Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (17 page)

Indeed, from the day York was removed from sanctuary, Gloucester and Buckingham “no longer acted in secret but openly manifested their intentions”
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—and their intentions boded no good for Elizabeth and her family.

Richard was clearly determined to prevent the Wydeville-dominated boy king from reigning. He later alleged that on June 8, someone—Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, according to Commines—had
“discovered to the Duke of Gloucester” that before Edward IV married Elizabeth Wydeville in 1464, he “had been formerly in love with a beautiful young lady and had promised her marriage, on condition that he might lie with her. The lady consented and, as the bishop affirmed, he married them when nobody was present but they two and himself. His fortune depending on the court, he did not discover it, and persuaded the lady likewise to conceal it, which she did, and the matter remained a secret.”
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Any bishop or cleric would have known that a ceremony of marriage conducted without any witnesses present was invalid, but even if Stillington had officiated, it seems strange that it had taken him nearly twenty years to speak out, for the existence of a previous secret marriage rendered the second union bigamous, with serious implications for the legitimacy of the children born of it and the royal succession; and there were implications too for the safety of the King’s immortal soul,
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which should have exercised the bishop’s mind. But Stillington was no saint—he had fathered bastards, rarely visited his diocese, and switched loyalties like a weathercock, according to which king was ruling, acquiring pardon after pardon along the way. What’s more, in 1472 he had sworn allegiance to Edward, Prince of Wales, as Edward IV’s “very and undoubted heir”—a strange thing to do if he knew the boy was not legitimate.
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He was therefore not a reliable witness.

The lady Edward was said to have married was Eleanor Butler, daughter of the great John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, a military hero of the Hundred Years War. She had married Thomas Butler, heir to Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, but was widowed before 1461, and died in a Norwich convent before June 30, 1468. It is highly unlikely that Edward ever did go through any ceremony of marriage with her. English sources mention only a precontract, a promise before witnesses to marry; once it was cemented by sexual intercourse, it became as binding in the eyes of the Church as a marriage. By the fourteenth century the Church had reluctantly allowed that such clandestine marriages—with no calling of banns or blessing by a priest at the church door—were valid, but only if the promise had been made before two witnesses, which the law required. In practice, many couples considered themselves married on the basis of a promise alone,
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but there is no good
evidence that Edward IV made any promises to Eleanor Butler, or considered himself precontracted to her. Only after his death did Gloucester assert that he “stood married and troth-plight” to the lady, “with whom [he] had made a precontract of matrimony.”
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Significantly, Eleanor Butler, a member of a powerful aristocratic family, never joined the chorus of protest when the news broke that the King had married Elizabeth Wydeville, who was of lower rank than herself; nor did her family ever defend her honor when the alleged precontract was made public or later confirmed in Parliament. People were not afraid to speak out against the Wydeville marriage, so there is no reason why she and her kin could not have taken advantage of that and enlisted the support of Warwick, who was affronted by the King’s marriage. Moreover, as a notably pious lady,
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she surely would not have allowed a situation in which her husband was putting his immortal soul at risk to continue. Finally her nephew, Gilbert Talbot, was to fight for Henry Tudor, who had vowed to marry Elizabeth of York—which Talbot surely would not have done if he believed Elizabeth were illegitimate.

Furthermore, if Elizabeth Wydeville had married Edward IV in good faith, not knowing that he was already under contract to another lady, her children could have been declared legitimate, and her marriage regularized, on Eleanor Butler’s death in 1468; then the legitimacy of her sons, who were born later, would never have been in doubt. It seems inconceivable that Edward IV, who lived in an age in which lawful title to the crown was bloodily disputed, would knowingly have made a bigamous marriage, or would not have taken steps to ensure that his heirs’ legitimacy could never be disputed. But Gloucester apparently accepted this new evidence as sufficient to render his brother’s marriage invalid and his nephews and nieces bastards and unfit to inherit the crown or anything else.
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Commines is the only source to name Stillington as Gloucester’s informant: he is not mentioned by English writers, so Commines may have been reporting speculation or gossip from diplomatic circles abroad. If Edward IV had indeed married Eleanor Butler in secret, he is hardly likely to have chosen his Keeper of the Privy Seal to perform the ceremony,
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but an obscure priest such as the one who had married
him to Elizabeth Wydeville. And as Commines reports that the bishop had officiated at an actual marriage, rather than a precontract, and without witnesses present, the rest of his story must be called into question.

