Mistress of the Monarchy (39 page)

It was probably before his departure that Katherine had lent John a substantial sum of money. The Pope had promised special remission of sins to those who helped finance the Duke’s ‘crusade’, so Katherine, mindful of her former life, was perhaps laying up treasure in Heaven. The fact that she had such funds to lend is further testimony to her financial acumen — it will be remembered that John himself had entrusted her with large sums of money for the maintenance of his daughters, and
we know she was careful with her income, and prudent in providing for the future. But when the Duke was in need, she did not hesitate to assist him liberally, showing herself selflessly sympathetic to his cause, even though it took him away from her. John did not forget her generosity, and on 16 February 1387,
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he sent instructions to his receiver in Yorkshire to repay £100 (£33,471) in part repayment of the 500 marks (£41,058) she had loaned him ‘in his great necessity’.
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We might infer from this that he and Katherine were maintaining some kind of contact while he was abroad: the interests of their children alone would surely have necessitated it.

In the spring of 1387, diplomatic solutions having failed, the Duke took Galicia, and at the end of March he and King João invaded León, a kingdom ruled by Juan I of Castile. But things did not go well — there were complaints that the Duke’s womenfolk slowed down the march; his son-in-law, Sir Thomas Morieux, died, worn out by fighting;
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and the Castilians had laid waste the land, so that countless men and horses died of starvation, dysentery and heat exhaustion. ‘These are the fortunes of war,’ observed Froissart. ‘The Duke was at his wits’ end, and weighed down by anxiety. He saw his men exhausted and ill and taking to their beds, while he himself felt so weary that he lay in his bed without moving.’ John nearly died too, but forced himself to get up and look cheerful, for the sake of maintaining morale among his men. Nevertheless, there was much muttering about his leadership of the campaign,
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even though the Count of Foix thought John had ‘conducted himself valiantly and wisely in this war’, and soon King João began urging him to abandon the fighting in favour of a return to diplomacy.
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But the Duke refused.

On 26–27 March 1387, Richard II and Anne of Bohemia visited Lincoln, to be admitted to the confraternity of the cathedral. It is hard to conceive that Katherine, probably a member herself, was not among the congregation that witnessed this ceremony. Richard II thought highly of her, and may well have singled her out on that day, because the following month, he appointed ‘Lady Katherine de Swynford’ a Lady of the Garter (or, more correctly, a ‘Lady of the Fraternity of St George and of the Society of the Garter’),
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the highest English honour to which a woman might aspire. Her formal robes of scarlet wool embroidered with blue taffeta garters in gold, with the motto
Honi soit qui mal y pense
in blue silk, and a matching hood, were paid for by the King the following August.
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In 1387, Katherine would have gone to the glittering court at Windsor, donned her robes, participated in the Garter ceremonies with the other
ten ladies of the order, and attended the great feast hosted by the King on St George’s Day. Doubtless she met up with many people she had known during her glory days with the Duke, but Katherine could now hold her head up at court in the knowledge that she was there in an honourable and legitimate capacity. Even so, her admission to the most prestigious order of knighthood in Europe was probably a tacit acknowledgement by the King of her special relationship with John of Gaunt, and of her influence with him. It might also indicate that the scandal surrounding their affair had died down and that people knew they were no longer lovers.

Edward III had begun the practice of appointing ‘Dames of the Fraternity’ with Queen Philippa and his eldest daughter Isabella, but since the beginning of his reign, Richard II had been assiduous in admitting ladies to the order, notably his mother Joan of Kent, the Duchess Constance, her sister Isabella, and Philippa and Elizabeth of Lancaster in 1378–9, and Queen Anne, Catalina of Lancaster, Eleanor de Bohun and Lady Mohun in 1384. So Katherine Swynford was in august company. But there was an ulterior motive for her advancement. By 1387, Richard was engaged in a bitter struggle with those lords who resented his reliance on worthless favourites like Robert de Vere and his former tutor Sir Simon Burley, and were demanding a new push to win the war with France: Richard had never yet led an army into the field — an abrogation of his duty, in the eyes of his martially minded magnates — and was essentially inclined to peace. That summer, Parliament itself was to demand that he remove his offensive counsellors. Richard had therefore come to a belated realisation of how loyally John of Gaunt had supported him; he knew how much John cared for Katherine, and making her a Lady of the Garter was one way in which he could show favour to his uncle and solicit his support; this would not be the first time he had promoted ladies to the order to forge useful alliances with his nobles.
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It is probably no coincidence too that Chaucer’s fortunes now began to improve: in July, he was sent to Calais on the King’s service, and in August he was acting as a justice of the peace at Dartford in Kent
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— more sops to the Duke perhaps.

