The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  At parliament he accepted with seeming meekness the impeachment, fining, and imprisonment of Pole, the removal of certain others, and the formation of a “great and continual council” to manage his affairs. Parliament dissolved and Chaucer hurriedly fled home, resigning those customhouse positions that might put him in Gloucester’s line of fire. As for the king, he soon showed his scorn of the proceedings. He remitted Pole’s fine and sent him to Windsor, where Simon Burley was his jailer and where the king himself went for Christmas. While the council began its work, sealing writs on its own authority, Richard and his favorites slipped away to roam England, Ireland, and Wales, gathering an army and, more important, gathering up legal opinions.

  First at Shrewsbury and then at Nottingham, the king met with the highest law officers in the realm and set before them carefully stated questions concerning the legality of the parliament of 1386. Gloucester learned of the meeting with the judges from the archbishop of Dublin, who was present at the meeting at Nottingham. Professor R. H. Jones writes,

  The anxiety of Gloucester and his associates when they heard the archbishop’s tale is easy to imagine, for Richard’s questions and the replies of the justices amounted to more than a preparation for war against the commission [the council]. They raised ghosts which had been dormant for more than half a century. The awesome word treason, with all that it implied of forfeiture, hanging, quartering, disembowelling, and attainted blood had been introduced into the controversy. Taken as a whole, furthermore, the questions constituted a more explicit and elaborate statement of certain aspects of the royal theory of prerogative right than any which had yet appeared.9

  The judges’ unanimous and inescapable decision—they answered under oath and, despite their later claim, without constraint10—was that actions like those of Gloucester and his friends were treasonable. What Richard was after, it needs to be observed, was not an appearance of legality, when the time might come for him to take his revenge, but true legality—defense and clear definition for all time of an English king’s rights and privileges.

  Armed with his judgments but not, unfortunately, with horsemen and swordsmen, since he imagined his enemies would be bound by the rule of law, the king returned to London and called his lordly enemies to meet him. They excused themselves on the grounds that the king had surrounded himself with men eager to kill them. Richard issued a royal proclamation—a weapon he would use as a substitute for gunpowder much of his life—that no one in the city was to sell anything to the earl of Arundel. Immediately Gloucester, Arundel, and doddering but shrewd old Warwick began to muster forces in Harringway Park, north of London. They withdrew then to Waltham Cross and from there sent out cunning propaganda circulars explaining their opposition to the favorites and calling for support. The propaganda worked, rousing the citizens, and Richard was forced to compromise. Gloucester insisted that he and his companions had never meant harm to the king himself but only meant to save him from evil counsellors. Gloucester demanded trial of the counsellors and demanded that the king imprison them until parliament could assemble. Richard ceremoniously agreed and ordered the meeting of parliament in eleven weeks. His agreement to imprison his favorites slipped his mind, however, and all except Nicholas Brembre—who bravely stayed in London, trying to raise troops—escaped to England’s forests.

  Parliament, when it met, was furious. (Chaucer, apparently by choice, was not there.) According to the Westminster chronicler, some of the lords wished to depose the king and replace him with Gloucester, who was not unwilling, but old Warwick persuaded them to a course more prudent: gather up an army and hunt down Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland. The army, commanded by, among others, Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, trapped de Vere’s army, but failed to catch de Vere, who escaped into fog and whom the king managed to hide and smuggle overseas. Richard retreated for safety to the Tower and apparently began plotting to get help from France against his upstart barons. He sent word to, among others, Geoffrey Chaucer, who sighed, no doubt—this was no work for a born survivor—but immediately dropped everything and took out papers for travel to Europe. For some reason Chaucer never made the trip, though others did. Meanwhile, a solemn parley was arranged at the Tower. Some years earlier, in 1385, when Richard, nineteen and childless, was about to go to war in Scotland, parliament had appointed Mortimer as his heir, and Richard had assented. Now the lords spoke sternly to the king, reminding him that his heir was of an age to rule, “whereupon Richard, stupefactus, promised to be governed by them, saving his crown and his royal dignity.”11 The lords appealing to him—the “lords appellant” (Gloucester; Richard Arundel; Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick; Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham; and Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke)—took the promise seriously and intended, by God, to govern.

