Mistress of the Monarchy (7 page)

Henry’s duchess was Isabella de Beaumont; sadly, they had no son to succeed to his great inheritance. Instead, there were two daughters, Matilda and Blanche. Matilda of Lancaster had probably been born in 1340; after a brief first marriage, to Ralph de Stafford, which saw her widowed by the age of ten, she had been married in 1352 in the King’s Chapel at Westminster to William, Duke of Bavaria,
³
who became Count of Holland in 1354 and Count of Hainault in 1356, on the death of his mother, the Countess Margaret; he was the son with whom the Countess had been briefly at war prior to this marriage, and it had been on his account that she had fled to England in 1351, bringing Paon de Roët with her.

After their wedding, Matilda went to Hainault to live with her husband, but in 1357 the insanity that was to render William incapable of ruling became alarmingly evident, and there were unfounded rumours attributing his madness to an attempt to poison him while he was in England. By 1358, he was being kept in confinement at The Hague, and later he was moved to the fortress of Quesnoy, where he remained shut up until his death thirty-one years later.
⁴
There were no children born of his marriage to Matilda.

Blanche of Lancaster, the younger of Duke Henry’s daughters, had probably been born on 25 March 1342.
⁵
She spent some of her formative years at court in the care of Queen Philippa, and came to know the royal family well. As we have seen, Katherine and Philippa de Roët were among her younger companions.

Edward III, needing to provide for his rapidly expanding family, was vigorously pursuing his successful policy of marrying his sons to English heiresses, and so consolidating his own interests and binding nobles and Crown closer together. Blanche was the greatest unmarried heiress in England, and Edward was determined to marry her to his third surviving son, John of Gaunt, and secure for John her share of the rich Lancaster patrimony. On 7 June 1358, the King petitioned Pope Innocent VI for a dispensation allowing the young couple to wed — they were within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity — which was granted on 8 January 1359.
⁶

It was in honour of the memory of ‘Blanche the Fair’ that Geoffrey Chaucer later wrote his dream poem,
The Boke of the Duchesse
.
⁷
Allusions in the text make this clear: Chaucer uses the word ‘Duchess’ in the title, and there was only one duchess in England at the time; he makes a play on Blanche’s name, calling her ‘my Lady White’, or ‘good, fair White’; and he refers to ‘a long castle’ (Lancaster), St John (the Duke’s name-saint) and ‘a rich mount’ (a pun for Richmond, John’s earldom). The context of the poem will be discussed in Chapter 4, but it contains a eulogistic description of Blanche, whom Chaucer calls ‘the flower of English womanhood’:
‘Gay and glad she was, fresh and sportive, sweet, simple [i.e. straight-forward] and of humble semblance, the fair lady whom men call Blanche.’

Chaucer’s description reveals that, like her father, Blanche was intelligent, well-mannered, self-controlled and moderate in behaviour, ‘not too grave and not too gay’. Her speech was ‘low-toned and gentle’, friendly and eloquent, and her character ‘inclined to good’. She was no flatterer, but was truthful, ‘devoid of malice’ and never voiced a criticism. Happy and carefree in her demeanour, she was ‘like a torch so bright that everyone could take its light’. Froissart echoes Chaucer’s praise of Blanche, calling her ‘gay, sociable, gentle, of humble semblance’ and above all ‘good’.

There is a corbel head that is said to be Blanche at Edington Priory in Wiltshire, and a statue of a girl holding a pet monkey, whom some have identified as her, on Queen Philippa’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, but these are in no sense portraits; nor can we glean any idea of what she looked like from drawings of her tomb effigy, because the effigy depicted is not the original that was sculpted in the fourteenth century. So it is to Chaucer that we must turn for a detailed description of Blanche. Her hair, he says, was ‘glittering golden’, her eyes ‘gentle and good, steadfast yet glad, not set too wide’. She did not ‘shyly glance aside’, but gazed openly with a ‘candid mien’ that was ‘free of artfulness’ and in no way wanton. Here, one suspects, was a young woman who knew her own worth, for although her look ‘made men smart’ with desire, she affected not to notice: ‘well she guarded her good name’. Her lovely face was ‘pink and white, fresh, lively-hued, [the] highest example of Nature’s work’; her neck was graceful, her shoulders lovely, her breasts rounded, her skin unblemished. She was tall and straight-backed, with ‘well-broad’ hips, and her arms and legs were ‘well-clothed in flesh’, suggesting a degree of plumpness that was fashionable in the fourteenth century.

