Identifying the Yorkist messengers sent to return Henry Tudor from Brittany: Part 2: 1484

William Catesby, from his memorial brass at Ashby St Ledgers, Northants

Introduction

Henry Tudor’s fateful flight from Vannes in Brittany into France in the autumn of 1484 is claimed by the Tudor histories to have been precipitated by the finalisation of negotiations between Richard III and Francis Duke of Brittany’s treasurer, Pierre Landais, for his repatriation to England. Neither of the earliest narrative accounts of these events, those of Bernard André (1500-1502) and Polydore Vergil (c. 1512), refers to the presence in Brittany of any envoy from King Richard at the time of Henry’s flight.[1] Modern historians in search of the exact trigger for his departure have, however, noted that an offering was made on 12 September 1484 at St. Vincent Ferrer’s tomb in Vannes cathedral by ‘le Grant Escuier d’Engleterre’ (in modern French le Grand Écuyer d’Angleterre): literally ‘the great esquire from England’.[2] Not unnaturally, this man has commonly been assumed to have been the individual whom King Richard had sent to conclude the negotiations for Tudor’s repatriation; he has been identified by some authors as William Catesby, esquire, and by others as Sir James Tyrell.

 

William Catesby as Envoy

Probably on the basis that William Catesby was far and away the most powerful esquire in King Richard’s service, in their discussion of this second failed attempt to capture Tudor, in 1985 Ralph Griffiths and Roger Thomas asserted that Catesby ‘was in Brittany by September 1484 (when he made an offering in Vannes cathedral . . .)’.[3] This identification has since been followed by Rosemary Horrox and Henry VII’s most recent biographer Nathen Amin.[4] It does, however, contain two major flaws.

The first of these flaws is that William Catesby cannot have been in Vannes, in southern Brittany, on 12 September 1484. On 11 September Scottish ambassadors had reached King Richard at Nottingham, 160 miles from the south coast; on the following day – the day on which the Grant Escuier made his offering in Vannes cathedral – William Catesby was with the King to hear the address given by the Scottish ambassador’s spokesman, Archibald Whitelaw; two days later Catesby was formally appointed as one of the commissioners to treat with the Scots for a truce and marriage treaty, and on 20 September was named in Richard’s ratification of the resulting truce as one of those who had negotiated it on his behalf over the period of the previous several days (per nonullos dies mensis Septembris).[5] The second issue is that the translation of le Grant Escuier as ‘the Great Esquire’, upon which this individual’s identification as Catesby is based, is almost certainly misleading. The word escuier/ écuyer has two meanings: in most contexts it is the equivalent of the English ‘esquire’, with which, indeed, it shares a common root. But it was also used to refer to the man in charge of the stable (écurie) of a lord or prince and in France le Grand Écuyer was the official title of the man in charge of the king’s stable, the officer known in England as the Master of the Horse.[6] William Catesby was not Richard III’s Master of the Horse.

 

Sir James Tyrell as Envoy

The true significance of the term ‘le Grant Escuier d’Engleterre’ had evidently been noticed by Clifford Davies when, in 1993, he suggested that the individual in question was ‘probably Sir James Tyrell’, Richard’s ‘master of the horse, and known to be employed on delicate foreign missions. . .’.[7] Davies did not, however, offer any further explanation of the point for readers unfamiliar with the term grand écuyer and so the man’s identification as Richard’s ‘great esquire’, William Catesby, did not fall out of favour.

On the basis that Tudor was fleeing Brittany to avoid being sent back to England, and that Sir James Tyrell was Richard’s Master of the Horse, Davies’ identification of Tyrell as the le Grant Escuier d’Engleterre who made offering in Vannes cathedral on 12 September 1484 is utterly reasonable. Yet, unfortunately, Tyrell was no more available to perform this task than Catesby since he too is recorded as a witness to Archibald Whitelaw’s address at Nottingham Castle on the critical day.[8] But if this English Master of the Horse was not Tyrell, then who was he? The puzzle is perhaps not insoluble, but we may have been looking in the wrong direction for its solution. 

 

An Alternative Grand Écuyer

Whilst it is true that Henry Tudor made his own last recorded offering at Vannes cathedral on 8 September 1484, just four days before the offering made by the Grand Écuyer, he may not have left Vannes for a further three weeks as it was not until 11 October that the French court at Montargis received word that he had left the Duke of Brittany’s domains and was on his way.[9] The mysterious Grand Écuyer would therefore seem to have been someone from whom Henry did not consider himself to be in danger.  

Sir James Tyrell’s immediate predecessor as Master of the Horse was John Cheyne, esquire, and Cheyne had been well known in the French-speaking world since the late summer of 1475 when he and Lord Howard had been left in France as hostages to ensure the return to England of King Edward’s forces and had been nobly entertained in Paris by Louis XI. Both Commines and the Paris notary Jean de Roye, author of the ‘Chronique Scandaleuse’, refer to Cheyne as le Grand Écuyer d’Angleterre, de Roye seemingly having known him only by this title.[10] After losing his post to Tyrell in 1483, Cheyne had thrown in his lot with Buckingham’s Rebellion, and following the collapse of the rising had had the good fortune to find passage from Devon across to Brittany, where he had joined Tudor’s growing band of exiles.[11] When Henry fled from Vannes he took with him less than half a dozen on his most trusted followers; Cheyne was not amongst them as is demonstrated by the Breton financial records, which show that payments of 100 livres each were made to Lord Scales, John Cheyne and Edward Poynings, ‘Englishmen who were left behind at Vannes after Richmond went to France’, to help them to leave Brittany.[12] Therefore, regardless of whether Tudor had left Vannes between 8^th and 11^th September, Cheyne would still have been there on  the 12^th and available to make the Grant Escuyer’s offering at the tomb of St. Vincent.

