The Third Plantagenet: George, Duke of Clarence, Richard III's Brother
Page 19
Despite their protestations of innocence, on Monday 19 May 1477, Stacy, Blake and Burdet were condemned for having committed high treason. Stacy and Burdet were taken to Tyburn on the following day, and there they were hanged, drawn and quartered.23 As we have seen, on the scaffold Burdet, in particular, reportedly protested against his condemnation – which was to have dire long-term consequences for the Duke of Clarence.
Thomas Blake was not executed. Instead, although he seems to have been condemned with the others, he was pardoned on 3 June, at the request of another Oxford graduate, James Goldwell, Bishop of Norwich.24 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bishop Goldwell was a devout priest and bishop.25 Interestingly, he also had links with the Duke and Duchess of Clarence. Having served in Rome as the king’s proctor from 1467 until 1471, it was he who had obtained for them the papal dispensation that permitted their marriage in 1469.
As for the executions of John Stacy and Thomas Burdet, their final declarations of innocence were somehow recorded, and found their way into the hands of the Duke of Clarence. While Edward IV was at Windsor Castle, George burst into a meeting of the royal council at the Palace of Westminster, accompanied by Dr William Goddard, the Father Provincial (head) of the Franciscan order in England. Dr Goddard had completed his doctorate at Oxford University, and probably knew Stacy and Blake. On the Duke’s instructions he now read to the royal council the alleged protestations of innocence of Stacy and Burdet. Dr Goddard was, perhaps, not the most diplomatic choice of a reader in this context, since the very same man had been selected by the Earl of Warwick in September 1470 to preach in favour of Henry VI’s Readeption at St Paul’s Cross.26 When Edward IV learned of what had been done he was furious.
The Crowland author’s account of these events contains further questionable statements, suggesting that either he was extraordinarily ill informed or that he wished to deliberately conceal something. First, he tells us that Stacy and Burdet were permitted to speak ‘briefly’ before they died. However, he then contradicts this with the statement that Burdet used ‘many words’. He also tells us that virtually all the lords temporal of the kingdom were present at the trial – thereby implying that most of the English nobility were well aware of the accusations that had been brought and what precisely had been the evidence in the case. However, the surviving commission of the king specifies a quite specific group of people to hear the case. Moreover, if almost all the lords temporal already knew what had been said, it is hard to understand why Edward IV should have become so angry when his brother had Burdet’s defence statement read to the royal council – for they would have already been familiar with the contents. One is also left wondering which medieval journalist or shorthand expert took down Burdet’s precise words on the scaffold. It seems likely that what was read to the council was a paraphrase – or a re-write – or a script prepared for Burdet in advance – or an invented version – of Burdet’s defence.
Clarence’s only direct connection with the case of Burdet, Stacy and Blake was through Thomas Burdet, a member of his household. However, Burdet’s verses of spring 1477 were aimed at ousting Edward IV and his children – presumably in favour of Clarence’s accession as the new king (hence, perhaps, the prophecy of ‘G’). No direct evidence survives of the reason the verses put forward for removing Edward IV and his Woodville heirs, and it is often assumed that the continental story of Edward IV’s own illegitimacy was the sole basis of Burdet’s case. However, it has been noted here for the first time that Burdet had a close connection with Eleanor Talbot’s family by her first marriage. It may therefore be that the case (or part of it) as put forward by Burdet in 1477 – and as subsequently airbrushed out of his narrative with great care by the Crowland author – was identical to the one reportedly presented by Bishop Stillington to the royal council six years later, in the summer of 1483, namely that Edward IV was a bigamist and that his children by Elizabeth Woodville were illegitimate.
So was the Duke of Clarence aware of Edward IV’s Talbot marriage in 1477? Were Burdet’s publications on this topic the source of Elizabeth Woodville’s sudden alarm, in that very same year, about her own marital status? Her anxiety was reported in writing only a few years later by the Italian diplomat and spy, Domenico Mancini:
The queen then [1477] remembered the insults to her family and the calumnies with which she was reproached, namely that according to established usage she was not the legitimate wife of the king. Thus she concluded that her offspring by the king would never come to the throne unless the duke of Clarence were removed.27
Mancini’s clear and explicit account of Elizabeth Woodville’s sudden misgivings about her status and her children’s future is specifically connected to the fate of the Duke of Clarence. Although no supernatural reason for Elizabeth Woodville’s fears about her children’s future is specified by Mancini, his account is not inconsistent with the surviving later reports of the prophecy of ‘G’. The queen’s fear of Clarence strongly suggests that by 1477 Clarence had finally somehow discovered the hitherto secret history of Edward IV’s marriage to Eleanor Talbot. How did he find this out? The king seems to have assumed initially that Robert Stillington was the source, and thus punished the bishop. However, the king may have been wrong. There were other potential sources, and the most likely one now appears to be George’s own servant – Thomas Burdet.
