He married her, and had her children legitimized.

But in the end, when his second wife died She bore him four children – he was married twice to other women.

But the story it tells is basically true, and it IS a most astonishing story: Katherine Swynford, of an undistinguished background, became mistress to the third son of King Edward III: John of Gaunt. The story is romantic and sweeping, and Seton is free to make what she wants of Katherine because nothing survives of her own thoughts or words. But I kept on reading and became completely entranced one more time. This one not only has some strange attitudes, but is full of the worst kind of faux-Mediaeval chitchat (‘what danger to me could there be from a handful of renegade villeins?’), and twinkly-eyed servants vowing loyalty, and dainty demoiselles with dimples. The truth is that novels based on history reflect the time they were written in rather than the time they were set. Seton is no Philippa Gregory or Hilary Mantel. When I started it I was fairly horrified and concerned: it is so – old-fashioned. I recently recommended it to a friend (how had she missed it as a teenager?), then thought I’d look at it again myself. I look like one of them, she thought proudly, a court lady.Ĭommentary: Does the magic of Katherine still hold, for those of us who first read it as young and impressionable people? For me the answer is always yes. Even the Duchess had not so sinuous a line. She could see that the miniver-trimmed surcote disclosed half-moons of bosom and clung to her long waist without a wrinkle. If she pursed her mouth it became the two crimson cherry-halves so much admired. Her high white forehead and the delicate arched eyebrows looked exactly like those of all the noble ladies. When she had dressed herself in the long green gown, fastened the girdle low on her slender hips and bound her hair into two silver-filleted cauls on either side of her face, much as Alice Perrers wore hers, Katherine looked in the hand-mirror and was startled, not by her beauty, which still seemed to her negligible, but by her air of sophistication. His beard was clipped short and his face shaven to disclose a full and passionate mouth. His eyes were as bright blue as his father’s once had been, his thick hair was tawny yellow as a lion’s pelt.

In John’s face the Plantagenet stamp of long nose, narrow cheeks and deep eye-sockets had been softened but not coarsened by the Flemish heritage. He was tall, though not so uncouthly large as Lionel, and he was slender, but not with the meagre delicacy of Edmund. John of Gaunt, who had just turned twenty-six last month, was the best made of all the King’s sons. A gold girdle, fastened by the ruby rose of Lancaster, hung on his narrow hips and around his wide muscular shoulders lay the SS golden collar of Lancaster. He was magnificent in a red and azure tunic quartered with the lilies of France and the Leopards of England.

Katherine by Anya Seton