Important Yorkist Genealogy Now Available On-Line in Interactive Digital Format

The Yorkist claim to the English throne was based, in large part, on a hereditary argument that the children of Anne Mortimer and Richard, earl of Cambridge, were the more senior heirs to Edward III than the children of John, duke of Lancaster. Many genealogies were created to demonstrate the strength of this claim and to convince a sceptical public. One of the most enigmatic and colourful is Free Library of Philadelphia MS Lewis E201, a fifteen-foot, nine-inch long roll that has been called by various names, including the ‘Edward IV Roll’ and the ‘Edward IV Coronation Roll’. Believed to have been produced between 1460 and 1464, many scholars have written about its imagery and text, but none have attempted a full transcription or translation.

 

Lewis E201 unrolled. Photo by Laura Blanchard.

 

With funding from the American Branch of the Richard III Society and others, Lewis E201 has been digitized, transcribed, translated, and annotated in a fully interactive digital edition using the open-access software Digital Mappa.

The link to the project is www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/chronicle-world.

Professor Emily Steiner at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) served as Project Director, overseeing a team of four PhD-level students. Two of the students worked on transcribing the text, one worked on translating the text from Latin, and a fourth studied the potential sources consulted by its scribes and creators. Two anonymous peer reviewers, both widely published specialists in medieval genealogical manuscripts, checked the overall quality of the transcriptions and translations. Dot Porter, Curator of Digital Humanities at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the UPenn Libraries, was technical lead.

Volunteers from the Richard III Society were recruited to research the 54 coats of arms and many badges and mottoes contained in the roll, building on tentative insights offered by Peter Hammond and Geoffrey Wheeler more than two decades ago. Tapping into the specialized knowledge base of the Society, including its extensive libraries of primary and secondary sources, the volunteers prepared annotations summarizing the current body of knowledge about Lewis E201’s images. The current editor of The Ricardian, Dr. Joanna Laynesmith, and the Society’s Research Officer, Dr. David Grummitt, reviewed these annotations and offered helpful comments to improve them.

Users can navigate the manuscript visually by viewing the images and clicking on specific items of interest. They can also navigate the manuscript via a series of text files, which present the transcriptions, translations, and annotations.

Example of Digital Mappa interface.

 

Much remains to be studied and understood about Lewis E201, but the team can report several preliminary observations that may shed some light on its origins. While it was expected that the roll would follow the models established by Peter of Poitiers and Ranulf Higden, as well as the native English histories written by Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth, it was less expected that Lewis E201 would venture into more obscure sources. One of these derives from the early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman prequel to Brutus’s conquest of Albion called Des Granz Geanz (c.1333-4) and its Latin translation, De origine gigantum. Middle English adaptations of this story can also be found in Castleford’s Chronicle, a fourteenth-century verse chronicle written in the north of England, and the Auchinleck Manuscript, produced in London in the 1330s and now in the National Library of Scotland. The tale is inscribed at the top of Lewis E201 next to roundels showing the Creation and Fall of Man and takes up a considerable amount of space. Relating the tale of 30 daughters of a Greek king who are exiled for plotting to kill their husbands to preserve their sovereignty as princesses, the sisters set sail and discover an uninhabited island which they name ‘Albion’ after the eldest sister, Albina. They populate the island by mating with incubi; the result is a race of giants who are conquered by Brutus when he discovers Albion centuries later. This legend came to prominence during Edward I’s mediation with the Pope on the issue of Scotland’s status as sovereign nation or vassal state to England, and resurfaced in the mid-fifteenth century when it became appended to many versions of The Brut, both in prose and verse forms, often with subtle variations on the narrative, for example, a Syrian king instead of a Greek one. However, it is a very unusual choice for a pedigree and was not often (if ever) incorporated into English royal genealogical rolls from the Wars of the Roses period.

A second unusual source for Lewis E201 appears to be the Livre des bouillons, extant in a single fifteenth-century register from Bordeaux (Bordeaux AA 1, fos 121v-2). Lewis E201 quotes, almost verbatim, several legends from this text which relates miracles pertaining to the dukes of Aquitaine, whose line as shown in E201 culminates in the father of Henry II’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. E201 tells the story of the legendary crusader king Senebrinus, who, with the intercession of the Virgin Mary, converts a Saracen princess named Fenix to Christianity. Another tells the legend of the third-century saint Valerie of Limoges, descended from the kings of Bordeaux and heir to the count of Limoges, who, having spurned marriage to her cousin Stephen, is beheaded at his order. St. Martial miraculously places her decapitated head back on her neck, a feat which inspires Stephen to convert to Christianity along with the entire kingdom of Bordeaux and the surrounding Aquitaine lands. It is still unclear from where the Lewis E201’s compiler sourced these legends, but their remarkable similarity to the Livre des bouillons suggests multiple pathways for future research.