One possible explanation of what took place – and of course, since none of Burdet’s publications survive this can only be speculation – is that Thomas Burdet then produced, printed, and distributed in London verses which contained specific references to the invalidity of Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, allegations of bastardy against the couple’s children, and prophecies (aimed originally at promoting the cause of the Duke of Clarence) which stated that the next true king of England would bear a name beginning with the letter ‘G’. Sadly, for the Duke of Clarence, the chief result of these publications – and of the subsequent trial and execution of Burdet and his associates – was that ‘loe sudaynly [Edward IV] fell into a fact most horrible, commanding rashly and upon the suddane his brother George of Clarence to be apprehendyd’.28
NOTES
1. Crowland, p.145.
2. The dowager Lady Beauchamp’s will is dated 29 January 1487. In it she conspicuously asked to be buried beside her husband. G. E. Cockayne, The Complete Peerage vol. 2 (London, 1889), pp.46–7.
3. See also A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 vol. 1 (Oxford, 1957), p.197.
4. H. Grimstone and T. Leach, eds, Reports of Sir George Croke, Knight, of … Select Cases (Dublin, 1793), p.121.
5. Madden, ‘Political Poems of the Reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV’, Archaeologia, vol. 29 (1842), pp.318–47.
6. Croke … Select Cases, p.122.
7. CPR 1476–1485, p.43.
8. A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register vol. 2, p.776. On Friday 13 June 1477, just over three weeks after her husband’s execution, Mary or Marion Stacy was granted all his goods and debts; CPR 1476–1485, p.43.
9. ‘Potius excellentior’, Catalogus Vetus of Merton College, quoted in Emden, A Biographical Register vol. 1, p.197.
10. This may suggest a connection of some kind with the wife of Richard, 2nd Lord Beauchamp.
11. ODNB, ‘Thomas Burdet’.
12. Eleanor, pp.110–11.
13. On 19 January 1477/8, Stillington was appointed to a commission of the peace for Southampton (CPR 1476–1485, p.572). However, by Friday 6 March he had been imprisoned in the Tower of London. See: J. Gairdner, History of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third (Cambridge, 1898), p.91, n.1, citing the letter of that date from Elizabeth Stonor. The precise date on which Stillington entered the Tower is not recorded, but Gairdner estimates that it was between 13 and 20 February.
14. On Tuesday 14 April 1478, Stillington was appointed to a commission of the peace for Berkshire, which implies that he was free again (CPR 1476–1485, p.554).
1
5. Commynes, p.397.
16. CPR 1476–1485, p.102.
17. W. Shakespeare, Richard III, (c. 1592), act 1, scene 1.
18. J. Haslewood, ed., Mirror for Magistrates vol. 2 (part 3) (London, 1815), pp.226–43, ‘George Plantagenet’, attributed to William Baldwin, fl. 1547, present author’s emphasis.
19. HCSP, p.138.
20. CPR 1476–1485, p.50.
21. Under the Marquess of Dorset, it comprised four earls, including Elizabeth Woodville’s brother, Earl Rivers. It also included eighteen knights, including Sir Henry Grey. Sir John Howard was also a member, as were Sir Thomas Stanley, and the earls of Arundel and of Essex.
22. The present writer’s translation of Croke … Select Cases, pp.121–2.
23. Burdet’s property was inherited by his son, Nicholas, a minor who was placed under the guardianship of Sir Simon Mountfort (CPR 1476–1485, p.102). Subsequently, Sir John Grevyle was appointed to head commissions to examine what Burdet had held in the counties of Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire (CPR 1476–1485, p.50).
24. Goldwell held the see of Norwich 1472–99. For Blake’s pardon, see CPR 1476–1485, p.43. Even after receiving his royal pardon, Thomas Blake evidently experienced some problems in re-establishing himself, as his surviving subsequent petition to Edward IV shows (TNA C81/1512/52).
