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Back to Basics: A Series for Newer Members
Issue 7 -- December 1993
The
Assumption of the Throne
| The Pre-Contract in the Middle Ages | The
Woodvilles of Grafton Regis | Mediaeval Dictionary:
Royal Seals | Back to Index
In the series on
the 'crimes' Richard's assumption of the throne has not yet been dealt
with. Whether or nor it is regarded as a crime depends on how the grounds
on which he claimed the throne are viewed. These grounds were mainly
that his nephews were illegitimate. First we will describe the complicated
events leading up to Richard's assumption of the throne.
Edward IV died
unexpectedly on 9 April 1483. His son and heir, Edward Prince of Wales
was in Ludlow, on the marches of Wales, where he nominally governed
the Principality with his council under the guidance of Bishop John
Alcock, President of the council and the Prince's teacher and Earl Rivers,
his uncle and Governor. The news was received in Ludlow on 14 April,
taking 5 days to travel the 130 or so miles. The news probably reached
Richard of Gloucester in Middleham at about the same time. Subesequent
events are well known, with Richard's party travelling down from York
and meeting the royal party at Northampton and Stony Stratford on 29/30
April. Despite the arrest there of Rivers, Sir Richard Grey (the new
king's half brother) and his chamberlain Thomas Vaughan, the work of
the government went on in the name of Edward V until the first official
signs of something wrong. These came with the ceasing of privy seal
writs in the name of Edward V on 8 June and the postponing on 16 June
of his coronation from 22 June until 9 November.
On Sunday 22 June
sermons were preached in London alleging that Edward IV was not a true
king and so nor could his sons be. Mancini alleges that the preachers
said that Edward IV was illegitimate, but other, later sources, such
as the Great Chronicle and Polydore Vergil
and including Thomas More say that it was alleged that as well as Edward
IV his sons were illegitimate too, on the grounds (More says) of Edward's
marriage to Elizabeth Lucy before he married the Queen. The legitimate
king was therefore Richard of Gloucester. There is some doubt as to
what grounds were alleged for replacing Edward V, various preachers
may have given different versions in their sermons, but there is no
doubt that the official grounds were that Edward IV was precontracted
to marry someone else before he married Elizabeth Woodville.
The woman he was
said to be precontracted to was not Elizabeth Lucy however, as More
probably knew very well. Lucy was well known as one of Edward's mistresses
and probably mother of Arthur Viscount Lisle. The woman was in fact
Eleanor Butler, daughter of John Talbot, first Earl of Shrewsbury and
widow of Sir Thomas Butler, son of Ralph Butler, first (and last) Lord
Sudeley. Thomas was dead by 1464; Eleanor by 1468. Her name was certainly
known to the Crowland Chronicler and it is given in a petition presented
to Richard on 26 June requesting him to take the throne and subsequently
incorporated in Titulus Regius, the Act of Parliament setting
out his title. Titulus Regius also says that the son of Clarence
was barred from the throne by his father's attainder. It is thus certain
that the events of April-June 1483 ended with Richard of Gloucester
claiming the throne chiefly on the grounds of the illegitimacy of his
nephews due to their father being precontracted at the time of his marriage
to Elizabeth Woodvile and linked to this, that the marriage was a secret
one. The marriage was undoubtedly secret but we have no way of proving
the pre-contract story beyond doubt. The question then remains as to
whether or not the pre-contract was still a bar after the death of Eleanor
Butler and the long term marriage of Edward and his wife. It has been
held not to be a bar.
As described above,
Richard claimed the throne on the grounds of Edward IV's pre-contract
with another woman before he married Elizabeth Woodville. In Canon Law,
the law which governed marriage in fifteenth century England, a marriage
could be contracted by simply exchanging consents between two parties.
The exchange of words such as 'I do marry you' was all that was necessary;
there was no need for witnesses or a priest. The use of the future tense,
'I will marry you' did not have the same binding effect, unless it was
later followed by intercourse. This completed the marriage on the grounds
that it gave a presumption of 'present consent'. To allege a pre-contract
was a perfectly valid way to object to a marriage although it must have
always been difficult to prove. The other allegation made in Titulus
Regius that the marriage of Edward and Elizabeth was invalid because
it was secret was also a legally valid objection to a marriage.
References and
further detail for the above may be found in many books. A detailed
chronology of events from 9 April to 30 June is given in The
Coronation of Richard III, by Anne Sutton and P.W. Hammond,
pp.13-26; R.S. Sylvester, The History of King Richard III,
1963, pp. 234-236 discusses the sermons. A good summary of the situation
is found in Mary O'Regan, 'The Pre-contract and its Effect on the Succession
in 1483', The Ricardian, volume 4, no. 54,
(1976), pp.2-7 and R.H. Helmholtz, 'The Sons of Edward IV: A Canonical
Assessment of the Claim that they were illegitimate', in Loyalty,
Lordship and Law, ed. P.W. Hammond, (1986), pp. 91-103.
All of these titles are available from the Society Library. -- PWH
Continuing our
series on medieval people we will look this time at a whole family,
the Woodvilles. It has been suggested that Edward IV's elevation of
the family so alienated the other peers that it was one of the main
causes of the downfall of the Yorkist dynasty. It may have been Edward's
intention to curb the power of the old nobility by creating a new power
group who would be loyal to him only as they had received all their
patronage from him.
The Woodvilles
of Grafton Regis were a monor Northamptonshire family with few estates.
