Surely no royal mistress in the not so distant past has been more mysterious than the young woman known later as ‘Jane Shore’. There are no records of the crucial dates in her life: when and where she was born, or when and where she was first married and acquired the name of Shore. She had no Christian name in the writings that mention her until about 1599, when the playwright Thomas Heywood decided, in his two-part drama about King Edward IV, to call her Jane, as did both her husband and the king. The name she had received at birth, Elizabeth, was not discovered until 1972, along with confirmation of her second marriage, all of this clarified by her father’s will, proved in 1487.1 Throughout her long survival in legend and literature, which has been created by poets, dramatists, novelists, early film-makers, theatrical and television producers, in addition to biographers, she has always been known as Jane Shore.
Fortunately a good deal is now known about her father, who belonged to an important group of men in the late medieval city of London. These were the merchants, or mercers, who so impressed the Scottish poet William Dunbar in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century; it was their continuous activity and success against all odds that had kept the country going through several decades of overseas fighting in the Hundred Years War and trouble at home. This included a rebellion which reached the city itself, plus a civil war which began in 1455 and lasted for thirty years in all, while throughout these upheavals there had been a constant shortage of able-bodied people caused by recurring outbreaks of plague. This was hardly a cheerful time in the history of England nor for the family in Cheapside where ‘Jane Shore’ was probably born.
The seemingly endless war between England and France, initiated in the previous century by King Edward III, was drawing painfully to a close and despite the victories of the former king, Henry V, notably of course at Agincourt in 1415, France now seemed dangerously close to triumph. There had been an attempted two-year truce between the warring parties in 1444, while during the following year the province of Maine, still in English ownership, had been secretly promised to France by King Henry VI of England. In 1445, that same year, Henry, aged twenty-four, was married to the teenage Margaret of Anjou, daughter of René, Duke of Anjou, in the hope that such an alliance would help to bring the two countries together in peace. This it failed to do, and the new Queen Margaret, a girl of sixteen, did not even bring a useful dowry with her. The English king, who was more interested in spiritual life than personal ambition or political negotiation, likewise failed to satisfy anyone; the English were angry when the imminent loss of Maine became known and by 1449, when the French had regained the important province of Normandy, they were more angry still.
This situation was not likely to help the business activity of London, especially the export trade, mainly in woollen cloth and some home-produced silk, but the city merchants, responding to the challenge, continued to work with more concentration than ever, fortunately able to continue exports through Flanders, and there was little radical change in the way their personal lives were organised, for they remained constantly optimistic: they knew how much the country and the military leaders themselves depended on them. John Lambert, father of the girl who became known as Jane Shore, was one of the merchants, or mercers, admired by William Dunbar in his poem In Honour of the City of London and is assumed to have conducted his business in Cheapside. He had decided when he was about fifteen or so, the age when boys took up apprenticeships, that he would train to qualify as a mercer, hoping for a profitable career. It is worth noting that the Mercers’ Company, which he aimed to join, was the most important of the many livery companies which controlled trade at the time and it still exists today as a charitable concern. John Lambert’s period of apprenticeship had been shortened from the usual period of ten years to eight, possibly because he was a highly promising young man.
He had been born in about 1419 or 1420 and sometime in the 1440s he married Amy Marshall, whose father was a prominent member of the Grocers’ Company, second only to the Mercers’ in reputation and success. John Lambert, who had set up in business as soon as his apprenticeship was over, quickly won a good reputation, he was energetic and highly ambitious, essential qualities in the city. He soon took on apprentices of his own and before long he was taking part in the administration of the city. He was appointed as an alderman in 1460 and chosen as a sheriff for a year, when he acted as warden for the area known as Farringdon Within, an important part of the city which included St Paul’s church as it was then known, and of course many other churches of varying importance. The boundaries and the area it included can be studied in detail in John Stow’s Survey of London of 1598, which lists every street and important building in all of the twenty-four wards making up this proud old city, which had been first established in Roman times. (The twenty-fifth ward lay on the south side of the Thames.)
