The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  The damage was done. Four days later Blanche of Lancaster’s skin had gone dark in patches like ink stains: Black Death. On parts of her body there were lumps the size of eggs; if they broke, there was a chance—but the pustules would not break. Her fever soared, she could not hear or see them. When Gaunt bent down to kiss her, a servant drew him back. And so Gaunt’s beautiful young wife died. His grief was frightening, and though he turned his mind at once to war, his spirit was in ruins; he rode at the head of his army like a ghost.

  There are politicians capable of taking deep grief in stride, ambitious men—which is not to deny that they may also be good men—for whom even the most terrible personal tragedies do not rob life of meaning, because power, for them—often the power to do good—is itself life’s meaning. But John of Gaunt was no such man. Though it was rumored otherwise by those of his contemporaries who envied or feared him, he never sought power for himself or his sons, but supported the throne, as Steward of England, because he believed it was his duty. And though duty can be a strong motivating force, it gives cold comfort to a man whose beloved mother and wife have just died and whose dearest friend in the world, Gaunt’s elder brother the Black Prince, is hurrying toward the grave. Chaucer watched Gaunt’s sorrow, no doubt grieving himself for Blanche, and did for Gaunt the only thing he could do, began a poem. To be true to his feelings, true to the dignity of Gaunt and Blanche, it must be the finest elegy ever written in English; and in fact it would be, when Chaucer finished—long after he began, because a poem in memory of Blanche must be as large and airy and full of subtleties, teasing innuendoes, oddly lighted beauties, as a Gothic cathedral. Though a difficult poem for modern readers, it stands today as one of the four or five great elegies in our language, a poem full of mystery and the queer shape-shifting common in our dreams. In her husband’s memory, Lady White—Blanche—sums up all the beauty of the universe:

  For I dar swerë, withoutë doutë,

  That as the somerës sonnë bryght

  Ys fairer, clerer, and hath morë lyght

  Than any other planete in heven,

  The moone, or the sterrës seven, [the seven fixed stars]

  For al the world so haddë she

  Surmounted hem alle of beauté…

  And her death becomes one with the mutability of the universe, a source of absolute despair. Yet finally her love, like that of Dante’s Beatrice, is the key to the knight’s return to health, since her nature is not merely physical but spiritual as well: human love and divine love work by one same principle:

  My lady yaf me al hooly [gave me wholly]

  The noble yifte of hir mercy…

  As helpë me God, I was as blyvë [swiftly]

  Reysëd, as fro deth to lyvë… [raised]

  Lady White, in other words, sums up not only all that gives us delight in nature but also the benevolence of the unseen power nature veils. The Book of the Duchess does, of course, far more—a lyrical and philosophical masterpiece—but the heart of its greatness is its convincing expression of Gaunt’s love and grief, and Chaucer’s anguish and concern.

  Not too surprisingly, Gaunt’s campaign in France went badly. Even if he’d been at his best, there was little he could do. Under the brilliant du Guesclin the French fought methodically, with infuriating patience—keeping out of sight, refusing battle except when they knew they had the clear advantage—as the Scots had done forty years ago, during Edward III’s first campaign. Gaunt’s army had no choice but vain ravaging marches, hunger and pestilence moving along with them, snatching at the stragglers. The duke was back in England from November 1369 to June 1370, consulting with his father and the Black Prince.

  It must have been a painful meeting. It was the first the two brothers had seen of each other since the death of Blanche, and the Black Prince was much worse now, his once powerful body wasted to a skeleton. Yet they were king’s sons; they got down to business quickly. What was wrong was clear enough. Whatever a man’s courage and will to fight, he can’t kill shadows and empty air, an invisible enemy like du Guesclin. But not even the Black Prince was sure, at first, what to do against the Frenchman’s strategy. In September, sick of body and mind, furious at the war’s dragging on and on, more allies abandoning the English every month, the Black Prince—over Gaunt’s strong protest—turned on Limoges the tactics he’d despised when he’d seen King Pedro of Spain use them, and for him as for Pedro, they backfired. Former neutrals and indifferent peasants became fanatical Anglophobes. The Black Prince, feverish and raging, sailed home.