But John had far more pressing matters on his mind. His campaign in León had ended cruelly in dysentery, mass desertions and disaster, he had failed to rally sufficient Iberian backing for his cause, and he now saw that there was no prospect of him ever taking Castile.
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His army, encamped on an open plain in the burning sun, was decimated by the bloody flux. ‘You must believe that the Duke of Lancaster was not without trouble night or day, for he was sorely ill, and his valiant knights dead. He sorrowed for them and cried (if one can say so) every day, and took
everything to heart.’
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To make matters worse, King João fell seriously ill and nearly died, as a result of which his distraught bride, Philippa of Lancaster, suffered a miscarriage. Their recovery was seen as little more than a miracle.
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One of those who perished of dysentery in Léon may have been Philippa Chaucer. On 18 June 1387, Geoffrey collected her annuity as usual from the Exchequer, but on 7 November, when the next instalment was due, he fetched only his own pension. Nor did he ever pick up any more payments to Philippa.
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Since the usual reason for disappearing from these records was death, the assumption must be that she died between 18 June and 17 November 1387.
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It has been suggested that a stone effigy of a mediaeval lady that was discovered in the nineteenth century beneath the floor of the church of St Mary the Virgin at Old Worldham in Hampshire is that of Philippa Chaucer. This claim is based on the evidence of a brooch, or ‘fermail’, on the breast of the figure, which is said to display a Roët wheel. However, the design bears very little resemblance to that emblem, and in fact is common to such brooches. The costume, moreover, is that of the first half of the thirteenth century (when the church was built), not the last quarter of the fourteenth.
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Of course, Philippa could have died in Lincolnshire and been buried there, perhaps at Kettlethorpe — that is the traditional version — or even in Lincoln Cathedral, to which she was entitled as a member of its confraternity. It has also been suggested that she returned to Hainault and spent the rest of her life there, having inherited property in that region.
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But the most credible theory is that she accompanied Constance to Spain and died there, which would account for there being no record of her death in England and no known tomb. If she did succumb to dysentery in the heat of León, she was probably buried in a pit with other victims, with scant ceremony and no memorial.

Wherever Philippa died, Katherine had lost her sister, and she must have mourned her sincerely: they had evidently been close in recent years, living often in the same household. There is no record of their mutual bereavement bringing Chaucer and Katherine closer together: their lives seem hardly to have coincided for a long time afterwards. For Geoffrey, who never made any reference to his wife’s death in his verse, there must have been feelings of regret, but his loss did not diminish his cynicism regarding marriage — far from it, as his later poems show. Nor would he ‘fall of wedding in the trap’ again.

It was now painfully obvious that John of Gaunt’s long-cherished dream of winning the throne of Castile was never going to come to fruition.

Finally accepting this, he agreed terms with King Juan I, and at Trancoso, in July 1387, a settlement was proposed whereby, in return for a cash payment of £100,000 (£33,470,817) and an annual pension of £6,666 (£2,231,165), John and Constance would relinquish their Castilian claims to their fifteen-year-old daughter Catalina and enter into negotiations for her marriage to Juan’s son Enrique.
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Just before John of Gaunt concluded the peace with Juan I, he made an emotional promise to the Virgin Mary to amend his way of life, and was seen weeping in repentance for his sins.
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This echoed the public avowal he had made in 1381, and begs the question whether or not he had lapsed into his old promiscuous ways. But given how ill and weak he was at this time, that is unlikely. Was he referring to Katherine Swynford? Although he had been abroad for over a year, he was perhaps still carrying the proverbial torch for her, and might have maintained contact between them, thereby affronting his wife. If so, that contact can only have been intermittent: that summer, there were alarming rumours in England, but they were just that, for even Walsingham had no idea of what was really happening in Spain; that the Duke’s army had suffered terrible losses was known, but some were claiming that the hot weather had ‘induced deadly plague’.
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We can only imagine what Katherine and her children would have felt if they heard that.

