To everyone’s surprise and dismay King Edward died on 9 April 1483 after a short and mysterious illness. The visiting Italian historian Dominic Mancini gave his version of what might have happened: ‘one day he was taken in a small boat, with those whom he had bidden go fishing, and watched their sport too eagerly. He there contracted the illness from which he never recovered although it did not long afflict him’.1 He was said to have caught a chill which developed into a fever because the fishing trip took place along the Thames in misty and changeable spring weather. Many tentative suggestions for the cause of his death have been put forward: poison, for instance, which was always suspected in medieval times when a king became ill or died, perhaps a slight stroke, or even, as suggested later by Sir Winston Churchill, appendicitis.
Why did Edward die so quickly, so suddenly? He was still only forty – a few weeks later he would have been forty-one – but he had lived a self-chosen exhausting life for over twenty years, constantly leading or partaking in battles, perpetually indulging in rich food and drink, always involved in love affairs with a strong sexual content, some presumably more intensive, while all the time assuming that his youth and buoyant good health would protect him from illness and allow him time for the business of governing England and conducting some sort of foreign policy. It never occurred to him that he might give up some of his entertainments, including part of the courtly socialising demanded by his married life, as well as his unmarried life with temporary mistresses, followed by the more settled relationship with Jane. He could have simplified some of the more formal life without effort but it was all too important to him – he was determined to go on living a personal life that was as ceremonial and glamorous as he could make it.
He had risked a good portion of this life on endless battlefields, but the finality of death, especially an inglorious death in his own bed, was something he had presumably never thought about, despite regular observance of Christian practice. Some kings, including his exact contemporary, Louis XI of France, became obsessed with death, but Edward had chosen to ignore it. He had done nothing to preserve himself from the onset of middle age, but had assumed that he would remain young and healthy for ever. His activity in military, political and sexual life, all of which had begun before he was twenty, had obviously aged him prematurely; and as he inevitably grew fatter and less active in his mid-thirties he had probably lost his resistance to minor health problems and possible infections. He had another problem too which few physicians of the time were likely to solve: he had been used to constant victory in both military and diplomatic life, but now he saw himself outwitted by European rulers and diplomats who were more astute and richer than he was, notably the unavoidable, unattractive but clever Louis XI, who was known as the ‘universal spider’. Edward also felt he had let down his old friends the Flemings, who were now estranged from him through the latest political entanglements with Burgundy and France. ‘On this account,’ wrote Dominic Mancini,2 ‘Edward fell into the greatest melancholy.’ He was not a winner any longer, and since he had never been in that situation before, other than his enforced brief escape to the continent during the Readeption, he now encountered a greater danger: he became gradually more and more depressed and could not come to terms with a condition that he and his friends could not diagnose. His physicians might suspect it but could not treat it, for depression is deeper and more insidious than mere ‘melancholy’ and regret.
If Jane was close to the king as a comforting friend, her presence or advice could only soothe his unhappiness; she could not do anything to help him through his depressed state.
Edward had led a hero’s life and had forgotten or refused to admit that in pursuing his father’s claim to the throne he had been in fact a usurper, like Henry IV and others before him; he had fought his way to his kingship, in his case twice over. He had also insisted on the so-called romantic marriage that he wanted, despite opposition from his own family, his political advisers and from most of the country. He had suppressed several minor rebellions, some of them threatening, and in the mid 1470s he had developed a grandiose plan to invade France, the country that had once been subject to English rule; in the end however he had accepted a pension from Louis XI, a helpful solution for a king who was always short of money and had become very cautious about spending it, but not a very courageous option. After seriously preparing for more war he had now been bought off, he had given in to a form of bribery, and it seemed a feeble denouement. His ideas for promoting useful alliances by marriage were not realised either; he had hoped to marry his eldest daughter Elizabeth to Louis XI’s son, the dauphin of France, but this plan failed, and so did several others. Edward had become a near-forgotten king, and if much of his life is duly chronicled in historical works of all kinds he was clearly becoming infinitely less interesting and controversial than his youngest brother, Richard, who eventually followed him, having removed his nephew, Edward’s son and heir, from the succession to the throne. Edward surely could never have suspected that such a state of affairs could possibly happen, despite the troubled history of his family.
