This unexpected visitor to Ludgate jail would know all about Jane – he might even have gone there specially to see her – for she was a subject of London gossip now, well known at least by name, notorious in fact; but she probably knew nothing about him.
Five or six centuries after they lived there is still as much mystery about Thomas Lynam as there is about Jane Shore, perhaps even more. He was certainly a northerner, born in Sutton-upon-Derwent to the south-east of York, probably about 1440 or so, making him a little older than Jane. Richard, as is well known, liked northerners, finding them more trustworthy and less hypocritical than the average southerner. The latter group included of course all the ambitious people who had found their way to court, sometimes deservedly so, but often through sycophancy, bribery or personal favouritism. Such people lurked near the king and queen, looking always for advancement, which many hoped to achieve without taking too much responsibility or carrying out too much work. Members of the Woodville family believed they did not need to do anything, convinced that even a distant relationship to the queen was enough for them to achieve preferment. Richard’s attitude had been influenced ever since his brother’s marriage by the scheming of this ambitious family, led by Queen Elizabeth Woodville. She was regarded by her brother-in-law as a snob who after all came from what he regarded as a class lower than his own: her first husband had been a mere knight and, even worse, a Lancastrian, while she herself had earlier been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Margaret of Anjou. Richard avoided Edward’s queen and stayed away from London as much as he could. He was much happier when surrounded by people in the north who were not necessarily less ambitious but were ready to work hard and honestly in order to rise in the world. This of course is a simplified, idealised picture of the people that the new king liked to have around him – although northerners might still believe today that little has changed since Richard III’s time.
Thomas Lynam had extra qualities likely to please his employer, for whom he had worked earlier when the present king was still Duke of Gloucester. Lynam was a member of the Inner Temple, presumably well trained and experienced before Richard became king and his expertise in handling land deals was particularly valuable, so much so that the king brought him to London especially to supervise this aspect of legal activity. Richard, always eager to increase his personal power and the security of his reign, saw this work as a first priority, and assumed that if he could legally control the activities and land ownership of both the aristocracy and the gentry then his own position would be stronger and the danger of rebellion, constantly in his mind, would be reduced. He never forgot that he was a usurper, and he knew that others never forgot it either. The trouble stirred up by his former supporter, the Duke of Buckingham, had alarmed him seriously, but fortunately for Richard the rebellion of 1483 had been badly organised, suffered bad luck in various ways, especially from the weather, and failed.
The records of Lynam’s activities that have been preserved1 show the kind of problems he had to deal with, including the follow-up to the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion which entailed an investigation for possible treason. The king rewarded his lawyer regularly by giving him land and various manors in addition to his regular salary. Lynam was also chosen for responsible assignments, including for instance the checking and certification of arrangements made by Lord Powis as he led a thousand archers into Brittany. In fact Lynam obviously became invaluable to his employer, so much so that Richard made him King’s Solicitor, presumably late in 1483, a post that was virtually equivalent to the modern post of Solicitor General, and he was also a member of the King’s Council.
These details concern Lynam’s activities in late 1483 and during the following year. But soon after his arrival in London, also presumably in 1483, the invaluable legal expert announced something that his employer could hardly believe: he had met a young woman in Ludgate prison and had chosen to make her an offer of marriage. Richard had punished her severely more than once, sending her to prison twice – this was her second stay in Ludgate – and arranging for her to do public penance to atone for her behaviour as a harlot; so why did Lynam make such a choice and how was his employer to respond? The young woman was of course Jane Shore, whom Lynam had met during what was presumably an official visit to the jail. If Richard had at first reacted with fury, by the time he wrote to Bishop Russell of Lincoln, his chancellor, he was apparently trying to prove how understanding and merciful he could be when necessary, although he had to admit that Lynam’s plan did not please him at all.