 

In Search of an Alternative Envoy

This solution does, however, leave us without an identity for the English envoy from whose approach Tudor is often assumed to have fled; it is therefore time to examine Richard’s diplomatic links with Brittany during 1484. Although there is evidence of written communications passing between the English and Breton governments that summer, the statement given by the Breton treasurer Pierre Landais after his arrest in June 1485 indicates that much of the diplomacy had taken place in the context of tripartite negotiations between King Richard, the Breton government and the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, who was concentrating all his efforts on securing the rule of the Low Countries for his infant son Philip.[13] This ties in with Polydore Vergil’s claim that Henry’s flight was caused by the arrival not of an English agent but of a messenger from John Morton, Bishop of Ely, who was then living in exile in Flanders, with a warning about ‘this treacherous agreement’.[14] Bishop Morton would have had a very personal motive for sending such a message since his nephew and protégé Robert Morton (later Bishop of Worcester) was with Henry in Brittany and so also at risk.[15]

 Marie Barnfield

 

Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading

Nathen Amin, Son of Prophecy: The Rise of Henry Tudor (Stroud, 2024)

I. Arthurson and N. Kingwell, ‘The Proclamation of Henry Tudor as King of England, 3 November 1483’, Historical Research, LXIII, Issue 150 (February 1990)

A. Bernier (ed.), Procès-verbaux des séances du Conseil de régence du roi Charles VIII pendant les mois d’août 1484 à janvier 1485 (Paris, 1836)

Bernard André:

James Gairdner (ed.), Memorials of King Henry the Seventh: Historia Regis Henrici Septimi, a Bernardo Andrea Tholosate Conscripta (London, 1858) (Latin text)

Daniel Hobbins (trans.), Bernard André: The Life of Henry VII (New York, 2011) (English translation)

M. Condon, ‘The Kaleidoscope of Treason: Fragments from the Bosworth Story’, The Ricardian, VII, no. 92 (March 1986) ( https://richardiii.net/research/the-ricardian-journal/ )

C. S. L. Davies, ‘Richard III, Brittany and Henry Tudor’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, XXXVII, 1993

James Gairdner, Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, 2 vols, I (London, 1861) 

Chris Given-Wilson et al., The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME) (Woodbridge, 2005)

Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Gloucester, 1985)

Rosemary Horrox, Richard III, A Study in Service (Cambridge, 1989)

Rosemary Horrox, ‘Catesby, William’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4884)

Rosemary Horrox and P. W. Hammond (eds.), British Library Harleian Manuscript 433, 4 vols, III (Gloucester, 1982)

Michael Jones, ‘“For My Lord of Richmond, a pourpoint . . . and a palfrey”: Brief Remarks on the Financial Evidence for Henry Tudor’s Exile in Brittany 1471–1484’, The Ricardian, XIII (2003), pp. 283-293 (https://richardiii.net/research/the-ricardian-journal/)

Michael Jones, ‘La Bretagne et le Pays de Galles à la fin du Moyen Âge: contacts et échanges’, Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, XCI (2013)

B. de Mandrot (ed.), Journal de Jean de Roye, connu sous le nom de Chronique Scandaleuse, 1460-1483, 2 vols, I (Paris, 1894 

B. de Mandrot (ed.), Mémoires de Philippe de Commynes, 2 vols, I: 1464-1477 (Paris, 1901)

Stephen O’Connor (ed. and trans.), Polydore Vergil’s Life of Richard III: An Edition of the Original Manuscript, Richard III Society (Westoning, 2023) (Latin text on odd-numbered pages, English translation on evens)

Thomas Rymer, Foedera, Conventiones, Literae et Cujuscunque Generis Act Publica, 12 vols, XII (London, 1727)

Chris Skidmore, Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (London, 2013)

 

 

 

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[1] Gairdner, Memorials (André), p. 24; Hobbins, André, Life of Henry VII, p. 20-21; Vergil’s Life of Richard III, pp. 33/34, 35/36.

[2] ‘. . . l’offerte que fait le Grant Escuier d’Engleterre sur la tombe de Saint Vincent’ (Jones, ‘La Bretagne et le Pays de Galles’, p. 241, n. 85).

[3] Griffiths and Thomas, Making of the Tudor Dynasty, p. 111.

[4] Horrox, A Study in Service, p. 278, and ‘Catesby, William’, ODNB; Amin, Son of Prophecy, p. 387.

[5] Gairdner, Letters and Papers, I, pp. 63-67; Rymer, Foedera, XII, pp. 236, 242-3.

[6] ‘Écuyer’, Dictionnaire de l’Academie Française (https://www.dictionnaire-academie.fr); ‘La Maison du Roi: écurie: le grand écuyer’ (https://www.heraldica.org).

[7] Davies, ‘Richard III, Brittany and Henry Tudor’, p. 117 & n. 38.

[8] Gairdner, Letters and Papers, I, p. 65.

[9] Skidmore, Bosworth, p. 181; Bernier, Procès-verbaux, p.128.

[10] Mandrot (ed.), Chronique Scandaleuse, 1460-1483, I, p. 345; Mandrot (ed.), Philippe de Commynes, I, pp. 306, 325.

[11] PROME, Parliament of January 1484, item 3 [7]; Arthurson and Kingwell, ‘Proclamation’, p. 102.

[12] Jones, ‘Pourpoint’, p. 293.

[13] Davies, ‘Richard III, Brittany and Henry Tudor’, pp. 111-2, 117, 125.

[14] Vergil’s Life of Richard III, p. 33/34.

[15] Condon, ‘The Kaleidoscope of Treason’, p. 210.

