by John Gardner
Loo! how goodly spak thys knyght,
As hit had be another wyght; [wight, commoner]
He made hyt nouther towgh ne queyntë
And I say that, and gan me aqueyntë [saw]
With hym, and fond hym so tretable,
Ryght wonder skylful and resonable,
As me thoghtë, for al hys balë. [sorrow]
In the years of Chaucer’s service with the countess, Gaunt’s mind can have been on only one thing: war. Or rather, two: war and women. If the two young men talked—the talented young prince and the sly young wit who was a vintner’s son—war and women were, at least some of the time, the subject. Gaunt’s eldest brother had just lately won his incredible war prize, King John of France, and was home again, basking in female adoration, giving away favors, moving from flower to flower like a magnificent black bee. In fourteenth-century courtly circles, war and women were pleasures inextricably linked. What Chaucer says of his Knight’s son, the Squire, in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, was true of all young soldiers of that age—if not of every age:
And he haddë been somtyme in chyvachië… [the cavalry]
And born hym weel, as of so litel spacë,
In hopë to stonden in his lady gracë.
It was partly, of course, the universal experience: men who constantly play games with death have a sharpened appetite for the pleasures of living, and no one has invented a pleasure more profound or intense than the love of man and woman. But in the late Middle Ages the usual experience may perhaps have had extra bite.
By official—by this time rather old-fashioned—Church doctrine, love was a bad business (just as violence was). It was as likely as not to hurl one straight to damnation, that specially grisly damnation universally advertised by fourteenth-century painters, minor English poets, and hell-fire churchmen: hissing serpents, monstrous fire, ingeniously sadistic imps equipped with the latest Italian implements of torture. On the other hand, as the example of the Virgin Mary showed, a truly good woman could be an inspiration toward nobility and virtue. As the writers of the Romance of the Rose explained in a passage much copied and quoted throughout medieval Europe, a lover attracted to a lady of great purity, gentleness, and goodness might rise through the influence or “grace” of that lady to similar virtue, and thence still higher, in Platonic fashion, lower goods awakening the soul to higher and higher goods in the way Plato described in his Symposium and the way Dante treated as the central dramatic principle in his Divine Comedy. Like a just and noble war, the love of a good woman could be a knight’s salvation. Like an unjust and ignoble war—a war pursued in a bad cause or by bestial, unchivalric means—the “carnality” in love, the tendency of love to collapse into sex and selfish greed, could spell ruin. Thus the two emotions, love of battle and love of love, became, at least for some, intrinsicate. Not only in the joust but in battle as well, the knight wore his lady’s talisman: her virtue, her influence, would prevent any damning lapse from chivalry on his part. And his success in the battle, which he joined in her name and for her increased glory, would earn him his lady’s “grace” or favor—and also persuade her to his bed. For those who earnestly believed official doctrine, the love affair of the soldier and his lady was a dizzying game, a tightrope walk over the chasm of eternal torment, as exciting as a joust. Managing it properly became a matter of ritual, a religion (at least in poetry, and probably to some extent in real life)—the so-called love religion or courtly love in all its innumerable varieties and forms.
The Plantagenets were experts, though they were sufficiently sophisticated and freethinking to take official doctrine with a grain of salt. As children of Satan—a role they played with gusto—they took the idea of hell rather lightly, as they took the idea of death. But they enjoyed the game enormously nevertheless. Even a man thoroughly convinced that the religious reformer John Wyclif was right, or close to right, in his main points (that a man should examine the scriptures for himself and trust in the mercy of Christ, not the Pope), even a man certain of God’s essentially loving and patient nature—and all of Edward’s family felt certain of this—could be troubled by misgivings, the midnight uneasiness that gave zest to the game. The Plantagenets (with some exceptions) flaunted their superiority to the stern, little-minded old religion. But they were careful to be thoroughly honorable. The Black Prince had several illegitimate children and cared for them well; neither he nor anyone else in court saw much harm in it. Before his marriage to Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt had a daughter by one Marie of St. Hilaire, and took care of both mother and daughter ever afterward. When the Plantagenets changed mistresses, as they frequently did (except for Gaunt’s deeply, perhaps narrowly religious younger brother Thomas of Woodstock, later earl of Gloucester), they no more abandoned them than they abandoned their wives. Gaunt especially would all his life give his former mistresses and his illegitimate children tokens of affection and generous support. At least twice he would fall deeply—and faithfully—in love, once to Blanche, whom Chaucer mourns in the Book of the Duchess, once to Katherine Swynford, Gaunt’s mistress for twenty-five years before he at last became free to marry her.
