John of Gaunt. Time-Honoured Lancaster. A name that will live for as long as England itself. Queen Elizabeth II. Time-Honoured Windsor. A name we will cherish as surely as England itself. One may never have been a king, but he fathered a dynasty whose roots our present sovereign shares. One may have reigned for longer than any other monarch in British history, but she mothered a dynasty whose roots lie deep in the House of Lancaster.) Her son, our King and Duke of Lancaster, Charles III, bears this time-honoured legacy and builds upon it in his new reign. It is therefore only appropriate that we should gather here today, in commemoration of monarchs past, present and future, as we prepare for the coronation of our new king. In Lancaster Castle, through the institution of the Duchy of Lancaster, two of the most significant figures in the history of the English monarchy find their communion. John of Gaunt himself visited the Castle in 1393, while our late Queen last visited in 2015 to celebrate the 750-year connection between the Duchy, in its predecessor form as the Earldom of Lancaster, and the Crown. This lecture seeks to honour, in our time, Time-Honoured Lancaster, as a man, as a warrior, as the dynast of dynasties, here and across the world.
When the last son of Philip IV, Charles IV, died in 1322, the last of the Capetian royal dynasty, which had ruled France since 987, was finished, and Philip VI, of the House of Valois in Navarre, became King of France in 1337. Under Salic Law, governing the French royal succession, the female line was excluded, but Edward III pressed his claim to the French throne, formally in 1340, through his mother Isabella of France, he justified this by claiming to be the closest surviving male relative. Furthermore, as a vassal of the French king for holding English lands in Gascony (in south-western France), Edward III saw advancing his unilateral claim to the French throne as a means of resolving this complicated sovereignty dispute once and for all. This dispute began what has become known as the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), a series of military and diplomatic clashes between England and France that only ended with the expulsion of English forces from France at the Battle of Castillon (1453).
It was into this world of dynastic instability, political intrigue and military conflict that John of Gaunt was born in 1340. His surname is a corruption of Ghent, in Belgium, where he was born, so later scurrilous gossip had it, to a Flemish butcher in the town. In fact, John of Gaunt was born the legitimate child of Edward III while he was on campaign seeking to bolster an alliance with the Flemish towns and the German Holy Roman Emperor for a joint campaign against France. The alliance proved to be unreliable and costly, forcing Edward III to postpone his offensive against France and providing an opportunity for the French to prepare a significant naval invasion of England, at Sluys in Belgium on 24 June 1340. The French ships, chained together and packed with crossbowmen, could not match the rate of fire of the English longbowmen, who poured English arrows ‘like hail in winter’, according to one London chronicle, and the water was thick with the blood and corpses of perhaps 16,000-20,000 dead Frenchmen. The English joked that, if the fish in Sluys harbour could speak, they would speak French, such were the number of dead that day. John of Gaunt was therefore a product of a victorious campaign and a symbol of hope for England’s future as a great Continental power.
Early life
John of Gaunt was raised with his older brothers Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and Edward of Woodstock, known to history as Edward the Black Prince. As the youngest child, John of Gaunt looked up to his oldest brother the Black Prince the most, accompanying him on his tours of duty throughout his estates dispensing justice and hearing disputes, as well as emulating his chivalric tastes and thirst to prove himself in combat.
His time would come in 1350, when the French sought to avenge their catastrophic defeat at Sluys by launching dramatic raids along the south coast of England. Gascony, the source of the conflict, supplied England with over 1,000 ships per year, and import duties on wine, especially from Bordeaux, was the single largest source of English state income after customs duties on wool, which the French were determined to exploit. They therefore commissioned Charles de la Cerda, a member of the Castilian royal family (in modern Spain), to intercept English ships in Gascony and murder their crews, thus dragging Castile into the Hundred Years War. The Castilians proved to be ruthless pirates, bringing panic to English ports and a real threat of invasion in collaboration with the French, until they were intercepted at Winchelsea on 29th August 1350. The 10-year-old John of Gaunt was aboard his brother Edward’s flagship, which was rained upon by ‘quivering bolts and arrows’ from the high forecastles of 50 large Spanish warships, with large catapults smashing through timber, crushing masts and knocking the brains out of any soldiers who were unfortunate enough to get in their way, according to the chronicler Jean Froissart. The chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker adds that men had ‘never experienced anything more dreadful than this frightening conflict’, and John of Gaunt stood in the thick of it. After saving an English flagship, the Salle du Roi, from a ferocious Castilian attack, Edward the Black Prince had to abandon his own sinking ship and board an enemy ship, the Bilbao, with his younger brother in toe. No sooner had they watched their own ship sink and were under heavy fire from Castilian archers than Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, jumped to the rescue of his future heir, yelling ‘Derby to the rescue!’. The Bilbao was seized as a war prize and the long and gruesome battle was won, at a cost to the enemy of 14 to 26 ships, though the sinking of many English ships, including the royal flagship, the Cog Thomas, indicated that English casualties were heavy too. The Battle of Winchelsea knocked Castile out of the Hundred Years War, at least for the time being, and was followed up by a mounted raid of destruction known as a chevauchee through Aquitaine, bordering Gascony, by Henry of Grosmont, to force the French to battle. John of Gaunt’s first taste of mediaeval combat would make a deep impression upon the boy, who would grow to become a man who would fight in the front rank against the enemies of England, not least against the Castilians who had threatened his very life.