He in fact suffered painful disagreements within this family about possible political issues, including the succession, and does not seem to have put his mind to protecting his heir against possible dangers. Neither had he found the strength to deal with aggressive behaviour by various factions in Scotland in 1480 and afterwards, leaving the necessary action there to his brother Richard, who had been living more or less permanently in the north – mainly in order to avoid the Woodvilles – and had advised war against Scotland. Edward knew he could rely on military support from Richard, who had often accompanied him in the past, as he was experienced and trustworthy, although obviously Edward, if he had not been sinking into depression, would probably have had to give the basic orders.
To make matters worse, his other brother, George, Duke of Clarence, caused him immense trouble, perpetually complaining about the treatment he received from Edward, alleging that he himself was undervalued and unappreciated. He was also aware of the rumours about Edward’s possibly illegitimate birth – their mother, Cecily of York, had alleged this when she had been trying to dissuade Edward from his planned marriage – and taunted his brother about it when he could. In fact Clarence was so jealous that in 1477 he had begun to behave in a strange, irrational way, especially when he accused a woman who had served his late wife, the duchess, of actually poisoning her. He even forced a jury in Warwick to condemn this woman, Ankarette Twynho, as guilty of murder and she was hanged, although there had been no evidence against her. As though that were not enough Clarence went further: his brother the king, he alleged, was not above using the devices of magic himself to run the country and at the same time was aiming to murder him. After he had accused others, some of them eminent, of using the well-known image-magic practices for dire purposes it was discovered that Clarence himself was ready to follow the same methods.3
Edward patiently tolerated these angry jealous scenes in public and private but in the end, realising that he had to stop his brother’s tedious behaviour somehow, ordered him to face trial. It sounds a harsh decision, as though family ties did not count any longer, but in 1478 the court reached a decision that was harsher still: Clarence was arrested, tried, found guilty of treachery, committed to the Tower and sentenced to death. He was killed, either first stunned or stabbed and his body then immersed in a barrel of wine, or else he was simply drowned in the legendary butt of Malmsey. The odd and tragic end to this story is only too well known in English history and certainly many people at the time approved of what happened. Not everyone though: according to rumour, it was even said by some that Richard, Duke of Gloucester had pleaded with Edward on his brother’s behalf. But Richard was too much of a realist and this supposed reaction was more than unlikely.4 News about the royal family always began a trail of gossip, usually inaccurate or exaggerated. Later, but too late, Edward himself apparently felt remorse, although that rumour too is contested. Centuries later still, the Victorian writer George Henry Lewes was to suggest in his Physiology of Common Life of 1879 ‘that murder, like talent, sometimes seems to run in families’ and in 1478 the Yorkist branch of the Plantagenet dynasty seemed to merit that description. It was not long since Edward had arranged at least one other murder, that of his enemy the saintly Lancastrian Henry VI. But the battle of Tewkesbury was in the past, the Lancastrian heir Prince Edward had been killed. So in principle Edward IV no longer had any rivals. If the end of Henry VI was one of the last deeds in a near-final act of the Wars of the Roses, does a respected king, after what was hopefully not an unfair trial, order the killing of his own brother, even if the latter had behaved in an exasperating way? Edward of York, like his brothers, was a man of his times. He seems to have been only dimly aware that he was nothing less than a murderer in the case of Clarence, and the murdered man was his own younger brother. Henry VI had been an enemy, while Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s widow, escaped violent death because the Plantagenet kings did not kill women.
