Mistress of the Monarchy (19 page)

After the obsequies were completed, Katherine perhaps returned to Kettlethorpe. As Chaucer remained in service at court, her sister may have gone to live in his family house in London, with their growing family, for there was no place for her in the royal household now that the Queen was dead.

The political events of 1370 were to have a profound effect on Katherine’s future, so it is worth leaving her at Kettlethorpe for the time being, and looking at what was happening in the wider world.

After Queen Philippa’s death, things went badly for the ageing Edward III. In 1370, Aquitaine came under threat from Charles V, who had allied himself with Enrique II of Castile. The harsh rule of the Black Prince had driven his Gascon subjects to appeal to the French King for aid, and as the Prince’s overlord, Charles V had summoned him to Paris to account for his cruelties, but he was too ill to comply. In retaliation, the French closed in on the Duchy.

Again John of Gaunt raised an army, this time to assist his brother in repelling the invader, and once more Sir Hugh Swynford was summoned to attend his lord. Did Katherine have a presentiment, as she saw him off on his way to join the Duke at Plymouth, that she would never see her
husband again? She had perhaps often entertained fears of this kind, for war was a dangerous business, and those who escaped death at the hands of the enemy often perished as a result of the dysentery and disease that could decimate armies.

John of Gaunt’s fleet sailed at the end of June, and once again, Geoffrey Chaucer was with it, in company with his brother-in-law, Hugh Swynford.

John would have been shocked at the change in his once-magnificent brother, who was waiting for him at Cognac. The Black Prince was virtually bedridden, suffering from what Froissart calls ‘an incurable illness’, the malady that had laid him low for three years now, since he had contracted amoebic dysentery in Castile. He could no longer ride a horse, and it was reported to Charles V that he had a dropsy from which he could never recover.
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Modern medical opinion holds that this was symptomatic of nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys that causes swollen legs, ankles, eyes and genitals, due to a build-up of fluid.
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The Prince’s condition, and the humiliation and frustration engendered by weakness and helplessness, had turned him into an embittered man.

On 24 August, the city of Limoges voluntarily — and treasonably — surrendered to the French. The Black Prince’s fury was lethal, his retribution savage. He laid siege to the city, and when the walls were breached on 18 September, ordered it to be sacked, directing that neither man, woman nor child be spared. The carnage went on relentlessly for two days, as the invalid Prince watched from a horse-litter, urging his men to ever-worse atrocities. Soon the ruined streets were piled high with hundreds of corpses and running with blood.
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Never again would Edward of Woodstock’s glorious reputation shine as fair.

John of Gaunt was present at the fall of Limoges, in command of the English forces during the siege, and it was as a result of his brave efforts that the city capitulated. Froissart implies that John supported his brother in inflicting the atrocities that were committed after the siege: ‘I do not understand how
they
[author’s italics] could have failed to take pity on people who were too unimportant to have committed treason,’ he opined, ‘yet they paid for it, and paid more dearly than the leaders who had committed it.’ But Froissart may not be correct — he certainly exaggerated by tenfold the number slaughtered — for afterwards, it was thanks to John’s intervention that the bishop who had surrendered Limoges to the French was able to escape the Black Prince’s vengeance.

After Limoges, the Prince realised he no longer had the strength to govern his principality, and reluctantly decided to relinquish his command to his brother. On 8 October, referring to ‘the very great affection and love’ he cherished for John, he created him Lord of Bergerac and
Roche-sur-Yon,
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and three days later, surrendered to him the lieutenancy of Aquitaine. His burden laid down, he retired to Bordeaux.

In January 1371, the Prince’s physicians urged him to return to his native air of England without delay, if he wished to preserve his life. His misery was compounded, that same month, by the death of his five-year-old heir, Edward of Angoulême, at Bordeaux. Yet so ill was the Prince that the bereaved parents dared not let even their terrible grief delay their departure. Leaving John of Gaunt to arrange their child’s burial,
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the Prince and Princess returned to England with their surviving son Richard at the end of January. When they made land in Devon, they were obliged to rest for five weeks before the Prince could face the journey to Berkhamsted Castle, and when they arrived there, he took to his bed. From that time, he was a broken man.

