It has for long been known that Richard III’s title to the throne of England rested in large part on the claim that his late brother, King Edward IV, was, at the time of his marriage to his queen Elizabeth Woodville, secretly married to Dame Eleanor Butler (d. 1468), who was a daughter of John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, (d. 1453) by his second wife Margaret Beauchamp, and the widow of Sir Thomas Butler (d. bef. 1460). This prior marriage – or precontract, to give it its legal term – albeit clandestine, would indeed have invalidated Edward’s marriage to his queen and rendered their children illegitimate provided that Edward and Eleanor had not themselves been barred from marriage by any nullifying impediment such as a yet-earlier undisclosed marriage or kinship within the prohibited degrees either by blood (consanguinity) or through marriage or other sexual union (affinity). It would seem unlikely that any such impediment would have been overlooked since Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, a Doctor of Civil Law and a former Lord Chancellor, was either the source of the precontract claim or heavily involved in its publication. In early August 2025, however, @Lemmy-Historian uploaded to his Lemmy History YouTube channel a short video or podcast claiming that Edward and Eleanor were barred from marriage by an impediment of affinity.[1]
The marriage that @Lemmy-Historian has identified as the root of this impediment is the second marriage of Eleanor’s grandmother Ankarette le Strange. Ankarette’s first husband had been Richard, 4th Baron Talbot (d. 1396); Eleanor’s father, John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, was the eldest son of that marriage. But after Richard Talbot’s death Ankarette wed Thomas Neville, Lord Furnivall, a younger brother of Edward IV’s maternal grandfather Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland (d. 1425). Because, in 1215, canon 50 of the Fourth Lateran Council had established that impediments of relationship should thenceforth extend to four degrees of kinship (in laymen’s terms, four generations, the conclusion is drawn that the Strange-Talbot marriage, being merely three generations removed from Edward and Eleanor, brought them into affinity with each other and thus barred their marriage.[2]
@Lemmy-Historian is correct in stating that four degrees of kinship was equivalent to four generations: the method of counting the degrees of consanguinity during the medieval period was the so-called Germanic method, whereby the degrees relate to the numbers of generations between both the prospective bride and the prospective groom and their nearest common ancestor. Thus, second cousins were described as being related in the 3rd degree(s), and second cousins once removed as being related in the 3rd and 4th degrees. The nature of the impediment of affinity presented in this podcast is, however, inaccurate: affinity was not contracted from prior marriages between a member of the groom’s family and a member of the bride’s.
The
rationale behind the impediment of affinity is that, by sexual intercourse, a
couple become, so to speak, one flesh and thus the husband’s blood relations
become the wife’s affines and vice versa. Besides this direct affinity, two
other, indirect, kinds of affinity had at one time produced an impediment to
marriage: ‘. . . if the first husband of
the widow had been a widower, the blood relatives of his first wife were akin
to the first husband, were also akin to the new wife, and to the last husband.
. . . Affinity also, in the ancient law, arose between the children of a woman
from a deceased husband and the children of her husband from a deceased wife.
Hence a father and a son could not marry a mother and a daughter. Affinity
begot affinity. . . . .’[3] Canon
50 of the Fourth Lateran Council however, as well as limiting the degrees of
impediment to four, abolished these indirect second and third types of affinity;
Pope Innocent III also issued a decree detailing this relaxation of the rules
under the summary: ‘The husband’s kin licitly contract with the wife’s kin’.[4]
From this point onwards, the impediment of affinity prevented marriage only to a blood relative of the bride or groom’s own former spouse or sexual partner, a rule summed up by the axiom ‘affinity does not beget affinity’. The check for affinity therefore works on the same principle as for consanguinity except that the bride/groom needs to compare her/his consanguinity tree with that of the prospective spouse’s previous partner or partners. Indeed, it became extremely common for widows and widowers to cement their own unions with marriages between their respective siblings or the offspring of their previous marriages, and Ankarette le Strange and Thomas Neville, Lord Furnivall, did precisely this, Ankarette’s eldest son John Talbot, the future earl of Shrewsbury, taking Neville’s daughter Maude as his first wife.
Canon law is, to be fair, a specialised area and @Lemmy-Historian is not the only scholar of the period to have misunderstood the scope of the impediment of affinity. In 2006 Professor Michael Hicks identified the affinity between Richard III and his wife Anne Neville arising from the marriage between Richard’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, and Anne’s sister Isabel rather than (as was actually the case) from Anne’s previous marriage to Richard’s second cousin once removed Prince Edward of Lancaster, and was therefore puzzled that their papal dispensation referred to affinity only in the third and fourth degrees.[5] In 2020 a commentator on the Ricardian Loons website misidentified the Earl of Shrewsbury’s first marriage to Maude Neville of Furnivall as having created impediments of both affinity and consanguinity to Eleanor’s union with Edward IV.[6]
As can be seen from the ancestry
tables of Edward and Eleanor set out below, the couple shared no common
ancestor within the forbidden four degrees and so there was no impediment of
consanguinity to their marriage. Nonetheless, Eleanor had been married before
and so a similar blood relationship between Edward and Sir Thomas Butler would
have produced an impediment of affinity to Edward’s marriage to Butler’s widow.
It has not been possible to draw up a chart for Sir Thomas Butler that is
complete and verified at every point because much of that ancestry is
relatively humble, but these few gaps can safely be ignored as irrelevant to
the ancestry of Edward IV, which is uniformly exalted and well documented. In
brief, this check confirms that, just as there was no impediment of
consanguinity, neither was there any impediment of affinity barring Edward from
marriage to Eleanor Butler.
Marie
Barnfield
Suggestions
for Further Reading
Marie
Barnfield, ‘Diriment Impediments, Dispensations and Divorce: Richard III and Matrimony’,
The Ricardian, vol. 17 (2007), pp. 84-98
Richard
Helmholz, ‘The sons of Edward IV: a Canonical Assessment of the Claim that they
were Illegitimate', Richard III: Loyalty Lordship and Law, ed. P. W.
Hammond (London, 1986), pp. 91-103
H.
A. Kelly, ‘The Case against Edward IV's Marriage and Offspring: Secrecy;
Witchcraft; Secrecy; Precontract’, The Ricardian, vol. 11, no. 142 (Sept.
1998), pp. 326-335
H.
A. Kelly, ‘The Crowland Chronicle and the Marriage Impediments of Edward IV and
Richard III’, The Ricardian, vol. 32 (2022), pp. 29-58
[2] 1215: Concilium Lateranum IIII
(pdf of English translation), www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu.
[3] ‘Affinity
(in Canon Law)’, Catholic Encyclopaedia, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01178a.htm.
[4] Concilium Lateranum IIII; Henry
Ansgar Kelly, ‘The Crowland Chronicle and the Marriage Impediments of Edward IV
and Richard III’, The Ricardian, vol. 32, 2022, p. 45, n. 94.
[5] Michael Hicks, Anne Neville:
Queen to Richard III, Stroud, 2006, pp. 132-3.
[6]
https://ricardianloons.wordpress.com/2018/09/08/the-trial-that-should-have-happened-in-1483/#comment-454, message from ‘Latrodecta’, 24
April 2020 at 15:22.
