Cecily Neville: Mother of Kings

by Amy Licence

  On 11 June, Richard had written to Cecily’s nephew Ralph, Lord Neville of Raby, requesting that he sent troops to London to assist in his defence against the queen who, in his own words ‘intended and daily doeth intend, to murder and utterly destroy us … and the old royal blood of this realm’.15 Such a sentiment makes complete sense regarding Cecily’s involvement. Richard’s biographer, Charles Ross, claims there is little evidence for this but, even if no evidence survives, Cecily and her son may have believed there was a plot in hand to deprive them of their influence. Mindful of the many past attempts to assail the Duke of York’s position, they were particularly sensitive to their dynastic right and perhaps more readily inclined to pre-empt any perceived attacks that might replace their bloodline with one that was less royal. This explanation requires Cecily and Richard to have believed in the pre-contract story or, at the least, for Richard to have used it as a cover for other, more damaging truths. If Richard believed the repeated rumours that his mother had been unfaithful and conceived his brother in adultery, he may have used the pre-contract story to protect her. However, the illegitimacy story was quickly dropped after 22 June. Did Cecily object in strong terms? Did it simply seem less plausible than the likelihood that Edward had committed bigamy? It is more likely that, in collusion, Cecily and Richard acted to protect the inheritance of the ‘pure’ bloodline of the House of York, rather than allow the accession of a boy who may have been conceived in unlawful wedlock.

  Yet that boy was Cecily’s grandson and Richard’s nephew. To a modern reader, it may appear intolerable or impossible for Cecily to have played favourites, to have chosen to support one of her close blood relatives against another, especially given Edward V’s youth. It goes against modern sensibilities to believe that she deliberately sided with Richard to the exclusion of her grandson. Yet this was not a time troubled by modern sensibilities. In June 1483, she cannot have known that, by assisting in the removal of the twelve-year-old Edward, she may also have been signing his death warrant. The bigamy story was apparently leaked by Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who claimed that, prior to 1464, Edward had gone through some form of pre-contract with a lady named Eleanor Talbot, née Butler. The lady in question was now deceased but the circumstances of Edward’s secret marriage to the queen, as well as his reputation for womanising, made this a more plausible story. Richard and Cecily may have agreed to use these two rumours as weapons and remained with the one that proved to be a better fit.

  A number of possibilities emerge. Either Cecily was slandered by Richard, in his rise to the throne, as Vergil claims, or Edward was in fact illegitimate as she suggested. If so, had she colluded in Richard’s rise, as argued by historian Michael Jones? There is a third alternative. Given her understanding of the importance of dynasty, it is likely that Edward was legitimate but that Cecily knowingly allowed a false rumour regarding his birth to be used to help Richard to the throne. Richard may or may not have believed it. When that failed, they resorted to their second defence, which was Edward’s pre-contract. The question of whether or not they believed in this is almost redundant; it was sufficient that the report had the desired effect. It does indicate, though, that the breach caused by Edward’s marriage had been festering for two decades. This is not a hostile interpretation of Cecily, although it sits uncomfortably with modern sentiment. It is a realistic possibility that a medieval matriarch was prepared to use the only weapons available to her in order to promote her true bloodline. Far worse atrocities were committed on the battlefields of the day, but women did not have that recourse.

  On 25 June, Rivers, Grey and Vaughan were executed at Pontefract and the princes were withdrawn into the inner sanctum of the Tower, while their previous attendants, including Mancini’s main source, Dr Argentine, were dismissed. On 25 June, an assembly of lords, either voluntarily or under duress, gathered at Baynard’s Castle to offer Richard the crown. Initially, he refused. Whatever conversations passed that night, under his mother’s roof, proved decisive. Was this what he and Cecily had planned? Did she persuade him, or did he persuade her, that this was the right course of action? Did they celebrate this turn of events, or spend the hours in earnest discussion, solemn contemplation or prayer? The following morning the lords returned, and this time Richard accepted their offer. He was crowned as Richard III on 6 July. The official records suggest his mother was not present, but this appears to be the trend with Cecily on ceremonial occasions, rather than the exception.

