THE LAST KNIGHT by John F. Cantor

John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, has been one of my favourite historical characters ever since I read (too many years ago!) Anya Seton’s Katherine, which tells the story of John and the mistress who in the end became his third wife and ancestor of the Tudors among others. It (Katherine) also paints an unforgettable picture of the second half of the fourteenth century from the Black Death to the deposition of Richard II, the time of Geoffrey Chaucer (who was married to Katherine’s sister), the wars in France (the Black Prince, who was John’s bother, and the Battles of Crecy and Poitiers) and the Peasants’ Revolt (during which John’s great house in London was burnt to the ground and Katherine narrowly escaped with her life); and I have noticed that most people who read it are, like me, hooked on that period for ever after.

It was a world [writes Norman F. Cantor] in which the Middle Ages were passing away and the Renaissance struggled to be born [...] a world in transition, and Gaunt was its central figure.

 

The Last Knight can be thought of as the non-fiction version of Katherine, the background which was not easily available then. For example, John, who was he?

 

John of Gaunt was the second surviving son of King Edward III [but] he inherited the Lancaster title and fabulous properties not from his father but from his father-in-law, the first Duke of Lancaster, who died in 1663.

Dukes then, any Duke, were important people, as important as kings in their own lands, and Cantor explains all this in the best outline of the development of Dukes, Counts, Kings in France and England that I have ever read. It begins:The origins of the aristocracy of which John of Gaunt was a prime exemplar go back to the period between AD 800 and 1000 [...] when the short-lived empire of Charlemagne, the Carolingian empire [...] was disintegrating …

And John’s family, who were they? A masterly and often very funny outline of John’s ancestors which includes lines like “John of Gaunt was a direct descendant of a heathen Scandinavian chieftain named Rollo …” “Among Rollo’s successors, who were converted to Christianity and civilized by the Church, the most politically skillful was William the Bastard (later the Conqueror) ...” “King John was all business and showed himself to be an unusually skillful administrator, especially in financial matters. Unfortunately he was also paranoid and manic-depressive.” “Edward II was a bisexual, married to a fierce French princess. He spent his time losing Scotland, cultivating his male French lovers, and getting overthrown in a palace coup organized by the Queen and her aristocratic lover …” And so to Edward III, John of Gaunt’s father, who was, we are told, “a good-humored man ever trying to give his many sons and daughters a helping hand. He arranged John of Gaunt’s marriage with the Duchess of Lancaster.”

 

There is something about this book which is reminiscent of Barbara Tuchman’s
A Distant Mirror, a history of the same period but based on the life of  Enguerrand de Coucy VII, “the most experienced and skillful of all the knights of France” who lived from 1340 to 1397. He married the eldest daughter of Edward III of England, thus becoming John’s brother-in-law, and was Duke of Bedford for several years until he and the princess separated and he renounced his allegiance to the English Crown. The Last Knight is, however, nowhere near so ambitious, and, unless you have a lot of time on your hands, a far easier read. This may be partly because of Cantor’s style which is often so laconic we seem to be reading the preliminary notes not the finished work.

 

He is extremely good, though, on many aspects of John’s life, for instance Wyclif (whom John supported) and the Church, and on The Cloud of Unknowing and the Carmelites, whom John espoused when he stopped supporting Wyclif (and thereby delayed the Reformation, which could easily have happened then, for nearly 200 years).

 

I like too his comments on Scotland (“a nation of cattle rustlers and horse thieves“), on Cathedral Canons (“They lived a cloistered, segregated and selfish life, much like Ivy League professors today“) and medieval sex (“It is necessary to stress Gaunt’s free sexual behavior not only to round out our picture of the man, but to countervail recent views of the later Middle Ages as a dark time of sexual repression [...] The moral regimen priests were urged to impose upon the laity was no more significant in Gaunt’s time than today“).

 

Entertaining and educational. Anyone interested in the Middle Ages (and that must include you) will enjoy reading it and then want to keep it handy as a reference book.

 

PRINCESS NEST OF WALES by Kari Maund

This is the kind of biography which, if page after page of speculation is not to become indistinguishable from fiction (and I personally would almost always prefer to read a fictitious account of the life of a historical character), it must focus as much or more on the history of the place and period as on the subject of the biography, and this for the simple reason that very little is known about her.

