The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (25 page)

Gloucester, according to Mancini, by this time had cast off his mourning and was swanning about London clad in purple, surrounded by 1,000 men. On Sunday 22 June, he treated the Londoners to sermons claiming that Edward IV had been conceived in adultery and looked nothing like his alleged father, unlike Gloucester, the spitting image of the man. This line of argument, which is also mentioned by Thomas More, does not seem to have gone far. Either Gloucester belatedly remembered his filial duty to the old Duchess of York, who was very much alive, or the Londoners found it impossible to believe that the proud old lady had made a cuckold of her husband in her youth. It was the other thread of Gloucester’s argument – that Edward IV’s children were illegitimate – that ultimately carried the day.
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As embodied in the 1484 Act of Parliament confirming Richard III’s title as king (known as Titulus Regius), there were four grounds for declaring Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth invalid and his children thus illegitimate: that the marriage was made without the knowledge or assent of the lords of the land; that it was procured by sorcery and witchcraft on the part of Elizabeth Woodville and her mother; that it was made privately and secretly; and that before Edward had married Elizabeth, he had been married to Eleanor Butler, a daughter of the deceased Earl of Shrewsbury.
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The first three grounds need not concern us much. It was certainly not necessarily to the validity of his marriage that Edward gain the consent of his lords, although doing so would have been politic. Secrecy did not in itself render a marriage invalid at the time, although as R.H. Helmholz points out, it could prevent a couple from arguing that a marriage was conducted in good faith and therefore could prevent the children of that match from being deemed legitimate.
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As for witchcraft, as noted in Chapter 5, Parliament offered no proof of its allegations.

It is the fourth allegation – the alleged marriage to Eleanor Butler – that has excited the most debate. It is noteworthy that other than the lady’s name and that of her father, Titulus Regius gives no details about the supposed marriage – a fact that is in itself suspicious, since surely on a matter as important as the entitlement to the crown, a draftsman would want to give as much credence to the claim as possible by including the pertinent facts.

Eleanor Butler, née Talbot, whose birth John Ashdown-Hill estimates as taking place around February 1436,
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was married to Thomas Butler around 1449 to 1450 and widowed in 1459, having not borne any surviving children. Her uncle was the Earl of Warwick, and her sister, Elizabeth, was married to John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. Through these connections, and others, she certainly could have come into contact with the new Yorkist king, and the fact that she was a few years his senior would probably not have troubled him, as the case of Elizabeth Woodville shows. It is not implausible that Edward IV might have married her secretly – but it is entirely unproven, despite attempts by Richard III’s modern-day defenders to build a case for the marriage based on the shakiest of evidence.

As noted in Chapter 9, only one source, Philip de Commynes, indicates that Robert Stillington, later Bishop of Bath and Wales, actually joined Edward and Eleanor in wedlock. (Admirers of Richard III have been less eager to support Commynes’s claim in the preceding paragraph that Richard ‘barbarously murdered his two nephews’.)
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Other sources, however, suggest that rather than providing evidence, Stillington helped Gloucester frame his allegations. Eustace Chapuys, imperial ambassador and loyal partisan of Catherine of Aragon in Henry VIII’s reign, wrote on 3 November 1534 that ‘Richard III declared by definitive sentence of the Bishop of Bath that the daughters of king Edward […] were bastards’. The previous year, on 16 December, he stated that Elizabeth of York ‘was declared by sentence of the Bishop of Bath a bastard’.
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More importantly, at Henry VII’s first parliament in 1485, Stillington was spoken of as the man believed to have drawn up Titulus Regius; the peers asked whether he should be made to answer for it before Parliament. The king, having already pardoned Stillington, declined.
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Stillington may indeed be the anonymous person referred to by Crowland, who writes that it was put about that the petition urging Gloucester to take the throne originated in the north, ‘although there was no-one who did not know the identity of the author (who was in London all the time) of such sedition and infamy’.
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If Stillington was more than a draftsman, Henry VII’s later treatment of him does not suggest this, for like Edward IV before him, as we have seen, he does not seem to have regarded Stillington as a person who had to be silenced. After having received his initial pardon, he was imprisoned in 1487, probably due to his involvement in the rebellions of that period, but seems to have been at his own episcopal manors in 1489 and 1491, albeit perhaps under house arrest.
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The circumstantial evidence given in support of the marriage is equally unconvincing. Ashdown-Hill notes that the source of certain lands in Wiltshire owned by Eleanor cannot be traced; he suggests that these were a gift from the king, either to support her or to keep her quiet, but is unable to provide evidence of the lands’ royal origins.
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Even if the lands were royal gifts, however, this need not mean that a marriage took place; the lands could equally be a parting gift from a lover. Another possibility is that they were a gift from Edward’s predecessor, Henry VI, to Eleanor and her late husband. As further evidence, Ashdown-Hill offers the fact that Eleanor chose to deed certain land to her sister during her lifetime rather than to leave it to her in her will. She did this, he argues, because Eleanor considered herself to be married to the king and as a married woman could not bequeath real property by will without her husband’s permission.
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This argument, however, has a fatal flaw: a married woman also could not deed property without the permission of her husband. This was no arcane point of medieval law; it was a fact of everyday life of which anyone in the landowning classes would have been acutely aware. If Eleanor believed that she had a valid marriage to Edward IV that prevented her from making a will, she would have been equally unable to make a valid deed without her ‘husband’ joining in.