‘Signifying unto you,’ he wrote to the bishop, presumably from York and presumably in 1483, although the letter is undated, ‘that it is showed unto us that our servant and solicitor Thomas Lynam, marvellously blinded and abused with the late [wife] of William Shore, now being in Ludgate by our commandment, hath made contract of matrimony with her, as it is said, and intendeth, to our full great marvel, to proceed to effect the same. We for many causes would be sorry that he should be so disposed. Pray you therefore to send for him, and in that you goodly may, exhort and stir him to the contrary. . . .’2
Richard may have indicated that he could hardly believe the news but he obviously did not want to sack his solicitor, who had been so trustworthy until now, and there would have been no point in sending him back to the north, for he was presumably irreplaceable. If Richard had been angry on first hearing the news – he was away from London at the time – he may have thought it over; perhaps, after all, nothing could be done about the situation: ‘And if,’ he went on, ‘you find him utterly set for to marry her and none other will be advertised, if it may stand with the Law of the Church, we be content, the time of the marriage being deferred to our coming next to London, that on sufficient surety being found of her good bearing, ye do send for her keeper and discharge him of Our said commandment, by warrant of these committing her to the rule and guiding of her father or any other by your direction in the mean season. Given &c.’
Whether Jane’s father was officially requested to supervise his wayward daughter is not known, but in any case Richard, no doubt unwillingly, had realised he had to accept the inevitable. Lynam married Jane – precisely when and where remains unknown – although the marriage surely took place quickly in case the king changed his mind and before any unexpected political events could upset the lives of the betrothed couple or even that of Lynam’s employer, the man who disapproved but felt he had to tolerate this unexpected development, despite trying in general to present an image of high personal morality in himself.
Since there is no record of when and where Lynam married Jane, P.M. Kendall for one had believed it never happened. It is possible that nothing would ever have been known of this marriage if the will of John Lambert, made in 1485, two years before he died, had not been discovered and carefully examined in 1972.3 Thomas Lynam, remembered in this informative document, had been executor, along with the eldest Lambert son, Jane’s brother John. Lynam was obviously by then part of the Lambert extended family and when his mother-in-law Amy died the following year he was included in the list of her sons who, along with Jane, were to divide her property equally among themselves. Lynam had evidently been a most welcome addition to the family.
By John Lambert’s will Thomas Lynam, ‘Gentilman’ – he apparently liked to be known this way – received ‘xxs’ (20 shillings) and Julian Lynam, presumably Jane’s little daughter, received ‘xls’ (40 shillings). John Lambert also remembered Thomas Lynam’s servant, Isabel Thomson, who received a ‘violet gown’. The most interesting bequest was made to ‘Elizabeth Lynam, my daughter, a bed of arras with the velour tester and curtains [and] a stained cloth of Mary Magdalene’. When mentioning this in 1995 Desmond Seward4 could not resist referring to Jane’s earlier adulterous life, and wondered if her father’s bequest implied a criticism, a joke or a sign of his forgiveness. John Lambert must have been pleased by Jane’s second marriage and the birth of his granddaughter. At last his own daughter was respectable.
John Lambert had made his will not long before he died, as though reluctantly accepting that his life as a merchant adventurer was nearing its end. Despite all his valuable work as a mercer and his loans to the late king he had had some bad luck: various lands in the West Country that had been given to him had to be returned to their original owners because of changes in the political system. Later still he was actually sued by the Goldsmiths’ Company.5 How could such a thing have happened? It appears that in 1472 he had rented a house they owned in Wood Street and when he left it he was alleged to have been something of a thief, accused of taking away some window panes (glass was still a valuable commodity), iron bars, shutters, even the panelling in the chapel and at least one even more valuable item, a pewter ‘laver’ which had stood in the hall of the house and had been used by any men who entered for washing their hands. He did not simply take this vessel home with him, but sold it to the well-known Edmund Shaa who was a goldsmith himself and later became Mayor of London, in 1482. If these allegations were true, why did John Lambert behave like a common thief? Had he been worried at the time about his daughter’s first unsatisfactory marriage or had the Readeption and the king’s flight from England upset him? However, his general good reputation must have helped him because in the end he was not penalised too heavily; he had to return all he had taken, naturally, pay for the repairs following the damage he had caused and arrange for the laver to be returned from Shaa. That must have been very shaming for him. This happened two years after he had lost the title of Alderman in 1470,6 which probably happened because he had been carried away by Yorkist sympathies during some argument in public; this was too close to the dangerous period of the Readeption, not a suitable time to indulge in political propaganda. But John Lambert had to express what he believed: he was obviously that sort of man, forthright and full of energy which he sometimes could not control.
