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Myth 5
CHAUCER’S SON THOMAS WAS JOHN OF GAUNT’S BASTARD

In the biography attached to Thomas Speght’s 1598 version of Chaucer’s works there appears this curious, almost throwaway line: “Yet some hold opinion (but I know not vpon what grounds) that Thomas Chaucer was not the sonne of Geffrey Chaucer, but rather some kinsman of his, whome hee brought up.”¹ Speght almost immediately distances himself from this “opinion,” arguing that “this pedigree [the Stemma peculiare Gaufredi Chauceri that appears on the previous page] by the hands of Master Glouer alias Somerset, that learned Antiquarie, as also the report of Chronicles shew it to be otherwise.”² If Speght was interested in offering reassurance about the parentage of Thomas Chaucer, however, his refutation of this discarded opinion had the opposite effect.

In the preface to his magisterial edition of Chaucer in 1775, Thomas Tyrwhitt lamented that we did not know the date of Chaucer’s marriage because if we did, “we should know better what to think of the relation of Thomas Chaucer to our author. Mr. Speght informs us ‘that some hold opinion that Thomas C. was not the sonne of Geffrey’ and there are certainly many circumstances that incline us to that opinion.”³ There is no further reference to Thomas Chaucer’s doubtful parentage until 1872, when F.J. Furnivall announced in the pages of Notes and Queries that “there is not one scrap of direct or indirect evidence that the wealthy Thomas Chaucer was the son, or any relative, of the poet.”⁴ Ten years later, Mary Elizabeth Haweis cites a letter from Henry Beaufort that confirms Thomas Chaucer was cousin to the children of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford. This seems to confirm his status as the son of Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer, since she was sister to the Duchess of Lancaster, Katherine Swynford. Yet, strangely, Haweis says, “such hypotheses rather increase the cloud which still enshrouds Thomas Chaucer’s birth.”⁵ Whether or not Speght’s refutation of the “opinion” and Tyrwhitt’s and Furnivall’s speculative notes constitute a “cloud” might be debated, but in Haweis’s eyes the suspicion about Thomas’s parentage could lead in only one direction.⁶ Using language that Mary Flowers Braswell has termed “purposefully ambiguous,” she implied that Thomas Chaucer was not some kinsman of Chaucer’s but John of Gaunt’s son.⁷

Haweis’s speculation led several medievalists to weigh in on the potential legitimacy or illegitimacy of Thomas Chaucer, but it was Russell Krauss who wrote the most detailed defense of the position in 1932.⁸ Krauss rehearsed earlier arguments and added some of his own, including Gaunt’s “life‐long interest in Philippa and Thomas” (as against his ignorance of Geoffrey later in his life), the coats of arms on Thomas Chaucer’s tomb, John Lydgate’s failure to mention that Thomas was Geoffrey’s son and the comment by Speght that started the debate about Thomas Chaucer’s paternity.⁹

It is true that Gaunt favored both Philippa (sister to his wife) and Thomas. Philippa received a number of annuities from the Duke, and she was given New Year’s gifts several times through the 1370s and 1380s.¹⁰ Thomas had a long career in the employ of the Duke and was well compensated throughout the 1390s.¹¹ Moreover, “John of Gaunt also interested himself in the affairs of Elizabeth Chaucer [Philippa’s daughter], since it was he who paid for her admission to the Black Nuns, a payment that has led some Chaucerian biographers to fear the worst.”¹² Geoffrey also received annuities, but these were given in part because of his wife’s services to John of Gaunt’s mother (Edward III’s queen, Philippa) and his wife (Constance).¹³ It is possible that these annuities stopped after Philippa’s death, but the records of payments are imperfect and so it is difficult to draw any conclusions about Gaunt’s disinterest in Chaucer as opposed to his wife or son. We do know that Gaunt’s son, Henry of Derby, gave gifts to Geoffrey in the 1390s, while John of Gaunt was still alive, and once he reached the throne confirmed an annuity for Chaucer (even if that confirmation was delayed; see Myth 26) that may have taken the place of Chaucer’s annuity that had been given by John of Gaunt.¹⁴ There is thus little indication that Gaunt or his house showed sufficient disinclination towards Geoffrey Chaucer or a sufficiently unusual inclination towards Philippa or Thomas to indicate a suspicious connection.

