisition of these two manors, both situated not far from Kettlethorpe, added considerably to Katherine’s income; she was by now a fairly wealthy woman.

Gringley-on-the-Hill is a pretty village perched eighty-two feet above sea level, twelve miles to the north-west of Kettlethorpe, and boasts beautiful views over Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and a church with a Norman arch, dedicated to St Peter and St Paul. To the east is Beacon Hill, the site of the original Saxon settlement. The mediaeval manor had been granted to John of Gaunt by Edward III,
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and between 1372 and 1377, John had kept the manor house and its chambers in repair.
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There was good hunting to be had nearby: in his
Register
, the Duke refers to ‘the West Park’ and ‘our parks of Gringley’. Katherine surely would have visited, and stayed at, this desirable property.

Wheatley, which is mentioned in Domesday Book and was granted to John of Gaunt by Edward III,
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is now two villages, North and South Wheatley, but in Katherine’s time it was a manor set in woodland, and famous for the strawberries that grew there. It is situated three miles south of Gringley and nine miles north-west of Kettlethorpe.

At some unspecified date, possibly in 1377, Katherine was also granted the manors of Waddington and Wellingore in Lincolnshire. The entry in
John of Gaunt’s Register
(which is erroneously dated 1354, at the Savoy) states that these properties were bestowed on her in reward ‘for the good and loving service which Lady Katherine Swynford has rendered to our late dearly beloved Duchess’.

Waddington lies about five miles south of Lincoln, and had formed part of the Lancastrian inheritance. Wellingore is five miles further south, and ten miles east of Newark on the Lincoln road. Originally a Saxon settlement and Domesday village, it occupies a magnificent position on the Lincolnshire Cliff, with the old village built of light brown stone lying to the west, where the escarpment rises 260 feet above sea level; below is the valley of the River Witham. Apart from the heavily restored twelfth-century church, the ruined stone cross by the old main road is the only surviving mediaeval structure; the Manor House to the north, and Wellingore Hall, set in extensive parkland to the south, both date from the eighteenth century.

Katherine was at Nottingham, or had business there, some time during
1377, for her seal was used there by John, son of Walter de Dunham, in witness of a document.
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John de Dunham was a prominent merchant and burgess of Bishop’s (later King’s) Lynn in Norfolk; he owned at least one shop there in the 1370s, and served as one of the town’s chamberlains in 1377–8. His father, Walter, had held the same office in 1340–1. The Dunham family was spread all over East Anglia and the East Midlands, while an earlier John de Dunham’s will had been dated at Lincoln in 1346.
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Katherine’s links with the family probably arose through trading connections, for at some point she too owned a house in King’s Lynn (see Chapter 10), while Dunham’s use of her seal suggests a degree of friendship between them.

Katherine’s fortunes may have been in the ascendant in 1377, but John of Gaunt’s were under serious threat. His reversal of the decisions of the Good Parliament had made him even more hated and feared than before. It was probably around this time that his daughter Philippa’s former nurse, a lady known only as Maud, wrote warning him that five friars of Canterbury ‘have wickedly and treacherously spoken of you, my very redoubtable lord’. She beseeched him to protect himself ‘well from them and all others, in God’s name’.
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Did Katherine tremble for her lover when she heard of such things?

Parliament had reassembled on 27 January, with Prince Richard and John of Gaunt presiding. It has often been said that it was packed with John’s supporters, but the evidence does not bear this out.
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Nevertheless, due to the Duke’s influence, much of the legislation of the Good Parliament was formally reversed.

By this time, disturbing rumours that John of Gaunt was a changeling were causing ‘great noise and great clamour’ in London and the rest of the kingdom. They appear to have been spread by the banished William of Wykeham (although he was to deny that)
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and/or his supporters in a bid to topple the Duke from power. It was asserted that in 1340, Queen Philippa had actually given birth to a daughter, but had overlaid and suffocated her. Fearful of confessing this to King Edward, she had substituted the little corpse for a living baby boy, the son of a Ghent labourer, butcher or porter (there are various versions of the story), this infant having been smuggled into St Bavon’s Abbey where the Queen had been confined; she named him John and brought him up as her own. Philippa was said to have admitted this in confession to William of Wykeham on her deathbed in 1369, insisting that, should there ever arise any prospect of John succeeding to the throne, the Bishop must break the seal of the confessional and publicly reveal the truth, ‘lest a false heir should inherit

England’.
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For all its propaganda value, there are inherent flaws in this story. First, there was a strong family resemblance between Edward III and John of Gaunt, who had typically Plantagenet features. And second, Queen Philippa had been a lady of great integrity, unlikely to have contemplated such a deception; nor is there any evidence that Edward III was so fearsome a husband that she could not have told him of the tragedy that had occurred; on the contrary, theirs was an affectionate union, and he both loved and indulged her. Finally, had there been any substance in the story, surely the Bishop would have openly proclaimed the truth, rather than stooping to spread scurrilous unsubstantiated rumours. Unsurprisingly, few believed the tale, although there were those who were ready to use it as a weapon against the Duke. The rumours angered John himself, and doubt less hurt him, for he had cherished a high regard for his mother, but he did not stoop to contradict them. It would have been beneath his dignity to do so.

