John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (6 March 1340 – 3 February 1399), was an English prince, military leader and statesman. He was the fourth son (third surviving) of King Edward III, and the father of King Henry IV. Because of Gaunt's royal origin, advantageous marriages and some generous land grants, he was one of the richest men of his era and an influential figure during the reigns of both his father and his nephew, Richard II.Death of John of Gaunt, Richard Cavendish explains the life and death of Henry IV's father, on February 3rd, 1399John of Gaunt: Son of One King, Father of Another, Kathryn Warner, Amberley Publishing, 2022 As Duke of Lancaster, he was the founder of the royal House of Lancaster, whose members ascended the throne after his death. His birthplace, Ghent in Flanders, then known in English as Gaunt, was the origin of his name.
John's early career was spent in France and Spain fighting in the Hundred Years' War. He made an abortive attempt to enforce a claim to the Crown of Castile that came through his second wife, Constance of Castile, and for a time styled himself as King of Castile. When Edward the Black Prince, Gaunt's elder brother and heir apparent to the ageing Edward III, became incapacitated by poor health, Gaunt assumed control of many government functions and rose to become one of the most powerful political figures in England. He was faced with military difficulties abroad and political divisions at home, and disagreements as to how to deal with these crises led to tensions between Gaunt, the English Parliament and the ruling class, making him an unpopular figure for a time. He helped forge the 1386 Anglo-Portuguese alliance, secured through the marriage of his daughter Philippa to John I of Portugal, which is still in force today.
John exercised great influence over the English throne during the minority of King Richard II (Edward the Black Prince's son) and the ensuing periods of political strife. He mediated between the king and a group of rebellious nobles, which included Gaunt's own son and heir-apparent, Henry Bolingbroke. Following Gaunt's death in 1399, the Lancastrian estates and titles were declared forfeit to the Crown, and the now disinherited son, Bolingbroke, was branded a traitor and ordered into exile. Henry did not stay in exile; he raised an army to reclaim his inheritance and depose Richard. He reigned as King Henry IV (1399–1413), the first of the descendants of John of Gaunt to hold the English throne.
John cultivated an extensive network of retainers, known as the Lancastrian affinity, which became the cornerstone of his political power and was later inherited by his eldest surviving son, Henry, the future King Henry IV. All English monarchs from Henry IV onwards are descended from John of Gaunt. His direct male line, the House of Lancaster, ruled England from 1399 until the Wars of the Roses. Gaunt fathered additional children surnamed Beaufort (from the name of one of Lancaster's fiefs in France), by Katherine Swynford, his long-term mistress. After he married Swynford (his third marriage), his Beaufort children were later legitimised by royal and papal decrees. Through his daughter Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, he was an ancestor of the Yorkist kings Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III. Through his great-granddaughter Lady Margaret Beaufort he was also an ancestor of Henry VII, who married Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth of York, and all subsequent monarchs are descendants of their marriage. Two of John's daughters married into continental royal houses (those of Portugal and Castile). Through them, many royal families of Europe can trace lineage to him.
Early life
John was the son of Edward III of England and Philippa of Hainault, and was born in Ghent in Flanders, most likely at Saint Bavo's Abbey, in March 1340. The name by which he has become best known, of Gaunt, was derived from an anglicised form of his birthplace, Ghent. Its use was popularised by Shakespeare in his play Richard II, but during John's lifetime, he was not referred to as this after the age of three. When he became unpopular later in life, a scurrilous rumour circulated, along with lampoons, claiming that he was actually the son of a Ghent butcher.
John married his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, in 1359 at Reading Abbey as a part of the efforts of Edward III to arrange matches for his sons with wealthy heiresses. Upon the death of his father-in-law, the Duke of Lancaster, in 1361, John received half his lands, the title "Earl of Lancaster", and the became the greatest landowner in Northern England as heir to the Palatinate of Lancaster. He also became the 14th Baron of Halton and 11th Lord of Bowland. John inherited the rest of the Lancaster property when Blanche's sister Maud, Countess of Leicester (married to William V, Count of Hainaut), died without issue on 10 April 1362.
John received the title "Duke of Lancaster" from his father on 13 November 1362. By then well established, he owned at least thirty castles and estates across England and France and maintained a household comparable in scale and organisation to that of a monarch. He owned land in almost every county in England, a patrimony that produced a net income of between £8,000 and £10,000 a year, equivalent in 2023 to c.£170 – 213 million in income value, or £3.5 – 4.4 billion in relation to GDP.Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1270 to Present, www.measuringworth.com
English Magnate First Campaign in France Because of his rank, John of Gaunt was one of England's principal military commanders in the 1370s and 1380s, though he did not have the kind of success that had made his elder brother Edward the Black Prince such a charismatic war leader.
