Mistress of the Monarchy (15 page)

That said, it is unlikely that Katherine got to exercise her pious privilege. The ducal household was at Bolingbroke in Lincolnshire until 18 April 1365, then it moved south to the Savoy; it was still in residence there on 4 June, and did not arrive at Leicester until 14 June, some time after Pentecost,
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and too late for Katherine to have her private services.

By 12 September 1366, Philippa de Roët, Katherine’s younger sister, had become the wife of Geoffrey Chaucer, now a Yeoman of the Chamber to Edward III; Chaucer must have been newly appointed to this post because his name does not appear in a comprehensive list of members of the royal household compiled in the summer of 1366;
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he was to hold it until 1372.

On that 12 September, Edward III issued letters patent granting a life annuity of ten marks (£1,119) — to be paid twice yearly — to Philippa ‘Chaucy’.
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A Chancery warrant of the same date describes her as ‘Philippa Chaucer, one of the
damoiselles
of the Chamber of our very dear companion the Queen’.
⁶⁵

Like Katherine and Hugh Swynford, the newly married Chaucers were both busily employed in a royal household; as we have seen, marriage between royal servants was not uncommon.
⁶⁶
Philippa’s duties increasingly involved looking after the ailing Queen, while Geoffrey, when not serving the King on a personal basis, was to be entrusted with several sensitive diplomatic missions. On 20 June 1367, Edward III granted ‘our beloved yeoman’ Geoffrey Chaucer a pension of twenty marks (£1,926) a year for good service.
⁶⁷
His status is variously
described, but the titles used — yeoman, valet (Latin,
valettus, valettorum
) or esquire (French,
esquier
) of the King’s Chamber — were interchangeable at that time, and all meant the same thing: a civil servant who performed confidential duties for his master as well as a wide range of tasks including the purveying of goods, the conveying of money, the making of beds, setting of tables or lighting of torches, as directed by the Chamberlain of the Household.
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Chaucer’s manifold talents were already held in high regard by the royal family, and the likelihood is that his role as yeoman encompassed more responsible duties; there is evidence that in the spring of 1366, the year before he took up his new post, he had been sent to Spain on a secret diplomatic mission that was probably connected with dynastic turmoil in Castile,
⁶⁹
a matter that was to bear heavily on the fortunes of John of Gaunt. And in 1368, Chaucer was sent to France on official business.
⁷⁰
We might conclude, therefore, that his duties at court were by no means limited to domestic chores.

Geoffrey was remarkably clever and possessed of great charm, but his appearance belied that. Surviving pictures of him in later life show a rotund little man of about 5’6”with brown hair, a forked beard and dusty black garments. He was wise, tactful, discreet, shrewd and observant, and his understanding of human nature was profound. A well-read, objective scholar, a curious observer of life, he loved delving into the mysteries of science, astrology, philosophy and religion.

Thanks to his abilities and his discretion, Chaucer was to be able to use his talents in a variety of capacities, and would often be rewarded handsomely; his marriage to the daughter of a knight, a girl who was above him in station, was a measure of his early success. He knew Latin, Italian and French, and would undertake seven more diplomatic missions abroad for the King in the 1370s; in Italy, during that decade, he would perhaps meet those great literary colossi Petrarch and Boccaccio. In England, his royal service, and his marriage, gave him privileged access to the royal family.

Geoffrey’s greatest gift, of course, was the ability to write wonderful rich, witty, earthy verse in the English language, a departure from the usual French poetry beloved in courtly circles. Yet the classical and allegorical themes of some of his works show that they were indeed meant to be circulated, read and enjoyed at court by a cultivated audience, and it would appear that by 1368 at the latest, Geoffrey had already earned himself a reputation as a maker of verses, and that his compositions were admired by John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster. His younger contemporary, the poet John Gower, tells us that ‘in the flower of his youth’, Chaucer was already enthralling the country with
‘ditties and glad songs’. He was not the first to write verse in English — although he was the first to use iambic pentameter, ‘the golden couplet’ — but it was he who was responsible for popularising poetry in the vernacular and he who, in so doing, ensured that in the decades to come, English would become the accepted literary language in England.

Geoffrey and Philippa were probably married well before September 1366. Their first child was almost certainly the daughter who would enter St Helen’s Priory, London, in 1377; her name at that time was recorded as ‘Elisabeth Chausier’. Her parentage is indicated by her surname (there was no regularity of spelling then), her likely date of birth, her placement in a convent that lay a stone’s throw from her father’s lodgings in Aldgate, and the fact that in 1381, John of Gaunt most generously dowered an ‘Elizabeth Chaucy’, who was almost certainly the same person, to the highly select Barking Abbey at a time when her aunt, Katherine Swynford, was his mistress. Elizabeth may even have been named after another aunt, the nun Elizabeth de Roët; as has been noted, the placing of Elizabeth de Roët, Margaret Swynford and Elizabeth Chaucer in convents may well indicate a family tradition of offering Roët daughters to God.

Given that she first became a nun in 1377, Elizabeth was presumably born no later than 1365, the year after Chaucer perhaps returned from Ireland. Thus her parents had probably married in 1364, possibly as soon as Philippa de Roët reached twelve, the minimum canonical age for girls to marry and have sex. The marriage was probably arranged by the Queen herself, who doubtless felt responsible for seeing the younger Roët girl safely disposed in wedlock and her future provided for. Within two years of it, Chaucer became a wealthy man, for his father died in 1366, leaving him all his property.

