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Richard III’s Genes part II – the mtDNA line

Anne of York died in 1476, leaving her surviving new-born daughter and namesake to be brought up by her second husband, Sir Thomas St Leger (who was the baby’s father). But seven years later, in September 1483, St Leger found himself caught up in the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion against Richard III. In the aftermath of the rebellion Sir Thomas St Leger was captured, and ‘though large sums of money were offered to ransom St Leger’s life, Richard saw no reason to spare the second husband of his eldest sister’.¹ Thomas was duly executed. The fact that we have just told Thomas’ story sets a precedent for the greater part of this chapter. For, rightly or wrongly, in the past men were much more important in the world than women. Thus, although we are tracing a female line of descent, on the whole little is known about most of the girls descended from Anne of York, beyond their names. It is the stories of the husbands and fathers and brothers of these girls that tend to have been preserved.

Several years after Richard’s fall at Bosworth the orphaned Anne St Leger was married, at the age of 14, to George Manners of Belvoir and Helmsley, the 20-year-old son of Sir Robert Manners. Young George was the grandson on his mother’s side of Thomas, tenth Lord Roos, and was eventually to fall heir to his maternal grandfather’s title. At the time of his marriage, however, George had no titles at all. In 1497 he was knighted by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, for his service in the expedition against the Scots. Sir George attended Henry VII to his meeting with the Archduke Philip, just outside Calais, in 1500, and in 1501 he was one of those appointed to receive the Infanta Catherine of Aragon, bride of Henry VII’s eldest son, Prince Arthur. In 1512 George became Lord Roos, but did not enjoy the title for long, dying the following year of a sickness he had taken while on military service in France. Lord Roos was buried in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, near the tomb of his mother-in-law, Anne of York, and subsequently his wife was buried beside him.

FAMILY TREE 4: The first six generations of Anne of York’s line of descent.

Anne St Leger was the first cousin of Henry VII’s queen, Elizabeth of York, a relationship sufficiently close to the new reigning dynasty to carry some prestige – and some potential danger. However, being female, Anne was not perceived as too much of a threat. Unlike most of the other descendants of the House of York, therefore, Anne St Leger and her children were suffered to live in peace. Anne bore George Manners two sons and five daughters. Only the line of her daughter, Catherine, concerns us here, as only Catherine has living all-female-line descendants.

Catherine Manners married Sir Robert Constable, a member of the well-known Yorkshire family of Constable, and the eldest son and heir of Sir Marmaduke Constable of Flamborough in the East Riding. Sir Robert is thought to have been born only two years after Catherine’s mother, so he must have been a good deal older than his young bride – who would eventually bear her husband a numerous progeny: seven sons and five daughters. Catherine and Robert were probably married before 1518, in which year Sir Marmaduke Constable died, leaving Robert his estates.

A soldier by nature, Robert Constable had taken part in the defeat of the Cornish supporters of the second Yorkist pretender, generally known as ‘Perkin Warbeck’, in 1497. For this service he was knighted. As a member of the Yorkshire gentry he also served as a justice of the peace and a member of the king’s council of the north. However, he has been described as ‘volatile’, as having a ‘dangerous disposition’, and as being involved in a number of local feuds and disputes.² This led to his being summoned before the court of Star Chamber on more than one occasion.

Royal authority in the north of England, always somewhat equivocal, was rendered the more uncertain by Henry VIII’s religious policies, which alienated conservative northern opinion. Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham (whose steward was none other than Sir Robert Constable) forfeited the king’s favour by defending the cause of Queen Catherine of Aragon. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who was a distant cousin of Lady Constable (Catherine Manners), and to whose affinity Sir Robert belonged, also favoured the Catholic faith. Sir Robert Constable shared the earl’s point of view. ‘Along with his old friends Darcy and John Hussey, Baron Hussey, [Constable] maintained a traditional stance. In 1534 all three men had agreed upon their aversion towards heresy and their determination to die as “Christian men”.’³

As a result, Sir Robert Constable found himself drawn into the movement known as the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’. This movement was for the defence of the Church in the face of Henry VIII’s break with Rome and his attack upon the monasteries. Its supporters demanded ‘that the king should suppress no more abbeys, should impose no more taxation, should surrender Cromwell to the people, and get rid of the heretical bishops’.⁴ Having been drawn into the ‘Pilgrimage’, Constable soon became one of its leaders. Although he accepted Henry VIII’s royal pardon under the terms of the agreement reached at Doncaster in early December 1535, Constable was later summoned to London where he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was subsequently tried, not for his activities in the main phase of the rebellion, but for offences allegedly committed after his pardon. Condemned to death, Constable was transported to Hull for execution. On 6 July 1537, he was taken to the town’s Beverley Gate and there hanged in chains.⁵

One female-line granddaughter of Sir Robert Constable and his wife, Catherine Manners, was Margaret Babthorpe. Margaret married Sir Henry Cholmley of Whitby, Yorkshire, and she bore him three sons and seven daughters.⁶ The third amongst these daughters was Barbara Cholmley. This child, who was probably born in about 1580, may have been named in honour of her grandmother, Barbara Constable.

FAMILY TREE 5: The line of Barbaras.

