This malicious prelate smothered his revenge in his heart near twenty years together, but it recoiled upon himself, for he had a son, of whom he was extremely fond and to whom King Richard designed to give a plentiful estate, and to have married him to one of the young ladies whom he had declared illegitimate (who is now Queen of England, and has two fine children). This young gentleman, being on broad ship by commission from King Richard, was taken upon the coast of Normandy, and upon a dispute between those that took him, he was brought before the Parliament at Paris, put into Petit Chastellet, and suffered to lie there till he was starved to death.”
What we are to make of de Commines’ latter observations on Stillington’s purported son and a marriage to Elizabeth of York I leave, at this time, for future deliberations. Whether and how this would have acted as a reward for Stillington himself is difficult to decipher. However, there is more here concerning Stillington as the source, and especially if de Commines has been considered the sole source of this information for some prolonged interval of time. In particular, we need here to look at de Commines’ specific use of language. A careful reading of the two quotations seems to indicate quite clearly that Stillington was the original source of information concerning the pre-contract. In fact, we read that, ‘This Bishop discovered to the Duke of Gloucester …’: the use of the term ‘discovered’54 here seems specifically to imply that it was Stillington’s voluntary act that revealed the information to Richard. However, when we look a little further into the same text, more is revealed about this phraseology. Shortly after this quotation, de Commines used the term in the following quote: ‘His fortune depending upon the court, he did not discover it, and persuaded the lady likewise to conceal it, which she did, and the matter remained a secret.’ Here, the use is of the same word, but now we can read into this a different interpretation. In this sentence, the word ‘discover’ can mean advertise or broadcast the fact and in actuality it aligns much more with the modern use of the word uncover.
As we read further into de Commines’ two passages, we also find that the Bishop ‘assisted’ Richard, in that he ‘affirmed’ the reality of the pre-contract. In the circumstances described, Richard ‘caused two of his brother’s daughters to be degraded and declared illegitimate, upon a pretence which he justified by means of the Bishop of Bath.’ Here we have yet another description in which the bishop ‘justified’ Richard’s action. I do not wish to belabour the point beyond what a reasonable interpretation will bear. However, the passages which describe Stillington as the primary source of the pre-contract, as opposed to someone who confirmed that the pre-contract had occurred, and whose authority was then employed by Richard to achieve a more general acceptance of the fact of the bastardisation, is not completely unequivocal. It can be interpreted in a number of potentially differing ways. Therefore, from the text alone, the idea that de Commines proves the source of a pristine accusation is not quite as clear as the traditional story might have us think.
However, there are other objections to de Commines as a source in general, beyond his own words. It has been noted that de Commines was ‘unreliable,’ inaccurate and slanderous toward ‘English internal affairs.’55 In respect of his own reporting, Lander has suggested that ‘[Armstrong] points out that [de] Commines himself stressed his ignorance of English affairs.’56 Thus we have a source here of doubtful accuracy and this doubt is actually expressed by the original author himself. Indeed, it has further been suggested that de Commines may have even inferred Stillington’s role here from what he was subsequently told about the Parliament of Richard which convened in early 1484, and some evidence he adduced from what was reported there. Furthermore, we must always remember that, of the three present at the pre-contract ceremony, Stillington was the only one alive at the time in question. Thus, it may be possible that de Commines inferred this role as the source of the revelation to Stillington as opposed to actually knowing of his actions directly. If this is so, it renders de Commines’ identification as Stillington as the source of the information potentially doubtful. In contrast, I contend here that Stillington only acted to confirm what Richard actually put to him. In providing this confirmation, Stillington subsequently became the public face of the pre-contract revelation. What I am questioning is whether he was the original source for this knowledge. It is evident that Wood also expresses doubts about Commines and indeed Croyland also as contemporary to the events of June. He noted, ‘It is clear that Commines and Croyland both base their accounts not on the events of June but on the act of succession passed the following January which contains what is alleged to be a copy of the June petition.’57 It is worth remembering that the Speaker of that latter Parliament, and a skilled and able lawyer himself, was one William Catesby. To garner further understanding of the accusation against Stillington we now need to turn to the other evidence that Hammond identified and subsequently to the reactions of Henry VII upon his assumption of the throne in the early afternoon of 25 August 1485.