The aldermen were not only merchants, they acted as bankers, for the Italian banks were not yet fully established in London. Their duties in maintaining order were important and they had great powers which earned them much respect: they could act as local justices, pronounce sentences and determine punishments of all kinds – from the stocks to the pillory, from whipping to many other indignities that had to be suffered in public. They also ran Ludgate prison and supervised sentences of capital punishment: so they were indeed men to be respected, even feared.
‘Jane’, as she was later known, therefore, was to grow up in a family where the father was an important and for most of his life a responsible man. Probably John Lambert had ambitions to be chosen as mayor, which unfortunately did not happen, but like many other mercers and sheriffs he soon joined the bankers, lending money when he was satisfied that the debtors would pay him back and making more money as a result. It was well known that among those who constantly required finance were the kings of England, for parliament never voted them sufficient funds for court expenses and especially those needed for fighting a successful war.
If the Hundred Years War was at last approaching its end it was not yet over, and in the early days of 1450 nobody could tell what would happen next. Inevitably there would be heavy outstanding debts which had to be paid later, somehow: but how? Much depended on those ‘merchants full of substance and of might’ as Dunbar described them.
John Lambert was known to be a supporter of the Yorkists, and so cannot have approved the current rule of the Lancastrian King Henry VI, destined to be the last in a long series of Lancastrian kings of England. He in no way resembled his heroic father, Henry V, who had died young in 1422, when his son was only nine months old. The child was declared king of England that year while a month or so later, after the death of his maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France, he was in principle king of France too. He was declared of age in 1437, but as he grew up it became obvious that he possessed few, if any, qualities of kingship in the practical sense, for he preferred meditation and prayer to politics. His advisers soon saw that the future of the reign would be difficult, and they began to fear the representatives of the rival Plantagenet group, the ambitious Yorkists, who were likely to become dangerous opponents. The leaders of both groups were descended from Edward III, through the sons of his sons, and each of the rival claimants now had to prove his case, each demonstrating that his own descent was more direct than that of the other. The Duke of York was in fact descended directly from Edward III through both his parents.
If John Lambert made no secret of his support for the Yorkists, led by the ambitious and not too popular Duke of York, a view he shared with many Londoners, for the time being he concentrated on his business, his civic duties and the establishment of his family. The date of his marriage to Amy Marshall is not known; their first surviving child, christened Elizabeth, was probably born in 1450 or perhaps slightly earlier, in 1445 at the earliest, and if the Lambert parents had hoped for the essential son and heir – a daughter was of secondary importance – they were soon rewarded, for the family increased later by three sons, John, Robert and William.
Despite the uncertainty of life at this period John Lambert prospered. His wife Amy soon acquired high status on her own account and was so highly respected that she was referred to as ‘Lady Lambert’, seen as the outstanding wife of an outstanding man. Despite the difficulties of the merchants’ work at the time there was still every hope of a good future for their children. Unfortunately, however, for the Lambert family and for all the citizens of London the year 1450 soon developed into a particularly dangerous and violent time which set the pattern of everyone’s life for at least thirty years ahead, mostly dominated by fighting and uncertainty. Soon after that the unexpected ‘usurpation’ and tyrannical behaviour of the future Richard III caused the violence to recur, if briefly. It was difficult to imagine that peaceful times would ever follow and in 1450 the English had little to be proud of, especially after the loss of Normandy the previous year. The same year had seen the end of the unpopular Duke of Suffolk, Earl de la Pole, who appears to have been an incompetent leader, even if the decisions behind his attempt to counter-attack the French, the wrong decisions, had been taken by Henry VI, who was not qualified to direct military operations. Henry hoped to save Suffolk from public wrath by banishing him from England for five years but in May 1450 the duke was seized by his personal enemies and beheaded in a rowing boat (with a rusty sword) while attempting to cross the Channel. He was treated with ignominy, his body abandoned on the shore. Nobody was upset, nobody cared about Suffolk and most people welcomed his disappearance. Incidents of this kind reveal the brutal style of the late Middle Ages, when memories of chivalric romance seemed to be fading and those attractive images of tranquil pleasure accompanied by minstrels on harp and lute had to be forgotten, at least for the time being.