Much of Jane’s story cannot be separated from that of the king: all through both their lives there was a constant interaction between their different but sometimes related experiences. So perhaps she was not too shocked by all these developments as she had grown up through scenes of violence, bloodshed, distant battles and nearby street-fighting, so that death as such presumably no longer took her by surprise. If she had tried to dissuade Edward from these killings, she would hardly have been successful; however, she may have been at least partly responsible for the king’s alleged, if delayed remorse concerning the death of Clarence.
These incidents belong presumably to the period evoked by Sir Thomas More when he described how Jane Shore would help to resolve the endless problems that beset the king during the second part of his reign. She was aware of being close to a complicated family, and she realised her own insecurity, but she probably concentrated on listening to Edward’s problems and it seems unlikely that she seriously attempted to influence the king in this type of situation: it would have been too dangerous, and a solution to this problem could only be left to the king and his queen. The latter had never forgotten her hostility towards her brother-in-law Clarence; it was part of her intense pro-Woodville ambitions. She had been afraid that if her husband should die early Clarence might be declared king or at least protector until her elder son attained his majority. Clarence would even have been capable, Elizabeth Woodville suspected, of seizing the throne by any means available to him. There is no confirmation of this, but given the queen’s general attitude, by which the members of her own family were hoping to become ever closer to overall power, it cannot be forgotten. Jane’s role, important in the circumstances, would presumably as usual be the one she fulfilled so well, that of sympathetic listener. It is hard to think of anything more different from the combative attitude of the queen, who remained more devoted to the interests of the Woodville family and her sons than to anything else.
All these far from happy events filled the last years of Edward’s life. The only happier ones had come earlier, the birth of his second son Richard in 1473 and of his three younger daughters. A last son, George, was born in 1477 but died in infancy. The truly ‘happier’ event might have been the mere presence of Jane, who had drawn him into a kind of undemanding, semi-domestic, almost cosy situation where virtually nothing happened, and that was something pleasantly different from all that had happened to either of them earlier.
It was during this relatively quiet period however that Edward at least found time to deal with one problem which seems to have been on his mind for a long time, and if he had not listened to advice he might have acted too hastily. This was the existence of Eton College, situated near Windsor, the Berkshire town with its many royal connections. The College was a fairly recent foundation, and the founder in 1440 had been the last Lancastrian king, Henry VI, so Edward could not have been expected to value it greatly. According to Nicolas Barker, writing in Etoniana in 1972,5 Edward had contemplated at least a change in its status even before his own acceptance as king, and later came into conflict with Pope Pius II by whose decision Eton was to be united with St George’s in Windsor. Later, when Edward had become king, complicated and slow-moving negotiations continued, and it was not until 1470 that Eton was finally restored to its former status. Then in 1474 Edward seemed ready to change his attitude again and once more Eton might have returned to the control of St George’s.
The date is important here, for by this time Jane was the accepted royal mistress and according to one legend it was she who persuaded the king to leave things as they were and not to remove any more property or rights from the College, which Edward had gradually been doing. It later became generally acknowledged, though without any reliable evidence, that if Jane had not persuaded Edward to stop his interference in the affairs of the College – there was no question of it being closed down – then it would have lost its true independence. It so happened that the Provost of Eton at the time, Pierre Bost, was also Jane’s confessor, and he might have influenced her attitude. This possible influence may have accounted for the presence at Eton of her portrait, or what has been assumed to be her portrait, perhaps a copy of some later work that was ‘doctored’ until it looked vaguely like her; it is still in the College and has always attracted attention. Was it presented in gratitude by some unknown admirer of the College and/or of Jane herself? A similar portrait exists also in Queens’ College, Cambridge, but exactly why they have both been preserved, or who painted them, is not known. These questions have never been answered, although the portraits have led to surprising comments, especially the one mentioned by Nicolas Barker, that an eighteenth-century description of the College included no other fact, merely the existence of Jane’s portrait.