  England’s depression, and no doubt Chaucer’s, deepened. In plague-gutted France and England, it was beginning to be remarked, chivalry was dead. Gunpowder was standard, and no longer used merely to frighten the horses. As defense against the longbow, breastplates and leg armor of leather were being added to chain mail, with the result that a knight was virtually helpless when down off his horse, hence easy to capture or—by the increasingly popular strategy of King Pedro—kill. Though there were still noble gentlemen of the kind that had rushed to their death at Crécy—still men like Richard Stury and Guichard d’Angle—they were becoming increasingly inferior, in general, to the seasoned and able, thoroughly unchivalric mercenary companies who would fight on any side, in any cause, whatever its morality, for cash. The “new English gentlery” was on its way, men whose code was that of the crusaders who would shame Christendom in the European campaign of the bishop of Norwich, slaughtering and seizing booty not from the infidel but from Christian European burghers, or that of the knights who would swear by the solemnest of all Christian oaths to give Richard II safe-conduct, then treacherously seize and kill him. Not that French or English gentlemen necessarily understood the extent to which ideals had declined by the 1370’s. Some remembered the code men once had served and believed that chivalry might even now be revived. But Geoffrey Chaucer, for one, was not fooled. Late in the noble old poet’s life, when chivalry was in ruins—the genteel Christian code set forth in the thirteenth-century French poem L’Ordene de Chevalerie and dramatized in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, and even practiced, to the letter, by Christian knights like St. Louis and Henry of Lancaster—Geoffrey Chaucer would create, with gentle irony, his “verray, parfit gentil knyght” and give him a story, the magnificent Knight’s Tale, which at once celebrates the ideals of chivalry and reveals the old Knight’s awareness of the code’s decay. In the tale the Knight tells, blood-sworn oaths mean nothing to his knightly characters: in blatant violation of the knightly code they serve a tyrant, Creon, and they lightly abandon their oaths to one another for love of a woman they cannot even get to from their prison. Yet Chaucer’s storytelling Knight takes it casually enough, even shows affection for his ignoble young heroes; and in the end that was no doubt Chaucer’s stance. For most men, especially the younger generation of poets and painters from Italy to Scotland, the world had grown harsher, more desperate; it was becoming the dark, endless forest of Sir Thomas Malory, a grim cosmic joke redeemed only—if at all—by “courteous love.” But Chaucer was a wise and compassionate man, a man secure in his faith that God had things in hand.

  Devoted, like Gaunt, to the English royal court, he nevertheless knew well enough that since the death of Queen Philippa it had decayed. Increasingly, it was ruled, not by Edward himself but by his mistress Alice Perrers, “the Lady of the Sun,” a woman Chaucer undoubtedly admired, though she had faults enough, and though history has taken a dim view of her. Since her story is interesting, since she was a friend and in some sense patron of Chaucer’s, and since her rise to power provides insights into the general moral decline at this period, it seems worth telling.

  Chaucer may have known her, or known about her, from childhood, since she came from his own class, his father’s merchant circle. Like all royal favorites, she came to be hated, at the peak of her power, and contemporary stories of her background tell us only the extent to which she was hated by those who made up the stories. Recently champions have arisen to d
efend her, foremost among them F. George Kay, who has written the first sympathetic biography.1 Even Professor Kay has perhaps been too cautious in giving Alice Perrers her due. At any rate, she was Chaucer’s good friend and saw to his welfare for as long as it lay in her power to do so, and she was equally a friend of John of Gaunt and others of Chaucer’s circle. She was a woman of conviction; she was ferociously loyal; and if she fought tooth and nail for her own selfish good, she also fought for the rights and privileges of the crown, more on principle than for selfish gain, when King Edward, grieving, disillusioned, sick at heart, and tired half into his grave, no longer cared.

