Royal Bastards
Page 2
We also acknowledge with thanks permission to reproduce pages 80-82 from The King of Fools (1988) by John Parker, relating to Tim Seely (see page 247), as well as the many brief extracts from so many books listed in the bibliography; and to The Sunday Times relating to Clarence Guy Gordon Haddon (see page 233). We also acknowledge with thanks permission to reproduce the various illustrations from the owners concerned, all as listed below (see page 287), as well as to Burke’s Peerage and Burke’s Landed Gentry, Burke’s General Armory and Collins’ Peerage for permission to reproduce various armorial bearings.
PB-D March 2006
Introduction To Second Edition
The response to our first edition has been truly heartening and we thank our readers for their interest and our publishers, Burke’s Peerage & Gentry for their help.
However, this second edition is being published in paperback by Tempus Publishing, who will be promoting the book rather more at home and overseas. This follows the success of the book, which has been used recently as a basis for two recent television programmes ‘So You Think You’re Royal’, by Sky TV and Shine Ltd and ‘In Search Of Lost Royals’ by Granada Television and ITV. Sadly, both companies took fright at the prospect of using our title ‘Royal Bastards’ for fear of causing offence! We are also grateful to the BBC for inclusion in several of their Local Radio stations and for the many kind reviews and interviews we have had. Moreover, a lecture tour of South Africa generated much interest and we have now had bookings for some fifty lectures upon the subject. So it does seem to have provoked some interest
Happily, we have been informed of very few mistakes, but the opportunity of a second edition has enabled us to make a few minor corrections and additions. We have also been informed of a number of other possible candidates for inclusion, but the evidence is not strong enough to include them in this edition.
Meanwhile our energies are being directed towards our next book in the series ‘Royal Affairs – Mistresses & Lovers of the English Monarchy’ which should be out next year.
PB-D, March 2008
SECTION I
TUDOR
BASTARDS
1485–1603
Chapter I
The Bastards of Edward IV (1442-83)
Arthur Plantagenet, KG, Viscount Lisle (1462/4–1542)
King Edward IV reigned from 1461–83 and Arthur was his illegitimate son by Elizabeth Lucie, a widow. She was named by one source (Anstis) as having been the daughter of Thomas Wayte, of Hampshire, but Arthur’s date of birth is still a matter of some conjecture; one source stating it was 1462/64 and another 1480.
The first would seem to be based on the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed who claimed that when Edward IV wanted to marry Elizabeth Woodville, his mother declared that he was already pre-contracted to marry Elizabeth Lucy, on whom he had begot a child before. However, the official version recorded in the Rolls of Parliament, stated that he was pre-contracted to Lady Eleanor Butler, the daughter of John (Talbot), Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife Margaret Beauchamp. Although not a contemporary source, Hall and Holinshed based their version on an earlier manuscript viz: Chronicle of England (Harl. 2408).
Unfortunately we know nothing about the beautiful widow who captured Edward’s heart, but of Edward we are on much safer ground. According to the chronicler Hall, he was
‘a man of goodly personage, of Stature high and exceeding all other in countenance, well-favoured, and comely, of eye quick and pleasant, broad-breasted and well-set; all other members down to his feet kept just proportion with the bulk of his body’.
Sir Thomas More’s description of him was no less flattering: ‘of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and clean made’ and he stood six feet three inches tall. The similarities between Edward and his grandson Henry VIII were striking not only in build but also in character – for both had close members of their own family executed. We cannot tell if Edward’s bastard son resembled his father in looks but he certainly did not in character.
Although the sex of Elizabeth Lucie’s child is not mentioned, it has been assumed that it was in fact Arthur. However, it is claimed that Elizabeth and Edward also had a daughter and namesake, who married Thomas Lumley, who died 1486/7, son of George Lord Lumley (see page 170). It is possible, therefore, that it is she who is referred to above.