When Barabara Constable had been born, in about 1525, practically everyone in England had been Catholic. The Reformation had as yet scarcely touched the land. Subsequently, however, there had been many changes, culminating in Queen Elizabeth I’s establishment of the Anglican Church, which she perceived as an aurea mediocritas. Not all of her subjects found Elizabeth’s middle way acceptable, however, and there was dissent from both Catholics and Puritans. In Yorkshire, many remained Catholics. Among them was the family of Barbara Cholmley. Thus the little girl was brought up in the old religion.

In about 1600, Barbara married Thomas Belasyse of Newborough, Yorkshire, the only son and heir of Henry Belasyse, MP for Thirsk, who was to be created a baronet in 1611. As a family, the Belasyses were not, at that time, Catholics. However, the death of Elizabeth I, and the accession of James I and his Catholic consort, Anne of Denmark, was thought at first to offer hope of renewed tolerance to Catholics, and in due course Thomas Belasyse converted to Catholicism, though he has been described as a ‘church papist’.⁷ He succeeded his father as the second baronet in 1624, and in 1627 he was created first Baron Fauconberg by the new king Charles I. Conspicuously loyal to Charles as the situation in England became ever more polarised and threatening, in 1643 Thomas was elevated to the rank of Viscount Fauconberg. He outlived his king, and died in 1653, in an England then ruled by Oliver Cromwell. Barbara Cholmley, however, witnessed little of this drama. She had died in January 1619 (before her husband had even succeeded to his baronetcy) having born Thomas at least two sons and two daughters.

Although the line of her elder son would inherit the title of viscount, and that of her younger son the title of baron, it is Barbara Cholmley’s daughters who concern us here. It was her elder daughter, Barbara Belasyse, who maintained the female line of Richard III’s mitochondrial DNA, which survives to the present day. On 7 July 1631, at the age of about 22, Barbara Belasyse married Henry Slingsby, the second son (and, since his elder brother’s death in 1617, the heir) of Sir Henry Slingsby of Scriven, Yorkshire. The young Henry Slingsby was a graduate of Queens’ College Cambridge, and sometime MP for Knaresborough. He succeeded to his father’s estates in 1634 and was created a baronet in 1638.

Unlike her mother, Barbara Belasyse lived long enough to profit from her husband’s new rank, and she became a lady. Sir Henry Slingsby’s religious beliefs are somewhat difficult to disentangle. He is said to have much disliked the views of the Scottish Covenanters, and in general he appeared to be a practising Anglican of somewhat Arminian tendancy, favouring reverence in worship, while nevertheless expressing disapproval of ‘bowing and adoring towards the altar’ and other ‘new ceremonies.’⁸ At the same time, however, he opposed the clerical policies of Archbishop Laud, to the extent that he supported the exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords. Henry Slingsby certainly married the daughter of a Catholic. Indeed, it is virtually certain that Barbara Belasyse was herself a Catholic. Moreover, although he showed no overt sign of it during his lifetime (professing himself an Anglican) Sir Henry, also, is reported to have been a Catholic, at least at the time of his death. Subsequently, Henry and Barbara’s eldest son, Sir Thomas Slingsby, was a strong supporter of Charles II’s overtly Catholic younger brother, the Duke of York (the future King James II), standing by him through the Exclusion crisis.

As for Sir Henry Slingsby’s own politics, he was outspokenly Royalist, stating in Parliament that to refuse to pay the king ship money was tantamount to an act of rebellion. This was a point of view to which many of his fellow MPs took very vehement exception. When the Civil War started, Slingsby left London to join Charles I at York. He commanded a regiment of foot, and fought for the king at Marston Moor and at Naseby. His property was confiscated by Parliament (though relatives purchased it, to hold it in trust for his children). Barbara, his wife, was not, however, forced to endure the discomforts of this confiscation, having died in 1641.

After the execution of the king in January 1649, Sir Henry Slingsby remained in contact with the Royalist underground, and delivered a secret letter from the future Charles II to Lady Fairfax (who was a connection of his late wife’s family – Barbara Belasyse (Slingsby’s) paternal grandmother having been a Fairfax). Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, Sir Henry was arrested and tried at Westminster for treason against the new state. On 8 June 1658 he was beheaded on Tower Hill. His descendant, Joy Brown (Ibsen), once commented to me that she found it intriguing to have ‘an ancestor, Sir Henry Slingsby, beheaded on Tower Hill in 1658 “for his loyalty”. – What an interesting age.’⁹

Barbara Belasyse (Slingsby)’s daughter, Barbara Slingsby, married Sir John Talbot of Lacock, Wiltshire, thus becoming Lady Talbot. Their family home, Laycock Abbey, had originally been an Augustinian nunnery founded in the thirteenth century. John Talbot belonged to a cadet line of the descendants of the great John Talbot.

As we have seen, Barbara’s family was Catholic. The main line of the Talbots of Shrewsbury also adhered to the old religion, but some cadet Talbot lines (including that which leads to the present Earl of Shrewsbury) adopted Anglicanism. The religion of Barbara Belasyse’s husband is, therefore, uncertain. It is possible that he was an Anglican. Indeed, it seems to be at about this period that the family line which we are tracing finally parted company with the old religion. John Talbot and Barbara Belasyse produced two daughters: Anne and Barbara Talbot. Anne, the elder daughter, married Sir John Ivory, MP, of Wexford. As for Barbara Talbot, on 11 July 1689, at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, she married Henry Yelverton, Lord Grey. Henry’s title carried with it the priviledge of carrying the golden spurs at coronations, and Henry had done so in 1685, at the coronation of James II.

