Mistress of the Monarchy (10 page)

The palace was reputed to be the most beautiful and opulent building in England — it was ‘a marvellous structure unmatched in the kingdom’, ‘the fairest manor in Europe’, ‘unto which there was none in the realm
to be compared in beauty, splendour, nobility and stateliness’.
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It rivalled even the King’s great palace at Westminster. It was built on a quadrangular collegiate plan; at its core was a magnificent great hall, which was surrounded by domestic and service ranges erected around courtyards and connected by cloisters and alleyways; the ducal apartments lay behind the great hall, and had windows facing the river. The whole precinct was surrounded by a fortified wall, bisected by a massive gateway with a portcullis on the Strand, a smaller gate next to it for pedestrians, and a river gate at the side. There was a chapel to the right of the front gateway, a library, a treasure chamber, extensive wine cellars, accommodation for an army of servants and retainers, stables, orchards, a fish pond and beautiful rose and vegetable gardens with ornamental rails and flower borders, all sloping down to the Thames; the Duke loved his gardens, and actively involved himself in their planning and maintenance. At the rear of the palace, elegant terraces overlooked the Thames, which in the fourteenth century was much wider and shallower than it is today. A low wall ran along the river’s edge, and stairs led down to the landing stages, where barges could be moored. With the narrow streets of London so congested, most people preferred to travel by river. John’s richly appointed barges — he bought a new one in 1373 — had a master and a crew of eight oarsmen,
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and he would use them whenever he wished to visit the court at Westminster or, later on, the Black Prince at Kennington Palace on the Surrey shore of the Thames.

John of Gaunt made yet more improvements to the Savoy. He employed the great master mason, Henry Yevele, whose work can still be seen in Westminster Hall, Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral. Yevele was much in demand, for it was he who refined and improved the new Perpendicular style of architecture, with its flattened arches and fan vaulting; he had worked for the Black Prince at Kennington, and would do so for Edward III and Richard II at Westminster, the Tower of London, Eltham Palace, Sheen Palace and Leeds Castle. John of Gaunt also commissioned Henry Yevele to make improvements to Hertford Castle.

The interiors of the Savoy were sumptuous. The furniture, rich beds and headboards — one of which, emblazoned with heraldic shields, was said to be worth 1,000 marks (£125,221)
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— French tapestries,
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silk hangings, gold and silver plate, stained glass, carpets, cushions, fine napery and ornaments all afforded lavish evidence of the Duke’s immense wealth and superb taste. His registers record payments for numerous luxury items, including jewelled goblets, devotional books with gem-encrusted leather bindings, images of the Virgin Mary, sculpted reliefs of the Crucifixion, enamels, and rich silks from Constantinople in the Lancastrian colours of blue and white. The contents of the palace alone were valued at £10,000 (£3,756,616), and
those of the chapel at £500 (£187,831). Nothing survives, but the tapestries must have been similar to those John owned in 1393, which depicted the Frankish King Clovis, Moses confronting Pharaoh, and
The Life of the Lover and the Beloved
. The palace was also the repository for John’s priceless treasures, his armour, his furs and cloth of gold, his fabulous collection of jewels and precious stones, and his wardrobe. ‘No prince in Christendom had a finer wardrobe, and scarcely any could even match it, for there were such quantities of vessels and silver plate that five carts would hardly suffice to carry them.’
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The Savoy housed too the Duke’s secretariat and many of the written records, deeds and muniments of his Duchy.

Although he had his private apartments, John would have taken his meals in the great hall of his palace, at a table set on the dais or in a window embrasure, accompanied by his
familia
. This word applied not only to his family members, but also to the knights of his retinue, his confessor and honoured guests. The food was prepared by his master cook and an army of helpers, who worked in the various service departments: the kitchen, pantry, buttery, poultry, scullery and saltery. Dishes served at the ducal table included venison, game, salmon, bream, stockfish, herring, rabbit, poultry and lampreys. At the great feasts of the year — Christmas, Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost — the Duke’s arrival in the hall was heralded by his trumpeters.
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There is no way of knowing if the present Savoy Chapel, which is owned by the Queen as Duchess of Lancaster, occupies the site of the original palace chapel, because no plans of the palace survive, and in the early sixteenth century, Henry VII ‘beautifully rebuilt’ the Savoy
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as the Hospital of St John, for the succour of the poor. This tiny gem of a chapel, which was part of Henry VII’s foundation, suffered damage by fire in 1864, and was largely rebuilt in the Perpendicular style the following year by Queen Victoria; since 1937, it has served as the Chapel of the Royal Victorian Order. Interestingly, the Savoy Chapel, like the hospital it served, was originally dedicated to St John the Baptist, one of John of Gaunt’s own name-saints.
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What was he like, this exalted Duke, in whose household Katherine lived, and whose amorous interest she would one day ignite? He is known to most people largely through his brief appearance in Shakespeare’s
Richard II
, in which ‘old John of Gaunt, time-honour’d Lancaster’ features as a dying elder statesman who makes a famously patriotic speech about the kingdom he has loyally served for many decades:

