Mistress of the Monarchy (43 page)

Summoned by the King, who wanted the Duke’s support for the French marriage alliance that Thomas of Woodstock was so hotly opposing, John of Gaunt,
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armed with the Pope’s brief, returned to England in December 1395. He was no longer feeling in the best of health, and the crossing from Calais to Kent must have been disagreeable, even painful, for him: for when, late in November, he had visited Brittany and opened ultimately unsuccessful negotiations for a marriage between his grandson, Henry of Monmouth, and Duke John de Montfort’s daughter, he had declined an invitation to attend the wedding as ‘it will be very hard-going and very uncomfortable to him to sail’.
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This suggests he was suffering some bodily infirmity at this time, possibly the recurrent malady to which he was to refer in 1398, which may be one reason why he made a short pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury upon returning to England, no doubt to give
thanks for his safe return home, pray for relief for his complaint and ask the saint’s blessing on his coming marriage.

John was still in Canterbury at the beginning of January 1396, for his son Henry sent him nineteen ells of velvet there as a New Year gift.
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He left soon afterwards for Langley, Hertfordshire, to pay his respects to Richard II and seek his permission to marry Katherine Swynford. More than twenty years later, Walsingham claimed that the marriage came as a surprise to the King, but as his foremost subject, it is hardly likely that John of Gaunt, that great traditionalist and pillar of the monarchy, would have omitted his feudal obligation to obtain royal sanction for the marriage to go ahead. It is also doubtful if the Duke’s request came as a surprise to Richard, who apparently readily gave his consent.
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His manner towards his uncle, however, although cordial, was noticeably cool and, some said, ‘without love’.
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He wanted John’s backing, it was true, but he did not want him dominating political affairs as before. This change in Richard marked the beginning of the end of John’s political influence, which would now slowly but steadily decline; his health, of course, could also have been a factor. Nevertheless, he was to maintain a constant presence at court in the coming years, and would witness every royal charter up till July 1398.
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Katherine herself must have been in Lincolnshire at this time, probably living at the Chancery, although she was still exercising authority as the Lady of Kettlethorpe — on 4 December, she presented a new rector to the parish church there. This was none other than John Huntman, the Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, he who had had to seek alternative accommodation in 1391–2 because Katherine was in possession of his official residence, the Chancery. In appointing him Rector of Kettlethorpe, was Katherine attempting to compensate in some way for the inconvenience she had caused?

John did not delay long at court, but, having obtained the King’s permission to depart, set off north to Lincolnshire, to Katherine, to make her his wife without further delay. They ‘publicly contracted marriage’
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very soon after the Octave of the Epiphany,
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which fell on 13 January 1396 — possibly their wedding took place on the 14th,
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or even as late as February,
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which is far less likely. The ceremony in Lincoln Cathedral was probably conducted before the splendid chancel screen by the ageing Bishop Buckingham, who is known to have been in Lincoln later that month.
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Evidently John’s health had improved, for, as he and Katherine later confided to the Pope, their marriage was consummated ‘by carnal copulation’.
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There can be no doubt that they were lovers once more.

Katherine was now the Duchess of Lancaster and, in the absence of a
queen, the first lady in the land — a position she could not expect to enjoy for long, because the coming spring would see the signing of a new peace with France that was to be cemented by the marriage of Richard II to Charles VI’s six-year-old daughter Isabella.

Katherine’s feelings at this time may only be imagined. They must have encompassed love and gratitude with regard to the man who was now her husband, and perhaps a sense of relief that the long years of self-denial, steadfastness, waiting and uncertainty were over — not to mention triumph and elation at having come to a safe harbour at last, and at making such a spectacular marriage in the process, something that no other royal mistress of that age — and only a privileged few in other periods — would ever achieve. She was set up for life, and would never again have to worry about financial security.
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There was, too, the comforting knowledge that the way was now clear for her Beaufort children to be formally legitimised, and that their futures were secure — as indeed were those of Thomas Swynford and Katherine’s Chaucer relatives.

