Cecily Neville: Mother of Kings

by Amy Licence

  The education of aristocratic girls in the fifteenth century was designed to prepare them for their future lives as the wives of great magnates. Thus, as outlined by contemporary writers such as Christine de Pisan, the Ménagier de Paris and many anonymous poets, girls should be decorous, polite, submissive and pious. In order to prepare girls for the running of their own households, they were taught practical matters such the use of medicinal herbs, spinning and sewing, as well as courtesy and deportment, music, dancing, how to handle servants and reading from the Bible and other religious texts. The medieval poem ‘What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter’ was composed around 1430 and advocates the usual lessons about attending church, giving to the poor, not gossiping too much and being respectful to elders. It contains advice about manners and decorum, such as ‘laugh thou not too loud nor yawn thy mouth too wide’ alongside warnings about the behaviour of men: ‘By him do not stand but let him his way depart, Lest he by his villainy should tempt thy heart.’ Girls were taught to be modest and hard-working, to be a good wife, mistress of the house and neighbour, ‘and to do to them as thou wouldst be done to’. The poem survives in four manuscript versions but only one of them contains an extra verse that would prove especially pertinent to Cecily’s life:

  And if it thus thee betide

  That friends fail thee on every side

  And God from thee thy child take

  Thy wreak [revenge] on God thou must not take

  For thyself it will undo

  And all virtues that thee belongs to

  Many a one for her own folly

  Spills [ruins] themselves unthriftily21

  But in the 1420s, these misfortunes lay far ahead. Cecily’s future as the daughter of the house of Neville would have appeared as a glittering prospect, as the wife of a great magnate and mother of many powerful children. Before she was very old, she could see the destiny that was mapped out for her unfolding through the lives of her siblings.

  During Cecily’s early years, some significant births, deaths and marriages took place. In 1420, her eldest brother, Richard, married the fourteen-year-old Alice Montacute or Montagu, heiress of the Earl of Salisbury. They are recorded in Gregory’s Chronicle as appearing as a couple at the coronation of Henry V’s queen, Catherine of Valois, in February 1421. Together they would have witnessed the crowning, followed by the three-course banquet in the Great Hall, where Alice was listed last in precedence out of the ladies, simply as ‘the wyffe of Rycharde Nevyle, doughter to the erle of Salusbury’. The feast included such delicacies as brawn with mustard, great crabs, roasted porpoise, powdered whelks, motley or coloured cream and marzipan subtleties, or carvings, in the shape of a pelican, a panther and St George leading a tiger.22

  Richard and Anne’s first surviving child was born two years later and named Joan, after his mother, but their second daughter, arriving in 1424, was named Cecily after her young aunt. Their firstborn son, also named Richard, would inherit his future wife’s title and become known to history as Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’. Another important baby arrived at this time, when Cecily was six years old, whose future was to be entwined with hers and those of her children. Soon after her coronation Queen Catherine fell pregnant, and on 6 December 1421 she gave birth to a son at Windsor Castle. Nine months later, when the king died of dysentery, the little boy became Henry VI.

  Cousin Joan also made a very impressive match. Eleven years older than Cecily, Joan was probably named after her aunt, and was the child of John Beaufort and Margaret Holland, a half-niece of Henry IV. The King of Scotland, James I, reputedly fell in love with her while a prisoner in England. According to legend, he glimpsed her from a window as she was walking in the garden and was inspired to write the poem The Kingis Quair in her honour. In the absence of any surviving verifiable contemporary descriptions or portraits of Cecily, James’s description of her cousin might shed some light on both girls’ reputations for beauty. This princess of Cupid had ‘goldin haire’ and white throat but her attraction was concentrated in her air of ‘bountee, richesse and womanly facture … wisedome, largesse, estate and connyng’. ‘Hir faire fresche face, as quhite[white] as any ony snawe [snow] … in word, in dede, in schap, in contenance, that nature might no more hir childe avance … I not wher she be womman or goddesse.’23 In 1424, James was released and the pair were married at Southwark Cathedral, then Southwark Priory, followed by feasting at Winchester Palace. It was a prestigious match for the bride. She went on to bear James eight children, and ruled Scotland as regent after his death. No doubt the romance of their unusual meeting filtered through to the Raby household; perhaps Cecily’s mother told her stories about the beautiful, golden-haired lady who had married a king. It would have been the sort of tale to capture the imagination of a nine-year-old girl, hungry for her own life to begin. Cecily would not have long to wait.