Identifying the Yorkist Messengers Sent to Return Henry Tudor from Brittany: Part 1: 1476

17th-century image of Francis Duke of Brittany based on 

stained-glass at the convent of the Cordeliers, Nantes

Introduction

Rather than highlighting recently discovered material, this post and its companion revisit existing evidence on the basis of which claims have been made with regard to the identities of the men sent into Brittany by Edward IV and Richard III to take custody of Henry Tudor.  Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, used often to be named King Edward IV’s chief agent in his attempt to secure Henry Tudor’s repatriation in 1475-6 whilst William Catesby and Sir James Tyrell have both been identified as the envoy entrusted by Richard III with the same task in 1484. The grounds for these identifications is of some importance because of Henry Tudor’s treatment of these men after he became king, two of his first acts having been to order Catesby’s execution and Bishop Stillington’s arrest, whilst Sir James Tyrell, having worked successfully under Henry VII for over sixteen years, was also eventually arrested and executed for treason.[1]

Although most recent texts claim no role for Stillington in King’s Edward failed attempt to secure Tudor’s person, some of the secondary sources that do so are still widely consulted so its rejection by more recent scholars – and indeed by Edward IV’s early-twentieth-century biographer Cora Scofield – is deserving of an explanation.

The Chronicle Sources

The traditional account of Henry Tudor’s escape from King Edward’s envoys in the spring of 1476 is drawn from the Tudor histories. Polydore Vergil, writing early in the reign of Henry VIII, recounted that King Edward sent ambassadors to Francis Duke of Brittany ‘laden down with a great weight of gold’ who pretended that Edward wished Tudor to marry his eldest daughter Elizabeth. At length, so the tale continues, Duke Francis gave in and sent Henry off with the unnamed English ambassadors, who conveyed him to the port of Saint-Malo in the north-east of Brittany where their ship was waiting. Meanwhile the Duke’s favourite Jean Chenlet came to hear of this and persuaded Duke Francis to try to rescue Tudor, who would otherwise be killed. The Duke therefore sent his treasurer, Pierre Landois, to Saint-Malo, where he engaged the ambassadors in conversation ‘while his agents brought Henry, half-dead, to the inviolable asylum in that city’ (i.e. Saint-Malo cathedral). In the 1540s Edward Hall offered details of this English embassy, claiming that it consisted of ‘Doctor Stillyngton and twoo other’. Like Vergil, Hall made it clear that the men who escorted Henry to Saint-Malo were the ambassadors who had negotiated the extradition agreement with Duke Francis.[2]

 

Contemporary Evidence 

Fragmentary survivals of Breton financial records confirm Vergil’s and Hall’s central claim that Henry Tudor was taken to Saint-Malo, but the wider contemporary record calls into question many of the details in the Tudor accounts. To begin with, King Edward seems unlikely to have told Duke Francis in late 1475 or early 1476 that he intended Tudor to marry his daughter Elizabeth since at the end of August 1475 he had publicly sealed a treaty with the King of France for Elizabeth’s marriage to the Dauphin.[3] Vergil has also mangled the name of the Breton lord who, as he claims, persuaded Duke Francis to intervene to prevent Tudor’s repatriation to England: Jean Chenlet’s correct name was Jean du Quélennec, Vicomte du Faou, and he was the Admiral of Brittany.[4] He had been Henry Tudor’s keeper at an early stage in his exile and the same Breton financial accounts that confirm Tudor’s journey to Saint-Malo record that it was Quelennec who brought him there, from the port of Brest on Brittany’s west coast and probably by sea. A quite separate entry records the cost of escorting the English ambassadors, led by Chester Herald, overland to Saint-Malo from the court at Nantes.[5] This strongly indicates that – rather in the manner of extraditions, prisoners exchanges and the like today – the handover was to be made at the frontier, the English ambassadors being permitted to take charge of him only at the port of embarkation and probably only as he boarded ship. Indeed, had Tudor been in English custody during his sojourn in Saint-Malo it is unlikely that, in his ‘half-dead’ state, he could have succeeded in escaping to sanctuary.

The English Ambassadors and their Roles

A detail of Hall’s account that is wholly at odds with the contemporary record is his identification of ‘Doctor Stillyngton’ as the head of the English embassy that both negotiated Tudor’s handover and attempted to remove him to England. That he is here given no greater title than Doctor may itself be a warning sign since Robert Stillington had had been Bishop of Bath and Wells since 1465 so that if Hall had seen any document relating to his appointment in the mid-1470s that is how it would have described him.[6] Stillington is also unlikely to have been given an overseas commission, particularly one involving the forced removal of a fit young prisoner, because, although he had in the past negotiated on Edward’s behalf with foreign ambassadors visiting the English court, the bishop’s chronic ill health had prevented him from following the king on journeys even within England and he had twice before been forced to entrust the Great Seal to a temporary keeper when Edward was away from the capital and in urgent need of it.[7] The third puzzling feature of Hall’s claim is that no extant documents contain any reference to Stillington’s involvement in King Edward’s negotiations with Brittany; what they do record (as recent historians have noted) is the presence in Brittany during the summer of 1475 of an embassy empowered to negotiate a perpetual peace with England consisting of lords Audley and Duras and Master Oliver King, a royal clerk who was fluent in French, having studied at the university of Orléans. This was followed by the ratification of earlier treaties with England (by Duke Francis on 22 January 1476 and King Edward on the following 6 March) and by Oliver King’s promotion on 18 March 1476 to the post of the King’s secretary in the French tongue.[8] By the end of the decade Oliver King had gained a doctorate and it is a remarkable coincidence that, like Stillington, he was to end his days as Bishop of Bath and Wells. It would seem, therefore, that Hall had simply confused two doctors who had become bishops of Bath. Although Dr. King probably discussed with Duke Francis’ representative King Edward’s desire for Henry Tudor to return to England, he had left Brittany well before the attempted handover, and the Breton financial memoranda record Chester Herald (Thomas Whiting) as the head of the embassy that had been sent to escort Tudor into England. Henry Tudor held no grudge against Oliver King for any part he may have played in the affair; on the contrary, from the outset of his reign he entrusted Dr. King with important commissions and generously rewarded his efforts. Thomas Whiting also retained his post as Chester Herald under Henry VII.  

