There is only a little more I can tell you about Chaucer’s life before we begin the stories. We got as far as 1398, when the King gave Chaucer letters of protection from his creditors.
About this time another grant of wine was bestowed on him, equal to about £4 a year, or £40 of our money. In the next year, King Richard, who had not gained the love of his subjects, nor tried to be a good King, was deposed—that is, the people were so angry with him that they said, “You shall not be our King any more;” and they shut him up in a tower, and made his cousin, Henry, King of England. Now this Henry was the son of John of Gaunt, by his first wife, Blanche, and had been very badly treated by his cousin, the King. He was a much better man than Richard, and the people loved him. John of Gaunt did not live to see his son King, for he died while Henry was abroad; and it must have been a real grief to Chaucer, then an old man of sixty,[23] when this long and faithful friend was taken from him.
Still it is pleasant to find that Henry of Lancaster shared his father’s friendship for Chaucer. I dare say he had been rocked on Chaucer’s knee when a little child, and had played with Chaucer’s children. He came back from France, after John of Gaunt’s death, and the people made him King, and sent King Richard to the castle of Pomfret (where I am sorry to say he was afterwards murdered).
The new King had not been on the throne four days before he helped Chaucer. John of Gaunt himself could not have done it quicker. He granted him an annuity of £26 13s. 4d. a year, in addition to the other £20 granted by Richard.
The royal bounty was only just in time, for poor old Chaucer did not long survive his old friend, the Duke of Lancaster. He died about a year after him, when Henry had been King thirteen months.
John of Gaunt was buried in St. Paul’s, by the side of his first and best-loved wife, Blanche; Geoffrey Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey.
So ended the first, and almost the greatest, English writer, of whom no one has spoken an ill word, and who himself spoke no ill words.
Poet, soldier, statesman, and scholar, ‘truly his better ne his pere, in school of my rules could I never find.... In goodness of gentle, manly speech he passeth all other makers.’[24]
XII.
And now for Chaucer’s ‘speech.’ How shall I show you its ‘goodness,’ since it is so difficult to read this old English? Wait a bit. You will soon understand it all, if you take pains at the first beginning. Do not be afraid of the funny spelling, for you must remember that it is not so much that Chaucer spells differently from us, as that we have begun to spell differently from Chaucer. He would think our English quite as funny, and not half so pretty as his own; for the old English, when spoken, sounded very pretty and stately, and not so much like a ‘gabble’ as ours.