by Amy Licence
Edward’s second daughter was named after his mother. Cecily of York had already had a turbulent marital history by 1495, having been betrothed as a child to James IV of Scotland, then to his uncle Alexander Stewart, Duke of Albany. At some point after June 1482, Cecily was married to Ralph Scrope of Masham/Upsall, brother of Lord Thomas Scrope, a supporter of her uncle Richard III, whom Vergil referred to as ‘an obscure man’. Following the Battle of Bosworth, this match was annulled and she probably entered the household of Margaret Beaufort before being married to Beaufort’s half-brother, John, Viscount Welles, in 1487. She played a significant part in court ceremonies at the christening of her nephew Arthur and later bore the train of his wife. She delivered three children before being widowed in 1499. Her third marriage, though, was a quite different matter. Between 1502 and 1504, she became the wife of Thomas Kyme, a Lincolnshire knight, who was considered to be an unworthy match; this appears to have been entered into for love. As a result, she was banished from court and all her lands were confiscated. The intervention of Margaret Beaufort allowed many of these to be restored to her in time but she stayed away from court, living at East Standen on the Isle of Wight. Some sources suggest she bore Kyme two children, Richard and Margaret, before she died in 1507. Her final resting place is uncertain, with the Beaufort family books claiming she died at Hatfield, suggesting a burial local to there, while the chronicler Hall claimed that she lies in Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight.
Edward’s third surviving daughter was Anne of York. She had been betrothed as a child to Philip, son of Maximilian I, Archduke of Austria, but Edward’s death meant this was allowed to lapse. She was betrothed in 1484 to the grandson and namesake of Richard III’s supporter Thomas Howard, whom she married in 1495, making her the aunt of two of Henry VIII’s wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. She also played prominent roles in court ceremonies and bore at least one child. She was granted a number of lands by Henry VIII that had belonged to Richard of York’s mother, Anne Mortimer, but died the following year. She was buried first in Thetford Abbey but was later moved to the Howard Mausoleum at Framlingham.
Edward also planned an illustrious future for his daughter Catherine, the ninth of his children. Initially intended for a brother of Catherine of Aragon, she was betrothed to the Duke of Ross, a younger son of James III of Scotland, in a 1487 treaty that also allied her mother with the king. Before Cecily’s death, she married William Courtenay, later Earl of Devon, of Tiverton, Devon. She went on to bear three children but the family fell from favour. Having helped repel the threat to the Tudor throne from John de la Pole at Stoke in 1487, Courtenay backed a plot in favour of Pole’s younger brother Richard. For this he was attainted and imprisoned in 1504, finally being pardoned by Henry VIII in 1511, shortly before he died. Catherine chose not to remarry. Just weeks after Courtenay’s death, she took a vow of chastity and remained a widow until her death in 1527.
Catherine’s younger sister Bridget of York entered Dartford Priory as a child in the late 1480s. She became a nun there, taking the Augustinian vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and was in receipt of charity from her sister, the queen. She died around the year 1517 and was laid to rest in the priory.
Cecily’s surviving grandchildren from her daughter Elizabeth had far less good fortune. The daughter, Catherine, married Baron Stourton but produced no children, and her brother Humphrey entered the Church. However, the others suffered the consequences of being male heirs to the Yorkist throne and met with violent ends, following the death of their eldest brother, John, Richard III’s heir, at Stoke.
On John’s death in 1487, his brother Edmund took on the title of leading Yorkist claimant and married Margaret, daughter of Sir Richard Scrope. In 1501, he fled England to seek the assistance of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I in overthrowing the Tudor regime. However, he failed to get Maximilian’s support and the Emperor’s son Philip handed him over to England in 1506, on the promise that Henry VII would not harm him. Edmund was imprisoned on his return and Henry VII kept his word; however, his son, Henry VIII, was bound by no such promise and executed the earl in 1513.