Krauss and others also maintain that it is telling that Geoffrey Chaucer’s arms do not appear on Thomas Chaucer’s tomb. Of the twenty shields on the tomb at Ewelme in Oxfordshire, the only male ones are those of the sons of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford, Philippa Chaucer’s sister. The arms of Philippa de Roët (the maiden name of Philippa Chaucer) are quartered with those of Thomas Chaucer’s wife, Maud Burghesh. The suggestion would seem to be that Thomas was the son of Philippa but not Geoffrey. Yet it was not abnormal for men to put their mother’s arms on their tombs if those noble connections surpassed their father’s. And, as it was Thomas’s daughter Alice, the wife of the Earl of Sussex, who raised the tomb, it is not unusual that she would wish to stress the Chaucers’ connections with nobility.¹⁵

Finally, Krauss et al. argue that the omission of any mention of Thomas Chaucer’s relationship with his father in a poem by John Lydgate that was addressed to Thomas “has always been one of the worst stumbling blocks in the way of the view that Thomas was Geoffrey’s son.”¹⁶ The logic is that Lydgate, who made something of a career out of encomia to Chaucer, certainly would have mentioned Thomas’s connection to “Father Chaucer” had Chaucer really been Thomas’s father. Of course, it is always risky to argue from negative evidence. There might be any number of reasons that Lydgate did not include genealogical information in his poem. But in any case, the work is an occasional poem that marked the departure of Thomas for France. It is also very much a work that celebrates “not literary but social and political associations. It accurately depicts Thomas Chaucer’s actual and symbolic role at Ewelme and its locality rather than his place in literary history.”¹⁷

What we are left with, then, is Speght’s disavowal of what can only be called early modern gossip about the lineage of Thomas Chaucer. Krauss attempts to deal with Speght’s own dismissal of this opinion by claiming that Speght’s dependence on Glover’s pedigree is faulty, because it can only be based on heraldic information that we already possess, and so his interpretation is no more valid than Krauss’s own. His reasoning is that Speght and Glover were almost two hundred years removed from the poet and so they could not claim any special knowledge about the paternity of Thomas. But really this is very much what Speght says regarding the opinion about Thomas itself – he does not know of any grounds for the belief. Without grounds for the belief, all we really know is that the belief existed. And there are good reasons to think that the belief was mistaken.

First, it is not only Speght and Glover who claimed that Thomas was Geoffrey’s son. An action to recover debt was brought against Thomas Chaucer in 1396, and it explicitly names Thomas as Geoffrey Chaucer’s son.¹⁸ And Thomas Gascoigne, early fifteenth‐century theologian and sometime Chancellor of Oxford, when writing about Chaucer’s supposed deathbed repentance (see Myth 27), also wrote “this same Chaucer was the father of Thomas Chaucer, Knight, which Thomas is buried in Ewelme near Oxford.”¹⁹ Thomas Chaucer and Gascoigne both lived in Oxford at the same time (for sixteen years), so there is reason to believe that Gascoigne would have at least known who he was given Thomas’s social standing. Those who wish to make the case for Thomas’s illegitimacy have argued that Gascoigne is not reporting anything of which he has personal knowledge, but is merely making assumptions based on the fact that Thomas was raised by Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer. One might well argue that such an assumption would be warranted (especially in the absence of any other compelling counter evidence), but there is another reason that we should believe Gascoigne. He was no friend of John of Gaunt and by extension was no friend of the Chaucers. He most likely concocted the slander that Geoffrey Chaucer attempted too late to repent his sins (comparing him to Judas; see Myth 27) and reported that John of Gaunt had been a “magnus fornicator” and had died of putrefaction of the genitals. Had there been any contemporary gossip about the legitimacy of Thomas, one would think that Gascoigne would have included it.²⁰ Finally, had Gaunt cuckolded Chaucer, “he [Gaunt] would not have been allowed to marry Chaucer’s wife’s sister because of the undispensable degree of incest involved.”²¹ In addition, he would have been in a state of mortal sin and automatically excommunicated. As H.A. Kelly has said, “it is impossible to believe that he would have taken such a risk.”²²

