by Amy Licence
It seems most likely that Richard travelled up to Raby Castle at the end of 1423. He may also have spent some time at the court of the infant Henry VI. If he had not actually reached County Durham by 1424, there is a chance he may not have even met Cecily before the engagement was mooted, or even enacted. The contract could be drawn up and sworn by proxy but, although it is likely that they were introduced at some point, the legends of them growing up in the same household are misleading. A letter in the Paston collection describes how the first meeting of a betrothed couple had gone well, as the girl ‘made him gentle cheer in gentle wise’, so there was probably no need for a ‘great treaty between them’. During 1424, they would have had a little time to get to know one another at Raby, or the nearby Brancepeth Castle, which was also in Neville hands.
The year 1425 was to prove significant for Richard in more ways than one. On 17 January, his old guardian, Robert Waterton, died at Methley. Waterton was probably ill and aware that his end was in sight, as he had made his will seven days before this; perhaps increasing old age and incapacity had caused him to withdraw in his final years, and this might underpin the transference of Richard to the custody of the Nevilles. The news probably had not reached Raby before another important death occurred. On the following day, 18 January, Richard’s uncle, Edmund Mortimer, died of plague after having been sent to Ireland. This meant that the boy assumed the titles of Earl of March and Ulster, as well as the Mortimer lands in Wales and on the border, although he would not be able to fully enjoy them yet. The Calendar of Close Rolls for 26 November 1425 and 20 July 1426 record that his lands were held in trust by March’s widow Anne Stafford, Richard’s aunt, ‘by reason of the nonage [juvenility] of Richard, Duke of York’.15 His value as a marital commodity rose as a result but his new guardian, and potential future father-in-law, was also ailing.
On the Sunday after Midsummer 1425, Ralph Neville witnessed an indenture granting lands in Watlous to Thomas de Neville and his wife Cecily. It was one of his last legal acts. On 12 October, he died at Raby Castle, at around the age of sixty. He was buried in Staindrop church under a stone effigy flanked by images of both his wives, although their bodies are actually buried elsewhere. The alabaster used was dug from a quarry owned by his father-in-law, John of Gaunt.
Ralph’s title passed to his eldest surviving grandson, but the majority of his estates were left to his widow. The Calendar Rolls for May 1426 record an order ‘to assign dower to Joan who was the earl’s wife, of whom the king hath taken an oath’. That November, she was awarded arrears of 10 marks a year following an inquisition into the state of the earl’s finances, which discovered she was owed it by the Sheriff of Westmorland.16 Joan was already mother-in-law to the new earl before she became his stepmother. For around fifteen years he had been married to her daughter, Margaret, from her first husband. This made it awkward when Joan’s stepchildren contested the split between their title and estates and applied for the restitution of their inheritance. Over the coming years, the dispute became acrimonious. In 1431, a recognisance was issued for the new earl to raise taxes on condition that he would not ‘order or consent, do or procure no hurt or harm, to Joan Countess of Westmorland’ or her eldest son by her Neville marriage, Richard, Earl of Salisbury, or enter ‘unlawfully contrary to the law of England … any lands or possessions of Ralph, late Earl … in the possession of the said Countess’. A similar condition was extended to Joan and Richard, pending their appearance before the King’s Council, and other such statements would appear in the royal accounts over the coming years. The situation would not be settled during Joan’s lifetime.17 Ultimately, Cecily’s mother was protected by her royal inheritance, a further reminder to her children of the significance of their descent.
