Mistress of the Monarchy (42 page)

In January 1394, Henry hastened to London to take part in yet another tournament; in the midst of the excitement, he remembered to send a hamper of fish delicacies to Hertford for Mary,
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who was pregnant for the seventh time. Katherine also said farewell to John Beaufort, who departed early in 1394 on another crusade in Lithuania and Hungary, during which he is thought to have fought with the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Lettow. Katherine was living in Lincoln or at Kettlethorpe for at least part of 1394: on 27 February, in order to lay claim to his inheritance, Thomas Swynford was required to present proof of age at Lincoln, and Katherine was ordered to be present; she was there one Friday when he and his many witnesses turned up with their evidence, which was some time between 22 June 1394 and 22 June 1395.
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After this, Sir Thomas apparently took possession of his manors and established himself at Kettlethorpe; his mother Katherine would nevertheless remain in control there, for Thomas was often absent in the service of the House of Lancaster.

In the Hilary Parliament of 1394, John of Gaunt found himself the object of vitriolic criticism by the abrasive Earl of Arundel, who was jealous of his influence with the King. It was contrary to the King’s honour for him to be often seen walking arm in arm with the Duke, Arundel complained, and to wear the Lancastrian livery collar; furthermore, the Duke had so intimidated the lords with ‘rough and bitter words’ that they were now afraid to speak up in Council or Parliament; and the King should not have alienated Aquitaine to his uncle, nor given him money to invade Castile. Arundel had hoped to play on the King’s vanity by implying that the monarch was the Duke’s client, but a ‘grieved and displeased’ Richard spoke up vigorously for his uncle and forced Arundel to apologise publicly to him — after which Parliament declared the Duke free from any cause for blame, and Arundel, who had received no support from the other nobles, retired to sulk in private.
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Afterwards, John of Gaunt, clearly fearing that his integrity and loyalty had been impugned, wrote to the King: ‘I dare to call God to witness, and all loyal men, that never have I imagined, or tried to do, anything against your most honourable estate.’
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Following his sons’ departure, John also left England that spring: in March 1394, he went to France, where, on the 27th, he concluded a four-year truce with the French.
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He was therefore out of the country when the Duchess Constance died on 24 March at Leicester Castle,
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leaving him a free man.

I
t is unlikely that John of Gaunt had gone to France earlier in the month knowing that his wife was dying. There is no indication that Constance had suffered a long illness — she was at a hunting party and festive gathering at Much Hadham in July 1393
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— and in those days even a virus could prove fatal.
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Moreover, her funeral was delayed until July so that the Duke could attend it; after signing a peace treaty at Leulighen on 24 March,
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the day of her death, he was obliged to remain in France until late June.

The year 1394 was to witness the tragic deaths of three royal ladies in quick succession, although ‘the grief of all these deaths by no means equalled that of the King’, for on 7 June, at Sheen, Queen Anne died of the plague, plunging Richard II — who had loved her ‘even to madness’
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— into such all-consuming grief that he was to order that the wing of the palace in which she had breathed her last be razed to the ground.
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Then, on 4 July,
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just ten days after John of Gaunt’s return to England, and a month after she had borne her seventh child, a daughter called Philippa, Mary de Bohun passed away at Peterborough, aged only twenty-six and possibly a victim of puerperal fever. Katherine Swynford may have been in attendance on her during her last weeks, and the loss of her young patroness must have caused her considerable grief.

Meanwhile, John of Gaunt had travelled north to Leicester to attend Constance’s burial before the high altar in the collegiate church of St Mary in the Newarke at Leicester, and a hasty decision was made to have Mary interred there the next day in the choir,
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while all the mourners were gathered; these obsequies took place with great ceremony, and at staggering expense, totalling £584.5s.9d (£255,621),
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on 5 and 6 July, just days after Mary had died.
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It has sometimes been suggested that Constance was buried at Leicester because the Duke neither wanted her to lie beside him for eternity nor considered that she merited a great state funeral; yet he did not choose to be buried with his beloved Katherine Swynford either, while the cost of Constance’s obsequies and her interment in the established mausoleum of the House of Lancaster strongly suggests that John wanted every honour paid to the memory of the woman who — whatever tensions had lain between them — had been his Duchess for twenty-two years.

