Mistress of the Monarchy (8 page)

Thus rejected, John stole away and hid his sorrow for many days. But his desire was such that he determined to persist in his suit, intent on overcoming all resistance, and in the end, after many months, he joyfully won the heart of his lady. ‘ To seal the gift, she gave a ring’, which to him was ‘the utmost precious thing’; he felt as if he had been ‘from death to life upcast’.

All this would have had little relevance to the realities of royal matchmaking, but it had everything to do with the game of courtly love, and no doubt the young and ardent John of Gaunt took full advantage of the opportunities afforded by that convention, for all that his was essentially an arranged marriage. From what Chaucer tells us, we may infer that he set himself to win Blanche’s heart as well as her hand. For him, she would always be ‘my lady bright, whom I have loved with all my might’.

There is other testimony beside Chaucer’s to support the claim that John did fall in love with Blanche: his apparent faithfulness to her through all their years of marriage; his inconsolable grief at her passing; his enduring homage to her memory; and his desire to be buried beside her. Of course, that could equally have been inspired by a wish to be laid to rest beside the woman from whom he had derived his title and wealth, and who was the mother of his heir, but taken with all the other evidence, it would appear to have been motivated by deep affection and tender memories too.

And given that this was a love match, it is feasible that John’s ardour for his lady was well established by the time he spent that Christmas at Hatfield, for Chaucer tells us that Blanche kept him at bay for a year. This combination of true love and political and dynastic desirability was most unusual in that era of arranged marriages — but John of Gaunt was more than once to prove unconventional when it came to love and marriage.

John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster were married on Sunday 19 May 1359 in a lavish ceremony in the Queen’s Chapel at Reading Abbey, one of the foremost Benedictine monasteries in the realm.
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He was nineteen, she seventeen. Thomas de Chynham, clerk of the Queen’s Chapel, officiated,
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and Robert Wyvil, Bishop of Salisbury, pronounced the benediction.
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John’s wedding gift to Blanche was a gold ring with a great diamond set in pearls.
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Two weeks of festivities followed the wedding. There were feasts, boat races and three days of jousting in the meadows on the banks of the Thames. Then the royal family and their guests rode to London, where tournaments were held over a further three days at Smithfield, before huge crowds. Here, the King, his four eldest sons and nineteen of his lords disguised themselves as the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London, acquitted themselves with great honour in the lists, then revealed their true identity, to the lyrical delight of the spectators. Alongside the captive Kings of France and Scotland, the Queen was watching, along with her daughters and her ladies, and it is more than likely that the Roët sisters were present too.

If Chaucer is to be believed, John’s love for Blanche deepened after marriage, and he was convinced he could not have chosen a better wife, for she was good, loyal and true, ‘the queen of all my body’. Throughout their marriage, he ‘belonged to her entire’: there is no record of him dishonouring his marriage vows, and no breath of scandal tainted his name, which is in sharp contrast to the reputation he was to gain during his second marriage. Chaucer has John declare,

Although Blanche was younger than John, and sworn to obedience and subservience to him, Chaucer implies that he always deferred to her. For

It is worthy of notice that, in his idyllic portrayal of the married love between John and Blanche, Chaucer made a dramatic departure from contemporary literary practice, in which marriage is often seen as sounding the death-knell to love, which can only truly flourish in an illicit or courtly context. This striking departure itself suggests that the conjugal relationship between John and Blanche was unusually close and tender.

It is tempting to speculate on the kind of sexual relationship those two shared. Chaucer makes it clear that Blanche had a degree of worldly knowledge and an understanding of good and evil, but says her self-esteem was such that she would not permit any diminution of respect towards her person. One would imagine that the young John, with his well-bred ideals of love and chivalry, treated his wife with deference, and even reverence, in bed. A later assertion by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, that John brought prostitutes to share in bedtime romps with his understandably distressed wife, is almost certainly malicious and groundless, and invented purely for the purposes of character assassination.

Devoted as she was, Blanche, unlike the Queen, did not accompany her husband on his frequent expeditions overseas.
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First, John was usually sent abroad on military campaigns in which there was no place for women; and second, Blanche was frequently pregnant.

The young couple were both pious, and took their spiritual life very seriously. They were joint founder members St Mary’s College next to St David’s Cathedral in Wales;
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they petitioned the Pope for the right to choose or change their confessors, for permission for themselves and members of their households to have portable altars, and for ‘plenary remission [of sins] at the hour of death’.
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Like most aristocratic ladies, Blanche undertook charitable works, and in 1367, she successfully pleaded with the King to pardon a condemned murderer.
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As we have seen, Blanche won high praise from Chaucer and Froissart, both of whom knew her personally. She could read and write, had literary
interests and enjoyed poetry,
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so she may have been their patron. Thomas Speght, in his 1602 edition of Chaucer’s works, claims that one of the poet’s earliest poems, ‘An ABC’ was ‘made, as some say, at the request of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, as a prayer for her private use, being a woman in her religion very devout’. Speght may have had access to sources that are lost to us, but his claim cannot be proved because there are no perceptible allusions to Blanche in ‘An ABC’.
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Blanche conceived her first child by the end of June 1359, and was four months pregnant when her husband left England on 28 October to accompany the King on a new military expedition to France, Edward III being determined to have himself crowned at Rheims. It was on this campaign that Geoffrey Chaucer was captured by the French and had to be ransomed.