There was just possibly a second daughter of the marriage, and improbably a third. An Agnes Chaucer, who may have been a daughter or granddaughter of Geoffrey and Philippa, and was perhaps named for Chaucer’s mother, is listed as one of the
damoiselles
of the Queen at the coronation of Henry IV in 1399;
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however, Henry IV was a widower at the time of his coronation, and his second wife, Joan of Navarre, was not crowned until February 1403, so there is something amiss here. And it was not until the seventeenth century that it was asserted that Chaucer had a daughter called Katherine — there is no contemporary record of her, so it is unlikely that she existed.
⁷²

Living with a genius cannot always have been easy for Philippa. Geoffrey owned sixty books — an amazing number for a man in his position — and he spent much of his leisure time reading them or foraging
about in the many libraries in London. It has been suggested that he drew on his own experience when he depicted the frustrated Wife of Bath ripping up and burning her husband’s books so that he would have more time for sexual dalliance. Yet although Geoffrey claimed to be primarily a bookish man, he was also a career civil servant, and perhaps came to have less and less time to spare for his wife. He could be devas-tatingly cynical, and a passage in
The Boke of the Duchesse
suggests he was also a compulsive worrier who would lie awake at night fretting.
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Thus the married life of Geoffrey and Philippa may not have been particularly harmonious. Late in life, after Philippa had died, Chaucer composed a humorous poem, ‘L’Envoy a Bukton’ (
c
.1396), for a bachelor friend of his, warning him of ‘the sorrow and woe that is in marriage’. It was, he claimed, a deadly peril for all men, and he expressed the wish that his warning would prevent Bukton from rushing madly into the dire captivity of wedlock:

From his tone, we might conclude that he had many regrets about his own marriage upon which he did not like to dwell. He ends by saying he is resolved not to fall into ‘the trap of wedding’ again.

We might infer from this, and other circumstances yet to be revealed, that his marriage had not been happy, a theory that may be supported by internal evidence from Chaucer’s own verse. He is not known to have dedicated a single poem to Philippa, and most of his allusions to married life are cynical, ironical and disrespectful, hardly what one would expect from a man who enjoyed a loving relationship with his wife. Furthermore, Chaucer tells us in
The Boke of the Duchesse, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls
and
Troilus and Criseyde
(to name a few) that he has no experience of love apart from what he has learned from books — ‘I know not love in deed’ — and his image of himself is that of an unprepossessing failure as a lover, one who is devout and chaste because he has been banished from love’s courts. This self-deprecating portrayal may not be entirely truthful — how many men would wish to portray themselves as hopeless in bed? — and it could be merely the product of Chaucer’s ironic humour, while his literary take on marriage might just reflect prevailing trends in popular humour. For in ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, he reveals that, despite his protestations elsewhere, he knows just how spiritually transcendental love between a man and a woman can be:
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These read like the words of a man who has experienced such joy, yet although they refer to marital love, it is unlikely that Geoffrey and Philippa themselves enjoyed that kind of relationship, especially since Chaucer makes it clear he thought marriage a burden to be borne. No, his experience of love was of another kind entirely. In
The Boke of the Duchesse
, written probably in 1368, he reveals that he has been possessed with a great passion for an unnamed lady for no fewer than eight years. If this is true — and one theory will be discussed in the next chapter — then this passion must have pre-dated his marriage, and may well have contributed to its failure.

All we know of Philippa herself is that, according to her countryman Froissart, she had a fine sense of protocol, which she must have learned in the course of her upbringing in the Queen’s household, and which would have served her well at court. Given the differences in their status, she may have looked down on her husband and inwardly despised his humbler birth; after all, he was just the son of a vintner, while she was the daughter of a knight, and in her veins there probably ran the blood of ancient royalty. Her sister Katherine had married a knight, and Philippa perhaps felt she had not done as well. The fact that she married beneath her is another argument in favour of her being the younger sister.

Philippa Chaucer may have been discontented with her marital lot to begin with, or she might gradually have become disillusioned. The demands of their official duties dictated that she and Geoffrey were frequently apart, and both possibly came to welcome this. Philippa was perhaps shrewish and sharp-tongued, for in
The House of Fame
, Chaucer has himself worshipping at the shrine of St Leonard, patron saint of hen-pecked husbands. And he speaks of a dream in which he is seized by an eagle’s talons and awoken by the eagle’s insistent cry, ‘Awake!’, which it speaks

We might infer that the voice that awoke the poet was that of his wife. For once, though, she has spoken kindly to him, unlike her usual tone. In ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, Chaucer may have been thinking of the deterioration of his marriage, and perhaps of a continual battle for conjugal supremacy, when he expresses the opinion that

Of course, Chaucer, like many writers, may not have based his works on his own life and experiences, but on his observations of others, the books he had read or his own imagination. In assessing the nature of his marriage, we are entirely in the realms of speculation and educated guesses, and can conclude nothing concrete.

Marriage to Philippa de Roët must inevitably have brought Chaucer into contact with his sister-in-law, Katherine Swynford, and also, no doubt, with the Lancastrian household. He was, of course, already known to the Duke and Duchess, and we might infer from
The Boke of the Duchesse
that he was on friendly if formal speaking terms with both of them. There is also some evidence to suggest that for much of his life, Chaucer enjoyed John of Gaunt’s patronage. Although there is no evidence to show that he was ever employed by the Duke, he later received a pension from him, in addition to the one he received from the Crown, and he may well have owed some, if not most, of the preferments that came his way to John’s influence. His connection by marriage to Katherine Swynford, as well as his own talents and character, must in time have accounted to some degree for the Duke’s favour.

The marriage of her sister to a valued member of the King’s household would inevitably have strengthened Katherine’s ties with the court.
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And she would certainly have benefited personally from a close kinship with Chaucer, whose wisdom, humanity and erudition cannot but have made an impact on her young and impressionable consciousness. Her mind would have been broadened by his verses and tales, her imagination aroused, and her understanding of life challenged by his thoughtful insights.