Nevertheless, Stillington’s possible involvement has been the subject of much debate. It was he who had persuaded Clarence to submit to Edward IV in 1471.
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In 1475, after being dismissed as Chancellor of England, he had retired to his diocese of Wells, which bordered on Clarence’s lands in Somerset. In 1478, shortly after Clarence’s execution, Stillington had been sent to the Tower for uttering words “prejudicial to the King and his estate,” but was released three months later after paying a fine.
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What he had said to give offense is not recorded, but if it impugned the legitimacy of the King or his children, then the punishment was lenient. Furthermore, he defended himself, and it was recorded that he had “done nothing contrary to his oath of fealty, as he has shown before the King and certain lords.”

From such fragmentary evidence it has sometimes been conjectured that Stillington had entered into a secret alliance with Clarence and confided to him the tale of the precontract. That would have been political dynamite, of course, whether true or not. But Clarence never used the precontract story against Edward IV. He was ready to make wild and subversive claims, such as the one about Elizabeth Wydeville having poisoned his wife, and he had been quick to impugn Edward’s own legitimacy, so it follows that he would not have hesitated to act on explosive evidence such as this.

If there were allegations about a precontract in 1478, it would have been remarkable for Gloucester not to have heard of them. If he did, they did not undermine his loyalty to his brother, nor did he attempt to have the matter clarified. He had not used them against the Wydevilles back in April and May, even when fabricating evidence against them, notably falsely accusing the Wydevilles of stockpiling arms to use against him. Now, facing the likelihood of retribution from the young Edward V when the King achieved his majority, and determined at all costs to prevent the Wydevilles from returning to power, Gloucester probably fabricated the whole story, in all likelihood with Stillington’s assistance; Commines’s mention of him (out of all the bishops of
England) and his later prosecution by Henry VII suggests he was involved in some way. A yearbook of 1488 asserts it was Stillington who later drew up the petition in which the lords and commons beseeched Richard to accept the crown of England.
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However, he received no tangible rewards from Richard.

Given Edward IV’s reputation with women, the precontract tale may have sounded sufficiently convincing—at least to Gloucester’s supporters. But the sudden emergence of this information, surfacing at a crucially convenient time for the duke, is not only suspicious but also astonishing. Clearly many regarded it merely as “the color for” his seizing the throne—“this act of usurpation,” as the Croyland chronicler scathingly put it—or what More calls a “convenient pretext”; and it is obvious that many continued to regard Edward IV’s children as the rightful heirs of the House of York. Croyland, for one, insisted that the whole precontract story was false: “there was not a person but what knew very well who was the sole mover of such seditious and disgraceful proceedings.” And, of course, both Edward IV and Eleanor Butler were dead, and could not confirm or deny the allegations.

Gloucester’s informant was said to have produced “instruments, authentic doctors, proctors and notaries of the law” as well as the “depositions of divers witnesses,” none of which survive or were publicly produced at the time. If this evidence had been as compelling as Gloucester claimed, it is odd that he did not immediately act upon it, or refer it to an ecclesiastical court, as the law required, for no secular court had jurisdiction over such cases. Probably he realized that the story would not stand up, and knew that proof of it did not exist. Initially he ordered Dr. Ralph Shaa, the Lord Mayor’s brother, to preach at Paul’s Cross on the text “Bastard slips shall not take root,” and had him rake up Clarence and Warwick’s stale propaganda about Edward IV being “conceived in adultery.”
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Elsewhere in London, other clerics, similarly primed, were repeating the same thing.