The next de la Pole brother, William, reputedly earned the dubious honour of suffering the longest ever incarceration in the Tower of London. At the time that Edmund fled the country, he was imprisoned and remained there until his death in 1539. His youngest brother, Richard, known as the ‘White Rose’, fled to exile with Edmund but later moved to a place of greater safety in Hungary. In 1514, he was poised to invade England with an army of German missionaries but a French truce with Henry VIII stripped him of support. In 1523 he again planned an invasion, with the assistance of the Scots and French, but this never came to fruition. He was killed at the Battle of Pavia in 1525.
Edward, the son of George, Duke of Clarence, was equally dangerous to the Tudor regime as a male member of the York family. Cecily was still alive when Edward was imprisoned in the Tower as a boy of ten. In 1490, he was allowed to inherit his maternal grandfather’s title of Earl of Warwick, but soon after Cecily’s death his lineage got him in trouble. In 1499, the pretender Perkin Warbeck was incarcerated in the Tower following an attempt to escape from close supervision at the court of Henry VII. He was lodged close to Warwick and a plot was alleged to have sprung up between them, if not actively encouraged by their jailers to incriminate them. Warwick pleaded guilty at his trial that November and was executed a week later. His body was buried in the mausoleum of the Neville family at Bisham Priory, in Berkshire, which no longer survives.
Edward’s sister Margaret was married in 1487 to Henry VII’s cousin, Sir Richard Pole. They served in the short-lived household of Prince Arthur, with Pole acting as his chamberlain and Margaret as a lady-in-waiting to his young wife, Catherine. Margaret bore five children, and re-entered the royal household under Henry VIII. In the late 1530s, her sons rebelled against the king: Reginald fled the country, Geoffrey was pardoned and Henry was executed. Margaret was arrested on fabricated evidence and held in the Tower for over two years before being sent to the block at the age of sixty-seven.
Few of the places Cecily knew in her lifetime would be recognisable to her today. In the City of London, Westminster Palace, Baynard’s Castle and Sir John Fastolf’s house have long gone. All that remains of her place of retirement, Berkhamsted Castle, are a few thick walls, and there is even less of the castle where she lies buried at Fotheringhay. Ludlow still stands, with its window braces, fireplaces and doorways intact, but in order to find the one place that remains a testament to Cecily’s life it is necessary to return to its beginning. Advertised today as ‘one of England’s finest medieval castles’, Raby has remained in continual occupation since Cecily’s arrival, its interiors decorated and improved to chart the different centuries. Enthralling to Victorian and modern visitors alike, its ‘noble and extensive pile’ unites ‘great security and great antiquity’. Through the summer months, the castle throws open its gates to welcome twenty-first-century sightseers. Neville enthusiasts can pick out the dynastic badges surrounded by garters on the four-storeyed gateway and watch the sun setting behind the fourteenth-century Joan’s Tower.
Now ys my pore clene [clan] ovrthrown
Wher I was kynge and bear the belle
Than was I hye, now am I lowe
God amend wikked cownsel.
Sum tyme I rode in cloth of gold so redde
Throrow-oute Ynglond in many a town
Alas, I dare nowth schewe now my hede
Thys word ys turnyd clene uppe so down.2
Notes
Introduction
1. Halsted, Caroline Amelia, Richard III as Duke of Gloucester and King of England (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844).
Prologue, 1495
1. Paston Letters.
2. Cecily’s Will.
3. Ibid.
4. Ordinances.
5. Will.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Peachum’s Compleat Gent
leman (1634).
9. Ibid.
1 A Significant Year, 1415
1. From Anon., The Descyuyng of Mannes Membres MS Digby 102, quoted in Scattergood, V. J., Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Blandford Press, 1971). My translation.
2. Calendar of Patent Rolls (CPR) Henry V June 1415.
3. Riley, H. T., Memorials of London and London Life (1868) [Online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=585, accessed 21 January 2014].
4. The Agincourt Carol.
5. Niles, J. J., The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles (University of Kentucky Press, 1961).
6. Johnes, Thomas (trans.), The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet (London: William Smith, 1840).
7. Bordin, de Johannes, Henrici Quinti, Angliae Regis (London: Sumptibus Societatis, 1850).
8. Gairdner, James (ed.), Gregory’s Chronicle 1461–9 (London, 1876).
9. Monstrelet, Enguerrard, Chronicles (France: W. Smith, 1840).
10. Gregory.
11. Whittock, Martyn, A Brief History of Life in the Middle Ages (Robinson, 2009).
12. Harding, Vanessa and Laura Wright (eds), Bridge House Weekly Payments Book, Volume 2, London Bridge, Selected Accounts and Rentals 1381–1538 (1995) [Online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=1273, accessed 21 January 2014].