In the courts Gaunt frequented, where Chaucer was sometimes in attendance on the countess, there was a plentiful supply of worthy and noble-hearted ladies, thanks, largely, to that great and generous mother hen, Queen Philippa. She had married Edward III not merely for convenience (though the marriage was convenient), but because she loved him, and would love him, with remarkable selflessness, all her life. It has been suggested that one of her last acts was to set Edward up with a mistress who would love and care for him, Philippa’s ward Alice Perrers.
Philippa and Edward had first met in the last days of Edward II when Edward and his mother, Queen Isabella, made a week-long stay with the king of Hainault, his wife, and numerous daughters in his palace at Valenciennes. That week, Edward and Philippa were inseparable. Philippa’s parents and Isabella were delighted. It meant, to Isabella, a chance to get military and financial aid for her projected invasion of England with Roger Mortimer, and she at once promised that, on becoming king, Edward would marry Philippa in return for the alliance. According to Philippa, who told the story to her old friend Froissart, on the day when Edward and his mother had to leave, Edward gave Philippa a formal kiss, and she burst into tears. Asked why she was crying, she said, “Because my fair cousin of England is about to leave me, and I have grown so used to him.” Edward, too, remembered that moment. When he was told by peers and bishops, immediately after his coronation, of the tentative agreement with the family of Hainault, the boy king laughed and said, “I am better pleased to marry there than elsewhere, and rather to Philippa, for she and I accorded excellently well together, and she wept, I know well, when I took leave of her.” They were married in York, snow swirling down into the unfinished cathedral. In an age when marriage was not expected to go well, Edward and his queen lived in nearly perfect matrimonial happiness until Philippa’s death.
She bore Edward seven sons and, in all, twelve children. Two died in infancy, and beautiful young Joan, the favorite daughter, died of the plague in a remote French village while traveling to Castile to be married. She was fifteen. Much later, in 1361—when Geoffrey Chaucer was in his early twenties—Margaret, said to be the cleverest of the royal children, died suddenly of plague, and a few days afterwards, plague took Mary, seventeen-year-old bride of the duke of Brittany. Another daughter, Isabella—with whom Chaucer must have spoken on many occasions—was apparently a great tribulation to Queen Philippa. She was stubborn, hot-tempered, extravagant, and unpredictable, and Philippa loved her to distraction. Isabella refused many marriage contracts arranged for her. She was jilted once, and then at the age of thirty-two fell in love with a French lord who’d arrived in England in the retinue of King John. In 1365 she married him.
By this time, it might be mentioned, old Queen Philippa had other troubles. The Black Prince, her eldest son—England’s brilliant and ha
ndsome prize in the marriage-of-convenience game—had married himself off, not for convenience but for love, to Joan, “the Fair Maid of Kent”—Philippa’s ward ever since Roger Mortimer, ruling from behind the scenes during Edward III’s first years, had executed her father. Joan was in her prime regarded as the most beautiful woman in England, and, though the chronicle reference is somewhat mysterious, she was probably that “Countess of Salisbury” whom King Edward loved and with whose garter he started his famous Order. She’d been betrothed in childhood to the earl of Salisbury, though she’d never in fact become his wife. When Salisbury, after resistance on Joan’s part, sought to enforce the betrothal compact by abducting her, she revealed that she’d been secretly married for three years to Thomas Holland, Salisbury’s steward. (She was already, by this time, in love with the Black Prince.) When Thomas Holland later died in Normandy, Joan rushed to the prince at his home at Berkhamsted. She was now forty, and her legendary beauty had softened toward fat, but the prince was as much in love with her as ever (as was chivalrous and right) and swept away physical and spiritual objections—her age, her probable former relationship with his father, and the fact that he himself was her son’s godfather. He sent away post haste for a Papal dispensation and, before it arrived, married her.