In order to become the greatest knight of the realm that he aspired to be, in imitation of the chivalric deeds of his brother the Black Prince, John of Gaunt needed a secure inheritance at home that would be the envy of the nobility of the kingdom. In this, the support of his father Edward III was crucial to giving him a land he could call his own. As part of a conscious policy of rewarding the loyalty of his close relatives, as well as to galvanise them in support for his war with France, Edward III created the first dukedoms in English history. The very first such dukedom, the Duchy of Cornwall, was created for his eldest son, Edward the Black Prince, in 1337, and to this day the Duchy is invested upon the eldest son of the reigning monarch, in our time Prince William. The title ‘duke’ comes from the Latin ‘dux’, meaning ‘commander’, and this encapsulates much of the role envisaged by the king for making extensive use of this new title. This impression of creating a military band of brothers is further enhanced by the creation of the Order of the Garter in 1348, in direct imitation of the Knights of the Round Table of Arthurian legend, of whom Edward the Black Prince was among its original members. Being the youngest son of Edward III, John of Gaunt was not in the same position to acquire these illustrious titles, but it seems as though the king had grander plans for Gaunt.
On 19th May 1359, John of Gaunt married his cousin Blanche of Lancaster, the youngest daughter of Henry of Grosmont and his wife Isabel of Beaumont. Isabel was directly related to the Comyn noble family of Scotland, whose most famous member, John Comyn, had been murdered in 1306 by his rival for the throne of Scotland, Robert the Bruce. The Comyns therefore supported the Balliol family, the surviving rival faction claiming the throne of Scotland, and who were often used by English kings to justify military incursions into Scotland. For Edward III, a marriage between a descendent of the Comyns and his youngest son could pave the way for John of Gaunt to claim the throne of Scotland outright, just as the king himself had done to the throne of France. This would kick-start an obsession with claiming royal titles that would define much of John of Gaunt’s political career from this point on.
On 23rd March 1361, not long after returning to England from his last chevauchee in Brittany, Henry of Grosmont died without any male heirs. With his passing, the title of Duke of Lancaster became extinct, as it had only been created for his lifetime by Edward III in 1351. His estates, however, were co-inherited by his surviving daughters Maud and Blanche. When Maud died in 1362, all of these estates, including the titles of Earl of Leicester, Earl of Derby and Earl of Lincoln passed to John of Gaunt through his wife Blanche. He had retained, however, the title of Earl of Lancaster from 1361, as this had passed through Blanche’s line, along with half of the lands of Henry of Grosmont. He also became 14th Baron Halton and 11th Lord of Bowland, becoming in effect the most powerful landowner in the North of England. He was also arguably the wealthiest English magnate who ever lived, owning land in nearly every county in England, with at least thirty castles, including Tutbury, Pontefract and here at Lancaster, and accruing a net income of £8,000-£10,000 per year from his estates (equivalent to £6-7.5 million in 2021). John of Gaunt had quite literally struck gold; he had secured a marriage to the wealthiest heiress in the Kingdom of England, and his power at a national scale was second only to that of the king.
Edward III acknowledged the scale of his younger son’s power by creating him Duke of Lancaster in 1362 for his lifetime (John of Gaunt would successfully petition for the Duchy to descend to his heirs in perpetuity in 1390), and invested Lancashire, in the heart of his Duchy Inheritance, as a County Palatine. The County Palatine was, and is, distinct from the Duchy of Lancaster, the latter of which is best described today as a corporation administering estates on behalf of whoever holds the title of Duke of Lancaster (in our time, the King of England). The County Palatine, by contrast, encompasses the old boundaries of the County of Lancashire, from Warrington to Hawkshead, and whoever possesses the palatine powers over that county (in this case, the Duke of Lancaster), effectively exercises the royal prerogatives for that county. In effect, this means that the Duchy of Lancaster appoints the key judicial officials for the County, oversees the operation of Crown Courts throughout the County, and obtains the profits of justice (fines) levied by the Crown Courts within the County Palatine. In mediaeval times, this was a significant concession of sovereignty, and to devolve such responsibility and power to a younger son of such wealth and power as John of Gaunt had become indicates the supreme faith which Edward III had in his loyalty. This generous act of royal patronage, combined with the fortunes of fate that came the way of Time-Honoured Lancaster, resulted in the creation of an exceptional county that has been truly time-honoured by association with the name of Lancaster. The pivotal role of John of Gaunt in the formation of historic Lancashire is honoured by the name of the Gatehouse here at our Castle which was constructed with his memory in mind by his son and later king, Henry of Bolingbroke. John of Gaunt himself may only have visited Lancaster twice in his entire lifetime (1386 and 1393), but the myths that have attached themselves to him in the city of Lancaster, from the naming of Horseshoe Corner and the John O’Gaunt Gatehouse to the stained glass window here in the City Museum and the eponymous pub next door, are testament to his enduring and beloved memory of him from a city that regards him as truly Time-Honoured.