Joan’s proximity to the throne now dictated the next stage in Richard of York’s life. Before his death, Ralph had transferred the wardship to Joan, and she was now on the move. In 1425, she took Richard to London, to live at the Lancastrian court.18 Cecily probably went too. She was then aged ten, a point at which she was not yet considered a ‘maiden’ but thought to be beyond the dependency of early childhood. In the absence of evidence, there is a slight possibility that she was left behind at Raby, continuing her education under the watchful eye of a governess, but it is more likely that she also made the journey south, especially given the circumstances of mourning and the disputed inheritance. The majority of Joan’s surviving children were already married and Cecily was the youngest, so she probably accompanied her mother and fiancé to Westminster. They may have stayed at the court of the young Henry VI or with family or friends. A letter written by Cecily’s older sister, Katherine, in 1434 gives a sense of the arrangements made for accommodation in the city. Writing from Lincolnshire to John Paston, she confirmed that she would be taking up his offer to stay in one of his properties: ‘We pray you that your place there may be ready for us … for we will send our stuff thither before our coming.’19 When Cecily was in London in 1460, she borrowed the Southwark house of Sir John Fastolf, kinsman of the Pastons, who would soon serve with Richard in France. Equally, Joan and Cecily might have been found a place in the household of the widowed Queen Catherine of Valois, while Richard joined the young men clustering round the throne at the start of a new regime.
Born in December 1421, Henry VI had been nine months old when his father had died in France. Before his first birthday, he also became titular King of France, on the death of his maternal grandfather, Charles VI. Henry V’s shoes would have been difficult for his son to fill, even if he had been a fully grown adult. As an infant, he was governed by his uncles John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, at the head of a regency council. On his deathbed, Henry V had also named Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, a son of John of Gaunt, as the boy’s guardian. Obviously, in his early years, Henry was confined to the sphere of the nursery, and his care was treated separately from the government of the realm. His mother, the young Queen Catherine, was also resident at court and was permitted a degree of influence over his early years, playing a ‘direct and immediate … important role in bringing up her son’.20 Initially, his nurse, Joan Asteley, was in charge of the nursery along with day nurses and chamber women; their salaries were doubled in 1424 and 1427 as their charge grew older.21 From 1426, John, Lord Tiptoft, was steward of his household, and from 1427 his doctor was John Somerset. Later, Dame Alice Botiller taught him ‘courtesy and nurture’, and by the time the countess arrived at court, he was developing well; in 1428, he was considered to be very promising in ‘wit and understanding’.22 This was the world into which Joan Beaufort arrived, with Richard of York and her youngest daughter. There was a clear divide between generations, with older, experienced figures holding power until such time as young Henry and his peers came into their own. It must have been a place where glittering futures were anticipated.
The court remained close to London during this time, regularly moving between the favourite locations of Westminster, Windsor and Eltham, although Henry did venture further to his mother’s residences and to sittings of Parliament at Leicester and Kenilworth. Joan and her charges accompanied him; it was at Leicester in May 1426 that Richard of York was knighted by John, Duke of Bedford. Also ennobled alongside him was one of Cecily’s brothers, William, already married to the Yorkshire heiress Joan Fauconberg, who was described as an ‘idiot’ from birth. Watching them, carefully schooled by her mother in terms of her status, the young Cecily absorbed the ceremony and ritual that were her social dues.
Court life for Cecily would have been peripatetic and exciting after her years at Raby. Westminster at that time was a large complex of many buildings, including the palace, with its great hall, painted chamber and royal apartments overlooking the river, as well as the abbey and the multitude of buildings that the government of the realm and upkeep of the king’s household required. It would have been a vibrant and busy place, where the most important people of the realm gathered, with the nobles and churchm
en attending regular council meetings, ceremonial and religious occasions marked and the reception of ambassadors and visitors from all around the known world. Cecily would have attended the feasts, jousts and worship of a grand European court, with its patronage of the arts and notions of chivalry modelled by the king’s uncles and leading men of the day. Hundreds of servants were employed, in duties that encompassed the domestic, administrative, defence and more: controllers, cofferers, almoners and clerks; officers, ministers, minstrels and workmen; from the archers to the vintners, the apothecary to the wardrobe, all had a part to play in the huge, unwieldy machinery of the court. Under Edward III, a duke of the royal blood had been entitled to an income of over £15, of which £13 and 4d was for his daily diet and the rest to fund his retinue of 300 men and their horses.23 Yet by the 1420s, Cecily and Richard found themselves at a court in transition, in embryo; much had changed between the ordinances that survive detailing the running of Edward III’s household and those that would be laid down for the adult Henry VI in 1455.