But Katherine must also have been aware that society at large might not view her as the most suitable wife for the Duke. Notoriety and a tarnished reputation had never been desirable qualities in royal wives; moreover, John was a prince of the highest rank and renown, and could have advantageously made a grand marriage for profit or policy; that he should stoop to marry a woman of far lower degree, however highly regarded she was by his family, was unthinkable. But he had defied convention and done so, and now here she was, exalted above all other women in the realm.

In order to emphasise her royal status, and perhaps at the same time hopefully to obliterate memories of her immoral past, Katherine assumed as her coat of arms the three gold wheels of St Katherine, her patron saint, who was strongly associated with royalty, virtue and erudition in the popular imagination. These wheels were blazoned on a red shield, and they would have been prominently displayed on hangings, trappings, furnishings, clothing and livery badges. They appeared in profusion on the vestments she was to give to Lincoln Cathedral, and they also adorned her tomb there,
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while the image of St Katherine appears in the Beaufort Hours, a manuscript commissioned after 1401 by John Beaufort, who clearly wanted to honour his mother and associate her memory with the saint.
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The conversion of the silver Roët wheels into gold Katherine wheels suggests both a deep devotion to her name-saint, and a conscious effort on the part of the new Duchess to construct a far more respectable public image for herself.
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It is highly likely that the Duke was also involved in this mediaeval
version of ‘spin-doctoring’, or was even the inspiration behind it. After all, he had a vested interest in the heraldic emblems of the Lancastrian inheritance, and in the way people regarded his wife, whose character and demeanour reflected on his own nobility and honour; at the very least, Katherine would have had to consult him on this matter and seek his approval — married women in the Middle Ages enjoyed little autonomy, even if they had become used to making their own decisions during a long widowhood, as Katherine clearly had. One may infer from the sources quoted in this chapter, however, that John was a loving husband eager to make his lady happy. It may be that it was he who, after their marriage, arranged for the reburial of her father in St Paul’s Cathedral, or for the erection of a memorial tablet on Sir Paon de Roët’s existing grave there.

It was to Katherine’s advantage that ‘she had a perfect knowledge of court etiquette, because she had been brought up in princely courts continually since her youth’; this made her eminently well-qualified for her new rank,
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and it would have given her confidence as she came to grips with the realities of her new status.

The newly wedded Duke and Duchess made a short trip up north together before facing the court; possibly John wished to test the water by taking Katherine on a tour of his domains. By 23 January, they were lodging at Pontefract, a place that might have held bitter but long-exorcised memories for them, but which clearly became a favoured retreat during their marriage. High on its escarpment, the castle enjoyed commanding views of the River Aire; the royal lodgings were in the turreted trefoil-shaped donjon, which the Duke had had heightened twenty years earlier, so that it dwarfed all the other towers. Here he and Katherine would have resided in great comfort and luxury, for he had lavished huge sums of money on the place.
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By 10 March, they had moved north-westwards to Rothwell Castle, a thirteenth-century royal hunting lodge owned by the Duke, which lay hard by his manor of Leeds. They stayed there until the 31st,
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before travelling south.

It may have been at this time — it was certainly in 1396 — that they broke their journey at Coventry, where they were admitted as members of the prosperous Guild of the Holy Trinity, St Mary, St John the Baptist and St Katherine. The ceremony either took place in St Mary’s Guild Hall (constructed between 1340 and 1460) in the heart of the town, or at the Guild’s chapel in the collegiate church dedicated to St John the Baptist, which had been founded by John’s grandmother, Queen Isabella, the widow of Edward II; in 1344, she had given land in Coventry to the
Guild of St John for the founding of the chapel. This Guild had later amalgamated with those of St Katherine and Holy Trinity. Since their patron saints were both represented, John and Katherine would have felt a special affinity with this Guild.
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The new Duchess made her debut at court some time in April, probably at the St George’s Day celebrations, for she was issued with Garter robes that year. Her appearance there, and the announcement of her marriage to the Duke, gave rise to stunned shock and widespread disapproval, for most people regarded it as a disastrous misalliance:
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‘the which wedding caused many a man’s wondering for, as it was said, he had held her long before’.
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‘Everyone was amazed at the miracle of this event,’ wrote Walsingham with some irony, ‘since the fortune of such a woman in no way matched a magnate of such exalted rank.’ Froissart says the marriage ‘caused much astonishment’, in France as well as in England, ‘for she was of humble birth, far unmeet to match with his Highness, and nothing comparable in honour to his two former wives, the Duchess Blanche and Duchess Constance,’ while he was the richest, most powerful and most eligible catch in the land. In the fifteenth century, the chronicler John Capgrave recalled how the Duke had married Katherine ‘against the opinion of many men’. Even in our own time, such a marriage would cause comment. ‘Men of title and privilege simply do not marry their mistresses,’ observed the late Queen Mother, so we may imagine how much greater an outcry the union of John and Katherine provoked in 1396.