Crucial to the Lancastrian dynasty which John of Gaunt founded becoming truly Time-Honoured was his relationship with one of the titans of English literary history, Geoffrey Chaucer. Geoffrey Chaucer is most famous for writing ‘The Canterbury Tales’ (1387-1400), a Middle English collection of tales told by pilgrims to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, and is widely regarded by historians with popularising, and rendering more respectable among high society, the use of vernacular English as the language of an otherwise French-speaking elite. This was helped by the fact that Chaucer was himself a member of that high society, and he met John of Gaunt as a page of the wealthy Anglo-Norman heiress Elizabeth de Burgh in 1357. He would accompany Gaunt on the royal expedition to France of 1358 and the two remained very close friends from that time on. After a very happy marriage, Blanche of Lancaster died on 12th September 1368 aged 22, possibly from the Black Death that had made a resurgence across Europe. John of Gaunt was heartbroken and held annual commemorations of her death for the rest of his life. During one of these commemorations, possibly for the very first, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his very first poem, ‘The Book of the Duchess’, or ‘The Death of Blanche’. The poem tells the story of the poet’s dream; wandering a wood, past ‘a long castel with walles white/Be Seynt Johan on a ryche hil’, the poet discovers a knight clothed in black, and asks him why he is so sorrowful. The knight, likely representing John of Gaunt, explains he is mourning a terrible tragedy, ‘and goode faire White she het/That was my lady name ryght’. These references to a ‘Saint Joan’ on a ‘rich hill’, most likely alluding to John of Gaunt’s favourite saint, St. John, and his title of Earl of Richmond which he inherited through Blanche, as well as the juxtaposition of ‘long castle’ with ‘white’ inferring a connection between Lancaster and Blanche, indicate that the clear intention was for Chaucer to appeal to his patron’s sense of loss for a wife he held dearest and time-honoured to his heart.
John of Gaunt would never forget the compassion shown by his dear friend Chaucer, and would remain a loyal patron of his works for many years to come. In the 1390s, for instance, a short poem of Chaucer, called ‘Fortune’, directly references John of Gaunt, when the character of Fortune turns her attention to three princes believed to be the Dukes of Lancaster, York and Gloucester, with Lancaster being playfully hinted at as the ‘beste frend’ of Chaucer in helping him to higher estate. His wish would be granted when fortune decreed that Chaucer become part of the royal family. In 1366, Chaucer married Philippa de Roet, sister of Katherine Swynford, thus becoming brother-in-law to John of Gaunt himself. Katherine Swynford herself was engaged by John of Gaunt to raise the three children he had by his late wife Blanche, and from roughly 1372 onwards became the mistress of John of Gaunt, until she became his third wife following the death of his second wife, Constance of Castile, in 1394. Thus, Geoffrey Chaucer played a critical role in ensuring not only a favourable historical image of John of Gaunt but, indirectly, of the survival of his Lancastrian legacy.
Edward III resumed the Hundred Years War with France in 1369, and sent John of Gaunt to Calais with Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, with a small English army, from which he raided northern France. On 23rd August 1369, he came up against a much larger French army led by Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and decided not to attack but instead the two armies glared at each other across a marsh for several weeks until reinforcements under Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, forced a French withdrawal. Lancaster and Warwick then decided to march on Harfleur, the key base for the French fleet in Normandy, and they besieged the town for four days in October 1369, but he lost so many men to dysentery and bubonic plague that they abandoned the siege. During the retreat, the army fought its way across the Somme and John of Gaunt captured the French commander Hugh de Chatillon. By the time they reached Calais, the Earl of Warwick died of plague, but the campaign had forced the French king Charles V to abandon his plans to invade England that autumn. Such hard slogging through hostile territory, dogged by disease, pinned down by siege warfare and missing opportunities for potentially decisive yet risky pitched battles was the overwhelming reality of the Hundred Years War. Glorious Agincourts were few and far between.
