Mistress of the Monarchy (3 page)

Girls were not normally accepted into the novitiate before the age of thirteen, so Elizabeth de Roët, who was described as being ‘adolescent’ at the time of her placement, was probably born around 1335–6 at the latest. St Waudru’s was a prestigious and influential abbey, and it was an honour for a girl to be so placed by the Countess Margaret; it further demonstrates the close ties between the Roëts and the ruling family of Hainault, and suggests yet again a familial link between them. It was unusual for the eldest girl of a gentle family to enter the cloister, but given the fact that Paon’s daughters were both to offer their own daughters as nuns, we might conclude that giving a female child to God was a Roët family custom.

Payn also had a son, Walter de Roët, who was possibly named after Sir Walter de Mauney,
³²
and who, in 1355–6, was in the service, in turn, of the Countess Margaret and her son, Duke Albert, and Edward III’s eldest son and heir, Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, popularly known to history as ‘the Black Prince’. As Walter was a Yeoman of the Chamber to the Prince in 1355, and probably fought under his command at Poitiers in 1356, he is likely to have been born around 1338–40 at the latest.

Between 1350 and 1352, there are seven references to Paon in the
Cartulaire des Comtes de Hainaut
. For example, on 11 May 1350, he is recorded as preparing to accompany the Countess Margaret’s sons, Duke Albert, Duke William and Duke Otto, on a pilgrimage to the church of St Martin at Sebourg near Valenciennes to make their devotions at the shrine of the twelfth-century hermit, St Druon. It was probably in that year that Paon’s famous daughter was born.

It was C. L. Kingsford, in his article on Katherine Swynford in the
Dictionary of National Biography
, who suggested that she was born in 1350. There is no contemporary record of her date of birth, but given that the minimum canonical age at which a girl could be married and have marital intercourse was twelve, and that Katherine probably married around 1362–3 and had her first child in
c
.1363–4, then a date of 1350 is feasible, although of course she could have been born a little earlier. The twenty-fifth of November is the feast day of St Katherine, so it is possible that Paon’s
second daughter was named for the patron saint on whose anniversary she was born, and for whom she was to express great devotion and reverence.

In the Middle Ages, St Katherine of Alexandria was one of the most popular of female saints. Edward III and Philippa of Hainault had a special devotion to her; their accounts show that Katherine wheels, the symbol of her martydom, adorned counterpanes on the royal beds, jousting apparel and other garments. Like other English mediaeval queens, Philippa was patroness of the royal hospital of St Katherine-by-the-Tower in London, which had recently been rebuilt under her auspices, and with which Katherine Swynford herself would one day be associated.
³³

St Katherine had probably never even existed. There is no record of her in antiquity, and her cult did not emerge until the ninth century. She was said to have been of patrician or even royal birth, beautiful, rich, respected and learned. Her studies led her to convert to Christianity at a time when Christians were being persecuted in the Roman Empire, and she dared to publicly protest to the Emperor Maxentius (reigned AD 306–12) against the worship of pagan idols and the persecution itself. Maxentius was greatly impressed by her beauty and her courage in adhering to her convictions, and sent fifty of his sages and philosophers to reason with her. When they failed to demolish her arguments, he was so infuriated that he had them all burned alive. He then demanded that Katherine abjure her Christian faith and marry him, but she refused on the grounds that she was a bride of Christ. At this, the Emperor’s patience with her gave out, and she was beaten, imprisoned and sentenced to be broken on a spiked wheel that had its two halves rotating in different directions. But just as her agony was about to begin, an angel appeared and smote the wheel with a sword, breaking it in pieces. This miraculous intervention is said to have inspired the mass conversion of two thousand Roman soldiers, whereupon an even more enraged Maxentius had Katherine beheaded. Afterwards, other angels appeared and miraculously carried her remains to Mount Sinai, where a Greek Orthodox monastery was built to house her shrine. It should be noted that there are many variations on this fantastical tale.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the cult of St Katherine gained momentum. She was revered for her staunch faith, her courage and her blessed virginity, and was believed to have under her special protection young maidens, churchmen, philosophers, students, craftsmen, nurses and the dying. Numerous churches and bells were dedicated to her, and miracle plays were written about her. Her story, and her symbol of a wheel, appeared widely in art, mural paintings, manuscripts, ivory panels, stained
glass, embroideries, vestments and heraldry.
³⁴
And many little girls were named in her honour, in the hope that they would emulate her manifold virtues.