Much of this is speculation, and there has always been speculation about that crucial time in the history of Eton, for there was another rumour – that it was the queen, and not Jane, who persuaded the king not to interfere in College affairs any longer. Elizabeth Woodville and her rival Jane, both possibly influenced by Bost, may have talked separately to Edward on the same topic, and what man could have ignored simultaneous advice or attempted persuasion, even gentle nagging, from two women on the same topic? So the king probably gave in to them both and both have received the necessary credit, though not of course for any joint effort, which would have been unlikely.
Edward had other problems which he would have dearly liked to resolve, but realised perhaps how difficult it would be, if not impossible. When he became ill he must have been aware that if he died now, one difficult situation both within and outside the family might cause deep, even insoluble problems. Over the years that had passed since his marriage two distinct factions had developed among those close to the throne: the first consisted of his own blood relations – Richard, constantly faithful, while sometimes even the fickle Clarence had been on his elder brother’s side too – plus a few personal friends who were important to him, particularly his loyal lord chamberlain William, Lord Hastings; while the second faction, more or less in opposition, consisted of the entire Woodville family and their hangers-on. Several senior members of the second group had been given important posts, especially Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, the queen’s highly educated brother, respected as a creative writer and also for his very different skill in jousting: he had been entrusted with the important work of tutor to Prince Edward, heir to the throne. Rivers himself was not a difficult or highly ambitious man, but there was deep hostility between these two groups and Edward had set himself the near-impossible task of trying to reconcile them.
When the king took to his bed and realised that he might be dying he still found the strength to make one last effort towards solving, or at least improving, this seemingly unsolvable situation. He summoned members of each group to his bedside, did not include the queen and explained his urgent wish for reconciliation. These men realised what they must do – they must at least listen, they must pretend, they must appear to renounce their differences and accept reconciliation. They shook hands, each of them repeated that they were no longer enemies. According to hearsay, the king, apparently satisfied by this, turned over on his pillows and died. Whether he had seriously believed these promises to be sincere is not known. Jane would probably not have been allowed to see him when he became ill.
A codicil had been added to Edward’s will whereby, if necessary, his only surviving brother, Richard, would act as protector for the young Prince Edward, if the latter should be too young to occupy the throne immediately after his father’s death. This amended will however was not executed; the Woodvilles set it aside, intent on hoping to arrange that someone in their family should be Protector. There was still open but silent warfare between the Woodvilles and Edward’s surviving brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who was supported at least for a time by a few men the late king had valued, notably Lord Hastings.
The date of the king’s death, as already mentioned, was 9 April 1483 and the court began the period of ritual mourning, starting with Edward’s lavish, costly funeral and his burial in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, a building on which he had bestowed a great amount of care. For Jane, as it is simpler, if still incorrect, to name her, the situation was disastrous. The death of a king had always brought one essential and immediate follow-up: his current mistress immediately became a non-person, even if she had been accepted by the public and had established a kind of independent life for herself. The more civilised behaviour later of the Renaissance, although on its way to England, did not bring any rapid improvement to this situation. A few dates are significant here: it should not be forgotten that in 1559, about eighty years ahead, the celebrated Diane de Poitiers, who had been for twenty years the official, accepted mistress of Henri II of France, was not allowed to come near him, see him or speak to him when he was dying of a wound sustained by accident in a tournament. His widow, Catherine de’ Medici, assumed what she saw as the correct civilised attitude, declaring that ‘a dying king belongs to the queen’. At least Diane could retire to her own Château d’Anet in the Ile de France. Jane Shore, who was no aristocrat like Diane, had not been respected in the same way for she had made no attempt to attract public attention, preferring private life, and after all was barely tolerated, with disapproval, by the queen. At least she had her own house, at least her parents were still living and presumably could be helpful if she needed them. But the king was dead, and she herself no longer existed.
