The Third Plantagenet: George, Duke of Clarence, Richard III's Brother

by John Ashdown-Hill

  However, it is important to consult contemporary sources as far as possible. Interestingly, when the nineteenth-century engraving of the Rous Roll image of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence is compared with the original fifteenth-century drawing, it emerges that, while the engraving is generally accurate, in respect of the height of Isabel Neville it is slightly misleading. When the engraved image is superimposed over the original drawing it can be seen that the fifteenth-century image actually depicts Isabel as having been of about the same height as her husband. As a very rough approximation, we could therefore predict Isabel Neville’s height at death as having been in the region of 5ft 4in. This suggests that Isabel was probably of approximately the same adult height as her younger sister, Anne.

  As we have seen, the remains lying in the Clarence vault in the second half of the twentieth century were given their first systematic modern examination in 1982 by Dr Michael Donmall. A mixed assemblage of variably preserved human bones was revealed: parts of two skulls, an assortment of long bones, pelvic and shoulder girdle fragments, parts of the spinal column and some foot bones. There were no remains of teeth or hand bones. From the first it was clear that the remains, of at least two individuals, were very incomplete. The fragments had been arranged for display, with the two crania resting on the largest long bones. Six iron coffin handles, a fragment of flat metal and a nail were also found amongst the bones.

  After cleaning, necessary reconstruction of the skeletons was attempted using a water-soluble adhesive. The bones were formally assessed (i.e. morphologically) in order to assign where possible sex, the number of individuals, their pathology, and an estimate of age and stature at death. No scientific tests were undertaken.4

  The male remains were estimated by Dr Donmall to be in the age range 40–60+ years, and the female remains 50–70+ years. The putative male was described as being ‘rather short’ – about 5ft 3in. The height of the putative female was estimated as about 5ft 4.5in.5 The male bones were described as showing ‘mild age-related arthritic changes’. The female bones were said to show ‘more advanced arthritic change’.6 Obviously, the heights estimated in 1982 accord quite well with the new evidence offered here for the probable heights at death of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence. However, the suggested ages do not correspond.

  Dr Donmall’s 1982 report observed of the male skull that ‘the cranial sutures are mainly fused (or fusing) but not generally obliterated’. This point was not further analysed, nor evaluated as a possible indicator of the age at death of the male individual. Probably this was due to the fact that there is much debate about the value of cranial suture obliteration in assessing adult age.7 However, the male skull from the Clarence vault could perhaps belong to an individual who died at a somewhat younger age than that estimated by Dr Donmall for the other male bones. As we have seen, George, Duke of Clarence was 28 when he died, while his wife Isabel Neville was 25 at the time of her death.

  The April 2013 re-examination of the Clarence vault bones by Dr Joyce Filer suggested that the remains of more than two individuals are present. In respect of the majority of the limb and body bones, and also the female cranium, the 2013 assessment of the ages of these individuals at death agreed in general terms with the 1982 findings. These bones therefore appear to represent the partial remains of a male and a female who are too old to be the Duke and Duchess of Clarence. Their possible identification will be considered shortly.

  However, the damaged male skull which is preserved today in the Clarence vault may not belong with the other male bones. Some differences of colour and preservation were observed between the skull and the post-cranial male remains. The skull may therefore represent a different – and possibly younger – male. The person concerned had suffered a cut to the front of his head several years prior to his death, which had healed. This is potentially consistent with the report that George suffered an injury at the Battle of Barnet about six and a half years before his death (see above, chapter 10). As we saw in the previous chapter, there is also some written evidence that the male skull remained intact until the mid-twentieth century, and may have been articulated with two neck bones. In the 1930s this was thought to suggest that at some point this head had been cut off – a point potentially consistent with Jean de Roye’s account of the final stages of George’s execution. It is therefore possible that the partially surviving male skull may be that of the Duke of Clarence.