For the next six months, John of Gaunt ruled Aquitaine, holding it successfully against the French. Then, in July, in accordance with the terms of his office, he relinquished his command and handed over his authority to Jean de Grailly, Captal de Buch.
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The Duke now had his sights on a richer prize than Aquitaine. The daughters of Pedro the Cruel, Queen Constance and her sister Isabella, had remained in exile under the protection of first the Black Prince and then John of Gaunt, consigned to a humble existence in a village near Bayonne. Their position was an invidious one, for although royal, they were outcasts from their homeland, dependent on the charity of the English, whom their father had betrayed, and surrounded only by a few of their own people. ‘The girls had suffered considerably, on account of which they were the objects of great pity.’
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Now all that was to change.

On 10 August, John of Gaunt took up residence at Bordeaux, the capital of the Duchy. English princes sojourning in Bordeaux resided in the ancient Ombriere Palace, in which the royal apartments were located beyond the Porte Cailhau in a tall keep known as ‘the Crossbowman’, which was surrounded by courtyards with tiled fountains and beautiful semi-tropical gardens.
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Once settled in this beautiful place, John gave some thought as to what should become of Constance and Isabella, with whom he must have had a passing acquaintance over the years. He was well aware that Constance had been willed the throne of Castile by her father, King Pedro, and was regarded as its legitimate queen by his followers. All she lacked was someone to take up her cause, and John knew that for the man who could successfully do so, there would be rich prizes indeed.

Some time during that sun-drenched summer of 1371, Guichard d’Angle, Marshal of Aquitaine and a trusted friend, diplomat and member
of the Duke’s council, who had been held prisoner by Enrique of Trastamara for two years, made the suggestion that John of Gaunt himself marry Constance and claim the crown of Castile in her right,
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a suggestion he would surely not have made without knowing that the idea was already in John’s mind, and perhaps in Edward III’s too. The Gascon barons backed the proposal. Such a union made good political sense: not only would it bring John a throne and a kingdom, which he had perhaps long desired, but it would also break the alliance between Castile and France, an alliance that was posing a very real threat to England and her chances of winning the war. The proposal ‘pleased [the Duke] so well that he sent without delay four of his knights for the young ladies’.
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For Constance, regaining her throne and laying King Pedro’s bones properly to rest in his native earth appear to have been sacred duties, for she cherished the memory of her father. Her strong loyalty is perhaps reflected in Chaucer’s generous portrayal of Pedro in ‘The Monk’s Tale’, and we may suppose that the poet was used to hearing all about the murdered king’s virtues and death from his wife Philippa, who in turn must have heard it again and again from Constance, whom she was to serve for years. Thus, ignoring the more brutal realities of Pedro’s rule and character, Chaucer could write:

Mindful that her father had long desired his daughters to be married to sons of Edward III, Constance accepted the Duke of Lancaster’s proposal with alacrity, confident that such a great prince would be successful in helping her achieve her cherished aims. Realistically, though, that was a remote prospect, for with the backing of France, Enrique of Trastamara had become even more entrenched in Castile.

Constance was in every way an ideal choice of royal bride: she was young, beautiful and devout, and she brought to the marriage the promise of a kingdom. Her tragic plight appealed to John’s sense of chivalry: Guichard d’Angle had played on that when he pointed out that marrying her ‘would offer comfort and aid to these girls, daughters of a King, who are forced by circumstances to live in their present state’. It was these words that had ‘softened the heart of the Duke’.
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Yet Constance was no stereotypical maiden in distress: for all her youth — she was seventeen — she had her father’s pride, his singularity of purpose and tenacity, and the passionate, grieving love that only an exile can feel for his or her native land.
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We have only two surviving manuscript pictures of Constance: one is in a late-fifteenth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and shows her with John of Gaunt at the surrender of Compostela in 1386. The other appears in a genealogy executed between 1493 and 1519 showing the descent of the royal House of Portugal, which includes members of the family of John of Gaunt:
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Constance wears a red velvet gown with a full skirt and blue kirtle typical of Castilian dress of that later period, and an anachronistic horned headdress. Her hair is black, parted and looped either side of the face in the style that would be favoured by Queen Isabella of Castile, and her features are florid, with a long nose. This illustration may have been based on one in an older manuscript that has been lost, for the headdress is partly of the fourteenth century.

