Cecily Neville: Mother of Kings

by Amy Licence

  Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection would have reinforced Cecily’s chosen mode of life; in chapter seventeen, ‘Of the Means That Bring a Soul to Contemplation’, he advocates the reading of Holy Scripture and good books, spiritual meditation and diligent prayer with devotion. Hilton advocated that the devout put all their faith in Christ, and use these methods to wipe away sin and cleanse their hearts, the better to ultimately achieve grace.2 Love’s translation of the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ had been composed around 1400 and approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury for circulation. It proved to be one of the most popular new works of the times, and the advent of printing under Edward IV saw an explosion in the facilities necessary to circulate it among a wide audience. In the century following 1485, it was republished ten times. Likewise, the thirteenth-century The Golden Legend was one of the first texts to run off William Caxton’s printing press, which was based in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, in 1483.

  Dinner was taken at eleven o’clock or twelve on fast days. On Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Cecily’s household dined on boiled beef, mutton and one roast dish, while on Monday and Wednesday they had just the beef and mutton. On fast days, which were regular throughout the pre-Reformation calendar, two dishes of fresh fish and one of salt fish were served. Berkhamsted may have had its own fish ponds, which were expensive to maintain, or fish may have been caught from the River Bulborne, flowing beside the castle, or transported from merchant ships in London, or from popular suppliers in Essex or Kent. On Saturdays the diet was supplemented with butter and eggs.

  After dining, Cecily allowed an hour for business. In the great hall at Berkhamsted, she gave ‘audyence to all such as hath any matter to shewe unto her’.3 She then slept for a frugal quarter of an hour before rising to devote herself to further prayer until the first peal of the bells for evensong. Depending on the season, this could vary between three and five in the afternoon. It was the sign for Cecily to ‘drynketh wyne or ale at her pleasure’4 before reaching the chapel by the last peal of the bell. From there she went to supper and, while eating, she recited to her household the text of the sermon she had heard earlier at dinner. After the meal, she pursued ‘honest mirth’ by being ‘famyliare with her gentilwomen’,5 then, an hour before bedtime, she drank a glass of wine and retired to her private closet, making her final prayers. She was in bed by eight.

  Her household ran along very regular lines, especially for those who served her at Berkhamsted. Friday was payment day for the supplies of fresh produce to the castle; otherwise, bills were settled at the end of each month. The exceptions were those employed in the chapel, who received their dues each quarter, the biannual household wages and the yearly wardrobe accounts. Four times a year, a proclamation about the castle was made in the marketplace at Berkhamsted, to call in outstanding payments and debts and to state that certain sums owing had been settled. Cecily’s servants were also provided for, but not particularly lavishly. Her head officers, if they were present at Berkhamsted rather than ‘lying within the town’, were assigned bread, ale, fire and candles; this was extended to waiting women, so long as they were married. The sick were given ‘a lybertye to have all such things as may be to their ease’ and if a servant was incapacitated or ‘fell impotent’ they would still receive the same wages.6

  The world outside the closed walls of Berkhamsted underwent significant changes in the final decade of Cecily’s life. In January 1486, her granddaughter Elizabeth of York was married to Henry VII at Westminster, and the duchess’s feelings about her union with the man who had killed her son Richard in battle cannot have been straightforward. Perhaps this was the trigger that spurred her to lead a more retired life. After all, there was little she could do about it other than accept the situation and withdraw into her religion. In September 1486, Elizabeth gave birth to her first son, Arthur, a great-grandson for Cecily, who was to be the heir to the Tudor dynasty. There is no record of the duchess’s attendance at his christening, which was held near to the place of his birth in Winchester. Her granddaughter and namesake, Cecily of York, carried baby Arthur into the church of St Swithin, accompanied by her grandson John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. Dowager Queen Elizabeth Wydeville was his godmother; it may have been distance that prevented Cecily from attending.

