Who Was John of Gaunt?

Written by Simon Williams

John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was Edward III's third surviving son and the most powerful, most hated nobleman in Richard II's England. Rebels destroyed his Savoy Palace on 13 June 1381, sparing him only because he was in the north, negotiating with the Scots.

• Born: 6 March 1340, Ghent, Flanders, hence the name "Gaunt"
• Father: Edward III, third surviving son after Edward the Black Prince and Lionel of Antwerp
• Title: Duke of Lancaster, created 1362, through his marriage to Blanche of Lancaster
• Marriages: Blanche of Lancaster (1359), Constance of Castile (1371), Katherine Swynford (1396)
• Savoy Palace destroyed: 13 June 1381, by Peasants' Revolt rebels
• Location during the revolt: Berwick upon Tweed, negotiating a truce with Scotland
• Died: 3 February 1399, Leicester Castle
• Legacy: father of Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV, founding the House of Lancaster

Picture the Savoy on the evening of 13 June 1381. It was, by every contemporary account, the finest private house in England, richer in its furnishings than most royal palaces, and by nightfall it was a smoking shell on the bank of the Thames. The man it belonged to was nowhere near London. He was several hundred miles north, at the Scottish border, trying to keep a truce together, and he would not learn what had happened to his home until well after the rebels had moved on.

That absence probably saved his life. Everyone else in England seemed to know exactly where they stood on John of Gaunt in June 1381, and almost none of it was friendly. He was the king's uncle, the richest man in the kingdom after the Crown, and by common report the figure most responsible for the government the rebels had risen against. Understanding why requires going back further than the revolt itself, to a birth in Flanders, three marriages, and an inheritance that made one man's household bigger than most European kingdoms.

This article covers Gaunt's rise through birth and marriage, his dominance over government during Richard II's minority, why that dominance made him the target rather than the poll tax commissioners themselves, what actually happened at the Savoy on 13 June, and how a man who lost his greatest house in an afternoon still ended his life as the ancestor of three English kings.

The Making of a Prince: Birth, Marriages and the Lancastrian Inheritance

John was born on 6 March 1340 in Ghent, in Flanders, while his father Edward III was campaigning on the continent early in what would become the Hundred Years' War. The city's name settled into English as "Gaunt", and it stuck for the rest of his life even after he became one of the great landowners of England. He was Edward's third surviving son, behind Edward the Black Prince and Lionel of Antwerp, which in the ordinary run of dynastic politics should have left him well provided for but never dominant.

Marriage changed that arithmetic completely. In 1359 he married Blanche, daughter and eventual sole heiress of Henry of Grosmont, first Duke of Lancaster, and when Grosmont died in 1361 Gaunt inherited, in right of his wife, one of the largest private landholdings in England. Edward III created him Duke of Lancaster the following year, and the Lancastrian estate, spread across dozens of counties, gave Gaunt an income that rivalled the Crown's own. A second marriage in 1371 to Constance of Castile, daughter of the deposed King Pedro of Castile, added a claim to a Spanish throne, which Gaunt would spend years and a great deal of money trying to make good, without ever quite succeeding. A third marriage, in 1396, to his long-term mistress Katherine Swynford, legitimised the four Beaufort children they had already had together, a decision whose consequences would ripple through English royal politics for a century afterward.

The Most Powerful Man in England: Gaunt and Richard II's Minority

Edward III died in 1377, leaving the throne to his ten-year-old grandson Richard II, since the Black Prince had died the year before. No single regent was appointed. Instead a series of "continual councils" governed in the boy king's name, and John of Gaunt, as the senior surviving royal uncle and by far the wealthiest magnate in the country, was the dominant figure within them, whether or not he held a formal office that said so.

That dominance was real, but it was also widely resented, and not only by the peasantry. Other nobles distrusted a man whose personal resources outstripped their own. Londoners, in particular, had clashed with Gaunt directly in 1376 and 1377 over his interference in city politics and his association with unpopular royal financial policy, well before the poll taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381 gave the wider country a fresh grievance. By the time the third poll tax was being collected in the spring of 1381, John of Gaunt had spent the better part of a decade as the visible face of a government that ordinary people held responsible for heavier taxation without any corresponding improvement in their fortunes.

Why John of Gaunt Was the Nation's Scapegoat

None of this means Gaunt personally designed the poll tax, still less that he benefited from it in any direct way. What mattered to the rebels of 1381 was simpler: he looked, from the outside, like the man in charge. He was uncle to a king too young to rule alone, he sat at the head of the councils that set policy, and his household at the Savoy was a byword for the kind of wealth that made a fifteen-year-old peasant paying a shilling a head for a tax feel, correctly, that the burden was falling in the wrong direction. Readers wanting the fuller picture of how that burden was actually assessed and collected, and how it connects back to the labour shortages the Black Death left behind, will find the background laid out in our study guide on the labour laws that followed the plague, The Labour Machine.