  On February 3, 1388, the “Merciless Parliament” convened at Westminster Hall. On February 14, Michael de la Pole, de Vere (earl of Oxford, duke of Ireland), the king’s chief justice Robert Tresilian (who’d drawn up the shrewdly phrased questions for the judges), and the archbishop of York were pronounced guilty of treason and, except for the archbishop, saved by his cloth, condemned to its gruesome penalties. Three days later Chaucer’s associate, enormously fat Nick Brembre, was charged. When he protested his innocence and offered to defend himself in battle, the king tried to intervene in his behalf, but the five appellants threw their gauntlets clanging at Brembre’s feet, and other gauntlets followed “like a fall of snow.” On technical grounds, trial by combat was denied. There was debate and struggle and great doubt on all sides that Brembre was guilty of any capital offense, but after three more days of thoroughly crooked and cynical justice he was condemned. Meanwhile Tresilian was caught—already condemned in absentia. He was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn and brutally executed, and Brembre was given the same punishment the following day.

  More trials, condemnations, and executions followed. Tyburn ran shoetop-deep in blood. Never before in English history had so many men of gentle birth been executed on such flimsy pretexts. Though it is undoubtedly true that many of Richard’s courtiers were greedy, irresponsible, and wrongheaded, none of them was ever proved a criminal and none, certainly, was deserving of murder by the machinery of law and order. In some cases—that of Simon Burley, for instance—the appellants themselves were in fierce disagreement, Henry Bolingbroke staunchly defending Burley, and Edward III’s timid, poetry-writing youngest son, Edmund Langley, duke of York, offering to champion Burley in battle against his own brother, the duke of Gloucester. But Gloucester won, his passion not tempered by Gaunt, and he settled down to control of the throne he was half-inclined to believe he ought to occupy. Yet it is probably true to say that it was indeed the king’s advisers, not the king, that he hated, and probably true, too, that had he not destroyed the king’s beloved friends, the king, when his turn came, would have spared him.

  Gloucester’s triumph was brief. On May 3, 1389, at a meeting of the great council, Richard asked mildly what his age was. When he was answered—“twenty-two”—he announced his intention, since he was now of full age, of ruling the kingdom in person. It was impossible to object. Moreover, the council’s more important enemies were all dead or driven into hiding. In November of that year the last possibility of Gloucester’s return to power collapsed when, with all his opponents around Richard destroyed and his hopes in Spain voided, John of Gaunt arrived in England.

  The period of Gloucester’s supremacy (1386-88) was a grim time for Chaucer, and England’s political situation was probably the least of it. It was probably during the summer of 1387 that Philippa Chaucer died. Chaucer drew her last annuity payment on June 18 of that year, and on November 7 he drew his own but not his wife’s. Strange to say, for all the facts we have about Chaucer’s life, we know nothing of what may have been the most intimate part of it. We may speculate that it was Philippa’s final illness or death that spared Chaucer the trip to France when Richard was ensconced in the Tower and in need of help from abroad; but however th
at may be, Chaucer was with her, or at any rate nearby, when Philippa died, and in all probability so were the children, home from school for the summer. Except for his poem, much earlier, on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, he writes nowhere of the death of a beloved wife—writes only, and often, of the pleasures of love and marriage; and that may be our best clue to what he felt. He speaks often of what women desire of men and men of women—exactly what William Blake meant, in the highest physical and spiritual sense, “The lineaments of satisfied desire.” And he makes comedy of men and women who cannot understand that simple truth. It seems impossible that he can have been one of the incompetent husbands his comedies present. He must then have loved his wife and been loved by her, and as for her death, for all his sorrow, he had no faintest doubt—not even his worst villains have the faintest doubt—of the possibility of heaven and the reunion of loved ones. Like other good medieval men, he wept and buried her and walked in the fields with his sons.

