Eleanor Talbot’s story does not end with her death, nor with Henry VII’s rewriting of history. However, anyone in quest of earlier books about Eleanor will search in vain, for there are none. In reviewing Eleanor’s historiography over the last 500 years it is therefore necessary to seek out snippets, which are generally to be found in studies focussed on such better-documented fifteenth-century figures as Edward IV or Richard III. Since, for writers on Richard III, Eleanor constitutes part of the controversy that surrounds that sovereign, what the author has to say about Eleanor tends to depend largely upon what attitude he or she wishes to take in respect of Richard.
There are many published works which mention Eleanor briefly. There are even more books that might have been expected to do so, but which opt instead to follow the official ‘Tudor’ line and leave Eleanor out. Only the most important can be considered in this necessarily brief overview. Writers such as Mancini, the parliamentary clerks of 1484, the continuator of the Crowland Chronicle and Commynes have already been considered, and will not be re-examined here. Although his reference to Edward IV’s involvement with a member of the Earl of Warwick’s family has also already been noted, we shall begin with Polydore Vergil, who published his English History in 1534.
In studying Eleanor’s historiography the omissions of writers are potentially as interesting as their statements. Thus the fact that Polydore Vergil makes no mention whatsoever of Eleanor is highly significant. From the contemporary letters of Eustace Chapuys (see below, appendix 1) we know that the issue of Edward IV’s marriage to Eleanor was actively being discussed in Europe in the very year in which Vergil’s history was published. Vergil’s decision not to mention this question can therefore only be a matter of deliberate choice on the part of himself, his sources, or his patron. His account of the Widville marriage is nevertheless interesting. Having described Warwick’s embassy to France, seeking a marriage for his king with Bona of Savoy, Vergil explains that ‘King Edwardes mynde alteryd uppon the soddayn, and he tooke to wyfe Elyzabeth, dowghter to Richerd earle Ryvers … which mariage because the woman was of meane caulyng he kept secret’. When this marriage was revealed, the nobility ‘found muche fault with him … and imputyd the same to his dishonor, as the thing wherunto he was led by blynde affection, and not by reule of reason’.1 Vergil’s picture of a king who was well-known to be very much at the mercy of his own libido and a queen whose tenure was in question is not without relevance in the present context.
Vergil’s account of the accession of Richard III also contains material which requires consideration. He relates in some detail how the Duke of Gloucester, ‘being blinde with covetousnes of raigning … had secret conference with one Raphe Sha, a divyne of great reputation … to whom he utteryd, that his fathers inherytance ought to descend to him by right, as the eldest of all the soones which Richard his father Duke of York had begotten of Cecyly his wyfe: for as much as yt was manyfest ynowghe … that Edward who had before raignyd, was a bastard … praying the said Sha to instruct the people therof in a sermon at Powles Crosse’.2 Having thus represented Richard’s claim to the throne as being based on the illegitimacy of Edward IV, Vergil continues: ‘ther ys a common report that King Edwards chyldren wer in that sermon caulyd basterdes, and not King Edward, which is voyd of all truthe’.3 Yet Fabyan’s Chronicle of 1516 had certainly quoted the sermon as arguing ‘that the childyr of King Edward were not rightfull enherytours unto the crowne’.4 Even more unfortunately for Vergil’s denial of this statement, we now know beyond any question, from the text of the titulus regius of 1484, that Richard III’s claim to the throne was indeed based upon the illegitimacy of Edward IV’s children. Either Vergil was misinformed, or he is deliberately setting out to mislead us.