Gaunt's unpopularity was not new in 1381. He had been the target of hostile pamphleteering and open jeering in London for years, accused at various points of ambitions on the throne itself, ambitions no serious modern historian credits, but which stuck to his reputation regardless. When the rebel armies from Kent and Essex converged on London in the second week of June, his was one of the first names attached to their demands for the removal of "traitors" around the king. He simply was not there to answer for it.

The Savoy Palace: London's Grandest House Destroyed in an Afternoon

The Savoy stood on the Strand between the City and Westminster, and contemporaries agreed it had no equal in England for the richness of its furnishings, tapestries, plate and jewels. When rebels from Kent reached it on 13 June 1381, what followed was, by the account of chroniclers writing soon afterward, the single most complete act of destruction anywhere in the revolt.

What could not be smashed with hammers or burned in the palace's own fires was carried out and thrown into the Thames, and a rebel caught pocketing a silver piece for himself was killed by his own companions on the spot.

The detail that has struck historians ever since is not the violence itself but its discipline. This was not an opportunistic robbery. Precious metal was pounded to fragments rather than pocketed, textiles and furnishings were put to the torch, and at least one rebel who tried to walk away with Lancastrian silver was killed by fellow rebels for breaking what appears to have been an understood rule. It was not universal: one account has a woman named Johanna Ferrour making off with a chest containing over a thousand pounds belonging to Gaunt and loading it onto a boat on the river, so the discipline had limits. But the overwhelming pattern, recorded independently by more than one chronicler, was destruction rather than theft. The message being sent was aimed squarely at Gaunt's power, not his money.

Absent by Chance: John of Gaunt and the Scottish Border

Gaunt was not in London because English relations with Scotland required his personal attention that spring. He had gone north to negotiate terms at Berwick upon Tweed, several hundred days' ride from the capital, working to avoid a full breakdown into open war on the border while royal attention and money were increasingly consumed elsewhere. He was still there, effectively unreachable, when the revolt broke out in the second week of June.

The distance that kept him safe also left him politically exposed. Word reached him at Berwick of threats against his life, and for a period he could not safely return south at all, taking refuge for a time in Scotland itself under the protection of a Scottish court that had every diplomatic reason to shelter him. Meanwhile his own tenants and officials bore the brunt of rebel anger in his absence: his castle at Hertford was attacked, and his estates and agents across East Anglia and elsewhere were targeted by rebels who could not reach the man himself. Being four hundred miles from London on 13 June 1381 very plausibly saved John of Gaunt's life. It did nothing to save his reputation, and it left him, for a time, arguing his loyalty from outside the kingdom he was supposed to help govern.

Reconciliation, Spain and the Twilight Years

Gaunt's relationship with his nephew the king did not collapse permanently after 1381, though it went through further strain later in the 1380s as Richard's own style of personal rule began to alarm the nobility. In 1386 Gaunt left England altogether to pursue his claim to the Castilian throne through his wife Constance, campaigning in Spain for several years with only partial success before agreeing, in 1387, to renounce his own claim in exchange for a cash settlement and the marriage of his daughter into the Castilian royal family.

He returned to England in November 1389 to find a kingdom in political turmoil, with Richard's authority challenged by a group of powerful nobles known to history as the Lords Appellant. Gaunt, restored to favour and once again the senior royal uncle, worked through the early 1390s as a genuine moderating influence between Richard and his opponents, using the same weight of landed wealth and royal blood that had made him a target in 1381 to steady a throne that badly needed steadying. Constance died in 1394; two years later he married Katherine Swynford, and in 1397 secured papal and royal legitimisation for their four Beaufort children, tidying up decades of an arrangement that had scandalised and fascinated the English court in roughly equal measure.

Death, Disinheritance and the Birth of the Lancastrian Dynasty

John of Gaunt died at Leicester Castle on 3 February 1399, aged fifty-eight, and was buried beside his first wife Blanche in the choir of Old St Paul's Cathedral in London. He did not live to see the final act of the drama his death set in motion. Richard II, rather than allowing Gaunt's vast Lancastrian inheritance to pass intact to his exiled son Henry Bolingbroke, confiscated the estate for the Crown, a decision that gave Bolingbroke every reason to return from exile that same year with an army rather than a petition.