Yet, despite the slender evidence supporting the idea and its sheer improbability, the belief has remained remarkably enduring.²³ There seem to be a few reasons for this. First, there is the delicious irony that the father of English literature (see Myth 1) might not have fathered his own child. Second, Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetic autonomy is reinforced. Any patronage flowing to Chaucer from Gaunt or his sons becomes a matter of reparation for a decidedly non‐literary injury. The poet’s art remains (seemingly) pure and unsullied by the ministrations of Mammon. Finally, it fits into a romantic notion of the suffering poet. Poor Geoffrey is betrayed by Gaunt, abandoned by Philippa and in old age, in serious debt (Myth 26), unable even to get his annuity from his “son’s” brother.

Notes

1 1 Thomas Speght, ed., The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly Printed (London, 1598), b5r.

2 2 Ibid., b5r.

3 3 Thomas Tyrwhitt, ed., The Canterbury tales of Chaucer: to which are added, an essay on his language and versification; an introductory discourse; and notes (London, 1775–78), 1:xxxiii.

4 4 F.J. Furnivall, “Thomas Chaucer, Not the Poet Geoffrey’s Son,” Notes and Queries, 4th Series 9 (1872), 381–3, here 381.

5 5 Mary Elizabeth Haweis, “More News of Chaucer, Part I,” Belgravia: A London Magazine 48 (1882), 34–46, here 43.

6 6 Especially as she references the Glover pedigree contained in Speght’s edition.

7 7 Mary Flowers Braswell, The Forgotten Chaucer Scholarship of Mary Eliza Haweis (New York: Routledge, 2016), 17.

8 8 Russell Krauss , Haldeen Braddy and C. Robert Kase , Three Chaucer Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932).

9 9 Ibid., 169.

10 10 Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson , eds., Chaucer Life‐Records (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 80, 85, 88–91.

11 11 Martin B. Ruud , Thomas Chaucer (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1926), 4–67; Krauss, Braddy and Kase, Three Chaucer Studies, 161.

12 12 Peter Ackroyd, Chaucer, Brief Lives (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004), 28.

13 13 Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life‐Records, 272.

14 14 Ibid., 273.

15 15 Alison Weir , Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009), 94, 332.

16 16 Krauss, Braddy and Kase, Three Chaucer Studies, 143. Furnivall goes even further, claiming that the scribe who copied the poem (John Shirley) would have been sure to mention Thomas’s connection to Geoffrey if there had been one (“Thomas Chaucer,” 381).

17 17 Jacquelyn Fernholz and Jenni Nuttall, “Lydgate’s Poem to Thomas Chaucer: A Reassessment of Its Diplomatic and Literary Contexts,” in Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Linda Clark, The Fifteenth Century 6 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 123–44, here 132.

18 18 Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life‐Records, 341.

19 19 Quoted in Míc&c.dotab;eál Vaughan , “Personal Politics and Thomas Gascoigne’s Account of Chaucer’s Death,” Medium Aevum 75 (2006), 103–22 , here 115. See Myth 27.

20 20 Ibid., 109.

21 21 H. Ansgar Kelly , “Shades of Incest and Cuckoldry: Pandarus and John of Gaunt,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991), 121–40 , here 137.

22 22 Ibid, 137.

23 23 See, for instance, Sheila Delany , Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature Medieval to Modern (New York: Schoken Books, 1983), 58; John H . Fisher, The Importance of Chaucer (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1992), 19–23; R. Allen Shoaf , Chaucer’s Body: The Anxiety of Circulation in the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2001), 100–1; and its persistence as a recurring theme in contemporary historical fiction featuring Chaucer, for example Garry O’Connor , Chaucer’s Triumph (Lancaster: Petrak Press, 2007).