From 1428, the king’s tutor was Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. He appointed a number of young men to wait on the young Henry, whose future would be entwined with his. Among them were many other Nevilles or those connected to Cecily by marriage. For the young girl, watching her fiancé and family advance, the court would have been full of familiar faces: brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts, along with their children. First there was Anne Neville, Cecily’s sister. In 1424, she had also been married to a royal ward, Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who had been knighted in 1421 and became a Privy Councillor three years later. There were Cecily’s brothers: Robert Neville, who became Bishop of Salisbury on 26 October 1427, and Richard Neville, who inherited the title of Earl of Salisbury. This was also the year in which Richard Neville’s eldest son, Joan’s grandchild, was born. The baby would go on to become the famous ‘Kingmaker’ Earl of Warwick. Another key figure at court was Joan’s son-in-law Henry Percy, son of the Henry ‘Hotspur’ of Shakespearian legend, who had been appointed to the Great Council during the king’s minority. Percy had married Cecily’s elder sister Eleanor Neville and by this point they already had eight children. They may also have encountered the newly restored Duke of Norfolk, John de Mowbray. He was the husband of Cecily’s eldest sister, Katherine, which might have proved uncomfortable for young Richard, as Mowbray had sat in judgement on his father back in 1415. No wonder Joan took Richard and Cecily to court, with so many of her family close by; no doubt they joined in the young couple’s wedding celebrations.
A marriage settlement would have been drawn up for Richard and Cecily. It no longer survives, but another from 1429, between William Haute and Joan Wydeville, can serve as a model of the conventions that Ralph Neville would have followed. The bride’s dowry was listed as £40 per year, with an additional £400 marriage portion, and her father would bear the costs of the wedding at Calais. He would also provide her with a ‘chamber as a gentlewoman aight for to have’, like a trousseau, although this extended beyond clothing to personal jewellery and furniture. If the conditions were met, ‘the said William shall have and with the grace of God wedde to wyff Jahn Wydeville’.24 As the daughter of an earl and future wife of a duke, Cecily could have anticipated her own impressive ‘chamber’, with clothes, jewels and pieces of furniture to equip her for her life to come.
Richard and Cecily were definitely married by October 1429, when a papal indult was issued to them jointly, concerning their choice of confessor.25 Sarah Gristwood suggests the ceremony took place soon after May 1427, when Cecily had reached her twelfth birthday, and this would be in accordance with contemporary practice. The location remains a mystery but they were probably either in London or County Durham. When Cecily’s sister Katherine was married in 1412, the wedding took place in the chapel at Raby Castle, so there is a chance that Cecily and Richard were united there too. However, their location in London may suggest it was in one of the chapels at Westminster Palace, perhaps even in the queen’s closet, in the presence of the king. The most likely location was St Stephen’s Chapel, which had been, and would continue to be, used for royal marriages.26 It was an important marriage, even without the benefit of hindsight, but it was not standard practice to record the details of the event. Over a century would pass before churches began to keep registers of birth, marriages and deaths; if Richard and Cecily’s nuptials made it onto paper, that record has not survived. On her marriage, Cecily’s heraldic coat of arms, which had been a Neville white saltire, or diagonal cross, on a red background, was impaled by that of her husband, with its French fleur-de-lys and English lions.
On 6 November 1429, Richard, Duke of York, attended Henry VI’s coronation in Westminster Abbey, wearing clothing provided by the royal household. As his duchess and wife, Cecily would have been with him, along with several other members of her family who performed ceremonial roles. According to Gregory’s Chronicle, the young king, just a month short of his seventh birthday, was borne into the abbey, in a scarlet cloth, by Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. Cecily’s brother-in-law John de Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, rode after them as Marshall of England, and her brother Richard, Earl Salisbury, rode with them as a Constable of England. Gregory describes the boy being ‘a-rayde lyke a kynge in a ryche clothe of golde, with a crowne sette on hys hedde’,27 then led through the Palace of Westminster to the hall.