According to legend the best-known and most popular mistress of Charles II, two centuries later, was more fortunate: if the dying king did not actually say, ‘Don’t let poor Nellie starve,’ she didn’t, although sadly Nell Gwynn died not long afterwards, probably aged about thirty-five, in 1685. Edward, it seems, had carelessly neglected to make any arrangements that might have helped Jane, just as he had not carefully worked out valid details about his successor. Perhaps, if he had idly thought about any problems which his death might bring to Jane, he might have assumed in an equally careless way that since she had her own house and the many possessions he had given her, she would not be deprived of everything. It had obviously never occurred to Jane that he would die so young: she had just assumed that he would always be there. During her years close to Edward she had probably lost any sense of reality, life was comfortable and enjoyable, that was enough.
Fortunately for her however, a powerful protector appeared immediately and decided to take up residence in her house. This was comforting for her, perhaps, but it was soon seen to have been a mistake. This protector was none other than Lord Hastings, lord chamberlain to the late king and one of his closest friends. Apparently Hastings had always found Jane attractive, but, according to Sir Thomas More, he had behaved honourably, even during the earlier mistress-swapping in which Edward and his comrades had indulged. Hastings, said More, had ‘somewhat doted’ on her, but ‘that while forbare her of reverence toward his king, or else of a certain kind of reverence to his friend’, and Jane, who must surely have been in shock, feeling miserable and anxious, did not discourage him. She must have known earlier that he was attracted to her.6
There is no need to describe here how Richard, Duke of Gloucester, virtually kidnapped his nephew from the Woodville family and brought him to London, causing the dowager queen to retire into sanctuary in Westminster, along with her six daughters, her younger son Richard and her older son by her previous marriage, the Marquess of Dorset. The latter however soon decided to leave sanctuary and disappeared, thought to have gone to France. Gloucester then spent a few weeks calculating how he could make his own position more secure – for he knew, despite all his attempts to prove how he was potentially a more suitable king of England than his brother had been, that Edward himself had probably been a usurper. Richard and his supporters emphasised that he was unquestionably a legitimate son of the Duke and Duchess of York, while Edward had been a bastard. Cecily’s angry confession at the time of his marriage had not been forgotten. Also, he himself had been born in England, at Fotheringhay, whereas Edward had been born in Rouen. Despite all the propaganda that he organised, Richard still did not have enough supporters round him to make him feel safe. He developed neurotic tics, noticed by observers: he was seen to be constantly biting his lip and fingering his dagger, all signs of his insecurity.
He had indeed few friends but compensated for this by finding many victims, and notably one of them was Jane. For instance he was intent on searching for Dorset, for all the Woodville family must be under his control, and he began at once to attack Jane for she was known to have been close to the missing man. One question about Jane’s behaviour will never be answered: had she, when the king was still alive, accepted Dorset as a lover? Perhaps. In any case, he, along with the queen, as already mentioned, had gone into sanctuary at Westminster soon after Edward’s death, but then managed to leave it in secrecy, to the annoyance of Richard, who had soon been accepted, to the dismay of the Woodvilles, as protector of the king-in-waiting. This was Edward V, aged twelve and now living in the Tower of London, soon to be joined by his younger brother whom the queen had reluctantly allowed to leave sanctuary.
Richard thought it essential at least to locate all the Woodvilles, as they were a threat, and he seemed ready to annihilate them if he could, although the dowager queen would be spared. Dorset still could not be found. Richard was convinced that Jane was secretly harbouring him and when once established as king in July 1483, he made a determined effort to blame her for this and force her to disclose where he was. On 23 October that year7 the new king apparently issued a proclamation in Leicester, offering a reward of 1,000 marks in money, or 100 a year in land for taking ‘Thomas late marquis of Dorset,’ who, ‘not having the fear of God, nor the salvation of his own soul, before his eyes, has damnably debauched and defiled many maids, widows, and wives, and lived in actual adultery with the wife of Shore’. Richard had planned to accuse him of treason, assuming that he might be still somewhere in England, possibly with the Duke of Buckingham, one of his early supporters, but he was not; so Richard concentrated in a puritanical way on Dorset’s supposedly immoral cohabitation with Jane, who was a harlot, he insisted. Historians have argued over the order in which Jane’s two admirers, Hastings and Dorset, loved Jane and/or lived with her, a problem unlikely to be solved and perhaps not of great importance, unless Jane’s fidelity to Edward needs to be questioned. It has been assumed that as Edward reached the early mid-life crisis of his late thirties his relationship with his mistress had developed into a deep and steady friendship, the excitement of their sexual partnership becoming just a memory. Dorset was not found as a result of the proclamation.