  3

  Duke of York

  1411–1429

  Lo! On that mound in days of feudal pride

  Thy tow’ring castle frowned above the tide

  Flung wide her gates, where troops of vassals met

  With awe the brow of high Plantagenet1

  Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, was thirteen in 1424. With his family, title and lands, he was an important English magnate in the making and a significant match for Ralph Neville’s daughter. Like the ruling house of Lancaster, he could trace his descent directly from Edward III. Edward, though, had sired a large family, and it was the order of his children’s births that complicated the nature of later royal inheritance. He had five surviving sons, all of whom fathered children who went on to compete for the English throne over the course of the next century, sowing the seeds for the Wars of the Roses.

  Richard of York was Edward’s descendant twice over, from both his second and his fourth son. He was the great-great-grandson of Lionel of Antwerp, and the grandson of Edmund of Langley. Edward died in 1377. His eldest son, the Black Prince, had died the year before, but he had fathered a son of his own, named Richard. This Richard now became Richard II. He fathered no children of his own, so named the offspring of his next brother as his heirs. This was the Mortimer family, the line from which Richard of York’s mother came.

  However, everything changed in 1399. Richard II had become increasingly despotic. After several years of conflict, he was deposed by the children of Edward III’s third son, which began a new line of Lancastrian kings under Henry IV. His Mortimer heirs were incarcerated and the male line died out. However, there was a Mortimer sister, Anne, who married the Earl of Cambridge and died while giving birth to Richard Plantagenet in 1411. Four years later, Cambridge decided to fight to restore his wife’s claim to the throne but was arrested and convicted of treason in what became known as the Southampton Plot. Sentenced along with him was his future wife’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Grey. Rymer’s Foedera records that, on 5 August, the commission was given to Thomas, Duke of Clarence, to carry out the execution.2 It also records the confession made by Richard’s father shortly before his death:

  My most dreadful and sovereign liege Lord, like to your Highness, touching the purpose cast against your high estate, having the Earl of March by his own assent and by the assent of myself (whereof I most me repent of all worldly things) … to have had the foresaid Earl into the land of Wales without your licence, taking upon him the sovereignty of this land … for the which point I put me wholly in your grace … Beseeching to you, my liege Lord, for his love that suffered passion on the Good Friday, so have thee compassion on me your liege man.

  He pleaded for mercy, explaining that ‘other folk egged (him) thereunto’, by which he had ‘highly offended’ the king, pleading ‘for the Love of our Lady and of the blissful Holy Ghost’.3

  His pleading did not save him, and the future of his four-year-old son, Richard, looked uncertain. However, the wheel of fortune swiftly restored the young boy to favour. For this, he had to thank his uncle, Edward of York, who was among those knights who sailed to France wit
h Henry V in 1415. By being one of the few English men of noble blood to die on that day, he redeemed his nephew in the eyes of the Crown and secured his own reputation. Edward of York’s death at the Battle of Agincourt went a long way to offset the execution of his brother for treason. An entry in the Calendar of the Fine Rolls for December that year records that the four-year-old boy was not to be penalised for his father’s crime. Listed as ‘Richard, son of Richard late Earl of Cambridge, his kinsman and heir’,4 he was allowed to inherit his uncle’s dukedom of York and potentially to receive the title of Earl of March, with its extensive inheritance, so long as his maternal uncle, Edmund, did not produce children of his own. The Calendar of Fine Rolls for April 1416 lists the expenses in black cloth for Edward of York’s funeral, held at St Paul’s Cathedral. By the king’s commandment, it was draped ‘within and outside’, made into banners, curtains and a standard. Henry and ‘his brethren and other Lords’ made offerings and kept a vigil. Medieval protocol made it unlikely that the young Richard would have attended, even if he was aware of the significance of the day.5

