The greater part of this study has been concerned with the attempt to resurrect and clarify the lost story of Eleanor Talbot. As an adjunct to this work it may be useful, finally, to consider Eleanor and her reputation as these have been presented in fiction. The appeal of fiction is widespread, so that probably many more people have encountered Eleanor’s name in a novel than have done so in a serious historical study – the more so given that serious historical studies have, until now, generally expended very little time and effort on Eleanor. However, Eleanor’s fictional appearances have also contained some important errors.
Eleanor’s first recorded manifestation in fiction was a rare appearance upon the stage. John Crowne’s The Misery of Civil War had clear contemporary relevance when it appeared in 1680. However, coming as it did towards the end of the century which had seen the publication of the titulus regius of 1484, Weever’s Funeral Monuments and Buck’s study of Richard III, it availed itself of the opportunity for the introduction of a novel character: Lady Elianor Boteler ‘a young lady of great quality, that was one of King Edward’s mistresses’.1 Despite his use of the word ‘mistress’, Crowne’s portrayal of Elianor is equivocal. At the battle of Wakefield she tells Edward IV that she is ‘his wife in hopes and promises’, and earlier in the play she reminds the king of the oaths he has sworn to her.2 Dramatically, Elianor is present at the play’s Widville marriage, during which she voices her feelings to both Edward and Elizabeth Widville. Elianor finally dies at Edward’s hands at the battle of Barnet, warning the king that his injurious treatment of her will prove his undoing. The inclusion of the character of Elianor in The Misery of Civil War must have done much to make Eleanor Talbot’s long-obscured name more widely known, and may have contributed to her subsequent appearance in Whig pamphlets, where her name and claim to be the rightful wife of Edward IV were eagerly pressed into service to bolster the much more doubtful cause of Lucy Walter and her son by Charles II, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth.3
There are numerous historical novels that deal with the Yorkist period, and it would hardly be possible to mention all of them. Those included here are therefore either particularly well known, or have something interesting to say about Eleanor. Among their positive contributions to Eleanor’s reputation, one must unhesitatingly catalogue the fact that novelists have almost universally been much more willing than historians to credit the notion of a marriage between Eleanor and Edward IV. As Josephine Tey remarked, ‘Edward seems to have made a habit of secret marriages. … It must have been difficult for him … when he came up against unassailable virtue. There was nothing for it but marriage.’4 On the negative side, however, historical novelists have perhaps confused the picture in other respects. Of course, one must remember that novelists are, by definition, writing works of imagination, not of history. They therefore have a perfect right to adapt Eleanor’s story to fit their wider narrative intentions. While their distortions are certainly no worse than those perpetrated by some serious historians,5 it is possible that novelists have been more influential than historians in colouring the popular perception of Eleanor.
Rosemary Hawley Jarman, while asserting Edward’s marriage to Eleanor, makes the king declare the fact of this earlier marriage to Elizabeth Widville when the latter is trying to seduce Edward into marriage with herself:
‘I would wed with you tomorrow, save that … I am married already.’ He said dully. … ‘I was crazy to marry her. She was chaste, like you, Bessy, and would have me no other way. It has been a secret for three years. She has no royal blood, but – her name is Eleanor Butler, daughter of Talbot. … Lancastrian, the whole family. Nell was so saintly, so good. Sudeley, curse him, was trying to cheat her out of her estates. She was widowed, she came suing to me for restoration. And we were wed. … Only my lady mother knows. Well – she and a very few more. Bishop Stillington, he bound us together.’6
It is, in fact, very unlikely that Elizabeth Widville knew of the Talbot marriage at the time of her own contract with the king. Had she known, she was certainly intelligent enough to have realised that a secret marriage in her own case would not serve, and that a very public ceremony was essential.
Jarman’s account contains other historical inaccuracies: the fact that at the time of this imagined conversation between Edward and Elizabeth Widville, Stillington was not yet a bishop; the implication that Lord Sudeley was trying to cheat Eleanor out of her jointure; the asseveration that Eleanor had no royal blood. On the other hand it is conceivable that the dowager Duchess of York did indeed have some knowledge of the Talbot marriage as Jarman suggests. As we have seen, this is implied (albeit with inevitable distortions) by Sir Thomas More.7
Like historians, novelists have generally presented Eleanor under the surname Boteler. This is regrettable. The more so since almost all novelists are then inconsistent, and refer to Elizabeth Widville by her maiden name. (Since both ladies were widows, they should be treated alike in this respect – as they were in reality by Richard III – and either both should be referred to by their maiden names, or both by their married names.) An interesting, early and laudable exception is Lord Lytton, who presents the following conversation between Richard, Duke of Gloucester and Lord Montagu in 1468:
‘Thou knowest well that the king was betrothed before to the Lady Eleanor Talbot; that such betrothal, not set aside by the pope, renders his marriage with Elizabeth against law; that his children may (would to Heaven it were not so!) be set aside as bastards, when Edward’s life no longer shields them from the sharp eyes of men.’
