Who Was John of Gaunt?

John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (1340–1399), was the third surviving son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, and the most powerful — and most unpopular — English magnate of the later fourteenth century. He never won a decisive military victory, and the expeditions he personally led were, on the whole, costly failures. He was, nevertheless, the effective ruler of England from the early 1370s until the accession of his son Henry IV in 1399, the founder of the House of Lancaster, and the great patron of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Wyclif. The 15th-century English monarchy, for better and for worse, was the political creation of John of Gaunt.

Early career and Najera

John was born in March 1340 at Ghent (hence Gaunt), created earl of Richmond in 1342, and duke of Lancaster in November 1362, having married Blanche, daughter and eventual heiress of Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster. The Lancastrian inheritance — the duchy of Lancaster, the honour of Lancaster, the earldoms of Leicester, Lincoln, and Derby, and half a dozen other great estates — made him the richest magnate in England.

His first significant military experience was the Castilian campaign of 1367. He fought at the Battle of Najera on 3 April 1367, alongside his elder brother Edward the Black Prince, in support of Pedro the Cruel of Castile against Henry of Trastámara. The battle was a victory; the campaign drained the Black Prince’s Aquitanian treasury and was the seed of the Caroline phase of the war. John returned to England, in Froissart’s words, “with great honour but small profit.”

The Castilian claim

In 1371 John married Constance, daughter of Peter the Cruel, and advanced a claim to the Castilian throne. The English crown formally recognised him as King of Castile, León, and Galicia in 1372. The Castilian claim was John of Gaunt’s single most expensive political enterprise. He led an English army to Bordeaux in 1373, attempted an overland chevauchée through southern France to Castile that winter, and was forced to retreat. He led a second expedition, by sea to Santander, in 1386; it was inconclusive. He sold the claim to King John I of Castile by the Treaty of Bayonne on 8 July 1388, in return for a substantial pension and a free withdrawal. The “King of Castile” tag persisted in Tudor propaganda and in Shakespeare’s Richard II, but the political substance of the claim was already exhausted.

The political operator

John’s importance is that he was, from the early 1370s to the early 1390s, the principal minister of an ageing and increasingly unreliable king. The Good Parliament of 1376 was a serious attempt to curb the household and the king’s mistress Alice Perrers; John of Gaunt was its principal target, and the parliament broke when John, by then, had the king recalled. He was, as Froissart noted, “greatly hated by the common people,” and the Peasants’ Revolt of June 1381, in which the rebels of Essex and Kent demanded his head, was the most striking expression of that hatred. He survived because the revolt collapsed at Smithfield and because the king protected him.

In the early 1390s, John faded from the centre of politics. He lost his first wife Blanche in 1368 and his second wife Constance in 1394. In January 1396 he married Katherine Swynford, his long-time mistress and the mother of his Beaufort children, and the children were legitimated by Richard II and later by the pope. The Beauforts were the genetic root of the Tudor claim to the English throne.

Reputation

The “Lang John” of the popular imagination — the tall, dark, somewhat sinister figure of the opening scenes of Richard II — is a Tudor construction. The contemporary evidence is mixed. Froissart, who knew him personally and was treated hospitably by him, was favourable. Walsingham was hostile. Henry IV’s government, eager to dissociate the Lancastrian revolution from the misgovernment of Richard’s reign, minimised the inheritance. John died on 3 February 1399 and was buried in Old St Paul’s. He was succeeded as duke of Lancaster by his son Henry, who deposed Richard II four months later and became Henry IV. The war that Henry V reopened in 1415 was, in real terms, the war his grandfather had failed to win.