Marie Barnfield

 

Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading

 

Lorraine Attreed (ed.), The York House Books 1461-1490, 2 vols., II (Stroud, 1991) 

Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Stroud, 1993)

Edward Hall, ‘The prosperous reigne of Kyng Edward the fourth’ in The Union of the Two Noble and Ilustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (London, 1547)

Michael Jones, ‘“For My Lord of Richmond, a pourpoint . . . and a palfrey”: Brief Remarks on the Financial Evidence for Henry Tudor’s Exile in Brittany 1471–1484’, The Ricardian, XIII (2003), pp. 283-293 ( https://richardiii.net/research/the-ricardian-journal/ )

Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, Chronicles of London (Oxford, 1905)

H. C. Maxwell-Lyte (ed.), The Registers of Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells 1465-1491, and Richard Fox, Bishop of Bath and Wells 1491-1494, Somerset Record Society LII (London, 1937)

Nicholas Pronay and John Cox (ed.), The Crowland Chronicle Continuations 1459-1486 (London, 1986)

Thomas Rymer, Foedera, Conventiones, Literae et Cujuscunque Generis Act Publica, 12 vols., XI, XII (London, 1727)

Cora L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth, 2 vols., II (London, 1923) 

Dana Sutton (ed.), Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia ( https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/polverg/ )

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[1] Crowland, p. 183; York House Books, II, p. 737; Kingsford, Chronicles of London, pp. 255-6.

[2] Vergil, Anglica Historia, XXIV; Hall, Lancastre & Yorke, ’Edward the fourth’, ff. 48r-50r.

[3] Rymer, Foedera, XII, p. 20.

[4] Jones, ‘Pourpoint’, pp. 287-8;

[5] Jones, ‘Pourpoint’, p. 289.

[6] Register, p. viii.

[7] Foedera, XI, pp.574, 764, 782.

[8] Scofield, vol 2, p. 166; Foedera, XII, pp. 12, 22, 24, 26.

A Papal Grant to ‘Richard, Duke of York’ in 1494

Mid 16th C. sketch from Receuil d'Arras identified in 18th C. inscription as 'Pierre Varbeck' (Image: Public Domain)

For much of the 1490s Henry VII’s security was dogged by the claims of the most widely supported Yorkist claimant to his throne. It was as Richard, duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV last seen with his elder brother in the Tower of London in the summer of 1483, that this young man made his claim; but it was as Perkin Warbeck, the son of a Tournai boatman, that he was hanged at Tyburn in 1499 and it is as Perkin Warbeck that he has generally been known to history. The discovery by the Missing Princes team of the ‘Gelderland document’ (Gelders Archief, 0510/1549), in which the recently emerged York provides an explanation for his disappearance and survival, has reignited interest in the question of the claimant’s true identity.[1] His foreign supporters (of whom the most committed were the Princes’ aunt, Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, and her stepson-in-law Maximilian, archduke of Austria and King of the Romans) hailed him as Richard, duke of York, but not so King Henry VII and his allies. The Vatican’s support for King Henry was of long standing and has always appeared to have held secure, therefore it is a little surprising to see that, on 21 May 1494, as Maximilian was slowly preparing the way for the young man’s attempt to oust King Henry from his throne, the bishop in charge of the apostolic office of the Penitentiary accorded him an official grant in the name of Richard, duke of York.

The Papal Penitentiary performed a double function. Chiefly, as its name suggests, ‘it was the department of the Roman Curia which dealt with the sins reserved to papal absolution’, but it also ‘issued letters which conferred an increasingly wide variety of dispensations and graces on their beneficiaries.’[2] The indult granted to ‘the nobleman Richard, duke of York’ falls into the latter category and was first brought to the world’s attention in 2008 by Peter D. Clarke, who provided the following translation of the text:

Rome [at St Peter’s], 21 May 1494. The nobleman Richard, duke of York, [requests] that the pope grant him a licence that he may have a portable altar with due reverence on which he can have masses and other divine offices celebrated in fitting and decent places by his own or another suitable priest without prejudice to another’s right and in the presence of himself and his domestic familiars and that the pope grant him littere confessionales in forma ‘Fervens’ too. Fiat de speciali Iul. episcopus Brethonoriensis regens (= approved under a special papal mandate by Julianus de Matteis de Vulterris, bishop of Bertinoro, regent of the penitentiary i.e. the cardinal penitentiary’s deputy).[3]

The original Latin text was later published by Clarke and his colleague Patrick Zutshi in their three-volume calendar of the English and Welsh entries in the Penitentiary’s fifteenth-century registers.[4]

 

This young man had first identified himself as the Duke of York whilst in Ireland in 1491, and in the following year he had spent some time at the French court until the treaty agreed with England at Étaples had forced him to seek the protection of the Duchess Margaret in the Low Countries. It was probably at about this time that his personal statement, preserved in the ‘Gelderland document’, was issued. During 1493 he remained on the continent, supported not only by Margaret but also by Maximilian, who in August succeeded his father as Holy Roman Emperor. In November, the new emperor took the young man with him to Vienna where, early in 1494, he sought to raise loans ‘for the young king of England for the conquest of his kingdom’. Indults for portable altars were often sought by the wealthy in preparation for an extended journey, and this case seems to have been no exception as in May 1494 ‘the nobleman, Richard, duke of York,’ would have been preparing to return with Maximilian to Flanders.