‘When the news of this marriage reached the great ladies of England, such as the Duchess of Gloucester, the Countess of Derby [
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; Mary de Bohun had, of course, died in 1394], the Countess of Arundel [a Mortimer, and a descendant of Edward III] and other ladies with royal blood in their veins, they were surprised and shocked, considering it scandalous, and thought the Duke much to blame. They said that he had sadly disgraced himself by marrying his concubine, a woman of light character’ — for such they apparently still perceived Katherine to be. Many thought John of Gaunt a fool, including perhaps Chaucer, who was the same age: around this time, in a poem dedicated to his friend Henry Scogan, he wrote that he was beginning to see himself as beyond the age for love and marriage. What, then, did he think of the Duke?

What rankled most with the great ladies was that the new Duchess of Lancaster would take precedence before them. ‘Since she has got so far,’ they sniffed, ‘it will mean that she will rank as the second lady in England, and the young Queen will be dishonourably accompanied by her.’ But
they were plotting their revenge. ‘For their parts, they would leave her to do the honours of the court by herself,’ they declared, ‘for they would never enter any place where she was. They themselves might be disgraced if they permitted a woman of so base a birth, and concubine to the Duke for a very long time, inside and outside his marriage with the Princess Constance, to have place before them. Their hearts would burst with vexation, and rightly so!’
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The two people who were the most incensed and ‘outrageous’ about the marriage were Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, ‘a man of an high mind and a stout stomach’ who ‘misliked his brother matching so meanly’ and considered him ‘a doting fool’, and Thomas’s wife, Eleanor de Bohun. ‘They considered that the Duke of Lancaster had overstepped all bounds when he took his concubine to wife, and said they would never recognise her marriage, or call her lady or sister.’ However, John’s other brother, Edmund of Langley, ‘soon got over it, for he was most often in the company of the King’ — who, we may infer, supported the marriage — ‘and his brother of Lancaster. The Duke of Gloucester was of different stuff, for he respected no one’s opinions.’
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To make matters worse, by means that are not recorded, the existence of an impediment to the marriage, that of compaternity, somehow became ‘publicly known’, and because John and Katherine could produce ‘no apostolic letters authorising its dispensation’ — they had been given only an oral brief, not a full dispensation — they became ‘apprehensive’ that their marriage could ‘very likely be impugned, and an annulment follow, and grave scandals arise therefrom’. They therefore ‘made humble supplication’ once more to Pope Boniface, ‘that we deign of our apostolic benignity to provide for them concerning the aforesaid’ and pronounce on the legitimacy of their children.
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They must then have spent many anxious months awaiting his reply, and hoping that no English bishop would see fit in the meantime to enquire into the validity of their union.

Richard II, however, was welcoming to Katherine; it was he who had issued her with Garter robes so that she could participate in the St George’s Day ceremonies. After those were completed, the Duke and Duchess moved to London, where they probably took up residence at Ely Place. There, on 16 May, John assigned Katherine the generous sum of £600 (£243,620) per annum, to be paid by his Receiver-General, for the expenses of her wardrobe,
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obviously anticipating that his new Duchess would dress herself and furnish her apartments as lavishly as her rank merited. Like John’s previous wives, Katherine had her own separate wardrobe and household; we know nothing of its composition, however, or the names of her officers and ladies.
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