The second date of 1480 is taken from the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) and is entirely unsupported by any evidence. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography concludes that he was born before 1470. However if it were true, Arthur would have been born towards the end of his father’s reign, thus perhaps explaining why his father never acknowledged him. However, in support of a possible birth date of 1462/4 is an entry in the Exchequer Records of Edward IV’s reign for a list of garments to be made for ‘My Lord the Bastard’ in 1472, but the identificiation with Arthur is far from certain given that Edward IV might have had other bastards. Nevertheless the reference to Elizabeth Lucie being Edward’s mistress before his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville in 1464, would seem to support 1462/4 as Arthur’s birthdate.
What is known for certain of Arthur’s early life is that he was originally known as Arthur Waite and that he appears for the first time in the pages of history in 1502 as a member of the household of Queen Elizabeth, wife of Henry VII, probably as an esquire of the body; prior to that he may have served in the household of Henry’s mother the Lady Margaret Beaufort. The Wayte family owned the manors of Lee Marks and Segenworth in Titchfield, Hampshire from the fourteenth century but it is unclear when the young Arthur emerged from the shadows and took his place in the world.
Arthur was rescued from obscurity by his half sister Queen Elizabeth and after her death in 1503 he was transferred to the King’s household where he again served as an esquire of the body. His duties demanded that he be ‘attendant upon the King’s person, to array and unray him, and to watch day and night’ and among his fellow squires were Charles Brandon, Richard Weston (born c 1465/6), Edward Guilford and Henry Wyat (born ca 1460). The royal favour continued under Henry VIII.
The years 1509–13 were the honeymoon period of Henry VIII’s love for his first wife Katherine of Aragon and despite the birth and deaths of two infant Princes of Wales, he remained optimistic that she would eventually bear him healthy sons. During this period the King was generous and gracious to his kinsman and on Arthur’s first marriage in 1511 to Elizabeth, subsequently Lady Lisle in her own right, widow of the notorious Edmund Dudley (the well known minister of Henry VII) he received a large grant of lands to sustain him and his wife as landed gentle folk. He also settled into a pattern of service as a Justice of the Peace for Hampshire and Sussex and this was followed in 1513 with a knighthood, just days after the death of the King’s second son. The King also made him Sheriff of Hampshire in which county he had apparently some standing, the Earl of Surrey declaring that ‘the country regards him best of any man hereabouts, and also he is sheriff of the shire, and dwelling within three mile of Portsmouth’.
However, despite his royal blood, it would be another ten years before Henry VIII deemed him fit to be created a peer of the realm. In 1523 the King finally raised him to the peerage by creating him Viscount Lisle and in the next year he appointed him a Knight of the Garter. Further honours followed in 1525 when Lisle was appointed Vice-Admiral of England and acted as deputy for the King’s illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy (see page 60), who was made Lord High Admiral as well as Duke of Richmond and Somerset. Henry’s elevation of two royal bastards, one his own and the other his uncle, was interesting. His subsequent paranoia and suspicion of all his Plantagenet relatives, especially the Pole family, had clearly not yet manifested itself. It would only come with Reginald Pole’s exhortation to Henry VIII not to ruin his own soul over his passion for Anne Boleyn. Lisle retained the position until 1533 when he was succeeded by the Duke of Norfolk, Richmond’s father-in-law.
After the Pilgrimage of Grace and the birth of Prince Edward in 1537, Henry’s
thoughts turned increasingly towards securing his only son’s unhindered succession to his kingdoms. The focus of his fears was the Pole and Courtenay families but his particular hatred was reserved for his near kinsman Cardinal Pole, on whom he had originally bestowed many royal favours including the offer of the archbishopric of York. When Henry sought his kinsman’s support in his plan to divorce his wife and marry Anne Boleyn, Pole refused and condemned him for his actions. The king replied ‘I will consider what you have said and you shall have my answer’. The measured tones of his answer hid the anger that Henry felt at such an insult, but as he later confessed ‘There was so much simplicity in his manner that it cheated my indignation, and I could not think he meaned me any ill’. However, the resulting rift between the two was permanent and the discovery of ‘a coat of arms found in the Duchess of Salisbury’s coffer’ which impaled the royal arms of England with those of the Pole family all surrounded by pansies (for Pole) and marigolds (for Princess Mary) only confirmed Henry’s suspicions. According to one contemporary John Worth, it was as if ‘Pole intended to have married my Lady Mary and betwixt them both should again arise the old doctrine of Christ’. When Henry struck it was swiftly and ruthlessly. Within a short period of time both the Marquess of Exeter, Henry’s first cousin, and Lord Montague, Reginald Pole’s brother, were executed. They were followed by Pole’s mother the Countess of Salisbury in 1541.
