John, Lord Talbot, and his retinue landed safely, probably in Portsmouth, soon after 20 February 1441/2. From the port he must have made his way rapidly to London, to impress upon the king the urgent need for reinforcements in Normandy. Evidently his requests fell upon receptive ears. Permission was given to raise a new army to reinforce with all possible speed the existing English forces in France.
Talbot himself seems to have remained in London. In March, commissioners were appointed by the king to requisition ships to convey the reinforcements to Normandy, and some were dispatched to the East Anglian ports, but on Tuesday 27 March, the Tuesday of Holy Week, Lord Talbot himself was commissioned to assemble ships from the Port of London and from Sandwich, which suggests that he was at that time living in or near the capital.1
It is probable that the Talbot family had a house in London at this period. There is an area known as Talbot Court off Gracechurch Street, not far from the site of St Benet’s church, just opposite the east end of Cheap Street, and north of London Bridge. This may mark the site of a former Talbot residence.2 There is still a building there called Talbot House, though the present structure is of much more recent date. Later sources, however, have claimed Talbot Inn in Whitechapel as John Talbot’s London home.3
Evidence certainly exists of Talbot connections with London. In 1467 John’s second wife, Margaret, Countess of Shrewsbury, was probably living in London when she died. She was undoubtedly buried in London, at St Paul’s Cathedral. Their youngest son, Humphrey, also seems to have lived in London for at least part of his adult life. He founded a chantry for himself and his deceased relatives at the church of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe.4 He also assumed responsibility for his mother’s funerary monument at St Paul’s Cathedral.
John Talbot’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, and his daughter-in-law, Jane (Humphrey’s wife), seem to have been familiar with the London suburbs lying beyond the city walls, between Gracechurch Street and Whitechapel. They both retired, in later life, to the Convent of the Poor Clares (‘The Minories’) near Aldgate. There used to be other noble houses in this general area. The Nevilles once had their London home on what is now the site of Leadenhall Market.5 It is entirely plausible, therefore, that John Talbot might have had a house in this part of the city or its suburbs. It is also possible that the Talbot family still from time to time made use of Furnival Inn in Holborn, which had been the former house of John’s first father-in-law. It is said that the latter, as Lord Treasurer, had used Furnival Inn to accommodate the clerks of the Exchequer, who may have remained in occupation of at least part of the building. However, the property certainly belonged to the earls of Shrewsbury until the mid-sixteenth century.6
It was therefore probably either in a house off Gracechurch Street, or in Whitechapel, that John Talbot’s reunion with Margaret and the rest of his family took place. This may well have been the occasion of his first meeting with his daughter Eleanor. It is legitimate to wonder what the little girl (already nearly 6 years old) might have thought of this tall, dark stranger, the formidable man who was her father.7 Had he remembered her birthday? Did he bring her a gift from France? And was it perhaps in this same house, later that night, or on one of the succeeding nights, that the last child of John Talbot’s family was conceived in that spring of 1442?
As usual, Lord Talbot spent little time in his native land. The situation in France meant that the Duke of York required reinforcements urgently. The king therefore commanded that the ships requisitioned to transport them to France should be at the port of Winchelsea by the last day of April.8 For Eleanor, the unaccustomed presence of her long absent father can have been only the briefest of interludes. Moreover, since the earl was much occupied with affairs of state, she may have seen very little of him.
Nevertheless, John Talbot does seem to have found time during this visit to discuss family concerns with his wife. Margaret was increasingly impatient with the pace – so slow as to be virtually indiscernible – of the legal resolution of her claim to part of the Berkeley inheritance. This claim had originally been asserted by her parents, years before, upon the death of her grandfather. Then the Earl and Countess of Warwick had occupied Berkeley Castle, as Margaret knew well, for in due course she was to repeat this action herself. However, Henry V had ruled against them and recognised the Countess of Warwick’s cousin James as the new Lord Berkeley.
As a rather meagre compensation, Margaret’s parents had been granted three of the Berkeley manors: Wotton-under-Edge, Simondshall and Cowley, for the Earl of Warwick’s life only. In exchange, Richard Beauchamp had agreed to abandon his claim to the rest of the Berkeley inheritance – a considerable concession on his part. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that when their father died, on 30 April 1439, Margaret and her sisters were eager to hold on to these three manors, in spite of the condition of life tenure under which their father had received them.