On the resumption of war with France in 1369, John was sent to Calais with Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and a small English army with which he raided into northern France. On 23 August, he was confronted by a much larger French army under Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Exercising his first command, John dared not attack such a superior force and the two armies faced each other across a marsh for several weeks until the English were reinforced by the Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, at which the French withdrew without offering battle. John and Warwick then decided to strike Harfleur, the base of the French fleet on the Seine. Further reinforced by German mercenaries, they marched on Harfleur, but were delayed by French guerilla operations while the town prepared for a siege. John invested the town for four days in October, but he was losing so many men to dysentery and bubonic plague that he decided to abandon the siege and return to Calais. During this retreat, the army had to fight its way across the Somme at the ford of Blanchetaque against a French army led by Hugh de Châtillon, who was captured and sold to Edward III. By the middle of November, the survivors of the sickly army returned to Calais, where the Earl of Warwick died of the plague. Though it seemed an inglorious conclusion to the campaign, John had forced the French king, Charles V, to abandon his plans to invade England that autumn.
In the summer of 1370, John was sent with a small army to Aquitaine to reinforce his ailing elder brother, the Black Prince, and his younger brother Edmund of Langley, Earl of Cambridge. With them, he participated in the Siege of Limoges (September 1370). He took charge of the siege operations and engaged in hand-to-hand fighting in the undermining tunnels. After this event, the Black Prince gave John the lieutenancy of Aquitaine and sailed for England, leaving John in charge. Though he attempted to defend the duchy against French encroachment for nearly a year, lack of resources and money meant he could do little but husband what small territory the English still controlled, and he resigned the command in September 1371 and returned to England. Just before leaving Aquitaine, he married the Infanta Constance of Castile in September 1371 at Roquefort, near Bordeaux. The following year he took part in an abortive attempt with his father, Edward III, to invade France with a large army, which was frustrated by three months of unfavourable winds.
Probably John's most notable feat of arms occurred in August–December 1373, when he attempted to relieve Aquitaine by the landward route, leading an army of some 9,000 mounted men from Calais on a great chevauchée from northeastern to southwestern France on a 900-kilometre raid. This four-month ride through enemy territory, evading French armies on the way, was a bold stroke that impressed contemporaries but achieved virtually nothing. Beset on all sides by French ambushes and plagued by disease and starvation, John of Gaunt and his raiders battled their way through Champagne, east of Paris, into Burgundy, across the Massif Central, and finally down into Dordogne. Unable to attack any strongly fortified forts and cities, the raiders plundered the countryside, which weakened the French infrastructure, but the military value of the damage was only temporary. Marching in winter across the Limousin plateau, with stragglers being picked off by the French, huge numbers of the army, and even larger numbers of horses, died of cold, disease or starvation. The army reached English-occupied Bordeaux on 24 December 1373, severely weakened in numbers with the loss of at least one-third of their force in action and another third to disease. Upon arrival in Bordeaux, many more succumbed to the bubonic plague that was raging in the city. Sick, demoralised and mutinous, the army was in no shape to defend Aquitaine, and soldiers began to desert. John had no funds with which to pay them, and despite his entreaties, none were sent from England, so in April 1374, he abandoned the enterprise and sailed for home.
Head of government
On his return from France in 1374, John took a more decisive and persistent role in the direction of English foreign policy. From then until 1377, he was effectively the head of the English government owing to the illness of his father and elder brother, who were unable to exercise authority. His vast estates made him the richest man in England, and his great wealth, ostentatious display of it, autocratic manner and attitudes, enormous London mansion (the Savoy Palace on the Strand) and association with the failed peace process at Bruges combined to make him the most visible target of social resentments.
However, John's ascendancy to political power coincided with widespread resentment of his influence. At a time when English forces encountered setbacks in the Hundred Years' War against France, with John's efforts not viewed as being as successful as his father and brother, and Edward III's rule was becoming unpopular owing to high taxation and his affair with his mistress Alice Perrers, political opinion closely associated the Duke of Lancaster with the failing government of the 1370s.
The Good Parliament was called in 1376 due to shortages of government funds. It turned into a parliamentary revolution, expressing grievances at high taxation, misgovernment and corruption at court. With the Black Prince supporting reform John was isolated and the Commons managed to get the great officers of state dismissed and Alice Perrers was barred from the court. This changed with the Black Prince's death on 8 June 1376 and the onset of Edward III's last illness at the closing of the Good Parliament on 10 July left John with all the reins of power.
John immediately had the ailing king grant royal pardons to all the officials impeached by the Parliament; Alice Perrers too was reinstated at the heart of the king's household. John impeached William of Wykeham and other leaders of the reform movement, and secured their conviction on old or trumped-up charges.