Stillington as the Source: Later Evidence
Let us now return to Hammond’s observations on other citations which identified Stillington as the source of the pre-contract and explore exactly what these respective sources said. In his brief note, which I have reproduced in full here, Hammond states that:
It has been said that Commines is the sole contemporary source connecting Bishop Stillington with the pre-contract of Edward to Eleanor Butler. This is not in fact so, since from the contemporary report of a discussion of Titulus Regius by the Justices in the Exchequer Chamber at the beginning of the reign of Henry VII, and by the Lords in Parliament, it is clear that they thought that Stillington was the author, ‘the Bishop of Bath made the bill’ (see James Ramsey, Lancaster and York, Vol. 2, 1892, p. 488 and S.B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century, 1936, p. 266, both citing the year book, Hilary Term, Henry VII, Appendix No. 75). The Lords thought he should be summoned before them, as the author of this notorious bill, but the King refused, saying he had pardoned him. It seems clear that his contemporaries thought the Bishop had told Richard about the pre-contract, or had invented it, since they would surely not have been so concerned if they had merely believed him to have drafted the bill on the orders of the King.58
This seeks to establish that, although de Commines may have been the traditional source for the accusation that Stillington revealed the precontract to Richard, it was by no means the only one and indeed if the citations in Ramsey and Chrimes to the same (almost contemporary) source are correct, this latter source59 may have even been closer to events in time than de Commines’ actual writing. So, let us explore this source in further detail. The observation by Hammond basically encapsulates what Chrimes has to say on the matter. Chrimes’ last sentence is however, a little more informative. He states:
All the justices in the exchequer chamber, by command of the king, discussed the reversal and destruction of the act which bastardized the children of Edward IV and his wife. This act was considered so scandalous that they were unwilling to rehearse it, and advised against its recital in the repealing act in order to avoid the perpetuation of its terms. ‘Nota icy bien le policy’ wrote the reporter. ‘Nota ensement,’ he continued, ‘que il (i.e., the offensive act) ne puissoit ester pris hors del record sans act de la parliament pur l’indeminity et jeopardie d’eux qui avoient les records in lour gard.’ The authority of parliament was needed to discharge them. The lords in the parliament chamber thought well of this counsel, and some of them wished to summon the bishop of Bath (Stillington), who had made the false bill, to answer for it, but the king said he had pardoned him and did not wish to proceed against him.
Ramsay is even terser on this matter and simply states, ‘de Comines’ assertions that the troth of Edward and Eleanor had been received by the Bishop of Bath was doubtless based on the mere fact that the case was got up by Stillington.’ Ramsay cites the same source as that which was used later by Chrimes also. It should be carefully noted th
at these accusations concern the so-called ‘Bill,’ referring directly to the Titulus Regius, which was the subject of the conversation by the referenced lords. Stillington is accused of authorship here, although Ramsay goes further and accuses Stillington of the complete fabrication of the whole episode. It remains crucial to reiterate that this original source, used by both later authors, did not accuse Stillington of revealing the pre-contract to Richard. Rather, it accused him of authoring the bill in the Parliament of 1484, which took place some eight months after the events of June 1483 at the Tower. Thus neither of the close-to-contemporary sources that we have unequivocally points to Stillington as Richard’s informant. It is true that both sources heavily implicate him in these events, but the question of whether he was the actual source remains, I suggest, unresolved by these documents. The indication that Henry VII ‘did not wish to proceed against him’ is, in my view, vitally important to the interpretation that we may impose on the actions of Robert Stillington at this time.