The Vatican official who approved this grant was Giuliano Maffei, Bishop of Bertinoro from 1477-1505 and Archbishop of Dubrovnik in modern-day Croatia  from 1505 until his death in 1510.[5] By 1494 Bishop Maffei had been the Penitentiary Regent for over a decade; most of the business that had passed through his office during that time had been unremarkable, routine requests from priests, scholars and minor gentry, but the indult to Richard, duke of York, was not the first politically sensitive request that the bishop had conceded. On 27 March 1484, for instance, he had granted to Henry ‘Richemond’ and Elizabeth ‘Plantageneta’ a dispensation to marry despite being related by consanguinity in double fourth degrees (i.e. being third cousins).[6]

It will be noted that, while the first of these two politically contentious dispensations facilitated the cause of Henry Tudor, the second, issued almost exactly ten years later, acknowledged the right of Henry’s new dynastic rival. It may well be that Bishop Maffei was persuaded that the new claimant was indeed who he said he was because in late 1493 and early 1494 this good-looking young man was appearing at his best: sumptuously dressed, well-spoken and, in a nutshell, ‘fort gorgias’. [7] He charmed those who met him at Maximilian’s court and no alternative identity than the one he claimed had as yet been made public. But the papacy’s primary concern was for the interests of the Catholic Church, and so the blood claims of the various contenders for the English throne are likely to have carried less weight in Rome than the support they were deemed likely to be able to provide the Church. Unfortunately for the House of York, in 1485 Richard III’s fugitive enemy, John Morton, bishop of Ely, had spent some time in Rome where he seems to have made a very favourable impression. After Morton’s delayed return to England following Henry’s victory at Bosworth, Pope Innocent had shown himself remarkably keen to intervene in English domestic affairs, not only issuing several ratifications of Henry and Elizabeth’s new marriage dispensation (granted by a visiting legate in January 1486), but even going so far as to forbid any of Henry’s subjects from stirring up fresh tumults in the realm ‘under pain of excommunication and the greater anathema.’[8]

 

Pope Innocent, like his immediate predecessor Sixtus IV, had been desperate for the rulers of Christendom to resolve their disputes in order that they might participate in a crusade to liberate Constantinople from the Turks, and it may well be he had been persuaded that this union of Lancaster and York really could put an end to civil strife and place England’s military capacity at the service of Christendom.[9] The existence of the papal Bull anathematizing rebels against Henry VII had severely hampered Yorkist efforts to raise the country against him, and although Pope Innocent had died in the summer of 1492 without any sign of support from England for a crusade, the new pope, Alexander VI, had shown no inclination to change course. In May 1495, a year after the issue of this indult, Margaret of Burgundy was to send a lengthy and impassioned plea to Pope Alexander to withdraw this Bull in order – so she argued – that Richard, duke of York, could reclaim from his sister and her husband the throne that was rightfully his own.[10] But the Duchess Margaret’s plea was to fall on deaf ears, as did a number of similar pleas that she addressed to Henry VII’s Lord Chancellor John Morton, now cardinal archbishop of Canterbury, who responded cannily to the Duchess Margaret’s assurances that her protégé truly was the son of Edward IV: ‘But indeed he is not reputed the son of King Edward in this kingdom.’[11]

It has been assumed that a second petition to the Pope sent four months after Margaret’s by the Emperor Maximilian was also ignored because no response to it survives, but just possibly it bore some fruit because in 1497, as he made his bid to take Exeter, the claimant (now publicly identified in England as Perkin Warbeck) is said to have ‘published certain apostolic bulls affirming that he was the son of King Edward and that he meant to coin money and to give money to all.’[12] Or perhaps these bulls were simply further dispensations from Rome issued to him, with no political intent, under the same name in which he had requested them.

Marie Barnfield

 

 

Sources and Further Reading

Ian Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491-1499 (Stroud, 1994) 

J.-A. Buchon, ed., Chroniques de Jean Molinet, 5 vols., vol. V (Paris, 1828) 

Peter D. Clarke, ‘English Royal Marriages and the Papal Penitentiary in the Fifteenth Century’, EHR, vol. 120, no. 488 (2005) 

Peter D. Clarke, ‘New evidence of noble and gentry piety in fifteenth-century England and Wales’, Journal of Medieval History, vol. 34, no. 1 (2008) 

Peter D. Clarke and Patrick N. R. Zutshi, Supplications from England and Wales in the Registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary, 1410-1503, 3 vols., Canterbury and York CIII-CV (Woodbridge, 2012, 2014 and 2015) 

CMP: Allen B. Hinds, ed., Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts in the Archives and Collections of Milan 1385-1618, (London, 1912)

CVP: Rawdon Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, vol 4 1527-1533, (London, 1871)

C. S. L. Davies, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See and the Accession of Henry VII’, EHR, CII, No. 402 (1987)

James Gairdner, ed., Memorials of King Henry the Seventh: Historia Regis Henrici Septimi a Bernardo Andrea Tholosate Conscripta, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores X (London, 1858), Appendix A (transcript of Lambeth Palace Library, MS CM XI/3)

Lambeth Palace Library, MS CM XI/31 (image at  https://images.lambethpalacelibrary.org.uk/luna/servlet/detail/LPLIBLPL~31~31~178146~135259)

Philippa Langley, The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (Cheltenham, 2023)

The Hierarchy of the Catholic Church (www.catholic-hierarchy.org): ‘Diocese of Bertinoro’: ‘Giuliano Maffei (Matteis)’ 

The National Archives (TNA), SC 7/23/5, 6 7, 10

Ann Wroe, Perkin: A Story of Deception (London, 2003)

 

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[1]. For an English translation by Nathalie Nijman-Bliekendaal, see Langley, The Princes in the Tower, pp. 331-3.

