Mistress Katherine Swynford
Mar. 1st, 2010 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessAs an unabashed addict to anything Tudor history related, I naturally had to grab Alison Weir's latest work on the subject, The Lady in the Tower: the Fall of Anne Boleyn.. While I was at it, I also checked out her earlier work, Mistress of Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster. Let's chat about that one first.
The book would probably have been better off with the title The Life and Times of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster, since, although Katherine Swynford (c. 1350-1403) was the long time mistress and later wife of the fabulously wealthy John of Gaunt (you may remember him from his overly long death speech in Shakespeare's Richard II, unless you repressed this from your memory), and in all probability Geoffrey Chaucer's sister-in-law (the relationship is not quite as proven as Weir states it is, but the preponderance of evidence suggests, yes) and had an abundance of children, records about her are scanty at best. We have nothing that she wrote, and aside from legal documents, and some unproven speculation that her character might have helped inspire that of Chaucer's Wife of Bath (very unproven!), most of our information about her comes from people with extreme economic and political reasons to lie about her for good and evil. By "extreme," I mean, "were worried about losing their heads/were blaming her for an upcoming loss of a head/were trying to usurp a throne/were trying not to lose a throne." That sort of motivation. These were not people interested, for instance, in telling us that Katherine Swynford liked to curl up with a book and was more of a dog than a cat person. (I have just made both of those facts up. Katherine Swynford was probably literate, and financial records and her later position in life suggest she had horses, but that's about the extent of our information about her scholarly and animal interests, although I like to think that she had a cat or a small dog. It seems a duchessy sort of thing to have.)
The extreme paucity of the sources stems from multiple causes: the inevitable loss of legal and other records from Katherine's life, the lack of sources in general for the period (the printing press was only to arrive in England about 76 years after her death), and the fact that Katherine Swynford was the sort of scandalous ancestor that pious people preferred to sort of sweep under the table. It did not help, for instance, the already rather shaky Tudor cause to know that their claim to the throne came directly from Katherine Swynford and from some rather dubious legal documents that decided that since she had eventually married John of Gaunt, their children, born when the two were distinctly not married (and John of Gaunt was most distinctly married to Constance of Castile) were legitimate after all. It's not surprising that the Tudors, and others, did not want to dwell on this, and did not exactly encourage people to run around collecting Swynford memorabilia.
The result is a book fascinating in its demonstration of the use of inference and speculation. Take this one sample passage as an example:
Sounds reasonable enough, but let's unpack this. Weir is assuming:
1. Constance had the option of holding herself aloof from the English court, and was not, in fact, sent to Tutbury by either her husband or the king.
2. Constance preferred seclusion, and was not actually a) banished by her husband, who saw her just often enough to keep up appearances, or b) avoiding the sight of her husband hanging out with his mistress.
It's entirely possible that Constance did accept the situation, or was happy with the situation, and made friends with her husband's mistress; polyamory is not that new of a concept, and Constance and John married for politics, not love. (They literally do not seem to have spoken the same language; his Castilian was not good and her knowledge of English and French is uncertain.) It's equally possible that she was not at all happy with the situation. The point is, we can't tell.
3. John respected Constance, and was not just using her as an excuse to party and eat rich foods.
4. John did not look at himself after Constance left and said, Hmm, putting on the pounds there, let's cut back a little.
5. Constance was not taking revenge on the whole "you took your mistress to court!" thing by demanding that John spend lots of money on her.
6. John was not using the occasion to remind everyone that through Constance he was sorta technically the king of Castile (even if someone else was actually doing the whole ruling thing) and trying to show off.
7. The extra expenditures were not purely coincidental/because they had more servants around when Constance was about.
And so on. My point is, we really have no idea what either Constance or John was thinking.
