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The Life and Times of Chaucer

Page 37

by John Gardner


  His temper proved disastrous, as much to himself as to anyone else, in 1385 when he was in Scotland on his first military campaign. In a brawl near York, his half brother John Holland killed the heir of the earl of Stafford, and Richard, in a paroxysm of rage and grief, swore he would deal with his brother as a common murderer. The bitterness of the quarrel apparently brought on the death of their mother, Princess Joan. Chaucer made no direct comment, or at any rate left none in his poetry. But he was writing at the time Troilus and Criseyde, and there, in the fifth book, he brooded at length on the melancholy of a prince who, feeling betrayed in love, abandons the Venus in his character for Mars. Revenge is all young Troilus can think about, and in his melancholy rage, he futilely strikes out at his enemies until, in effect, he kills himself on the sword of “fierce Achilles.” The poem is in no way a political allegory, but its central concern, the effect of a man’s putting faith in love—in the broadest sense, charity—as opposed to the effect of his putting all his faith in power (the warring inclinations of Troilus’ character), was a concern Richard’s court could understand.

  Chaucer, despite reservations, was firmly committed to Richard’s court and was accepted there as one of Richard’s own. In a writ issuing liveries of mourning for the funeral of Princess Joan, Chaucer was given three and a half ells of black cloth, and he is classed with Richard’s esquires and sergeants. With a heavy heart, the poet took his part in the nation’s mourning for his late friend and patron. The princess died at Wallingford Castle on August 7, 1385, the day Richard’s army crossed the border into Scotland. Her body was wrapped in swathings of waxed cloth and borne to Stamford in Lincolnshire, on the main road north, to be buried beside her first husband, Thomas Holland. Richard postponed the funeral, as he would later postpone Queen Anne’s, in order that it might be performed with due pomp, and she was finally buried in the Stamford church of the Gray Friars, after the king’s return from Scotland, probably in January 1386 when the judges in the Scrope-Grosvenor case (in which Chaucer was, as we’ve seen, a witness) adjourned for the trip north and the ceremony.

  When Chaucer and Philippa attended the funeral, their grief no doubt encompassed more than the death of the gentle, plump old princess. Chaucer was now a man of forty-six, dignified and graying, and knew these people around him well, including young Richard. Kneeling by his mother’s elevated catafalque, twelve great towering candles around it—in the background darkness archbishops, bishops, other prelates of the Church, and all the important magnates of his realm—Richard was no longer the hope of England. He was her danger. Gaunt watched, uneasy but reserved, and Chaucer must have looked on sadly. The king’s uncle Thomas of Woodstock, soon to be duke of Gloucester, moody and remote in that large, solemn crowd (snowlight coming in through the high stained-glass windows), was beginning to think things over, incline toward treason.

  Eight: The Rise of Gloucester and Chaucer’s Fortunes as a Royalist in Evil Times (c. 1385-1389)

  AS EARLY AS NOVEMBER 1381, parliament was complaining about Richard’s vast retinue and colossal expenses, as earlier parliaments had complained about the retinue and expenses of the young king’s hero, Edward II; but despite various efforts by parliament and by Richard’s uncles, including John of Gaunt, the king’s extravagance continued—huge gifts and lucrative appointments for such favorites as Michael de la Pole, who helped to arrange Richard’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia, for Simon Burley and his relatives, and for many, many others, including Geoffrey Chaucer. Edward III’s war debts were still unpaid (those not reneged on earlier), and new debts were mounting. The crown itself and most of the crown jewels were in pawn to the city of London, and when Lancaster’s chancellor, Richard Scrope, tried to break the spiral, Richard and his courtiers dismissed him.

  In such times war was the traditional solution: new lands, rents, and ransoms for the upper class, occupation and booty (and a slash in population) for the lower. Though John of Gaunt was against the ruinous war with France, he had been pushing since Queen Anne’s coronation for renewed war in Spain for a variety of reasons, chief of which, perhaps, was the fact that Castilian galleys were continually raiding the English coast but could be stopped, or better yet, turned against France, if Henry the Bastard were knocked from his throne, or rather, Gaunt’s throne. Moreover, these were the days of the great Papal schism, when two Popes, Pope Urban VI and his French rival, Clement VII, each with his own political backing, claimed exclusive rule of the Church. If directed against the Clementists of Portugal, the war Gaunt proposed could be counted as a holy crusade—at least by those Christians who backed Urban.