Despite the past favour shown to him by Henry VIII, Lisle did not escape the dreadful reign of terror that the King launched against his relatives. The reason for Lisle’s sudden arrest was his alleged part in the so called Botolf Plot. According to Holinshed the chronicler:
‘The occasion of his trouble for which he was committed to the Tower rose upon suspicion that he should be privy to a practice which some of his men (as Philpot and Bryndeholme executed the last year as before ye have heard) had consented unto for the betraying of Calais to the French, whilst he was the King’s Lieutenant there.’
The instigator of the plot was Sir Gregory Botolf, one of Lisle’s three domestic chaplains, who entered Lisle’s service in 1538 and within a short time had earned himself the description of ‘Gregory Sweet Lips’. Sir Oliver Browne, another of Lisle’s chaplains thought him ‘the most mischievous knave that ever was born’ and so it proved to be. By his own subsequent declaration Botolf stated that:
‘And know ye for a truth what my enterprise is, with the aid of God and such ways as I shall devise. I shall get the town of Calais into the hands of the Pope and Cardinal Pole. This is the matter that I went to Rome for.’
The author of Lisle’s arrest was none other than the King’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, who was concerned that Lisle’s request for a commission to be set up to implement the King’s religious policy in Calais, would expose his own reluctance to do the job. In doing so Lisle effectively became an opponent of Cromwell, and the latter used the alleged plot to frighten Henry into having his uncle arrested.
Ensconced in Calais, Lisle grew increasingly uneasy, and as his position at Court became more difficult, he became a figure of suspicion. For seven years he had been Governor of Calais and from across the Channel had watched as Henry struck down his relatives one by one. When Lisle was finally arrested, in 1540, he was already a man broken in health and spirit. As he mounted the steps to his prison, he should have remembered the words of his friend Sir Francis Bryan ‘Keep all things secreter than you have been used, there is nothing done or spoken but it is with speed knowen in the Court’. His arrival was noted by the French ambassador:
‘Two days ago, at 10 o’clock at night, lord lisle, deputy of Calais, uncle to this King, was led prisoner to the Tower …It is commonly said he is accused of secret intelligence with Cardinal Pole, who was his near relation, and of certain practices to deliver the town of Calais to Pole’.
For two years the King kept him confined in the Tower but was eventually convinced of his innocence remarking to the French Ambassador that ‘he could not think the Deputy erred through malice, but rather through simplicity and ignorance.’ Lisle was overjoyed when Henry ordered his release and when the King, as proof of his regard, sent him a diamond ring and a ‘most gracious message’ it made such an impression upon the poor man that he died from joy the following night in 1541/2.
Although he had escaped the headsman’s axe, Lisle had become another victim of Henry’s reign of terror on all his surviving male relatives. During his lifetime he had witnessed many momentous events including Henry’s breach with Rome, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the executions of Anne Boleyn, Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher and, his cousins, Henry Marquess of Exeter and Henry Lord Montague. A stronger man might have survived his confinement in the Tower but this scion of the blood royal ‘The gentlest heart living’, Henry’s description of him, possessed none of the steely character of his cousin the Countess of Salisbury who ‘withstood days of relentless interrogation with the steadfastness of a strong man, and survived the rigours of three years imprisonment in the Tower before she was executed at the age of sixty seven’. Indeed he was lucky to survive the debacle surrounding the trial and execution of Anne Boleyn for two of his more prominent friends Henry Norris and Sir Francis Bryan were accused of committing adultery with that unfortunate woman. The transformation of the King’s character during these years earned him the contempt and disgust of many of his contemporaries including the French Ambassador who described him in 1539 as ‘the most dangerous and cruel man in the world.’