In the summer of 1370, John of Gaunt was sent to Aquitaine to reinforce his elder brother, Edward the Black Prince, at the siege of Limoges, in central France, finally giving him the chance to prove his mettle as a warrior before the brother he had always idolised. He took charge of the siege operations and at one point engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the undermining tunnels beneath the city walls. According to Froissart, the Black Prince was put into a ‘violent passion’ upon seeing the defiance of Limoges, and upon the fall of the city walls Limoges was subjected to a brutal sacking that effectively ended its hitherto famous enamel industry and led to the slaughter of perhaps 300 men, women and children in a most unchivalrous act of war. Nevertheless, doubt has recently been cast on the extent of the city’s destruction, as a recently discovered letter from the Black Prince to the Count of Foix states that 200 prisoners were taken but no civilian deaths were noted, and at the time when Froissart wrote his account of the siege he was employed by a vassal of the King of France, Guy de Chatillon. Three captured French knights were certainly noted by Froissart for pleading with John of Gaunt to treat them ‘according to the law of arms’ and were made prisoners, which casts further doubt on how far we should take Froissart’s account seriously. In any case, John of Gaunt was entrusted with the defence of Limoges by his brother, who left for England, but he could not hold it for more than a year due to the lack of resources and money he could marshal for the task. Thus, John of Gaunt retreated back to Aquitaine, to consolidate English territory in France in its Gascon heartlands.
Probably John of Gaunt’s most famous action in the Hundred Years War occurred in August-December 1373, when he led a chevauchee of 9,000 mounted warriors from Calais to Aquitaine, perhaps the greatest armed raid of the entire period. This four-month ride, covering 900km through enemy territory, evaded French armies across its entire route, through Champagne and Burgundy east of Paris, across the Massif Central mountains in central France, and down the River Dordogne in Aquitaine. Unable to assault any strongly fortified castles or cities, the raiders plundered the countryside, which damaged the French infrastructure but also imperilled the long march itself, as it created bitterness and resentment among the local inhabitants that dogged its progress. Marching in winter across the Massif Central, being picked off by French raiders, exposure, starvation and disease, by the time the army reached Bordeaux two-thirds of their numbers had perished. Many more succumbed to bubonic plague in the city itself, and many deserted due to lack of funds, which John of Gaunt had promised them as plunder to be gained on the great chevauchee. Having achieved an impressive strategic display but achieved virtually nothing except alienating the French population further from English rule, John of Gaunt abandoned the enterprise and sailed home.
John of Gaunt’s final campaign in France was in 1378, involving a ‘great expedition’ of mounted soldiers landing at Brest and seizing control of Brittany. Nevertheless, not enough ships could be found to transport the horses, and John of Gaunt had to content himself instead with capturing the small harbour of St. Malo. Although the landing was successful and the town was besieged, the size of the army proved a liability, because French armies under Olivier de Clisson and Bertrand du Guesclin occupied the surrounding countryside, conducting guerrilla warfare and denying resources to the besieging army. In September 1378, the siege was simply abandoned, the army returned ingloriously to England and John of Gaunt received most of the blame for the debacle.
Disillusioned by these series of failures in France, which were both an affront to his idea of honour and chivalric service, as well as witnessing the horrors of mediaeval warfare first hand to no meaningful gain, John of Gaunt concluded that the war with France was unwinnable because of France’s greater reserves of wealth and manpower. As a result, even in the midst of his great chevauchee, he advocated peace negotiations by appealing to Pope Gregory XI. This led directly to a short-lived period of peace with France from 1374-1377, and John of Gaunt himself courted extreme unpopularity among those English nobles, heavily invested in a successful outcome to the war and in the profits of plunder accruing from the war, who believed that victory was at hand if only the French could be forced into a decisive battlefield defeat. Time-Honoured Lancaster, however, had seen the futility of seeking the ‘big push’ first hand, even upon the fields of the Somme where the futility of total victory would lead, in centuries to come, to even more tragic outcomes. His priorities lay elsewhere, however, and greater glory awaited upon a different battlefield.
In 1369, Edward the Black Prince intervened in a succession dispute over the Crown of Castile between Pedro I of Castile and his half-brother Henry of Trastamara, and effectively a proxy battle of the Hundred Years War was fought between England and France at the Battle of Najera, with English and French royalty backing both sides in this peninsula war that would become a veritable ulcer for both sides, especially the English. Although the Black Prince was victorious at Najera, and elevated Pedro I as King of Castile, Henry of Trastamara escaped from the battlefield, eventually rallying the Castilian nobility against Pedro I, who was eventually betrayed to his half-brother and assassinated, with Henry becoming Henry II of Castile. The Black Prince’s health had declined while in Castile, but took as hostages Pedro I’s daughters, Constance and Isabella, who could be used as diplomatic bargaining chips in the civil war in Castile. (SLIDE 18 – CONSTANCE OF CASTILE AND A ‘YO EL REY’ CHARTER) In 1371, John of Gaunt married Constance, which enabled him to claim the Crown of Castile through the right of his wife, insisting that he be referred to as ‘my lord of Spain’ and impaling his coat-of-arms with that of the Castilian kingdom. From this time onwards, John of Gaunt gathered around himself a small court of refugee Castilian knights and set up a Castilian-style chancery issuing documents in the style of Pedro I, signed by himself with the Spanish diplomatic formula ‘Yo El Rey (I the King)’. Time-honoured Lancaster was clearly biding his time for when his Spanish fruits would ripen, but he would reap a bitter harvest when the time for glory came.
