Alison Weir 2007 on "Katherine Swynford"

Alison Weir is an author who knows how to make her subject matter fascinating, and who's knowledge on the history of the royal family going back several centuries, knows no bounds. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting her, and I wish I'd had Alison as my history teacher, I might have stayed with it instead of swanning of to geography! I had no idea who Katherine Swynford was, but as I learned about her I discovered all about John of Gaunt, Chaucer and many many other historical figures. Alison here talks very enthusiastically and persuasively.

Below is a written abridged version of the interview. 

VW: Alison Weir - welcome to the Bookfiend's Kingdom to talk about your book, Katherine Swynford.

AW: It should be Katherine de Swynford, but traditionally everybody calls her Katherine Swynford, so I`ve followed that.

VW: You have a tremendous interest in Royal history.......

AW: Thank you.

VW: This book has so much information that I had to keep flicking backwards and forwards to the genealogies to keep pace with what you had written.

AW: There are so many characters with similar names - and the past is a foreign country, as they say!

VW: Why Katherine Swynford? What was it about her?

AW: I read her story when I was about fifteen, in a famous novel by Anya Seton called Katherine, which has never been out of print since it was published in 1954, and came 95th in the top 100 books voted for by the nation in BBC`s The Big Read in 2003.

I was captivated by this wonderful hero, John of Gaunt, whom Anya Seton based partly on Clarke Gable as Rhett Butler, and partly on nineteenth-century perceptions of Gaunt. He had this passionate love affair with Katherine Swynford, who was his mistress and friend for the best part of twenty-five years before he married her, and their marriage caused even more scandal, as she was thought to be immoral and far below him in rank. It was said that he was wasting himself on such a woman, but through her personal qualities and good tact, Katherine won through in the end. The novel has a very poignant ending, as they didn't have very long together.
It just grabbed me, this love story - but the thing has always got to me is that there are only fragments of information about the real Katherine. It's been a challenge to piece these fragments together and make them into a cohesive book. And of course, until very recently, no publisher would have ever commissioned the biography of a relatively obscure woman like Katherine Swynford.

VW: It is a fascinating story, with all the different characters that you bring in, and it caused me to wonder how this one married up with that one, and why does this one have to be a relative of that person over there, who may soon become the wife or husband of someone over here, who might actually produce a king or queen somewhere down there!

AW: The court was essentially one big family, since all the nobility were inter-related. I have been studying aristocratic genealogy since 1970 and have tables for the whole peerage.

VW: Did you not get confused by all the characters?

AW: No! I've known about them for years, having done so much research. I've read everything I could get. I knew this story when I was a teenager, so this knowledge goes back a long way. What I wanted to do was discover the truth, but this is an unusual biography, because my subject has not one quote or one letter surviving!

VW: And you had to read other peoples poetry, writings and diaries.

AW: Yes.

VW: Chaucer?

AW: Yes, but you have to be very careful with Geoffrey Chaucer because writers have endlessly - and fruitlessly - trawled through all his writings to see if there is something that refers to Katherine. But in The Boke of the Duchess, Chaucer did refer to John of Gaunt and his first wife Blanche of Lancaster, and gives precious insights. Some have dismissed this as mere literary conceit, but internal evidence suggests it is based on truth. As for monastic chronicles, they are very biased.
The best evidence is to be found in sources like John of Gaunt's Register, in very dry entries. These entries chart the affair, to a degree, but the register ends abruptly in 1382, the year after John renounced Katherine, so there is no record in it of what happened after that.

VW: This is a woman who was a strong catholic - but I presume everybody was back then. But she really was!

AW: She was very pious.

VW: But why then did she have an affair?

AW: I think her heart over-ruled her head and her religious convictions. She was a destitute widow of twenty-one, and he was very charismatic, very sexy and powerful too. He was ten years older than her and perhaps she didn't like to resist him initially, although we don`t know how it actually started. Clearly she thought highly of him, and we know that their relationship endured after their parting because she lent him money when he was in need, and they remained friends; and they eventually married, so obviously this was some relationship!

All through the medieval period, a lot of devout Catholics had mistresses and bastards. It was seen as being pretty much the norm among the clergy!

VW: Katherine married Sir Hugh Swynford and had four children with him - is that correct?

AW: Three or four children. There is a question mark over one of the daughters, Dorothy, but I think she existed.

VW: And Katherine went on to have four more children.

AW: Yes, with John of Gaunt.

