The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  His quasi-mystical notion of what kings might do with impunity led Pedro, in 1353, to a more dangerous error. For centuries France had been exerting influence on the affairs of kingdoms in the Spanish peninsula. The rulers of Navarre, Castile’s neighboring kingdom to the northeast, controlling the upper Pyrenees, were of French lineage, and the powerful French navy rivaled the Castilian for control of the European Atlantic. To seal a peace with France, Pedro married a French princess, Blanche of Bourbon, and then, indifferent to the concern expressed by his barons and even his close friends, immediately locked his French queen in a dungeon for the sake of his mistress, Doña Maria de Padilla. It was an act of madness. Rich and splendid as his court might be, graced by Moorish philosophers and musicians and supported by the marvelous powers of sorcerers, it was still a foolish business to stir up that hornet’s nest, France. His favorite counsellor, the bastard brothers, and the queen mother united in a rebellion, which Pedro crushed.

  But since the injury to France invited invasion and thus involved not Castile alone but also her neighbors, and since a strong Castile, united under an absolute monarchy, could be a threat to smaller, less wealthy kingdoms nearby, Pedro’s success was temporary. Neighboring kings joined in, notably Peter IV of Aragon (also in the mountainous northeast, next door to Navarre), supporting the eldest bastard, Don Henry of Trastamara. Pedro won for a time and shocked Christian, chivalric Europe by executing his captives, both women and men, including two of his half brothers, and killing with his own hand the suppliant king of Granada. France was persuaded to enter the conflict, not only to punish the offense to Blanche of Bourbon and Pedro’s scorn of the chivalric code, but also to prevent, if possible, an alliance of Castile with England, and, incidentally, to give employment to the “free companies,” the roving bands of mercenaries who were then ravaging southern France. The king of France and the Pope at Avignon sent one of the finest French generals of the day, Bertrand du Guesclin, with a large army of mercenaries, into Spain. They won the throne of Castile for Trastamara in 1366, and Pedro, exiled, turned to the Black Prince for help. With some reluctance but very little choice from the point of view of international politics, since the Castilian navy under Trastamara would certainly side with France, the Black Prince came, leading his crack army and a bevy of diplomats (probably including, as we’ve seen, Chaucer), and in a typically brilliant victory at Nájera, in 1367, placed Pedro once more on his throne. Pedro slaughtered his captives as usual, and the Black Prince, indignant—and also suffering from the disease that would finally kill him—angrily returned to England, where he and his staff would advise abandonment of Pedro’s cause, support for a government of Castilian magnates, and the partitioning of Castile.

  So began the English involvement in Spain. Meanwhile, left to face his enemies alone, and believing implicitly in the strategy that had worked so well for the Moors, Pedro stepped up the atrocities. Then, near Montiel, in 1369, his castle under siege, he was tempted out by du Guesclin for truce talks and murdered by his bastard brother in the Frenchman’s tent. Pedro’s daughters by Maria, whom the Cortes (heraldic judges) acknowledged legitimate heirs to the throne, made war against Trastamara, whose weakened Spanish neighbors now deserted him. In 1372—three years after the death of John of Gaunt’s beloved Blanche—the daughters of King Pedro secured England’s continued alliance by marriage of Pedro’s daughter and heiress, Constance, to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, making Gaunt, according to Spanish law, the legitimate king of Castile, if he could snatch his legitimate throne from the usurper Trastamara.

  One may wonder what “glory” a man like Chaucer could see in King Pedro. Yet Chaucer’s attitude need not surprise us. For one thing, whatever he may have thought of Pedro as a man, the poet naturally favored Pedro’s side on the issue involved. Like Gaunt and the Black Prince (until revulsion caused the latter to abandon his stand), Pedro stood for strong central government as opposed to government by a puppet king supported by rival, frequently warring magnates, government that historically, in Britain, had seldom proved efficient either in organizing for war or in maintaining peace and prosperity. (Turning against Pedro, Prince Edward had not changed his mind about how government ought to be run; he had merely given up on Spain and Pedro.) Praising Pedro after his death, when his friend John of Gaunt was married to Pedro’s daughter and stood as rightful claimant to Pedro’s legitimate power, Chaucer was perhaps more honoring the Castilian throne than the man who had held it.