  As for the older male remains, they could possibly belong to William de la Zouche, 1st Baron Zouche, who was born c. 1284 and died 28 February 1336/7. Although his date of birth is not precisely recorded, William’s age at death would probably have been about 53, which is consistent with the age of the male body and limb bones from the Clarence vault, as estimated in both 1982 and 2013.8 William de la Zouche was originally interred in the eastern Lady Chapel of Tewkesbury Abbey – a chapel commissioned by his wife. However, following the Dissolution, when the eastern Lady Chapel was demolished, his tomb superstructure was rescued and re-erected at Forthampton Court (a former residence of the abbots), probably by John Wakeman, last Abbot of Tewkesbury, and first Bishop of Gloucester.9 Forthampton Court was granted to former Abbot (soon-to-be Bishop) Wakeman by the crown in 1540.10 It is possible that when the tomb superstructure was moved, William’s corpse was also rescued, and reburied in the Clarence vault, which had the space to accommodate further burials, and which lay just opposite the entrance to the eastern Lady Chapel which was then under demolition.

  It would therefore be tempting to conclude that the accompanying female bones and the partial skull which appears to belong with them might be those of William de la Zouche’s wife, Eleanor de Clare (Despenser), born 3 October 1292, who died on 30 June 1337, at the age of 45.11 Eleanor, an ancestress of the Duchess of Clarence, was the founder of the eastern Lady Chapel at Tewkesbury, where she was buried beside her second husband, William. Her body, too, might therefore have been removed to the Clarence vault when the Lady Chapel was demolished. Unfortunately, however, the main collection of female remains in the Clarence vault today appears to belong to a woman older than Eleanor is reported to have been when she died.12

  In addition to the partial remains of a woman who apparently died aged about 60, the Clarence vault also contains very fragmentary remains of another female, of slender build, who appears to have died in her twenties. These female remains (which include a mastoid process in no way associated with the surviving female cranium) are few in number, but are completely different in colour compared to the remains of the older female. They may comprise surviving fragments of the body of Isabel, Duchess of Clarence.

  There is no immediate prospect of using DNA testing in an attempt to further clarify the identity of the remains in the Clarence vault. At present no mtDNA sequence is available for the Duchess of Clarence, for her ancestress, Eleanor de Clare, or for the latter’s second husband, William de la Zouche. Nor are Y-chromosome details available for William. Thus, at the present time there is nothing with which to compare DNA from the two sets of female remains or the older set of male bones. George, of course, would have had the same mtDNA sequence as his mother and siblings. I published the full details of this sequence (J1c2c) in 2007, following my discovery of Anne of York’s all-female-line descendant, Joy Ibsen,13 and in 2013 Dr Turi King of Leicester University confirmed that this sequence matched that of the bones from Richard III’s grave. But, unfortunately, the partially surviving skull of the younger male in the Clarence vault is incomplete. It has, for example, no surviving teeth – which would have offered suitable material for DNA testing. There remains the possibility that Carbon 14 dating could be considered, in an attempt to substantiate or disprove the tentative identities proposed here for the surviving Clarence vault remains, based upon the dates of death of the individuals concerned.

  NOTES

  1. See above, chapter 5.

  2. http://pediatrics.about.com/library/blgrowthdelay.htm (consulted March 2013).

  3. R. H. Sh
merling, MD, ‘Can we predict height?’, p.4. http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/WSIHW000/35320/35323/360788.html?d=dmtHMSContent (consulted February 2013).

  4. TA4, p.32.

  5. TA4, p.36.

  6. Ibid.

  7. See for example http://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/age-closure-fontanelles-sutures (consulted March 2013).

  8. http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=jweber&id=I03126 (consulted June 2013).

  9. J. Bettey, chapter 7, p.73 in Morris and Shoesmith (eds), Tewkesbury Abbey.

  10. C. R. Elrington, ed., VCH Gloucester vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=66403 (consulted June 2013).

  11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_de_Clare (consulted June 2013).

  12. Though Eleanor had eleven children by her two husbands, and she spent a total of about five years in prison in the Tower of London and elsewhere.