  This is no place for discussion of the great schism; suffice it to say that the time was a dark one for Christianity, and the cynicism shown by the contention of two men for the position as spiritual father of Christendom was as deep in England as elsewhere. Gaunt’s plan of an anti-Clementist crusade lost to another plan, the bishop of Norwich’s “glorious crusade” in Europe, opposed by the English Lords but favored by Commons and by the king’s advisers, partly because it would be led by bishops, not secular magnates like John of Gaunt, whose ever-growing power they meant to keep in check, but chiefly because it would be financed by the selling of plenary remissions from the Pope—indulgences capable, according to the Pope, of remitting the sins of both the living and the dead. “Angels from heaven, the pardoners were saying, would descend at their bidding to bring souls out of purgatory and waft them to the skies.”1 Gaunt fumed in indignation, as did his friend John Wyclif, who scoffed at such pardons. So did Chaucer, of course. He listened in amazement to the preposterous claims of the pardoners, and he would later immortalize the whole scoundrel lot in his “gentil Pardoner of Rouncivale” with his wallet full of pardons “comen from Rome al hoot.” He writes in the General Prologue,

  But of his craft, fro Berwyk into Warë,

  Ne was ther swich another pardoner.

  For in his male he hadde a pilwe-beer [pillow-case]

  Which that he seydë was Ourë Lady veyl;

  He seyde he haddë a gobet of the seyl

  That Seint Peter hadde, whan that he wentë

  Upon the see, til Jhesu Crist hym hentë [called]

  He had a croys of latoun ful of stonës, [false gold]

  And in a glas he haddë piggës bonës.

  But with thisë relikës, whan that he fond

  A povre person dwellynge upon lond, [person (parson?)]

  Upon a day he gat hym moore moneyë

  Than that the person gat in monthës tweyë….

  The “glorious crusade” was a disaster. It harmed rather than helped England’s military and political position, and it converted not one soul to the English choice of Popes.

  These days things were generally going badly for Gaunt and therefore, to some extent, for Chaucer. The king was now eighteen, full of strong opinions about what monarchy should be: its quasi-magical and divinely appointed power and magnificence, its dependence on no one. He had become a young man impossible for even Gaunt to keep in line, partly because his ideas were well thought out and, though opposed both to Gaunt’s ideas and to his self-interest as a magnate, hard for a loyal Steward of England to answer. Though Gaunt did not hesitate to speak sternly of Richard’s evil counsellors, and to urge their dismissal, especially that of the king’s fatuous young hawking friend Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, Richard more and more went his own stubborn way, giving out crown possessions and favors, proving his divine right and his people’s obligation to support his munificence whatever he might spend. Complaints grew louder; Gaunt’s attempts to restrain the king grew fiercer (his failure lost him his brief popularity); and Richard’s resentment of his uncle’s interference smoldered.

  At the Salisbury parliament of 1384, a Carmelite friar by the name of John Latimer told Richard that his eldest uncle was plotting his murder. Perhaps because of his extraordinary faith in the decency of friars—a faith like that which Chaucer mocks in his “lord of the village” in the Summoner�
��s Tale—or perhaps because the whole thing was a plot engineered by Oxford, and Richard was in on it, or perhaps because Gaunt seemed to Richard more hostile than he was, Richard believed the friar’s charge against Gaunt. Gaunt, it should be mentioned, could stage some pretty masterful scoldings, as when he posted his men at every door of Richard’s palace, letting no one in or out, then went himself to the king to give one of those cold-blooded steely-eyed tongue lashings that made Gaunt the terror of all enemies. At any rate, hearing the friar’s accusation against Gaunt, Richard was ready to have his uncle hanged at once. Gaunt defended himself with stern dignity—he could in those days still match the golden-haired, hotheaded young man who was always so certain he must be right—and the lords present for the parliament persuaded the king to hold the friar in prison while the charge against Gaunt was investigated. On his way to the prison the friar was intercepted by a band of Lancastrians, including the king’s half brother John Holland, was brutally tortured, and finally killed. If Geoffrey Chaucer, when he heard the news, was sorry for the friar, it did not temper his hatred of the mendicant brood Richard and his courtiers coddled. From behind the mask of the ferocious Summoner he would write, a short while later,

  ye han oftë tyme herd tellë

  How that a frerë ravysshëd was to hellë

  In spirit onës by a visioun;