” … like the majority of women in this period, her life went largely unrecorded.Chroniclers, including her grandson Gerald, tell us of her sons and their deeds, but they record nothing of Nest’s feelings or beliefs. Her story has to be pieced together from a patchwork of sources … “

But Kari Maund does this successfully. She opens with a brief history of medieval Wales (“Nest’s Wales”) which is full of details it would be virtually impossible to find elsewhere. (Anyone thinking of writing a novel set in 11th-12th century Wales should start their background reading here!)

And what is more, she is refreshingly realistic about the place of women in Celtic society. So many modern writers, all of whom should know better and some of whom surely do, create a picture of a utopian world utterly destroyed by the male chauvinist Saxons and Normans. In fact, as Kari Maund observes in her Introduction (and maintains with examples throughout the book) “Despite popular modern myth, medieval Welsh women enjoyed little respect and scant freedom. Legally lifelong minors, they remained pawns in the hands of male kin, incapable of owning land and married off to suit changing political needs. Women in Anglo-Norman England enjoyed wider privileges, and Nest, the daughter of a king, probably found herself accorded an importance she had never experienced before.”

“Legally lifelong minors“: I like that.

I liked the whole book. And I liked Nest, of whom I had never even heard before. As Kari makes clear, “the seductress of the English” was quite a lady. The daughter of a Welsh king; the mistress of the Norman English King Henry I (to whom she bore a son); wife of Gerald of Windsor (one of their grandsons was Geraldus Cambriensis, the great historian /chronicler); abducted by Owain ap Cadwgan, son of another Welsh king and leader of resistance against the Normans; later married again, and again, to other Norman lords, who all sought her hand. And it can’t have been just her hand that made her so irresistible. It must have been, as George Harrison didn’t quite put it, something in the way she walked.  

ISABELLA: SHE-WOLF OF FRANCE, QUEEN OF ENGLAND by Alison Weir

Let’s start with the title. First, the “of France”: true she was born in France, was “the daughter of the King of France and the Queen of Navarre,” and as such “a great prize in the marriage market: no queen of England before her had boasted such a pedigree.” But after her marriage she was very much the Queen of England, and there no evidence that her loyalties remained to France. On the contrary. Her father, Philip the Fair (IV) was, like the later Henry VIII of England, a brutal megalomaniac who in any other walk of life would have ended up on the scaffold or in the madhouse. Her life from the moment she arrived in England was no longer his to dictate.

And as for the words “She -Wolf”, the phrase “She-Wolf of France” was in fact, Alson Weir tells us, coined by Shakespeare (why am I not surprised?) but he used the words of Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI; it was not until the eighteenth century that it was first applied, by the poet Thomas Gray, to Isabella. And – very unfairly – it stuck.

Isabella, as Alison Weir makes clear, was not a simple femme fatale, “one of the fairest ladies in the world,” “the fairest of the fair,” but a good queen. If it had not been for her infidelity she would be seen as a great queen, a liberator, for Edward II and his friends the Despensers were, by the time she organised the coup d’état, running what was certainly the worst example of tyranny in the history of England. To see what life was like under Edward and the Despensers, you have only to read one of Michael Jecks’ books such as The Mad Monk of Gidleigh or A Friar’s Bloodfeud. In modern times, that infidelity would not be held against her, especially when we consider that her husband was far more interested in his “friends” (Piers Gaveston, and later Hugh le Despenser) that he was in her.

The other problem is how and why – and if – and on whose orders Edward II was murdered following his deposition. In this book, “the Fieschi letter” is reproduced in full and the reader, as she considers Weir’s arguments for and against its authenticity and credibility, must make up her own mind whether Edward II in fact escaped and lived on, abroad. Personally, I am convinced that he did, and that it was not in his son’s interest to acknowledge his father’s continued – and shameful – existence when he finally learnt of it. I suspect that he felt only contempt for his father, and admiration for his mother, the lioness who had brought him up and made him king. He had to get rid of Mortimer, his mother’s lover and de facto ruler of England, but he never turned against Isabella.

Another wonderful biography from Alison Weir. I am proposing to read, next, her The Princes in the Tower - Edward IV’s sons Edward and Richard, two more who are said to have been murdered but rumoured to have survived.