That same month, a Castilian assassin’s attempt to murder John and Constance by poison left them shaken and demoralised; the man confessed and was burned to death, apparently on the Duke’s orders.
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In August, John was well enough to accompany King João to Portugal;
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at Oporto, the next month, after confirming a treaty of friendship with Portugal that still holds good today, and is England’s most ancient alliance, John took his leave of his daughter and son-in-law, and sailed with Constance to Bayonne;
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he would never again set eyes on Philippa, and parting from her must have been a wrench, for she had married at the unusually late age of twenty-seven, having remained in her father’s care for far longer than most daughters of her caste, and there was obviously a close bond between them.
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On 26 May 1388, Richard II appointed John King’s Lieutenant in Aquitaine,
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and for the next eighteen months the Duke would remain in the south of France, ruling the Duchy. At Bayonne, in 1389, he received Thomas Chaucer into his retinue, retaining him for life at an annual fee of £10 (£5,102),
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and appointed him Constable of Knaresborough Castle.
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From now on, Thomas Chaucer’s fortunes would be closely linked to those of the House of Lancaster.

On 8 July 1388, John of Gaunt and Juan I concluded the Treaty of Bayonne, which confirmed the proposals made at Trancoso, and in
September, Catalina, now sixteen, tall, fair and very beautiful,
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was married to the Infante Enrique, the nine-year-old heir to Castile, at Fuentarrabia; she became Queen of Castile when he succeeded as Enrique III in October 1390.
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One of the witnesses to the treaty, unusually, was the Duke’s long-serving physician, Lewis Recouchez, whose presence has led several historians to wonder if John was still unwell as a result of the rigours of the campaign.
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After the wedding, with the crown of Castile irrevocably beyond their reach, and their only child royally married, John and Constance no longer needed each other, and appear to have abandoned all pretence of marital unity. From now on, they would effectively live apart. She was of no further political importance to him, and accordingly there are few further references to her in the chronicles. The Duke continued to provide generously for her, but there was to be no more pretence of marital felicity.

For Constance, the abandonment of her cherished hopes must have been hard to bear. In October, she went to visit her daughter and new son-in-law in Castile, where she had her father’s remains exhumed from the field of Montiel and honourably reburied with his ancestors. She tried to persuade King Juan to use his influence to end the Great Schism, which had left one Pope in Avignon and another in Rome, and also worked to foster good relations between her husband the Duke and the House of Trastamara.
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Constance would not return to England until the following year, and then she would live mainly at Tutbury, dissociating herself once more from the Lancastrian household and the court, and surrounding herself with her Castilian ladies and gentlemen.
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Her withdrawal would leave the way clear for the relationship between the Duke and Katherine Swynford to flourish once more.

Meanwhile, England had descended into political turmoil. Those magnates who opposed the rule of Richard II — who styled themselves the Lords Appellant — had finally had their way and purged the royal household of his favourites, reminding the King that he was still a minor and forcing him to accept councillors of their own choosing. Richard retaliated by having Parliament declare their actions unlawful and treasonable, but he was no match for the might of the lords. In November 1387, three of the Appellants — Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, and the Earls of Arundel and Warwick — angrily accused Robert de Vere and the King’s other favourites of treason, and on 20 December, Henry of Derby, who with Thomas Mowbray had lately joined the Appellants, defeated de Vere in a skirmish at Radcot Bridge and was hailed as a hero. Afterwards, de
Vere fled into exile, never to return. (In 1392, he was fatally savaged by a boar whilst hunting at Louvain.) By this point, matters had reached such a crisis that for a few days in late December, Richard II, now a captive in the Tower, was effectively deposed.