Like Vergil, Sir Thomas More makes no mention whatsoever of Eleanor Talbot in his History of King Richard III, various versions of which were published from 1543 to 1557.5 However, More does not completely eschew the allegation that Edward IV’s relationship with Elizabeth Widville was bigamous. He chooses to address this issue, but in such a way as to make it appear ridiculous. According to More’s English text, when she heard of his relationship with Elizabeth Widville, Edward IV’s mother begged him ‘to refrain you from her mariage, sith it is an unsitting thing, and a veri blemish, and highe disparagement to the sacred magesty of a prince … to be defouled with bigamy in his first mariage’.6 This sounds paradoxical, but presumably Cecily Neville’s imputed reference is to the fact that Elizabeth Widville had been married previously. Edward’s reply is even more curious, for More puts into his mouth the sentence: ‘as for the bigamy … I understand it is forbidden a prieste, but I never wiste it yet that it was forbidden a prince’.7 His intended reference is to the rule that prohibited marriage with a widow to clerks in minor orders (for of course, priests of the western church were meant to be celibate).8
According to More’s narrative, the Duchess of York, ‘nothyng appeased … devised to disturbe this mariage, and rather to help that he shold mary one dame Elizabeth Lucy, whom ye king had also not long before gotten with child. Wherefore the kinges mother obiected openly against his mariage, as it were in discharge of her conscience, that the kinge was sure [i.e. committed] to dame Elizabeth Lucy, and [was] her husband before god.’9
The substitution of the invented name of ‘Elizabeth Lucy’ for that of Eleanor Talbot constitutes a fascinating tour de force of manipulation. The issue of a prior attachment is thereby explicitly addressed, but in a very clever way, because More is able to explain that ‘when she [the mythical Elizabeth Lucy] was solempnely sworne to say the trouth, she confessed that they were never ensured [committed]’,10 thus apparently undermining the entire story. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that More (or his informant) was deliberately muddying the waters just sufficiently to thoroughly confuse anybody who happened to have retained some memory of the genuine bigamy allegation of 1483–84. One is reminded of Henry VII’s more blatant attempt to obscure the true course of events by his repeal and destruction of Richard III’s titulus regius.
Needless to say, apart from More’s account, we have no surviving evidence that Cecily Neville intervened in the matter of her son’s marriage in 1464 (although she may have done so), nor that ‘Elizabeth Lucy’ was ever quizzed on the subject – for no such person appears to have existed. However, Edward Halle’s version of More’s history as published by Grafton in 1550, contains the additional claim that a sermon, preached by Dr Ralph Shaw at Paul’s Cross in 1483, named this invented woman as ‘the very wife of King Edward’.11
Early in the seventeenth century two significant developments took place. One was the publication of the text of Richard III’s titulus regius.12 The second was the appearance, in 1631, of Weever’s Funeral Monuments, which fortuitously recorded (before all trace of it was lost) the existence of Eleanor’s tomb in the ruins of the church of the former Carmelite Priory in Norwich. But for this fact, we should have no notion where Eleanor was buried. It is unlikely that Norwich would have been thought of, since her family background and her tenure of manors would have tended to focus attention on quite different geographical areas.
Buck’s History of King Richard the Third, published in 1619, had a good deal to say on the subject of Eleanor Talbot. Indeed, it was the first historical study to mention her at all, since her name, cast to oblivion by the deliberate policy of Henry VII, had previously been generally unknown, at least in a royal context. Buck was aware of the principal documentation relating to Eleanor: the Act of Parliament of 1484, the Crowland Chronicle and the Mémoires of Commynes. His introduction of Eleanor comes in a quotation from the Crowland Chronicle, reciting the tenor of the Act of Parliament of 1484. Buck’s quotation is interesting, however, since his text differs slightly from our standard text of the chronicle (see below, Hanham). Consider, for example, Buck’s phrase:
filii regis Edwardi erant bastardi, supponendo illum præcontraxisse matrimonium cum quadam domina Alienora Boteler antequam reginam Elizabetham duxisset in uxorem.13
The children of King Edward were bastards, on the pretext that he had previously contracted a marriage with a certain Lady Eleanor Boteler before he espoused Queen Elizabeth.
This contains the word matrimonium (marriage), which is absent from the standard Crowland text. Whether Buck made a mistake, or had access to a slightly different version of the chronicle, which is now lost, cannot be resolved.