‘Ah!’ said Montagu, thoughtfully; ‘and in that case, George of Clarence would wear the crown, and his children reign in England.’
‘Our Lord forfend,’ said Richard, ‘that I should say that Warwick thought of this when he deemed George worthy of the hand of Isabel.’8
It is noteworthy that Lytton believes the Talbot marriage to have been known and talked about while Eleanor was yet living. Also that he not only draws the obvious conclusion in respect of the potential advantage to the Duke of Clarence, but goes on to imply Warwick’s possible awareness of the situation. On the other hand, Richard of Gloucester, who was, in reality, only 16 years old at the time of this imagined conversation, seems, perhaps, rather excessively perspicacious for one so comparatively young!
Unfortunately, Lord Lytton’s story ends with the death of the Earl of Warwick, so that we have no opportunity to see fully how he would have handled the Talbot marriage in respect of the events of 1478 and 1483. He provides a foretaste, however, when he refers to Elizabeth Widville’s children in 1483 ‘subjected to the stain of illegitimacy, and herself recognised as the harlot’.9 Lytton, incidentally, is robust in his handling of Elizabeth Widville, painting throughout a clear, if unflattering portrait of ‘the grey cat’. He is particularly insistent on the inferiority of her birth – which, given his own rank and period, is interesting – calling her ‘scarce of good gentleman’s blood’ and even ‘mud-descended’, while her father and brothers were ‘knaves’ sons’ and ‘little squires’, so that Lord Dorset is invited to recall ‘the day when, if a Nevile mounted in haste, he bade the first Widville he saw hold the stirrup’.10
Josephine Tey, while acknowledging Eleanor to be the Earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter,11 simply calls her ‘Lady Eleanor Butler’ and does not say whether ‘Butler’ was her maiden or her married name. Sharon Penman, while employing the surname Boteler, makes some attempt to grasp this nettle in her narrative. She sets a scene at Windsor Castle, in September 1477, in which Edward IV and Elizabeth Widville confront one another over what is to be done with the Duke of Clarence. In the course of this, Edward reveals to Elizabeth that his marriage to her was bigamous, explaining that he was already married to ‘Eleanor Butler. Shrewsbury’s daughter’. Elizabeth Widville is stunned, but eventually responds: ‘Butler’s not the family name of Shrewsbury … She was married, then?’12 leading Edward to explain about Eleanor’s marriage to Thomas Boteler. In this version, Eleanor’s maiden name is never supplied, but presumably Penman was aware that it was Talbot – though it has to be said that she commits the unforgivable sin of consistently referring to the morally questionable Elizabeth Lambert, as ‘Jane Shore’!13
Among the most interesting contributions to the picture of the fictional Eleanor is that of Sandra Wilson. While, like most of her fellow novelists, she consistently refers to Eleanor under the surname Boteler, Wilson has a very clear awareness of Eleanor’s family connections, and presents her throughout as the niece of Anne Beauchamp, Countess of Warwick (and hence the niece by marriage of the ‘Kingmaker’). Wilson is also aware that Robert Stillington was not a bishop at the time of Edward’s meeting with Eleanor.14 However, she makes some errors in her chronology. When Eleanor first appears in her story, on 10 October 1460, she is described as being 22 years old.15 In fact, at that date she had passed the age of 24 and was well on the way to her 25th birthday. Wilson goes on to describe Eleanor’s ‘thick black hair’, and says that ‘Nan could see in her niece the ghost of her long-dead half-sister, Margaret’.16 While Wilson is very probably correct in respect of Eleanor’s hair colouring, Eleanor is more likely to have inherited this from her father than from her mother, and of course, in 1460, far from being long-dead, Margaret, Countess of Shrewsbury still had almost seven years of life remaining to her.