  In February 1486, Cecily was awarded a licence for life to export wool from the ports of Sandwich, London and Southampton through the ‘straits of Marrok’, round the tip of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean Sea.7 This was a continuance of previous grants made to her by Edward IV in 1468 and would have provided her with a useful income, which served as a continuation of York’s activities. During the 1450s, the duke had been issued with a similar licence to export wool to the customs value of 10,000 marks,8 some of which may have been drawn from his extensive lands and prepared by his tenants. That June, she was granted ‘certain farms in recompense of her dower’, which may well have contributed to the production of sheep and wool.9

  As early as 1486, Cecily was considering how to bestow her many properties after her death. This highlights the responsibility she had to her many tenants, who lived and worked on her lands, to find them a suitable and sympathetic replacement lord. To this end, in November, she appointed John, Earl of Oxford, as the steward and keeper of the park and manor of Hunden, Suffolk, ‘after the death of the said duchess’.10 In January 1489, she granted the stewardship, keeping of the parks and honour of Berkhamsted and King’s Langley to Ralph Verney, possibly son of the Ralph Verney who had been Lord Mayor of London.11 That spring she granted property in Gloucestershire to Thomas Poyntz and in Hertford and Kent to Roger Cotton. Thaxted in Essex went to Sir Thomas Grey and Marshwood in Dorset to ‘the King’s servant John Knollys, yeoman for the King’s own mouth in the king’s pantry’.12 Stoke Clare went to a Sir William Hastings, who may have been the son or grandson of her son Edward’s close friend. In February 1492, a lengthy document recorded in the Patent Rolls divided up the majority of her remaining lands.13 As she advanced through her seventies, possibly beset by illness, having seen many of her relatives die young, she would have been aware that any illness might signal the end.

  Cecily’s life was drawing to a close. However, the House of York was not completely defeated. Henry Tudor may have won a decisive victory at Bosworth and claimed the throne of England as a result, but there were still members of the York family to claim the titles and claims of Richard, Duke of York. The most notable of these were the sons of Cecily’s daughter Elizabeth, the eldest of whom, John de la Pole, had been de facto heir to Richard III from 1484. Now in his mid-twenties, he briefly resolved to live under the Tudor regime, as his role at Arthur’s christening showed, but he was soon drawn into a plot to replace it with his own line. An amenable priest introduced him to a boy named Lambert Simnel, who bore a striking resemblance to Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of George, Duke of Clarence. This ten-year-old could provide the chance the House of York needed. Lincoln travelled to Burgundy to visit his aunt Margaret and ask for her support against the regime that had replaced her brother. She offered 2,000 mercenaries, perhaps because, as Vergil later described, she ‘pursued Henry with an insatiable hatred and with fiery wrath never desisted from employing every scheme which might harm him as a representative of a hostile faction’. Her mother may have felt the same way but she was now Henry’s subject and had to tread carefully.

  Lincoln also recruited Richard III’s loyal friend Francis, Lord Lovell, leading a similar number. The boy was crowned in Dublin Cathedral as Edward VI, and an Irish–Burgundian army landed on the west coast of England led by Lincoln. At Berkhamsted, Cecily must have been torn. On one side, her grandson was leading a rebellion in the Yorkist name, but it was against her granddaughter and the claim of her newly established line, embodied in her granddaughter’s young son, Arthur. In her retirement, Cecily was fortunate that she did not have the option to actively take sides. What her private hopes and wishes were cannot be guessed at; she may have sim
ply stepped back and awaited the result.

  The armies clashed at the Battle of Stoke on 16 June 1487. It was clear, by that point, that the young boy Simnel was an imposter, as Henry had taken the precaution of temporarily releasing the real Edward, Earl of Warwick, from the Tower and parading him through the streets of London. Still, Lincoln urged the confrontation onwards, perhaps having used the boy as a screen to further his own claim. The encounter is often relegated to an afterthought, a brief rebellion after the impact of Bosworth, but no line was drawn in the historical sand in 1485. For those Yorkists lined up on the top of Rampire Hill, facing the royalist army led by Henry Tudor, his uncle Jasper and the Earl of Oxford, as well as for those like Cecily waiting at home for news, the battle had the potential to swing power away from the Tudors again. With the hiatus of 1470–71 in mind, as well as Bosworth, all those involved knew that short-lived kings could be displaced and sudden change could sweep through the political world, with all the resulting personal implications. If the outcome of Bosworth had been determined by a series of misfortunes for Richard, luck could equally turn against Tudor and his men. Cecily may have been expecting to hear that her grandson was returning to the capital as John II.