The two and a half years of Richard III’s reign formed one of the most dramatic and controversial periods in the history of England, understandably receiving a great deal of attention from historians, biographers and novelists expressing all possible shades of opinion. There were a few, but principally two, leading players in the ‘great matters’ making up this drama, or rather melodrama: King Richard, the usurper, soon to be killed in battle in 1485, and his victim, Jane Shore, who in the end outlived all the tragic events of his reign, including the rebellion and death of a third player, his former ally the Duke of Buckingham. She was to survive Richard by over thirty years, through the reign of two more kings, Henry VII and Edward VI, then through some sixteen years of a third, Henry VIII, the grandson of her former lover Edward IV.
In late 1483, now that he was king – if still insecure – Richard needed someone to blame for all his problems, many his own fault, some real, some imagined. Although surrounded by men he had known and worked with for a long time, whom could he trust? And how could he explain what had happened to the two young princes, seen earlier ‘shooting and playing’ in the Tower of London gardens but then seen no more? Mancini recorded that before he himself left England in 1483 people were already enquiring, sometimes tearfully, about their disappearance, suspecting that it was not temporary but final. Richard was and still is suspected of having ordered their deaths, but no proof of yet another murder within the family has ever been established. As soon as it become obvious that he could trust nobody, Richard looked for somebody whom he could attack, for he needed some form of self-expression without any fear of reprisals. He soon realised that if he attacked Jane, as he now chose to do, she could not respond, could not cause him any harm; he knew he could treat her as a woman of no importance and use her existence to emphasise that his late brother had known and relied on worthless people, like this ‘harlot’.
Much of Richard’s behaviour at this crucial time cannot easily be explained even centuries later. He could have taken some action against the dowager queen, but had the tact not to do so. However, he accused her of acting in league with Jane and of practising sorcery, the allegation always suggested at this period in any unsolvable situation; the accusation was expected, but could not be proved. Jane however was particularly vulnerable and available for punishment and so Richard chose to be particularly aggressive towards her.
In the meantime dramatic events had taken place in the Tower, which involved her indirectly; she was not of course summoned there, not being grand enough, but the Protector had begun early to use her existence and her reputation as a means of demonstrating his authority. He had called two meetings on 13 June, one of them in the Tower, one in Westminster, and he appeared to conduct the former in two parts. He entered the appointed room, apparently in a good mood, and asked the Bishop of Ely if he could have some strawberries from his garden. Then he left the room but soon returned in a quite different mood, angry, destructive and bent on ambitious revenge. For this he chose vulnerable subjects, the queen and her unlikely associate, Jane. It was their sorcery, he alleged, that had caused his arm to wither, although everyone knew that it had always been in its present state. With hostile questioning skill he then succeeded in making Lord Hastings look like a traitor. In his History of King Richard III, More described what ensued: ‘So was he [Hastings] brought forth into the green beside the chapel within the Tower, and his head laid down upon a long log of timber, and there stricken off, and afterwards his body with the head interred at Windsor beside the body of King Edward, whose both souls our Lord pardon.’8 Shakespeare gave a brutal account of this death in Act III of Richard III, scenes 4 and 5.
It looked as though the Protector had temporarily lost his reason, for he also despatched to Pontefract in Yorkshire four leading Woodville supporters, including Earl Rivers himself. They were housed in the prison there and later executed. Rivers, while awaiting execution, spent some time writing a poem; although not a very good one: at least he found the mental strength to compose it, expressing his stoicism in the face of death. It has been described as owing much to Chaucer,9 and consists of five stanzas of eight lines each. The last stanza, as ‘translated’ and edited by P.M. Kendall reads:
My life was lent
Me to one intent,
It is nigh spent.