That Katherine was Paon de Roët’s daughter is not in doubt. The chronicler Jean Froissart, himself a native of Hainault and a servant of Queen Philippa, may well have met Katherine — he certainly took an interest in her — and he states that she was ‘the daughter of a knight of Hainault called Sir Paon de Roët, in his day one of the knights of good Queen Philippa of England’.

Paon’s fourth child, Philippa,
³⁵
was probably so called in honour of the Queen, who may have been her godmother. It is often claimed that Philippa de Roët was placed in royal service in the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, by 1356, in which case she would have been born in the early 1340s at the latest. However, as will be proposed below, this claim is probably unfounded.

In 1631, John Weever
³⁶
asserted that Katherine was the oldest of Paon’s daughters, but this can hardly be the case, as that would make her at least twenty-eight when she married, middle-aged by mediaeval standards; but perhaps Weever knew nothing of Elizabeth de Roët, and had Katherine’s other sister Philippa in mind, in which case he was probably correct in saying that Katherine was the elder.

Philippa de Roët was certainly in the Queen’s service on 12 September 1366, and was married by then; she was therefore likely to have been born in the early 1350s, and was probably Katherine’s younger sister, as Weever implies, rather than the elder of the two, as is usually assumed.
³⁷
Thus Paon appears to have had two older children, Elizabeth and Walter, born between
c
.1335 and
c
.1340 at the latest, and two younger daughters, Katherine and Philippa, born around 1350 or later. The long gap between the births of Walter and Katherine suggests that Paon married twice and that each marriage produced two surviving children.

It is sometimes erroneously stated that Katherine Swynford was born in Picardy, France; this error has arisen from some historians confusing Philippa de Roët with a waiting woman of the Queen called Philippa Picard, but they were in fact two different people,
³⁸
so there was no Roët connection with Picardy. Froissart refers to Katherine as a Hainaulter, and in England she was regarded, by virtue of her birth and descent, as a stranger or alien, the chronicler Henry Knighton calling her ‘a certain foreign woman’. We may therefore conclude that she was born in Hainault, probably on her father’s lands near Mons. This being the case, the earliest possible date for her birth is 1349.

* * *

Katherine was born into a troubled world, and would not long remain in the country of her birth. In 1351, Paon was in the service of the Countess Margaret as the Knight Master of her household, in which capacity he seems to have been responsible for enforcing the observance of protocol.
³⁹
But Margaret’s position was by no means secure: in 1350, she had renounced her claims to Holland, Zeeland and Friesland in favour of her second son, William, in the hope of retaining Hainault for herself, but in the spring of 1351, William seized control of it. Several attempts at negotiation failed, and all four counties became embroiled in the conflict. When Margaret was forced to flee from Zeeland and take refuge in Hainault, her followers were exiled, their castles destroyed and their property and offices redistributed. Paon must have been caught up in this political maelstrom, and may temporarily have found himself faced with ruin.

In December 1351, hoping to enlist the support of Edward III, Margaret fled to England with her household, taking Paon with her.
⁴⁰
Given the uncertainty of any future in Hainault, he is likely to have brought with him his children, Walter, Katherine and possibly Philippa, and indeed his wife, if she was still alive. Elizabeth, of course, was left behind in her convent; it is doubtful if Katherine ever knew her elder sister.

A settlement was quickly reached between Margaret and her son, whereby Margaret was to keep Hainault, and early in 1352, William came to England to be married to King Edward’s cousin, Matilda (or Maud) of Lancaster. In March, when the Hainault royals returned home, Paon was with them,
⁴¹
but after August 1352, he disappears from contemporary sources entirely. His date of death is nowhere recorded, and we know only that he was buried in Old St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where a memorial inscription to him was put in place after 1396. In 1631, in his
Ancient Funerary Monuments
, John Weever described Paon’s sepulchre, which was ‘in this cathedral church, and near unto Sir John Beauchamp’s tomb, upon a fair marble stone, inlaid all over with brass (of which nothing but the heads of a few brazen nails are at this day visible) and engraven with the representation and coat [of] arms of the party defunct. Thus much of a mangled funeral inscription was of late time perspicuous to be read, as followeth:
Hic jacet Paganus Roët miles Guyenne Rex Armorum Pater Catherine Ducisse Lancastriae
’ (‘Here lies Paon Roët, soldier, Guienne King of Arms, father of Catherine, Duchess of Lancaster’).

