Richard III and the Murder in the Tower (6 page)

If we have the date of her birth correct, and we can be reasonably certain of the general period, then Eleanor’s subsequent marriage to Sir Thomas Butler (the son of Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley), which occurred around late 1449 or early 1450,
¹⁰
would have seen Eleanor as a bride at the age of just thirteen or fourteen years of age. It has been speculated that Eleanor would have then lived in the house of her in-laws until the age of sixteen, when the marriage would have been consummated sometime in 1452, or possibly early 1453.
¹¹
Indeed, in early May of 1453, Eleanor is mentioned in a document in which Ralph, Lord Sudeley presented a deed of gift to his son (Thomas) and his wife (referred to as Eleanor, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury) and their legitimate heirs with the manors of Griff, Fenny Compton and Burton Dassett (sometimes noted as Great Dorsett or Chipping Dorsett after the market held there). All of these were in the county of Warwickshire, although Eleanor apparently held some other lands in Wiltshire also.
¹²
As we shall see, geographical issues play almost as crucial a role in the present proposition as those of history itself and so it is important to confirm here that the manors of Fenny Compton and Burton Dassett (or Great Dorsett) adjoin each other in south-west Warwickshire. While it has been a somewhat difficult search, the latter manor of Griff (or Grieve), lies approximately twenty miles north of Great Dorset in the vicinity of the suburbs of modern day Coventry, just south of Nuneaton. The map of the two adjacent properties of Fenny Compton and Burton Dassett is shown in Figure 8.

Perhaps this gift followed on the consummation of the marriage? Although we do not know this for certain, it may very well have been around this time in 1453 that Eleanor and Thomas
¹³
set up their own household, most probably on the manor lands which they had been granted. At this time, Great Dorsett was a much more substantive gift than it might appear today. Earlier, Henry III had granted permission to hold a market there every Friday and an annual fair of three days from the eve of St James. Such was the prosperity of the town that in 1332 Great Dorsett had paid taxes to the king’s treasury of almost one-quarter of those paid by the whole of the city of Coventry.
¹⁴
We do not know what the equivalent revenues were at the time of Eleanor’s possession. However, it would appear that this was still a major centre and the manor of Great Dorsett most probably included all of the present-day settlements of Burton Dassett, Avon Dassett, Little Dassett, Temple Herdewyke and Northend. This being so, the gift of Lord Sudelely to his son and daughter-in-law certainly appears to have been an appropriately generous one. Parenthetically, this property was later broken up by the actions of Sir Edward Belknap who, at the very end of the fifteenth century, evicted sixty people in his conversion to pasture. Sir Edward’s actions, although purportedly logical at the time, seem to have spelled the end of Great Dorsett’s fame. The actual village of Burton Dassett is now only a few farms and farm buildings around All Saints’ church, and the most evident landmark of the settlement is the tower on the Dassett Hills (now a country park), which can be seen from the nearby motorway, the M40 (
see
Figure 31).

Around the time that Eleanor and her husband were gifted the property, she would have been approximately seventeen years of age. Thomas Butler, her husband, as best we know was in his early thirties. Let us accept then, as a reasonable possibility, that Eleanor Butler (née Talbot) was now the young and inexperienced lady of the manor. It seems reasonable to assume that they would have taken up their respective roles as the lord and lady of this demesne, which would certainly appear to have been their largest and most profitable property (
see
Appendix III notes on the Manor of Great Dorsett). Indeed, there is an intriguing possibility that one of the major charities of the area could have been associated with Eleanor.
¹⁵
It is important here to consider for a moment what Eleanor’s social life would have been like at this time. To help understand a critical social connection with an extended part of her family, I again have to delve further back in time and explore her relations within the Talbot family and especially the youngest sister of Eleanor’s father, Alice Talbot.

Earlier, I noted that Richard Talbot (4th Baron Talbot of Goodrich) had a total of nine children with his wife Ankaret (Le)Strange. The first of these was Eleanor’s father, John Talbot (1st Earl of Shrewsbury). However, the last of the nine, and thus Talbot’s youngest sister, was Alice Talbot, who married Sir Thomas Barre. Their only child, a daughter, was Joan (or Jane) Barre. In terms of familial relationship, Joan was Eleanor’s first cousin with the common grandfather and grandmother in Richard Talbot and Ankaret Strange. However, in terms of age, the two women were separated by a number of years. To the best of present knowledge, Joan was born about 1422, with her first marriage, to Sir Kynard de la Bere, taking place some time around late 1430s, since their son Richard was recorded as being born in 1440 (
see
Figure 9), by which time Joan would have been perhaps eighteen. However, following the death of her first husband, Joan re-married, this time to Sir William Catesby of Ashby St Ledgers (
see
Figure 7), to the best of our knowledge sometime around 10 June 1453.
¹⁶
It was a second marriage for both of them, she being approximately thirty years of age and he somewhat older at approximately thirty-three years old. Sir William had been previously married to Phillippa Bishopston, the daughter of William Bishopston and Phillippa Willcott, and by her he had already three children, two girls and one boy. Phillippa was recorded as dying on 7 December 1446,
¹⁷
when the young boy, also William, was only six or seven years old. He would have been born around 1440, and was the oldest of Phillippa’s children. He was, of course, ‘the Cat’ of Colyngbourne doggerel, and represents the key figure in the present work. Following his 1453 marriage to Joan Barre, William’s father, Sir William, had three more children, two boys and a girl, the latter of whom died as a child.
¹⁸

Given the dates involved, it appears that the young William Catesby was still a child and just about into his teen years when he gained his new stepmother. In contrast, Eleanor was about seventeen years old and, by the standards of the day, almost a full adult when her first cousin married Sir William Catesby. As we shall surmise, the link between Eleanor and Joan now becomes critical to the question of the legitimacy of Edward IV’s subsequent marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, in light of the revealed precontract with Eleanor (Talbot) Butler.