The will of 1485 gives the impression of a united family when the Lamberts were living in Hinxworth in the north of Hertfordshire; John had bought a house there in 1484, perhaps at first for a summer residence. Perhaps too the Lynam family were regular visitors, taking time away from London, unless they were thinking ahead, in a mercenary way, about John Lambert’s possibly imminent death and the inheritance they might receive.
There were family gatherings here, which included presumably Thomas Lynam, Gent, whose status, even if self-appointed, must surely have pleased his father-in-law, always keen for his family to move into the social class above his own. No more details are available about any members of the Lambert or Lynam family at this time, although it is thought locally that the present Hinxworth Place, not far from the church of St Nicholas, is the house that John bought, called at that period Pulters Manor.
Sadly there are major gaps too in the later history of Jane, her husband and her daughter. Confusingly the name ‘Julian’, or Julyan, was usually invariable at the time and could have been used to designate a boy, but the memorial brasses later installed on the family tomb (of which more in due course) include the figure of a little girl, although she is not mentioned anywhere outside her grandfather’s will. Did she die young? Possibly, for children in those days were vulnerable, as they did not have the resistance to recover from child health problems and the Black Death constantly lurked about.
It is strange and sad also that there are so few reliable details about the later life of Thomas Lynam. He and his wife would have had a disturbed time during 1485 because Richard III was in serious trouble, and as everyone knows, his life came to a tragic but unmourned end at the battle of Bosworth Field in August of that year. It is also known of course that the Lancastrian Duke of Richmond became Henry VII very soon afterwards, but what is not known is how far the Lynam ménage survived this major change. Lynam himself did succeed in keeping a good post under the new monarchy although it was apparently at a less senior level and the date of his appointment is not known. He could not easily forget the existence of Richard because as later records show, Peter Curteys, the former Keeper of the Wardrobe to the late king, took action against Lynam upon a bond for £204 8s 4d concerning the wardrobe. The Inner Temple also sued him for dues in 1496/7 and again in 1510.7 However, he had been granted a pardon in 1509 when he was apparently far away from London and from Hinxworth. He had been appointed as JP for Shropshire from 1502 until some unknown date, and from 1505 he was clerk or baron of the Exchequer at Chester. Unfortunately his name is similar to that of other civil servants of the time and as a result there is possible confusion about Thomas Lynam’s later life and his death.
But what happened to his family? Did Jane go with him to Shropshire or had the marriage disintegrated? There is no means of knowing. If they had parted it was perhaps Jane’s fault: it may have been that she could not tolerate exile from London, because it is hard to think of her in a provincial setting. Lynam is known to have died during or before 1518,8 the ninth year of Henry VIII’s reign, but the actual date of his death cannot be confirmed.
Of Jane herself during her later years nothing is known, except from the moving piece written by Sir Thomas More in his History of Richard III. He describes how she had reached her seventies in a state of wretched poverty and was reduced to begging, often approaching those who in the past had begged favours from her. It has been suggested by Nicolas Barker that she did not walk about with a begging bowl, a melodramatic touch that was to appeal to some later writers, but wrote begging letters to various people in the hope of finding some support. It is difficult to imagine how she survived. How could Thomas Lynam leave her without provision? Either he was in financial trouble after Richard III died or he was personally careless, as many professional people can be; or else the marriage had broken down angrily and there was nobody to help either of the partners.
Ever since More wrote his History, first in Latin and later in English with many editorial changes, it has been attacked by historians. However nobody can destroy what he wrote about Jane, if only because there is no other contemporary evidence about her life generally and particularly about her last years. Desmond Seward has mentioned9 that in 1509 when Henry VII died, Jane strewed flowers along the path of the funeral procession, as was often done to celebrate the death of a former victor, but there seems to be no proof of this legend. According to More, Jane died well into Henry VIII’s reign, possibly in 1527, implying that she was indeed in her seventies; presumably she had outlived her second husband and probably lost her young daughter, unless she had been forced to arrange some kind of adoption for her.