The year 1450, possibly that of their daughter’s birth, could well have been a happy one for the Lambert parents, but in addition to the still unending war with France it was also the year of a short but violent rebellion against the English government led by a man from Kent, Jack Cade. In 1450 only very old people could possibly have lived through or even remembered the violence of the unsuccessful Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the sixth year of Richard II’s reign, but the peasants’ protests, which were largely ignored, and the death of their leader Wat Tyler, killed by the Lord Mayor of London in the presence of the king, had not been forgotten. Now, seventy years later, and during the final disastrous decade of the Hundred Years War, it was not merely peasants but responsible people of all classes, including the gentry and the clergy, who felt it was essential to protest about the misconduct of the war and the increased taxes they were now being asked to pay, both for many heavy military losses and for the upkeep of the court and the royal family. Queen Margaret of Anjou, who had first appeared to the Londoners in 1444 with a splendid escort of nineteen carriages filled with her attendants, had not concerned herself with economy.2
Relatively little seems to be known about Cade, although he had recently been tried for possible sorcery. In the proclamation for his arrest, in 1450, he was accused not only of using books of magic but of having ‘raised up the Devil in the semblance of a black dog’ in his lodgings in Dartford.3 Activities of this kind were anything but rare at the time, for many uneducated people, and even many who had had the benefit of better education, still believed that only magic or witchcraft could help them achieve their ambitions or get them out of trouble. Appropriately, as the leader of what turned out to be a strong, brief but disturbing rebellion, Cade was a violent, ambitious character, like so many men of those times. In an apparent attempt to attract the attention of another ambitious and potentially violent man, Richard, Duke of York, Cade called himself ‘Mortimer’, recalling the name of the duke’s mother, for he knew that the duke intended to make a claim for the throne; this had not yet been openly put forward, but the duke’s threat was becoming widely if unofficially better known and had begun to alarm the government. Its members feared that Cade could bring him useful support.
Cade and his band, joined by rebels from the east of the country, marched from Kent to Blackheath and submitted their complaints to the king, only to find themselves virtually ignored, in the hope that they would be discouraged and melt away. Cade was not a man to accept this kind of treatment and in the end, after various disturbing incidents, the rebels forced their way into the city, which suffered badly, despite Cade’s early attempt to forbid any pillage. Very soon the rebels turned into an undisciplined mob, ignored their leader and decided among other opportunistic moves to attack the premises of a merchant named Philip Malpas, who was an alderman, very rich and apparently very unpopular: he must have been carefully chosen. He lost virtually everything and he was not the only one.4 There are no accounts of an attack on the Lambert house, but all the aldermen naturally rallied to the defence of the city by preparing such weapons and armour as they possessed, most of it old and rusty, but the citizens had to do what they could to protect the capital and naturally took special care of their own homes.
The rebels may have begun their protest quietly enough but they knew how to terrify the city, and the situation worsened. Even the sheriff of Kent was beheaded in the Mile End area and another man suffered at Whitechapel. Worse still: Lord Say, ‘Great Treasurer of England . . . was brought out of the Tower of London unto the Guildhall, and there he was of divers reasons examined’ and finally executed at the Standard in Cheap.5 The severed heads were nailed up on London Bridge, there was fighting and drowning, the bridge was set on fire, and Cade made certain of even more support by breaking open two prisons, the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea, releasing all the prisoners and hoping of course that they would join his followers.
All this and more was recounted in documents of the time. The Lamberts, who presumably lived not far away from these scenes of violence, possibly in Cheapside itself, must have been alarmed, and the children would not have been allowed out of the house. However the aldermen in particular continued to oppose the Cade supporters, using whatever weapons they possessed, although there was nothing they could do to end the fighting. It is shocking to think that the garrison in the Tower of London actually fired on the London civilians, even killing women and children.
Finally, after more than two months, when nobody seemed capable of ending the struggle, Lord Scales, who was in charge of the official military defence, organised a meeting with three high dignitaries of the Church and as a result a general pardon was issued. But there was no happy ending: after a reward was promised for the capture of Cade he was hunted down in Sussex and killed. His corpse was brought back to London where his head was cut from his body and fixed to London Bridge; at the same time parts of his dismembered body were distributed round the country in order to deter any future rebels. It was a reminder of the ruthless behaviour of those earlier centuries. So ended the man who had almost subdued the city and had proudly gone to Cannon Street to touch London Stone with his sword. He is still remembered near the western boundary of Kent by a plaque in the Sussex village named after him: Cade Street. That may have been a long way from Cheapside, but the end of Cade is typical of the heartless and cruelty-ridden time which formed the framework to the early life of Elizabeth Lambert.