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Anon. (previously attributed to Lydgate, John), London Lickpenny.
17. Nichols, John Gough (ed.), London Pageants 1: An Account of Sixty Royal Processions and Entertainments in the city of London, chiefly extracted from contemporary writers (J. B. Nichols & Son, 1831).
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Andrews, Allen, Kings and Queens of England and Scotland (London: Marshall Cavendish Publications, 1976).
22. Nichols.
23. Bordin.
24. Usk, Adam of, Chronicon Adae de Usk 1377–1421 (trans. Edward Maunde Thompson) (London: H. Frowde, 1904).
25. Nichols.
26. Usk.
27. Nichols.
28. Gregory.
29. Nichols.
2 ‘Rose of Raby’, 1415–1429
1. Lydgate, John. From ‘On Forked Headdresses’ in Nicolas, Nicholas Harris, A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 (1827).
2. F. M. L., The Visitor’s Guide to Raby Castle, Barnard Castle and the neighbourhood. (London: Whittaker & Co., 1857).
3. Ibid.
4. Lewis, Samuel, A Topographical Dictionary of England (1840) [Online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=445, accessed 21 January 2014].
5. F. M. L.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. http://rootingforancestors.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/ralph-neville-1st-earl-westmorland-1364.html.
9. http://www.geni.com/people/Gilbert-de-Neville-c-1115/6000000003051190882.
10. http://www.geni.com/people/Gilbert-de-Neville/6000000002302694490.
11. Ibid.
12. Windeatt, B. A. (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe (Penguin, 2000).
13. Ibid.
14. Page, William (ed.), A History of the County of Durham, Volume 2, Victoria County History (1907) [Online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=241, accessed 21 January 2014].
15. http://www.stmarysstaindrop.org.uk/Staindrop/History.html.
16. Twemlow, J. A., Calendar of Papal Registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 7 1417–1431 (1906) [Online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=986, accessed 21 January 2014].
17. F. M. L.
18. Ibid.
19. The Regulations and Establishment of the Household of Henry Algernon Percy, the fifth Earl of Northumberland, at his castles of Wresill and Lekinfield in Northumberland in Yorkshire (London, 1770).
20. F. M. L.
21. Rickert, Edith (ed.), The Babees’ Book or Medieval Manners for the Young (Chatto & Windus, 1908).
22. Gregory’s Chronicle for 1421.
23. James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair (ed. Walter Skeat) (Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1911).
3 Duke of York, 1411–1429
1. ‘Antona’s Banks’ (1797), quoted in Bonney, H. K., Historical Notices in Reference to Fotheringhay (2011).
2. Rymer’s Foedera.
3. Ibid.
4. Calendar of Fine Rolls (CFR) Henry V, August 1415.
5. CFR Hen. V April 1416.
6. CFR Hen. V August 1415.
7. As researched by Paul Fairbrass.
8. CFR Hen V August 1415.
9. Ibid.
10. Edginton, Brian W., Charles Waterton: A Biography (James Clarke & Co., 1996).
11. The Peerage.
12. Scattergood.
13. Johnson, P. A., Duke Richard of York 1411–1460 (Oxford Historical Monographs, 1988).
14. Calendar of Close Rolls (CCR), Henry VI, Volume 1, membrane dated 1423.
15. CCR Henry VI, November 1426.
16. Ibid.
17. CCR Hen. VI August 1431.
18. Griffiths, R. A., The Reign of King Henry VI (Ernest Benn, 1981).
19. Paston Letters.
20. Griffiths.
21. Paston Letters.
22. Ibid.
23. A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Governance of the Royal Household, made in divers reigns from King Edward III to King William and Queen Mary (London: Society of Antiquities, 1790).