What happened to her three brothers? After all, William had entered the priesthood and might have been expected to show at least some Christian charity, in the best sense of the word, towards his solitary sister. None of these Lambert men has been traced; perhaps they did not share their sister’s longevity. Jane may have chosen to be solitary, perhaps her second husband had disappointed her, but only the romantic novelists could make a choice among all these eventualities and explain the sad end to her long life. The historical novelist Jean Plaidy, who wrote The Goldsmith’s Wife in 1950, apparently believed that Jane did not love Lynam, and for that reason had decided not to marry him. It is known now of course from the Lambert will that they did marry, but perhaps there was not enough love between them to keep them together for long. Perhaps Jane had been so anxious to find a new ‘protector’ and leave prison that she had accepted Lynam’s offer of marriage for no other reason, and if any contemporary writers knew more about this marriage they chose not to mention it.
However, not long after her death, there was one eventuality which might have brought some consolation for Jane: she was soon taken out of the shadows, where she had lived for a long time, for as her mortal life ended, a second life, a kind of literary, half-legendary life, began. Her real life had not followed the classical pattern of rags to riches, she had known a comfortable start in a middle-class home, but she had been unable to tolerate an arranged marriage with no sexual content. In her bid for independence she took a great risk and when her lover the king died early she suddenly saw that she had lost. A second bid for independence, which involved remarriage, seems to have meant only short-term protection, followed by solitude and poverty. If only she could have been trained in order to earn a livelihood – but most women were not to have that security for many years to come. Instead, death released her from poverty and led her at once towards the writers who were to celebrate her existence in various ways, forgive her so-called ‘sins’ and reflect on the lessons that her successors might learn from her.
Jane was the first royal mistress in English history to be remembered by something more than a few anecdotes, but even modern research has not produced sufficient facts to explain all of her life. During most of the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth centuries the post of royal mistress did not exist, or was irrelevant. Henry VIII had preferred to marry his mistresses, for he was desperately in need of a legitimate son, while later James I did not desert his Danish-born wife despite acquiring several male favourites. From the time of Charles II the mistress returned to favour and then, after the happy marriage of George III, the occasional mistresses of George IV, the devotion between William IV and Dorothy Jordan, and the long reign of Victoria, the institution of mistress was restored again, first by her son Edward VII, later by Edward VIII and latest of all by Prince Charles, current heir to the British throne (who may of course prefer to see his eldest son as king of England in his place). In France the royal mistress had been an institution from early days and the long ‘reign’ of Diane de Poitiers; even François Mitterrand, the recent president, had enjoyed the company of a semi-official mistress.
Sadly, the date of Jane’s death is vague, the place unknown, although it would be probably somewhere in London. No will is extant, no grave has been discovered, although as will be seen later, she was included in a family memorial in a Hertfordshire church.
A leader, whether king or not, can be forgiven for needing relaxation and entertainment and this was the reason that kept Jane Shore so close to Edward IV for so long, especially because she was not seeking power in any way. When he died suddenly at forty she might perhaps have retired to a convent, as solitary women so often did. But no, she recovered, she wanted life, and her longing for independence outstripped any guilt she might have felt. After her own long life ended, memories of her story were not forgotten and subsequent generations of writers chose to see her as a potent symbol, the solitary woman who needed support and love. Her lover had deserted her by dying, his successor had punished her, but she had survived, apparently without any help from God. Despite her conventional upbringing, which would inevitably have had a religious background, there is no sign that she later asked for or expected any help from the Church. It is known that she had had a confessor, Pierre Bost, when Edward IV was alive but no more is heard about him or any successors afterwards. How did she pass the time after the disappearance of Lynam? If she had been with him in the provinces she would then, presumably, have come back to London, where she had been brought up and lived all her life. Now she waited for death. If Lynam had died in about 1518 her wait, although solitary, was not too long. Nor was her death the end: she who had been a minor historical figure now became an unexpected heroine of legend.