Constance and John were married on 21 September 1371 at Roquefort-sur-Soulzon,
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a small town nestling on terraces on the side of a rocky outcrop near Mont-de-Marsan in the Aveyron, just south of Bordeaux; since the first century BC, the distinctive Roquefort cheese had been produced there and matured in the local caves. John’s wedding gift to Constance was a gold cup ‘fashioned in the manner of a double rose with a pedestal and lid, with a white dove on the lid’,
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while Constance gave him the finest gold cup he ever possessed.
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It would be no exaggeration to say that from the day of their marriage, the conquest of Castile would be the major preoccupation of John’s life.

On 25 September, after some brief celebrations in Bordeaux,
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the Duke and his new Duchess arrived at the port of La Rochelle, and there requisitioned a salt ship bound for England, obliging the master to offload his cargo to make room for their retinue and chattels.
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John was attended by a train of Castilian knights wearing the Lancastrian livery, and Constance by a bevy of Castilian ladies. They docked at Fowey, near Plymouth, on 4 November, and rested at Plympton Priory from 10 to 14 November.
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Two days later, the Duke and Duchess had moved on to Exeter, where they offered 20s. (£335) in the cathedral.
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John then left Constance and rode to London to make ready for her arrival; he was in residence at the Savoy, and reunited with his three children, by the end of the month,
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when he went ‘to report to the King’.
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Then in December, after paying his respects at Blanche’s tomb in St Paul’s, he travelled down to Kingston Lacy in Dorset, where he and his bride kept Christmas, feasting on venison and rabbits.
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John was back at the Savoy by 22 January, having arranged for Constance to journey up to London at her leisure. Her long sojourn in the West Country had perhaps been necessitated by her suffering the discomforts and sickness of early pregnancy.

* * *

Hugh Swynford had not accompanied his lord back to England. He died ‘beyond seas’ in Aquitaine, ‘on the Thursday after St Martin’, 13 November 1371.
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The fact that he did not follow the Duke north in September argues that he was already too ill to do so. The news of his death would have taken some weeks to reach Katherine, but probably arrived in time for her to spend a dismal Christmas facing up to early widowhood and the prospect of bringing up her children alone on a pittance, for Hugh’s finances and affairs had been left in little better shape than they had been when she married him.

The mediaeval church at Kettlethorpe has long since largely disappeared, and with it any fourteenth-century tombs and memorials, so there is no way of knowing whether Hugh’s body was brought back to England and interred there, but given his parlous financial state, he may well have been buried in Aquitaine.
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Whether he was laid to rest in Kettlethorpe Church or not, a requiem mass would surely have been held there for him, with Katherine in attendance.

Katherine was only about twenty-one when she was widowed, yet custom required her to put on nun-like mourning garments consisting of a black gown and cloak and a white wimple; the constricting barbe that covered the chin and spread like a cape across the shoulders mercifully had not yet come into fashion. She would wear these weeds until the expiration of her first year of widowhood, after which she might remarry with propriety.
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It would appear that John of Gaunt came to her rescue, and that, learning of her plight, and doubtless recalling her good service to Blanche, he invited her to serve his second Duchess in a similar capacity. Philippa Chaucer, likewise redundant because of the death of a royal mistress, was also appointed to serve Constance as one of her many married
damoi-selles
; on 30 August 1372, at Sandwich, John of Gaunt awarded her an annuity of £10 (£3,347) ‘by our especial grace for the good and agreeable service that our well-beloved
damoiselle
Philippa Chaucer has done, and will do in the future, for our very dear and well-loved companion the Queen’.
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