History David Horspool
A son and father of kings, John of Gaunt was an ambitious moneybags
‘Old John of Gaunt’ are the first words of Shakespeare’s Richard II.
They fix the King’s uncle for ever in our minds as the venerable sage and royal adviser. In 1398, when Richard’s words are meant to have been spoken, John, 2nd Duke of Lancaster (1340-99), father of the future Henry IV and progenitor of a line that would fold itself back into English royalty in two different ways, was six months away from death.
But he wasn’t particularly old, a mere 58. Only three years before, the Duke had been the main negotiator with the French at Leulinghem in the Pas de Calais, settling a truce which closed the latest chapter in the Hundred Years’ War.
It was not age that withered John of Gaunt, but life. As a new book, The Red Prince by Helen Carr, shows, a career of duty, wealth accumulation and relentless ambition – not to mention a tangled and energetic sex life – took its toll.
The Shakespeare problem is one historians of medieval England routinely have to face. It’s usually a waste of time to point out where the playwright got his facts wrong – complaints about artists messing about with royal history are nothing new (look at The Crown) and the response is always the same. Poetic licence, and genius, amount to a free pass.
But if quibbling over the details is pointless, what about the big picture? In the case of John of Gaunt, is the portrait in Richard II an approximation of the truth, or a travesty of it?
What emerges from Carr’s book is that, by the end of his life, John of Gaunt was almost the only thing between Richard II and full-blown tyranny. Carr’s Richard has all the petulance, unpredictability and wounded narcissism of Shakespeare’s, without the poetry.
She draws attention to Richard’s peculiar fixation with his greatgrandfather Edward II, whom he tried to have canonised. Considering Edward had been deposed and brutally murdered by a vengeful aristocracy who resented the king’s reliance on favourites, a pattern Richard was busy reproducing, this was a provocative pastime, to put it mildly.
Because John of Gaunt is not the main focus of the play, Shakespeare gives us only a small detail of the portrait. Carr shows how much effort went into achieving his position, and how it was a result as much of personal striving as of high birth.
Born in Ghent (hence Gaunt) in 1340, John was the third son of Edward III, brother to Edward the Black Prince and Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence. Despite this stellar pedigree, it was marriage that made John of Gaunt.
First, his union with Blanche of Lancaster brought him the largest inheritance in England when Blanche’s father Henry, 1st Duke of Lancaster, died without male issue.
Then, following Blanche’s death, Gaunt set his sights even higher, marrying Constance of Castile, daughter of Pedro, King of Castile, known as the Cruel. Pedro had been restored to his throne with the help of John and the Black Prince, but was deposed and murdered in 1369. Thus the Castilian throne was nominally in the hands of a usurper when John and Constance married. The Duke claimed the crown and spent much of the rest of his life trying to make good on that claim.
In 1387, he led a disastrous expedition to Castile. Though a military failure and a personal blow, the campaign had two beneficial outcomes for John and his dynasty. His daughter married into the new Castilian royal family, and Enrique of Castile, the King, paid John a large bribe to go away.
It was as a moneybags with ideas above his station that John of Gaunt’s popular reputation was fixed. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, rebels declared they would ‘have no king called John’. Fortunately for him, the Duke was away from London when the mob descended on his splendid Savoy Palace by the Thames – where the hotel is today.
Carr vividly describes the rebels systematically destroying the riches on display there and cracking open barrels of fine wine. Many were killed, unable to get out of their boozy confinement in the palace cellars when their comrades set the building alight.
The other stain on the Duke’s reputation was his carrying on with a mistress, Katherine Swynford. Though John seems to have been as promiscuous as any of his peers, Katherine was different. Only after the Revolt, when his reputation was at its lowest ebb, was he persuaded to ‘put her away’.
On his second wife’s death, John made the unprecedented decision to marry his lover, and successfully petitioned Richard to legitimise his offspring by her, born before they married. This sort of devotion did not go down well.
For all the difficulties of writing medieval biography, it’s worth it to remind us that people in the Middle Ages were no less complex than they are today. ‘Old John of Gaunt’ was rich, ambitious, ruthless John of Gaunt and protective, dutiful, chivalrous John of Gaunt.
The Red Prince: The Life of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster by Helen Carr is published on 15th April