[2] Clarke and Zutshi, Supplications from England and Wales, vol. 1: 1410-1464, p. xiii.

[3] Clarke, ‘New evidence of noble and gentry piety, pp. 27-8, 34.

[4] Clarke and Zutshi, Supplications, vol. 3: 1492-1503, p. 127.

[5] The Hierarchy of the Catholic Church (www.catholic-hierarchy.org): ‘Diocese of Bertinoro’: ‘Giuliano Maffei (Matteis)’.

[6] Clarke, ‘English Royal Marriages and the Papal Penitentiary, EHR, pp. 1024-5; Clarke and Zutshi, Supplications, vol. 2, p. 151.

[7] Chroniques de Jean Molinet, vol. V, p. 15.

[8] TNA, SC 7/23/5-7, 10.

[9] Davies, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See and the Accession of Henry VII’, pp. 21-22.

[10] Lambeth Palace Library, MS CM XI/31.

[11] CMP, p. 328.

[12] CVP, vol 4, ed. Appendix: ‘Miscellaneous 1495’, pp. 482-3; CMP, p. 327.

The Princes in the Tower: A Debatable ‘Discovery’

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Richard III, Sir James Tyrell, and the Princes in the Tower are in the headlines once again. This time it’s the result of a Channel 5 Documentary. It’s always gratifying to fifteenth-century historians to be reminded that events of 500 years ago have such a wide popular interest. And TV documentaries are a great way of keeping this interest alive or inspiring new fascination. (The Richard III Society experienced a sudden surge of new memberships and gift orders in the hours after the most recent one). But in order to tell a coherent story - and to be accessible to those who know nothing about the period - there is rarely room in such programmes to provide viewers with the full range of information needed to judge for themselves on the evidence presented. This post aims to fill some of that gap.

 

Sir James Tyrell

The documentary concluded that Sir James Tyrell was a prime suspect for overseeing the murder of the princes in the Tower – so who was he? He was the eldest son of an East Anglian gentleman: Sir William Tyrell. Born in 1455, James was three years younger than Richard III. Sir William was executed in 1462 for his part in a Lancastrian rebellion against Edward IV. Custody of young James and his estates was granted to the king’s mother, Cecily duchess of York. But she immediately sold this back to the boy’s mother. In 1469, fourteen-year-old James married a daughter of the greatest landowner in Cornwall, Sir John Arundel of Lanherne. Unlike his in-laws, Tyrell fought for the house of York at Tewkesbury where he was knighted on the field. Shortly afterwards he entered Richard duke of Gloucester’s service and became one of his councillors, entrusted with sensitive commissions, becoming one of the Chamberlains of the Exchequer in 1479 and serving as one of Gloucester’s bannerets in the Scottish campaign. Meanwhile, his first cousin, Elizabeth Darcy (née Tyrell) had become lady mistress of the royal nursery, caring for Edward IV’s younger children.  

On Richard III’s accession to the throne, Sir James became Master of the Horse and Master of the Henchmen to the king. He played a major role in suppressing Buckingham’s Rebellion and was rewarded with the stewardship of the duchy of Cornwall. He was also one of Richard’s key officials in Wales, until he was sent to Guines early in 1485. After Richard III’s death at Bosworth, Tyrell transferred his services to the new king, Henry VII. He was trusted to carry out sensitive diplomatic negotiations and in 1495 he was appointed one of the feoffees to the use of the king’s will. Four years later Tyrell received a visitor at Guines: Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, younger brother of John earl of Lincoln. Many had considered Lincoln to be Richard III’s heir after Richard’s own son died. Lincoln had been killed at the battle of Stoke in 1487. Although Suffolk briefly returned back to England after his initial visit to Tyrell, he fled again in 1501 and it was soon clear that he planned to challenge Henry VII’s right to the throne. Tyrell was arrested in the spring of 1502 for assisting Edmund, was tried at London Guildhall on 2 May that year, and executed four days later.

 

Thomas More’s Narrative

In Sir Thomas More’s narrative of the death of Edward V and his brother (written some thirty years after the event, during the reign of Henry VIII), Sir James Tyrell is one of the henchmen sleeping on pallets outside Richard III’s chamber at Warwick Castle during the king’s post coronation progress north. [As Master of the Henchmen, the real Tyrell’s accommodation would have been elsewhere]. Richard is talking with a page about the impossibility of finding someone willing to kill the princes. The page suggests that Sir James is ambitious enough to be willing to commit murder. So Richard wakes Tyrell from his bed to sound him out and sends him off the next morning to take possession of the keys of the Tower. Tyrell then enlists one of the four men guarding the princes, Miles Forest, and his own horse-keeper, John Dighton, to do the deed. When Tyrell is later imprisoned in the Tower for treason, both he and Dighton confess to the crime. Yet Dighton, More tells us, is still walking free. Forest, he reports, died in sanctuary at St Martin’s church.  

More’s story is full of vivid circumstantial details and reported speech which must have been imagined. Consequently, most scholars are deeply wary of accepting his account of events. Moreover, there are demonstrable errors such as incorrect names and ages and some sections cannot possibly be true. For instance, he relates that Edward IV’s mother, Cecily duchess of York, opposed the king’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and so tried to arrange instead for her son to marry one of his mistresses, whom he’d recently got pregnant. Cecily claims that this mistress, Elizabeth Lucy, was already legally Edward’s wife. Elizabeth Lucy seems to be an invention by More, conflating several different women, and the whole confused passage appears designed to mock the claim that Edward IV had been precontracted (married) to Eleanor Talbot. For these reasons, we cannot accept More’s narrative without other corroborating evidence. The Channel 5 documentary sought to present such evidence.