24. Bentley, Samuel (ed.), Excerpta Historica (1831).
25. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
26. Thank you to DeAnn Smith for her very helpful discussions with me regarding the location of Westminster marriages.
27. Gregory’s Chronicle.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
4 His Young Duchess, 1429–1437
1. ‘The Assembly of Ladies’, Anonymous medieval poem, ed. Derek Pearsall, University of Rochester online TEAMS texts.
2. Shahar, Shulamith, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (Methuen, 1983).
3. Licence, Amy, In Bed with the Tudors (Amberley, 2012).
4. Amt, Emilie, Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 1993).
5. ‘The Chronicle of the Grey Friars: Henry VI’, Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London: Camden Society Old Series, 53 (1852), pp. 15–21.
6. CCR Hen. VI Feb 1430.
7. Ibid.
8. Griffiths.
9. Ibid.
10. Amt.
11. DNB.
12. CCR Hen. VI May 1432.
13. CCR Hen. VI May 1433.
14. Ibid.
15. CCR Hen. VI May 1433.
16. Barbican Research Associates
17. CCR Hen. VI May 1433.
18. Ibid.
19. Crawford, Anne, The Yorkists: The History of a Dynasty (Hambledon Continuum, 2007).
20. CCR Hen. VI July 1435.
21. Ordinances.
22. http://www.winchelsea.net/visiting/winchelsea_history_pt14.htm.
23. Rymer’s Foedera.
24. Cook, Sir Theodore Andrea, The Story of Rouen (J. M. Dent, 1899).
25. Spear, David S., ‘Rouen Médiéval: Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology at Rouen’, Persée, 45 (1995), pp. 460–462.
26. Nicolas, Sir Harris (ed.), Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England (POPCE), V, 15 Henry IV to 21 Henry VI (PRO, 1835).
27. Johnson, P. A.
5 Becoming a Mother, 1438–1442
1. From ‘The Chastity of Wives’, John Audelay.
2. Nicolas.
3. Ibid.
4. Griffiths.
5. Johnson.
6. POPCE Volume V, Nov 1440, 15 Henry IV to 21 Henry VI.
7. Griffiths.
8. POPCE Volume V, March 1441.
9. Ibid., May 1441.
10. Ibid.
&
nbsp; 11. Gristwood, Sarah, Blood Sisters (Harper Press, 2012).
12. Ibid.
13. Jones, Michael, Bosworth 1485 (The History Press, 2003).
14. Wilkinson, Josephine, Richard III: The Young King to Be (Amberley, 2009).
15. Scattergood.
16. Chiquart, Maistre, Du Fait de Cuisine (trans. Elizabeth Cook).
17. National Archives.
18. Dufferwiel, Martin, Durham: Over 1,000 Years of History and Legend (Mainstream, 1996).
19. Philips, Kim M., Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England 1270–1540 (Manchester University Press, 2003).
20. See Gregory’s Chronicle for 1441 and Griffiths, whose footnote 102, p. 477 also cites Brut p. 477 and Flenley, R., ‘London and Foreign Merchants in the reign of Henry VI’, English Historical Review, XXV (1910), pp. 644–655.
21. Jones.
6 The Question of Edward, 1442–1445
1. Gregory, Philippa, The White Queen (Touchstone, 2009).
2. Griffiths.
3. Stevenson, Joseph (ed.), Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France in the Reign of Henry VI, King of England (Longman Green, 1841).
4. Weightman, Christine, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, 1446–1503 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989).
5. Ross, Charles, Edward IV (Yale University Press, 1997).
6. Stevenson.
7. Griffiths.
8. Scattergood.
9. Griffiths.
10. Johnson.
7 Loss of Focus, 1446–1452
1. Scattergood.
2. CPR Hen. VI Oct. 1446.
3. Shahar.
4. CPR Hen. VI July 1447.
5. Crawford, The Yorkists.
6. Ibid.
7. CPR Hen. VI May 1447.
8. Johnson.
9. Oxford DNB entry ‘Mulso family’.
10. Johnson.
11. Ibid.
12. Griffiths.
13. Johnson.
14. Ibid.
15. Harvey, John H., ‘Westminster Abbey: The Infirmarer’s Garden’, Journal of Garden History, 2(2) (1992).