It has often been asserted that Chaucer’s
Boke of the Duchesse
is not intended as a realistic portrayal of Blanche; undoubtedly, the poem was conceived as a dream sequence, and it was inspired by several well-known works: those of Ovid and Froissart, the popular mediaeval romance poem,
Le Roman de la Rose
, and the innovative verse of the avant-garde French writer and composer, Guillaume de Machaut.
⁸
Yet although Chaucer’s laudatory and idealised description of Blanche conforms to the literary conventions of the age, it does convey an impression of a real person. After all, this poem would have been circulated at court and amongst the Duke’s circle, so its portrayal of Blanche and her relationship with John of Gaunt would have had to be recognisable and convincing to those who had known her well. And Blanche may well have been lucky
enough to have had the kind of looks that were fashionable in that period. Furthermore, Chaucer himself was a member of the royal household when he wrote the poem; he knew John of Gaunt and the rest of the royal family. So what he wrote must to a degree have been drawn from life.

John of Gaunt had been born probably in March (certainly by 28 May) 1340 at St Bavon’s Abbey in Ghent, Flanders
⁹
— hence his appellation, ‘Gaunt’ being an English corruption of ‘Ghent’. He was always to demonstrate a sense of affiliation with the country of his birth, and with Hainault, his mother’s birthplace.
¹⁰
This affinity might partly explain why he would be attracted to Katherine Swynford, herself a Hainaulter.

His early years had been spent in the care of a nurse, Isolda Newman, under the supervision of his mother, Queen Philippa. ‘The Lord John’ was created Earl of Richmond on 20 November 1342, the King himself solemnly girding the two-year-old child with the sword of his earldom, which had been held by the Dukes of Brittany since the Norman Conquest, and was vacant on account of the death of the last Duke, whose infant heir had been passed over.
¹¹
This earldom brought young John an income of 2,000 marks (£303,882) per annum. At the age of three, with his father and his elder brothers, he was accepted into the confraternity of Lincoln Cathedral, thus forging the first of his close links and attachment to Lincoln, its cathedral chapter
¹²
and the social orbit of the Swynford family.

John’s nurse was pensioned off in February 1346,
¹³
at which time he would have been assigned a male governor to oversee his education and his training in the knightly arts. We know little about his childhood, but all the evidence suggests that he was fond of his parents — he was especially close to his mother
¹⁴
— and his siblings, and grew up in a happy, stable family, which was not always the case where royal princes were concerned.

Above all, John would have grown up to the heady awareness that his father the King was winning great victories over the French and international renown, and that his glorious brother, the Black Prince, ten years his senior, had assisted most nobly in achieving those victories. It was an era of growing national confidence and pride, and the young John’s world was surely dominated by triumphal heroes.

One man whose influence on John was paramount was Henry, Duke of Lancaster, the man whom, next to his father and eldest brother, he seems to have revered most. In Duke Henry, he had before him the example of a great lord who was honourable, trustworthy and pious, and doubtless the young John thrilled to tales of the Duke’s youthful crusading adventures and his distinguished victories over the Scots and the
French. He seems to have spent his life trying to emulate Henry of Lancaster, from his military successes and diplomatic achievements to his charitable enterprises and elegant mode of living.

On 29 August 1350, when he was only ten years old, John first saw active service in the war with France, when he accompanied his father and the Black Prince on a naval expedition that ended in a dramatic victory over enemy ships off Winchelsea, with the King capturing twenty vessels. John was too young to take part, but Froissart says his father had taken him along ‘because he much loved him’. And that decision nearly proved fatal, for the ship carrying the King and his sons was rammed by an enemy vessel and began to sink; they were saved only through the courageous intervention of Duke Henry, who brought his ship alongside that of the aggressor, boarded it and heroically rescued them. For John, it was a salutary initiation into the realities of warfare, and another reason for hero-worshipping the Duke.