By the autumn of 1399 Richard II had been deposed and Bolingbroke was crowned Henry IV, the first Lancastrian king, taking his dynastic name directly from the title his father had built through marriage nearly forty years earlier. Two more Lancastrian kings, Henry V and Henry VI, followed him, and further down the family tree the legitimised Beaufort line produced Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, carrying John of Gaunt's blood into the Tudor dynasty as well. The man whose grandest possession was reduced to ash and river silt in a single afternoon in 1381 ended up, by an odd historical symmetry, as the common ancestor of every English monarch who followed him.

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This article is part of the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 series. Explore all articles at https://historiesandcastles.com/blogs/historical-events/timeline-peasants-revolt-1381.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ King Richard II and the Peasants' Revolt: see how Gaunt's absence left his fourteen year old nephew facing the rebel leadership alone at Mile End and Smithfield.

→ Peasants' Revolt 1381: Full Timeline of Events: place the burning of the Savoy within the full seven week chronology of the rising.

→ Who Was Wat Tyler?: the Kentish leader whose followers carried out the destruction of Gaunt's London home.

→ The Causes of the Peasants' Revolt: the taxation and labour grievances that made Gaunt's government, and his wealth, a lightning rod.

→ The Statute of Labourers 1351: the labour law whose enforcement fed the resentment that boiled over against Gaunt's household.

→ The Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt: how the plague reshaped the labour market Gaunt's government was trying to legislate against.

→ 5 Facts About King Edward III: the father whose favour and whose marriages first set John of Gaunt on the road to Lancastrian wealth.

→ King Edward III and His Impact on England: the reign and the Hundred Years' War campaigns that shaped the world Gaunt grew up fighting in.

People Also Ask

Who was John of Gaunt?

John of Gaunt was the third surviving son of King Edward III, born in Ghent in 1340 and created Duke of Lancaster in 1362 through his marriage to Blanche of Lancaster. He became the wealthiest nobleman in England and the dominant political figure during the minority of his nephew, Richard II, before dying in 1399 as the father of the future Henry IV.

Why was John of Gaunt hated?

Gaunt was resented as the most visible figure of authority during Richard II's minority government, seen by many as the man responsible for the unpopular poll taxes and heavy-handed rule of the late 1370s. His enormous personal wealth, centred on the Savoy Palace, made him an obvious target for anger that the wider political system had actually generated.

What happened to the Savoy Palace in the Peasants' Revolt?

On 13 June 1381, rebels from Kent systematically destroyed the Savoy Palace, Gaunt's London residence and reportedly the richest private house in England. Valuables were smashed or burned rather than stolen, with chroniclers recording that a rebel caught keeping stolen silver for himself was killed by fellow rebels.

Where was John of Gaunt during the Peasants' Revolt?

Gaunt was at Berwick upon Tweed on the Scottish border, negotiating a truce with Scotland, when the revolt broke out in June 1381. His absence from London almost certainly saved his life, though it left him unable to protect his property or immediately answer the accusations made against him.

How is John of Gaunt related to Henry IV?

John of Gaunt was the father of Henry Bolingbroke, who deposed Richard II in 1399 and became King Henry IV, founding the Lancastrian royal dynasty. Gaunt's death that same year, and Richard's decision to confiscate the Lancastrian inheritance rather than let Bolingbroke succeed to it peacefully, directly triggered Bolingbroke's return from exile and the deposition that followed.

When did John of Gaunt die?

John of Gaunt died on 3 February 1399 at Leicester Castle, aged fifty-eight, and was buried beside his first wife Blanche of Lancaster in the choir of Old St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Goodman, Anthony (1992): John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth Century Europe, Longman. The standard modern scholarly biography, covering Gaunt's landholding, marriages and political role in detail.
• Dobson, R.B. (1970): The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, Macmillan. Collects translated extracts from contemporary chronicles describing the destruction of the Savoy Palace and the discipline shown by the rebels there.
• Saul, Nigel (1997): Richard II, Yale English Monarchs series, Yale University Press. Sets Gaunt's role during the royal minority and the 1381 revolt within the wider context of his nephew's reign.
• The National Archives, Kew: Duchy of Lancaster records (series DL), covering the administration of Gaunt's estates and the confiscation of the Lancastrian inheritance in 1399.
• The 1381 project: 1381.online, an academic digital humanities project on the participants and events of the revolt, including material specifically addressing Gaunt's absence and its consequences.

Note: the precise details of the Savoy Palace's destruction, including the fate of the rebel killed for keeping stolen silver, come from chronicle accounts written soon after the events rather than an independent eyewitness record, and some specific figures reported by contemporaries, such as exact quantities of goods destroyed, should be treated as period estimates rather than verified totals. The characterisation of Gaunt's unpopularity as substantially disproportionate to his direct responsibility for the poll tax reflects the current scholarly consensus rather than a claim made by contemporary sources, which were often hostile to him for other political reasons.

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