Sir Richard Woodville was a member of the household of the Duke of Bedford,
Henry VI's uncle. Not long after the death of his master in 1435, he
married the widowed Duchess of Bedford, Jacquetta, daughter of Peter,
Duke of Luxembourg and Count of St. Pol. The marriage did not meet with
universal approval and the young couple had to pay a fine of £1000
for marrying without the King's permission. Woodville was a loyal servant
of King Henry and was rewarded with the Rivers Barony in 1448. His wife
was high in Queen Margaret's favour. So it was natural for their eldest
daughter Elizabeth to become one of Queen Margaret's ladies and to be
married while still in her teens to Sir John Grey, heir of Lord Ferrers
of Groby, a strong supporter of the House of Lancaster. Two sons were
born of this marriage: Thomas (later Marquis of Dorset) and Richard.
Sir John was killed fighting for Lancaster at the second Battle of St.
Albans. Elizabeth returned to her family home with her two young sons.
The romantic story relates that Elizabeth waylaid Edward in the forest
to plead for the protection of her widows' jointure and the rights of
her sons and he was so ensnared by her feminine wiles that he wanted
her to become his mistress but she refused anything except marriage.
Whether this is true or not they were certainly secretly married in
May 1464. The marriage was not made public for several months, during
which time Warwick continued to press Edward to cement an alliance with
France by marrying the sister-in-law of the French king. The seeds were
thus sown of the rift which eventually led to the fall of the House
of York.
Perhaps things
would have been different if Elizabeth had not had so many relatives
or had not been so determined to help them all. Edward was induced to
provide grants of land and office for her father and her brothers and
her sisters nearly all made advantageous marriages, three of them to
minors. The eldest, Margaret, was married to the heir of the Earl of
Arundel, and nephew of the Earl of Warwick. Anne the next sister was
first married to William Bourchier, the heir of the Earl of Essex. She
married secondly George, eventually Earl of Kent and brother of her
sister Joan's husband Anthony, Lord Grey of Ruthyn and eldest son of
the Earl of Kent. Catherine married firstly the eleven year old Duke
of Buckingham, secondly Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford and thirdly Sir
Richard Wingfield. Mary married William Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke.
Only one of Elizabeth Woodville's brothers made a marriage at all out
of the ordinary and that was brother John (aged 20) to Katherine, dowager
Duchess of Norfolk (aged about 65). Such a marriage was not totally
unheard of, but it offended Warwick's ally the Duke of Norfolk, (Katherine
was a Neville). Several others of the marriages were really only offensive
to the Nevilles and their allies.
It is only fair
to say that Martha, one of the daughters, married Sir John Bromley a
minor Shropshire gentleman and another, Jacquetta, was married to John,
Lord Strange of Knockyn, before her sister married the King.
If you want to
find out more about the Woodvilles the Library has two full-length biographies
of Elizabeth: the standard one is Elizabeth Woodville 1437-1492:
her life and times by David MacGibbon, 1938; The
First Queen Elizabeth by Katherine Davies, 1937 is more
old-fashioned and traditional in tone. The Coronation of
Elizabeth Wydeville, Queen Consort of Edwward IV on May 26th 1465,
edited by George Smith, 1935 is a transcription of a contemporary account
of the ceremony with biographical notes on the participants, the longest
entries being devoted to Elizabeth herself and to her mother Jacquetta.
A junior library book The Knight and the Merchant
by Grant Uden, 1965, is a study of the contrasting careers of Anthony
Woodville, Elizabeth's talented brother, and William Caxton. There is
an illuminating essay by Michael Hicks on 'The Changing Role of the
Wydevilles in Yorkist Politics' in the book Patronage Pedigree
and Power in Later Medieval England, edited by C.D. Ross,
1979, and a number of articles in periodicals, including 'Marriage and
Politics in the Fifteenth Century: the Nevilles and the Wydvilles' by
J.R. Lander (from Bulletin of the Institute of Historical
Research, Vol. 36, No. 94, 1963) which examines the marriage
alliances of the two families and their effect on policy, 'Edward Woodville,
knight errant' by R.B. Merriman (from Proceedings of the
American Antiquarian Society, 1903 and 'A Local Dispute
and the Politics of 1483: Roger Townshend, Earl Rivers and the Duke
of Gloucester' by C.E. Moreton (from The Ricardian,
Vol. 8, No. 107, December 1989, with follow-up in No. 109) on the relations
between Rivers and Gloucester in early 1483. Other articles on the family
are listed in Part One of the Catalogue of Papers in the Library. --
HCH
In the second of
this series the royal seals will be briefly described. They are often
mentioned, but are a rather confusing topic. There were three of them
(usually), the Great Seal, the Privy Seal and the Signet.
- The
Great Seal: This was the first of the seals to be developed.
Under the Norman kings it expressed the personal wishes of the king
and authenticated all acts by the king or his government. This remained
the case throughout the whole of the Middle Ages but by the thirteenth
century the Chancellor, who held the seal, had a large department
under him and the seal no longer regularly travelled with the king.
- The
Privy Seal: This was originally developed, probably in the
early thirteenth century to act as the private seal of the king once
the Great Seal was no longer under his immediate control. It was sometimes
used as an instrument of government in its own right or to authenticate
a message to the Chancellor, from him to issue a document under the
Great Seal. The Keeper of the Privy Seal gradually became an important
officer of state and was housed away from the court. Thus in turn
the Privy Seal was not under the direct control of the king.
- The
Signet: The king always needed a seal under his own control,
to authenticate private corresondence and to enable him to exercise
his authority directly. The Privy Seal no longer meeting this need,
various secret seals came into being, of which the most permanent
became the Signet, under the control of the King's Secretary. Sometimes
(perhaps always) the king also had a secret seal which was not in
the keeping of the Secretary. Edward IV certainly had one. This seal
was used as a warrant for the acts of the king and for the issue of
instruments under the Great Seal.
A discussion of
the Signet in our period can be found in The King's Secretary
& the Signet Office in the Fifteenth Century, by J. Otway-Ruthven,
which is in the Society's Library.
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