Having received two salutary reminders of the frailty of human life, John of Gaunt soon afterwards ordered alabaster effigies of himself and Blanche of Lancaster for their tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral, and he was to raise ‘a tomb of marble with an image of brass like a queen on it’ for his ‘dear companion, Dame Constance’.
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He also, in his will of 1399, arranged for an obit to be celebrated every year on the anniversary of her death in perpetuity, for the safety of her soul.
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In 1413, Henry V commissioned an effigy of his mother, Mary de Bohun, from a London coppersmith, which would lie on her marble tomb.
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The third royal funeral was somewhat more dramatic. At the end of July, when Queen Anne was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, the Earl of Arundel, still smarting after his forced apology to John of Gaunt, had the insolence to turn up late, provoking an outraged Richard II to strike him in the face and draw blood, thereby desecrating the sanctity of the church, which had to be re-consecrated before the funeral could continue. Arundel was committed to the Tower for several weeks, then made to swear an oath guaranteeing his future loyalty
and
pay the King a large indemnity.
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John of Gaunt prudently went north; on 24 August, he was with his grieving family at Pontefract, and the following day, having heard to his dismay that there were people at court questioning his own loyalty to the King, and being mindful that Richard’s temper was on a short fuse, he wrote him a letter protesting his loyalty.
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This evidently paid off, for in September, the King confirmed him as Duke of Aquitaine, which meant that John would have to go there without delay, in order to enforce the royal authority and look after his interests in the Duchy. Immediately he began assembling his retinue at Leicester, prior to sailing from Plymouth early in October.

John Beaufort was going with him
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— it is possible that, around this time, the Duke planned to create a new fief for the young man in Aquitaine, although this was not to remain a viable prospect for long
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— and Katherine was no doubt bracing herself for another prolonged parting from John, and from their son. Silva-Vigier suggests that she
actually accompanied the Duke to Aquitaine on this occasion, but there is no evidence or comment in the chronicles or official records to support this theory, which there surely would have been had she gone. The fact that the Chancery was not leased to the new Chancellor until after 1396, and that he had had to be found alternative accommodation in 1391–2, strongly suggests that Katherine was still living there during the Duke’s absence in 1394–5.

By the time he left for Aquitaine, John had probably made up his mind to marry Katherine Swynford. The text of a letter from Pope Boniface IX dated 1 September 1396 makes it clear that ‘when Constance, of blessed memory, had come to the end of her life, Duke John and Katherine, desiring to marry’ had applied for a dispensation, which was necessary because of the compaternity created by John long ago acting as godfather to Katherine’s daughter.
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This reads as if the approach to the Pope had been made as soon after the death of the Duchess as was decent, and it also suggests that John had already resolved to marry Katherine as soon as he was free to do so; this would in part explain the esteem in which she had been held by his family and the King, and it may also have been the reason why Katherine had never remarried. Armitage-Smith thought that the Duke may have enquired even before Constance died if there were impediments to his marrying Katherine, although that is unlikely, as Constance’s death seems to have been rather sudden. Any enquiries were probably made after her demise.

