The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  The king was indignant. Though he could do nothing for the moment, he too had his opinions of what royalty meant, and this meddling with his personal affairs by his subjects was an outrage. He was not altogether alone in that opinion. Many of the magnates were doubtful themselves that it was right to impose ordainers on a chrisomed king; but he’d given them no alternative.

  Again Gaveston was not banished for long. When word reached the ordainers that Gaveston and the king were traveling through the northern counties, mustering an army, they felt they had no choice but to meet the king’s challenge. Using tournaments as a cover, and with Queen Isabella’s approval, they called up their large private armies and prepared for war.

  On May 4, 1312 (approximately the year John Chaucer was born), Edward and Gaveston were at Newcastle when warning came that Thomas of Lancaster, with a large force, was descending on the town. The king and Gavetson fled by boat down-river to Tynemouth, and the next day set out for the walled town of York. The people of Newcastle were in no mood to fight; the town and castle fell without a siege. Lancaster rounded up the royal servants, weapons, treasure, and horses, and arranged his army to block Gaveston’s flight if he should double back. Meanwhile other lords, the earls of Pembroke and Warenne, chased Gaveston and the king northeast toward the sea—old Robin Hood country—caught them at Scarborough, and soon forced Gaveston’s surrender.

  The earl of Pembroke was a mild and moderate man, sandy-haired, hesitant, devoted to old books and the golden haze of chivalry as it once was; so when Gaveston begged that they stop and rest on the way to Gaveston’s own castle of Wallingford, where Pembroke meant to hold him in house arrest, Pembroke, after some thought, agreed and took the opportunity to visit his countess at the neighboring manor of Bampton, leaving Gaveston in the charge of his servants. While he was gone a less chivalrous, more modern knight, Guy Beauchamp of Warwick, came with his small army and surrounded the rectory. When Gaveston saw them, the chronicles say, he ran from window to window in fright, but there was no escape. “Get up, traitor, you’re taken!” his enemy shouted, and Gaveston was forced to throw on some clothes and descend the stairs. Barefoot and bareheaded, he was forced to walk on the ground like a captured highwayman, crying and complaining, for half of the long way to Warwick Castle, then to ride for the rest of the trip like a woman, on a mare.

  Pembroke was dismayed. He begged the earl of Gloucester, a member of the king’s party, to help him—to save his name from dishonor and his property from forfeiture. Gloucester pursed his lips, black brows lowered, and refused. He next begged help from the clerks and burgesses of Oxford, imploring them to attack Warwick Castle and recapture his prisoner. They, too, looking soberly at the ground, refused. Meanwhile Thomas of Lancaster and his friends made their decision. They removed Gaveston to Lancaster territory, led him up onto Blacklow Hill, and there two Welshmen in Lancaster’s retinue beheaded him. Lancaster kept the once beautiful head; the boyish, gray body they rolled onto a ladder, which four bent-backed shoemakers carried to the earl of Warwick, who prudently refused it.

  Lancaster’s success was notable—however dubiously legal—but not final. The king found new favorites, the elder and younger Hugh Dispenser. Moderate barons like Pembroke, men of the so-called middle party, thwarted Lancaster’s ambition of limiting the power of the king and changing the government of the realm. At last Lancaster and those who sided with him (the barons whose lands were in the north midlands and the west,22 among others the great western family of Mortimer, a barony that dated back to William the Conqueror) were forced to conspire with Scotland to safeguard their holdings. As Gaveston had done, the younger Hugh Dispenser made a personal fortune on the king’s favor, though unlike Gaveston he did more to earn his keep than amuse the king: he reorganized the royal household and, with the help of carefully chosen servants, imposed more order on the king’s complex and confused affairs than even the Ordinances could do. But his access to the king, his ruthlessness and greed, stirred jealousy and dread among the barons, exactly as Gaveston’s had done, and his rapacious seizure of other men’s lands, sometimes legally, sometimes by force of arms, led at last to parliamentary rebellion and the banishment of both the elder and younger Dispenser. The elder acquiesced and went to France; the younger scornfully turned to channel piracy, robbing merchant ships with the knowledge and even connivance of the king. Like Gaveston’s, the banishment of the Dispensers proved unenforceable: Edward had both Hughs back within the year.