Later, Buck goes back in time to offer further explanation of who Eleanor was. He relates that King Edward ‘had many mistresses or amasias’, of whom ‘the most famous were Catherine de Claringdon, Elizabeth Wayte (alias Lucy), Joanne Shore, [and] the foresaid Lady Eleanor Talbot’.14 Buck is the first writer to use the word ‘mistress’ to describe Eleanor’s relationship with the king, for no fifteenth-century source does so. Some later authors have gleefully seized upon this word, but we must be very careful and tread warily. In the early seventeenth century, ‘mistress’ described the object of a man’s affection, not necessarily his illicit sexual partner. This can be seen from literature of the period, such as Marvel’s sonnet ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Indeed, Buck himself makes this point explicitly by his addition of the synonym amasia, a late Latin term meaning ‘sweetheart’. Elsewhere we discover that Buck employs the word ‘concubine’ when he wishes to refer explicitly to an illicit sexual relationship.15 However, he never applies the word ‘concubine’ to Eleanor. In the present passage he is therefore telling us that Eleanor was the object of Edward’s love. He is not suggesting that she was the king’s sexual partner outside of marriage.
Buck may possibly have had access to some sources which are no longer extant. He tells us, for example, that when Edward left Eleanor, ‘her heart was so full of grief that she was ready to burst, and that she could no longer conceal it. She revealed her marriage to a lady who was her sister, or, as some say, her mother, the Countess of Shrewsbury, or to both’.16 The subsequent conduct of the Duchess of Norfolk makes it entirely credible that she was aware of her sister’s relationship with Edward IV. However, no contemporary text now surviving explicitly involves Elizabeth Talbot at this stage. Buck also attempted to supply one genuine piece of information regarding the invented character known as ‘Elizabeth Lucy’. He assumed that there was a connection between the invented name of ‘Elizabeth Lucy’ and a genuine mistress of King Edward IV, whose maiden name was Wayte. Likewise he has correctly identified, and uses, Eleanor’s maiden name (which is not supplied in either the titulus regius or the Crowland Chronicle). However, even Buck was apparently unable to penetrate the late sixteenth-century disguise of ‘Joanne Shore’: a point upon which we may very briefly digress.
The name of the latter has generally been given as Jane Shore. In fact, however, the first name Jane is pure invention. Jane Shore’s real name was Elizabeth Lambert, though she was first married to William Shore. probably it was in about 1472 that she petitioned the bishop of London for an annulment of this marriage on grounds of non-consummation. Her case was referred to the pope in 1476, and the Shore marriage was duly annulled. Despite this, and her subsequent marriage to Thomas Lynom, contemporaries continued to call her ‘Mistress Shore’. As a result, by the sixteenth century her real first name seems to have been completely forgotten, and in 1609, when Beaumont and Fletcher produced their play, Knight of the Burning Pestle, they could find no record of it, so they then invented Jane Shore to give the character a name on stage.
To return to Buck, he does make some mistakes in respect of Eleanor. He wrongly identifies her mother as Lady Catherine Stafford, and tells us that when the king abandoned her, Eleanor’s predicament was communicated to her father, which is impossible, for the first Earl of Shrewsbury was long dead.17 Buck was familiar with the text of Philippe de Commynes, and quotes the latter’s version of how Stillington married Edward and Eleanor.18 However, he also makes use of Thomas More and, extrapolating from his knowledge of the fact that elsewhere the name of ‘Elizabeth Lucy’ had been substituted for that of Eleanor, he gives More’s account of the intervention of the Duchess of York in 1464, but substituting Eleanor as the ‘former love and wife’ to whom Cecily Neville begs her son to return.19
During the eighteenth century two further important contributions were made to Eleanor’s historiography. The first of these is rather distinctive, being Masters’s history of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, published in 1753. Robert Masters notes Eleanor as a benefactress of the college, but he was unable, even at that date, to find any extant evidence of her involvement dating from her own lifetime.20 Masters was well aware of Eleanor’s identity. He states that she was the sister of Elizabeth Talbot, Duchess of Norfolk, the wife of the late ‘Sir Thomas Botelar’ (son and heir of Ralph, Lord of Sudeley), and the daughter of John Talbot, first Earl of Shrewsbury by his second wife, Margaret Beauchamp. He also cites the Act of Parliament of 1484 naming Eleanor as Edward IV’s wife.21 Given that Masters was able to publish all this information in the mid-eighteenth century it is somewhat astonishing that some later writers apparently remained ignorant of these basic facts. However, most historians were unaware of Eleanor’s connection with Corpus Christi College, and therefore failed to consult Masters and his sources.