  And as an angel ladde hym up and doun,

  To shewen hym the peynës that ther werë,

  In al the placë saugh he nat a frerë;

  Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo.

  Unto this angel spak the frerë tho:

  “Now, sirë,” quod he, “han frerës swich a gracë

  That noon of hem shal comë to this placë?”

  “Yis,” quod this angel, “many a millioun!”

  And unto Sathanas he ladde hym doun. [Satan]

  “And now hath Sathanas,” seith he, “a tayl

  Brodder than of a carryk is the sayl. [barge]

  Hold up thy tayl, thou Sathanas!” quod he;

  “Shewë forth thyn ers, and lat the frerë se

  Where is the nest of frerës in this placë!”

  And er that half a furlong wey of spacë,

  Right so as beës out swarmen from an hyvë,

  Out of the develës ers ther gonnë dryvë

  Twenty thousand frerës on a routë…

  If the earl of Oxford was behind this plot against Gaunt’s life, no evidence was found. While Gaunt’s friends were torturing the friar to make him talk, the king’s second uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, later earl of Gloucester, burst into the royal chambers in a rage and swore he’d cut down anyone, including the king, who tried to impute treason to his brother the duke of Lancaster. Richard and his courtiers were cowed, for the moment, but they were determined sooner or later to rule without a trace of interference. As the struggle between the king and his magnates grew more fierce, Thomas of Woodstock would resist more and more recklessly. As for Gaunt, recognizing the direction of events, he demanded and received backing for a new expedition to Spain, got Richard’s formal recognition of his claim as king of Castile, put his son and heir Henry Bolingbroke in charge of his affairs at home, and sailed out of Plymouth harbor, July 9, 1386, to put Richard out of mind and fight for his own crown.

  With Gaunt out of England, Thomas of Woodstock’s power would increase by leaps and bounds, and Chaucer, loyal to the king, would find himself dangerously involved in the struggle. In 1385, when Gaunt was seeking ways to avoid confrontation with Richard and his court, and Thomas of Woodstock was becoming the main voice of opposition, Chaucer seems to have sought, probably with Gaunt’s help, a government position less dangerous and controversial than the office of controller of customs. He gave up his house over Aldgate and the customhouse work that apparently went with it, partly, no doubt, because there was no longer much profit in customs collection, and any collector or controller who had profited by customs collection in the past would be sure to come under the scrutiny of parliament and its leader Woodstock, now duke of Gloucester. (Under Gloucester’s tight-fisted régime, the crown even charged Queen Anne for bed and board.) And it may be that Chaucer had reason to feel threatened by Gloucester’s rise. Three years later, in May 1388, while Gloucester was in full control of government, Chaucer saw fit (or, more likely, was forced) to “surrender at his own request” his pensions to John Scalby. He won them back only after 1389, when Richard was back in power. Most Chaucerians have doubted that the poet really did surrender his annuities at his own request; but he may well have done so, as a voluntary proof that he meant to be no trouble, whatever his loyalties. It was apparently not necessary in any other case for Gloucester to seize an annuity from an enemy and claim the enemy had volunteered it as a gift.

  In any event, if Gloucester’s ascendancy hurt Chaucer’s fortunes, the king took care of them despite his uncle’s wishes. No records survive to give positive proof, but in 1941 Margaret Galway convincingly argued that when Chaucer left his work as controller of customs (1385) he already had at hand a much better job as “clerk,” or general custodian and steward, of the king and queen’s favorite palaces, Eltham and Sheen (perhaps one or two others as well), and that in place of Aldgate, he probably had as his personal residence nothing less than the small royal manor at West Greenwich, on the crown estate called Rotherhithe.2 It will be enough here merely to summarize the evidence.