A third notable source for the Lewis E201 is the Chronicle of Wigmore Abbey, which records the ancient lineage of the abbey’s patrons, the Mortimer family, Welsh Marcher lords. The Mortimer claim to the throne would become inextricable with that of York. A presumptive heir to the throne, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, married Philippa, the only child of Lionel, the second surviving son of Edward III; Lewis E201 asserts that their son, Roger, ‘was next in line to the kingdoms of England and France. Then he was declared heir throughout all of England.’ Roger’s daughter, Anne, would marry another Richard, the second son of the Duke of York, who was the grandson of Edward III and son of Edmund, Duke of York, and Isabelle, princess of Castile and Leon. Lewis E201 confidently proclaims this Richard to be ‘the true heir of the kingdoms of England, France, Castile, and Leon and the Lord of Ireland.’ For the early history of the Mortimer family, the compiler of Lewis E201 text was clearly drawing from a source related to the Fundatorum historia, now University of Chicago Library, Codex MS 224, which features a Mortimer family tree, probably copied from a roll, as well as from other records, including a list of British kings extracted from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Lewis E201 repeats information from the Fundatorum historia otherwise disputed, claiming for example, that Hugh of Mortimer (d.1181) married Matilda, the daughter of William Longsword, a descendant of Rollo, Duke of Normandy. Although this information could have been extracted from any number of different sources, it appears that an extra effort was made to incorporate it into Lewis E201.

Finally, Lewis E201’s compilers consulted the Revelations of Saint Bridget of Sweden, part of which appears at the foot of the roll in a large scroll flanked by the royal arms of England, France, and Spain. The text appearing in the roll comes from Book Four, Chapter 3 of the Revelations, and concerns itself with usurpation and legitimate succession. It has been translated as follows:

And because nothing should be acquired with injustice; and because the kingdom of England, to which is owed succession by hereditary right, was estranged from the older brother, the true heir, through an arbitrary election carried out through fear and violence, and given and granted unjustly to the younger brother, not the heir; for this reason the kingdom of England has suffered this affliction and its desolation, as is well and clearly declared in the Revelations of Saint Bridget in the book of the heavenly Emperor to the kings, beginning in the third chapter. The bride [speaks] to Christ at the end of this chapter in the following manner. ‘Again the bride said to the Lord, “O Lord, do not be offended if I ask one more thing. The current king has two sons and two kingdoms. In one kingdom, the king is chosen by hereditary right; in the other, he is elected according to the will of the people. Now, however, the opposite has been done. For the younger son holds the hereditary kingdom while the older holds the kingdom that is granted through election.” God responded, “in their electors there were three faults, and a fourth that surpassed these: unlawful love, feigned prudence, flattery of fools, and lack of faith in God and in the common people of the kingdom. For this reason, their election was against justice, against God, against the good of the commonwealth and the welfare of the common people and the kingdom. Therefore, for the provision of peace and the welfare of the common people and the kingdom, it is necessary that the older son regain the hereditary kingdom and that the younger son come to the election (sc. the elective kingdom). Otherwise, unless the earlier actions are repealed, the kingdom will suffer loss, the kingdom’s people will be afflicted, discord will arise, the days of its sons will be spent in bitterness, and their kingdoms will no longer be kingdoms, but it will be as it is written: ‘the powerful will move from their seats, and those who walked on the earth will be elevated.’ Mark this example of two kingdoms. In one there is election; in the other, hereditary succession. The first, where there is election, was destroyed and afflicted because the true heir was not elected. And this was caused by the election and the greed of the one who sought to rule. Therefore, because God does not strike down the son because of the sins of the father, and because he is not eternally angry but acts as a just protector both on earth and in heaven, for that reason this kingdom will not come to its earlier glory and happy condition until there appears the true heir, either from the paternal or the maternal line.

Following the example of Henry V, Edward IV subscribed to this saint's cult and supported the Bridgettine order at Syon Abbey, west of London. The abbey saw Edward IV as a founder, singing masses for him, his queen, and Henry V on August 31 every year. Syon also sang masses for Edward IV’s parents – suggesting the duke and duchess were patrons before 1461. Edward IV’s mother, Duchess Cecily, owned a copy of the Revelations of Saint Bridget, leaving it to her granddaughter (Anne de la Pole, prioress at Syon) in her last will. These connections indicate that Lewis E201 was commissioned by someone operating at the very heart of the Yorkist establishment, perhaps even someone at court, but more work needs to be done to determine who E201’s original patron was, where it was originally produced, and how this genealogy would have been used as a political, social, and material object. 