Queen Philippa was worried. She distrusted Joan, though she loved her. Joan was too fond of the spectacular, too much the unscrupulous social climber, though famous for sweetness and generosity. And Philippa worried that the child of a woman of forty might not be healthy. She was apparently right. News came from Bordeaux that a child had been born to the heir of England’s throne. “Slow,” it was whispered.…“Straunge of eyë”—so Philippa learned, some historians believe. (The records speak only by significant omissions.) It seems at least possible that the child was mongoloid. Stowe says, when he mentions the child’s death, “The death was not too soon, it was said.” The Black Prince, nonetheless, was heartbroken. But in her second pregnancy Joan of Kent was luckier, or so it seemed at the time. She produced the brilliant, healthy baby with golden hair who would be Richard II—the man who, by uncommon bad luck and miscalculation, would bring on revolution.
Young Chaucer would come to know Joan of Kent well, and beyond a shadow of a doubt he would be shocked by modern historians’ occasionally adverse judgment of her. However Queen Philippa may have disapproved of the marriage, if she had really disliked Joan, her devoted and sequacious old friend Froissart could never have brought himself to say that in all England Joan was “the most loving [of women], famous for her beauty and the extravagance of her dress.” The loving nature of that pretty, fat, bejeweled lady shines through page after page of the story of her life. In 1381 (when Chaucer was approximately forty-one and just beginning his Canterbury Tales, from which he sometimes gave readings for Princess Joan and her friends), Joan was a peacemaker between Gaunt and the angry Londoners, with whom Gaunt was too busy and too self-righteous to deal. Several of her knights were important as a stabilizing influence in Richard’s court, and others were among the famous “Lollard knights,” pious adherents to reformer John Wyclif. When trouble broke out between Richard II and his violent half brother Sir John Holland, and Richard threatened to have him executed, their mother Joan of Kent made frequent, painful trips to reconcile them. Her apparent failure to do so may have brought on her death.
Besides Joan of Kent and Alice Perrers, the girl who would become Edward’s mistress, Queen Philippa had various other wards and attendant ladies, many of whom, by the late 1350’s, had courts of their own. One was Chaucer’s employer, Elizabeth, countess of Ulster. Another was Blanche of Lancaster, who would become first wife to John of Gaunt.
Her father was, as I’ve said, the son of blind Henry and cousin of Edward III, and had become, after Henry’s death, the earl of Lancaster, a distinguished general in the Scottish and French wars, a superb negotiator, a beneficent influence on the king, whom he frequently dissuaded from acts of cruelty, and one of the best jousters in all Europe. He was the richest man in England—his daily expenditure was £100 ($24,000)—and one of the most deeply devoted Christians of his day. When the king of France, John the Good, entertained Henry on the occasion of a great French tournament and wished to give him rich gifts, Henry would accept nothing but a thorn out of the Saviour’s crown, which he then gave to the collegiate Church of Our Lady in Leicester. Toward the end of his life—he died of the pestilence in 1361—he wrote an honest and moving meditation called The Book of Holy Medicines (Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines).
Blanche, his second daughter, was apparently a young woman much like her father. It is true, of course, that one does not always get an accurate portrait from a funeral elegy, so that Chaucer’s portrait of “Lady White” in the Book of the Duchess may be very much an idealization. But it is also true that good writers do not tell lies in elegies, but idealize qualities that were really there. She was, by Chaucer’s elegiac account, supremely modest yet easily approachable, refined, temperate, lighthearted, and pious without sternness or coldness. Whatever Chaucer wrote for other ladies, for Blanche (when he came to know her, perhaps not until 1361), he wrote devotional pieces, notably—if tradition can be trusted—his religious poem, theABC, a free translation of a religious poem in French, done at Blanche’s request. It has always been taken as a straight devotional piece, which indeed it is; but its appeal in its day was its obvious relationship to the poetry of courtly love at its most spiritual. Chaucer’s ABC is in effect a courtly-love poem to the Virgin, if not simultaneously (and only indirectly) to Lady Blanche herself. The poem strongly emphasizes the spiritually uplifting effect of the lady, as courtly-love poems, like poems to the Virgin, always do. The poet asks only that her perfection help him toward God; but his stance as worshipper is not purely conventional. He says, for instance:
Evere hath myn hope of refut been in thee, [refuge]
For heer-beforn ful ofte, in many a wysë,
Hast thou to misericordë receyved me. [mercy]
But merci, ladi, at the grete assysë, [great judgment]
When we shulë come bifore the hye justysë!