However, Henry Yelverton deserted the Stuart king in 1688, giving his support to James’ son-in-law and elder daughter, William and Mary. Henry went on to carry the spurs at the coronation of the new, Protestant sovereigns, and in 1690 the new king, William III, gave the recently married Lord Grey the title of Viscount Longueville. The new viscount once again carried the spurs at the coronation of Queen Anne, and he served as gentleman of the bedchamber to her husband, Prince George of Denmark, until his early death, in 1704. His widow (who had borne her husband two sons and one daughter) long outlived him, dying in 1763, at the age of well over 90.

The will of the Right Honourable Barbara, Viscountess Longueville, dated 13 July 1759 and proved on 5 February 1763, is preserved in the National Archives.¹⁰ The dowager viscountess desired to be buried beside her husband privately and without fuss. Twelve men were to attend her corpse and there was to be a coach provided for her women servants. The sum of 20s was to be paid to the minister of every village through which her body passed on its last journey, for distribution to the local poor. The bulk of her estate was divided between her surviving younger son, the Hon. Henry Yelverton, and her grandson, the second Earl of Sussex (her elder son having predecessed her). The date of death of her daughter, Barbara Yelverton (Calthorpe), is not known, but it seems virtually certain that she too had predeceased her mother, since nothing is left to her in the will. To her daughter’s daughter, Lady Gough (née Barbara Calthorpe), however, the old lady left the sum of £100, ‘and also my little japan cabinet in my chamber and my red and buff damask bed and the two leaf screen which was my daughter Yelverton’s’.¹¹ There were various bequests to servants, and in particular ‘my poor servant Elizabeth Cramp’ was to have £10, together with all the viscountess’ clothing (except her morning dress and the underwear which went with it). Elizabeth Cramp was also to have ‘the chest of drawers in her bed chamber, a wainscot cupboard, and all the useful things in the closet by my chamber (except plate), together with my books of devotion’. As for her porcelain, her pictures and the rest of her chests and cabinets, they were to be held in trust for the young earl of Sussex by Lady Gough’s husband, Sir Henry Gough, Bart. The will was signed ‘B. Longueville’, and was witnessed by D. Wright, by the picturesquely named John Lickorish, and by Thomas Harris.

It was Viscountess Longueville’s only daughter, Barbara Yelverton, who carried on the mtDNA line of Richard III, marrying (as his second wife) Reynolds Calthorpe. The latter had acquired his seat of Elvetham from his first wife (and first cousin), the only daughter and heiress of Sir Robert Reynolds.¹² The daughter of Barbara Yelverton and Reynolds Calthorpe was Barbara Calthorpe who, as we have just seen, inherited a laquered cabinet, a damask bed and a screen from her grandmother under the terms of the latter’s will. Unbeknown to her, Barbara Calthorpe had also inherited old Lady Longueville’s mitochondrial DNA.

Barbara Calthorpe married Sir Henry Gough of Edgbaston, first baronet, and Barbara Gough-Calthorpe, the elder of their two daughters, was born in 1744. Barbara Gough-Calthorpe must have known her great grandmother, Lady Longueville, for she was already 19 years of age when that elderly aristocrat (then rapidly approaching her century) died at Brandon in Warwickshire.

Barbara Gough-Calthorpe came from a hybrid background. Her father, Sir Henry Gough, was a wealthy merchant while her mother was the daughter of a county family with estates in Norfolk and Suffolk. Barbara’s maternal inheritance, of course, comprised more than status, for the mtDNA which her mother had inherited from Viscountess Longueville was the mtDNA of Catherine de Roët, of Cecily Neville and of Richard III. This genetic inheritance was transmitted by Lady Gough to her two daughters: Barbara Gough-Calthorpe and her younger sister, Charlotte.

Barbara Gough-Calthorpe married, according to the lights of the time, somewhat beneath her. Her husband, Isaac Spooner, was rich, but he was an ironmaster, merchant and banker from nearby Birmingham, with a pedigree which was unremarkable. His family fortune was a recent phenomenon. It had been founded by his father, Abraham, and was then extended by Isaac himself. By contrast Barbara’s younger sister, Charlotte Gough-Calthorpe (1747–83) enjoyed greater marital success, acquiring as a husband a baronetted MP who conferred upon his fortunate spouse the title of Lady Palmer.

When she married Isaac Spooner in 1770, Charlotte’s elder sister, Barbara, acquired no special matrimonial handle to her name. Nevertheless, Mr and Mrs Spooner ranked among the leading citizens of Birmingham. They lived at nearby Elmdon Hall, and enjoyed the luxury of a second house in fashionable Bath, though the society which surrounded them there was evidently regarded as less than brilliant, since one visitor uncharitably described their Bath house as ‘the very temple of dullness’.