  The palaces of Eltham in Kent and Sheen in Surrey were respectively about seven and eight miles from London. The Greenwich royal manor, occasionally used in the time of Edward III but not sufficiently ostentatious for Richard, lay midway between them; thus one man could conveniently take charge of the upkeep and repair of all three. Around 1370 Robert Sibthorp had done just this as “clerk of the great works at Eltham, Shene and Retherhythe,” and soon afterward became (as Chaucer would become in 1389) chief clerk of the king’s works. As chief clerk, Sibthorp had an assistant who covered Eltham, Sheen, Rotherhithe, and Banstead (near Sheen).3 Another man, one Arnold Brocas, became chief clerk of the king’s works in 1381 after serving as clerk of the works at Eltham, Havering, and Hadleigh (in Essex). These and other records show that normally before becoming chief clerk of the king’s works a man had to prove himself as clerk of three or four estates; and they show, too, that the clerkship of Eltham and nearby manors was a usual stepping stone.

  We have clear evidence in Chaucer’s poetry that he at some time lived in Greenwich and had dealings with Eltham and Sheen. In early manuscripts, including the best, the Ellismere, a scant allusion to Chaucer’s place of residence in the Envoy to Scogan has the marginal gloss “Greenwich”; and a line in one prologue to the Legend of Good Women speaks of delivering a poem at Eltham or Sheen. Chaucer’s name appears as a member of a Greenwich board of freeholders in 1396, which proves he lived there at that time if not earlier; and in the “Reeve’s Prologue” (c.1385) there appears what might be a joking allusion to Chaucer’s habitat, when the Host speaks of “Greenwich, ther [that] many a shrewe [crook] is inne.” There is other evidence as well, all tending to the conclusion that Chaucer’s great editor Skeat was right in his educated guess that “It is highly probable that Chaucer’s residence at Greenwich extended from 1385 to the end of 1399, when he took a new house at Westminster.”4 It was surely because John Churchman knew about Chaucer’s responsibilities at Eltham and Sheen that, in suing the poet for unpaid bills, he had sheriffs search for Chaucer, to no avail—thanks undoubtedly to graft or influence—in both the counties of Kent and Surrey.

  In 1385 when Richard was preparing to fight the Scots and French in the north, he felt it necessary to arrange for the care of his estates and family in his absence. He officially assigned three of Chaucer’s friends, Sir Lewis Clifford, Sir Richard Stury, and Sir Philip Vache, with other knights and squires, to see to “the comfort and security of his mother [Princess Joan] wherever she shall abide within the realm, rendering other services befitting the estate of so great a lady.” Presumably h
e did the same for his queen, and apparently Chaucer had a part in the king’s provisions. On April 6, 1385, Richard granted Chaucer £10 ($2,400), a sort of loan or retainer unrelated to his stipend from the customs or his annuities, which Chaucer received “into his own hands” at Eltham. Other records show that the poet was out of London in April, June, and again in October, by which time he was certainly living in Kent or he could not have been appointed (October 12) as justice of the peace to replace the deceased Thomas of Shardelowe.

  Chaucer’s position in connection with Eltham, Sheen, and Rotherhithe involved various kinds of work, including supervision of whatever building was being done on the king’s estates, the upkeep and repair of the large dwelling houses, outbuildings (barns, mews, lodges, gatehouses, and so on), gardens and garden walls, park fences, lakes and fishponds, bridges and walkways. The clerk had to provide building materials and arrange for their cartage, had to pay the workmen’s wages and the wages of regular custodians, foresters, and gardeners, and keep detailed accounts. It was obviously a job that meant considerable hard work; but though Chaucer’s supervision of upkeep and repairs was by no means a sinecure, it was abundantly rewarding. The king’s estates were magnificently beautiful places. Froissart speaks of Eltham’s long vine-covered walkways, and various poems and paintings from the period give us clues to the beauty of such settings—the forests and deer parks, manicured paths that might open unexpectedly on a still lake with lilypads, a valley full of flowers, a memorial shrine half hidden in ivy, or the grotto of some ancient hermit.

 

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