  Nevertheless, after her death he had no easy time keeping his spirits up. Because he was on the wrong side—that is, the king’s side—he was harried and harassed. In 1388, the year of the Merciless Parliament, his Exchequer annuities were transferred—at “his own request,” whatever that means—to John Scalby, one of Gloucester’s men. It was also in 1388 that Chaucer first began to be sued for debt by John Churchman, by Henry Atwood (or atteWood), hostler, William Venour, grocer and former mayor of London, John Layer (or Leyre), another grocer, and by Isabella Buckholt, administratrix of the goods of Walter Buckholt. No one knows exactly what Chaucer’s debts involved, but it seems certain that at least one of the men who sued him, William Venour, was a moneylender. Another, Walter Buckholt, had business connections with Chaucer when the poet became chief clerk of the king’s works. During and after Chaucer’s clerkship, Buckholt acted as deputy parker for the king’s park at Clarendon and he may later have been deputy parker at Charing Cross as well. Thus some of Chaucer’s debts may have been personal, and then again some or all may have come about because of his work for the king. In the end, of course, it all comes to the same thing. While Gloucester ran the government, Chaucer had unusual difficulty collecting what was due him; and even after Richard took on his kingship in 1389, the government continued to pay Chaucer irregularly, forcing him to stratagems that may well have filled him with weariness and depression of a kind he had described in another connection long ago, in the Book of the Duchess:

  Al is ylychë good to me— [alike]

  Joye or sorowë, wherso hyt be— [whatsoever]

  For I have felynge in nothyng,

  But, as yt were, a masëd thyng, [dazed]

  Alway in poynt to falle a-doun.…

  The amounts of the debts for which his creditors harass him are all relatively small—£3 6s. 8d. ($800) to John Churchman, £7 13s. 4d. ($1,840) to Henry Atwood, £3 6s. 8d. ($800) to William Venour, and so on. Considering the amounts of money Chaucer handled after 1389, when Richard made him chief clerk of the king’s works, these debts, still up for collection, must have been mere matters of nuisance; in fact, he regularly failed to appear when summoned and then settled out of court. But though the debts do not tell us, as earlier biographers imagined, that Chaucer was a spendthrift who in his later years suffered for his prodigality, they do reveal that as clerk of the king’s works, riding back and forth all over England, a widower now and sometimes discouraged about his poetry, Chaucer was a harried and at times downright unhappy man.

  Richard asked for and received the right to govern in May 1389, and immediately began restoring his friends—those who survived—to office. Chaucer was made chief clerk of the king’s works on July 12, an office he would hold until June 1391, by which time he was already connected, probably, with Petherton Forest. He was also given back, in 1389, his Exchequer annuity.

  No doubt the office of chief clerk of the king’s works seemed at the time Chaucer received it a splendid promotion; but it would soon prove drudgery perhaps beyond anything he’d imagined before. As clerk, he was responsible, according to the writ that gave him his appointment, for

  …our works at our Palace of Westminster, our Tower of London, our Castle of Berkhamstead, our Manors of Hennington, Eltham, Clerendon, Shene, Byfleet, Chiltern, Langley, and Feckenham, our Lodges of Hathebergh in our New Forest, and at our other parks, and our Mews for falcons at Charing Cross; likewise our gardens, fishponds, mills and park enclosures pertaining to the said Palace, Tower, Castles, Manors, Lodges, and Mews, with power (by self or deputy) to choose and take masons, carpenters and all sundry other workmen and laborers who are needful for our works, wheresoever they can be found, within or without all liberties (Church fee alone excepted); and to set the same to labour at the said works, at our wages.12

  In taking the job he replaced one Roger Elmham, who had been clerk in all the places named in Chaucer’s patent and also for Windsor Castle, including the Windsor manor and lodge, Hadleigh Castle in Essex, and various other manors and lodges. While Chaucer was in office, Windsor remained in control of the constable of the castle; but on the same day as Chaucer’s appointment as chief clerk he was also made clerk of the works for St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, apparently because construction was in progress there, and the king wished to relieve the financial burden on the Windsor account by throwing the work on the Exchequer.