Barbara and Isaac Spooner had a large family. The majority of their ten children were boys. Curiously, one of these was given the name ‘Richard’; a name which was in Barbara’s family, for she also had a brother called Richard. Is it possible that those who named these boys had some inkling of their family connection with Richard III? Probably not. In any case, the boys were a genetic dead end. However, there were girls in the family too, and these were capable of passing on into the future the inherited DNA of Catherine de Roët and Richard III.

Barbara Ann Spooner was the third of the ten children of Isaac and Barbara Spooner, and she was born in 1777. She possessed a dark beauty, as we know both from her surviving portrait by Russell, and from contemporary descriptions of her. Those who knew her described her as pretty, pleasing and handsome. As to her character, we are told that she was a pious, sweet-tempered girl who had ‘considerable humility and a mind rather highly embellished than strongly cultivated’.¹³

In the spring of 1797 the 20-year-old Barbara Spooner met a 37-year-old bachelor, the slave trade abolitionist William Wilberforce. Wilberforce, who until this point had appeared intent on remaining single (following a previous unsuccessful relationship) seems, during the winter of 1796/97 to have changed his mind. In Bath he confided his desire to find a partner to his friend Babington, who in response mentioned to him the name of Miss Spooner. Shortly thereafter, coincidentally as it seemed to Wilberforce (though in fact Babington may have given Barbara a hint), a letter reached Wilberforce asking for his advice in spiritual matters. The letter was from Barbara Spooner.

The entries in Wilberforce’s private diary chart the progress of the affair from his point of view. For a while Wilberforce agonised over what he should do, but on the Sunday after Easter he wrote Barbara a proposal of marriage. ‘That night I had a formal favourable answer.’¹⁴ On the morning of Tuesday 30 May 1797 they were married, quietly, at the parish church of Walcot, Bath. Barbara had two bridesmaids, and after the ceremony they dined at her father’s house. There was no honeymoon as such, and that night Barbara asked her new husband to join her in her prayers, following which they went to bed early. The following day the couple set off on a four-day tour of the schools in the Mendips run by Wilberforce’s friend Hannah More. This somewhat unusual wedding journey seems to have passed off well enough, and Wilberforce confided his opinion, at the end of the trip, that ‘there seems to be entire coincidence in our intimacy and interests and pursuits’.¹⁵

Furneaux, one of William Wilberforce’s modern biographers, has written that ‘it is difficult to be fair to Barbara’.¹⁶ Unfortunately, Furneaux seems sometimes to be naively uncritical in his evaluation of his sources. The comments that he quotes from Wilberforce’s wildly jealous friend, Marianne Thornton, for example, tell us at least as much about her as they do about Barbara! The facts which emerge from these hostile comments are that Barbara idolised her husband, and was unhappy when he was away from her. (A trait which William, at least, may have rather liked, since few human beings enjoy the feeling that their presence is readily expendable.)

Probably Barbara was by nature an anxious person. As the years passed this tendency seems to have increased, and she worried a great deal about her children. However, the early deaths of her two daughters may help to make such anxieties more understandable. The Wilberforces had six children: four sons and two daughters, all of whom inherited from their mother the mitochondrial DNA of Richard III. The eldest son, another William, was born on 21 July 1798 (he lived until 1879) Robert (1802–57), Samuel (1805–73) and Henry (1807–73) followed. The two girls, Barbara (1799–1821) and Elizabeth (‘Lizzie’ 1801–31) fit into the family tree between William and the three youngest sons. The elder daughter, Barbara Wilberforce, died unmarried and childless in her early 20s. Lizzie’s life, though also short, lasted a little longer, and when she died she left a daughter of her own.

In January 1831 Lizzie married John James who, at the time, was an impoverished young curate. Her marriage proved short-lived. She quickly became pregnant, and bore her child towards the end of the year. Subsequently she fell ill with a chest infection, and although her husband brought her from their home in Yorkshire to stay on the Isle of Wight, where it was thought the climate would suit her better, in fact her condition continued to deteriorate. Early the following year Lizzie died. Sending Lord Carrington the sad news on 23 March 1832, her father wrote: ‘my poor son-in-law and his little infant are indeed much to be pitied’.¹⁷

The baptismal register of Rawmarsh, Yorkshire, where Rev. John James was curate, reveals that on 11 December 1831 his daughter by Lizzie Wilberforce was baptised Barbara Wilberforce James. No doubt her first name was chosen in honour of her grandmother and her deceased aunt. She grew up to marry Captain Charles Colquhoun Pye in 1860, at Avington, Berkshire, where her father John James had been the rector since the late 1830s. However, Barbara Wilberforce James left no heirs to carry forward the genetic heritage of Richard III and his family.¹⁸ To follow the mitochondrial DNA of Richard III forward into the twentieth century we must now abandon the descendants of Barbara Spooner and William Wilberforce, and turn instead to the descendants of Barbara’s younger sister, Anne Spooner.

Unlike her sister Barbara, Anne Spooner did not attract the jealous comments of other women. Her husband, an evangelical clergyman, the Rev. Edward Vansittart Neale, was never a well-known figure in the political and social world of his day, and no detailed portraits of the couple, either painted or verbal, have come down to us. Our one surviving glimpse of Anne seems to be a brief and anonymous mention of her by one of her granddaughters. It relates to a period near the end of Anne’s life, when she was already more than 80 years old (for, like many members of the family which we are following, Anne Spooner was a long-lived lady). Born in 1780, in the reign of George III, she died at the age of 93, in 1873; the thirty-sixth year of Queen Victoria’s reign.

