The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  Gaunt continued to be kind to Elizabeth Chaucer and to another of Chaucer’s children as long as he lived. When Elizabeth entered the convent of Barking to become a nun, Gaunt presented the convent with £51 8s. 2d. (c. $12,235), partly as a gift, partly for “various expenses” incurred. Since Elizabeth was the niece of John of Gaunt’s beloved mistress (later wife) Katherine Swynford, since Gaunt and Geoffrey Chaucer were evidently friends for many years, and since Gaunt, as duke of Lancaster, was by now the richest man in England, no dark explanation of the gift need be sought. All the same, the gift is large enough to suggest that Gaunt may have had special reasons for concern about Elizabeth.

  Professor Williams finds numerous hints that Gaunt felt a concern about Philippa not related to his interest in and friendship for Chaucer. He granted Philippa, in August 1372, an annuity of £10 ($2,400) “by our special favor, and for the good and agreeable service” she had done for “our very dear and much loved companion the queen.” Later he granted Chaucer an annuity of £10 not only for the services of “our well-loved Geffray Chaucer” but also “for the good service that our well-loved Philippa, his wife, has done to our most honoured lady and mother the queen.…” Queen Philippa had at this time been dead for five years. Just before his departure for the Great March through France, in 1373, Gaunt gave presents to his second wife (after the death of Blanche of Lancaster) Queen Constance of Castile, to his father, his sister, his daughters, Alice Perrers (King Edward’s mistress), and, among others, Philippa Chaucer. To his wife he gave four gold buttons, and to Philippa he gave a buttoner with six silver buttons worked with gold. On New Year’s Day, 1380, he gave Philippa a silver cup worth 31s. 5d. ($377); in 1381 he gave her another silver cup, worked with gold, which was one of a pair worth £10 4s. 2d. ($2,570), and the next year he gave her another silver cup. Gaunt was of course generous to everyone around him; nevertheless, the steady recurrence of Philippa Chaucer’s name in his household accounts, even granting the fact that she was the sister of Gaunt’s beloved Katherine, is interesting.

  The evidence, or possible evidence, can be spun out indefinitely. In May 1379, when Gaunt was in complete control of public affairs in Lincoln, the sheriff of Lincoln for some reason sent Philippa and a Mary St. Clair (another of Gaunt’s pensioners) £26 13s. 4d. From 1381 to 1386 certain receipts from the customs were not paid entirely to Geoffrey, the controller, but were divided between him and Philippa, which perhaps suggests (or so Williams speculates) that Geoffrey and Philippa were not at this time living together, and that someone was taking care of Philippa’s interests. At any rate it is certain that Philippa Chaucer had a life independent of the poet’s and was esteemed in her own right in the Gaunt circle. On February 19, 1386, she was admitted to the fellowship of Lincoln Cathedral, along with Gaunt’s sons Henry Bolingbroke (his son by Blanche), and John Beaufort (by Katherine), Katherine’s son Thomas Swynford (Gaunt’s stepson), Robert Perrers (who would soon be Gaunt’s son-in-law, husband to Gaunt’s daughter by Katherine, Joan), and other of Gaunt’s retainers. Chaucer himself was not admitted. Neither was Katherine Swynford, but she may well have been a member already (and, indeed, she may have been the arranger of the whole initiation).

  To all this it can of course be answered that Gaunt showed his fondness for Chaucer in other ways. He seems to have placed Chaucer in the king’s service in the beginning, in 1366 or 1367, and, contrary to the rather queer opinion of J. R. Hulbert,14 seems often (though not always) to have had a hand in Chaucer’s political and financial advancement. In 1369, when Chaucer was paid £10 ($2,400) on account of wages and expenses to be incurred in the war with France, Gaunt was the leader of the troops to be sent to France. In 1370, when Chaucer received letters of protection for a journey across the sea, Gaunt was in England taking a leading part in public affairs. In 1372, when Chaucer was commissioned to go to Italy, Gaunt was in London, had for some months been the lover of Katherine Swynford, Chaucer’s sister-in-law, and was by far the most powerful figure in the government. In April 1374, when Chaucer was granted his pitcher of wine daily for life, Gaunt had probably just returned from his Great March through France, which had ended that month. He was certainly back in England on May 10, two and a half weeks later, when Chaucer was granted a free lifetime lease on the house above Aldgate, probably in order that he might (as Margaret Galway suggests) be close to his new work as customs controller—a job already awarded though not yet granted officially. Four weeks after that, he was appointed controller of customs and subsidy of wools, hides, and wool-fells for the port of London; four days after that he was made controller of petty customs of wines for the port of London; and the following day he was granted a lifetime annuity of £10 by Gaunt himself. And so it goes to the end of Gaunt’s days.