  13. J. Ashdown-Hill, ‘Margaret of York’s Dance of Death — the DNA Evidence’, Handelingen van de Koninklijke Kring voor Oudheidkunde, Letteren an Kunst van Mechelen, 111 (2007), p.201.

  THE CLARENCE POSTERITY

  By a strange irony of fate, George, Duke of Clarence, the middle surviving brother of the House of York, who never managed to become King of England, or Duke of Burgundy, or even Duke of York, and who was put to death by Edward IV, has a very large number of living descendants today. The marriage of George and Isabel produced four children (though only two of these outlived their parents). Their four children were:

  Anne of Clarence (16 April 1470 – c. 17 April 1470), who was born and died in a ship off Calais.

  Margaret of Clarence (Pole), 8th Countess of Salisbury, born Farleigh Hungerford Castle, 14 August 1473,1 executed 27 May 1541, who married Sir Richard Pole. This couple had a number of children. Margaret was ultimately rather brutally killed by Henry VIII in the course of his religious and marital upheavals. Three and a half centuries later she was beatified as a Catholic martyr (‘Blessed Margaret Pole’) by Pope Leo XIII on 29 December 1886. Her feast day is celebrated annually by the Catholic Church on the day after her execution – 28 May – because 27 May was already the feast day of St Augustine of Canterbury. Today, all the known living descendants of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence are also descendants of Margaret.

  Edward of Clarence, born Warwick Castle, 25 February 1475, godfathers: Edward IV and John Strensham, Abbot of Tewkesbury, created 17th Earl of Warwick,2 executed 28 November 1499. There are questions about his life (see below). According to the traditional account, he was cared for and promoted by Richard III, but subsequently permanently imprisoned in the Tower of London by Henry VII, since he had a far better claim to the throne than the ‘Tudor’ king. He was finally executed by Henry VII for allegedly attempting to escape from the Tower of London. Edward is reputed to have suffered from some kind of mental deficiency – possibly as a result of the kind of life he was forced to lead.

  Richard of Clarence, born in the infirmary at Tewkesbury Abbey, Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, 5 October 1476 and baptised in the parish church (nave of the abbey) on 7 October,3 died 1 January 1477 at Warwick Castle, Warwick, Warwickshire. Buried in Warwick. His father believed that he had been poisoned by John Thursby, acting on the instructions of Sir Roger Tocotes, and possibly at the behest of Elizabeth Woodville.

  George’s children, Edward of Clarence, Earl of Warwick, and Margaret, later Countess of Salisbury (after the Rous Roll).

  George is generally considered to have been a faithful husband. His reaction to Isabel’s death could certainly be interpreted as implying that he had been close to her. Indeed, the bereavement may have unhinged his mind – though it is also possible that he saw what he interpreted as her murder as some kind of personal affront.

  No records exist which refer unequivocally to George as having fathered any bastard children (unlike his brothers Edward IV and Richard III). It is true that, long after George’s death, in 1487, 1491 and 1493, there were widespread and persistent rumours relating to each of the two Yorkist pretenders which suggested that one or other of these was George’s son.4 However, these rumours seem not to have been meant to imply that the pretenders were Clarence bastards, but rather that one or other of them was George’s legitimate son and heir, the genuine Earl of Warwick. According to these rumours, Warwick had been secretly smuggled out of England to the Low Countries by the Duke of Clarence shortly before his death, and the young man of reputedly limited intelligence imprisoned by Henry VII in the Tower of London was an imposter. In fact, as we have seen, in 1477/8 the attempted smuggling abroad of his heir was one of the accusations levelled against George by Edward IV. Although the Act of Attainder against George claimed that this attempt had been unsuccessful, subsequent events do open certain questions about this.

