Smart courtier John of Gaunt sought power, not a crown

THE LAST KNIGHT: THE TWILIGHT OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN ERA

By Norman F. Cantor

Free Press, $25, 250 pages

REVIEWED BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN

Most people know John of Gaunt (1340-1399), the “last knight” of medieval historian Norman F. Cantor’s newest book, only from Shakespeare’s play “Richard II.”

There Gaunt, uncle of the soon-to-be-deposed Richard and father of Richard’s successor, Henry IV, delivers one of English literature’s most famous patriotic speeches: “This sceptered isle … this precious stone set in the silver sea … this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

They would be surprised to learn that John of Gaunt, far from being the ultranationalist that Shakespeare portrayed, devoted nearly 20 years of his life to pursuing his claim to be king of Castile and Leon, in Spain.

His second wife, Constance, was the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, king of Castile. Her husband, after leading a fruitless excursion in 1386 against another claimant to the Castilian throne (also named John), finally abandoned his ambitions to become Spanish royalty by betrothing his daughter by Constance to John of Castile’s son Henry in 1387 and returning to England.

The Spanish adventure was typical of John of Gaunt. The fourth son of the long-reigning Edward III (1312-1377), Richard II’s grandfather and predecessor, Gaunt was, as a younger son in a dynasty full of offspring, in no good place to become king himself, and he was too smart to try.

He instead, by a combination of astute marriages and political alliances, managed to become the wealthiest and most powerful man in England, indeed in all of Western Europe, who was not a crowned head.

His mother was a Low Countries princess, Philippa of Hainaut, and John was born not in England but at Ghent in Flanders (the sobriquet “Gaunt” is an alternative spelling of “Ghent”). Through his marriage to his first wife, Blanche, in 1359, John of Gaunt became duke of Lancaster and heir to vast revenue-generating landholdings, not only in northwestern England but all over the country.

His nephew Richard II made him duke of Aquitaine as well in 1389, although by this time, the claim of the English royal family, the Plantagenets, to the huge French holdings that Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought with her when she became queen of England during the 12th century existed mostly on paper and in the territorial claims of the English crown during the protracted Hundred Years’ War between France and England.

Edward III had launched that war in 1337 by proclaiming himself king of France as well as England, and Gaunt led an unsuccessful excursion from Calais to Bordeaux on behalf of his father in 1373.

Indeed, as his failed French and Spanish adventures indicate, John of Gaunt was a terrible military commander; in France his army marched in a swathe that devastated the countryside but accomplished little. Mr. Cantor writes of the sally, “During this time Gaunt lost nearly half his army of fifteen thousand men to disease and hunger and thoroughly wasted the precious tax-raised resources Edward III and Parliament had given him.” Gaunt was so depressed by this disaster, Mr. Cantor notes, that he retired to one of his country estates in England to brood for 10 solid months.

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