Perhaps the most common error perpetuated by the novelists is the fallacy that Eleanor retired to a convent and became a nun. In We Speak No Treason, Rosemary Hawley Jarman neatly managed to avoid this error by skating rapidly over Eleanor’s association with the Carmelites. Bishop Stillington simply states that Eleanor is ‘dead these fifteen years … in the house of Carmelites at Norwich’.17 However, since, in this version, Stillington’s information is conveyed to Lord Howard (who, in reality, probably knew more about Eleanor’s last years than the bishop), the narrative is historically flawed in this respect. Later, in The King’s Grey Mare, Jarman is much more specific. Edward IV refers to the nuns of Norwich, stating that ‘Eleanor is in a convent there’, and again, later, ‘Eleanor is with the nuns’.18
Tey, for her part, firmly locates Eleanor in a convent.19 Penman, too, makes this mistake,20 and Majorie Bowen, Rhoda Edwards and Jean Plaidy likewise fall into the trap.21 In a scene of Bowen’s which is undated, but which appears to be set in 1469,22 the Duke of Clarence takes his brother of Gloucester to meet a dying nun who knew Eleanor in Norwich. The implication that they lived in the same nunnery is clear. Later, in 1483, Bishop Stillington reveals Eleanor’s royal marriage to the council. The following exchange ensues:
‘Why did not the Lady Eleanor speak?’ asked Buckingham.
‘Sir, she was a woman perplexed, humiliated and betrayed,’ replied the bishop. ‘She went into a convent in Norwich, and there died, silent, in the year 1466.’23
In this passage, Bowen not only misplaces Eleanor in a convent, but also anticipates her demise by two years!
Bowen’s chronological errors involve other characters in addition to Eleanor. In her 1469(?) scene, Clarence at first implies that Stillington is in hiding.24 Almost immediately afterwards, however, Bowen states that ‘[Richard] could make nothing of the mystery of the imprisonment of Dr Stillington.’25 These accounts are mutually incompatible. Moreover, both are wrong. Stillington was not in hiding in 1469, nor was he imprisoned until the end of February 1477/8, when Edward IV consigned him to the Tower following the execution of Clarence.
In her 1478 episode, Jarman once again skirts around the issue. Neither Stillington nor Eleanor is mentioned in connection with the execution of her Duke of Clarence. All we hear is ‘Elizabeth [Widville]’s soft voice from the shadows … “My children are not safe while Clarence lives”’.26 Bowen involves Stillington with Clarence much more directly than does Penman. The latter produces an interesting idea, which might even be true, when she describes Dr Stillington as a long-term member of the Talbot affinity.27 Her thought recalls the Talbot sisters’ real historical patronage of Dr Thomas Cosyn. Penman’s Stillington is a terrified and tortured figure, who only finally reveals the truth to Clarence in the Tower, when the Duke is about to die, in the mistaken belief that he already knows all about it. Her evocation of Stillington, summoned to court by the king in the autumn of 1477, is highly dramatic:
Elizabeth [Widville] had never understood why Edward had named Stillington as his Chancellor. A mild-mannered, self-effacing man in his fifties, he had neither the intellect nor the ambition for a position of such power, and Elizabeth hadn’t been the only one to wonder why Edward had chosen to honour Stillington so lavishly. He’d exercised his authority unobtrusively and, when his health began to suffer, seemed almost relieved to resign the Chancellorship and retire to his native Yorkshire. Elizabeth had not seen him in more than two years and she was shocked now at sight of the haggard, ageing man being ushered into Edward’s private chambers. Was he as ill as that? But then he glanced back over his shoulder and her breath stopped. What she saw on his face was sheer terror, the look of a condemned prisoner about to mount the steps of the gallows.28
Edwards, whose story starts late, chronologically, has no 1478 scene as such, but she deals with the Clarence episode retrospectively. When Stillington makes his revelation to Richard and Anne (in this case, in private), he explains that his long silence has been due to hounding by Elizabeth Widville, moreover ‘I was not the only one she hounded. Your Grace’s own brother, the Duke of Clarence …’.29 Richard is distraught at this news:
You mean my brother George died for that? I never knew why, that last time, he was not forgiven, as he had been before. The Queen – the pretended Queen – killed him, for fear it might be discovered that she was nothing but a whore. She made one of my brothers kill the other because he’d begotten the heir to the throne of England in adultery, and was terrified of being found out.30
This is fine dramatic stuff, but perhaps rather overstates the case. By no stretch of the imagination is it justifiable to call Elizabeth Widville a whore. Indeed, had she been, the whole problem would have melted away. Edwards also seems keen to shift all responsibility in the matter from the shoulders of Edward IV, which, after all, is where it truly belongs.