James, the new Lord Berkeley, repossessed the manors by force, but Lord Talbot used his influence at court to have James imprisoned in the Tower. He was assisted in this by Margaret’s brother-in-law, Edmund Beaufort, whose secret marriage to Margaret’s middle sister, Eleanor, had been recognised in 1438.9 Edmund Beaufort (later created Duke of Somerset) was a cousin of the king, the former lover of Henry V’s widow, and the possible progenitor of the so-called ‘Tudor’ dynasty.10
Subsequently the Earl of Warwick’s inquisition post-mortem ruled (somewhat surprisingly, in view of the terms of the original grant) that Margaret and her sisters were entitled to the disputed manors. Possession, however, has always proved nine points of the law, and James, Lord Berkeley was difficult to dislodge. In 1440 Margaret’s brothers-in-law, Edmund Beaufort and Lord Latimer, made an attempt at arbitration. However, Talbot (then serving in France) threatened to break off the siege of Harfleur and return to England if any decisions were made in his absence.
Margaret’s son, young John Talbot III, next tried a legal approach, sending a subpoena to Lord Berkeley. This move was received with arrogant contempt. Gestures speak louder than words, and the haughty Lord Berkeley signalled unequivocally his uncompromising stance with a pantomime of theatrical provocation. He would make his detested rivals eat their words – literally! The unfortunate Talbot messenger was compelled to consume his master’s subpoena, parchment, wax seal and all.
In 1441 Edmund Beaufort and Margaret’s other brother-in-law, George Neville, Lord Latimer, were again disposed to compromise with Lord Berkeley. Talbot, however, still vigorously opposed any accommodation with the enemy, who, meanwhile, continued in defiant occupation. Legal moves aimed at ousting him dragged on, both in the courts in Gloucester and in Parliament. Meanwhile, Margaret and her husband, with their growing brood of children to provide for, refused to give up what they saw as their rightful claim.
No record has survived of their conversations in the spring of 1442, although discussions of the inheritance disputes must have taken place. This can be inferred from the actions taken by Margaret later that year, following John’s return to France – actions in which she had the support of veteran men-at-arms who had served with her husband in France and who must have been left at her disposal by him for that specific purpose.
But before we get ahead of the story, let us continue with the events of early 1442, when we may conjecture that the Talbots also gave thought to the future domestic arrangements of their eldest son, John III, now 16 years old. Perhaps Lord Talbot deputed his wife to look out, in his absence, for a likely bride for the young man.
On Whit Sunday, 20 May 1442, King Henry VI acknowledged the growing importance of Lord Talbot by honouring him with an English earldom. As we have seen, he had already been created Count of Clermont by the English authorities in France. But English contemporaries seem to have taken little account of this, for chronicles and in fact the Patent Rolls continue to call him Lord Talbot until the end of May 1442.
His new English title was officially Comes Salopie, which was perhaps originally intended to be translated into English as ‘Earl of Shropshire’. However, it was soon popularly rendered as ‘Earl of Shrewsbury’. This form of the title then became the norm, and it has continued to be borne by John Talbot’s descendants, down to the present day, despite the fact that it was unusual in the fifteenth century for an earl’s title to be derived from a town rather than a county. Talbot’s new title meant that his little daughter was now unquestionably Lady Eleanor Talbot.11
On the following Friday, 25 May, commissioners were appointed by the king to take the muster of the new troops,12 ‘and the 25th day of May my Lord Talbot (sic) took his way toward the sea, for to pass into France with his retenue’.13 By Friday 15 June they were all in Normandy and mustered at Harfleur. The new Earl of Shrewsbury had spent less than four months in England, but when he departed he left Margaret an acknowledged English countess. He also almost certainly left her pregnant yet again, carrying the child who was to be the last addition to their family.
Lord Shrewsbury’s hard work on his king’s behalf did not go unnoticed by Henry VI, who subsequently remarked on the Earl’s ‘strenuous probity, even to old age’.14 Nevertheless, the Earl’s return to France in the summer of 1442 may have been timely, in more ways than one. It had the distinct advantage that he was not on the spot to be asked awkward questions when violence subsequently erupted in connection with the Berkeley dispute (see below).