John was always close to his eldest brother, whom he obviously looked up to and tried — apparently without jealousy — to emulate, and from at least 1 March 1350 until 20 May 1355, he lived in the Black Prince’s household, residing with him mainly at Berkhamsted Castle and the manor of Byfleet in Surrey. The Prince acted as a mentor to the boy, and supervised his training in arms; according to Froissart, he was ‘very fond’ of John and always referred to him as his ‘very dear and well-beloved brother’.
¹⁵

In July 1355, the fifteen-year-old John received the accolade of knighthood, whose chivalrous tenets he was to follow to the best of his ability all his life. That year, he served on a campaign in France under Duke Henry, and in the winter of 1355–6, he was in Scotland with the King, forcing a stand-down by the Scots that became known as ‘Burnt Candlemas’; John was a witness to their surrender of Berwick on 13 January 1356. The young man’s qualities evidently impressed the Scots, because in 1357 they proposed naming him as the successor to their childless King David II, a plan that — sadly for John — came to nothing. John was to retain a special understanding and respect for the Scots throughout his career, and would achieve significant diplomatic successes with them in future years.

In
The Boke of the Duchesse
, Chaucer, who must have come to know John of Gaunt fairly well, and observed him on many occasions, has him say that from his youth he had ‘most faithfully paid tribute as a devotee to love, most unrestrainedly, and joyfully become his thrall, with willing body, heart and all’, and that he had carried on in this fashion ‘for ages, many and many a year’, with ‘lightness’ and ‘wayward thoughts’. But his only recorded early love affair was with Marie de St Hilaire (or
Hilary), one of his mother’s
damoiselles
, who, like Katherine Swynford, came from Hainault.
¹⁶
According to Froissart, this youthful indiscretion, which almost certainly occurred when John was in his teens, resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child — the only one, apart from the Beauforts, that John ever acknowledged. Her name was Blanche,
¹⁷
and the likelihood is that she was born well before his marriage to Blanche of Lancaster, probably in the later 1350s. Certainly no hostile chronicler mentioned the affair later on, nor attempted to make political capital out of it, which supports the theory that it happened before John came to political prominence.

In 1360, Edward III granted Marie an annuity of £20 (£5,779) per annum,
¹⁸
the same amount as that given in 1359–60 to Joan de St Hilary (who was surely Marie’s sister), and in 1367 to Elizabeth Chandos, two of Marie’s fellow
damoiselles
; this parity suggests that the annuity, handsome as it was, and more than the other
damoiselles
ever received, was awarded as much for exceptional service to the Queen as to support the mother of the Queen’s bastard granddaughter. Marie remained in Philippa’s service until 1369, and was still alive in 1399, when she was in receipt of a pension from John of Gaunt ‘for the good and agreeable service she has rendered for a long time to our honoured lady and mother, Philippa, late Queen of England’.
¹⁹
Thus, in his characteristically honourable fashion, John provided for Marie and — as will be seen — their daughter all their lives.

John of Gaunt would surely have known Blanche of Lancaster well. Their fathers were cousins and staunch friends, and she was a frequent presence in the Queen’s household. Given that they were close in age, John and Blanche — she was the younger by two years — may have been childhood playmates from infancy.

At Christmas 1357 and New Year 1358, John was a guest of his brother Lionel of Antwerp, Earl of Ulster, and the Countess Elizabeth at the Queen’s manor of Hatfield, near Doncaster in Yorkshire.
²⁰
This was the gathering at which young Geoffrey Chaucer was also present, and it was perhaps the occasion on which the talented Chaucer first came to John’s notice.

Blanche of Lancaster may also have been present at Hatfield,
²¹
and if so, John may have taken the opportunity to pay court to her. It was six months later that Edward III applied for a dispensation for the young couple to marry.

Chaucer, in his
Boke of the Duchesse
, recalled John telling him that he was first taken with Blanche’s charms after being struck by how vividly she stood out among a group of fair ladies:

He watched her dancing gracefully, singing and laughing, and noticed that her eyes were gracious, her voice ‘warm with kindliness’. To him, she appeared ‘a treasure house of utter bliss’: ‘that flower of womanhood was life and joy’, the chief source of his ‘well-being’. But when he embarked on his ‘mighty quest’ to win her love, he initially met with cool rejection. Blanche ‘gave no false encouragement; she spurned such petty artifice’. Her ardent swain composed songs that, while ‘not well done’, were written ‘in passion for my heart’s delight’, but he held back from confessing to her how much pain he was suffering on her account, fearing lest she might take offence at his presumption. Yet in the end, ‘I had to tell her, or die.’ Quaking in dread, he declared his love and devotion, swore ‘to guard her honour evermore’, and begged for mercy, not daring to look Blanche in the eye. Afterwards, he could not recall exactly what her response had been, but ‘the gist of it was simply “No”’.