  Williams’ analysis, I think, greatly underestimates the influence of King Richard II on Chaucer’s later fortunes; but it is true, certainly, that whatever he could do for Chaucer, Gaunt did. Beside such favors—it can easily be claimed, in opposition to Williams’ position—Gaunt’s gifts to Philippa were mere tokens of friendship to the family of a man Gaunt esteemed. It might be claimed that Gaunt was telling the truth: he gave gifts to Philippa because she’d been extraordinarily kind to his mother Queen Philippa in her last years (except that we know Gaunt used the same formula on one woman who really was his mistress); and it might be claimed that later he was kind to her because she was Katherine’s sister and had perhaps helped them in their love affair. We’ll never know the truth, but however we may wish to deny the rumor, the whole business looks exceedingly suspect. Why did John of Gaunt give such a very large gift to Elizabeth Chaucer—and not to Katherine Swynford’s son Thomas, by her earlier marriage, a boy Gaunt loved?

  Part of what makes the whole puzzle so dark is that Gaunt and Chaucer do indeed seem to have been friends, as Gaunt’s account books insist: other recipients of Gaunt’s largesse are often simply named; Chaucer is always “our beloved.” Though all the evidence is indirect, Chaucerians have generally formed the impression that the two were quite close friends, not because of what Chaucer owed Gaunt or Gaunt owed Chaucer, not because Philippa and Geoffrey helped the duke in his affair with Katherine (though they may have), and not because Chaucer’s marriage to Philippa and, after Philippa’s death, Gaunt’s marriage to Katherine made the two men relatives, but because they were brilliant, in many ways like-minded men, intellectually daring, scrupulously honorable, at least by their own medieval code, and emotionally useful to each other. Gaunt could give Chaucer the station and self-respect that Englishmen of the middle class hungered for (as no one knew better than Chaucer himself, who dramatized that hunger in the Canterbury Tales),15 and Chaucer could give Gaunt a sense of participation in the contemplative, artistic life he was fitted for by nature but largely denied, except as patron and collector, by his responsibilities and station. He was—as we’ve said—a prince who’d grown up in a household where ideas were celebrated, where sage and polished old Froissart and his friends were never beyond Queen Philippa’s call; a prince who in later life would haunt the halls of Oxford and pay visits to scholars among his enemies the French, and who would defend with armed soldiers the right of theologians to free inquiry—not that we need deny the element of self-interest in Gaunt’s stand, since Wyclif’s inquiry favored civil power. Yet all we know of Gaunt suggests that his action was not pure self-interest.

  Nothing would be more natural, though of course the suggestion is pure speculation, than that Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, with a few attendants, should from time to time spend an evening with the Chaucers, the sisters talking of whatever it is medieval sisters talked about—a certain cool distance between them, it may be, young Katherine sometimes made suddenly timid by some hint of irritation in her older sister’s voice, forced to be cautious about showing too openly her affection for the duke, never reaching for his hand when Philippa was in the room (even a smile shared between them could make Philippa’s eyes go quiet) yet at other times standing f
irmly, younger sister or no, unwilling to take any more blame than she deserved, even defiant, however guardedly, taking with Philippa the attitude Criseyde had taken in the temple where Troilus first saw her,

  …somedel deignous…for she let fallë

  Hirë look a lite aside in swich manerë, [little]

  Ascaunces, “What! may I nat stonden herë!” [askance]

  —and while the sisters worked out their difficult truce, the two men, great in their extremely different ways, discussed, for Gaunt’s benefit, the difficult question of animals versus cows, and, for Chaucer’s benefit, the fascinating intricacies of a double-front French war.

  Though described as “mediocre” by most modern historians since the nineteenth-century Bishop Stub, that was by no means what Gaunt seemed to Chaucer. That very moderation, that very reasonableness which makes Gaunt seem pale in comparison to his dramatic father and older brother—pale even in comparison to his stern and monklike younger brother, Thomas of Woodstock, later earl of Gloucester, doomed to die for treason against King Richard II, or to his still younger brother, Edmund Langley, later bishop of York, who cared more for the pursuit of fox and deer than for pursuit of empire or justice or salvation—Gaunt’s balance, his good sense, was for Chaucer a high and noble virtue, indeed the apex of virtue, the chief point of praise he’d offered in his elegy for Blanche:

  Therwith hir lystë so wel to lyvë,

  That dulnesse was of hir adrad.