A shocked Mancini wrote that Gloucester “had so corrupted the preachers of God’s word that they did not blush to say in their sermons to the people, without the slightest regard for decency or religion, King Edward IV’s offspring should be disposed of at once, since he had no right to be King, and no more had they. For they claimed that Edward
was conceived in adultery and bore no resemblance to the late Duke of York, although he had been passed off as his son. Rather, Gloucester, who looked just like his father, should come to the throne as the rightful successor.” That was no more believed in 1483 than it had been in 1469, and Shaa found his homily falling on deaf ears. The Londoners were unconvinced: “such as favored ye matter were few in number.”
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Worse was to come. The council had refused to sanction the executions of Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, and Haute, so Gloucester, “of his own authority as protector,” had sent orders to Pontefract for them to suffer execution,
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on the patently false charge that they had plotted the death of the protector.
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There was “more of will than justice” involved,
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for they were beheaded on June 25 “without any form of trial being observed”—another act of tyranny, theirs being “the second innocent blood that was shed” as a result of Gloucester’s coups.
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These executions prompted a rising in Kent by Elizabeth Wydeville’s outraged kinsmen, the Hautes, and although abortive, it was sufficient to prove to Gloucester that the Wydevilles were still a force to be reckoned with, even though their teeth had been drawn. Tidings of the deaths of her uncle and half brother must have impacted badly on Elizabeth in sanctuary. She would have had to deal with her mother’s fresh grief and her new fears for the future.

Influenced probably by the incredulous reaction to Shaa’s sermon, or perhaps by his mother’s protests, only now did Gloucester publicly proclaim the illegitimacy of his brother’s children. On June 25, 1483, at the Guildhall, in the presence of the lords (who had been summoned to Parliament), the Lord Mayor, and the citizens of London, Buckingham presented an address to the protector “in a certain roll of parchment,” asserting for the first time “that the sons of King Edward were bastards,”
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on the grounds that Edward had been “legally contracted to another wife” at the time of his marriage to Elizabeth Wydeville.
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At this, a low whispering broke out, “as of a swarm of bees.” As the next in line of succession, and the only “certain and uncorrupted blood of Richard, Duke of York”—Clarence’s heir Warwick barred because of his father’s attainder—Gloucester was “entreated” to accept the
crown.
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The lords, who had been ordered to bring only small escorts to London, found themselves intimidated by the presence of “unheard of terrible numbers” (estimated at four to five thousand) of Gloucester’s and Buckingham’s armed retainers in the City, and they and the commons unanimously signaled their approval. Some might have regarded a grown man with a proven record of service in government and in the field of battle as preferable to a child ruler anway.
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Even so, unsupported allegations about Edward V’s legitimacy and an address made before an assembly of nobles were no substitute for a ruling by an ecclesiastical court, and were a very shaky foundation on which to base a claim to the throne.
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All the same, the next day, at Baynard’s Castle, Gloucester was entreated to bow to the lords’ petition; with a show of reluctance, he agreed and was proclaimed King Richard III.

What was so striking, and probably shocking, about Richard’s usurpation was that where previous kings—Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI—had been deposed because of their bad government, Edward V did not even have a chance to prove his ability, while the speed of Gloucester’s two coups and his ascent to the throne strongly suggested that he had all along meant to oust his nephew. Moreover, Edward had been deposed, and he and his siblings branded bastards, on highly dubious grounds. These rapidly unfolding events must have been horrifying to Elizabeth and her mother and sisters. In an age in which the illegitimacy rate may have been as low as 2 percent,
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and bastards were legally barred from inheriting property, the loss of her status would have been a terrible blow, coming so soon after the death of her father and the curtailment of her freedom. And now the man whom her mother feared most was king, and they were all at his mercy.