But this is not the sum of the man — far from it, for these sentiments are unlikely to have informed the thinking of the real John of Gaunt, who was a remarkable and complex character, entirely undeserving of the poor reputation cast upon him for centuries by historians and other writers, who mostly followed the calumnies of hostile chroniclers or accepted Sir John Fortescue’s fifteenth-century view of John as the oppressive over-mighty subject
par excellence
. For them, he was an unscrupulous and immoral tyrant.
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It was not until 1904, with the appearance of Sydney Armitage-Smith’s monumental biography, that a fairer and more considered view of John of Gaunt emerged.

For better or worse, John of Gaunt made a tremendous impact on the history of England; even today, oral traditions, legends and folk memories of him still survive throughout the Lancastrian ‘countries’, as his domains were called.
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His name is writ large in the annals of the age of chivalry. He was the greatest English nobleman of his time.

In appearance, even as a young man, John of Gaunt was commanding. In
The Boke of the Duchesse
, Chaucer gives us a tantalising glimpse of him at the age of twenty-eight, describing him as ‘a splendidly looking knight … of noble stature’ with a ‘stately manner’. Traditionally, it has been asserted that John was unusually tall, because from 1625 it was claimed that a suit of armour measuring 6’8” in height, which is still preserved in the Tower of London, had been made for him; in 1699, a visitor to the Tower admired its codpiece, ‘which was almost as big as a poop-lantern, and better worth a lewd lady’s admiration than any piece of antiquity in the Tower’;
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but — sadly for those who relish such ‘evidence’ of the Duke’s famed virility — it has now been established that this armour dates only from around 1540, was made in Germany, and has nothing to do with John of Gaunt.

The only other surviving description of John is to be found in the Portuguese chronicle written by Fernño Lopes, whose account was based on the recollections of people who had known the Duke. According to this, he was ‘a man with his limbs well-built and straight’; spare and lean, ‘he did not seem to have as much flesh as was required by the height of his body’, yet he was vigorous and healthy, as befitted a warrior who
played a prominent part in no fewer than a dozen military and naval campaigns,
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and had, according to Lopes, ‘high majestic features and piercing eyes’. Surviving representations of ‘this vial full of Edward’s sacred blood’
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depict a hollow-cheeked, bearded man with the angular bone-structure and aristocratic aquiline nose of the Plantagenets. In youth, John probably looked young for his years: in 1368, Chaucer thought he was twenty-four, when he was actually twenty-eight, but then he was ‘not bushy-bearded at this stage’.

There are several surviving images that enable us to gain some idea of what John of Gaunt looked like. The earliest-known contemporary picture of him was in a mural depicting Edward III, his family and St George adoring the Virgin. This once adorned a wall at the eastern end of St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster, and was painted after 1355, since Thomas of Woodstock, the King’s youngest son, who was born that year, is included. In no sense were these portraits. Like his father and brothers, John appears in armour, kneeling. Although the faces of each of the eighteen-inch-high figures are all different, John’s is a blank, for the paint had perished before the picture was copied.
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This mural, which had lain hidden under panelling for centuries, was discovered in 1800, only to be covered up again almost immediately, and then destroyed in the fire that burned down the palace in 1834. It is known only through coloured drawings made from tracings in 1800, which were engraved by Richard Smirke for the Society of Antiquaries of London.