We hope that this project will inspire scholars to look further at this fascinating and enigmatic manuscript and bring it into dialogue with other genealogical materials of its day.

Susan Troxell

Chair, Richard III Society-American Branch

 

Acknowledgements: For the potential role of the Livre des Boullions and Wigmore Abbey Chronicle in shaping Lewis E201, I am quoting from the Director’s Introduction by Professor Emily Steiner, and Annotator’s Introduction by Eleanor Webb, PhD candidate and Doctoral Fellow at Wolf Humanities Center at UPenn. The translation of E201’s incorporation of the Revelations of St Bridget is by Emma Dyson, PhD-candidate in UPenn’s Department of Classics. I thank them for allowing me to use them here. 

Funding: In addition to the American Branch, funding was provided from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, and from Sean Quimby, Associate Vice Provost and Director of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

Primary Sources :

Archives municipales de Bordeaux: Livre de Bouillons (Bordeaux: Imprimerie de G. Gounouilhou, 1867).

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (London: Penguin Books, 1995). 

Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, translated by Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin Books, 1966) (English)

The revelations of Saint Birgitta of Sweden, translated by Denis Searby, with introductions and notes by Bridget Morris, 4 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2006–2015) 

Paul Remfry, The Wigmore Chronicle, 1066 to 1377: A Translation of John Rylands Manuscript 215, ff. 1-8 and Trinity College, Dublin, MS.488, ff. 295-9 (Ceidio, 2013).

 

Secondary Sources:

A. Allan, ‘Yorkist Propaganda: Pedigree, prophecy, and the “British history” in the Reign of Edward IV’ in Patronage, Pedigree and Power, ed. C.  Ross, Gloucester 1979, pp. 171-192.

A. Allan, ‘Political Propaganda Employed by the House of York in England in the Mid-Fifteenth Century’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Swansea, 1981).

L. Blanchard and S. Troxell, ‘“This was done by the Lord”: The Transcription, Translation, and Online Presentation of an Edward IV Genealogy’, The Ricardian XXXIV (2024), pp. 3-16.

J.P. Carley and J. Crick, ‘Constructing Albion’s Past: An Annotated Edition of De Origine Gigantum’, in Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition, ed. J.P. Carley, Woodbridge, 2001, pp. 347-418.

L. Coote, ‘Prophecy, Genealogy, and History in Medieval English Political Discourse,” in Broken Lines: Genealogical Literature in Medieval Britain and France, ed. R.L. Radulescu and E.D. Kennedy, Turnhout 2008, pp. 28-44.

C. Given-Wilson, ‘Chronicles of the Mortimer Family, c. 1250-1450’ in Harlaxton Medieval Studies, IX: Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England, Proceedings of the 1997 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. R. Eales and S. Tyas, Donnington 2003, pp. 67-86. 

C. Heffernan, ‘The Revelations of St Bridget of Sweden in Fifteenth-Century England’ in Neophilologus 101 (2017).

J. Hughes, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV, Stroud 2002.

 O. de Laborderie, ‘A New Pattern for English History: the First Genealogical Rolls of the Kings of England’, in Broken Lines: Genealogical Literature in Medieval Britain and France, ed. R.L. Radulescu and E.D. Kennedy, Turnhout 2008, pp. 45-62.

 J.L. Laynesmith, Cecily Duchess of York (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

 J.L. Laynesmith, ‘Anne Mortimer’s Legacy of the House of York’, in The Mortimers of Wigmore 1066-1485, ed. P. Dryburgh and P. Hume, Eardisley 2023.

 K.L. Scott, ‘The Edward IV Roll: Chronicle of the World from Creation to Woden, with a Genealogy of Edward IV’ in Leaves of Gold: Manuscript Illumination from Philadelphia Collections, ed. J.R. Tanis and J.A. Thompson, Philadelphia 2001.

 N. Weijer, ‘How England was Called Albion: the Legendary History of Britain in Script and Print, c. 1330-1575’ (Ph.D. thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 2017) (available online at https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/).

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Edward IV’s Marriage to Dame Eleanor Butler: Ruling out Impediments of Relationship

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, 1^st 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, 4^th 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, 1^st 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 3^rd degree(s), and second cousins once removed as being related in the 3^rd and 4^th 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

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inyZSlq2zB4 .

[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.

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.