FAMILY TREE 6: The Wilberforce connection.

Anne, it seems, remained true to her chosen métier as the wife of an evangelical clergyman, and perhaps true also to her upbringing at her parents’ home in Bath, which we have already heard described unflatteringly as ‘the very temple of dullness’. Her granddaughter, Alice Strettell, then aged about 15, found herself sent home to England by her parents (who as we shall shortly see, were then living in Italy) in order that she might attend a boarding school in Brighton. She looked forward to her holidays, when she might return to the Continent and to her parents:

However, when the period of congé was short, or the weather seemed too bad for me to cross the channel, I was consigned to the care of a saintly but evangelically minded grandmother, and though her society was doubtless improving, such a holiday was, from my point of view, scarcely a relief from term-time. Many were the long Sundays I spent at the pretty satin sandalled feet of my grandmother as she sat by the green-verandahed window of her drawing room. In her cap of fluted tulle, tied under her chin with a ribbon, she taught me the Catechism and some terrifying hymns. Many, too, were the long, dull afternoons and evenings I spent sewing, or reading the Bible, until at nine o’clock the old butler appeared and my grandmother said, ‘Bring in Prayers.’¹⁹

Alice Strettell’s pen portrait of Anne Spooner is brief but vivid. However, for Anne it is perhaps unfortunate that this record of her was preserved by a teen-aged granddaughter who was eager to be out in the fashionable world and living life to the full, and for whom the experience of life with the old lady felt, as Alice herself readily admits, as though ‘my sprouting wings were clipped’.

Anne Spooner married a clergyman called Edward Vansittart Neale. The latter was born simply Edward Vansittart, and was not, in fact, of Neale descent. The family of Neale were seated in Staffordshire in the reign of Richard III. A descendant, John Neale, of Allesley Park, Warwick, died in 1793 without issue. At the death of his widow in 1805 the Allesley and other estates passed under her will to the Revd Edward Vansittart of Taplow, Bucks, with the provision that he should take the name and arms of Neale.²⁰

Joy Ibsen, a living descendant of Anne Spooner and Edward Vansittart Neale, recalled to me:

Edward’s father owned Bisham Abbey in Berkshire, once a house of the Knights Templar and at one time owned by the Duke of Clarence and later his son, Edward [Earl of Warwick], who was beheaded in 1499 for attempting to escape from the Tower with ‘Perkin Warbeck’. In 1941 it belonged to Edward [Vansittart Neale]’s grand-daughter, Lady Vansittart Neale. There is supposed to be a curse on the place.²¹

Anne Spooner’s granddaughter, Alice Strettell (Comyns Carr) also remembered ‘the home of my mother’s family – the beautiful Gothic Abbey of Bisham near Marlow. We were staying with my cousin, George Vansittart, who was then the owner’.²² The latter objected to trippers along the river Thames landing on his banks and used to chase them off.

Anne Spooner and Edward Vansittart Neale produced a large family, in which daughters very much predominated – a fact which appears superficially promising for the future of the mitochondrial DNA of Richard III and his family. Unfortunately, several of the daughters remained unmarried. Alice Strettell, the granddaughter of Anne Spooner whom we have already met, was the elder daughter of one of Anne’s daughters: Laura Vansittart Neale. Laura was born at Taplow (where her father held the living) in the year after the final defeat of Napoleon I at Waterloo. She died aged 62 in the year following Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee.

Although Laura had clear views on what was and was not proper, and although, like her mother, she married a clergyman, her life was certainly not dull, and was open to unusually wide horizons. Her husband was Alfred Baker Strettell, who served for a time as her father’s curate at Taplow, before accepting, in 1851, the rather unusual appointment as English chaplain at Genoa. The growing Strettell family (a son and two daughters) lived in Italy for many years – though in 1851, of course, no country called ‘Italy’ yet existed. Indeed, the Strettells were to witness the process of Italian reunification at first hand, and in 1862, after the treaty of Villafranca, the family watched from the balcony of the British Consulate, as Garibaldi accompanied King Victor-Emanuel I and the Emperor Napoleon III of France in procession through the streets of Genoa.²³

Laura attended the royal ball at the palace later that evening and her elder daughter, Alice Laura Vansittart Strettell, has preserved for us a description of her mother’s appearance on that occasion. Laura wore a crinoline with ‘spreading skirts of blue gauze garlanded with tiny rosebuds. Her hair was dressed low, in the prevailing fashion, with a pink rose fastened behind her ear and a long curl falling on her neck.’²⁴ Some hint of Laura’s appearance may be glimpsed, perhaps, in a surviving photograph of her sister, Charlotte, which must have been taken at about this period, and which shows her wearing a spreading crinoline and a fine lace shawl. ‘The photo of Charlotte Vansittart Neale as a young girl is interesting I think because of her lovely dress.’²⁵

The Italian upbringing of the Strettell children was unusual, and it produced unusual results in terms of the children’s education. Both Alice and her sister had linguistic accomplishments. Alice spoke Italian like a native. Many years later she remembered her husband’s delight, when he was trying to purchase something from an Italian vendor, ‘at the sudden drop of five francs in the demand of the astounded plunderer upon hearing his own vernacular from my indignant English lips’.²⁶ As Alice admitted later, however, she did not fully appreciate all the advantages of her upbringing at the time:

FAMILY TREE 7: The Strettell connection.