  She nas to sobre ne to glad;

  In allë thynges morë mesurë

  Had never, I trowë, creaturë.

  According to Professor Williams, the likelihood, or anyway suspicion, is that not only Chaucer’s daughter Elizabeth but also his son Thomas was biologically a child of Gaunt. The idea is an old one, but it became a matter for serious consideration in 1932, when Russell Krauss wrote his elaborate study, “The Paternity of Thomas Chaucer.” Like many Chaucerians who have followed him, Krauss began his study, he tells us, in hopes of disproving the old contention that Gaunt could have been Thomas Chaucer’s father, but ended up convinced that there was no other way of accounting for the facts.

  The tradition begins with Speght, who reluctantly reports, damaging his own case, “Yet some hold opinion (but I know not upon what grounds) that Thomas Chaucer was not the sonne of Geffrey Chaucer, but rather some kinsman of his whome hee brought up.”16 Krauss comments: “Speght was undoubtedly reporting a genuine opinion—an opinion of a sort that can hardly arise without some basis in fact. Unless we are to assume that some one sat down and made it up, which seems gratuitous, how are we to account for it?”17 Various kinds of evidence can be adduced. The weakest piece of evidence (though one repeatedly brought forward) is the fact that John Lydgate, who revered Geoffrey Chaucer and knew Thomas sufficiently well to address a complimentary poem to him, says nothing in that poem about Thomas’s paternity. If the argument is worth answering at all, the answer is that even if Geoffrey was Thomas’s father and Lydgate knew it, Lydgate would not necessarily have thought that relationship an appropriate detail for inclusion in his verses. It is true of course, though it carries no weight, that if Lydgate knew Thomas Chaucer to be Gaunt’s son, he’d have been a fool to have mentioned it.

  Two slightly stronger bits of evidence are, first, Thomas Chaucer’s various coats of arms, one of which is preserved on his tomb, and second, his apparent failure to claim his Roet property in Hainault. The heraldic evidence is complicated, but in brief it comes to this: On his tomb Thomas Chaucer takes his mother’s Roet arms, not Geoffrey Chaucer’s, and elsewhere, when he displayed the arms of Geoffrey Chaucer as his own, he seems not to have adopted them outright but to have used them in an altered form. It was not uncommon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for a man to choose his mother’s coat of arms when her station was higher than her husband’s; but given Geoffrey Chaucer’s fame and favor—pace the usual opinion of Chaucerians, the poet was chiefly admired not for his diplomacy but for his brilliance as a poet, the greatest since Dante in all Europe—the omission is curious. Thomas’s apparent alteration of his father’s arms is even stranger. The seal used by Thomas Chaucer at Ewelme in 1409 is marked “S [G]HOFRAI CHAUCIER”—it is, in other words, not Thomas’s seal at all but Geoffrey’s—and on this seal we find a bend entire. All other surviving coats of Thomas Chaucer exhibit a bend countercolored. Though this might be explained as a personal whim, the explanation is a little unconvincing, since the alteration could be construed as a sign of bastardy. The suggestion that the Ewelme seal may be an engraver’s mistake is also unconvincing. Ordinarily one does not pay for work that might be construed as critical of one’s mother.

  Since Philippa Chaucer was a Roet heiress, Thomas Chaucer ought to have been in line for property in Hainault; but there is no evidence that he ever held land there. There are several plausible explanations. One is suggested by the difficulty encountered by Thomas Swynford, Katherine’s son. In 1411 Thomas Swynford was unable to claim his share of the Hainault property, his inheritance through Katherine, because those who held it maintained that he was illegitimate. Henry IV rescued him by issuing a writ proclaiming his legitimacy. Perhaps for Thomas Chaucer, no such writ could honestly be issued.