Horace Walpole, writing in 1768, explicitly noted the conflict between the accounts of George Buck and Thomas More in respect of the bigamy allegation levelled against Edward IV, concluding: ‘I am unwillingly obliged to charge that great man [More] with wilful falshood.’22 He also knew that ‘Edward’s precontract or marriage, urged to invalidate his match with the lady Grey, was with the lady Eleanor Talbot, widow of the lord Boteler of Sudeley [sic], and sister of the Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the greatest peers in the kingdom’.23 His statements are generally accurate, though he repeats some of Buck’s errors, including the one of identifying Eleanor’s mother as Catherine Stafford.
Walpole was also familiar with, and cited, the evidence of the Crowland Chronicle, the text of the titulus regius of 1484, and the account of Philippe de Commynes. Having quoted the Act of Parliament, he enquires ‘could Sir Thomas More be ignorant of this fact? Or, if ignorant, where is his competence as an historian?’24 Nor does Walpole forbear from casting acidulated aspersions upon ‘the art used by Sir Thomas More (when he could not deny a pre-contract) in endeavouring to shift that objection on Elizabeth Lucy, a married woman, contrary to the specific words of the act of parliament’.25 Unfortunately Walpole did not realise that Thomas More’s ‘art’ was even more manipulative, since the character to whom he referred as ‘Elizabeth Lucy’ probably never existed.
Writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, Caroline Halsted largely based her assessment of Eleanor and the surrounding issues upon Buck and Commynes. Consequently she added very little in the way of new material. That little, however, is important, despite the fact that Halsted consigned it to a footnote. She informs us that ‘the Lady Eleanor did not long survive the king’s infidelity: retiring into a monastery, she devoted herself to religion, and dying on 30th of July, 1466, was buried in the Carmelites’ church at Norwich. She was a great benefactress to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, as she was likewise to the University.’26
Halsted was, of course, mistaken regarding the date of Eleanor’s death, and she misinterpreted Eleanor’s choice of religious life. However, with the exception of the college historian, Masters, Halsted was the first writer to mention Eleanor’s association with Corpus Christi, Cambridge. She was also the first to intimate that Eleanor retired into a religious life of some kind, was associated with the Whitefriars and was buried at the Norwich Carmel. She cited Weever as her source, and doubtless for Eleanor’s Carmelite connections and her burial, this was correct. However, Weever does not mention Corpus Christi College, so it seems that Halsted must also have seen Masters’ history of the college, although she does not say so.
In his study of Richard III, published initially in 1878, James Gairdner both reported and analysed in some detail the allegation of the Act of Parliament of 1484 that Edward IV was married to Eleanor Talbot prior to his Widville marriage. Observing that ‘the evidence of Edward IV’s pre-contract with Lady Eleanor Butler rested on the single testimony of Robert Stillington’,27 Gairdner went on to examine the account given by Buck (above), regretting that ‘we cannot tell the precise evidence from which [he] derived his information’.28
Unlike some other historians, however, Gairdner approached the entire question in a spirit of academic enquiry and investigation:
The imprisonment of Bishop Stillington is mentioned by Commines, and is, moreover, confirmed by the Stonor Family Letters, from which we know that it took place in the year 1478. But the words of Commines scarcely indicate that his imprisonment had anything to do with the secret of the pre-contract; indeed they might rather be taken to imply that, in the opinion of the author, the pre-contract story was a falsehood maliciously invented by the bishop to revenge his imprisonment as soon as he could do it with safety. On this view of the case, we may assume that Stillington was, like many other people, an enemy of the Widvilles, and attributed his misfortune to them. Yet it must be remarked that, by the same authority, his antipathy to them dated from a much earlier period than that of his imprisonment, for Commines says that he smothered his revenge for nearly twenty years, which would imply that he took offence at the very time when the Widvilles originally rose into influence by Edward’s marriage. If so, there is nothing improbable in the assumption that he was from the first disliked by the queen and her relations as the depository of a dangerous secret.29
Gairdner’s careful and balanced analysis is very much to be commended. As we have already seen, he concluded that, while the account of the Talbot marriage had been generally discounted by historians, there were, in fact, insufficient grounds to justify this.