The Cade rebellion, although particularly destructive to London, was not an isolated incident, and was followed by other violence. In fifteenth-century English history it is hard to find more than a few weeks when there was no outbreak of anger, with the result that many young people, even children like Elizabeth Lambert, could have assumed that the whole of life was full of anger and violence like this. Soon after Cade’s death the Bishop of Salisbury, after saying mass, was murdered and stripped bare by various parishioners from Erdington in Wiltshire, who were even proud of their wicked behaviour. The bishop had been carefully targeted, for it was he who had officiated at the marriage in 1445 of the unpopular and ineffective Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou at the Premonstratensian abbey6 at Titchfield, also in Wiltshire. Edward Hall, in the edition by Grafton of his Chronicle, ended his account of this twenty-eighth year of Henry VI’s reign with despairing words: ‘and so from thenceforth daily succeeded murder, slaughter and dissension’.7
There was no good news during the rest of 1450: Caen was surrendered to the French, so was Cherbourg, and unsurprisingly morale in England fell to a low point. What would happen now?
Richard, Duke of York, had occupied two important posts in France, acting as the English king’s Lieutenant there in 1436/7, and later becoming Governor of France and Normandy from 1440 to 1445. Returning to England after his years abroad, ending with the loss of Normandy, he had watched all political developments carefully, but everyone in royal circles also watched him, for his ambition was becoming clear. His ancestry meant that his claim to the throne was good, but his hopes were dashed when in October 1453 Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s wife, gave birth to a son. This was so unexpected an event after nearly nine years of marriage that there was gossip: the child was surely not legitimate, claimed the Yorkists, especially since the king, suffering from an attack of mental instability, had apparently failed to show any interest in his son and did not even bless this new heir to the Lancastrian cause. During the king’s illness the Duke of York was appointed Protector. He had hoped to return to France with some senior command but the suspicious Lancastrian court decided to make him Governor of Ireland instead. As Protector he had a valid excuse for delaying his departure to Ireland as long as he could. Fortunately, at least in some ways, the king had recovered from the upset to his health by the end of 1454, and the Duke of York had to give up his protectorate.
However, the country was still in the grip of violence even though the Hundred Years War had reached its dismal end in or about 1453 with defeat for the English at the battle of Castillon in Guyenne, in the south of France, and the loss of Bordeaux, the valuable port on the west coast. There was no official peace treaty. England, which had previously owned almost half the area of France, was now left only with Calais and the Channel Islands, a miserable situation. Exports from England went through the Wool Staple at Calais, so at least this was saved, and the town retained an English Captain. Then, as though people could not imagine life without conflict, there came the immediate threat of a new and different war: ‘the Wars of the White and Red Roses’ were to follow with scarcely a break.
Henry VI seems to have had more health trouble, with the Duke of York again acting as Protector, but although the king recovered quickly and deprived him of his post, this time it was too late. Nothing, it seems, could pacify the restless duke, and he won the support of another ambitious man, his wife Cecily’s powerful uncle, the Earl of Warwick. Already in 1455 the impatience of these men ‘let slip the dogs of war’ and years of fighting followed, years which were to be dominated by the career of the Duke of York’s son and heir, the young man who in 1461 became Edward IV, king of England and some ten or twelve years later took Mistress Shore as his mistress. Their stories were parallel for many years, even if in some ways far apart.
The seemingly romantic title given to these wars is said to have been a phrase used casually by Sir Walter Scott four centuries later in his novel Anne of Geierstein (1829), a story set in England, France and Switzerland during the fifteenth century. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries some British historians have disliked the use of this phrase to describe a bloody war which went on far too long, changing the course of English history itself, but after more than five hundred years it is too late now for any other memorable description to be adopted. More memorable, although presented with disguised violence, is the well-known painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Henry Payne, in which he recalled the fanciful scene in the Temple garden introduced by Shakespeare into Henry VI Part I, Act II, Scene 4. The possible contestants wear gowns, not armour, and they offer the famous roses, although their gestures are threatening.