John of Gaunt found a potentially valuable ally for his cause in claiming the throne of Castile in Ferdinand II of Portugal, concluding a secret treaty with him to overthrown Henry II. Three unsuccessful wars followed, with John of Gaunt a big driving force behind them all, eventually ending in a peace treaty with Castile before Ferdinand II died in 1383. This precipitated civil war in Portugal between 1383-1385, in which John I of Castile, the son of Henry II of Castile, intervened. The Battle of Aljubarrota (1385) ended in decisive victory for the Portuguese under John I of Portugal, of the House of Avis, who emerged victorious during the civil war. Aljubarrota was fought very much in the style of Crecy and Poitiers, with the use of longbowmen against a large army of cavalry proving devastating against the Castilian forces. This is also one of very few battlefield sites from mediaeval Europe that can be positively identified by archaeology, with vivid testimonies to the scale of injuries sustained by the combatants, as can be seen in the extant padded armour worn by John I of Portugal on the day. The victory at Aljubarrota was underpinned by the Treaty of Windsor (1386) between England and Portugal, still to this day the oldest active diplomatic alliance in existence.
The historic alliance between England and Portugal finally enabled John of Gaunt to pursue his long-held dream of becoming King of Castile. He sailed from England in 1386 with a huge Anglo-Portuguese army of about 5,000 men, including 1,500 English retainers and an extensive “royal” household that included his wife and daughters. Pausing en route to drive off French besiegers from Brest in Brittany, he landed at La Coruna, in Galicia, on 29th July 1386, wrong-footing John I of Castile who had expected him to invade from Portugal. There, in the most distant and disaffected region of the Castilian kingdom, John of Gaunt set up a rudimentary court and chancery from the town of Ourense, receiving the homage of the Galician nobility upon condition of the rest of the Castilian regions recognising him as king. In November 1387, John of Gaunt met with John I of Portugal at Ponte de Mouro, on the border between Castile and Portugal, and concluded an agreement for a joint invasion of Castile, sealed by the marriage of Philippa, the eldest daughter of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, to the King of Portugal, whose children would produce what is known as the “Illustrious Generation” in Portugal. Time would prove kind to the House of Lancaster in these lands, but here time was not on the side of time-honoured Lancaster. Gambling on a decisive early battle, John of Gaunt’s efforts were frustrated by the refusal of the Castilians to give battle, and a large part of his army wasted away to disease during the 1387 campaign, reduced to time-wasting sieges or scrabbling around the arid Spanish landscape for food. Harried by French mercenaries in what amounted to guerrilla warfare, hundreds of English knights, including close friends and retainers of John of Gaunt, perished. A campaign of noble failure ended with John of Gaunt renouncing his claim to Castile during a secret treaty in 1388 with John I of Castile, in return for a large annual payment and the marriage of Catherine, daughter of John of Gaunt by Constance of Castile, to the King of Castile. Their offspring would dominate the history of the House of Trastamara in Castile right up to the union of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1469, and her great-granddaughter would be Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII. Time had chastened time-honoured Lancaster in his pretences to royal dignity, but his dynastic legacy in these lands, and beyond, would be beyond his comprehension. Disillusioned with the tragedies of war, failing to set up a house of his own in distant lands, he resolved for the rest of his days to set the house of his own nation in order.
Regent of England
In 1376, Edward the Black Prince, the beloved elder brother of John of Gaunt, died, leaving Richard of Bordeaux, born to the Black Prince in the principal city of Gascony, as the heir to the throne. A heartbroken and infirm Edward III relinquished the reins of government to John of Gaunt, and surrounded himself in his final year within the embrace of his mistress, Alice Perrers. Edward III showered her and her followers with patronage, becoming the wealthiest woman in England, who was worth £20,000 (£6m in 2016) by 1376. Her enemies saw her as jealous, opportunistic and manipulative of the old king, and in 1376 they moved against her. The Good Parliament was called that year in order to raise money for the war in France, which was failing miserably. Not only had significant territorial advances not been made, and at vast expense, but English coastal communities were constantly prey to attacks by the French and their Castilian allies. Everyone was looking to blame the government for this terrible state of national affairs, which was effectively in the hands of John of Gaunt and Alice Perrers. It was no coincidence that it was at this time that John Langland, in his English poem ‘Piers Plowman’, railed against the injustices of inequality, for ‘when Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?’ What is more, John of Gaunt was seen as largely responsible for the military failures in France, even though he had fought valiantly on the field of battle. Alas, unlike his dear departed brother, he could not boast of any Crecy or Poitiers to wash the stain of military incompetence that stuck to him for the rest of his days.