  However, luck favoured Henry Tudor that day. While Lincoln’s trained mercenaries initially beat back Tudor’s forces, the following three hours saw them roundly defeated and the majority of their leaders were killed. Lincoln died in the field, and only Lovell escaped to an uncertain future. No doubt Cecily would have learned the result by letter a few days after the event and offered up her prayers for yet another grandson lost to the conflicts of the age.

  The future looked more secure for the Tudor dynasty with the arrival of more children. Elizabeth of York bore a daughter, Margaret, in 1489 and another son, Henry, in 1491. As one regime was getting established, the final members of the old one were gradually dying away. In early June 1492, Cecily would have heard news of the death of her one-time daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Wydeville, the woman whose marriage she had so bitterly opposed. Elizabeth had spent five years at Bermondsey Abbey, and her will revealed few bequests of value for the mother of a queen. She was buried without fuss on Whit Sunday beside Edward at Windsor, accompanied on her final journey by her husband’s illegitimate daughter Grace. She may also have been aware of an upsurge in the posthumous reputation of Henry VI, with the composition of the poem ‘A Remembrance of Henry VI’ by James Ryman in 1492 and the attempts made by her son-in-law to advance his acceptance as a saint. The thoughts of Henry VII would also turn to the resting place of his predecessor, Richard III. In 1495, he would pay for the construction of an alabaster tomb to lay over his resting place in the Grey Friars at Leicester.

  In November 1494, Cecily may have heard of the celebrations to invest Prince Henry as Duke of York. After a month of preparations, during which the three-year-old was invested as a Knight of the Bath, he was created duke on All Hallows’ Day, standing on the dais in the parliamentary chamber at Westminster, dressed in royal estate. He was presented with the symbols of office before celebrating High Mass in St Stephen’s Chapel. He then witnessed the jousting at Westminster Hall, with his parents and elder sister. Perhaps someone, mindful of the significance of the title, wrote to Cecily to describe her great-grandson’s excitement at seeing the challengers dressed in the tawny-and-blue Yorkist livery.

  The last years of Cecily’s life saw a second, more serious, threat rise against Henry VII. In 1491, another pretender emerged, claiming to be one of her grandsons, lost after entering the Tower in 1483. The young man, Perkin Warbeck, bore a striking resemblance to Edward IV and soon enlisted the support of Margaret in Burgundy to mount a challenge to the throne under the identity of Richard, Duke of York. His true identity has never been satisfactorily resolved, although it has been suggested that he may have been an illegitimate son of Edward’s, conceived during his exile in the Netherlands in 1470–71. He was proclaimed as King Richard IV on attending the funeral of Emperor Frederick III in 1493, and planned to invade England with a foreign army via Ireland, much as Simnel and Lincoln had attempted. The appointment of Henry as Duke of York had been a significant move to present a legitimate bearer of that title, to which the pretender now laid claim. It was during Cecily’s final weeks, in the late spring of 1495, that Warbeck gathered his armies. As she dictated her will, he was setting sail across the North Sea. Perhaps she heard that he was on his way. Margaret may even have written to her mother, explaining her belief in the young man’s chances and provenance. However, by the time Warbeck’s ill-fated ships appeared off the coast of Kent, the woman he claimed was his grandmother had passed away.

  Cecily began dictating her will on 4 April 1495.14 She was approaching her eightieth birthday but of ‘hole mynd and body’. She followed the traditional Catholic convention of surrendering her soul into the hands of God and her body to be buried beside that of her husband Richard at Fotheringhay church. Then she began the lengthy process of dividing up and bequeathing her worldly goods. To the best of her knowledge, she was ‘not muche in dett’ but, if her coffers were found wanting in the execution of her will, she assigned parcels of plate, to help pay the necessary costs. To King Henry VII, she left all customs money owing to her still and two gold cups. Her granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth, received a small diamond cross, a psalter with silver clasps covered in green cloth of gold and a pyx, a little box made of wood or metal, which contained the flesh of St Christopher. To Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, she left a service book covered with black cloth of gold, with gold clasps. To her great-grandson, Prince Arthur, she left an arras hanging for a bed, a tester and counterpane embroidered with the image of the Wheel of Fortune and another arras ‘with the pope’. To his younger brother, Henry, Duke of York, she left three arras hangings, depicting St John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene and the final one with the ‘Passion of our Lord and St George’.

