Mistress of the Monarchy (22 page)

Katherine’s conveyance of the news of Catalina’s birth to the King suggests that she had been in attendance; having borne at least four children of her own at a young age, she would have been able to reassure and support Constance through her ordeal. But as soon as her own pregnancy became obvious, a pregnancy that could not have been her husband’s doing, she would have been obliged to resign her post and return to Kettlethorpe.

The war with France was not going well at this time. The French were making inroads into Aquitaine and attacking Brittany. In June, at Hertford, in order to retain the friendship of a valuable ally against France, John surrendered the earldom of Richmond to John de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, in whose family it had previously been for centuries, receiving other lands in exchange. That same month, Edward III resolved on a naval offensive against France, whereupon, on 1 July, John undertook to serve overseas for a year.

John was probably at Wallingford Castle on 11 July,
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attending the marriage of his younger brother, Edmund of Langley, Earl of Cambridge, to Constance’s younger sister, Isabella of Castile, an alliance that had been arranged by John of Gaunt to bolster England’s links with the future monarchy of Castile and to ‘save [Isabella] from her enemies’.
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It was also seen as a way of preserving England’s claims to Castile should Constance die in childbirth.
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On the same day as the wedding of Edmund and Isabella, John of Gaunt summoned all his retainers to attend him on the coming campaign, and then went north for a few weeks’ hunting in Leicester Forest before joining his army at Sandwich before 18 August.
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It was there, on 30 August, that he granted the annuity to Philippa Chaucer in recognition of her past and future services to the Duchess Constance. We might conclude that Philippa had been instrumental in helping her young mistress to settle in a strange land, and had perhaps assisted her during her pregnancy and confinement, and was helping to look after her baby; and we might wonder if John’s grant to Philippa Chaucer was at Katherine’s behest.

On 31 August, John sailed for Gascony with his father the King and the Black Prince. For Edward III and the Prince, this would be their last military adventure, and for Katherine and John, the first of many partings occasioned by the war. The expedition was a disaster, with ships
smashed or blown off course by contrary winds and gales and many lives lost, and after two hellish storm-tossed months in the Channel, the remains of the fleet limped home, having accomplished nothing.

During John’s absence, Katherine would have been preparing for her coming confinement. Her baby probably arrived in the winter of 1372–3;
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by this reckoning, John Beaufort’s age, as given in Richard II’s grant of 1392, must be inaccurate. In which case, if Constance had given birth in the summer of 1372, Katherine’s pregnancy would not then have been apparent; she had probably left the Duchess’s household soon afterwards and returned to Kettlethorpe. Her child was perhaps born there: the delivery of oaks in June 1372, on the Duke’s orders, might have been intended for the refurbishment of the manor house, to make it a fit place in which Katherine could bear or rear his child; if the calculations above are correct, it would have been around June when her pregnancy became a certainty. It is possible though that Katherine actually gave birth to this son in Lincoln, and that he was the child for whose baptism in February 1373 rich cloths were provided.

In childbed, Katherine had succeeded where Constance had failed, for she had borne a son, a boy who would be known as John Beaufort of Lancaster;
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he was named John for his father, with whom he was always to be ‘a great favourite’,
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and Beaufort after the lordship of Beaufort in Champagne, which had once been held by the Duke as part of his Lancastrian inheritance.
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In 1369, John of Gaunt had lost Beaufort to the French through the treachery of one of his vassals,
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thus it was a safe name to give to his bastard son by Katherine Swynford: it was a name associated with the Duke, yet the lordship was no longer part of, and could not therefore prejudice, the inheritance he would leave his lawful heir.
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It used often to be claimed
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that John’s children by Katherine Swynford were born at Beaufort Castle, but that would not have been possible, for he had sold it years before, and had never visited it anyway.
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John Beaufort’s early years were probably spent at Kettlethorpe. The pattern of John’s grants to Katherine, some of them concerning its refurbishment, some of them handsome gifts, may indicate the dates of birth of their other children, and certainly suggests that the manor was being made a fit place for them to be brought up in. Kettlethorpe was a remote village with a tiny population, an ideal setting for discreet confinements and the raising of royal bastards whose existence was better kept secret — at least for the present.