VW: She had four before the age of twenty-one, didn't she?

AW: Yes - she probably had the first one when she was thirteen, because twelve was the minimum age at which girls could marry and co-habit; boys could cohabit from fourteen.

VW: My goodness!

AW: That was the norm in those days. Life was much shorter for women then: their average life expectancy was about twenty-nine to thirty, because of the high mortality rate in childbirth. Children were regarded as little adults to be civilised, and childhood was not seen as a separate phase of development. Boys went into battle at eleven years old. Adult responsibilities came early.

VW: So what kind of person was Katherine?

AW: I think she was possibly a very charming person, with warmth, kindness and integrity, as well with great diplomacy and tact. She may have been an adulteress, but she did not exploit her position as a royal mistress. She wasn't like the grasping Alice Perrers, Edward III's mistress, milking the government of thousands of pounds. We only have two instances of her using her influence in a small way in Leicester, whose Mayor gave her gifts in gratitude for her patronage.

VW: Why did John of Gaunt renounce her?

AW: He renounced her in the wake of the Peasants` Revolt, believing that the destruction of his property and the murders of his servants were a judgement of God for his evil life with her. He was unpopular, and perceived to be the author of all the calamities that were befalling the country, the failures of the Hundred Years` War and the hated poll tax.

VW: He was a scapegoat?

AW: He was the scapegoat, as he was the man who was virtually governing the kingdom, but there were other lords who shared that responsibility. If you read about John of Gaunt - and there was nothing in my research that disabused the impressions I had of him from Anya Seton's book - you will find that he was a true knight of chivalry, and that there is much to admire in him.

VW: What was your starting point when you started to do this research?

AW: I started with Sydney Armitage-Smith's monumental biography of John of Gaunt, which came out in 1904; it is very dated, but it was the first really objective biography of John, and it is exhaustive. Then I read Professor Anthony Goodman's essays on John of Gaunt, which came out in 1991. After that, I went back to John of Gaunt's registers and contemporary chronicles, then read what felt like hundreds of books on the fourteenth century. I didn't re-read the novel, as I didn`t want it to colour my biography.

VW: The novel is very romanticised. Have you re-read it since you finished the book?

AW: No I haven't had the time!

VW: Life in those times was quite extraordinary in the courts. Some of the relationships seemed almost incestuous.

AW: The court was like one big family; the aristocracy were all related. Also, there were bonds created by good lordship. A magnate like John of Gaunt would have all his retainers as part of his familia. He paid them grants and pensions, and offered them his protection, and in return, they fought for him in time of war and were part of his grand train. It was a two-way relationship, and this was the reason why Katherine went to John of Gaunt when she was widowed and left in penury; she had every right to do so, because he was her overlord as well as her husband's, because they had joint tenure of their lands, and he could assist if she was in financial straits.

VW: Tell us about Katherine`s family.

AW: Her father, Paon de Roet, came from Hainault with Philippa of Hainault when she married Edward III of England in 1328. It is possible that his wife may have been a connection of the House of Avesnes, the ruling family of Hainault, although no one has been able to trace Katherine's mother. A familial link would explain a lot of things, including Queen Philippa's care for Paon`s daughters. Paon de Roet was distantly related to the counts of Hainault himself.

VW: What about her Beaufort bastard? There doesn't seem to have been any stigma in their being illegitimate.

AW: Their royal blood was more important than their bastardy. John of Gaunt`s standing was such that anyone who was connected to him had this protective shield around them. Yet even the Beauforts couldn`t rise high without being legitimated.

VW: How extraordinary that personality and status were everything!

AW: He was the Duke of Lancaster - he had an income of £12,000 a year, and the next noble down the scale had £4,000. Put like that.....!

VW: But £12,000.00 a year was millions of pounds!

AW: Yes, he was very wealthy, and wealth and power were sexy! He had the largest landed estate in England, after the Crown. In some areas, he enjoyed the same autonomy as the King. He was a great magnate, and very influential.

VW: And yet he came to such an awful end.

AW: Possibly. We are not sure about that. But there are indications.....

VW: Yes very graphic!

AW: My editors' threatened that I would have to include them in public readings from the book!

VW: I think the moral of the story is, `you don't spread it around`.

AW: Unfortunately, it looks as if he did! He said it himself. He confessed it.

VW: I hate to say this, but that has to be the end of our conversation. Alison thank you so much.

AW Thank you so much. I've very much enjoyed it. Thank you, Vicky.