Alison Weir - Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I should like to express my warmest gratitude to various people who have helped with this book. To Anthony Goodman, our finest late medieval historian, for his assistance with references and original documents; I am also indebted to him for his two booklets, Katherine Swynford and Honourable Lady or She- Devil?, and his magnificent collection of essays on John of Gaunt, which have all proved profoundly useful. To Dr. Nicholas Bennett, Librarian of Lincoln Cathedral Library, and his wife Carol for their kindness in welcoming me to the library, making available various sources, and arranging a visit to the Priory, where Katherine Swynford lived toward the end of her life. To Roger Joy, founder of the Katherine Swynford Society and a walking authority on Katherine, for generously sharing his knowledge with me, and for sending me his unpublished articles. To Patricia McLeod and the staff of Sutton Library for their efforts in tracking down numerous books and articles. To Abigail Bennett of the University of York, for translating into English numerous texts in medieval Latin. To Andrew Barr and his team at the National Trust East Midlands Regional Office. To the staff at Lincoln Central Library for their assistance in locating books.

I am indebted also to the many people who have published information about Katherine on the Internet, foremost among whom is Judy Perry, who has been researching her subject for over twenty- five years.

My gratitude to my editors for commissioning this book is acknowledged separately, in the Introduction, but I should also like to express it here on account of their unflagging enthusiasm, their sensitive insights, and their illuminating input. I wish also to thank my inspirational and ever- supportive agent, Julian Alexander, and all the people at Random House who have helped to create this book.

Lastly, I wish to thank my family and friends, who have all cheerfully put up with me while the book was being written. And to Rankin, my husband--thanks for all the wonderful meals, and just for being there.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AUTHOR'S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

Spring 1378

ONE

Panetto's Daughter

TWO

The Magnificent Lord

THREE

The Trap of Wedding

FOUR

Mistress of the Duke

FIVE

Blinded by Desire

SIX

His Unspeakable Concubine

SEVEN

Turning Away the Wrath of God

EIGHT

The Lady of Kettlethorpe

NINE

My Dearest Lady Katherine

TEN

The King's Mother

APPENDIX

Anya Seton's Katherine

GENEALOGICAL TABLES

NOTES AND REFERENCES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I have used the form "Katherine" (rather than "Catherine") throughout, as Katherine's name is usually spelled with a K in contemporary sources.

The correct medieval form of her name is "Katherine de Swynford," but I have chosen to refer to her as "Katherine Swynford," as she is traditionally and popularly known. It is worth noting that in John of Gaunt's Register, Katherine's name is given as either "Katherine" or "Kateryn(e)." The language of the court and the aristocracy at this time was Norman French, and these spellings indicate that John--and others--probably pronounced her name in the French way as "Katrine."

The modern equivalent of fourteenth- century monetary values has been given in parentheses throughout the book. For currency conversion, I have used an invaluable Internet website, measuringworth.com, produced by Lawrence H. Officer, professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Samuel H. Williams, professor of Economics, emeritus, of Miami University.

INTRODUCTION

This is a love story, one of the greatest and most remarkable love stories of medieval England. It is the extraordinary tale of an exceptional woman, Katherine Swynford, who became first the mistress and later the wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, one of the outstanding princes of the high Middle Ages.

Katherine Swynford's story first captured my imagination four decades ago, when I read Anya Seton's famous novel about her, Katherine. This epic novel made a tremendous impact on me as an adolescent, and still has the power to move me today. And I am not alone, because it has hardly been out of print since its first publication in 1954, and ranked ninety- fifth in the top one hundred favorite books voted for by the public in BBC TV's "The Big Read" in 2003. (Interested readers will find more about this novel in the Appendix.)

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have wanted to write this book for forty years. But even when I became a published author in the late eighties, no publisher would have contemplated commissioning a biography of this relatively obscure woman. And that remained the situation for many years, until the recent explosion of interest in all things historical, which inspired me to seize the chance to make my longstanding secret dream come true. I am truly indebted to my editors, Will Sulkin, Anthony Whittome, and Susanna Porter, for their support and enthusiasm for this project, and to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who suggested that I write about Katherine as well as John of Gaunt, the subject I originally proposed.

Katherine Swynford deserves a biography for many reasons. First and foremost, she was romantically linked to John of Gaunt, one of the most charismatic figures of the fourteenth century, and their passionate and ultimately poignant love affair is both astonishing and moving. Katherine was clearly beautiful and desirable, not to say enigmatic and intriguing, and some of her contemporaries regarded her as dangerous also. Her existence was played out against a vivid backdrop of court life at the height of the age of chivalry, and she knew most of the great figures of the epoch. The renowned poet Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, was her brother- in-law. She lived through the Hundred Years War, the Black Death, and the Peasants' Revolt, knew passion, loss, adversity, and heartbreak, and survived them all triumphantly. Her story gives us unique insights into the life of a medieval woman.

Yet Katherine was unusual in that she did not conform to many of the conventional norms expected of women in that age, and in several respects her story has relevance for us today. Feminist scholars are now beginning to see her from a new perspective, as a woman who was an important personage in her own right, a woman who--in a male- dominated age--had remarkable opportunities, made her own choices, flouted convention, and took control of her own destiny. Katherine was intelligent, poised, and talented, and fortunate enough to move in circles where these qualities were valued and encouraged in women. Among the choices she faced were ones that would be familiar to women today, although her modern counterparts would not have to endure the moral backlash that at one time rebounded on Katherine and probably wrecked her life. Yet they would identify with her as a woman who coped brilliantly with the sweeping, and sometimes devastating, changes of fortune that befell her.

Above all, Katherine Swynford occupies an unprecedented position in the history of the English monarchy; dynastically, she is an important figure. She was the mother of the Beauforts, and through them the ancestress of the Yorkist kings, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and every other British sovereign since--a prodigious legacy for any woman. Without her, the course of En glish history would have been very different.

writing a biography of Katherine Swynford poses its own particular problems, however, for her voice has been silenced forever: No letter survives, no utterance of hers is recorded. None of her movable goods are extant, and we have barely any details of the clothes she wore, so we cannot determine her tastes in art, literature, or dress. Her will is lost, and with it any insights it might give us into her feelings for John of Gaunt, her moral outlook, her family relationships, or her charities. She is one of the most important women in late fourteenth- century England, and yet so much about her is a mystery to us. She is famous but, paradoxically, she is little known.