 

The Forest Connection

Sir Thomas More knew the sons of Miles Forest, so it was suggested that one of them could have told More of their father’s crime, providing him with a far more detailed account of the princes’ deaths than any previous writer. This theory was discussed in some detail in this blog in 2021 when Professor Thornton first revealed the connection between Thomas More and Miles Forest’s sons. That post questioned whether Henry VIII’s Groom of the Chamber (Edward Forest) or Cardinal Wolsey’s servant (Miles junior) would have risked their family’s reputation by revealing that their father had murdered Henry VIII’s uncle. They would also have risked being found guilty of misprision for failing to reveal their knowledge of regicide earlier.

More recently The Missing Princes Project has brought to light another document relating to Miles Forest. This was the narrative found in the Gelderland Archive at Arnhem which presents itself as Richard duke of York’s report of his escape from the Tower, and subsequent life on the Continent. This relates that the young duke was ‘entrusted to the keeping of Miles Forrest*, Halneth Maleverer and William Puche’. So we now know that as early as 1493 Miles Forest was believed (at least in some quarters) to be connected with the princes’ stay in the Tower. It could be that Thomas More was aware of this Gelderland Archive account, which also mentions James Tyrell among the boys’ keepers. If so, More may have drawn both names from here for his own imaginative account. It's equally possible that both More and the author of the narrative were drawing on oral reports of the arrangements at the Tower. In either case, it seems that these names were first identified as keepers rather than killers. The presence of Forest’s name in the Gelderland document, composed when Thomas More was only a child, makes it much less likely that More had to rely on revelations from Forest’s sons decades later to learn of Forest’s connection with the princes.

The Itinerary

The second piece of evidence is the itinerary of Henry VII. In a fascinating article examining this, Professor Thornton demonstrated that Henry VII only ever stayed at the Tower when ceremonial required it or at times of national crisis. The crisis in 1502 was the threat to Henry VII’s throne from his queen’s cousin, Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. As mentioned earlier, Edmund's elder brother, John earl of Lincoln had been widely considered Richard III’s heir. He died in 1487 when Edmund was only about 15. On reaching adulthood Edmund initially accepted Henry VII’ s kingship, but in 1501 he sought support from the Emperor Maximilian to challenge the Tudor regime. Tyrell was arrested and tried for supporting Edmund's claim. Thomas More reported that at this time Tyrell also confessed to having killed the princes. The Channel 5 documentary suggested that this story of a confession was supported by the fact that Henry's queen, Elizabeth of York, sister of the missing princes, was also present at the Tower and then journeyed to visit her aunt, Elizabeth de la Pole, duchess of Suffolk. It was argued that the queen was likely reporting to her aunt on what she had just learned about the princes.

However, there is an argument to be made that if Queen Elizabeth had just learned of the fates of her brothers she would have been more likely to want to share this with her sisters who had grown up with the boys, rather than her aunt. Elizabeth duchess of Suffolk would surely have been more concerned to hear what Tyrell could tell of her own son Edmund for whose sake Tyrell was about to lose his life. Indeed, the queen’s decision to visit her aunt at this time strongly suggests that it was only Edmund, and not the princes, that Elizabeth had news of. This would mean that the queen was unaware of any confession by Tyrell.

 

The Capell chain

Finally, we were presented with the ‘smoking gun’, a reference to a chain associated with the young king Edward V in the 1516 will of Lady Margaret Capell, half sister of James Tyrell’s wife:

'Also I bequeth to my sonne sir Giles his faders cheyne which was yonge kyng Edwarde the v^th. To have the forsaid stuffe and cheyne during his lyfe w^t reasonable weryng upon the condition that after his decease I wille that yt remayn and be kept by myn executours to the use of Henry Capell and Edward Capell [Giles’s sons] from one to another And for defaulte of thise two childern I wille that my doughter Elizabeth Paulet shalhave the forsaid goodes.' (TNA PROB 11/19/456)

Much like the ‘new evidence’ for Elizabeth Woodville’s death by plague discussed in this blog a few years ago, this document has actually been known to historians for centuries, but it is the interpretation that is new. The will was published in 1826 by N. Harris Nicolas in a collection of old wills: Testamenta Vetusta. In 1906, William Minet quoted Margaret’s bequest of Edward V’s chain in the introduction to an article on the Capell family. In 1994, Diana Scarisbrick mentioned many of Margaret’s jewellery bequests, including Edward V’s chain, in a survey of fashions in late medieval jewellery. In 2015 Dr Susan James referred to it in the context of women’s voices in Tudor wills. She gave it as an example of women handing on relics with royal associations which ‘burnished the memory of the giver by announcing her associations with monarchy’. Professor Barbara Harris also used the will extensively in 2002 in a discussion of women’s pious bequests. There are probably others, but no previous scholar seems to have suggested that it provided any link with Sir James Tyrell. Hitherto it has been overlooked by political historians.

Margaret Capell described the chain as ‘his [ie her son Giles’s] father’s chain’. Giles’s father was Sir William Capell (born before 1448) who belonged to a Suffolk gentry family and became an exceptionally successful London draper, merchant and money lender. Those he is known to have lent money to include John Lord Howard, future duke of Norfolk, Lady Alice FitzHugh, mother-in-law of Sir Francis Lovell (Richard III’s chamberlain who later rebelled against Henry VII) and Henry VII’s queen, Elizabeth of York (Edward V’s sister). Sir William became an alderman in 1485, an MP in 1491 and served as mayor of London 1503-4 and 1510. The National Archives house numerous records of court cases brought by and against him. He died in 1515.