The conclusion here is that Stillington certainly had something to do with the bill, that being the Titulus Regius of Richard III of the Parliament of early 1484. It may well have been this document which was also the basis of de Commines’ assertions. However, this latter reference, as we have seen, certainly does not unequivocally accuse Stillington of revealing the pre-contract to Richard in the summer of 1483, but only of complicity in the bill passed in Parliament in early 1484. Thus from these initial sources of information, it is at best a tentative assertion that Stillington acted in the manner traditionally ascribed to him by historical commentators such as Markham.
The revelation of the pre-contract and its implication was clearly no secret some few decades later. The cited example of this is to be found in the letter of Eustace Chapuys, an ambassador to the court of Henry VIII. He wrote to his master, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, on 16 December 1528. In this missive, he was concerned with Henry VIII’s treatment of his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, later Elizabeth I. In the course of expressing this concern he was to hark back to past times. Specifically, he recorded that:
… they say that you [Charles V] have a better title than the present King, who only claims by his mother, who was declared by sentence of the bishop of Bath [Stillington] a bastard, because Edward had espoused another wife before the mother of Elizabeth of York.60
The ‘they’ referred to in the quote of Chapuys’ is his attribution of the disgruntled populace of England, unhappy with a number of the policies of the then current administration. By implication, he was suggesting that circulation of the story of the pre-contract was one of public knowledge and public rumour. However, it is probably the case that Chapuys’ knowledge was derived from the earlier observations of de Commines. After all, these two were countrymen and it is possible, if not probable, that Chapuys had Comines’ text to hand. Of course, even if this were true, it does not necessarily mean that there were not public mutterings and murmurings. It is perhaps one of the sources of the great Tudor cruelty that they were so fragilely established on the throne and were as a result spiteful, vengeful and oppressive of all those that they considered possible rivals, even including the old Countess of Salisbury.
However, there is one further wrinkle to this whole issue of Stillington as the source and it is derived from the observations of the Croyland Chronicle. Again, it is critical here to repeat the original words since they, like the other citations, are so important to follow accurately. Croyland said:
and on the 26th day of the same month of June, Richard the protector, claimed for himself the government of the kingdom with the name and title of king; and on the same day in the great hall of Westminster he thrust himself into the marble chair. The pretext of this intrusion and for taking possession in this way was as follows. It was put forward, by means of a supplication contained in a certain parchment roll, that King Edward’s sons were bastards, by submitting that he had been precontracted to a certain Lady Eleanor Boteler before he married Queen Elizabeth and, further, that the blood of his other brother, George, duke of Clarence, had been attainted so that, at the time, no certain and uncorrupt blood of the lineage of Richard, duke of York, was to be found except in the person of the said Richard, duke of Gloucester. At the end of this roll, therefore, on behalf of the lords and commonalty of the kingdom, he was besought to assume his lawful rights. It was put about then that this roll originated in the North whence so many people came to London although there was no-one who did not know the identity of the author (who was in London all the time) of such sedition and infamy.
Again, by tradition, this unnamed author has been assumed to be Stillington. It is my contention that the individual ‘who was in London all the time’ was Catesby, and not Stillington. As we have seen, the traditional sources which name Stillington refer to him as having made the bill. Like Wood, I see these references emanating from his role in the Act of Parliament. The ‘parchment roll’ of 26 June is a creation I believe it possible to attribute to Catesby’s hand.
When was the Pre-contract Revealed?