  The implications for Cecily’s grandsons may have been beyond her comprehension in the summer of 1483. Once Edward V had been deposed, the problem remained of what to do with him and his brother, Richard of York, who had joined him in the Tower on 16 June, ostensibly to await the coronation. The boys’ ultimate fate is uncertain. The final sightings of them, playing in the Tower grounds, were made in July, and at the end of that month an attempt was made to free them.16 Richard was on progress in the North while the ringleaders were captured and executed. Some historians have seen this as the trigger which resulted in the boys’ murder, either by direct order, or on the initiative of one of Richard’s servants. It is important to remember that no actual evidence exists to prove that they were killed, not even the bones that were excavated from the Tower in 1674 and are currently stored in a sealed urn in Westminster Abbey. Excluding the later theories about pretenders to the Tudor throne, there is no evidence to indicate their existence after the summer of 1483. Many of their contemporaries believed they had been killed, as the shift in focus of anti-Ricardian rebels that autumn toward Henry Tudor reveals.

  What did Cecily believe had happened to her grandsons? Did she and Richard have a conversation about their futures, once the decisive step had been taken to declare them illegitimate? It seems unpalatable to suggest that she was aware of their possible deaths, but it is no more so than the possibility that they were killed by their uncle. Viewed as the product of a bigamous connection with the Wydeville family, they presented a danger to the Yorkist inheritance, which Cecily supported unfailingly. It all turns on whether she believed in the story of Edward’s pre-contract. During the summer and autumn of 1483, she must have searched her conscience. At one extreme, she may have supported Richard and turned a blind eye to their fate, at the other, she could well have pleaded for them to have been saved; perhaps it was her intervention that ensured their survival thus far, although she could do little to prevent any uprising that took place in July. No matter how much she disliked their mother, the boys were her own flesh and blood, named emotively after her own sons. Whatever the legalities of the succession, she must have grieved for them on a personal level.

  The autumn of 1483 saw fresh challenges to Richard’s rule. An attempted coup was uncovered in October,17 with the involvement of the king’s former ally, the Duke of Buckingham. His execution for treason took place that November. Also among the rebels was the second husband of Cecily’s daughter Anne, Thomas St Leger, who had survived his wife by seven years. A loyal supporter of Edward IV, he had initially been welcomed at Richard’s coronation and court, before finding himself deprived of his positions and required to hand over his daughter to the Duke of Buckingham, as a possible bride for the duke’s eldest son. Even after Buckingham had been caught and killed, St Leger went on fighting against his brother-in-law but was captured and executed at Exeter on 13 November. This was just another example for Cecily of how the struggles around the throne split the various branches of her family apart and set them against each other. It was a reminder that another powerful breach still festered at Westminster.

  In March, Richard reached an agreement with Elizabeth Wydeville, who left sanctuary with her daughters after he swore a public oath to protect them and find them suitable husbands. The dowager queen’s action has been read unsympathetically by many historians since then, as an admission of her belief that her sons were dead and as a compact with her enemy. In reality, Elizabeth had little choice. She did not have the benefit of hindsight
and, for all she knew, Richard might rule for another three decades or more. She could not keep her daughters hidden away forever, nor could she do anything further to assist the sons she had lost; so she emerged from Westminster on 1 March. Cecily would have approved of her daughter-in-law’s decision to come to terms with Richard, with the opportunity it offered to present a united public front even though, realistically, the personal hostilities were irreconcilable.