On 2 February, Convocation — the assembly of bishops — met, and demanded that William of Wykeham be present among them. Bishop Courtenay now seized his opportunity to move against Wycliffe, who had openly preached against Wykeham; he was determined to silence Wycliffe’s subversive views on the Church and its wealth, and summoned Wycliffe to appear before him to answer a charge of heresy. John of Gaunt rightly saw in this an attempt to disparage himself too, for he shared those views, and he resolved publicly to champion Wycliffe’s cause and discredit the bishops who had opposed him. He began by appointing four doctors of theology to undertake Wycliffe’s defence.

The nineteenth of February was the day appointed for the trial of John Wycliffe. John of Gaunt and Henry, Lord Percy, backed by a band of heavily armed retainers, ‘stood shoulder to shoulder’ with the reformer as he arrived at St Paul’s Cathedral, and forced a path through the large crowds of Londoners that had gathered there, Percy brandishing his staff of office and jostling the people aside. Bishop Courtenay was angered by the presence of the Duke and the Marshal, and a sharp quarrel erupted, with the Bishop castigating Percy for manhandling his flock, whereupon the Duke retorted that Percy would conduct himself as befitted the Marshal whether Courtenay liked it or not. This incensed both Bishop and people, who chose to interpret John’s words as a further threat to the City’s jealously guarded liberties, and the atmosphere grew dangerously heated.

Once the tribunal had assembled in the Lady Chapel, further harsh words were exchanged. Percy showed Wycliffe to a seat, but the Bishop ordered him to remain on his feet throughout the proceedings, at which John of Gaunt uncharacteristically lost his temper.

‘Lord Percy’s motion is but reasonable,’ he insisted, ‘and as for you, my lord Bishop, who are grown so proud and arrogant, I will bring down the pride, not of you alone, but of all the prelacy in England.’ Courtenay told him to do his worst, provoking the stern warning that Courtenay need not think that his aristocratic relations would protect him from the day’s repercussions, for they would be hard put to it to look to themselves. The Bishop replied that he would trust in God, not in his relatives. Angered by the Duke’s threats, the people began loudly to heckle him. He warned them he would have them arrested if they persisted, but Courtenay threatened to excommunicate him if he dared to do so in his cathedral. Whereupon the Duke muttered, ‘Rather than endure this, I should take him by the hair and drag him out of the church.’ It was probably said in the heat of the moment, but John’s arrogance and his apparent determination to ride roughshod over the privileges of the Londoners were to prove his downfall. Incensed by his treatment of their Bishop, and inflamed by a rumour that he intended to deprive them of their elected Mayor and replace him with the Marshal, the citizens exploded in anger, and the proceedings collapsed in chaos, with Wycliffe being hustled away by the Duke and Percy, and escaping ecclesiastical censure for the time being.
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Nevertheless, he was now a marked man, irrevocably alienated from the hierarchy of the Church. As for John of Gaunt, far from directing the opprobrium of the Londoners towards the bishops, as he had intended, he had succeeded in turning it upon himself.

Percy now made matters worse by usurping the powers of a magistrate and imprisoning a London man in his official residence as Marshal, which was seen as an even more outrageous attack on the City’s liberties. The next day, a rioting mob of Londoners rescued the prisoner and sacked Percy’s house. Then they made for the Savoy in a murderous mood, bent on assassination. On the way, they lynched a man who spoke up for John of Gaunt, and in Cheapside, some insultingly hung the Duke’s coat of arms upside down, as if he were a traitor. And they would have fired the palace itself, had not Bishop Courtenay arrived and ordered them to desist. Fortunately, the Duke and Percy were not there, but dining on oysters in Thames Street at the house of Sir John d’Ypres, a wealthy Flemish merchant who was an old friend of John of Gaunt’s and stood high in the favour of the King. Warned by one of his knights that ‘infinite numbers of armed men’ were out for his blood, and that ‘unless he took great heed, that day would be his last’, John leapt up so hastily from the table that he painfully crashed the backs of his legs against the wooden bench. His host offered him wine, ‘but he could not drink for haste’. He and Percy fled through a back gate, commandeered a boat across the Thames and ‘never stayed rowing’ until they reached Kennington, where
the Princess Joan was persuaded to act as mediator in the hope of calming the situation. She sent three of her knights to check the citizens, and because of the affection in which she was held, the mob gradually dispersed.
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