Welcome Fortune!
But I ne went [never thought]
Thus to be shent [ruined],
But she it meant:
Such is her wont.
It was discovered after his death that the urbane but stoical Anthony Rivers had been wearing a hair shirt which, according to Kendall, was then ‘hung up in a church in Doncaster as a holy object’. Rivers, the most civilised member of the Woodville family, is remembered as the author, or rather translator, of the first book in English printed and dated by Caxton in 1478, The Dictes or Sayings of the Philosophers. But in June 1483 Richard III saw him only as a potentially dangerous Woodville, and he had to die.
Richard’s shock tactics were explained to the public by a proclamation alleging that a murderous plot had been discovered and had to be dealt with at once. It is hardly surprising that this summertime drama in the warm days of mid-June remained a legend in England and eventually supplied Shakespeare with a melodrama, although other little-known writers were to use the story earlier. Only More’s account includes a mention of Jane in this context; the two Italian historians who described these scenes, Polydore Vergil and Dominic Mancini, clearly considered her of no importance: the latter in fact, when introducing his short Latin history, written in the next century, referred to King Edward’s daughters and added ‘but they do not concern us’.10 How could women, apart from queens or rich and marriageable princesses, be of any use or interest? Mancini could not have anticipated that in 1486, Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, was to become queen of England, when her marriage to Henry VII united the two factions of Lancaster and York.
The Protector however, according to More, was much concerned with one woman, Jane, for he was intent on punishing someone whose intimacy with his late brother could be used to discredit him. Richard accused her of every misdemeanour he could think of: after failing to have her convicted as a witch and failing to make her confess to harbouring Dorset he had to find some other means of attacking her. Having heard that the traitor Hastings had moved into her house after the death of Edward IV, Richard ordered that all her possessions should be removed from it and that she herself be sent to prison. Unlikely though it sounds, there was now a rumour that she had unexpectedly come closer to the queen – who was still in sanctuary in Westminster – and had acted as a messenger for her in an earlier attempt to keep in touch with Hastings and possibly foil some of Richard’s plans. The story seems unlikely but obviously the queen was desperate. So Richard took action and sent Jane to prison.
The news soon spread; Simon Stallworthe, who served the Lord Chancellor, wrote a letter to his friend in the country telling him, along with the other news of the day, ‘Mistress Shore is in prison, what shall happen to her I know not’.11 Jane had obviously attracted public attention. She no longer had anyone to defend her, and had to obey Richard, but she was still a Freewoman of London and therefore able to choose her prison. She chose Ludgate, for that was where anyone possessing the freedom of the city went, and she could rely on friends living nearby to bring her food and other requirements.
Had she perhaps heard the legend of how this famous and picturesque prison was said to have been founded originally by the mythical King Lud? Stow, in his Survey of London, wrote that ‘In the year 1260 the gate was beautified with images of Lud and other kings but these images did not last: in the reign of Edward VI [they had] their heads smitten off . . . Queen Mary did set new heads upon their old bodies again and Queen Elizabeth rebuilt the entire gate beautifully with images of Lud and others, as before’.12 The prison was said to have been built with stones from the ruined houses of persecuted Jews, and always attracted attention. In 1454 the Lord Mayor of London had been Sir Stephen Forster, of the Fishmongers’ Company, but as a young man he had been in trouble, reduced to begging at the prison gate. He had been noticed by a rich widow who took him into her service and later married him. Forster, grown rich and famous, later wanted to commemorate his rescue and did so by enlarging the prison for the ‘ease’ of the prisoners there, and building a chapel. This was the place to which Jane went after her committal by Richard, and she would surely have known something of this story. But all she could do now was wait until the revengeful king decided to free her.