  Thomas of Lancaster, seated in his great hall at Pontefract Castle, brooded. Though not yet forty-five, he was looking old. He knew well enough that he was caught up in what could be construed as a movement toward accroachment of the royal power. His brother Henry, younger by three years, was even more distressed. The future was dark; no doubt of it any more. Good and evil were less clear than in King Alfred’s time, the great, by now quasi-legendary age to which all Englishmen rich or poor looked back for their principles. The house of Lancaster had never been treasonous, was even now more intensely devoted to the welfare of the kingdom than any other earldom a man could name; yet Thomas, earl of Lancaster, Steward of England, had allied himself with men like brash, unprincipled young Roger Mortimer and, however tentatively, with a long-time enemy of England, a barbaric Scot. There seemed no hope any longer for compromise with London. Henry Lancaster had urged conciliation—acceptance of the unacceptable—from the beginning. He urged it still. But it was already too late. Though he’d been known in his day as a fair jouster, a faithful soldier (his son and heir, young Henry, would prove magnificent at both), he was a patient, lenient man, a Christian fatalist who would prefer, if possible, to leave Edward’s foolishness and the ills of the nation to God. But could he leave his brother Thomas to God?

  At his brother Henry’s prodding—and that of his conscience—Thomas Lancaster took the most moderate course available to him. He organized, with Roger Mortimer and other great barons, what some historians have dubbed “counter parliaments,” claiming a duty never claimed before in the name of his hereditary title, Steward of England. But soon, with the Dispensers back in power and seizing land that bordered on his own—their banishment outlawed by parliament’s moderates—Lancaster was forced, as it seemed to him, to more desperate measures. He called up his troops for war. Edward at once marched north to arrest him. The Mortimers crumpled without offering a fight—too many magnates had chosen the other side or refused involvement, and surrender might win leniency. “Death For Principle” was not Sir Roger’s motto. Other lords, seeing his surrender, followed suit, until finally, deserted by most of his allies and by much of his own army, Lancaster was taken. In what has sometimes been viewed as a parody of Gaveston’s “trial” and execution by the barons, Lancaster was read the charges against him, which were presented as “manifest and notorious,” thus admitting of no answer, condemned by seven of his coerced peers, and sentenced to death as a traitor. Within the next few days news reached the taverns and wineshops of England that Sir Thomas of Lancaster, one of the greatest and most beloved of magnates, had been led out of prison in penitential dress “on a lene white Jade with owt Bridil”—his near-blind younger brother watching sorrowfully, helpless, with his son Henry the younger beside him—and executed.

  Though the rabble jeered at the time of his death—the human filth that would go anywhere to see an execution for treason, a beheading, drawing, and quartering—Thomas of Lancaster became, almost instantly, a popular saint. In order to keep off the weeping crowds, Edward had to place an armed guard around Pontefract Priory, where Lancaster was entombed, and soon afterward a chapel, financed by donations from all over England, was built on the scene of his execution. For fear that blind Henry or his twenty-two-year-old son might become the center of a dangerous popular movement, blind Henry was immediately relieved of much of his suzerainty. Now the greed of the Dispensers increased by leaps and bounds, and soon opposition to Edward was greater than ever. And now—if not from the beginning—the heart
of the opposition was Edward’s beautiful, slightly mad French queen, Isabella.

  Though she bore the king four children, it had never been a love match. Isabella had been a child of twelve when Edward had brought her to England and married her. When Thomas of Lancaster—Isabella’s uncle—went north to hunt Gaveston he wrote to her in a tone which suggests that she was closer to her uncle’s side than to her husband’s. She had repeatedly interceded for men of Lancaster’s party—for, among others, her younger uncle, Thomas of Lancaster’s weak-eyed brother Henry, who’d been stripped of so much power after Thomas’s death that for the honor of his house he could no longer afford to be moderate.