Parliament proved to be an ideal venue for airing these grievances against the government, as it could only authorise the raising of taxes if their grievances were addressed. Chief among them was the corruption and abuse of power that the House of Commons claimed was being exercised by royal officials, singling out Alice Perrers for ‘maintenance’, or interfering in the due process of law. For the first time in the history of Parliament, the House of Commons elected a Speaker to deliver its petitions and the position of the House, and presided over a process of impeachment designed to remove such royal officials from power, with Alice Perrers sentenced to exile. John of Gaunt could see that, if Parliament could move against royal courtiers in this manner, then his enemies in Parliament could mobilise sufficient support in the Commons to move against him. He also shared the anxieties of the noble class of his time, shaken by the social mobility among the lower orders that came in the aftermath of the Black Death, and the power of this social class within the House of Commons greatly concerned him. In 1377, therefore, he induced Edward III to call his final Parliament before his death later that year, and undid all the work of the ‘Good Parliament’ in the so-called ‘Bad Parliament’. The ‘Bad Parliament’ declared the work of its predecessor to be unconstitutional and reversed the judgements of imprisonment that it had enacted, including recalling Alice Perrers from exile. This effectively neutralised the opposition to John of Gaunt that could come from Parliament, and he set his sights not only on consolidating his own power and influence but, as he saw it, strengthening the constitution of the body politic. While his enemies accused him of conspiring to take the throne himself from his young nephew, Richard II, John of Gaunt took pains to ensure that he never became associated with opposition to Richard’s right to rule. He sought no position of regency for himself and was content to shore up his Duchy of Lancaster Inheritance. Seeking to chart a steady course for his nephew, to be the devoted uncle to his brother’s only son, his next act would have profound consequences for the commonwealth of England in his lifetime.
The ‘Bad Parliament’ of 1377 introduced, upon John of Gaunt’s initiative, a poll tax of 4d per head upon every lay person in England over the age of 14, covering 60% of the population. This was designed to raise more money for the French war than the traditional levying of one-fifteenth the value of moveable and one-tenth the value of immoveable goods that had been the basis of Parliamentary taxation hitherto. £22,500 was raised from 1,355,000 people, but it made no appreciable difference to the war in France; in fact, matters worsened, and the failure of John of Gaunt’s expedition to take St-Malo in Brittany did not help his reputation. John of Gaunt knew that the war in France was proving costly and fruitless, and opened peace negotiations with the King of France, at the very same time as he was asking English taxpayers to pay more to finance the war effort. The result was a catastrophic blow to his reputation for governance, diplomacy and honour, despite his best efforts to retain them all in equal measure, and his name became reviled as the poll tax was renewed in 1379. The 1379 poll tax was designed to be fairer than its predecessor, with a graduated system of payment by social class and the taxpayer age was raised to 16, from 1 groat levied on every poor man and woman to 10 marks levied on the Duke of Lancaster himself. It was expected not only to defuse social tensions towards the government but to raise twice the amount raised in 1377. In the event, half the intended amount was raised, £19,000 in total. In the 1381 Parliament, therefore, the poll tax arrangements of 1377 were brought back, to raise the money quicker and easier, with a flat rate levied at 4d per head and an age limit of 15. However, tax commissioners worked within a 12d per head mean assessment, to cover the deficit arising from the 1379 poll tax, which meant that payments would be more variable than intended, and this resulted in widespread tax evasion. 750,000 people payed the tax, with 150,000 taxpayers disappearing from the poll tax rolls altogether. The total raised in 1381 was £45,000, of which £36,000 had been raised during the initial tax gathering in May. £36,000 was about the average for a “normal” level of village taxation, so communities were already on their beam ends when the commissioners came around again, at the end of the month, demanding that the “rest” of the tax be gathered from the missing taxpayers. This provoked violent upheaval in Essex and Kent, attracting support from across the southeast of England, and the resulting revolutionary moment has gone down in history as the Peasants’ Revolt.