There was much that must have been, unconsciously to myself, of rare educational advantage in the lovely scenery and picturesque surroundings of my childhood’s life on the Riviera and in the Apennines; and my parents so loved both Nature and Art that they gave us contant change of opportunities in these directions. Yet I must confess that as I grew up, the chestnut groves of the Apennines and the shores of the blue Mediterranean became empty joys to me, … and I longed for freedom and the attractions of the world – more especially in London, which I only knew through visits to relatives during the holidays of a short period of my life at a Brighton School. [So I] cajoled my father, then English chaplain at Genoa, into letting me ‘see London’ under the care of my brother, resident there.²⁷

At that time, Alice’s brother, Arthur Edward Vansittart Strettell²⁸ was living in rooms facing the British Museum, though he would later leave England for the United States²⁹ Alice stayed in a boarding house near Arthur’s lodgings, and soon after her arrival in London she met her future husband. This was in 1873 and ‘I had but lately arrived from Italy’. Joseph William Comyns Carr was then aged 24, and of Irish extraction, though at that time he had never yet visited his homeland. Henry Irving, would later describe Joe as ‘the wittiest man in England’.³⁰

Joseph and Alice were married in December 1873, in Dresden, where Alice’s father had taken a temporary chaplaincy. The civil ceremony took place in the hotel and, in Alice’s words, they were then ‘finished off’ by her father in the local English Church. The young couple settled in Bloomsbury. They ‘were at the center of what they termed the “Bohemian World” (vis-à-vis the “Social World”) which had begun to gravitate to London’s Bloomsbury District’.³¹ Alice later remembered:

the beautiful Adams room where Burne-Jones had once painted and that Whistler had not long left. [Here] a light rap fell on the door and a voice loved by us all called out: ‘Anybody at home?’ as the radiant face of Ellen Terry peeped merrily in upon us.³²

Alice was to be very close to Ellen for the rest of her life. As Ellen later recalled, Alice designed her stage costumes for many years:

As Katherine [of Aragon, in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII] she wanted me to wear steely silver and bronzy gold, but all the brocades had such insignificant designs. … At last Mrs Carr found a black satin which on the right side was timorously and feebly patterned with a meandering rose and thistle. On the wrong side it was a sheet of silver – just the right steely silver because it was the wrong side! Mrs Carr then started on another quest for gold that should be as right as that silver. She found it at last in some gold-lace antimaccassars at Whiteley’s! From these base materials she and Mrs Nettleship constructed a magnificent queenly dress. Its only fault was that it was heavy.³³

Alice also designed the very famous costume, sewn all over with the irridescent wing cases of beetles, which Ellen wore in the role of Lady MacBeth: a dress which figures in the well-known portrait of Ellen by John Singer Sargent.³⁴

John Singer Sargent was also a friend of Alice and Joe, and has left us both a pencil sketch and a painting of Alice, together with portraits of her sister and of one of her nieces. In fact Joseph and Alice had many friends among the artists then resident in London, and in the world of the London theatre. These included Sir Authur Sullivan, Oscar Wilde, and the artists Edward Burne-Jones, and Laurence Alma Tadema. The couple also had a number of American friends, with the result that several members of their family eventually visited the United States. In the 1870s they met the wealthy General William Jackson Palmer, founder of Colorado Springs, and his family. Subsequently Alice’s brother, Arthur Strettell, her daughter, Dolly, and sister and brother-in-law, Alma and ‘Peter’ Harrison all stayed at Glen Eyrie as guests of the Palmers. The Comyns Carrs also frequently stayed at Ightham Mote, a medieval manor house with Ricardian connections, ‘which our American friends, General and Mrs. Palmer had made their English home’.³⁵

Alice’s younger sister, Alma Gertrude Vansittart Strettell was born in Italy. She grew up with linguistic and literary interests and later published several books: Spanish and Italian Folk Songs, London 1887; Legends from River and Mountain, co-written with Carmen Sylva, London 1896, and The Bard of Dimbovitsa, translated by Alma, and Carmen Sylva, London 1914. ‘Carmen Sylva’ was the nom de plume of Alma’s friend, Elisabeth von Wied, the then Queen of Romania.³⁶ Alma collected Balkan folk music, and had many artistic friends including the painter John Singer Sargent (who painted two portraits of Alma) and the composer Elgar. Her eventual husband, ‘Peter’ Harrison, was also a painter, though a minor one.