These assumptions get considerably dicier when Weir starts discussing the sex lives of Constance, John, Katherine and the Chaucers. With a complete lack of other information, she uses pregnancies to determine when and if the couples were sleeping together. This is dicey for any number of reasons: 1) we often do not know when, exactly, these children were born (guesses often cover a five to six year span) making it equally difficult to know when they were conceived, and 2) this does not account for either natural miscarriages, which were not documented, or the possibility that the couples were using one of the rudimentary and unreliable birth control or natural abortifacients available at the time, also not documented. (It's unlikely, but possible, especially if one of the women had had a difficult or troubling pregnancy; Chaucer was not a nobleman in urgent need of an heir, and John of Gaunt already had one, the son who would eventually become Henry IV.) And yet Weir chooses pregnancy to try to draw inferences about these relationships.
When it comes to Katherine Swynford's feelings, which she does a credible job of trying to infer, she is on even shakier ground: she assumes that Katherine Swynford was enough in love with John of Gaunt to risk the loss of her reputation (and it was, indeed, completely lost in certain highly disapproving monastic chronicles), rather than what some contemporaries apparently thought: that she was after John of Gaunt's money. (He was ten years older than she, married, and one of the wealthiest men in Europe; it was an understandable conclusion.) Certainly John of Gaunt cared enough for Katherine Swynford to eventually marry her, to great scandal and merry gossip, but this might also have been a way to improve the fortunes of their children, who would thus gain a more legitimate status.
And the kids seem to have done fairly well. Their son Henry Beaufort, in a delightful example of the endemic corruption in the medieval church, became a bishop at the age of about 20. (This youthful promotion did not go unnoticed or unprotested, but those days, when the pope did a mostly unjustified favor for an old supporter, people said, yay, bishop. Drinks all around then!) Their son John Beaufort became a marquess and the ancestor of the Tudors and the Stewarts; their daughter Joan Beaufort married one of the Nevilles, eventually becoming the ancestress of the House of York. (Which meant that from Katherine Swynford descended the houses of both Lancaster and York.)
Aside from the multiple "well, that sounds plausible, but" inevitable in any biography of this sort, Weir's done a pretty impressive job here, especially with explaining the tangled relationships and politics of the period. I'm not entirely sure she's taken the full psychological effect of the devastation of the Black Death into account, and I have some quibbles with her statements about social status and climbing in the post Black Death period, but she's created a very readable work about the 14th century.
The book would probably have been better off with the title The Life and Times of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster, since, although Katherine Swynford (c. 1350-1403) was the long time mistress and later wife of the fabulously wealthy John of Gaunt (you may remember him from his overly long death speech in Shakespeare's Richard II, unless you repressed this from your memory), and in all probability Geoffrey Chaucer's sister-in-law (the relationship is not quite as proven as Weir states it is, but the preponderance of evidence suggests, yes) and had an abundance of children, records about her are scanty at best. We have nothing that she wrote, and aside from legal documents, and some unproven speculation that her character might have helped inspire that of Chaucer's Wife of Bath (very unproven!), most of our information about her comes from people with extreme economic and political reasons to lie about her for good and evil. By "extreme," I mean, "were worried about losing their heads/were blaming her for an upcoming loss of a head/were trying to usurp a throne/were trying not to lose a throne." That sort of motivation. These were not people interested, for instance, in telling us that Katherine Swynford liked to curl up with a book and was more of a dog than a cat person. (I have just made both of those facts up. Katherine Swynford was probably literate, and financial records and her later position in life suggest she had horses, but that's about the extent of our information about her scholarly and animal interests, although I like to think that she had a cat or a small dog. It seems a duchessy sort of thing to have.)
The extreme paucity of the sources stems from multiple causes: the inevitable loss of legal and other records from Katherine's life, the lack of sources in general for the period (the printing press was only to arrive in England about 76 years after her death), and the fact that Katherine Swynford was the sort of scandalous ancestor that pious people preferred to sort of sweep under the table. It did not help, for instance, the already rather shaky Tudor cause to know that their claim to the throne came directly from Katherine Swynford and from some rather dubious legal documents that decided that since she had eventually married John of Gaunt, their children, born when the two were distinctly not married (and John of Gaunt was most distinctly married to Constance of Castile) were legitimate after all. It's not surprising that the Tudors, and others, did not want to dwell on this, and did not exactly encourage people to run around collecting Swynford memorabilia.