Certainly the lovers were discreet, at least to begin with — had they not been, the world would soon have known of their affair, and we would not have to rely on inference and speculation in determining the circumstances in which it began. Costain argues that it was Katherine who
insisted on secrecy in the early years of the liaison — she was, after all, newly widowed — but there were political imperatives to be considered too: John would not have wished to openly dishonour his new wife when all his hopes were centred on claiming the crown of Castile in her right. Thus the need for discretion was probably mutual, and it ensured that for some years to come, his affair with Katherine was conducted in secrecy and with great circumspection.

T
he love and friendship between John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford was to endure for more than a quarter of a century. For great lords, marriage was normally a political affair, and love a private one.
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The Church and the public at large might frown on extramarital liaisons, but they were an accepted part of aristocratic life, given that love rarely followed marriage. Because John’s liaison with Katherine was to last for so long, many people in court circles must have come to regard it as unremarkable. In the meantime, John would treat his young wife with respect and courtesy, for she was his Duchess and a queen in her own right; but clearly his heart was Katherine’s, and would probably remain so until death.

It was quite permissible, in a world in which courtly love held sway over relationships between the sexes, for a man like John of Gaunt to pay open court to a lady who was not his wife; but Katherine was a widow, who for the first year of her widowhood was expected to be unattainable; she was of far lower degree than he, for all that she might have been distantly related, and had nothing more than herself to offer him; and John was a newly married man. Yet where Katherine was concerned, he seems to have been unable to restrain his passion: ‘he was blinded by desire, fearing neither God nor shame amongst men’.
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Was Chaucer thinking of his sister-in-law and John of Gaunt when, in the 1380s, he wrote, ‘You wise ones, proud ones, worthy ones and all, never scorn love… For love can lay his hands on every creature… The strongest men are overcome, and those most notable and highest in degree.’
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John’s younger brother, Thomas of Woodstock, would later put it more succinctly, calling him (says Froissart) a ‘doting fool’ for loving Katherine Swynford so utterly and so enduringly.

Yet, sadly for those romantics who would prefer to believe that the
Duke stayed true to Katherine within the limits of their adulterous relationship, there is some evidence that he had fleeting sexual encounters with other women during the course of it. In 1381, he was publicly to confess that he had committed the sin of lechery with Katherine herself ‘and many others in his wife’s household’.
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Certainly this reputation for lechery endured. Francis Thynne, Lancaster Herald under Elizabeth I, and a commentator on Thomas Speght’s edition of Chaucer,
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asserted that John of Gaunt ‘had many paramours in his youth, and was not very continent in his age’. In
The Boke of the Duchesse
, on which Thynne must have based his assertion, Chaucer has John recalling that from his youth he had ‘paid tribute as a devotee to love, most unrestrainedly, and joyfully become his thrall, with willing body, heart and all’. When contemporary chroniclers spoke of the Duke as a lecher and ‘great fornicator’, they may not have been commenting solely on his liaison with Katherine Swynford, as is often claimed. Then there is some fifteenth-century evidence that John died of a venereal disease, which — if true — he is unlikely to have contracted as a result of long years of fidelity to the same mistress.
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Even if this evidence is unsound, the fact that the allegation was made at all is proof that, forty years after his death, the charges of promiscuity were remembered and believable.

In his confession of 1381, John’s reference to ‘his wife’ can only be to Constance; there is no evidence that he was unfaithful to Blanche, although it is of course possible. Thynne and Chaucer were obviously referring to John’s early amorous encounters: today, we know only of his affair with Marie de St Hilaire, but there were seemingly others; possibly the occasional grants to various ladies in the
Register
are rewards for favours bestowed. Thynne’s comment about John not being continent in his age probably refers to his notorious relationship with Katherine Swynford. But the Duke’s own confession, and Chaucer’s portrayal of him as a man who unrestrainedly pursued sexual pleasure, suggest that he found it hard to remain physically faithful. During the years of his affair with Katherine, they were often apart, and he would have had many opportunities for straying. His taking many women of his wife’s household to bed supports the theory that he and Constance did not enjoy a satisfying conjugal relationship — they had just two, possibly three children in twenty-three years — and suggests that on his visits to her, he often abstained from her bed and assuaged his needs elsewhere. For great lords, such casual dalliance was easy, and many regarded it as their privilege; in aristocratic society, these things were accepted. Fidelity, and the pursuit of the courtly ideal, were conceits that masked the indulgence of lust. And probably John’s amours were
fleeting and purely physical — and made no impact on his obviously deep feelings for Katherine Swynford.

