A fictional account of possibly the most romantic true love story in British history told from the viewpoint of Katherine Swynford, ultimate ancestor of most of the Royal line of Britain.
When fifteen year old Katherine de Roet joined her elder sister at Court in 1366 she found her convent upbringing had little prepared her for the sophisticated machinations of the English nobility. The daughter of a minor knight, she was dazzled by the ruling Plantagenet family and particularly the third son of the King, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The Duke, in turn, experienced unsettling feelings towards her, despite being married to and, unusually for a dynastic marriage, very much in love with his wife the Lady Blanche. As was usual in the fourteenth century, a marriage was swiftly arranged for Katherine, to a landed knight, Hugh Swynford, who had been infatuated with her from the moment he saw her.
A union with a family far above her own in the feudal pecking order should have been a coup for Katherine but unfortunately she despised Hugh and was never happy with him. For most women of the era this would have been the end of her story, barring a few children and probably a relatively short life ending in the pain of childbirth or plague, as even the nobility had little better living conditions, from our perspective, than their serfs. However, fate was about to intervene. A chance visit from the Duke during the birth of her first child turned his undefined feelings for her into what would become an increasing infatuation, and one which would become obsessive after Blanche's death from Plague a few years later.
Despite the Duke's obvious feelings for her, Katherine could not bring herself to cuckold her husband, even though she had little love for him. The Duke's frustration is eventually resolved by Hugh's convenient death from wounds sustained in his service, after which Katherine was able to surrender to her feelings and freed from their respective ties the two embarked on a torrid and lifelong love affair which persisted despite John's marriage to the Queen of Castille and the disapprobation of a pious and socially rigid society.
The denouement of this saga is a fairy tale ending which deserves to be savoured with the help of good quality chocolate and a supply of absorbent handkercheifs and I have no intention of spoiling it by telegraphing any further twists in the plot as, despite being accessible to any student of history, the fact of knowing how it ends is overtaken at an early stage by the quality of the writing. Indeed, the tale is yet unfinished in one sense as, between them, John and Katherine are the direct ancestors of every English monarch since their time, including Queen Elizabeth II.
It is no longer fashionable, perhaps, to enjoy 'big' history, the doings of the ruling classes, dates, battles and Princesses in Towers, but that doesn't seem to have dampened its fascination for most of us. Additionally, whilst this is a well researched account of the times, it is primarily a romance in the traditional chivalric mould and as such is a classic of its genre written by such an accomplished storyteller that it lives and breathes, leaving you stranded and lovelorn at the turn of the fifteenth century.
Anya Seton developes her characters so fully and sympathetically that it's difficult to shake off the feeling that these people actually took part in your life and enriched it by their presence. She was also a master historian whose attention to detail so penetratingly recreates the ambience of this turbulent century in its dirt and its glory that you can almost smell it. The atmosphere is beguiling and the main characters, particulary John of Gaunt and Katherine herself elicit the empathy of the reader to the point where I almost think of Gaunt in terms of a well beloved freind. Their lives seduce you, and their tribulations are painful as their helpless, enduring addiction to each other takes them both to the edge of breakdown and destruction. Their fortunes at the mercy of a young and paranoid King, among others, buffet them between the rocks of politics and religious sensibility, ripping them apart at some points and pushing them inexorably together at others.
The drama of the period carries the plot and the characters along with it to a certain extent, with the Hundred Years War in France plodding along in the background, intermittent episodes of the ever present Plague and other virulent diseases and a society that had had its demographic changed so radically by the 1348-9 outbreak of Black Death that many of its institutions and feudal practises were on the verge of breaking down, leading to the Peasant's Revolt and sporadic undirected rioting. This is used by Seton, like an exotic tapestry, as a backdrop to showcase the characters, but at no time does she succumb to putting in something historically interesting just for the sake of it. Neither does she over glamorise the participants, ultimately, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, King of Castille was a Plantagenet and displays all the politically ruthless, self-serving opportunism that is a hallmark of both his time and his family, yet in this account of his private life, his natural charm and devotion to Katherine render him a much more sympathetic man than history would have us believe.
If you haven't worked it out already, I have been unrequitably fixated by John of Gaunt since the first time I read this book and for reasons I find hard to explain he has dragged me kicking and screaming into the fourteenth century never wholly to return. I hope he and his good Lady Katherine will do the same for you as their story leaves a little warm glow in the heart which never really goes away and the conviction that somewhere, sometimes fairy tales really can come true...
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