Given this timetable of events, a very pertinent question arises here, and I shall use Mowat’s words, who put it so succinctly:
Another pertinent question stems from the fact that those authors who accept that it was Stillington’s disclosure of the pre-contract which sparked off events leading to Richard’s assumption of the crown, assume that he revealed his secret early in June 1483: why did he delay so long after Edward IV’s death? Is it possible that the Bishop himself was doubtful whether a contract and/or marriage entered into secretly, and witnessed only by himself, was a proper legal bar to the Woodville marriage?61
Given the traditional story, let us take for the moment the premise that Stillington was the source of the pre-contract revelation. Although I will again conclude by disputing this premise, for the sake of the argument here let us say temporarily that this is so. The question then naturally arises, as Mowat indicates, when did the actual revelation take place? In this, one relatively modern historian, Sir Clements Markham, offers what appears to be a candidate date which he identifies as the Council meeting of 8 June 1483. Again, it is important to hear Markham in his own words.62 He says:
Up to this time affairs had gone smoothly. On June 5th the Protector had given detailed orders for his nephew’s coronation on the 22nd, and had even caused letters of summons to be issued for the attendance of forty esquires who were to receive the knighthood of the Bath on the occasion. But now there came a change. Dr. Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, apparently on June 8, revealed to the Council the long-concealed fact that Edward IV was contracted to Lady Eleanor Butler, widow of a son of Lord Butler of Sudeley, and daughter of the first Earl of Shrewsbury, before he went through a secret marriage ceremony with the Lady Grey.
I can find no source earlier than Markham which identifies this as the crucial day on which the pre-contract was revealed. But it is worth noting that Markham is only saying ‘apparently’ here, and states no evidentiary basis for his speculation at this point, other, presumably, than his own intuition as to the timing of events. However, Markham’s immediate intuition is directly countered by Kendall’s observation, which, in contrast, is backed up by fact. Kendall reports: ‘Writing on June 9th to an acquaintance in the country, Simon Stallworth, a servant of the Lord Chancellor’s reports that there is nothing new since he has last written, sometime before May 19th.’ Now we must weigh in the balance here Markham’s intuition against the null evidence implied in the Stallworth letter. In my view, the preponderance of the evidence that we have must argue against Markham’s speculation. One further point also militates against the Markham proposition. The 8th was a Sunday and in other citations the Council meeting is purported to have occurred a day later, on Monday 9th.63 This interpretation might actually strengthen Markham’s proposition, but again the Stallworth letter is somewhat against it. There is, however, the small point of the cessation of the writs of the Privy Seal that aga
in may be indicative here. We cannot thus rule out the possibility of the revelation taking place on the 9th out of hand. However, we must say that case for the 8th is doubtful and, similarly, the case for the 9th at present can at best be considered unproven. However, there is more.
A little further into Markham’s text we read what appears to be the definitive passage. It reads: ‘There was a prolonged sitting of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in the Council Chamber at Westminster, on June 9th Bishop Stillington brought in instruments, authentic doctors, proctors, and notaries of the law with depositions and diverse witnesses.’64 The authority that Markham cites for this observation is Grafton.65 At first blush this would seem to put paid to all that I have espoused in the present text. For if Stillington revealed the pre-contract to the Council meeting on the 9th, there can be no way that it was actually Catesby performing this self-same function on the 13th. However, when we delve a little deeper here we find an instance of one of the most frustrating aspects of Ricardian research. For it turns out that the original passage in Grafton’s Chronicle is some form of fictionalised account of a conversation between the Duke of Buckingham and Bishop Morton wherein, parenthetically, the duke is highly eulogistic of the bishop and his abilities. Upon closer reading, we find that the ‘he’ referred to in the passage cited by Markham is actually Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and not Stillington at all. Also, Grafton provides no dating of this meeting. Thus Markham transposes the individual involved and derives the dating from his own unsupported interpretation. This form of unbound speculation, if not outright misidentification, makes subsequent interpretation more than difficult,66 especially if one accepts Markham’s statements at face value. I find in light of these facts that I am justified in rejecting what Markham has suggested. I fail to find any creditable evidence here that Stillington presented anything to the Council on that date, or indeed at any other time. I have thus proposed here that the revelation actually took place on the morning of the 13th, some four or five days later, and that the informer involved was not Stillington at all but Catesby. I have further suggested that Catesby benefitted enormously from his act. However, supposing the traditional account to be correct and that Richard owed his throne to Stillington, let us see how the bishop was rewarded for this signal and indeed unique service to his new king.
Richard III and the Murder in the Tower Page 14
