Katherine by Anya Seton (1954)

 

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.

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth…

-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.

Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh (1940)

 

A dart's night at the Plume of Feathers, an old-fashioned pub at a small village in Devonshire, turns into a crime scene. Lawyer Luke Watchman, his cousin, Sebastian Parish who is a handsome and celebrated actor, and their friend, Norman Cubitt, a distinguished artist, are visiting the village after a year’s absence and are staying at the pub. Since their last visit some of the locals have formed the 'Coombe Left Movement' and think that the class problem and other ills could be solved by a Revolution.
The Secretary and Treasurer of the Movement is a man called Robert Legge. On the night of the dart game a man is murdered by poison and an inquest is held into the death. Cyanide was found on one of the darts and when Legge had thrown it, it had hit a man’s hand and he had died afterwards.
An inquest was held but no one was charged.

The coroner was Mr. Mordant, a sixty-seven-year old who suffered from dyspepsia:

He seemed to regard his fellow men with brooding suspicion, he sighed a great deal, and had a trick of staring despondently at the merest acquaintances. He at one time specialised in bacteriology and it was said of him that he saw human beings as mere playgrounds for brawling micrococci. It was also said that when Mr Mordant presided over an inquest, the absence in court of the corpse was not felt.

One man not happy with the lack of a conviction, presents himself to Scotland Yard and states his opinion on the case. The Yard decides to help with the investigation but the detectives have a chilly reception when they arrive at the Plume of Feathers. The police are part of the established order which the Coombe Left Movement considers to be corrupt to the core. The anti-authoritarian attitudes and hostility among the locals involved in the group hampers the investigation.

As this book was published in 1940, I thought that there would be references to the war but apart from a couple of passing comments about a soldier or two waiting to be called up, that was about as far as it went. This little village seemed completely isolated from the wider world. However, according to my copy of the book, it seems that Marsh finished writing it on May 3rd, 1939, and she was in New Zealand, so that may account for that.

On September 3, 1939 Britain declared war. The British Communist Party at first supported the war, but within a few weeks its line changed. On October 7, a manifesto was issued which referred to an ‘imperialist war’ and called for a government which would begin peace negotiations. Thereafter, the party’s official line remained essentially the same until June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, whereupon the Party entered into support for the war.

Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) had a wonderful sense of humour that trickles into conversations and comes out in her characters. She captures all the little idiosyncrasies of character found in people who live at close quarters and who hold opposing views.
In one conversation, Mr. Nark, a prosperous farmer, was denouncing capitalism and its lack of a scientific outlook to Mr Oates, the village constable who was hoping to rise in his profession.

‘Do you know, Dick Oates,’ continued Mr. Nark, ‘that you’ve got a rudimentary tail?’

‘And if I have, which I don’t admit – ‘

‘Ask Mr Cubitt, then. He’s an artist and no doubt has studied the skeleton of man in its present stage of evolution. The name escapes me for the moment, but we’ve all got it. Isn’t that correct, sir?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Cubitt hurriedly. ‘Quite right Mr Nark.’

‘There you are,’ said Mr Nark. ‘Apes, every manjack of us, and our arms have only grown shorter through us knocking off the habit of hanging from trees.’

‘What about our tongues?’ asked Mr Oates.

‘Never mind about them,’ answered Mr Nark warmly, ‘do you know that an unborn child’s got gills like a fish?’

‘That doesn’t make a monkey out of it, however.’

‘It goes to show, though.’

‘What’?’

‘You want to educate yourself. In a proper government the State ‘ud educate the police so’s they’d understand these deep matters for themselves. They know all about that in Russia. Scientific necessity that’s what it is.’

‘I don’t see how knowing I’ve got a bit of a tail and once had a pair of gills is going to get me any nearer to a sergeant’s stripe,’ reasoned Mr. Oates. ‘What I’d like is a case.’

Mr Oates gets his wish.

Roderick Alleyn, at 43 years of age, the youngest chief-inspector at New Scotland Yard and his sidekick, Mr. Fox, a big, burly fellow of about fifty (affectionately called Br’er Fox by Alleyn) have a good working relationship and an obvious liking for each other.
The case is convoluted and just when you think the murderer has been identified, a piece of evidence throws suspicion on someone else. I thought a couple of people could have done the deed and was surprised by the outcome. It was a person I’d suspected at first and then changed my mind.

Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealander and spent most of her life in Christchurch in the South Island, so I was impressed that she could describe the English countryside as well as if she had lived there all her life.
Marsh originally studied art and toured New Zealand with a Shakespearean company. She was credited for single-handedly reviving Shakespeare in New Zealand and encouraging young performers. Considered a ‘Crime Queen’ alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham, she wrote thirty-two novels featuring her detective, Roderick Alleyn. The theatre and painting feature in her stories and Alleyn is married to an artist. This background in the arts is unique to her work and adds richness to her novels.

Suspicions, Bacon remarked, that are artificially nourished by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.