Margaret’s will gives no physical description of Edward V’s chain. In contrast, Margaret also bequeathed her daughter a gold chain bearing a rose of diamonds and three pearls; she gave her son-in-law a long chain of fine gold with a long cross set with a ruby; to her granddaughters she gave a flat chain of worked gold with a cross set with a ruby and diamonds, and a lesser flat chain hung with an agnus dei (with the Trinity on one side and our Lady’s assumption on the other). To her grandson Edward she bequeathed a gold chain of 27 long links which she had bought from ‘one Rydley my lord of Kents servant’. In most cases she even recorded the weight of these chains.

Noblemen typically owned various chains but the objects we might think of as chains of office were usually called collars. We do not know if Edward V had been king for long enough to acquire a personal chain associated with his status as king and it is unlikely that he would have been wearing one when held securely in the Tower. It also seems unlikely that Richard III would have chosen to reward Tyrell with such a distinctive relic of their shared crime since Tyrell could hardly have displayed his ownership without awkward questions being asked. So how else might we respond to this evidence?

It has to be acknowledged that it is impossible to be certain whether the chain had been Edward V’s personal possession, or an item he had gifted to someone else. In the latter case it may have been a gift to Sir William. This might be implied in the wording of the will which describes it as Sir William’s chain. The circumstances of such a gift are difficult to guess. We don't know if Edward V ever issued any livery collars and it is difficult to see what Sir William might have done to deserve receiving one. Livery collars are usually more clearly described as such when they appear in wills. It is therefore unlikely that this was a livery collar.

However, it may have been a gift from Edward V to someone else who either gave it to Sir William as a gift or as collateral for a loan. In 1483, the king’s treasury was significantly depleted with ready cash in short supply. At this time, Richard, duke of Gloucester financed Edward V’s household with £800 of his own money. It is therefore possible the chain was used as collateral by Edward V for a loan from Sir William at this time.

It is also conceivable that the original owner was Sir Giles Daubeney who was another of Dame Margaret's brothers-in-law. Daubeney had been a member of Edward IV's household and could have received a chain from Edward V while the latter was prince of Wales. Daubeney joined the rebels against Richard III in October 1483 and joined the earl of Richmond in exile shortly after. He fought for Henry VII at Bosworth and was rewarded with the lieutenancy of Calais and was made chamberlain of Henry VII's household. It is possible that Dame Margaret named her eldest son in recognition of Sir Giles Daubeney and so Daubeney could, for instance, have gifted the chain to the Capells on the occasion of the birth of their first son.

If the chain was, as the documentary argued, Edward V’s personal property, acquired by Tyrell as a result of murder, it is difficult to imagine how Tyrell managed to pass it on to his brother-in-law without also acknowledging how he had acquired it. It is scarcely likely that Lady Capell would have been knowingly transferring the relic of a murder to her son and grandsons in such a public document as her will. Indeed, if she had any suspicion that a close kinsman was connected with Edward V’s death the object would surely have become a source of embarrassment and concern, no matter how it had been acquired. Sir Giles himself was a well-respected and close companion of Henry VIII when his mother made her will. He was one of Henry's leading military captains, a jousting companion of the king and a knight of the body. It seems highly unlikely that he would have wanted to be in possession of - let alone wear - a chain so closely associated with the murder of a king. There is an argument to be made that Lady Capell’s will indicates that close relatives of Tyrell did not imagine that he bore any responsibility for the death of the princes in the Tower. The rumours of Tyrell’s supposed role in Edward V’s murder were not published until more than a decade after Lady Capell’s death. There is no mention of the chain in the wills of Sir Giles (d. 1556) or his sons.

Ultimately, as Dr Sean Cunningham of the National Archives tactfully observed in a recent entry on TNA’s blog, ‘Margaret’s reference to a chain once owned by the uncrowned teenage king Edward V is a new piece of evidence that raises more questions than it answers.’

* The document is in Middle Dutch but refers to ‘mylorde  Forrest’. There was no Lord Forrest at this period and it makes no sense to use the phrase ‘my lord’ in this context. Consequently it has been widely accepted that the most likely identification of this man is Miles Forest.

 

Sources and Further Reading

 TNA PROB 11/18/292; PROB 11/19/456; PROB 11/40/136; PROB 11/59/443

 Anne Crawford ed., The Household Books of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk (Richard III & Yorkist History Trust, 1992)

James Gairdner ed., The Paston Letters, AD 1422-1509 (Chatto & Windus, 1903) vol. 6

Rosemary Horrox ed., ‘Financial Memoranda of the Reign of Edward V. Longleat Miscellaneous Manuscript  Book II,’ Camden Miscellany XXIX, Camden Society 4^th series (1987), 34:198-244

Nicholas Harris Nicolas, ed. Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York (W. Pickering, 1830)

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Baron De Cosson, ‘The Capells of Rayne Hall, Essex: With Some Notes On Helmets Formerly in Rayne Church’, Archaeological Journal, 1883, 40/1: 64-79

Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety (Amsterdam University Press, 2018)

Susan E. James, Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603: Authority, Influence and Material (Ashgate, 2015)

Philippa Langley, The Princes in the Tower. Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (The History Press, 2023)

William Minet, ‘The Capels at Rayne, 1486-1522’, Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society 2^nd Series 9 (1906), 243-72 

Diana Scarisbrick, Jewellery in Britain, 1066-1837: A documentary, social, literary and artistic survey (Michael Russell, 1994)

Tim Thornton, ‘More on a Murder: The Deaths of the “Princes in the Tower”, and Historiographical Implications for the Regimes of Henry VII and Henry VIII’, History, 2020, 106:4-25 (https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13100)

Tim Thornton ‘Henry VII and the Tower of London: the context of the “confession” of Sir James Tyrell in 1502’, Historical Research, 2024, 97:218-225 (https://doi.org/10.1093/hisres/htad031)

Tim Thornton, ‘Sir William Capell and A Royal Chain: The Afterlives (and Death) of King Edward V’, History, 2024, 109: 445-460  (https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13430)