Noteworthy in view of the apparent ignorance of some later writers on the subject, is the fact that in 1878 Gairdner had absolutely no doubt as to Eleanor’s parentage and family connections. Also he seems to have been the first to perceive the potential link between the imprisonment of Stillington by Edward IV, and the Clarence attainder. He cited the primary evidence of the Stonor letters to underline the fact that the dates of these two events closely coincided. Like Walpole, Gairdner also noted the discrepancies between the titulus regius of 1484 and the later account of Thomas More, in which ‘a courtesan of obscure birth is made to take the place of an earl’s daughter’ as Edward IV’s marriage partner.30 He concluded that More’s account was a misrepresentation, asserting with impeccable logic that ‘the care afterwards taken to suppress and to pervert [Richard III’s Act of Parliament] … is perhaps rather an evidence of the truth of the story’ of Edward IV’s marriage as therein reported.31
Sir Clements Markham, in his defence of Richard III, published in 1906, had little to add on the subject of Eleanor, though he gave a fairly full account, including details of Eleanor’s birth family and marriage family, and her burial at the Norwich Carmel.32 He assumed (probably incorrectly) that she also died in the city of Norwich, and he failed to note her association with Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
However, he made a real attempt to supply new information about Robert Stillington and observed that Henry VII ‘kept him in close and solitary imprisonment in Windsor Castle until his death in June 1491’.33 Markham was right in thinking that it is helpful to know as much as possible about Stillington. However, when he deduced from Henry VII’s life imprisonment of the bishop, and from his repeal of Richard III’s titulus regius that ‘the conclusion is inevitable that the previous contract of Edward IV with Lady Eleanor Butler was a fact’, this was clearly an oversimplification.34 Henry VII was bound to hound Stillington, and repeal Richard’s Act of Parliament, simply to defend his wife’s legitimacy. He would presumably have acted in this way whether or not the alleged Talbot marriage was a fact.
Cora Scofield, writing about Edward IV seventeen years later, was much more circumspect, both in respect of the Talbot marriage and in respect of Stillington. ‘How much truth, if any, there was in the story of Edward’s seduction, by means of a promise of marriage, of lady Eleanor Butler … it is impossible to say’,35 and ‘why Stillington was imprisoned so soon after Clarence’s execution is as much a matter of doubt as the immediate cause of Clarence’s punishment’.36
However, Scofield herself by no means always avoided speculation. According to her, ‘the story of Edward’s precontract … was not told to Gloucester until after Edward’s death when Stillington, who never forgave Edward for sending him to the Tower, related it to the duke – probably invented it for him – in order to furnish him with grounds for declaring Edward’s children illegitimate’.37 This passage contains two rather large assumptions, one of which – Stillington’s supposed rancour against Edward IV – is simply stated as though it were a fact, while the other – Stillington’s invention of the Talbot marriage – is glossed as ‘probable’. Both of these assumptions can certainly be questioned.