  The following April, Cecily’s dynasty suffered a further blow. While Richard was visiting Nottingham, sad news reached her mother in London. His only legitimate son, Edward of Middleham, had died in his northern home, aged around ten. The cause of his death is unknown, but Croyland relates that he was ‘seized by an illness of short duration’. Richard’s grief, and that of his wife Anne, was described by the chronicler as ‘bordering on madness’. Perhaps this loss moved Cecily to a comparison between the boy’s fate and that of his cousins in the Tower. Her piety may have led her to view young Edward’s death as a divine punishment for the princes’ deposition and fate. Richard’s grief was deep but his position required him to overcome this and think in practical terms; he later named his nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as his heir. A few months later, the closeness between Richard and his mother was apparent in a letter he wrote her from Pontefract:

  Madam, I recommend me to you as heartily as is to me possible. Beseeching you in my most humble and effectuous wise of your daily blessing, to my singular comfort and defence in my need. And such news as be here my servant Thomas Bryan, this bearer, shall show you, to whom please it you to give credence unto. And, madam, I beseech you to be a good and gracious lady to my lord my Chamberlain, to be your officer in Wiltshire in such as Colyngbourne had. I trust he shall therein do you service. And that it please you that by this bearer I may understand your pleasure in this behalf. And I pray God to send you the accomplishment of your noble desires. Written at Pountfreit, the iii day of June, with the hand of your most humble son, Richard Rex.18

  The Colyngbourne mentioned in the letter had previously been Cecily’s steward at a property she owned in Wiltshire. He had recently been removed from his office and replaced by Francis, Lord Lovell, which had occasioned Richard’s letter. Colyngbourne got his revenge six weeks later, on 18 July, when he pinned a series of infamous satirical verses to the door of St Paul’s Cathedral, defaming Richard, his rise to power and his allies Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell:

  The Cat, the Rat and Lovell our Dog

  Doe rule all England under a Hog.

  The crooke-backt Boar the way hath found

  To root our Roses from our ground.

  Both flower and bud he will confound

  Till King of Beasts the swine be crown’d.

  And then, the Dog, the Cat and Rat

  Shall in his trough feed and be fat.19

  Worse still, Colyngbourne was found to have been in communication with the Lancastrian Henry Tudor, son of Henry VI’s half-brother Edmund. Tudor was also descended directly from the same Beaufort line, fathered by John of Gaunt, as Cecily’s mother. His grandfather John had been Joan Beaufort’s brother. Tudor had fled England in the aftermath of the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 and remained in exile in Brittany, then in France. In the autumn of 1483, he had attempted to join Buckingham’s rebellion but his fleet had been beaten back by storms. That Christmas, he swore an oath to invade England and marry Cecily’s granddaughter Elizabeth of York, who had now left sanctuary. Colyngbourne died a traitor’s death but the threat of Tudor had not receded. In the autumn of 1484, rumours circulated regarding his planned invasion the following spring, and a number of Lancastrians and supporters of the Wydevilles had chosen to join him in exile. That December, Richard issued a proclamation against his enemy, painting him as a pretentious usurper whose reign would lead to national chaos. It sent out a decisive message but the threat still remained.

  There is nothing to suggest that Cecily was at court during Christmas and New Year 1484. The descriptions of the festivities made by the Croyland Chronicler have marked out those days as filled with unexplained and unspecific controversies, giving fuel to another of the most debated issues of Richard’s reign. Given the pious life she had adopted, or would soon adopt, Cecily is unlikely to have participated in the uneasy mixture of raucous celebration and the increasing suffering of Queen Anne, who was, by then, fatally ill. Cecily’s granddaughters had entered Anne’s household, where they had been received with ‘courtesies and gracious caresses, and especially the Lady Elizabeth, whom she used with so much familiarity and kindness as if she had been her own sister’.20 Croyland disapproved of the amount of time given to ‘dancing and gaiety’ and the ‘vain exchanges of clothing’ between the queen and princess, which caused people to ‘murmur’ and ‘wonder thereat’.21 Worse still, rumours circulated that, in the event of Anne’s death, Richard would contemplate a marriage with his own niece, Elizabeth of York.