The city mercers and their families might have been worried now, for a new war coming so soon might well threaten their business activity further. Yet they knew that indirectly they could make money out of the fighting, for without the capital they provided no army could be paid: coin is the sinews of war, as Rabelais had written. This fresh conflict, basically a civil war, began soon enough in the early summer of 1455 with the first battle of St Albans and victory went to the Yorkists.
Assuming she had been born in 1450 at the latest the young Lambert daughter would be at least about five years old now and joined by one or two of her brothers. Her parents, like all the city merchants and their families, might have worried about the new war situation but they were not faint-hearted, they continued to work hard: they had no choice. Some took sides, but in the city the Yorkists, who included John Lambert, still predominated. Thanks to the aldermen, whose battles took place well away from the battlefields, a kind of peace returned to London, but it was not to last.
The Yorkist faction was now openly fighting for the throne of England. In the first stages of this conflict victory went sometimes to York, sometimes to Lancaster, but the Yorkist defeat at Wakefield in 1460 seemed to be a disaster, for the Duke of York himself was killed. Queen Margaret, now virtually in charge of the Lancastrian force, was triumphant and the Duke of York’s severed head, adorned with a paper crown, was nailed up on the gates of York. The duke’s younger son, Edmund, had been killed too.
However, the Lancastrians had temporarily forgotten the eldest son, Edward, known as the Earl of March, who was only eighteen in 1460.
The Lancastrian leaders underestimated the earl’s determination to avenge his father’s death; the young leader left the Welsh border, set off rapidly towards the north, and on his way, undeterred by any danger, fought and won the battle of Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire, defeating an army of Welsh Lancastrians who had attempted to destroy the Yorkist army.
It was too early to assume that the Yorkist faction under their young leader was now ready to take control of the military or political situation. On 17 February the second battle of St Albans, fought under the command of the Earl of Warwick before Edward and his army arrived, was won by Queen Margaret’s troops. The queen had realised that she would have to take command, for her husband was incapable of doing so: he still preferred praying to fighting. At St Albans she broke with military tradition: her forces attacked the enemy’s flank and not the front, taking the Yorkists by surprise. The military historian A.H. Burne has imagined how the enemy might have reacted to this manoeuvre.8 Was it a clever move by someone who might have been a feminist avant la lettre, an accident, or merely a desperate action? The queen had adopted a strategy that was ‘unusual, brilliant and phenomenally successful. It must have made the leading soldiers of the time do a little quiet thinking’. In the past there had been a rule: ‘armies should engage front to front; but here was an army engaging front to flank’. In this century women were regarded merely as marriage partners, they were not expected to take decisions about important problems and certainly not about the conduct of a battle. Was the queen poised to start a new kind of warfare?
In 1461 this was a very different Margaret from the sixteen-year-old bride who had come to London seventeen years earlier for her marriage ‘with two steeds trapped all in white damask powdered with gold . . . and her hair combed down about her shoulders, with a coronal of gold, rich pearls and precious stones’.9 Life had moved on; the queen could optimistically assume now that she would soon receive support from both Scotland and France, as she had been promised, and boldly came to London, not many miles south of St Albans. She was triumphant, but much more unpopular than she had realised. She sent messengers to the city gates, asking for admission. The mayor and some aldermen, hoping for negotiations, thought they should meet her, but the citizens would have none of her. Reluctantly she decided that her army must turn back, and as a result London was spared the chaos and bloodshed that would inevitably have followed. The Lancastrian troops had already acquired a bad reputation for pillage and robbery, and would have wrecked the city.
It was now, in the aftermath of this second battle of St Albans in 1461, lost by the so far heroic Earl of Warwick, that London became aware of a new military leader, potentially even more heroic, the tall and handsome Edward of York, known as the Earl of March, only nineteen and still intent on avenging his dead father. His basic tactics were simple: he believed in attack whereas Warwick tended to prefer defence. Now, however, Edward was forced to remember that this fighting had one aim: Henry VI must be defeated and then he himself would take his place on the throne.