Katherine may only have found out about these casual affairs in 1381, after John made his public confession. Throughout their years together, he appears to have treated her with dignity, discretion and generosity, and perhaps never admitted to what he considered to be insignificant lapses.

The mediaeval Church, however, essentially regarded all sexual acts as potentially sinful, following St Augustine, who wrote: ‘There is nothing that degrades the manly spirit more than the attractiveness of females and contact with their bodies.’ St Paul’s dictum, ‘It is better to marry than to burn’, implied that celibacy was the ideal state. Even within marriage, sex was meant to be only for the purpose of procreation: according to the ascetic St Jerome, a man and wife who indulged in carnal lust for pleasure were no better than adulterers, for ‘in truth, all love is disgraceful, and with regard to one’s own wife, excessive love is. The wise man must love his wife with judgement, not with passion. Let him curb his transports of voluptuousness, and not let himself be urged precipitately to indulge in coition. Nothing is more vile than to love a wife like a mistress.’ Certain sexual positions were forbidden, as were masturbation and coitus interruptus, and those found guilty of indulging in oral sex might incur a penance lasting three years. You could not make love on Sundays, holy days or saints’ days, or during Lent, pregnancy or menstruation. For the devout, married life must have been a continual battle with temptation.

There was therefore no hope that the Church would ever officially look upon the adulterous relationship of John and Katherine with anything other than disapproval; each would have been regarded as equally guilty, and irrevocably damned.

In practice, however, attitudes were more lax. By the fourteenth century, the promiscuity of the clergy had become a byword, and many in holy orders took a relaxed and worldly view of immorality. Whereas in the thirteenth century adulterers had been publicly whipped, they were now more likely to be forced to do public penance, going in procession to church wearing just a sheet and carrying a candle. But no one ever called for the mighty Duke of Lancaster and his mistress to be punished in such a humiliating way.

The laity were generally tolerant of sexual licence, albeit in men, blaming it on the frailty and insatiability of women. Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
and Boccaccio’s
Decameron
reveal just how licentious fourteenth-century society was, and how relaxed with regard to fornication. The aristocracy were sophisticated to a degree in their attitudes to sex outside marriage:
it was accepted that titled men took mistresses or had casual sexual encounters. The royal court, as we have seen, was a hotbed of promiscuity, due to the financial inability of many young knights or gentlemen to marry. But where the wives and daughters of the nobility were concerned, chastity was the order of the day, for dynastic bloodlines and inheritances had to be protected, and soiled goods were of little value in the marriage market. Thus the purity of noblewomen was jealously guarded. Females of lower rank were considered fair game, and more responsive than their betters, and any gently born woman who so far forgot herself as to have an affair outside wedlock usually lost her reputation irrevocably. It is easy to see, therefore, why Katherine Swynford was so bitterly disparaged in the monastic chronicles.

When it came to bastardy, the world could be a cruel place. A bastard could not officially inherit lands or titles, nor obtain preferment in the Church. Yet these barriers could be circumvented by bequeathing property or by dispensations, and when it came to the aristocracy, much could be gained from a sympathetic monarch. Moreover, being the bastard child of a great lord conferred nobility, inspired deference, and entitled one to bear the paternal arms differenced with a bend sinister denoting illegitimacy. The infant John Beaufort’s arms were the leopards and lilies of England on a bend, mounted on a shield of blue and white, the Lancastrian colours. Fathers were seen as having a duty to provide equally for their legitimate and illegitimate children.
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