  But it was the younger Dispenser who finally forced Isabella’s hand. There were rumors, probably true, that he was trying to engineer annulment of her marriage to Edward; and in 1324, on the pretext of danger of a French invasion, he sequestered her estates. The queen was paid well for the sequestration; but the blow was a cruel one nevertheless: in the Middle Ages money was no substitute for property. When the king, on the imprudent advice of the Dispensers, sent Isabella to Paris to arrange an understanding between himself and her brother, Charles IV, king of France, she went eagerly, and stayed there, making France the base of her plot to wreck her husband. There she met dashing Sir Roger Mortimer, who had escaped from the Tower, and who now became her lover and fellow leader of the conspiracy. Soon, thanks to another error of the overconfident Dispensers, they were joined by the king’s son Edward, heir to the crown. He immediately became the plot’s kingpin.

  With continental help—not from France but from Hainault, Holland, and Zeeland, whose ruler, William II, was willing to exchange military support for the promise of the marriage of his daughter Philippa to Edward III, who happened to be in love with her—Isabella and Mortimer invaded England. Edward II ordered a muster of his fleet, but the sailors of England, according to the chronicles, refused to fight because of their hatred of the Dispensers. Edward II’s land forces were not much more helpful. He was soon captured, and after repeated attempts by his friends to rescue and reinstate him, agents of Roger Mortimer arranged his murder.

  As for the Dispensers, the elder was tried and condemned in an explicit parody of the so-called trial of Thomas of Lancaster. He was brought before a group of magnates which included Henry Lancaster, and the proceedings against him read, in part: “Sir Hugh, this court denies you any right of answer, because you yourself made a law that a man could be condemned without right of answer, and this law shall now apply to you and your adherents.” Like that of Thomas Lancaster, his conviction was “by notoriety.” Soon after, his son, Hugh the younger, was tried and condemned in the same way.

  Now Isabella and Mortimer ruled, with Edward III as their resentful puppet. And like Gaveston and the Dispensers before him, Roger Mortimer proved so greedy and unprincipled that all Englishmen soon hated him as devoutly as they’d hated the earlier royal favorites, the various so-called evil counsellors to the crown. As Gaveston had made magnates jealous and fearful through his acceptance of crown gifts—drains on the treasury—and as the Dispensers had stirred the magnates to wrath by their legal and illegal seizures of land, so now Roger Mortimer became the universal enemy by legal and illegal confiscations and profligate waste. Lancaster quietly raised an army to oppose him—once gentle Henry, now virtually blind—and was beaten and outlawed, with all his followers, including John Chaucer. The ruinous policy of Isabella and Mortimer was at last ended by the young king himself, who in conspiracy with the Pope and certain English lords (among them his cousin, Henry Lancaster the younger) seized and killed Mortimer and placed the queen in house arrest, where she remained, now quite mad and therefore harmless, until her death.

  The judgment has been universal against Mortimer as chief engineer of the deposition and murder of Edward II and later shameless thief of royal lands and prerogatives, as adulterous lover of the queen of England, and as cynical architect of the Treaty of Northampton, which ceded to the Scots—though they’d never won the field—all that they’d fought for, and freed Mortimer to selfish and acquisitive rule of England through his doting royal mistress, without fear of trouble on the border, those Scottish raids which had so stirred the people of the north against Edward II. The judgment is fair in a sense, but it requires some comment.

  In the fourteenth century, neither Edward II nor his barons were in a position to understand fully what was wrong between them. The endlessly repeated complaint against Edward II—later to be raised against the far more popular King Edward III and, still later, against his unlucky grandson Richard—was that through the influence of evil counsellors he was driving the kingdom to bankruptcy. The lavish outlays of Edward II and his court favorites, the endless travel from castle to castle, grandiose and expensive tournaments and entertainments—a manner of living which drove the crown to legal and illegal seizures of land and to unprecedented taxation and demands of land grants whose rents might help support the household—gave color to the complaint. But the complaint missed the point. For all his high living, Edward II’s real expenses were the inescapable expenses of a government larger and more complex than any formerly known in England. Because of the disorder of the king’s affairs—a tangle the Dispensers did much to straighten out—the king himself had no clear understanding of how much it cost to be a late medieval king. The baronial Ordinances imposed on Edward II reveal that the barons, too, had no clear idea of the magnitude of the royal enterprise. The Ordinances removed evil counsellors and drove out foreign parasites (as the barons saw them); but they made no solid arrangements for bringing money into the treasury for payment of the hundreds of civil servants, armorers, shipbuilders, architects, and diplomats (with their households and assistants) required by a monarchy involved in international trade and perpetually at war or threatened by war. Collection of the king’s customs by Englishmen meant only that, instead of foreigners, men like John Chaucer and later those collectors responsible to comptroller Geoffrey Chaucer could do the skimming.