  On 10 October 1417, Henry V entrusted the young Richard to Sir Robert Waterton. In the meantime, his possessions were carved up between loyal Lancastrians, until such time as the boy came of age. His new guardian was granted the boy’s ‘manor and lordship of Sowreby’ in the Fine Rolls, until he was ‘of full age’ or ‘so from heir to heir until one of them shall have attained lawful age’.6 Richard’s Essex manors at estates at Reylegh (Rayleigh), Racheford (Rochford), Tunderle (Thundersley), Estwode (Eastwood), Lovedene (Lovedown, near Hockley)7 and others nearby and across the border into Suffolk were granted to Joan de Bohun, Countess of Essex and Hertford and Henry V’s grandmother, ‘by reason of the minority of Richard, son of Richard late Earl of Cambridge’.8 His estates in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Herefordshire were equally distributed until his minority should come to an end.9 This was in line with standard practice.

  Richard’s new custodian, Robert Waterton, had a history of custodianship. He had been made constable of Pontefract Castle from 1399 and had responsibility for King Richard II after his deposition that year and during the period when he is reputed to have died, early in 1400. Today it is still not clear exactly what happened to the king, or how he met his end, but Sir Robert was well placed to know the truth: in 1404, he denied charges raised in Parliament that Richard might have escaped or was still alive. In 1405, he was imprisoned by the Duke of Northumberland in a failed attempt to discover the truth. Later, Waterton was the gaoler of James I, King of Scots, before his marriage to Cecily’s cousin Joan. He was also given responsibility for an important prisoner from the Agincourt battlefield, the Duc d’Orléans, who was incarcerated at Pontefract – although he was treated according to his rank and allowed out in order to visit the Waterton family home at Methley.

  Richard’s new guardian was a man in his fifties or sixties; wide-ranging estimates place his birthdate somewhere between 1350 and 1365 and, by the time he took on his charge, he already had a long and distinguished career serving two Lancastrian kings. He had been esquire to the body of Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, with whom he had gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Lands and, according to chronicler Adam of Usk, had been the first man to greet Bolingbroke on the quayside when he returned from exile in 1399.10 The new king appointed him as his Master of the Horse, sent him on embassies to France, Germany and Denmark and relied upon his support to crush the threat of rebellion by the Percy family. He was also Chief Steward, Sheriff of Lincolnshire and an executor of Henry VI’s will.

  The Waterton family came from Lincolnshire, probably from the medieval village of that name situated on the River Trent. During the fourteenth century, a John de Waterton married into the de Methley family and moved into the area. However, the seat at Methley Hall, between Pontefract and Leeds, was not conferred upon the family until 1410, when it was granted to Robert’s brother John by the master of the hospital of Pontefract. It was an impressive, solid, castellated building, mostly ranging over three storeys, but rising to four in the turrets that flanked its entrance. One eighteenth-century watercolour depicts a great hall with huge carved wooden minstrels’ gallery and staircase, embossed ceiling and floor-to-ceiling oriel window. The house was featured in a 1907 edition of Country Life, and a few surviving photographs give a sense of its grandeur but, after opencast mining was begun in the 1940s, it quickly became unstable and was demolished in 1964. Methley Hall was Sir Robert’s chief residence, which he rebuilt considerably and extended with grants from the king; it was also the location of his death and his body now lies in the Waterton Chapel in nearby St Oswald’s church. Methley Hall and the Manor of Woodhall at Methley, which was actually in Mickletown, are the most likely locations where the young Richard Plantagenet lived from the ages of four to twelve.

  As a child, Richard would have lived with Waterton’s family, as part of their household. At some point before 1408, Sir Robert had lost his first wife and married again, to a Cicely Fleming, heir to the nearby estate of Woodhall at Stanley. She bore him a son, Robert, and a daughter, Joan. The date suggests these two children would have been of a similar age to Richard, who then joined the young Robert both in the schoolroom for his formal education and out in the surrounding countryside, learning to ride, fight and joust. Joan was married on 15 August 141711 at St Oswald’s church, Methley, so the young Richard would have been a guest at her wedding to Lionel de Welles, 6th Baron Welles. Lionel later became stepfather to Lady Margaret Beaufort.

