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Appendix.)
    It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have wanted to write this book for forty years. But even when I became a published author in the late eighties, no publisher would have contemplated commissioning a biography of this relatively obscure woman. And that remained the situation for many years, until the recent explosion of interest in all things historical, which inspired me to seize the chance to make my long-standing, secret dream come true. I am truly indebted to my editors, Will Sulkin, Anthony Whittome and Susanna Porter, for their support and enthusiasm for this project, and to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who suggested that I write about Katherine as well as John of Gaunt, the subject I originally proposed.
    Katherine Swynford deserves a biography for many reasons. First and foremost, she was romantically linked to John of Gaunt, one of the most charismatic figures of the fourteenth century, and their passionate and ultimately poignant love affair is both astonishing and moving. Katherine was clearly beautiful and desirable, not to say enigmatic and intriguing,and some of her contemporaries regarded her as dangerous also. Her existence was played out against a vivid backdrop of court life at the height of the age of chivalry, and she knew most of the great figures of the epoch. The renowned poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, was her brother-in-law. She lived through the Hundred Years War, the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt, knew passion, loss, adversity and heartbreak, and survived them all triumphantly. Her story gives us unique insights into the life of a mediaeval woman.
    Yet Katherine was unusual in that she did not conform to many of the conventional norms expected of women in that age, and in several respects her story has relevance for us today. Feminist scholars are now beginning to see her from a new perspective, as a woman who was an important personage in her own right, a woman who — in a male-dominated age — had remarkable opportunities, made her own choices, flouted convention and took control of her own destiny. Katherine was intelligent, poised and talented, and fortunate enough to move in circles where these qualities were valued and encouraged in women. Among the choices she faced were ones that would be familiar to women today, although her modern counterparts would not have to endure the moral backlash that at one time rebounded on Katherine and probably wrecked her life. Yet they would identify with her as a woman who coped brilliantly with the sweeping, and sometimes devastating, changes of fortune that befell her.
    Above all, Katherine Swynford occupies an unprecedented position in the history of the English monarchy; dynastically, she is an important figure. She was the mother of the Beauforts, and through them the ancestress of the Yorkist kings, the Tudors, the Stuarts and every other British sovereign since — a prodigious legacy for any woman. Without her, the course of English history would have been very different.
    Writing a biography of Katherine Swynford poses its own particular problems, however, for her voice has been silenced forever: no letter survives, no utterance of hers is recorded. None of her movable goods are extant, and we have barely any details of the clothes she wore, so we cannot determine her tastes in art, literature or dress. Her will is lost, and with it any insights it might give us into her feelings for John of Gaunt, her moral outlook, her family relationships or her charities. She is one of the most important women in late-fourteenth-century England, and yet so much about her is a mystery to us. She is famous but, paradoxically, she is little known.
    Furthermore, the contemporary sources to support a biography of Katherine Swynford are meagre and fragmentary at best. She rates barelya mention in the chronicles of the period, and such references as there are usually reflect monastic prejudice against a woman who was