John of Gaunt was widely blamed by the rebels for the poll tax, and they marched on London, in the spirit of the ‘Good Parliament’, to arrest royal officials they accused of corruption and abuse of power, burning the hated poll tax rolls as they went. They drew up lists of those they wanted to see dead, and among them was the Duke of Lancaster. He was as far from the action as it was possible to be: Berwick-upon-Tweed. So hated a figure had he become in the popular imagination that even his own fortresses in the North closed their gates to him, and he was forced to take refuge in Scotland. He could only look on helplessly as the rebels burned to the ground his magnificent Savoy Palace, built from the proceeds of the Hundred Years War, defaced his coats-of-arms across the City of London, and slandered his name by concocting the story that he was the illegitimate son of a Ghent butcher. This was ironic given that Flemings were themselves being butchered by the rebels in a xenophobic fury against foreigners believed to be in league with enemies of England. The fulminous mood against traitors to the commonwealth reached its bloody apogee when the rebels burst into the Tower of London and executed Lord Chancellor Thomas Sudbury and Robert Hales, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Effectively, the Peasants had executed the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in one fell swoop! Despite their rampages, the rebels declared their utter loyalty to the King, and Richard II, only 14 years old, used this to his advantage, meeting the rebels at Smithfield and agreeing to their demands to end serfdom, abolish the poll taxes and lift all limits on wage rates. Their resolve weakened, the leader of the Revolt, Wat Tyler, got into a fracas with the king’s retainers and was killed. Richard cancelled all promises made under duress and executed 50 leaders involved in the Revolt. He had shown himself to be cool and calculating under pressure and, having tasted the fruits of power and savoured vanquishing a real threat to his royal majesty, he grew up determined never to let that power slip from his grasp again.
John of Gaunt meanwhile, returning to England once the Revolt had been pacified, resumed his influence over the government of England, and cut his links with a heretic who he had hitherto protected more than any other. This man was John Wycliffe, a Yorkshire firebrand and what some have called the Morning Star of the Protestant Reformation. John Wycliffe was born in Hipwell, in Richmondshire, in the mid-1320s, and studied theology at Merton College, Oxford, becoming Master of Balliol College in 1361. Witnessing the unprecedented ravages of the Black Death, and the St. Scholastica Riot (1356) between Oxford students and Oxford townsfolk, he acquired a very dim view of the human race, believing that both disasters marked a divine indictment upon unworthy clergy, who had strayed far from their vocation to God. He came to believe that God had predestined an ‘invisible church of the Elect’ would be saved at the End of Days, which he believed was imminent, and that only God has the power to decide who is saved or not. Since only God can know who is truly sinful, and sinful men cannot exercise God-given lordship, there was no practical religious sanction for the Pope to claim lordship over souls, since nobody can prove that the Pope is or is not sinful by mortal standards. This undermined the whole basis of the claim by the Papacy to universal monarchy, and cast doubt about how far papal statements on theology should be believed. Wycliffe therefore went back to the Bible, and claimed that the only true guide to Christianity lay in what could be verified in the Bible. For example, the doctrine that ‘good works’, such as masses for the dead, pilgrimages and endowing chantries, could influence the judgement of God was rejected, anticipating later Protestant ideas on salvation and harkening back to earlier predestinarian ideas expressed by Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century. Wycliffe’s logic of predestinarianism was based on his interpretation of the supposed transubstantiation of the bread and wine at the Eucharist into the Body and Blood of Christ, which he maintained were not sanctioned in the Bible and therefore that they were merely symbolic. These views, which only attained their full form by 1381, were heretical, and led to Wycliffe being condemned before an English Church synod in Blackfriars in 1382, called the ‘Earthquake Synod’ after an earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter Scale damaged St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. Archbishop William Courtenay of Canterbury declared that the earthquake signified the expulsion from the Church of erroneous heresies such as that of Wycliffe, an earthquake that John of Gaunt played a major part in provoking.