  The drudgery of the work was at least to some extent offset, of course, by the fact that it had a certain importance, even aesthetic importance, and by the fact that the work required talent and experience, even a touch of vision, so that a man could take pride in it—could even consider himself, if he liked, one of the government’s more important officials. He and his assistants would at any rate have a more lasting effect on the appearance of England than would most of their contemporaries. Richard’s reign was notable for lavish construction, though the building program was not yet in full swing when Chaucer took the clerkship. Chaucer spent approximately what clerks before him had spent; his immediate successor and all who followed during Richard’s reign spent vastly more. Even so, an occasional record gives a hint of the considerable size of Chaucer’s undertaking. He employed some of the same master craftsmen used by later clerks and paid some of them extraordinary wages—among others Hugh Swayne, or Hugh Purveyor, a London tiler, and the master mason (and architect) Henry Yeaveley, “the Wren of the fourteenth century,” designer of the nave of Westminster Abbey. Choosing such men, helping to revitalize English architecture—rebuilding sections of the Tower and wharf, constructing or repairing lakes, ponds, canals, reshaping the English landscape—must have been for Chaucer at least a little like writing poetry.

  He withdrew from or was removed from the clerkship June 17, 1391—he was now fifty-one or so—transferring his accounts, materials, etc., to one John Gedney, such materials as 101 tons of Stapleton stone and 200 cartloads of Reigate stone for repair of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. Various conjectures have been advanced on why Chaucer left or lost his clerkship, including theories “that he was dilatory” and “that he was unsuccessful as a man of business.”13 Such theories express a charming Romantic prejudice about the poetic life, the idea that poets love adventure and are temperamentally unsuited to being shackled (as Wallace Stevens was so happily) to account books. Chaucer would undoubtedly have smiled at such notions. It’s a wonderful thing, he would have said, to be solidly established, to live in a fine house with an army of servants and assistants, to have a hand in things. “Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens wrote. Chaucer might have argued that 200 cartloads of Reigate stone, gleaming white in the sun, soon to be shaped by human toil into architecture, is an impressive sight. In short, his reasons for leaving the clerkship were probably mundane. The chief work done during Chaucer’s time in office was construction he was especially well suited to supervise, the continuing repair and further rebuilding of the wool wharf near the Tower and the houses near the Tower for weighing wool—a project for which Chaucer was paid or assign
ed over £654 ($156,960), more than half his total expenditure as clerk of the works. (His next largest expenditure was £100 [$24,000] for the work on St. George’s Chapel, still unfinished when he left office.) The project was of course an important one for the king, since it involved customs collection, and it may well have been an important one for Chaucer—he may even have had some part in getting it authorized—since as controller of customs he had had first-hand experience with the program’s inefficiency. It should be mentioned here that Chaucer was also involved, in 1390, along with his friend Sir Richard Stury and others, in another waterways project, survey and repair of the walls, ditches, etc., on the Thames between Woolwich and Greenwich. A violent freak storm had struck before dawn on March 5, 1390, terrifying the populace and smashing in houses, barns, and hedges. It had blown down more than a hundred oaks at Eltham, just south of Greenwich, and caused extensive flooding and damage to bridges, walls, and drains. The business of Chaucer’s commission was to determine what landholders were responsible for repairs and to bring judgment against any whose careless upkeep of their waterways had contributed to the damage. Chaucer’s appointment to this job of inspecting damaged waterworks, determining such matters as which ruined watergates were rotten before the storm struck, shows plainly that he was considered an authority on these things. Since his clerkship ended just when his work on the wharf and weighing house ended, the obvious explanation of his leaving the clerkship would seem to be that he was hired as clerk of the king’s works because of his special knowledge of the mechanics of wharf construction and customs, and when that special knowledge was no longer needed he was awarded a different, equally desirable but less arduous job.