  She was probably born in the plague year of 1348 or 1349, of middle-class parents, and no doubt she received some education or she would not have become lady-in-waiting to Queen Philippa. Her background may have been much like Chaucer’s, since in court records she and Chaucer are frequently associated—they repeatedly received gifts on the same occasions, and Alice was serving at Gaunt’s Savoy Palace at the same time as Philippa Chaucer, when both, on May 1, 1373, were given presents by the duke. It may be that one of Alice’s early relatives had dealings with Chaucer’s grandfather Robert, for Haldeen Braddy points out that

  …it was no other than Elias Pier (Peres, Piores, Pieres, etc.) who on September 14, 1309, succeeded Robert Chaucer (appointed November 15, 1308) as Deputy to the King’s Butler in the City and Port of London. Moreover, on August 2, 1310, Robert le Chaucer and this same Elias Perr’ (Perrers) were appointed, jointly or severally, to collect at the port of the City of London the custom on wines brought by merchant vintners from the Duchy of Aquitaine.2

  When Alice was about eighteen, Queen Philippa was living in her favorite rural retreat at Havering, the unostentatious house in the woods that Edward the Confessor had praised as the most peaceful of resiences—the house that by this time had become, traditionally, the personal property of a reigning monarch’s consort or the permanent home of a widow queen. It was from this house, surrounded by huge, dark trees, old bridges, and flatlands reminiscent of the landscape of Philippa’s birth, that tidings came of the queen’s wish to hire a new maiden for her personal retinue.

  The queen was fifty-four when she engaged Alice. She was no longer the vigorous woman she’d once been; she’d been thrown from a horse when she was forty-six and had suffered a dislocated shoulder, perhaps other injuries as well, and she was plagued now by abdominal pains and, within the year, would for a time take to her bed with dropsy. She was of course no complainer. She was the most beloved woman in all England, with a gift for arousing the immediate affection of everyone who met her. What she needed at the moment was a pleasant young lady to “do” for her, keep her company and take care of the tiresome, troublesome things that the queen was too weary and stiff to attend to. Alice’s role with the queen’s personal staff, in other words, was like that of lady of the bedchamber when that office was not a mere sinecure.

  They obviously got on well. All her life Queen Philippa had surrounded herself with attractive, clever women and noble-hearted, cultured men. Such matters as birth and rank did not impress her. When young Jean Froissart had come to England to study the manners of the country traditionally hostile to his own, he was the son of an artisan, but Philippa in an instant saw through to the young man’s true “gentillessë,” as Chaucer would say, and invited him to be her guest in the royal household, where he remained for the rest of her life as her loyal servant, clerk, and diarist. She showed the same insight in choosing Alice Perrers, whose meteoric rise would have been impossible without Philippa’s help. For example, within months of her arrival, Alice received a grant from the king of two tuns of Gascony wine to be delivered to her annually. This was no small gift—four hundred gallons of wine a year, worth as much as £10 ($2,400)—and since the king had had virtually no opportunity to know Alice at this time, Philippa must have suggested the gift herself, as an assurance of the new damoiselle’s permanent security in the household.

  When Alice was nineteen or so she met, through her attendance on Queen Philippa, Sir William Windsor. He had served with Prince Lionel in Ireland and, before that, with the Black Prince at the Battle of Poitiers. Despite the fact that his beginnings were relatively humble, though aristocratic, he did well for himself, eventually becoming “an active and valorous knight rich with great wealth which he had acquired by his martial prowess.”

  He’d returned with Lionel to England for discussions with the king of the thorny Irish question. He must have acquitted himself well, at least in Edward’s opinion, since he was ordered back to Ireland as an assistant to the new governor, and later was made himself king’s lieutenant for Ireland. He was in his thirties when Alice met him—nearly twice her age—but he must have had the usual chivalric accoutrements. When he and young Prince Lionel came to visit with Queen Philippa, Alice sat quietly listening, waiting for her mistress’s commands. If her eyes shone, watching the old warrior, Queen Philippa surely knew. When Windsor returned to Ireland he left behind him a girl who would gladly keep him informed on court opinion and policy with regard to Ireland. She would later become his fiancée and, eventually, his wife, and when, long afterward, parliament condemned him, she would throw all caution to the winds to set Windsor free.3