So litel fruit shal thanne in me be foundë
That, but thou er that day me wel chastysë,
Of verrery right my werk wol me confoundë.
It is of course more courtly-love convention than Church tradition that accounts for the poet’s asking the Virgin to scold and correct him and thus help him resist sin and error. Though nothing whatever need be made of the not too serious reference in the Book of the Duchess to “eight years” of fruitless devotion to some lady, the very act of Chaucer’s translating the delicate ABC for Blanche shows that she was his friend long before the time of her death and his writing of the elegy.
If his feelings toward Blanche were friendship and admiration, we have strong evidence that toward other young ladies Geoffrey Chaucer could be something of a threat. In his old age he would speak of himself as having written “many a song and many a lecherous lay.” We have no reason to doubt the older Chaucer’s word. The venerable poet, notable for his dignified, unfanatical piety, had no reason to claim sins never committed, and no need to distort harmless ditties into lecherous lays. Moreover, Chaucer’s friend and fellow poet John Gower tells us, in a poem originally written for an audience that knew Chaucer intimately, that in “the flourës of his youthë” Chaucer was a disciple and poet of Venus and filled the countryside with “songës gladë.” Even if he were by nature disinclined to be a ladies’ man, his culture gave him hardly any choice. G. G. Coulton points out that conditions in the courts where Chaucer served made love affairs, Platonic friendships, requited or unrequited sexual passions “not so much natural as positively inevitable.” Coulton continues, “Within the narrow compass of a medieval castle, daily intercourse was proportionately closer, as differences of rank were more indelible than they are nowadays; and in a society where neither could seriously dream of marriage, Kate the Queen might listen all the more complacently
to the page’s love-carol as he crumbled the hounds their messes.”9
Two highborn ladies who were to be of importance in the life of Geoffrey Chaucer were the daughters of Sir Paon of Roet, a chevalier of Hainault. Roet was attached to the service of Queen Philippa when she came to England, and later attended her at the siege of Calais, when he was one of the two knights appointed to lead away the citizens she’d saved from Edward’s wrath. He also served as an official of the household of Marguerite, empress of Germany and countess of Hainault, sister of Queen Philippa. Sir Paon’s daughter Katherine, who married a man named Thomas Swynford, was to become John of Gaunt’s mistress, later his wife. Her sister Philippa was to become—sometime shortly before 1366—the wife of Geoffrey Chaucer.
It has sometimes been suggested, and perhaps rightly, that the romance between Chaucer and Philippa began as early as 1357 or so. The basis of the theory is a group of references, in the countess of Ulster’s Household Accounts, to gifts and expenditures on behalf of a lady called Philippa Pan’. The word “Pan’,” by this theory as originally brought forward, is short for panetaria, and means “mistress of the pantry.” In that form, at least, the theory won’t work. A careful search of records shows that Pan’ was never an abbreviation of panetaria;10 English pantries were run, in all cases we know of, by men, not women; the countess’s gifts to Philippa Pan’ include some which would be too fancy for a pantry mistress, for instance some furs for the St. George’s Day feast of 1358; and the abbreviation “Pan’” is more naturally explained as part of a family name, “Pantolf, Panetrie, Panter,” Manly says. But as a later scholar pointed out, “Pan’” may also abbreviate “Panetto,” a form of Sir Paon Roet’s name. It has more recently been identified as a possible abbreviation of Paon, Paonnet, and Payne, other known forms of Roet’s name.11 Thus, though the theory is commonly described as “discredited,” it is probably quite right. Chaucer and Philippa probably knew each other as teen-agers, and it may well have been to highborn, theoretically unreachable Philippa that Chaucer wrote some of his love songs.