There, Richard and Cecily would have taken their places at the table. Seated on the right of the king were the barons of the Cinque Ports and the clerks of chancery, and on his left were London’s mayor, William Estfeld, and his aldermen, along with other ‘worthy commoners of the city’. The duke and duchess were probably on one of the two tables in the centre of the hall with the ‘bishops, justices and worthy knights’.28 It would have been the young couple’s first taste of the type of celebrations that were apposite for medieval royalty, for a bloodline they shared. Later in life, they would gain a reputation for ostentation, for living ‘like kings’. As an impressionable young pair, aged fourteen and eighteen, they participated in the entertainments and sampled the three courses designed to emphasise the claim of a Lancastrian child, which was technically a weaker claim than Richard’s. As the first course was being served, the king’s champion, Sir Philip Dymoke, rode in, armed as St George. He proclaimed to the four corners of the hall that Henry VI was the rightful heir to the crown and that if anyone disputed this ‘he was redy for to defende hyt as hys knyghte and hys champyon’. Richard of York held his tongue, for now.29
Up from the kitchens came a boar’s head, ‘enarmoured in a castle royal’, frumenty with venison, gilded meat, swan, stewed capon, heron, pike, red cream with ‘a whyte lyon crownyde therein’, custard royal decorated with a golden fleur-de-lys and fritters ‘like a sun’.30 It was followed by a subtlety of carved marzipan, depicting St Edward and St Lewis bringing Henry his coat of arms, which bore celebration verses. The second course included white meats, jelly decorated with Te Deums, pork, crane, rabbit, chickens, peacock, bream, fritters, custard and cream with an ‘anteloppe crownyde therein and schynynge as golde’.31 The food was decorated with powdered gold fleur-de-lys and white feathers. The second subtlety depicted the Emperor and Henry V, offering the young king the mantle of the Garter. Finally, they dined on quince compote, more roast venison, crabs and a selection of roast birds, including egrets, curlews, woodcock, plovers, quails and larks. There were baked meats, crisp fritters and pies powdered with lozenges, gilded white and decorated with borage flowers. The cream was coloured violet and the subtlety was of ‘owre Lady syttynge, and hyr Chylde in hyr lappe, holdyng in everyhonde a crowne, Synt Gorge knelyng on that one syde and Synt Denys in that othyr syde’.32
The coronation and banquet must have been a memorable occasion for the young Cecily. It set a standard for the lifestyle suitable to one of royal estate that she would later try to emulate. However, on that November day, she probably did not imagine that her husband would ever challenge Henr
y VI’s right to rule.
4
His Young Duchess
1429–1437
A womman of right famous governaunce
And wele cherisshed, I sey yow for certeyne;
Hir felawship shal do yow grete plesaunce,
Hir porte is suche, hir manere is trewe and playne;
She with glad chiere wil do hir busy peyne
To bryng yow there.1
The courtly love of medieval romances mostly belonged on the pages of illuminated manuscripts, highlighted in red or gold, or tripping off the lips of troubadours strumming their lutes. Lovers swooned in neatly clipped gardens, pining for their beloved to notice their existence or else engaged in Herculean labours to win their favour. Such books were owned by many of the aristocracy of England and Norman France but, in reality, these stories bore little resemblance to the financial and legal negotiations by which they were partnered for life.
There was little that could be considered romantic about the majority of marriages made among the fifteenth-century nobility. Partners were chosen by a child’s family for dynastic and financial gain; they might be significantly older or younger than their spouses, and papal dispensations were often required in order to dissolve close ties of blood, intermarriage or spiritual connection. Once the agreement had been reached, with its various clauses about obligation and payment, the ceremony itself was more like the final stage of a transaction than the romantic occasions of today. The exchange of vows was consolidated by physical consummation, without which the match could be questioned or even dissolved. In royalty and high-ranking couples this was a formal occasion, with the pair led to bed by their family and friends and then questioned the following day, or the sheets and clothing examined, to ensure that the act had taken place. Physical difficulties and failures could become public knowledge, as in the case of Edward IV’s mistress Elizabeth (Jane) Shore’s first marriage, which was annulled due to her husband’s impotence.