  When Philippa died, King Edward conscientiously carried out her last requests and rewarded her faithful servants. His order to the Exchequer for such payments began with the sum of “ten marks yearly, at Easter and Michaelmas, to our beloved damsel Alicia de Preston [a scribal error for Perrers], late damsel to Philippa, late Queen of England.” He gave similar gifts to eight other ladies who had served the queen, but he described only Alice as “our beloved damsel.” The phrase carried no sexual or romantic significance; it marked only a subject whose loyalty and position are especially deserving of mention. But those in the know in King Edward’s household understood his mentioning, with special favor, and first on the list, a maiden of junior status on the late queen’s staff. And they probably approved. Weighed down by grief, taxed by problems of war, desertion by his allies, and grim financial troubles, and sorrowing over the continuing decline of his beloved Prince Edward, the king could easily be forgiven his attachment to the not-especially-beautiful but yielding and devoted—and intellectually remarkable—young Alice. In time she would become his sole reason for living, and his subjects’ approval would, little by little, be withdrawn. But for a time at least she seemed a gift from heaven, a lady capable of keeping the court a bustling, happy place where the king, for all his sorrow and weariness, felt amused, felt even that he was still a great king, surrounded by bejeweled and interesting ladies, entertaining knights, rich merchants of London (over whom Alice had particular influence), musicians, painters, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who was so regularly in attendance and so often seen with Alice that to strangers it seemed he was her special protégé. F. George Kay writes of her,

  …this woman was no brainless doll with a pretty face and a bewitching sexuality. No one who rose from utter obscurity and for eight memorable years reigned as uncrowned Queen of an England where monarchy was almost absolute could be without feminine qualities near to genius. That she was not beautiful but had a beguiling tongue was intended by her contemporary critic as a damning criticism. It is, of course, a testimonial. Women with the personality and brains of the quality enjoyed by Alice Perrers are rare phenomena. Still fewer manage to exploit them in a man’s world.4

  Whatever her ambition—and no one denies that Alice Perrers was ambitious, as Chaucer was (though Chaucer was more discreet)—all signs agree that she loved King Edward and that Edward would scarcely have survived without her calming devotion. Kay writes:

  The times of greatest infatuation on the part of the King…occurred when Alice was about twenty-eight. This was a mature age for a woman who proved to have the attraction of beauty and vigour as never before. The average woman was regarded as entering middle age in her early thirties. She was more often than not dead before she reac
hed thirty-five. But Alice Perrers was no average woman, and lived no ordinary life. Her adult days had been spent in the comfort and good living of the court, even if her childhood had been hard.…She had not been worn out by recurrent childbirth. The few descriptions of her, for the most part compiled in the crisis period of her life in the late 1370’s, give grudging concession to her healthy physical appearance.

  Perhaps more important is the fact that Edward III, through the experiences of his childhood, was the type of man who needed maternal love rather than a pretty toy. He got it from his Queen for more than forty years. And he enjoyed the same mixture of maternal and sexual love for the remaining eight years that were left to him as a widower.5

  It must certainly have been her devotion to the king, rather than her notorious cunning, that won Alice the friendship of both the Black Prince and John of Gaunt. These things are of course impossible to decide, since some people see plots everywhere, while others see nothing but the best of intentions even in the most deadly vipers. (Chaucer, if asked, would surely have insisted that snakes have, like people, good intentions.) Certainly it must be admitted that Alice’s admiration of the two great princes did not greatly interfere with her ambition. On the other hand, the princes were not slow to make use of Alice Perrers’s easy access to the king, whether of necessity or because they admired her, agreed with her, and felt gratitude for the health she gave their father, whom they both loved.

  As for Chaucer, who during this period had to deal with that group in government with whom Alice was most influential and to whom she was most beholden, corrupt political London merchants—customs collectors skimming the king’s profits, and moneylenders lending to the king at inflated interest rates—there can be no doubt that her cunning and self-advancing machinations were the qualities he liked least in her; yet he could blink such faults, since for all her ambition, Alice Perrers could be selfless too. And in any case, her freedom was limited: she loved her husband, as royal mistresses seem frequently to have done; yet, as any devoted medieval subject would have done, she returned the king’s love and did everything in her power to make him happy. To Chaucer, in short, she was a study for art—a brilliantly entertaining wit, a good, gentle woman, a thief, a harlot; she was, as a child of the poet’s own merchant class, an astonishing success, and at the same time a woman dissatisfied, as firmly locked out of the aristocracy as Chaucer was himself—a kind of pet, a failure. Chaucer watched, forgiving and fascinated, hands behind his back, prepared to trade lightning fast puns with Dame Alice, discuss biblical exegesis or astronomy or, if she liked, perform some recent poem for the dazzling company she’d assembled for King Edward’s amusement.