According to Pope Boniface, the couple, ‘being not unaware that John had lifted from the font a daughter of the same Katherine, begotten by another man, and that later the same Duke John adulterously knew the same Katherine, she being free of wedlock, but with marriage still existing between the same Duke John and the aforesaid Constance, and begot offspring of her; and believing that marriage between them was now allowable because, the impediment of the aforesaid compaternity not being notorious but rather occult’, sent a petitioner (whose name is unknown) to the Holy See to obtain the necessary dispensation. The Pope obligingly delivered to this petitioner a brief, ‘signed by our own hand, and containing therein a declaration of our having given our consent in this matter by word of mouth’.
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Because the impediment was not notorious, Boniface had felt it necessary to give only an oral dispensation. The ‘credential brief’ in which it was enshrined does not survive, and there is no record of the date on which it was issued. Given the time it would have taken for the petitioner to travel from England to Rome, where the legitimist Papacy was now based, the delays that may have been encountered in obtaining the brief
(although the Pope would not have wished to inconvenience his staunch supporter, the Duke of Lancaster, too greatly), and the fact that the marriage did not take place until January 1396, it may be that the dispensation was not applied for until a year had elapsed since Constance’s death, and that the marriage was further delayed by John setting his affairs in order in Aquitaine, for he did not return to England until December 1395. This is not to say that marrying Katherine was not a priority with John, just that he had to wait for a decent interval to pass after Constance’s death, for the Pope to act, and to meet his own obligations, before he could proceed.

It was virtually unheard of at that time for a royal duke to marry his mistress, especially one who was the daughter of a humble foreign knight, and John could have been in no doubt that the union would prove highly controversial. Twice he had entered into wedlock for political reasons: once successfully, the other time far less so. Even now, at fifty-five and old by contemporary standards, he was an eligible prize in the European marriage market, and could easily have made a political alliance that favoured his cherished peace process with France, or an advantageous union with an heiress that would handsomely augment the Lancastrian domains. That he did not pursue such alliances speaks volumes. Instead, he was resolved to make the unusual, highly unconventional and indeed brave choice of marrying for love. There can be little doubt that his feelings for Katherine played a large part in his decision — Froissart says he ‘had always loved and maintained this Lady Katherine’, and the settlements that he was to make on her during their marriage are ample evidence of his feelings for her.

But there was more to it than that. ‘From affection to [their] children, the Duke married their mother,’ Froissart adds, making it seem as if Katherine really did not come into the equation, although the chronicler may have drawn this conclusion himself, unable, along with many other people, to comprehend that the mighty Duke of Lancaster had so far forgotten himself as to marry for love. Yet love for Katherine aside, John’s desire to see the Beauforts legitimised was surely a powerful enough motive for marrying her, and perhaps just as important to the Duke. They were now growing up and proving themselves able and gifted, and he must have wanted them to enjoy the high offices of Church and State for which their royal blood befitted them and for which he had had them educated; and he perhaps also had a view to forging advantageous noble alliances through them. He may, too, in the wake of that series of tragic deaths, have felt the hand of time upon him; he was fifty-four when Constance died, and — as we have seen — aged beyond his years, although he must have been reasonably fit at this
time because he was contemplating going crusading against the Turks in distant lands; nevertheless, he perhaps felt an impulsion to seize whatever happiness he could while he could still enjoy life,
and
secure his children’s future before he died. These things, Katherine and the children, were clearly so important to him that he was prepared to brave public opinion to have his desire.

It was almost certainly with this aim in mind that, probably before he went abroad, John made provision for his eldest son by Katherine, and for the Chaucers. It was possibly in 1394, and certainly before 28 September 1397, that John Beaufort was married to Margaret Holland, daughter of Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent, the son of the late Princess Joan by her first husband; Margaret was therefore a niece of the King, and she had been born about 1381–5. By 1395, in order to provide for the young couple, the Duke had purchased for John Beaufort the reversion of the manors of Curry Rivel, Langport and Martock in Somerset.
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Around the same time, John made a gift of 20 marks (£2,917) to Thomas Chaucer, doubled his pension to £20 (£8,750), and paid £100 (£43,749) to secure his marriage to a wealthy heiress, Maud, the daughter of Sir John Burghersh of Ewelme; she came from a respected baronial family and brought him large estates in Surrey and Oxfordshire.
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Such lavish generosity towards Katherine’s nephew indicates not only a desire to please her, but also a genuine appreciation of Thomas Chaucer’s worth. Nor was Thomas’s father Geoffrey, still ensconced in the wilds of Somerset, forgotten, for it was during this year of 1394–5 that Henry of Derby sent him a grant of money and a fur-lined scarlet robe.