History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 7/10

• Accuracy: Carefully researched; the known outline of Katherine Swynford’s life is followed, but her feelings and much of her daily life are necessarily invented.
• Readability: Long, lush and absorbing, though the romance sometimes smothers the history.
• Plot: Spans decades, from convent girl to duchess, with the Peasants’ Revolt as a centrepiece.

Katherine de Roet was the daughter of a Hainault knight, the sister-in-law of Geoffrey Chaucer, the widow of a minor knight, and for many years the mistress of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Late in life Gaunt married her, and their children, the Beauforts, were legitimised. Through them she became an ancestor of the Tudors.

Seton had an extraordinary story and very few documents about the woman herself. She filled the gaps with an intense emotional narrative. Katherine arrives at court as a teenager, is married off to Hugh Swynford, a rough knight with lands in Lincolnshire, and slides into a love affair with Gaunt that costs her reputation and much of her peace.

The backdrop is strong. Plague, the war with France, Wycliffe’s ideas, and the burning of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 all appear. Chaucer is a recurring presence, and Julian of Norwich makes a brief, memorable appearance. Seton’s research into dress, food, travel and devotion is thorough.

The limits are those of the romance tradition. Gaunt is idealised, far more attractive and principled than most historians believe he was. Katherine’s moral struggles are sincere but handled with a heaviness that repeats itself across some five hundred pages.

The 7 is because it made a real and neglected woman vivid for millions, and still does. It is less a portrait of the fourteenth century than of what one twentieth-century imagination wanted from it. But that imagination was generous and well informed, and the book remains a touchstone for the genre.