In his 1955 biography of Richard III, Paul Murray Kendall has been accused of theorising beyond his data in certain instances. In respect of Eleanor, however, he strenuously sought to contribute new information. He suggested that Eleanor was the daughter of Lord Shrewsbury’s second marriage (a fact which has now been amply verified), and proposed that Eleanor was a few years older than Edward IV. Kendall misinterpreted the evidence of the patent rolls regarding the confiscation of Eleanor’s manors by the king (an event which has now been shown to post-date Eleanor’s demise). However, he picked up Gairdner’s observation of a possible connection between the arrest of Stillington and the death of Clarence. This he amplified with new source material relating to the accusation levelled against Stillington in 1478. He followed Markham in noting that Stillington was subsequently hounded by Henry VII.38 Finally, in a detailed footnote, Kendall supplied a complete summary of the surviving evidence in respect of Eleanor Talbot, as known at that date.39
In his study of Edward IV, Charles Ross did not mention Eleanor at all.40 This is, perhaps, curious, since he doubts neither her existence, nor her involvement with the king. We know this because in his study of Richard III, when describing Edward IV’s confiscation of Sudeley Castle, he unhesitatingly categorises Eleanor as Edward’s ‘former mistress’.41 Later he cites the Crowland Chronicle in respect of the claim that Edward was married to Eleanor before his marriage to Elizabeth Widville,42 a claim which he equally unhesitatingly dismisses as a ‘hugely tendentious piece of propaganda’.43
In view of the fact that at least two fifteenth-century sources exist which report the claim that Eleanor was Edward’s wife,44 while there is not a single fifteenth-century source in existence which names her as his mistress, Ross’s preference for this latter, unsubstantiated label, and his rejection of the marriage claim seems at best unscientific. His dismissal of the marriage claim is redolent with unsupported assertions and red herrings: Parliament, he informs us, had no jurisdiction in moral matters, and the validity of a marriage did not fall within its area of competence. This is disingenuous. The Parliament of 1484 was adjudicating neither morals nor the marriage question, but the right of succession to the throne. Likewise, the fact (emphasised by Ross) that Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury were born after Eleanor’s death is utterly irrelevant to the question of their legitimacy.
Unqualified but unsubstantiated judgements in respect of Eleanor’s alleged marriage with the king are not uncommon. One very clear example of this phenomenon is Dr Alison Hanham’s statement that the continuator of the Crowland Chronicle ‘makes it clear that the petition referring to Edward’s alleged marriage with Eleanor Butler was fraudulent’.45 Of course the Crowland continuator does no such thing. He simply makes clear his opinion that it was fraudulent. This opinion is only what one would expect, given the chronicler’s clear political stance.
As for Hanham’s assessment of Buck’s published quotations from the Crowland Chronicle (which, as we have seen, differ somewhat from the extant standard text, and include specific use of the word matrimonium with reference to Edward IV and Eleanor), her firm conclusion that ‘Buck’s alterations … were designed to support his thesis in support of Richard’ seems mischievous, in the light of her acknowledgement that the extant evidence is incomplete and renders the drawing of firm conclusions difficult.46
It is also interesting to find here an example of the historical double standards that so extensively bedevil attempts to study subjects which bear upon Richard III. For even if it could be demonstrated beyond question that Buck had falsified his text in order to favour Richard’s case, it is difficult to understand why that should be considered any more reprehensible than Henry VII’s deliberate attempts to rewrite history, for example by means of his repeal and attempted destruction of the Act of Parliament of 1484.
Sean Cunningham’s study of Richard III picks up a much earlier theme of Vergil’s, suggesting that ‘Richard’s claim to the throne as the only true heir of his father Richard, Duke of York, was publicly proclaimed during a sermon by Ralph Shaw at St Paul’s Cross. This alleged firstly that Edward IV was conceived in adultery and that therefore he and all his children were bastards.’.47 Unsurprisingly, Cunningham cites no source for this assertion. It can, indeed, only be based on hearsay, since the text of Shaw’s sermon is not extant. Moreover, we have already noted that Vergil’s account is selective, probably deliberately partisan, and not simply to be accepted at face value. Cunningham seeks to reconcile it with the evidence of the titulus regius of 1484 by stating that ‘this was later changed to a declaration that Edward’s marriage of 1464 was invalid because of an existing pre-contract to the Earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter’. His phraseology carefully avoids the use of the word ‘marriage’ in respect of Eleanor, though his unequivocal acceptance of her pedigree is encouraging. However, there is, in point of fact, no evidence that the claim advanced on Richard’s behalf was ever changed. Thus Cunningham’s statement is merely an opinion, based on selective use of the available evidence.
In conclusion, one may note that those historians who have accepted the potential significance of Eleanor Talbot’s role in fifteenth-century history have (perhaps not surprisingly) made a much greater contribution to our knowledge of her than those who, from the outset, have chosen to dismiss her or blue-pencil her. Since it is now an undeniable fact that she was named in relationship to Edward IV, it is surely desirable to seek to elucidate the part she played in events. This objective is not best achieved by pretending that she, or her relationship with the king, did not exist.