  The real problem, in other words, was the necessary expense of bureaucracy. Gaveston, as Professor McKisack points out, “was innocent of any notions about government: the household arrangements were much as they had been in the latter years of Edward I”23—when all the trouble started. It was the financial predicament of late medieval kings which drove them to dependence, not only on foreign bankers, but also on skilled administrators of the household, the only people who had even the faintest hope of keeping them solvent. The result was an impasse. Thomas of Lancaster’s solution, blocked by the king’s favorites and by his own peers, was to create, in effect, a puppet king who would be controlled by a baronial council under the presidency of the Steward of England—himself and those who followed in his title. Had Lancaster been successful, and had he managed to put England in the kind of order that obtained in his own household, he and his fellow barons might not have solved the problem but they would at least have learned how immense it was. As a loyal Englishman, Lancaster had no personal ambition of controlling the crown, much less of seizing it. He sought only financial order for the kingdom and, concomitantly, the safety of baronial wealth mainly threatened (he believed) by the insatiable favorites of the king. Because his program failed, the struggle had to be resolved largely by men of self-interest, royalist versus rebel.

  Insatiable the favorites certainly were, but their appetite has sometimes been misunderstood. Men like the Dispensers cannot have failed to recognize that their survival depended on more than Edward’s favor: they must have land, rents, armies. Snatching land from their neighbors, they roused an ire that must sooner or later swarm over them in any case, owing to their unaccountability, their access to the king. Since Edward II stubbornly refused to rule—refused as long as possible to deal with the terrorist raids of the Scots, refused to intercede in the squabbles and private wars of his magnates—those in charge of the king’s business must save themselves however they might, and those not in charge of the ki
ng’s business must either lose all or destroy the favorites, bring the king to terms. When the magnates were united that was easy to do (though not emotionally easy), for all of them had armies and they need not commit the treason of admitting opposition to the king himself. On the contrary, they could argue, and devoutly believe, that they attacked to rescue the king from pernicious advisers. But for the magnate whose peers refused to support him, who would allow his ancestral rights to be extingiushed rather than defend him against the power of the crown, survival became the only law. Mortimer, more unscrupulous and reckless than Thomas of Lancaster, survived, but in the process showed himself so cynical about law, even the laws of polite society—even the emotionally deep prohibition of regicide—that all who had a trace of devotion to decency were repelled. For young Edward III, whose devotion to the chivalric code was fanatical, and whose ambition was as great as his warrior grandfather’s, Mortimer’s very existence was an intolerable affront, and so he ended it.

  If knighthood was declining, young Edward was not yet aware of the fact. His chief friends and counsellors were men like his cousin, Henry Lancaster, son of blind Henry—an athletic, keenly intelligent young knight, Edward’s frequent companion, the man often cited as the probable model or partial model for Chaucer’s Knight in the Canterbury Tales. He would become in his maturity one of the greatest fighting men in England, yet a man at the same time gentle, generous, compassionate, a man of whom, apparently, it could truly be said that

  everemoore he hadde a sovereyn prys;

  And though that he were worthy, he was wys,

  And of his port as meeke as is a maydë. [deportment]

  He neverë yet no vileynye ne saydë

  In al his lyf unto no maner wight.

  He was a verray, parfit, gentil knyght.

  With the backing of young Lancaster and other lords, Edward III seized his rightful powers as king, married his princess, and maneuvered his exhausted and demoralized country into war. All England rejoiced. War was the way to wealth in the late Middle Ages—or so it seemed to businessmen like John Chaucer, who helped to organize syndicates to loan money to the crown, for substantial returns,24 and to barons who rode out in proud array to ransom or be ransomed for incredible sums.