  The only independent evidence that the Duke might either have produced a bastard son, or have succeeded in smuggling his legitimate son, Edward, out of England, is to be found amongst the Malines household accounts of his sister, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy. The record in question dates from 1486. In that year Margaret paid for eight flagons of wine for a person who is not named, but who is described as ‘the son of Clarence from England’.5 The terminology is frustratingly vague, but the date is interesting. Could this have been a visit from ‘Lambert Simnel’?6 The Earl of Warwick would have been only 11 years old in 1486 – about the same age as George himself when he had first visited the Low Countries. On the other hand, if George had fathered a bastard in the Calais region in the winter of 1467, such a boy could have been about 18 in 1486.7 Given the lack of any clear and firm evidence as to the age and identity of the young wine drinker, however, we are left guessing.

  The standard account tells us that George’s only surviving legitimate son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, was put to death by Henry VII in 1499. But, of course, Henry VII had never seen the Earl of Warwick before seizing the throne in 1485, and would have had no independent means of verifying the authenticity of the boy presented to him under that title. According to George’s Act of Attainder, his attempt to send Warwick out of England, either to Ireland or to the Low Countries, was made in order to provide a future focus for rebellion. And there is no doubt that in 1487 precisely such a focus for rebellion did materialise in Ireland, in the form of the person generally known as ‘Lambert Simnel’, but who reputedly claimed to be Warwick. This boy’s identity remains uncertain, since, according to a contemporary herald, his real name was John,8 while Henry VII referred to him merely as ‘some illegitimate boy’.9

  Henry VII’s historian, Polydore Vergil, tells us that the boy was an imposter who merely assumed the identity of the 12-year-old Edward of Clarence, Earl of Warwick. On the other hand, the contemporary French historian Jean de Molinet states equally firmly that the boy was the genuine Earl of Warwick and no imposter.1011 Interestingly, the boy in Dublin enjoyed the full support of key members of the House of York, the most prominent among them being Warwick’s first cousin, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. Other things being equal, Lincoln, then aged about 27, probably had a superior claim to the English throne than the Earl of Warwick (owing to George’s Attainder, which had never been repealed). Yet Lincoln chose to give his backing to the boy in Ireland, attending that boy’s coronation, at Christ Church Cathedral on 24 May 1487. It is said that the boy crowned in Dublin took the royal title of ‘King Edward VI’, and that Irish coins were issued in his name. I shall say more on all these issues in my forthcoming sequel to the present volume: a new book entitled The Dublin King.

  Henry VII later claimed to have established beyond doubt the pretender’s real identity. Moreover, according to Vergil’s account, Henry paraded through the streets of London a prisoner from the Tower of London whom he claimed was the real Earl of Warwick. Since it is highly questionable how many people in London would have been in a position to recognise the real Earl of Warwick if they saw him, in reality the latter ruse proves absolutely nothing.
Moreover, the subsequent well-orchestrated ‘Tudor’ account of the pretender’s supposed real identity, and his employment in Henry VII’s kitchens, though it all sounds (and was intended to sound) believable, is undermined by confusion about the age of the alleged pretender. Also, Irish peers who had supported the pretender and who subsequently saw the kitchen boy apparently failed to recognise him.12 Then there is the intriguing fact that after the Battle of Stoke Henry VII expressed regret at the death of the Earl of Lincoln, who might otherwise have been able to explain to the king what had been going on.

  So was the pretender of 1487 the real Earl of Warwick? Had his father actually succeeded in secretly sending him abroad in 1477? He certainly enjoyed the support of Gerald Mór Fitzgerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, who in 1477 had succeeded his father, the 7th Earl, as the Duke of Clarence’s Deputy Lieutenant of Ireland. Had Gerald received George in Ireland in February–March 1476/7, at the very time when the Duke is said to have been plotting to send his son to Ireland in secret? Did he therefore know that the pretender was probably genuine? There are no simple answers to these questions. But when studied carefully, the ‘Tudor’ accounts of this pretender do contain inconsistencies.13 Moreover, after George’s execution his (alleged) son was consigned to the guardianship of Elizabeth Woodville’s son, the Marquess of Dorset – who probably didn’t know the real Earl of Warwick from Adam. Yet, in 1483, Richard III (who might possibly have known the real Earl) took charge of this boy, promoted him as of noble and royal status, and apparently accepted his identity.