Before that, there was also a little matter of piracy accusations against the crew of a merchant ship belonging to the Earl of Shrewsbury. Apparently ‘certain evildoers’ from one of the earl’s balingers had made off with six bales of cloth which merchants of the Hanse in London had been in the process of exporting, via Faversham and Dover, to Calais. The merchants, Robert Blitterswyk and Bertrand Questenbergh, protested to the king, who instructed his serjeant-at-arms, Robert College, to track down the cloth and apprehend the ‘evildoers’.15
This was not the first time that the king had found himself enquiring into the activities of one of the Earl’s ships. In December 1438 the then Lord Talbot and Furnival had made a formal complaint to the Lord Chancellor, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, that his ship the Margaret of Portladown, valued at 100 marks, was at sea bound for Rouen with a cargo of salt worth 13s 4d when a Cornish balinger, the Jenot of Fowey, had attacked her and made off with the cargo, with the knowledge of her owner, Thomas Jerard of Fowey.16 On that occasion Lord Shrewsbury seems to have been the victim of a piratical attack.
There had also been another occasion (in 1440) when the king had been obliged to command the arrest of Thomas Williamson, master of one of the then Lord Talbot’s balingers, for piracy: specifically, the plundering of a ship called Le Crayer (master, Cornelius Brandson), containing the goods of the Hanseatic merchant John Dasse of Cologne.17 What Lord Shrewsbury himself knew of such piratical activities by his own mariners, cannot, of course, be ascertained, but the fact that his ships were implicated in acts of piracy twice in two years looks a little suspicious.
Much more serious however – because it involved civil disorder – was the escapade upon which the Countess of Shrewsbury embarked later in the year. Finding that legal processes were apparently getting her nowhere, Margaret imitated the examples of her parents, and of her rival and cousin, James, and took the law into her own hands. She seized the manors of Wotton-under-Edge, Cowley and Simondshall. Having seized them, she kept them, and could not be removed. This bold exploit paid off, for not until several years later were the Talbots to enter into any kind of negotiation in respect of these three manors, and then the outcome was that they were allowed to keep them for life.18 On this occasion, as on a similar, later occasion,19 Margaret seems to have employed those men-at-arms provided by her husband, veterans of his French campaigns.
It was probably towards the end of this eventful year of 1442 – in December, perhaps, or in January – that Margaret, Countess of Shrewsbury, gave birth to her last child and second daughter. As her time drew near, Margaret withdrew into her own chambers. The keyholes will have been blocked, and all but one of her chamber windows covered over in preparation for the coming event. For three or four weeks Margaret remained shut off from the rest of the world, surrounded only by her women. This was the first (and only) occasion on which Eleanor Talbot saw the complete withdrawal of her mother’s powerful presence. It may have been a bewildering experience for the little girl.
When she had safely given birth, Lady Shrewsbury stayed for some weeks in seclusion. At first, she would have been expected to remain in bed. Progressively she would then have risen, spending her time sitting, or exercising a little by walking around her rooms. Finally she would have reappeared in the rest of the house. Even then she would not, at first, go out of doors. Meanwhile the newborn baby would have been handed over almost at once to a nurse, as Eleanor and her brothers had been. Noble ladies did not normally breastfeed their own children. It would have slowed down their rate of reproduction: one of their principal raisons d’être. In theory, the fact that the new baby girl was in the hands of a nurse meant that she could be seen by her father, even though the mother was still confined to her chambers. In fact, of course, Lord Shrewsbury, as usual, was not even in the country when his last child was born.
Anxiety in respect of newborn infants meant that they were generally baptised as early as possible. Usually this ceremony was performed within a few days of birth. Since at that time Margaret was still lying in, she would have been unable to attend the new baby’s christening herself. It is, however, possible that little Lady Eleanor attended her new baby sister’s baptism, and it is highly probable that pride of place at the event was taken by one of Margaret’s own sisters. For if Eleanor Beauchamp had stood godmother at little Eleanor Talbot’s baptism six years previously, on this present occasion one can perhaps infer that Margaret’s youngest sister, Elizabeth, Lady Latimer, was the principal godparent. At all events, the new baby was certainly baptised Elizabeth.
For Margaret, the ritual of giving birth terminated in the ceremony of her churching, which marked her return to normal life. This was a short rite of purification and thanksgiving. Accompanied by her midwives and female attendants (possibly including Eleanor) the countess made her way to church bearing a lighted candle. She was received by clergy intoning psalms. An acolyte bore the holy water bucket and aspergillum, which the officiant took, sprinkling Margaret with holy water to cleanse her, while choristers chanted:
Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor;
Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.
(Sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
you will wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.)20