John of Gaunt had his own reasons for throwing his political support behind Wycliffe. From 1378-1417, the Catholic Church was split into two rival popes during a period known as the Great Schism, based in Avignon and Rome. Countries which supported France generally supported the Avignon Pope and those who opposed France supported the Roman Pope, so England aligned itself with the Roman Pope, and there were fears that supporters of the Avignon Pope within the English Church could be funnelling funds secretly to support the French war effort. This was certainly claimed to be the case with ‘alien priories’ such as Lancaster Priory, itself a dependency on the French Abbey of Sees, and would eventually lead to the dissolution of such monasteries by Henry V in 1414. Wycliffe’s polemics were mainly levelled against the Avignon Pope, who was seen as opulent and detached from the concerns of ordinary Christians, who were being fleeced to support the luxurious lifestyle of this erstwhile Vicar of Christ in his Palace at Avignon. In a febrile climate of resentment against high taxation, against wealthy and overmighty nobles, and especially against rich churchmen exploiting their flock for their own ends, John of Gaunt sought to take control of the narrative that was being used against him, by using Wycliffe as a means to show his hostility to the Avignon Pope, and at the same time humble the pride of English clergy who objected to his power and influence at court. Gaunt therefore backed Wycliffe from 1377 when he condemned the Avignon Pope, Gregory XI, for allowing the Church to fall into sin and called for the clergy to give up their property and live in poverty as the Apostles had done. Wycliffe’s oratory caused a sensation in England and beyond, inspiring the birth of the Lollard movement in England, based on his teachings, and the Hussite movement in Bohemia, named after Jan Hus, who led a war of independence against the German Holy Roman Empire based on Wycliffite doctrine. Despite the animosity he aroused, Wycliffe was protected by John of Gaunt, who helped him to retain his parish church living at Lutterworth in Leicestershire for the remainder of his life. As long as he continued to toe the line of attacking the wealth of the Church, this support would continue, but Wycliffe crossed the line on transubstantiation, regarded by John of Gaunt as a core Catholic doctrine, and from this point on Wycliffe lost his most powerful patron. John Wycliffe died in 1384 and, after his death, his body was exhumed and burned on the orders of Pope Martin V in 1428, when by that time the Roman Catholic Church was reunited under a single pope. This same Pope Martin also burned at the stake Jan Hus at Constance in 1415, and in England there was a unilateral purge of Wycliffites wherever they could be found, as if the Church was cleansing itself of its own sins of heresy and discord. John of Gaunt was by now looking to the care of his mortal soul, and the immortality of his own dynasty.
The Future of the House of Lancaster
By 1390, John of Gaunt had achieved a remarkable revolution in his reputation. From now on, he would indeed be Time-Honoured Lancaster. Not only was he advanced in age, experienced in statesmanship and influential in politics, he was effectively the senior statesman at the heart of English government and wealthy beyond measure. His reputation was helped by his absence from England during the crisis of royal authority triggered by the Lords Appellant in 1388, so called because senior English lords, led by Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, appealed against what they regarded as the tyrannical rule of Richard II, and particularly the king’s favourites such as Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Richard II had surrounded himself with a close circle of friends, precisely because he feared and resented the influence of John of Gaunt over what he regarded as his government, and his animosity towards the House of Lancaster was not helped by Henry of Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s son and successor by Blanche of Lancaster, being among the Appellants. The Appellants had their revenge against the king’s favourites, such as executing Richard’s friend Sir Simon Burley for exercising undue influence over the king, and effectively monopolised control of the king. John of Gaunt was effectively off the scene during this political mayhem, and upon his return in 1390 was able to break the influence of the Lords Appellant and gradually rehabilitate Richard II to power in his own right. Richard II never forgave the Lords Appellant, and the Duke of Gloucester ended up being murdered in Calais in 1392, most likely on Richard’s orders. As Richard’s style of government became increasingly absolute and arbitrary, John of Gaunt remained a valued councillor to the king, remaining silent when the Duke of Gloucester was murdered. It seems as though he was doing this to protect Henry of Bolingbroke, who was otherwise busying himself going on crusade to Lithuania. In 1390 and 1392, Bolingbroke enlisted temporarily with the Teutonic Knights, and in 1393 he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Despite this show of Christian piety, Richard II was determined to destroy the House of Lancaster once and for all. In 1398, Bolingbroke had interpreted a remark by the Duke of Norfolk regarding Richard’s style of rule as treasonous, reported it to the king as a display of loyalty, and this resulted in a duel between the two dukes that led to them being exiled. Richard II then summarily cancelled the right of Henry of Bolingbroke to automatically inherit the Duchy of Lancaster, despite John of Gaunt extracting the privilege of palatine powers being granted to his successors from 1390. (SLIDE 27 – TOMB OF JOHN OF GAUNT AND BLANCHE OF LANCASTER) John of Gaunt died on 3rd February 1399, and his nephew immediately seized the vast Duchy Inheritance for the Crown. Henry of Bolingbroke seized the opportunity to claim the Duchy which he believed was his by right, and eventually the Crown of England itself. By November 1399, the Duke of Lancaster had become Henry IV of England, the first king of the House of Lancaster. Every King and Queen of England would, from that point on, be directly descended from Time-Honoured Lancaster, now entombed beside his beloved Blanche in Old St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Time-Honoured Lancaster
John of Gaunt. Time-Honoured Lancaster. A name that will live for as long as England itself. An extraordinary man for extraordinary times, the quintessence of the mediaeval era. His Lancastrian legacy continues to touch us still, in the streets we walk, in the language we speak, in the stones that honour his name. A man of his time, and for all time, is honoured by time in the name of Lancaster. As we stand on the threshold of a new era for the British monarchy, let us raise our Loyal Toast, as proud and loyal Lancastrians: God Save the King and Duke of Lancaster!