  It seems probable, moreover, that the stories Chaucer heard, not from the Black Prince but from men who served under him, made Pedro appear at least nobler than his opponents. Chaucer may have received his information from old Sir Guichard d’Angle, a man of some importance in Chaucer’s life, though we know less of their relationship than we might wish. Guichard was a man with whom Chaucer would serve on various important diplomatic missions including royal marriage negotiations in 1376, and a man whose word would count with Chaucer or, indeed, with any Englishman.

  He was a Frenchman by birth and training, known in Chaucer’s circle as a man of exceptional chivalry and valor. He’d fought courageously on the side of the French in the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and had been left for dead on the battlefield. Soon after, from admiration of the Black Prince and in faithful service to the code of chivalry, which obliged a knight always to fight on the side he believed to be just, he’d switched his allegiance from France to England, abandoning everything he had, though a wealthy man. He’d been appointed marshal of Aquitaine by the Black Prince and later Lord Playnmartyn and captain of Aquitaine; and because he was a cultured and noble-spirited knight, he was repeatedly sent on errands for King Edward—to Rome in 1369, for example, to confer with Pope Urban V. (There he met his fellow ex-Frenchman, Froissart, who shared his great passions, including poetry, and his company on the journey home.) Guichard distinguished himself, as did his two sons, fighting with the Black Prince in support of King Pedro at the Battle of Nájera, and was present at the ceremonious meeting of the Black Prince and King Pedro. He escorted Pedro to Burgos when the Spaniard, surrounded by jubilant, cheering friends, resumed his title to the throne. In 1372 Guichard was captured by Trastamara and spent two years in a Spanish dungeon, a grim place even by medieval standards, where, according to the report of Owen de Galles one month after Guichard’s capture, Guichard and his companions lay in darkness, chained two by two. They were fortunate at that, since many of Trastamara’s captives, whatever their rank and nobility of lineage, were summarily executed, blinded, had their ears cut off, or were castrated. And while Guichard was suffering the misery of his dungeon—this too Chaucer knew in all its grisly detail—his wife was persecuted and humiliated by the French generals allied with Trastamara and was forced to surrender and flee her castle of Achart. She escaped to the protection of the duke of Berry, who eventually—in 1374-75—won by bribery and a prisoner exchange the release of Guichard and his fellow knights.

  Back in England, that long nightmare finally behind him but so deeply cut into his memory that he must have spoken of it frequently, Guichard met Geoffrey Chaucer often, since they both were favored diplomats and both in the inner circle of Gaunt’s friends. As Guichard grew older, his interests, not least of them his love of poetry, drew him closer still to Chaucer. Guichard remained in the retinue of the Black Prince, whom Gaunt and his mistress—and probably the Chaucers—frequently visited until the prince’s death, and when the prince saw death approaching in 1376 he made Guichard guardian of his young son Richard, the future king. It was Guichard d’Angle who first suggested to John of Gaunt a marriage alliance with Constance of Castile, an alliance that, with luck, might permanently remove Castile from French influence; and it was Guichard who negotiated and finally achieved the marriage. When Guichard died, in 1380—beloved old hero and a faithful friend of King Edward’s sons and grandson, now king—John of Gaunt, as a sign of the depth of his mourning for that emblem of steadfast faith and true chivalric valor, ordered payme
nt “for 1000 masses sung for the soul of Guychard Dangle.”

  Listening to the stories Sir Guichard had to tell of dungeon murders, torture, cruel disfigurings, starvation, chains, and filth—mistreatment bad enough if dealt out to peasants but outrageous when bestowed on a man like Guichard—Chaucer must have felt that Pedro was at least a lesser evil compared with his enemies. In any event, when cool, black-eyed Constance, Pedro’s daughter, arrived in England a few years later to take her place as Gaunt’s wife, whatever doubts Chaucer may have harbored about Pedro were forgotten.

