John of Gaunt III's rule was becoming unpopular due to high taxation and his affair with Alice Perrers, political opinion closely associated the Duke of Lancaster with the failing government of the 1370s. Furthermore, while King Edward and the Prince of Wales were popular heroes due to their successes on the battlefield, John of Gaunt had not won equivalent military renown that could have bolstered his reputation. Although he fought in the Battle of Nájera (1367), for example, his later military projects proved unsuccessful. When Edward III died in 1377 and John's ten-year-old nephew succeeded as Richard II of England, John's influence strengthened.
English and British royal mistress who had also been courted by Edward's brother and an Austrian prince, Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, Agnes Keyser, and Alice Keppel, who of all his mistresses had the most political power and sat at his deathbed in 1910. He fathered surprisingly few royal bastards considering their number and the fecundity he enjoyed with his wife Alexandra of Denmark. Edward VIII is the only member of the currently reigning House of Windsor to have kept a mistress. Among them were mostly married women like Freda Dudley Ward and Lady Thelma Furness. He first met Wallis Simpson in San Diego, California