The result is a book fascinating in its demonstration of the use of inference and speculation. Take this one sample passage as an example:
John spent much of April at Kenilworth. Constance was with him at first, but left for Tutbury before he departed for the St. George's festivities at Windsor: She evidently still preferred to hold herself aloof from the English court and to remain in seclusion with her ladies. But the duke had maintained great state while she was with him at Kenilworth, and his daily expenditure decreased significantly after she left. Clearly he was still treating her with great respect and deference, deliberately emphasizing her status as the Queen of Castile.
Sounds reasonable enough, but let's unpack this. Weir is assuming:
1. Constance had the option of holding herself aloof from the English court, and was not, in fact, sent to Tutbury by either her husband or the king.
2. Constance preferred seclusion, and was not actually a) banished by her husband, who saw her just often enough to keep up appearances, or b) avoiding the sight of her husband hanging out with his mistress.
It's entirely possible that Constance did accept the situation, or was happy with the situation, and made friends with her husband's mistress; polyamory is not that new of a concept, and Constance and John married for politics, not love. (They literally do not seem to have spoken the same language; his Castilian was not good and her knowledge of English and French is uncertain.) It's equally possible that she was not at all happy with the situation. The point is, we can't tell.
3. John respected Constance, and was not just using her as an excuse to party and eat rich foods.
4. John did not look at himself after Constance left and said, Hmm, putting on the pounds there, let's cut back a little.
5. Constance was not taking revenge on the whole "you took your mistress to court!" thing by demanding that John spend lots of money on her.
6. John was not using the occasion to remind everyone that through Constance he was sorta technically the king of Castile (even if someone else was actually doing the whole ruling thing) and trying to show off.
7. The extra expenditures were not purely coincidental/because they had more servants around when Constance was about.
And so on. My point is, we really have no idea what either Constance or John was thinking.
These assumptions get considerably dicier when Weir starts discussing the sex lives of Constance, John, Katherine and the Chaucers. With a complete lack of other information, she uses pregnancies to determine when and if the couples were sleeping together. This is dicey for any number of reasons: 1) we often do not know when, exactly, these children were born (guesses often cover a five to six year span) making it equally difficult to know when they were conceived, and 2) this does not account for either natural miscarriages, which were not documented, or the possibility that the couples were using one of the rudimentary and unreliable birth control or natural abortifacients available at the time, also not documented. (It's unlikely, but possible, especially if one of the women had had a difficult or troubling pregnancy; Chaucer was not a nobleman in urgent need of an heir, and John of Gaunt already had one, the son who would eventually become Henry IV.) And yet Weir chooses pregnancy to try to draw inferences about these relationships.
When it comes to Katherine Swynford's feelings, which she does a credible job of trying to infer, she is on even shakier ground: she assumes that Katherine Swynford was enough in love with John of Gaunt to risk the loss of her reputation (and it was, indeed, completely lost in certain highly disapproving monastic chronicles), rather than what some contemporaries apparently thought: that she was after John of Gaunt's money. (He was ten years older than she, married, and one of the wealthiest men in Europe; it was an understandable conclusion.) Certainly John of Gaunt cared enough for Katherine Swynford to eventually marry her, to great scandal and merry gossip, but this might also have been a way to improve the fortunes of their children, who would thus gain a more legitimate status.
And the kids seem to have done fairly well. Their son Henry Beaufort, in a delightful example of the endemic corruption in the medieval church, became a bishop at the age of about 20. (This youthful promotion did not go unnoticed or unprotested, but those days, when the pope did a mostly unjustified favor for an old supporter, people said, yay, bishop. Drinks all around then!) Their son John Beaufort became a marquess and the ancestor of the Tudors and the Stewarts; their daughter Joan Beaufort married one of the Nevilles, eventually becoming the ancestress of the House of York. (Which meant that from Katherine Swynford descended the houses of both Lancaster and York.)
Aside from the multiple "well, that sounds plausible, but" inevitable in any biography of this sort, Weir's done a pretty impressive job here, especially with explaining the tangled relationships and politics of the period. I'm not entirely sure she's taken the full psychological effect of the devastation of the Black Death into account, and I have some quibbles with her statements about social status and climbing in the post Black Death period, but she's created a very readable work about the 14th century.