APPENDIX THREE

The Hopper Ring

The Hopper ring is made of silver, and has a central ornament which bears traces of enamel and contains a small piece of wood said to be a fragment of the ‘True Cross’. It is inscribed ‘MKENI’ and ‘IESVS’, and may have been brought to England at the time of the Crusades. The sacred wood would have been regarded as a talisman, and may be the origin of the expression to ‘touch wood’ (for luck).

The ring first came to public attention when the architect Thomas Hopper died aged 81 on 11 August 1856. His obituary in the Illustrated London News was concerned mainly with the many buildings he had designed for worthy individuals and institutions, but also noted that ‘there exists a most curious tradition in his family that they are descended from a natural daughter of Richard III, by a lady the King brought with him from Edinburgh to Dover’.¹ The lady and her daughter were both called Ann, and the girl married a wealthy yeoman miller named Hopper whose mill was in Canterbury. King Richard allegedly gave the ring to one of them (perhaps to the daughter as a wedding gift?), and their descendants treasured it for nearly four centuries. It has been suggested that the inscription should begin with IESVS, in which case it would read ‘Jesus knows me’ in the Scots – an intriguing possibility given the alleged recipient’s known Scottish links.

The Hopper Ring, drawn by Geoffrey Wheeler.

What, then, are we to make of this? Some writers assume that ‘Richard of Eastwell’ was Richard of Gloucester’s son by this lady, and postulate that if the boy was really 15 or 16 in 1485 then Gloucester must have been in Edinburgh in 1468 or 1469.² But there is no evidence for this (‘Ann’ has probably been confused with the ‘lady of quality’ mentioned by The Parallel), and the only time he indisputably visited the city was when he briefly captured it in July 1482. It would not be surprising if he began a liaison with ‘Mistress Ann’ during his lengthy absence from Middleham, kept her with him when he retired to Berwick, and decided to provide for her when he learned she was pregnant. He was constable of Dover Castle c. 1481–3, but there is no obvious reason why a place so far from Scotland should have become her new home. The only logical explanation is that the journey was made by sea rather than by land, partly, perhaps, to keep the matter well away from Richard’s wife, Anne Neville. The name Hopper occurs frequently in Canterbury Archdeaconry Court wills from 1449 onwards, and a Hopper Mill (and field), operated by one John Hopper between 1547 and 1585, existed in Canterbury until it burned down in 1934. Richard is said to have made a written promise to ennoble Ann Hopper’s children, but the documents were burned by Thomas Hopper’s father ‘in a fit of drunken spleen’.³ This is not altogether improbable, since an obituary in The Builder, 14 (1856), p. 14, noted that the elder Hopper’s ‘intemperate habits’ had obliged his son to assist in ‘or rather carry on’ his father’s business from the age of 18.⁴

On Thomas Hopper’s death the ring passed to Jessalina, his youngest daughter, and then to her daughter Emily Euphemia. The story is told of how, one day, a London lawyer was examining the possessions of one of his clients, an elderly gentleman, when he came across the ring and was told he could throw it away! The lawyer asked if he might keep it, and loaned it to Mr Clarence Daniel, who placed it in his private museum at Eyam in Derbyshire.⁵ When Mr Daniel died in 1987, Mrs Audrey Cartwright of the Richard III Society suggested to his widow and to Dr J.S. Beck (the then owner) that it deserved to be seen more widely, and they agreed to allow the Society to place it on display at Warwick Castle. It was exhibited at Warwick for five years before being returned to Eyam in May 1996.

Family traditions are almost impossible to ‘prove’ even if (as must usually be the case) they are based on something, and this is no less true of this story than it is of others; but there is no discernible connection with Richard of York or Richard of Eastwell except that Eastwell is just over 12 miles from Canterbury and 25 from Dover. There is no particular reason why Richard should have been aware of Ann of Edinburgh’s existence, but if he was (and if, as we surmise, she was approximately ten years younger), by 1541 she would have been his only surviving first cousin. It is perhaps just possible that a family link with the area persuaded Richard to go there after leaving St John’s at the Dissolution, but the details we have are so sketchy that it is difficult to pursue the matter further. Enquiries made at Dover Castle in the 1980s yielded nothing, and all we are left with are suggestions that may, or may not, have anything to commend them. The late Joyce Rossall thought that the lady could have been a member of the Boyd family, forced into exile when the young Scottish king James III asserted his independence in 1469; but this date, we have assumed, is too early for Richard of Gloucester’s liaison. Another suggestion is that she was connected with Lennoxlove (or, more precisely, with the fortified tower that stood there in the late fifteenth century), and was perhaps a gentlewoman in the service of the Maitland family who occupied it.⁶ Richard’s camp was located at nearby Belvedere,⁷ and he could well have formed such an attachment while he was in the area. It is also interesting that, after he became king, he proposed a marriage between one of James’s sons and his niece, a daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, who was also called Anne, but whether this Anne has in some way lent her name to the story is now quite impossible to say.