The likelihood is that Katherine herself commissioned this tomb and memorial for her father. Weever’s description suggests that the tomb was of great antiquity in 1631, and the use of Katherine’s title without any-thing to qualify it (such as ‘late Duchess’) implies that it was executed in her lifetime, which would date the tomb to the period 1396 —1403. The question is, did Paon survive until then? It is just possible, but not at all
probable in those days, that he lived well into his nineties, and witnessed Katherine’s ultimate triumph. What makes his survival improbable, though, is the complete absence of references to him in contemporary records after 1352, although of course he may have continued to serve the Countess Margaret until her death in 1356 and then retired to his modest holdings in Hainault. No Inquisition Post Mortem has been found for him,
⁴²
which suggests that he did not die in England. The most likely conclusion is that he died long before 1396, possibly even as early as 1352, but more probably in 1355, as is suggested below, that he was buried either in St Paul’s — which in itself would underline his importance and the honour and esteem in which he had been held by the royal families of England and Hainault — or elsewhere, and that after 1396, Katherine or John of Gaunt perhaps had his remains translated to St Paul’s, or simply placed a new memorial over his resting place, wanting his memory to be invested with her own greatness.
⁴³

When Paon left England in 1352, he probably took his teenaged son Walter back to Hainault with him and left his tiny daughters in the care of the kindly Queen Philippa. It was then customary for gently born children to be placed in noble households with patrons who could provide an appropriate education and advance their prospects of preferment and an advantageous marriage, but these little girls were mere infants at this time, both too small to serve the Queen in any way. Paon’s placing them with her so young suggests that they were already motherless, their mother perhaps having died in childbirth. The likelihood is that Philippa offered or agreed to make them her wards, educate them and find them husbands, and that a relieved Paon left them with her, secure in the knowledge that the Queen’s patronage would be to his daughters’ lasting benefit.

This early placement of Katherine de Roët in the Queen’s household is corroborated by Froissart’s statement that she was continuously brought up from her youth in princely courts, and by a reference in
John of Gaunt’s Register
to Katherine’s nurse, Agnes Bonsergeant, who doubtless was appointed by the Queen to care for her.

Early in 1355, we find Walter de Roët in the service of the Countess Margaret at Mons; by May, he was in England, having been appointed a Yeoman of the Chamber to the Black Prince, Queen Philippa’s eldest son. We might infer from this that Paon had died early in 1355, and that the Countess at once sent Walter to Queen Philippa, who was caring for his sisters and who quickly arranged for him to join her son’s household. Had the girls’ mother still been alive in 1352, they would probably have returned to Hainault with their father, in which case there would have been no reason for the Countess Margaret to send all three children to
England; she had, after all, placed their elder sister Elizabeth in a convent in Mons, and could surely have made provision for the three younger siblings herself. Thus the evidence suggests that their mother was dead by 1352, and that Katherine and Philippa were placed with the Queen that year and were already in England in 1355, when their father probably died. Thus Katherine would hardly have known her father, still less her mother.

Katherine and Philippa were fortunate indeed to be taken into the care of the motherly Philippa of Hainault, a ‘full noble and good woman’
⁴⁴
who had borne twelve children of her own — the youngest, Thomas of Woodstock, had been born as recently as January 1355 — and had undertaken the upbringing of several other nobly or royally born children. The Queen was now about forty-four, a tall, plump, kindly lady who was wonderfully generous, wise, ‘gladsome, humbly pious’ and greatly loved and respected.
⁴⁵
She was interested in education, art and literature, and her charities were legion. At the same time, she was inordinately fond of rich adornment — ‘blessed be the memory of King Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, his Queen, who first invented clothes’, observed one chronicler caustically — and she maintained a large and very costly household. As a result, her income did not meet the demands made on it, which resulted in complaints in Parliament about her frequently getting into debt, and ultimately obliged the King to amalgamate her establishment with his own. Yet Philippa made a great contribution to the stability and success of the monarchy, with her genius for fostering a degree of family unity and closeness that was unique in the history of the Plantagenet dynasty. Her large brood all adored her, as did her husband the King (whose pet name for her was ‘mine biddiny’) and those children who were fortunate enough to be fostered by her. Jean Froissart, Philippa’s country man, called her ‘the good Queen, that so many good deeds had done in her time, and so many knights succoured, and ladies and damsels comforted’.