Alma was younger than Alice, who described her as being of a light and merry disposition. Having Alice as her older sister undoubtedly helped to bring Alma out. Alice and her husband went on a visit to Paris, where Alice recalled ‘cheerful meals in the humblest of restaurants … my sister, Mrs. Harrison – then Alma Strettell – was bidden as being of our party’.³⁷

In the 1880s, while she was still unmarried, Alma paid her first visit to the United States, where she stayed at Glen Eyrie, the Colorado Springs ‘castle’ of General and Mrs Palmer. Alma married Laurence Alexander (‘Peter’) Harrison at King’s Langley on 18 December 1890. The marriage was solemnised by Alma’s father, the vicar of King’s Langley. ‘Peter’ Harrison, a tall, slim man, was a portrait painter and landscape artist, though he described himself on the marriage certificate simply as ‘gentleman’. In fact Peter rarely exhibited paintings, though he was a member of the ‘Chelsea set’ and joined the New English Art Club in 1904. Although Peter had mistresses, and the couple were sometimes apart (as in May 1903, when he visited General Palmer at Colorado Springs, where he painted several extant studies),³⁸ in general the marriage seems to have been a success.

Alma died at Chelsea in 1939, leaving to her three children not only money but also pearl and diamond necklaces and tiaras, and further treasures, including an impressive collection of paintings by Sargent and others. Her property included a diamond ring which she had inherited from her mother, Laura, and a silver sugar sifter which had been a present to her from John Singer Sargent. The water-colour sketch of herself by Sargent, she left to her younger daughter, Sylvia, and her Sargent portrait in oils, to her son, Nicholas. Nicholas also received a landscape painting of Colorado by his father. Alma is still well known in certain literary circles, and has a website devoted to her on the internet. She left one son and two daughters. Her younger daughter, Sylvia, died unmarried. Through her elder daughter, Margaret, Alma does have living descendants – but they do not carry her mtDNA.

Like her cousin, Dolly Comyns Carr, Margaret (also known to her family as Meg or Margot) had an interest in music, which she studied under Percy Grainger (1882–1961, Australian-born pianist and composer). In about 1913 Margaret Harrison became engaged to Percy. However, her parents reportedly broke off this engagement (possibly because they were aware of Grainger’s taste for flagellation), and they sent Margaret to America to get her away. There, on 7 March 1916, Margaret married a fellow Christian Scientist, Ames Nowell (b. 30 December 1892 in Newton, Mass). They had one son: Lawrence Ames Nowell. Later Margaret had a second son, Leonard Nowell, but his real father was Percy Grainger. In 1933 Margaret and Ames Nowell divorced, and in 1934 Margaret married her second husband, in London. He was Francis W. (‘John’) Bacon-Armstrong, but they had no children. After the Second World War they emigrated to South Africa where John died in about 1952. Margaret then moved to Colorado to be near her son. She was married a third time, to Arthur Porter, in about 1956. She died in Carmel, CA in 1979. Margaret inherited her Christian Scientist religion from her mother, Alma.

Alice and Joe Comyns Carr had three children: Philip Alfred Vansittart Comyns Carr, Arthur Strettell Comyns Carr, and Dorothy Comyns Carr (known as ‘Dolly’). Naturally, all of Alice’s children inherited her mitochondrial DNA; the DNA of Richard III and his siblings; but only her daughter Dolly had the possibility of passing this on to future generations. Given the background in which she was brought up, ‘it is not surprising that Dolly Carr had artistic ambitions’.³⁹

By the time she visited Glen Eyrie in 1902–03, she had exhibited in several galleries in London and had sold a few of her paintings. Dolly was urbane and well-educated. She had traveled on the Continent and spoke French. … she had a generous heart and was a charming companion and delightful guest during her extended stay at the stately Palmer residence’ in Colorado Springs.⁴⁰

Dolly’s impressions of America in the first years of the twentieth century are fascinating. She noticed of course that everything, including the country itself, seemed very big. ‘At the turn of the century, New York was already the second largest city in the world, with a largely immigrant population of over 3,000,000.’ Dolly pronounced the Brooklyn Bridge ‘enormous’, and declared the Hudson ‘the biggest thing in rivers I have seen’. After leaving New York she found herself travelling westwards across the prairie. Dolly very much enjoyed General Palmer’s hospitality at Glen Eyrie. She continued to paint while she was there, joined later by her artist uncle, ‘Peter’ Harrison.

Sadly, Dolly’s artistic ambitions were not ultimately to be crowned with success. After returning to England, Dolly Carr continued to pursue her vocation as a painter (oils and watercolors) of flowers and landscapes. Her work was exhibited occasionally in London, but, despite some modest success, she did not achieve prominence as a professional artist. She remained unmarried and without children. On 10 May 1918, only a few days before her 40th birthday, she committed suicide near her home in Bedford. The coroner’s report reads: ‘Drowned herself in a certain pond whilst temporarily insane.’⁴¹ This must have been an enormous shock and a great tragedy for Dolly’s family. Her father was already dead, but her mother was then still living. However, Alice makes no reference whatsoever to her daughter’s suicide in her later published writings about her family. Alice herself died in 1927, a year before her old friend, Dame Ellen Terry.⁴² Unfortunately, neither she not her sister Alma seemed destined to pass on Richard III’s mtDNA into the twenty-first century. The family line which was destined to preserve that mtDNA into the second millennium was that of Laura Vansittart Neale (Strettell)’s elder sister, Charlotte, and the descendant who made that mtDNA available for research was Charlotte Vansittart Neale’s great granddaughter, Joy Brown (Ibsen).