25. ODNB, ‘James Goldwell’. Despite holding the Norwich see, Bishop Goldwell is unlikely to have known Eleanor Talbot, who died four years before he received that appointment. Of course, he must have known Eleanor’s sister and brother-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk.
26. There were two brothers, both named William Goddard, and both Franciscans, but despite arguments over who did what, it seems fairly certain that the Goddard who preached in favour of Henry VI and the one who defended Burdet and Stacy was the same man.
27. Mancini, pp.62–3.
28. Ellis, Polydore Vergil’s English History, p.167.
THE ACT OF ATTAINDER
The Crowland chronicler agrees with Vergil’s later account, for he too reports that ‘when [the king] heard the news he was greatly displeased’.1 The Crowland writer implies that the immediate cause of the king’s displeasure was George’s reading of Burdet’s statement to the council. However, he hints at other causes, stating that Edward IV also ‘recalled information laid against his brother which he had long kept in his breast’.2 This information was probably a message from Louis XI:
Through the mouth of an envoy the King of France sent word that, according to reliable information, one of the reasons Edward’s treacherous brother George of Clarence, aided by his sister Margaret, had hoped to secure the hand of Marie of Burgundy was in order to make himself King of England … According to the interpolator of Jean de Roye’s Parisian chronicle, usually reliable and here quite circumstancial, Edward IV, on receiving Louis’ report, immediately dispatched an envoy to France to ask what, in the king’s opinion, he should do about Clarence. Louis asked one question: ‘Do you know for certain that my brother the King of England has the Duke of Clarence in his power?’ ‘Sire, yes’, was the reply. The king then quoted a line of Lucan: Tolle moras, sepe nocuit differe paratas. (Avoid delay – postponement of a planned course of action often causes harm.) The ambassador asked for an explanation, ‘but he was unable to get anything more out of the king’.3
As a result, ‘the duke was summoned to appear, on a fixed day, at the royal palace of Westminster in the presence of the mayor and aldermen of the city of London’.4 These officials may have been involved because Burdet’s verses had been published in Holborn as well as Westminster. Hicks suggests that the hearing was scheduled for 10 June or very soon after.5 Once the group was assembled, and George stood before them:
the king, from his own lips, began to treat the duke’s action already touched upon [i.e. causing Burdet’s statement to be read to the council], amongst other things [not specified], as a most serious matter, as if it were in contempt of the law of the land and a great threat to the judges and jurors of the kingdom. What more is there to say? The duke was placed in custody and was not found at liberty from that day until his death.6
Of course, a great deal more could have been said but unfortunately this is all we have. In (probably) mid-June 1477 George was placed under arrest in the Tower of London, where he remained for about six months. Meanwhile, Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville were preoccupied with the plans for the splendid wedding of their 4-year-old second son, Richard, to Eleanor Talbot’s niece, Anne Mowbray, heiress of the late Duke of Norfolk. The marriage was to take place at the Palace of Westminster in January 1477/8. At about the same time, however, a Parliament was to assemble, to try the Duke of Clarence.
In fact, Parliament was opened on 16 January, two days after the royal wedding, and Edward IV himself presented the case against his brother. The text of the Act of Attainder which was finally passed against George is quoted in full below, each section of the medieval English text preceded by a brief modern English summary. Essentially, the case put by Edward IV begins by recalling how he had confronted various earlier attempts to overthrow him. It then goes on to say that there was now a new and particularly dangerous and malicious plot against not only the king, but also the queen and all their children. This plot was led by the Duke of Clarence. Despite all the kindness Edward IV had shown George, the latter was now protesting that his servant Thomas Burdet had wrongly been put to death. The Duke’s underlying aim was to make himself king. Clarence was protesting that the king had deprived him of his livelihood. He had also preserved a document from the time of the Readeption that declared that if Henry VI and Edward of Westminster died without heirs [as, of course, they both subsequently had died], Clarence should become king. Moreover, Clarence had been plotting with the Abbot of Tewkesbury and others to send his son and heir, the Earl of Warwick, out of the kingdom, to Ireland or Flanders.7 Because of all his plotting the king was now forced, despite their close relationship, to seek the conviction of the duke for treason:
Act of Attainder against George, Duke of Clarence.8