Katherine is a fictionalised account of Katherine Swynford (1349-1403) the woman who was John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster’s mistress for twenty years. Gaunt was the fourth son of Edward III and the Tudor dynasty descended from their illegitimate children.
Katherine and her older sister Philipa, daughters of a knight in what is now Belgium, are left orphaned. Philipa is sent to serve the queen at the English court while Katherine is placed in a convent in England and is educated there for a number of years until she, too, is summoned to court.
Katherine unwillingly marries Sir Hugh Swynford, a retainer in the Duke of Lancaster’s service, and bears him two children. When the Duke is away on a campaign, his wife Blanche contracts the plague and Katherine takes care of her and is with her when she dies. John hears of her kindness and courage and engages her as governess to their children. John is devastated by his wife’s death and turns to Katherine for comfort, but she refuses a relationship as his mistress as long as Sir Hugh is alive.
John has to marry again, and of course, he cannot marry a woman who is not of noble birth, so he marries a woman he does not love, Constance, the Princess of Castile, for political expediency. He does love Katherine and takes her as his mistress after the death of her husband. She bears the Duke’s four children, the ‘Beaufort Bastards,’ and after Constance’s death she marries the Duke after many years as his paramour.
There were aspects of this book I loved and then there were other aspects I didn’t. A number of historical figures and events are featured in Seton’s story – Edward III, Richard II, Wat Tyler and the Peasant’s Revolt, the Black Plague, John Wycliff, Julian of Norwich, and Geoffrey Chaucer (who was married to Katherine’s sister, Philippa) to name a few, which gave the book added interest, but as is usual with historical fiction, it’s difficult to sort out how much is actual historical fact and how much is the author’s imagination.
Parts of the story are highly romanticised and I became a bit tired of the love affair between the two main characters and Katherine’s agonising, ‘He loves me, he loves me not…’ while she disregarded the fact that she was monopolising him and his poor Constance was neglected.
Katherine’s first husband, Hugh, loved her in his own way but she found him repelling and he felt this keenly. Their first child, Blanche Mary, was born while he was away on a campaign and she loved the child. I thought that this would soften her attitude to Hugh when he returned, but she remained remote.
Her later relationship with the Duke deeply affected the children from her marriage to Hugh. The Beaufort’s, up until they were legitimised after Katherine and John’s marriage, had very little prospects and uncertain futures. The couple was often thoughtless about those who were adversely affected by their relationship.
Alison Weir has written an historical account of Katherine Swynford (Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess) and in this article she sheds some light on the real life of this woman who ended up bearing John of Gaunt’s Beaufort children and later married him.
The Middle Ages was a brutal time. Life was cheap, fortunes rose and fell depending on who was in power, life expectancy was short, infant mortality was high. Marriage was often a tool to gain political power and all sorts of unsuitable alliances were made for children of the nobility in order to add to their estates or elevate their status, and many women died in childbirth.
Reading books like this do make me thankful that I’m living now and not back then. To be sure, I would have died at sixteen from appendicitis if an infectious disease hadn’t taken me out before then.
-John of Gaunt ‘s speech (from Shakespeare’s Richard II)
Anya Seton (?1904-1990) was an American best-selling author of Romantic and biographical novels. Her father was the English naturalist and author, Ernest Thompson Seton, and her mother an American travel writer. Writing was obviously in her genes and apart from my comments above about what I didn’t like about the book, I found it very well-written and engaging.