  Meanwhile Edward’s war with France dragged on. While the Black Prince had been fighting in Spain there had been between France and England a cessation of hostilities; but in January 1369, a rebellion had flared up against Edward in Gascony, with the tacit approval of the French king, Charles V. On May 21, Charles officially declared war on England, and on June 3, soon after he received the news, Edward reassumed the title “King of France.” In September, Gaunt attacked, raiding France from Calais to Harfleur. Geoffrey Chaucer was with him.

  It was a grim time to be trying to fight a war. England had been sunk in deep spiritual and economic depression since the autumn of 1368, when abnormally heavy rains had flooded the lowlands and made higher land so sodden it was difficult or impossible to plow. The acreage of sown wheat and other grains was low; and spring planting failed to make up for it, because that spring the pestilence struck again and by June was soughing through London. The court sealed itself off in Windsor, on the theory that the vast belt of park and forest made it relatively safe. Plague was kept at bay, but Death, as the Pardoner’s Tale reveals, has schemes upon schemes. By July Queen Philippa was desperately ill and bedridden, though not with the plague. Her attendant ladies, including her beloved young Alice Perrers, who would later become King Edward’s mistress—and including also Philippa Chaucer—sat beside her bed to read to her, kept hot cloths on her forehead, trying to break the fever, and watched in sorrow, probably, as her physicians bled her, unwittingly helping death along. The queen had none of her family around her but the king and their fourteen-year-old son, Thomas of Woodstock—the devoted, model child who would later become the earl of Gloucester and would be executed by King Richard for treason—and she had few of her beloved old friends near either, not Joan of Kent, not even Froissart, who was away accompanying Prince Lionel to the wedding that was soon to prove the death of him. On August 15 the queen received last rites. Froissart got there barely in time to see her die. He wrote later:

  And the good lady, whanne she knewe and parceyved that there was with her no remedy but dethe, she desyred to speke with the kynge her husbande, and whan he was before her, she put out of her bedde her right hande, and toke the kynge by his right hande, who was right sorowfull at his hert; then she said, Sir, we have in peace, joye, and great prosperyte, used all oure tyme toguyder: Sir, nowe I pray you at our departyng, that ye wyll graunt me thre desyres. The kynge, ryght sorowfully wepyng, sayd, Madame, desyre what ye wyll, I graunt it.

  Sir, sayde she, I requyre you firste of all, that all maner of people, suche as I have dault with all in their marchaundyse, on this syde the see or beyond, that it may please you to pay every thynge that I owe to theym, or to any other. And secondly, sir, all suche ordynaunce and promyses as I have made to the churches, as well of this countrey as beyonde the see, where as I have hadde my devocyon, that it maye please you to accomplysshe and to fullfyll the same. Thirdely, sir, I requyre you that it may please you to take none other sepulture, whan soever it shall please God to call you out of this transytorie lyfe, but besyde me in Westmynster. The kynge all wepynge, sayde, Madame, I graunt all your desyre. Than the good lady and quene made on her the signe of the crosse, and commaunded the kyng her husbande to God, and her youngest sone Thomas, who was there besyde her; and anone after she yelded up the spiryte, the whiche I beleve surely the holy angels receyved with great joy up to heven, for in all her lyfe she dyd neyther in thought nor dede thyng, wherby to lese her soule, as ferr as any creature coulde knowe. Thus the good quene of Englande dyed.…Of whose dethe tidynges came to Tornehen, into the Englysshe hoost, whereof every creature was sore displeased, and ryght soroufull, and specially her son the duke of Lancastre [John of Gaunt].

  For all he had seen of plague and war, Gaunt was not a man who took the death of friends easily. For every loved one he lost, including his retainers and some of the retainers of his brothers, he established costly requiem masses and memorials, and he regularly did everything possible for the survivors of the deceased. Froissart’s remarks suggest that Gaunt’s grief, when he heard the news of his mother’s death, was terrible indeed. Yet there was further sorrow to come to him in that plague year 1369, sorrow that would be shared to the fullest by his attendant Geoffrey Chaucer.