The later and crucial stage was conducted in fact by Warwick, proving that he was not only an expert on battlefield defence but that he could deserve the name he was soon given, the Kingmaker. The Great Chronicle of London10 described what happened: ‘He [Warwick] mustered his people in St John’s Field where unto that host was proclaimed and showed certain articles and points that King Henry had offended in.’ Did the crowd find him ‘worthy to reign as king any longer or no. Whereupon the people cried hugely and said, Nay, Nay. And after it was asked of them whether they would have th’earl of March for their king and they cried with one voice Yea, Yea.’
This simplified decision, hardly a democratic vote or a plebiscite, was reported to Edward who was lodged at his mother’s house in the city, Baynard’s Castle. He modestly issued his thanks for the decision and added (of course) that he was not worthy to be king. However, he was soon accepted by dignitaries of Church and state, after an ‘exhortation’ by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops present, in addition to ‘other noble men’, probably influenced by Cecily of York, Edward’s mother. In principle, Edward was proclaimed king of England. Next day he rode to St Paul’s ‘and there had Te deum sungen with all solemnity.’ Later he went to Westminster, his right to the throne was proved and he was proclaimed king. ‘And thus,’ according to the Great Chronicle of London, ‘took this noble prince possession of the realm of England upon a Tuesday being the 4th day of March’.11
However, the young man, essentially a military leader at this period of his life, insisted on proving himself in a final battle. Politics and parliament were not yet real enough to him and he had not forgotten his father’s death. After joining Warwick he led the Yorkist army north, where the Lancastrians had withdrawn. The queen and her military leaders were hoping for a strategic pause but Edward was determined they would have no such thing. He planned to attack them at once.
It was on Palm Sunday, 29 March 1461, in a snowstorm, that Edward and the Yorkist army defeated the Lancastrians at Towton in Yorkshire, about five miles from Tadcaster. This conflict, which lasted all day, engaged the two largest armies ever opposed to each other so far on an English battlefield and an estimated 20,000 men died. The battle ended the first stage of the fifteenth-century civil wars, it passed into folk memory and is remembered locally every year. A commemorative cross was erected and still stands. Later, the Duke of Gloucester is said to have asked for a small chapel to be built in memory of the men who had lost their lives, but if it ever existed it has now vanished without trace.
With Towton, history became entangled with legend. A.H. Burne has mentioned that on this site there grew, until recently, an unusual dwarf rose,12 ‘with white petals and a red spot’, but after seven centuries this has vanished too. The site where it was observed is still known locally by the name it had earned in reality: Bloody Meadow. The citizens of London could only be selfishly thankful that the bloodshed had been so far away to the north. Queen Margaret, her husband and her son escaped to Newcastle, then Scotland. Edward IV was king of England.
These details give only a bare summary of the Wars of the Roses, but the ruthless fighting, which no one tried to prevent, formed the background to the early lives of both Edward IV and also, indirectly, the girl who was to be known as Jane Shore, later his favourite mistress. No two young people might have seemed more unlikely to meet, even though this is no simple rags-to-riches story.
The future Jane Shore, who would probably be about eleven or twelve years old during 1461, the year of Towton, would now learn more about Edward IV. Everyone wanted to see the new young king, and the girl, who would have been considered grown up at the time, might have had the chance, along with everyone in the city, to watch him riding in processions through the streets, on his way to Westminster or to any of the royal palaces in or near the city. These processions helped to inform people of what was going on and provided entertainment at the same time. The handsome young king, already attracting attention through his eye-catching clothes, which included expensive fur trimmings and brilliant jewellery, was an immediate star, the late medieval equivalent of a twenty-firstcentury celebrity. He had dismissed the unpopular Henry VI along with his increasingly aggressive queen, and changed the government of England. There was to be an uneasy kind of postscript to this story later, for Edward appeared to lose his grip in 1469, not recovering control until May 1471. With the death of Henry VI’s son at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 and the quiet killing of Henry himself in the Tower of London a few weeks afterwards, the Lancastrian line of Plantagenet kings came to an end.