Edwards introduces a novel element, however, in the form of an oath of silence, which Stillington was forced to swear before Edward would release him from the Tower. Other authors also introduce imaginative elements into the story. Plaidy unfortunately shares with Penman the major crime of having a character in her story called Jane Shore (in Plaidy’s case, actually the leading character), however, she shares the talent for unusual but plausible detail. Both Plaidy and Edwards date Edward IV’s attempted seduction of Eleanor to the period before he ascended the throne. Although historically this is almost certainly incorrect, it is a novel twist. Moreover, Plaidy’s Eleanor was almost as ambitious as Elizabeth Widville in demanding marriage, and Eleanor’s family knew all about it, although when the king ‘refused to recognise the marriage, they had been wise enough to keep silent’. Here, Plaidy is picking up and running with a thread from Buck’s account, and like Buck she mentions ‘a child who had died’.31
Wilson varies Eleanor’s story by introducing her to Edward while Sir Thomas Boteler is still living, and before Edward becomes king. Unfortunately we now know that Sir Thomas Boteler was dead before 1460, so he cannot possibly have played the dramatic role in the battle of Wakefield that Wilson would like to assign to him.32 Apart from that it is feasible that Edward and Eleanor may possibly have met before Edward’s accession to the throne, though the evidence, examined earlier in the present account, appears to show that their key relationship postdated Edward’s accession.
Another novel twist is supplied by Lytton. He was aware of the allegations preserved for us by Commynes and Vergil that Edward IV besmirched the honour of a ‘lady of Warwick’s house’, but had no idea, apparently, that Eleanor Talbot might fit this description. Consequently he applied the references to Anne Neville, causing an inebriated Edward IV to attempt the seduction of his future sister-in-law.33 In Lytton’s account, this attempted seduction was the reason why Anne had then to be hidden away for her own protection. This ill-advised move on the king’s part is then used to partly account for his desertion by the Earl of Warwick. Of course, in reality, Anne’s concealment is normally dated rather later, after her father’s death.
What is omitted by novelists can be as significant as what is included. Lytton is by no means alone in his ignorance of Eleanor’s wider family connections. With the (partial) exception of Wilson, no novelist seems to have realised that Eleanor was the Duchess of Norfolk’s sister, Anne Mowbray’s aunt, and Queen Anne Neville’s cousin. Eleanor’s patronage of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, also passes unremarked, there is little interest in her religious convictions, and there is generally no indication as to where (let alone upon what) Eleanor lived after the death of Thomas Boteler. There are even more extraordinary omissions. Penman, for example, has Anne Neville present in 1483 when Bishop Stillington (brought to Crosby Place by Buckingham) finally reveals the Edward/Eleanor marriage to the Duke of Gloucester.34 Possibly it is Anne Neville’s discomfort at having just been caught, by Buckingham and the bishop, in flagrante delicto with her own husband, which keeps her silent, but she certainly gives no indication that she recognises Eleanor’s name, nor does she appear to realise that Stillington is talking about her cousin. Earlier in her narrative, Penman makes the obvious chronological link between the marriage of Anne Mowbray and the execution of the Duke of Clarence. She fails, however, to point out the fact that Anne Mowbray is Eleanor’s niece.
Penman brings Eleanor into her story at a late stage. The first hint occurs only on page 555. By this time Eleanor is already dead, of course, so we never meet her in the flesh. This is a common novelists’ approach. Interestingly, however, Penman does allow her readers just a glimpse of Eleanor, through the eyes of the king.
He closed his eyes, only to have a woman’s face form against his lids. A gravely beautiful face, lovely and remote. A fair Madonna, he’d once called her and she’d been shocked, chided him for blaspheming. But it fitted her – all too well. Was that why he’d had to have her – because she’d seemed beyond reach, unattainable?35
Plaidy, on the other hand, has an entirely unmemorable Eleanor. Edward can scarcely recall what she looked like.36 However, Penman has every right to evoke a lovely Eleanor. There is no necessity for novelists to compromise on Eleanor’s beauty, given that she succeeded in attracting the king. Eleanor’s religious faith is also subtly encapsulated in Penman’s brief description. What she intended by her use of the word ‘fair’ is open to interpretation, given that the adjective has more than one meaning, and if she was referring to Eleanor’s colouring, she was probably on the wrong track, for other members of the Talbot family were certainly dark. It is probable however, that Penman was merely seeking a synonym for ‘beautiful’.
We see, then, that a range of novelists handled the Eleanor story. Most of them seem to have enjoyed it, for even without invention the tale of Stillington’s revelation to the council in the summer of 1483 is, after all, dramatic. Apparently without exception they have believed in Eleanor as Edward IV’s wife. They have done the story – and Eleanor herself – justice, and while they may have made mistakes, fiction writers generally seem to have grasped basic facts that have been ignored by some serious historians.