  With a vast army and an unusually large and unwieldy store of provisions—it was a time of famine—John of Gaunt, probably with Chaucer in personal attendance, crossed the Channel on a military expedition into France. (Chaucer received £10—$2,400—“for reward or wages of war.”) Gaunt’s duchess, Blanche, with numerous retainers, accompanied her husband part way to the front, as was customary in knightly wars, and a part of Chaucer’s business—he was now almost thirty—may well have been the care and entertainment of the duchess. No record spells out Chaucer’s office, but years later he would receive the exact same amount for a job which included attendance on Queen Anne when Richard II was at war in Scotland, and we know that for much of his life, from the days with King Edward to the death of Queen Anne, Chaucer was valued partly for his ability to entertain ladies of the nobility with poetry and conversation, much as Jean Froissart used to entertain and provide company in the household of Philippa.

  Perhaps Sir Richard Stury, one of the Black Prince’s most trusted retainers, was also in France, probably with Gaunt. (No evidence survives, but it’s certain that the Black Prince had one or two of his best men there to give advice as seasoned veterans of the prince’s great battles.) The prospects for the campaign were bad, in fact dismal. Chaucer, Stury, the whole company knew it. They’d landed in a city that shrank back in alarm from strangers, shrank even from friends, for no one could say who might be bringing “the death.” If there was merriment anywhere, it was the poisoned merriment Chaucer would write of in the Pardoner’s Tale, the riotous debauchery of seedy taverns, churches of the Devil, where prostitutes frolic with drunken dancers and shooters of craps:

  tavernës,

  Where as with harpës, lutës, and gyternës [guitars]

  They daunce and pleyen at dees bothë day and nyght, [dice]

  And eten also and drynken over hir myght,

  Thurgh which they doon the devel sacrifisë

  Withinnë that develës temple, in cursed wisë…

  Such pleasures were not for Chaucer and his friends. They settled the ladies into a castle in the country, a place they could hope might be safe from the plague, and while the lesser attendants brought in equipment from the wagons, opened wine, served food, and covered the cold bed-boards with mattresses and featherbeds, blankets and bolsters, Gaunt and his friends sat talking, since tomorrow they must ride out to the sprawling encampment and begin the slow trek into France.

  Gaunt, that night, at the table beside his beautiful, pale wife, perhaps seemed for the moment to have put away his grief to speak easily, almost cheerfully, of how changed things were since their earlier visits, though autumn in France was always beautiful, of course. In the past the English had struck France from Flanders, sent on their way by eager allies. Not now. Back in 1363, when a wool staple had been established at Calais—a boon to the Flemish, who were thus made firm allies of England—King Edward had begun negotiations for marriage between his sixth son, Edmund Langley, earl of Cambridge, and Margaret, heiress not only to Flanders but also to the counties of Burgundy and Artois. Charles V of France, determined to block that dangerous alliance, had persuaded Pope Urban V to refuse the necessary dispensation, then himself had en
tered into the bargaining and, in this dark year 1369, had won Margaret as bride for his brother, Philip the Bold. English domination in Flanders was at an end.

  That was no doubt at the back of Gaunt’s mind too, as he talked on, speaking lightly of the world’s great changes as if they had to do only with the weather, old friends moved away.

  But beauty passes “like a shadow on a wall.” Perhaps it was a servant, an old woman, who came hurrying from the pantry. Conversation broke off. Timidly, she asked permission to speak with the duke. Stury signalled to her; she spoke to him instead. He paled, then rose quickly, a little stiffly, and went to whisper with the duke. Gaunt said nothing for a moment, then at last announced that the company must move on to another place. A rat had been found dead. No one knew at the time exactly how it worked—how with the death of the rat, the rat fleas shifted not to cats or dogs but to the rat’s age-old companion and ancient kinsman, man—but they knew what the death of the rat meant, and the whisper went round: “Pestilence!”