Joy Ibsen was born in London, England, on 25 May 1926, the third child (and only daughter) of Muriel Charlotte Folliott Stokes and her husband, Orlando Moray Brown. The couple had married just after the end of the Great War:

By 1919, when my parents met, there were not many young men left in England and I suspect that my parents’ marriage that year was a hasty grasping at happiness after the horrors of 1914–18. At any rate, it was not a success. He was thirty-nine, she was thirty-five, and anxious to have children. … [My father] was to spend the next twenty years working as a mining engineer in Chile and Bolivia, living in fairly primitive places which seemed to suit him. His wife would join him briefly before returning to England for the birth of her children. After I was born she never returned. But he continued to live abroad for most of his life.⁴³

Joy’s two older brothers were Kenneth Patrick Brown (born 29 March 1920) and Patrick Hugh Brown (born 19 March 1924). Both of them shared with Joy and their mother the mitochondrial DNA of Anne of York and her family, but of course, being male, they could not pass it on.

Joy’s birth was registered under the name Muriel Joyce Brown, but she preferred to reverse the order of her names, and to shorten ‘Joyce’ to ‘Joy’. One of her godmothers was her grandmother’s first cousin, Alma Strettell (Mrs Harrison). ‘I have no memory of her but I recall my mother talking about “Aunt Alma”. I think there is a slight resemblance between the two’.⁴⁴ Joy and her brothers were brought up by their mother in Sussex and Shropshire, where her eldest brother, Ken, attended Shrewsbury School. Ken also recalls staying with his godfather, Arthur Comyns Carr,⁴⁵ in London in 1936 or 1937.

Although her father was absent, Joy recalls that ‘my grandfather, Allen Gardiner Folliott Stokes … was very dear to me as a child.’⁴⁶ Stokes, who died in 1939,⁴⁷ was the author of a number of books,⁴⁸ and a great lover of Cornwall, which he knew intimately. ‘He was a friend of the writer C. Ranger-Gull who dedicated his novel Portalone (1904) to him [saying]: “it was owing to him that I made knowledge of the wildest and most untrodden parts of Cornwall”.’⁴⁹ Joy’s mother, Muriel, suffered from asthma and rheumatoid arthritis and in 1937 the family moved to Nassau, Bahamas, and in 1945 to Canada, where Joy attended McGill University in Montreal, graduating with a BA in English and history:

My eldest brother embarked on a long career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal, London (England) and Ottowa. My other brother, Patrick, has had a varied career and lives in retirement in British Columbia. I wanted a career in journalism but at that time women were not welcome in daily newspaper newsrooms. Having mastered typing and shorthand I got my foot in the door of a western Canadian newspaper as secretary to the editor, a crusty ex-alcoholic (and crackerjack newspaperman). That newsroom was a great place for a young, aspiring writer. Some very good journalists worked there (I was to marry one of them later) as well as some odd characters! The pressure of daily deadlines was exciting, especially when I graduated to writing features or reviews. I learned a lot here. After one and a half years I moved on to an eastern paper as a reporter in the Women’s Department, leaving that job for a two-year stint as Women’s Editor at a small daily.⁵⁰

Joy and Norm Ibsen were married in May 1956. ‘We ended up in London, Ontario, where we still live. Norm has had a thirty-eight-year career at the London Free Press and is now retired. After producing three children I became a freelance writer, contributing articles to magazines and newspapers, and reviewing books’.⁵¹ As for Joy’s mother, Muriel Charlotte Folliot Brown lived in a number of places including London, Ontario. She died in London, Ontario, on 25 May 1961 at the age of 77. Her husband died in 1965.

Joy had an interest in her family tree before I contacted her, and she knew a good deal of information from family tradition, by word-of mouth from relatives. ‘Although I have spent most of my life away from England, I have often looked back at the rich genealogical history I have inherited, and have felt grateful to those who have preserved my “roots” over the centuries’.⁵² However, Joy had tended to concentrate on male lines of ancestors, and readily admits that she had not made a great deal of progress with her female line ancestry. Her previous knowledge on that side of her family extended back a mere three generations, to her great grandmother, Charlotte Vansittart Neale. The family’s descent from the house of York, and its relationship with Richard III, were lost in the mists of time. ‘How puzzling that a family interested in their ancestors would not have known of this connection and passed the information down the generations! … Possibly the widely-held traditional view of Richard III as an infamous murderer was a reason to play down the Plantagenet connection.’⁵³

When I first contacted Joy with details of her descent from Anne of York, Cecily Neville and Catherine de Roët, the information came as a complete surprise to her. Fortunately, she was also fascinated to be presented with a family tree that went back to the Emperor Charlemagne and beyond. ‘For my part, I am delighted to have been tracked down and identified … as a living descendant of Anne of Exeter, eldest sister of Edward IV and Richard III’.⁵⁴ In July 2004, Joy told me:

we are off shortly to Vancouver Island to dog-sit for our daughter at her seaside house. Our sons are flying in from Toronto and England for a small family reunion and I plan to surprise them with all your startling revelations about my family tree, the DNA etc. They are aware of the Pitt and Frere ancestors but not of their mother’s descent in the female line from Cecily Neville, Duchess of York. They’ll have to start showing me due respect!⁵⁵