  Cicely Waterton would have been the closest maternal figure that the growing boy would have known in his early years at Methley, and he would have joined the household in mourning her death, which occurred sometime before he reached the age of eleven. She was laid to rest in an alabaster tomb in St Oswald’s church, where her effigy reclines on a pillow, dressed in an elaborately decorated ‘hennin’, or headdress, with the long, draping sleeves fashionable at the time and her hips encircled with a narrow girdle. In 1422, Sir Robert married again. His new wife was Margaret Clarell, who had been widowed the previous year and had two sons and a daughter of her own. It is likely that William, John and Eleanor came to live at Methley with their mother, or were at least visitors there. Given that the eldest boy, William, lived until 1471, and that Margaret would go on to bear nine more children after Sir Robert’s death, these three were probably still quite young at the time of the Waterton marriage. Robert also had at least one illegitimate child, Thomas, to whom the Manor of Woodhall passed on his death; he may also have been raised as part of the household. Richard would have shared a roof with them until the end of 1423, when national events meant the current terms of his wardship were reassessed.

  Soon Henry V was at war again. In the summer of 1421 he had returned to France, capturing the city of Meaux after a five-month siege, although dysentery had decimated the English troops. Ultimately, though, it would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory, as Henry himself was unaware that he too had contracted the disease. Five months later, while at the Château de Vincennes, near Paris, he was suddenly taken ill and died between two and three in the morning of 31 August. He had reigned for less than ten years and was only thirty-five; his heir, an infant son, was not yet a year old. This unexpected loss was lamented by the poet John Lydgate, who called him the ‘lode star of chivalry’, with the chroniclers John Strecche, Chatelain and Monstrelet following suit. Hardyng claimed later that Henry’s reputation was so powerful that, even while he was away in France, his England was a safe and peaceful place.12 His death brought many changes, including the reassessment of the wardships belonging to the Crown; such valuable assets could be expected to change hands.

  Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, was now sold the custody and marriage of Richard, Duke of York, for 3,000 marks.13 His service to the Lancastrian regime had already been recognised, with an entry in the Court Rolls for 1423 conferring upon him the grant of certain castles for his ‘good and praiseworth service’.14 That
July, Neville’s clerk, William Glenne, was granted the right to levy taxes from the local area to the value of 1,000 marks, as was his knight, Nicholas Bowet, that August. Richard was transferred to his keeping in the same year, when he would have left the only real family he had known at Methley and travelled up to Raby Castle. This was a significant moment for the young duke, then aged twelve, marking a milestone in his progression from childhood to adulthood. He had little choice about the decision but may well have considered it equable with the stages of social maturation his contemporaries were experiencing; twelve was the age of consent for girls and the time when boys might begin an apprenticeship or join a noble household as a henchman, to be trained in the chivalric arts. Soon after coming under Neville’s guardianship, he underwent another significant rite of passage. In 1424, around the age of thirteen, Richard was betrothed to the earl’s youngest daughter, the nine-year-old Cecily.

  What the young couple thought of each other in 1424 is not recorded. It probably was not considered important. Even at such a tender age, they would have understood the union as being a career move, rather than driven by affection, with the aim to secure the most advantageous partner possible from among a fairly small aristocratic milieu. Under common and church law, the minimum age was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, although in practice, many matches were arranged earlier than this in anticipation of later consummation. Engagements could be drafted between children as young as seven, which was considered a ‘meaningful’ age, although the clause was often built in to allow them to reject the match once they came of age. An example of this survives in a 1466 contract between the Stonor and Rokes families, when the children were permitted to annul the match upon reaching thirteen and fourteen; the young Henry VIII also repudiated his betrothal to Catherine of Aragon at fourteen, although he later went ahead and married her. Neither Richard nor Cecily appeared to object to the marriage and there would be no later calls for them to separate. Legends that Cecily was kept in a room with bars to prevent her from escaping to meet a suitor of whom her father disapproved are belied by her age and stem from works of fiction.