Blanche’s baby, named Philippa in honour of the Queen (who was probably her godmother), was born on 31 March 1360.
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Out of ‘the concern that we feel for her condition’, Edward III had arranged for Blanche to stay with the Queen for the last months before her confinement,
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but her child was actually born at Leicester Castle: on 21 May, Philippa paid the expenses of the ceremony to mark her daughter-in-law’s ‘uprising’ (or ‘churching’) at Leicester.
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The midwife in attendance had perhaps been ‘our well-beloved Elyot, midwife of Leicester’, who later attended John’s second wife and Katherine Swynford, and was rewarded for her services in both cases.
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Blanche had her own household, separate from that of her husband, with her own staff of officers, ladies and servants. There is no record of Katherine de Roët being in that household before 24 January 1365 — when she is referred to as Blanche’s
ancille
(maidservant)
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— but John of Gaunt’s registers for this period have not survived, so it is quite possible that Katherine was serving the Countess considerably earlier than that, and had been placed by the Queen in Blanche’s nursery in 1360 to help care for the new baby, possibly as a rocker, a job often assigned to a young girl of Katherine’s age, which was then about ten years. Froissart just says that ‘in her youth, she had been of the household of the Duchess Blanche of Lancaster’, but he doesn’t specify how old she was at the time.

The female attendants of noblewomen were routinely required to help care for their mistress’s offspring, and given Katherine’s later appointment as governess, and her evident rapport with the young, it would appear that she had early on gained experience in looking after children and demonstrated a talent for it, thus earning the confidence of her employers. It may be that Katherine’s placement with the Duchess
Blanche came about as a result of arrangements that were made by the Queen when the pregnant Blanche was staying with her, and that Katherine was one of those who travelled with the Countess to Leicester.

Leicester Castle, the principal seat of the Earls of Leicester, was to become one of John of Gaunt’s favourite residences, probably because of its associations with Duke Henry; John ‘especially loved to be with his household’ here,
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keeping great state, entertaining lavishly and hunting in nearby Leicester Forest, where he had a substantial hunting box called — delightfully — Bird’s Nest.
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And he was popular in Leicester, for thanks to his frequent presence in their midst, the townsfolk enjoyed greater prosperity than they had ever known.

Over the years, Katherine would probably stay in Leicester Castle on many occasions. It had been built in 1068–88 and extended in the middle of the twelfth century, when the great aisled hall of stone that John and Katherine knew, with its lofty roof of braced beams, was put up; below were cellars or dungeons. Inside the castle was the ancient Saxon church of St Mary de Castro, which had been rebuilt in the twelfth century by the earls of Leicester; its slender spire was added in the fourteenth century.
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In the outer ward of the castle was the Hospital of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, founded by Henry, Earl of Lancaster, in 1331 for the care of the poor and infirm of Leicester. This foundation was extended by his son, Duke Henry, in the 1350s to house a precious relic, a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, and it was at that time that the small but ‘exceeding fair’
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collegiate church of St Mary was built beside it, with cloisters and pretty houses for the prebendaries. The whole area of four acres, which was enclosed by the thick castle wall and accessed by a stately triple-arched and vaulted gateway, became known as the
novum opus
, or the new work, which was soon being colloquially referred to as the Newarke,
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a name still in use today.

Whether Katherine was in Blanche’s household sooner rather than later, she had again been exceedingly fortunate in being placed with a kind and affectionate mistress. Blanche’s many qualities would have made her an easy person to serve, and her piety and literary interests were bound to have made some impression upon a young and intelligent girl of Katherine’s age. In Blanche, Katherine could profit from the example of a lady who conducted herself with dignity and honour, who was moderate in all her doings, with an effortless grace and serene demeanour, and who expected and received the respect that was her due, not just as a duchess but as a woman. The young and impressionable Katherine would have observed too the great love that lay
between the Duke and his lady, and perhaps hoped that she herself, in due course, would find such unusual happiness in marriage.

Katherine spent her youth, indeed her life, in the shadow of the Hundred Years War, but in 1360 that war was going well for England. Having failed to assert his claim to the Crown of France, Edward III had resorted to diplomacy, and on 8 May concluded the Treaty of Brétigny, which ceded to him all the lands he had won by conquest as well as an extended duchy of Aquitaine in full sovereignty. On 18 May, the King and his sons returned home to England in triumph, John having the added joy of greeting his new daughter. On 20 May, doubtless in recognition of his son’s good service in France, the King granted John the honour and castle of Hertford and other property.
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Hertford Castle was a residence that suitably befitted the exalted estate of the young Earl and Countess of Richmond. Formerly the property of John’s grandmother, Isabella of France (the widow of Edward II), who had died in 1358, it had been built three centuries before by William the Conqueror on low-lying land on the encircling banks of the River Lea. Successive monarchs had embellished the hall, chapel and royal apartments, but the ancient fortifications had crumbled, and never been replaced because there was no longer any need for them in this more peaceful age. Hertford was also conveniently situated, being within easy riding distance of London and Westminster. John of Gaunt instituted an ongoing programme of lavish improvements there, transforming the castle into a virtual palace, and unsurprisingly, it remained one of his favourite residences all his life.
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John was abroad again, in France with the King, from August to November 1360, and on 20 November received his first summons to Parliament, as Earl of Richmond. This marked his debut in political life.

The year 1361 saw another virulent outbreak of the dreaded Black Death, which claimed no less than a quarter of the already decimated population of England. Its most notable victim was the widely mourned Henry, Duke of Lancaster, who died on 23 March and was buried near the high altar in St Mary’s Church in the Newarke at Leicester, the foundation he himself had handsomely endowed, doubtless intending it to serve as a mausoleum for the House of Lancaster; the church was unfinished at his death, and it was left to John of Gaunt to take Duke Henry’s place as its patron and pay for its completion.
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