Now we must step from the realms of reasonably well-documented information and proceed rather carefully into the world of speculation. The first such speculation is one that might not be too difficult to sustain. Joan was born into the extensive Talbot family around 1422. As noted, she was the niece of the famous John Talbot, who was by now the head of the whole family. John Talbot himself married twice, and his second marriage occurred on 26 September 1425 to Margaret Beauchamp. He was then forty-one and she twenty-one years old. I think it must be a supportable proposition that Joan Barre, the niece of the bridegroom, was at the wedding. Indeed, I suspect Joan’s mother, Alice, and the new bride, Margaret, were friends. We know that some years later Joan married Sir Kynard de la Bere and was known by the appellation ‘Joan of Clehonger.’ Clehonger itself is a small village right outside Hereford, and is just under thirteen miles from Goodrich Castle. Both Goodrich and Clehonger are directly adjacent to the River Wye and, in fact, Goodrich Castle itself dominates its banks. It might be objected, however, that Joan was married to Sir Kynard de la Bere, who was the lord of Kinnersley Castle. However, Kinnersley is itself only nine miles further on from Clehonger, and is again very near to the Wye. I think, therefore, there is some justification for believing that Margaret acted as a form of older advisor or older sister to Joan, especially perhaps in the first years of Joan’s marriage. This, I must especially note, is pure speculation; I cannot substantiate this relationship at the present time. However, as we shall see, this early association, while strengthening my argument, was not absolutely essential to the overall proposition that I set forth here.

Given these family connections and the close proximity of where Joan was presumably living (at either Clehonger or Kinnersely) to one of the major residences of the senior Talbot family (at Goodrich), it is perhaps no great stretch from this premise to speculate that Joan Barre knew Margret Beauchamp’s daughter Eleanor from the moment of her birth. If, as is possible, Eleanor was actually born at Goodrich, and I suspect she was, Joan may well have attended the confinement, being a young lady of approximately fourteen years of age at the time. By that juncture, some time early in 1436, Margaret had already given John Talbot three children. I have no date for the death of Sir Kynard de la Bere, but it is probable that Joan saw Eleanor grow up, at least to her late childhood and early teen years, and strong attachments are made during such formative years. It was in 1449–1450 that Eleanor, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, was married to Sir Thomas Butler, and must have moved from her familiar surroundings to her new domicile, perhaps in the home of the father of her husband-to-be in Gloucestershire. It was only three or four years later, in 1453, that Joan herself married her second husband, Sir William Catesby.

Now, this brings us to the time when the new married couple of Eleanor and her husband Thomas Butler set up home in the manors of Great Dorsett and Fenny Compton. At this time and in this place, Eleanor’s mother would have been somewhat remote from her, perhaps back in Herefordshire and a fair distance to travel in such times. However, not so very far away, in fact only just over ten miles distant, along a pleasant river valley, in Ashby St Ledgers, resided her first cousin, Joan Barre. It may even be possible that the association between the two women actually began at this time (thus obviating the necessity for an earlier association), when Eleanor and Joan each moved to what for them were relatively unfamiliar surroundings. Regardless of exactly when the two first began their association, it is my contention that there would have been significant social intercourse between the two families, the Catesbys and the Butlers. Of course, we cannot know the frequency of their interaction, but we can confirm that there was certainly more than passing contact, since Sir William Catesby (the father of ‘the Cat’) acted as a witness to several documents pertaining to Eleanor, including deeds of gift,
¹⁹
and had previously acted extensively on behalf of John Talbot, Eleanor’s father.
²⁰
In reality, I suspect there was a great closeness between the families both before and after the death of Eleanor’s first husband.

There was one further, but frankly tenuous, connection between Burton Dassett and Ashby St Ledgers. At the present it is one that must remain an intriguing speculation which awaits future resolution. However, in All Saints’ Church at Burton Dassett, as shown in Figure 10, there is a series of wall paintings (
see
Figure 33). These are composed of a sequence of illustrations which for a long time have been covered over by whitewash. Over an original Passion series appears a representation of the Virgin, St John and two censing angels. The date of these paintings is though to be mid-fifteenth century. The most intriguing aspect of them is as follows:

If we speculate that such work occurred during the time that Thomas Conway was vicar of All Saints’ church at Burton Dassett, then is it possible that each of these pictures was commissioned by Eleanor Butler?
²²
This is indeed a stretch of probability, but if the paintings at Great Dorsett and the paintings at Ashby St Ledgers
²³
(
see
Figure 32) were by the same artist then it might be possible that, in representing the Virgin, the painter astutely commingled some of Eleanor’s features with those of the Mother of God. The upshot of this is that the representation in Figure 11 might just possibly contain something of the facial features of Eleanor Butler. It would be of great interest to integrate the features of her father and mother, shown in Figures 5 and 6, to see any possible resemblance. This would also address the speculation as to the image of Eleanor suggested by Ashdown-Hill.
²⁴
However, to be useful, speculation should not be unbounded.
²⁵

Much has been written about the pre-contract, and much of this concerns the nature of the relevant statutes and jurisdiction at the time that the precontract supposedly occurred. As the pivotal factor in the present theory it is important to describe the major facts as we know them. However, I do not intend here to go into the nuances of the law as it applied at that time, which is a topic that I leave for others.
²⁷
Sufficient to say that the present consensus appears to be that had the pre-contract occurred at the time it is speculated to have done, then Edward IV’s subsequent marriage with Elizabeth Woodville would have been invalid and the children of that marriage barred from succeeding to the throne.