In the meantime Richard continued his efforts to discredit his dead brother, remembering their mother’s complaints about her son Edward’s marriage and her threat to make public her own adultery at the crucial time before Edward was born. It had been alleged by her and later by Richard’s supporters that Edward had married illegally, for in addition to his so-called betrothal to Elizabeth Lucy he had also been betrothed to Lady Eleanor Butler.13 If there had been any proof of this betrothal, which was considered binding at the time, he could have remarried Elizabeth Woodville, for Lady Butler had died in 1468, but if Edward had thought about such a possibility, which he surely didn’t, he took no action. Richard tried to insist on all these facts because in addition to supporting his own claim it was a way of denigrating the unfortunate Jane: she could no longer boast that she had been the mistress of a king, since she was not only a harlot, but had merely been intimate with a man who had been born a bastard and later married illegally.
What could Jane do now? Her lover was dead, her short-term protector, Hastings, was dead, Dorset could not be found, although perhaps she did not want him to be found, for if so he would have suffered the same fate as the rest of his family. Richard was certain that Jane knew where he was. In any case she must have felt utterly deserted. After the king had released her from prison – it is not clear when precisely he did so – and he had earlier arranged the seizure of her possessions, there was yet another punishment in store for her, since her continued existence in freedom seems to have obsessed him. He wanted to annihilate her. He ordered the Bishop of London to condemn her to the performance of public penance, namely she must walk round the city or at least round St Paul’s Cross on a Sunday, carrying a large lighted candle and draped in a sheet. Richard probably thought that this Church-controlled punishment – already inflicted in the past on King Henry II, and on the unfortunate Duchess of Gloucester, suspected of using witchcraft – would condemn Jane forever to the world’s worst reputation a woman could suffer, for this was the punishment given to any common harlot. But Richard did not get his way. Jane obeyed the bishop but the effects on the crowds watching in the streets were unexpected: ‘she went in countenance and pace so womanly,’ wrote More, ‘and albeit she were out of all array save her kirtle only, yet when she so fair and lovely, namely while the wondering of the people cast a comely rud [blush] in her cheeks (of which she before had most miss), that her great shame won her much praise among those that were more amorous of her body than curious of her soul.’14
In other words, Richard had been once again frustrated in his attempts to punish her and through her to punish his late brother who had obviously been unfit to govern the country; ‘and many good folk also, that hated her living and glad were to see sin corrected, yet pitied they more her penance than rejoiced therein, when they considered that the Protector procured it more of a current intent than any virtuous affection’. In writing this More was obviously expressing what he thought of Richard III, occasioning one of the many complaints by Richard’s latter-day supporters that this unfortunate king has been deeply misunderstood from the time of Edward’s death until his own and ever afterwards.
What could Richard do now in order to destroy any remaining affection for Jane? There was not much choice. So it was back to prison for her, since her enemy did not give up easily. Was he perhaps unconsciously attracted to Jane, even ‘amorous of her body’? By controlling her life, possessing her in this indirect way, he was in one sense getting even with his dead brother. She seemed to hold a strange fascination for Richard. Perhaps he was curious to learn the secret of her appeal, for he was more drawn to women than has been assumed. He had had two illegitimate children before his marriage to Anne Neville, who were now grown up and he later appointed his bastard son to the post of Captain of Calais. There could have been other children who were not acknowledged. The two best known of Richard’s portraits show him as a serious, dignified man, surely reliable, a man who would not have displeased women, while the portraits of Edward presumably do him no justice, for the man who was said to be so handsome must either have been suffering from a hangover or else did not give the painter time to finish his work.
When some remaining Yorkist supporters heard about the treatment of Jane, they became worried, like Stallworthe. What these gentlemen did not know is that somehow, in spite of everything, something of Jane’s mysterious charm apparently remained undimmed even during her second stay in Ludgate prison. Many ‘official’ visitors came there, either making regular checks on administrative matters or perhaps investigating individual cases. One of these visitors was so deeply impressed by Jane that all at once a new chapter opened in her life.