John also appeared in armour on his tomb effigy, but the only surviving drawings of his lost tomb depict the effigy that replaced the original in the sixteenth century.
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His seal as King of Castile and León shows him enthroned, bearded and wearing a coronet over his chin-length hair. This is a conventional image of a king rather than a portrait.
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There is a contemporary coloured miniature of John of Gaunt in the ‘Liber Benefactorum’ of St Albans Abbey, which dates from
c
.1380. This shows him at prayer, wearing a long gold and pink robe embroidered in red, with a gold collar, four large buttons down the front, red undersleeves and red boots; he sports wavy reddish-brown hair — again chin-length — crowned by a gold coronet, wears a fashionable forked beard and has somewhat florid features, the delineation of which suggests that the artist, a lay illuminator called Alan Strayler, knew what his subject looked like. John was about forty at this time.
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There are posthumous stained-glass portraits of John of Gaunt in the chapel of All Souls College, Oxford, which was executed in 1437, and in the St Cuthbert memorial window in York Minster, which dates from
c
.1440.
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Parts of the head in the All Souls glass were replaced in the seventeenth century, but in both windows he is portrayed with the same forked
beard as in the St Albans miniature, and bears a remarkable resemblance to his father, Edward III, as he appears in the effigy on his tomb in Westminster Abbey. The small statue of John as a weeper on that tomb, which dates from the same period as the St Albans miniature, also shows him with a forked beard and long gown. The beard would have been kept trimmed by the Duke’s barber, Godfrey.
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A panel portrait in oils of John of Gaunt, wearing armour and helm, in which his finely chiselled facial features bear a striking similarity to those in other representations of him, is in the collection of his descendant, the Duke of Beaufort, at Badminton. Once thought to have been painted from life in 1390, it is now known to have been executed between 1600 and 1650. It is ascribed to a Dutch artist called Luca Cornelli, of whom nothing more has been discovered; it was once claimed erroneously that he was a court painter to Henry VIII. There is a possibility that this vivid portrait is based on a lost original; interestingly, John is identified by his arms as King of Castile and León, and by the heraldic symbols of those kingdoms — a castle and three lions. As he renounced his claims to Castile and León in 1388, one would expect any later portrait to refer to him simply as Duke of Lancaster, so this portrait might pos-sibly be a copy of one that was executed from life before 1388. Richard II, in whose reign such an original would have been painted, pioneered the novel art of royal portraiture in England, commissioning, in
c
.1395 or later, the Wilton Diptych and the commanding full-length portrait of himself enthroned that is now in Westminster Abbey. There may well have been other portraits of the King that have not survived, so it is not beyond the bounds of belief that an artist working in England under his patronage might also have painted John of Gaunt, the foremost lord in the realm, and that this is a copy of that lost original. Alternatively — since the pose is more typical of the seventeenth than the fourteenth century — the artist could have used John’s funeral effigy in St Paul’s as a model.

John dressed stylishly and elegantly, even magnificently, but there was an element of well-bred restraint about his clothes, unusual in that age of brash display. ‘His garments were not full wide,’ observed Thomas Hoccleve, but they did reflect his elevated status; like most aristocrats of the period, he loved ceremony, ritual and the outward trappings of rank.

John was reserved and dignified in character, a proud man who was ever conscious of the
gravitas
of his high estate. According to the laudatory Chandos Herald, he ‘had many virtues’. Courteous and charming, he ‘spoke well, very measured, temperately and with good judgement, being self-controlled and good-humoured’.
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Skilled in logic and rhetoric, he was a powerful orator and accomplished at debating; Froissart calls
him ‘wise and imaginative’, and the author of the
Anonimalle Chronicle
describes him arguing his point in Parliament ‘in good form, as if he was a man of law’. Edward III himself paid tribute to the ‘probity, activity and excelling wisdom of his dearest son John’. A great traditionalist, the Duke was conventional in his tastes and outlook, and reactionary in his views. Rarely did he abuse his power. Instead, he was liberal, generous, prudent, thoughtful and above all possessed of a strong sense of honour and firm principles. He never shirked his obligations or responsibilities, nor failed in his duty. He was applauded for his sense of fair play, and once won golden opinions when he threatened to hang a cheating duellist as a traitor.
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For him, the laws of chivalry were sacrosanct, and he tried all his life to remain true to his knightly oath while modestly protesting, ‘I am no great knight myself.’ Yet, he added, ‘My greatest delight is hearing of gallant deeds of arms.’
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