  What did Cecily make of this report? Such marriages did occur, when the requisite papal dispensations had been attained, but it was unusual and did incite contemporary censure on a moral level. Richard’s loyal adherents Lovell and Ratcliffe advised strongly against it as the match would be resented by the people, would call Elizabeth’s illegitimacy into question and would prevent the king from making a lucrative foreign alliance, much in the way that Edward IV had failed to do. In the early months of 1485, as the queen’s health worsened, a suitable international princess was already being sought. Perhaps Cecily added her voice to that of her steward Lovell and others by attempting to persuade her son of a less scandalous course of action, if indeed he ever intended to marry his niece at all. When Queen Anne died on 16 March, a plan was already in place for a dual marriage for Richard and Elizabeth with Joana of Castile and Manuel, Duke of Beja. As Anne was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, the ambassadors were already on their way to Portugal.

  The long-awaited invasion came in August. The news arrived that Henry Tudor had sailed from France on 1 August, bringing with it the certainty that a confrontation was imminent, and activating all the preparations Richard had made in establishing a naval and espionage network, gathering troops and arms. Before he travelled to Bosworth to confront his foe, Richard went to stay at Berkhamsted with his mother.22 He was Cecily’s only surviving son and her youngest surviving child. Together, on bended knee in the chapel at Cecily’s home, they prayed for his delivery and safe return. No doubt they discussed the challenge ahead, and she would have given him her blessing and encouragement. After all, it was a battle they believed Richard should win. He was an anointed King of England, a son of York, an experienced and intelligent strategist and military commander, repelling an invader with a weak personal claim who had never been tested on the battlefield. Richard had the advantage of location – England was his country and its men were his subjects. To oppose him was treason. He would arrive in Leicestershire with a firm belief in his own right, marching before his troops with a large cross to demonstrate that God was on his side. Cecily bade her son farewell, in the hope of soon hearing of his victory, and retreated to her prayers. She would never see him again.

  On 22 August 1485, Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field. His last moments, recaptured by the forensic analysis undertaken by Leicester University in 2012/13, reinforced the contemporary accounts that he made a brave charge at his enemy, which ended when his horse floundered in a marsh. The wounds on his body indicate a sustained attack, by several different weapons, from a number of angles. His crown was found under a hawthorn bush and passed to Henry Tudor. His body was carried back into Leicester and buried in the choir of the Grey Friars’ church. A few days later, the devastating news arrived at Berkhamsted.

  15

  Old Age

  1485–1495

  A book of hours, too, must be mine,

  Where subtle workmanship will shine,

  Of gold and azure, rich and smart,

  Arranged and painted with great art,


  Covered with fine brocade of gold;

  And there must be, so as to hold,

  The pages closed, two golden clasps.1

  An extraordinary document survives from the end of the fifteenth century which gives a vivid glimpse of Cecily at the end of her life. The ordinances of her household were composed at her instigation between 1485 and 1495, when she was living at Berkhamsted almost as a vowess, in accordance with having entered a strict religious regime. The first line states that it was ‘requisite to understand the order of her own person concerning God and the world’, which might imply it was some sort of attempt to impose routine and regulation following years of a turbulent and unpredictable existence. Although the document is actually undated, it refers to Cecily as the mother of the late King Edward, while making no mention of Richard at all, placing it firmly under the reign of Henry VII, her granddaughter’s husband. It is remarkable for its insights into her piety, her reading and the household regime established by this very elusive but highly important woman.

  Cecily rose at seven in the morning. Her chaplain was waiting to say matins while she dressed and, when she was ready, he administered the Mass. This would be followed by a visit to the castle chapel to hear divine service, followed by two more low Masses. She then went to dinner and, while she ate, listened to religious readings, usually from the Lives of the saints or reflective, contemplative texts. A few are mentioned specifically, including the Lives of St Maude, St Bridget and St Katherine, as well as other hagiographical collections and the works of Nicholas Love and Walter Hilton.