If Eleanor had any relationship with Edward before his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, it could have as easily been as a mistress as a wife, which may have been what led to her name being linked to Edward’s nineteen years after Edward had married Elizabeth Woodville. Eleanor’s piety, well documented by Ashdown-Hill, need not have stopped her from falling for the handsome king’s charms. It is true, as Ashdown-Hill states, that no contemporary source names Eleanor as his mistress,
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but Eleanor’s high social status may have led the pair to be discreet about their liaison. It is also noteworthy that the one person best placed to give evidence about Edward IV’s sex life – his friend William, Lord Hastings, described by Mancini as ‘the accomplice and partner of his privy pleasures’
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– had been murdered just days before Gloucester began to circulate the story of the precontract. Did Gloucester know that Hastings was in a position to contradict him?

To clinch their argument that Eleanor Butler was indeed Edward IV’s wife, Richard III’s defenders have pointed to Elizabeth Woodville’s failure to challenge Gloucester’s claims, while excusing Eleanor Butler’s own quite understandable failure to defy Edward IV by challenging the validity of the Woodville marriage. Annette Carson, for instance, writes in mitigation of Eleanor, ‘One does not lightly attempt to enforce one’s rights against a resistant king. Indeed, such an idea became fraught with difficulty, if not danger, once […] the Woodville family entered the fray’. Aside from the gratuitous slur against the Woodvilles, this is a reasonable enough argument for Eleanor’s failure to raise the issue, but all such considerations vanish when Carson contemplates Elizabeth Woodville’s similar silence. Likewise, while Ashdown-Hill suggests that Eleanor ‘may well have been putting her life in jeopardy’ by taking her case to an ecclesiastical court, he sees no such obstacles in Elizabeth Woodville’s case.
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Such highly selective reasoning disingenuously ignores the position in which Elizabeth found herself. Gloucester had already murdered Hastings in cold blood, which could have hardly been reassuring. Even if Elizabeth herself was safe in sanctuary, three of her sons and one of her brothers were completely within Gloucester’s power – and on 23 June, as we shall see, the situation would become even more grim. These circumstances were not conducive to taking a stand, either during the protectorate or thereafter. Nor was any canon lawyer inside England likely to dare to take such a claim on Elizabeth’s behalf to the ecclesiastical courts, where, as Crowland points out, the matter of the validity of the king’s marriage should have been decided in the first place.
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Part of the difficulty in proving (or disproving) the alleged precontract is that it took very little to enter into a valid marriage in medieval England.
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A couple who exchanged vows of marriage in the present tense were (provided that they were legally able to consent) validly married, regardless of whether any witnesses were present. A couple who exchanged vows of marriage in the future tense were married once they consummated their relationship. Such informal marriages were frowned upon, but, in the eyes of the church they were as binding as a marriage preceded by banns and performed by a priest in front of a crowd of witnesses. Nonetheless, clandestine marriages presented obvious problems of proof when one spouse wanted to wriggle free; here, of course, the putative spouses were dead.

While the possibility that Edward IV did indeed marry Eleanor Butler cannot be ruled out entirely, in the end we are left with nothing to go on but Gloucester’s self-serving, and conveniently vague, allegations. Certainly contemporaries were not universally convinced, as the later attempts to restore Edward V to the throne indicate.

On 24 or 25 June, Buckingham addressed a group of lords on the subject of the supposed illegitimacy of Edward IV’s children and on the myriad advantages of having Gloucester as king instead. Unnerved by the prospect of ‘armed men in frightening and unheard-of numbers’ coming from the north and from Wales, and thoroughly rattled by the fate of Lord Hastings, the lords agreed. On 26 June, a bill setting out Gloucester’s title to the throne was presented to Gloucester, who duly accepted and, as Crowland put it, ‘thrust himself in the marble chair’ at Westminster as King Richard III.
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Gloucester had taken care of one last bit of business before becoming king: ordering the execution of Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan. Rivers made his will at Sheriff Hutton on 23 June, indicating that the execution order had been sent from London at least a couple of days before that.

Rivers’s will is a conventional one, in which Anthony is concerned with paying his debts, righting any wrongs he might have done, such as to Lady Willoughby, providing for the poor, and attending to the welfare of his soul. Perhaps anticipating that he would be brought south and given the trial in front of his peers that was his right as an earl, he asked that if he died beyond the River Trent, he be buried before Our Lady of Pewe at Westminster. During his stay up north, he had borrowed a sum of money from his fellow prisoner, Thomas Vaughen – an indication, perhaps that he and Vaughan had been imprisoned at the same castle. We learn the name of his barber, Tybold, who received 5 marks. Anthony appointed ten executors, one of which was his son-in-law, Robert Poyntz, and asked – fruitlessly, it appears – that Gloucester allow his executors to carry out the terms of his last testament.

After the seven witnesses signed the will, Rivers learned that he was to die at Pontefract. Dutifully, he changed his burial plans: ‘My will is now to be buried before an image of our blessed Lady Mary, with my Lord Richard [Grey], in Pontefract’. Grey himself had been staying at Gloucester’s stronghold of Middleton, along with his servants and horses, but was transported to Pontefract, where he and his uncle met for the last time on earth.
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Thomas Vaughan, who had been serving the House of York when Gloucester was still a youngster, was also there at Pontefract to pay the price of his devoted service to his young charge, Edward V.

Crowland is adamant that Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan were beheaded ‘without any form of trial’ under the supervision of Sir Richard Ratcliffe, who was leading Gloucester’s army south to London. John Rous, on the other hand, claims that Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was their chief judge.
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No records of their indictments or trial, if there were any, have survived, nor is there any indication of who besides Northumberland sat in judgement of the trio. One is inclined to suspect that any process must have been summary even by contemporary standards; certainly nothing indicates that a jury of peers was summoned to try Rivers, as was his right under Magna Carta.