Chaucer's Triumph

Chaucer is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest of English poets, as well as the father of our language. Yet there has always lurked a dark secret in his life, a scandal or crime which, from evidence of two different legal documents of his time, has intrigued and mystified scholars for generations, dividing them into warring factions. In the five days before Prince John of Gaunt's London funeral in March 1399, the body of the great Plantagenet prince is being brought from Leicester Castle for burial in St Paul's. Setting out with it are his family, royal mourners, Katherine Swinford, recently married to him and now his widow, Geoffrey Chaucer, aged fifty-nine, and Adam Scriven, the poet's resentful scrivener or copyist. Not far away, in King's Langley, King Richard II, Gaunt's nephew, who has survived as king only under his protection, plans and manoeuvres to seize Gaunt's huge Lancastrian inheritance and even his body. Scriven has become convinced his master committed the legally recorded rape or abduction of Cecilia Champaigne twenty years earlier, and wants to use this final occasion to discover and test once and for all the truth about Chaucer's crime. But more is at stake than the poet's reputation: the future of England and Gaunt's royal line. Garry O'Connor has written a riveting historical novel, which brings out the passions of that paradoxically refined and savage age - it rekindles our fascination not only with the author of the bawdy and most erotic of the Canterbury Tales as well as of the rarefied love allegories of mediaeval chivalry, but also with Prince John of Gaunt, the historic sisters Philippa Chaucer and Katherine Swinford, and Scriven, the ever complaining antagonist. Authentic in background and based on close research, "Chaucer's Triumph", in its investigation of married love and the practice of adultery, is highly relevant to the modern world.