  None of this evidence is conclusive, but, for what it’s worth, we have more. Generous as he was to Geoffrey Chaucer, Gaunt was far more generous to Thomas Chaucer. Among other grants, he apparently arranged for Thomas a reward, additional to Thomas’s pension, of 20 marks ($3,000) in 1394-95 and in the same year doubled Thomas’s pension, as we learn from King Richard’s confirmation of Thomas’s £20 annuity after Gaunt’s death. Though the later records of Gaunt are scant, we know from Richard II’s Patent Rolls that when, in the last year of his reign, King Richard took over the late duke of Lancaster’s holdings, he infringed on provisions Gaunt had made for Thomas Chaucer and felt obliged to make amends, granting Thomas, for life, 20 marks a year as compensation for offices (unfortunately not described) which Richard had now given to the earl of Wiltshire. As Krauss remarks,

  If we compare this treatment of Thomas with that accorded Geoffrey, we cannot but be struck by the disparity. If we were to say that Geoffrey was a protege of Gaunt’s, how would we describe Thomas’s connection with him? John of Gaunt extended his bounty to Geoffrey in the year 1374 very possibly in recompense for an injury done him [the affair with Philippa]; he continued in warm and generous intimacy with Philippa throughout her life; but Thomas he received into his own retinue and provided for from the year 1389 [probably just after the death of Philippa] until he died, when the task passed to his sons.18

  Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, when he became King Henry IV, was extraordinarily generous to Thomas Chaucer; but, Krauss writes,

  Gaunt and [Henry IV] were not the only Lancastrians to heap good fortune upon him. Henry Beaufort [Gaunt’s son by Katherine]…made him constable of Taunton Castle in 1406, calling him in the writ “nostro Consanguineo.” This was a munificent reward. Chaucer was to have £40 yearly with “supervision of his manors, lands, and possessions in Somerset with all due fees, profits, emoluments and commodities.” When it is brought to our attention that no duties were attached to the appointment and that the office might be exercised by deputy, we must recognize that the salary amounted to an out-and-out gift. Writing of Thomas to his nephew Henry V in 1420, the cardinal called him “my Cousin.” Such a term would have been eminently fitting and generous for a great prelate to use in reference to his illegitimate half-brother.19

  Krauss’s final point here, I must admit, eludes me. The two men were cousins. But the rest is sound and it does seem curious that Gaunt and his sons and heirs gave no such lavish treatment to Katherine Swynford’s son, Thomas, Gaunt’s stepson.

  The early Chaucerian Thynne reported in his Animadversions (no one knows on what grounds) that Gaunt “had mayne paramours in his youthe and was not verye contynente in his age,” and Chaucer with careful politeness implies the same in his Book of the Duchess.
Who these paramours were, besides Katherine Swynford and Marie St. Hilary (mentioned by Froissart), no one has discovered. Marie, like Philippa Chaucer, was a damoiselle of the queen and received gifts from Gaunt, as did Philippa, “for the good and agreeable service she has rendered for a long time to our Lady and Mother Philippa, late Queen of England,” almost the same formula Gaunt used in giving gifts to Katherine Swynford. He used the same formula on other women, not all of whom, surely, can have been his mistresses; but the size of his gifts to Marie (later married to one of his retainers), to Katherine, and to Philippa is suggestive.

  Several objections are commonly raised to the theory that Philippa Chaucer was Gaunt’s mistress and that Thomas Chaucer was Gaunt’s son. One is the testimony of Thomas Gascoigne, of Oxford, who undoubtedly knew Thomas Chaucer, and who states plainly that Thomas was Geoffrey’s son. But Gascoigne may not have known Thomas Chaucer well—though they were Oxfordshire neighbors, their worlds were far apart—and Thomas, brought up by Chaucer, may not have advertised his illegitimacy. (Thomas once signed himself in court “son of Geoffrey Chaucer,” which may mean simply that he grew up in Chaucer’s house, though it may also mean, of course, that he was really Chaucer’s son.) No one else from the Chaucers’ time says a word about any relationship between Geoffrey and Thomas Chaucer, a fact which has made such eminent Chaucerians as Furnivall, Tyrwhitt, Kirk, and Lounsbury feel, at best, uncertain that Geoffrey and Thomas were father and son. A stronger, though strictly emotional objection is that, while one can understand Geoffrey’s marrying his friend’s cast-off mistress to help the cast-off mistress and the friend out of their trouble, it seems incredible that three to six years later (the probable time of Thomas’s conception), he should still be putting up with their love affair. This has been answered in several ways. Krauss’s view is that the love affair took place while Philippa was serving in Gaunt’s household, Geoffrey being away in Italy (December 1, 1372 until May 23, 1373), and that when the poet got home he was wild with indignation, which Gaunt assuaged by his largesse of 1374 (the pitcher of wine, the house over Aldgate, and so on). Professor Williams, bearing in mind Chaucer’s evident close friendship with Gaunt, takes a different tack. It should be remembered, he says,