  She left a number of religious items to the church at Fotheringhay, many for use in services: a canopy of crimson cloth, two altar cloths of crimson cloth of gold, two altar cloths of embroidered crimson damask, three Mass books, three grails and seven processioners. By way of priests’ clothing, she bequeathed them two copes of crimson cloth of gold and three of embroidered blue velvet, chasubles and tunicles, for celebrating the Mass. Similar items were left to the college at Stoke Clare in Suffolk and to Syon Abbey. Her granddaughter Bridget, a fourteen-year-old nun at Dartford Priory, received Cecily’s copy of The Golden Legend in vellum, a book of the life of St Katherine of Siena and one of Saint Matilda. Her granddaughter Cecily was the recipient of a purple velvet service book with clasps of silver and gilt as well as another ‘without note’.

  Other grandchildren received more practical items. Edward IV’s daughter Anne, then unmarried but betrothed, was left a large bed of ‘bawdekyn’, a rich silk brocade, with matching counterpoint and other items, while her sister Catherine, who married that year, received a blue satin curtain or hanging. To her daughter Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, Cecily left her travelling chair with its coverings, cushions, horses and harness, as well as all her palfreys. Elizabeth’s de la Pole sons were also beneficiaries; Edmund received a cloth of estate and three cushions in purple damask cloth of gold, while Humphrey, who had entered holy orders, was given two altar cloths of embroidered blue damask and a vestment of crimson satin. To William de la Pole she left a curtain of white sarcenet, two beds made of down and two bolsters, while his sister Anne, Prioress of Syon Abbey, was bequeathed a jointly bound book of Bonaventure de infancia and Hilton’s Epistle on Mixed Life15 in English, as well as copy of the Revelations of St Bridget. Numerous items were left to parish churches with which Cecily had had some connection during her lifetime.

  She left various gifts to her household and servants. Richard Lessy was given all the money owing to Cecily in debts, and others received items such as religious artefacts, books and clothing, also feather beds, bolsters and cushions. A John Walter received a large bequest, inc
luding a range of ceremonial objects used in the celebration of the Mass, as well as two curtains of fringed blue sarcenet, a long lantern and two little coffers. Sir John Verney and his wife Margaret were given a cross of silver, gilt and beryl, a piece of the holy cross and other ‘divers relics’. Cecily also had an inn to bestow. She gave the George at Grantham to another widow, Dame Jane Pesemershe, for the term of her life, after which it would revert to the ownership of the Fotheringhay College. The George was a medieval hospital, in the sense of hosting travellers rather than a medical centre, and had been granted to Cecily by Edward IV in 1461. It remained standing until 1780. Another bequest of two religious books and an altar cover went to a John More, who may well have been a London lawyer and the father of Thomas, who would write his own version of the life of Richard III, well after Cecily’s death. To a John Brown, she left ‘all such stuf as belongith to the kechyn in his keeping at my place at Baynardscastell in London’. She did not forget her servants, all received something – ‘all other gentilman that be daily waiting in my household … every grome … every page … every yoman’.

  The will gives a wonderful insight into the lifestyle of a late medieval duchess, and reads rather like opening her coffers and rifling through her wardrobe. Richard Boyvile and his wife, Griseld, were given Cecily’s chariot and horses, a purple satin gown with a train furred with ermine, a short purple gown lined with civet cat fur, a white damask kirtle, a gold spoon, a girdle decorated with a diamond, sapphire, amethyst and pearls, a little gold box with a diamond on top and a gold ‘pomeamber’ or pomander. Richard and Jane Brocas received more clothing, two gold-encased Angus Dei, which were wax talismans made from Easter candles, a string of white amber beads, another string of gold and coral, a coffer and a goblet. Nicholas and Jane Talbot were given a number of treasures: a gold spoon set with a ‘sharp diamond’, a variety of girdles made of gold or blue tissue, one set with columbines and diamonds, one with a buckle and pendant, also a gold hook with three roses, a ‘pomeamber’, of gold garnished with a diamond, six rubies and six pearls. As well as gowns, Anne Pinchbecke was left some cooking utensils: a little pot for malmsey wine and a ‘possettnett’ with a silver cover. Other friends received similar gowns, girdles, pendants and jewels, while Cecily left all her rings to John and Alice Metcalfe.