Henry Neville and the Strange Case of Katherine Swynford.
There is a strange omission in the play of Richard II. Where is Katherine Swynford? The Great Tudor Dynasty sprang from Katherine's relationship with John of Gaunt, so Katherine and her children's presence could have elicited a much more favourable assessment of the play from Queen Elizabeth Tudor. It was well within the great playwright's capabilities to slant the play in Elizabeth's direction. Why did the true author decide not to do so?
Katherine Swynford was a rare woman, especially for the times in which she lived. Beautiful, clever, bilingual and strong-minded, she managed to keep her public dignity despite the fact that she was the life-long and known mistress of the renowned statesman, John of Gaunt. Gaunt married her, however, in 1396, after the death of his second wife, Constanza of Castile, whose family’s claims for inheritance he was later to disavow.
But John’s third marriage created a great problem for future dynastic relationships: Katherine Swynford had already borne John four illegitimate children. Had John and Katherine been prepared to allow them to retain their illegitimate status, then there would probably have been less trouble to state affairs. However, John was determined to legitimise these children, thus arguably giving them equal status alongside his legitimate sons. The legitimisation had to be carried out by Papal decree, and by an Act of Parliament, since subsequent marriage of parents did not automatically legitimise children under English Law until a much later Act was passed, in 1926.
There was terrific complexity regarding dynastic rights during the Wars of the Roses, and the rights of the descendants of John of Gaunt were bound to figure in the fray. The Nevilles were related to both Henry IV (the legitimate son of Gaunt and his first wife) and to the Beauforts, the illegitimate descendants of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford. However, those Nevilles who were descended from the Beauforts sprang from a daughter of Katherine Swynford, while the man who ultimately began the Tudor dynasty – King Henry VII – began his descent from a son of Katherine Swynford. (Henry VII's great grandfather was the first son of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford.)
From a purely dynastic point of view, therefore, if any of Katherine Swynford’s descendants were going to become monarch at the end of the Wars of the Roses, it was probably acceptable that their descent should be traced through the male line. However, the Nevilles would have felt that they had a double right to the throne through their Plantagenet descendancy, which preceded their own descendancy from the Beauforts too.
Now, it is a strange fact that John of Gaunt and Henry IV play prominent roles in Shakespeare’s drama, Richard II, but Katherine Swynford (Gaunt’s wife when he died in the play) is never mentioned. Had the true writer of the play been a young, upwardly-spiralling ambitious poor man from Stratford, it is inconceivable that he would have omitted Katherine Swynford and her son from the play, because Katherine Swynford’s son, John, was the great-grandfather of the head of the Tudor dynasty, (Henry VII), and Henry VII was the grandfather of the reigning monarch, Elizabeth I. Any playwright at all interested in obtaining royal recognition and approval would therefore have written a play which implied praise for the reigning monarch by praising her ancestors. Besides this glaring omission, Richard II also included a scene involving the monarch's deposition. Surely only a playwright writing under the protection of a pseudonym would therefore have dared write such a play, with its significant and dangerous inclusions and omissions. No one who suffered the same financial need as did William Shakespeare, and no one who wished to curry favour with the present dynasty, would therefore have written the play, Richard II.
The Swynford boys were given the surname Beaufort. John Beaufort, Marquess of Dorset and Somerset, (Henry VII’s grandfather) was only five years younger than Henry IV, so he could easily have played a role in the play. It is therefore arguable that had the writer in any way heroicised this character, then Queen Elizabeth I might well have taken a very much more favourable view of that play. And, to add to this, those Beauforts who were not ancestors of the Neville line were also painted in an unfavourable light in the Henry VI plays. Who but a Neville would have had an interest in omitting or vilifying an ancestor of the Monarch whom he knew would watch the plays? And would a writer who wrote with such bias have dared declared his authorship? Who but a Neville would have had an interest in heroicising John of Gaunt and Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick in the History Plays? Certainly, no poor aspiring playwright who depended on writing plays for his living would have dared to do such a thing.
Years later, it is no wonder the Queen did not indict William Shakespeare of Stratford for allowing Richard II to be produced on the eve of the Essex Rebellion. She was not stupid: she must have realised that if Shakespeare had been the true writer then he would never have agreed to endanger himself and his livelihood by allowing a seditious play (which also omitted to mention any positive role played by Elizabeth’s own ancestors) to be performed under such sensitive political circumstances. Quite understandably, Queen Elizabeth would have looked for a writer who had another source of income, who was a friend of the Earls of Southampton and Essex, and who had an interest in placing (subliminally at least) an alternative dynasty in a brighter light than her own.
Elizabeth did not accuse Francis Bacon of being the author – he was an absolute monarchist and something of a sycophant. She did not accuse any of the other authorship contenders, but she placed Henry Neville in the Tower of London, alongside ‘Shakespeare’s’ patron, the Earl of Southampton. Henry Neville had known the Earl of Southampton since boyhood, and that same Earl was later to champion Sir Henry's bid to become Secretary of State. Neville was a supporter of the Earl of Essex too, so he was indeed lucky to stay alive throughout his two years' imprisonment in the Tower of London. Perhaps it was his relationship to the rich Greshams which helped him. (His mother was a Gresham, and her uncle founded the Royal Exchange, which became the basis of the Bank of England. Gresham money was definitely needed by the Tudor Queen.) But there was another factor in his survival too. Only through the careful offices of Robert Cecil did both Neville and Southampton keep their heads on their shoulders. We have Robert Cecil to thank for protecting his cousin, Henry Neville, the great humanist who was truly the writer of the plays.
© Brenda James, November, 2008
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