Unlike their kinsfolk none of Lord Lisle’s children married into the higher eschelons of the nobility, but that did not stop them from being proud of their royal blood. Indeed when there seemed to be propects for a disputed succession to the Crown on the death of Elizabeth I, Lord Lisle’s great-grandson Sir Robert Basset made known his pretensions:
‘but not being able to make them good, he was forced to fly into France to save his head. To compound for which, together with his high and generous way of Living, Sir Robert Basset greatly Exhausted his Estate; Selling off etc, no less than thirty Mannors of Land’.
Sir Robert remained in exile from 1603–11 and was but one of fourteen persons who had pretended titles to the crown in 1603. History, however, would be much kinder to George Monck, later 1st Duke of Albemarle, Lord Lisle’s great-great-grandson, who was instrumental in the restoration of Charles II in 1660.
Chapter II
The Bastards of Richard III (1452–85)
John De Gloucester, called De Pomfret, (1468?–99)
John of Gloucester, originally known as John of Pomfret, is the only known illegitimate son of King Richard III. He is a shadowy figure about whom very little is known, but during his short life, he posed a very substantial threat to the security of the early Tudor monarchy.
Despite the paucity of information about him, it is possible to piece together some information about his early life and career. Firstly he was almost certainly born no earlier than 1468, when Richard III was only sixteen years old. This would have made John about seventeen years old when his father appointed him to the office of Captain of Calais in 1485. However, it is possible that he was born in the early 1470s thus making him only about twelve years old in 1485. Either way he appears to have been born in Pomfret (Pontefract), Yorkshire or alternatively grew up there until he took up his post in Calais at the end of 1484. As his father was living at Pontefract under the tutelage of the Earl of Warwick from circa 1465–68, the former possibility seems the more likely.
In support of his birth between 1468–72 is a rather obscure reference in the records of the Great Wardrobe of the King in 1472 to a lord bastard. However, it must be said that this could equally have referred to Arthur Plantagenet, later Viscount Lisle, the illegitimate son of King Edward IV (see page 18). But as John was described as ‘the lord bastard’ on two further occasions in 1484 and 1485, the 1472 reference could also have applied to him. Unfortunately his mother’s name is unknown, although at least one hist
orian has speculated that she could have been Katherine Haute, wife of James Haute, son of William Haute and Joan Woodville, cousin to Elizabeth Woodville, wife of King Edward IV.
In addition to his appointment as Captain of Calais, John was made Captain of the fortresses of Rysbank, Guisnes, Hammes and Lieutenant of the Marches of Picardy for life. He was actually out of the country when his father King Richard was defeated and slain at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, but somewhat generously, Henry Tudor then proceeded to grant him an annual rent of twenty pounds, for life, from the revenues of the lordship of Kingston Lacy in Dorset. If John was born about 1468 he would have reached the age of twenty-one in 1489 or thereabouts, but following the grant of 1486, nothing further is heard of him until his death in prison in 1499.
George Buck, in his book ‘The History of King Richard the Third’ published in 1619, alleges that John had been in prison a number of years before his death and he was referred to in the confession of Perkin Warbeck, another pretender to Henry Tudor’s crown. The date given is 1491, the year in which Perkin Warbeck arrived in Ireland and the future Henry VIII was born. Why Henry decided to imprison John is unknown but it would seem to have a direct link with Warbeck’s appearance in Ireland and later the following year in France at the express invitation of King Charles VIII. Nor is it known if John shared the same prison as the young Earl of Warwick, the only remaining legitimate male Plantagenet.
Henry’s reaction to the threat of Warbeck was to invade France and besiege Boulogne. The French King quickly treated for terms and the resulting Treaty of Etaples stipulated that he pay the English an annual subsidy and banish Warbeck from the realm. Warbeck then appeared at the court of Margaret of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV and then paid a visit to the Holy Roman Emperor, who acknowledged him as Richard, younger son of Edward IV. Whilst Warbeck played out his semi-tragic role as the Yorkist heir to Henry’s crown, John of Gloucester languished in prison. It is not known if he had married but prior to his imprisonment he could have taken a wife. If he did, her fate is unknown. Unlike his cousin Arthur, Edward IV’s bastard, John, did not serve in the King’s or Queen’s household. In view of his age and his parentage he was clearly regarded as a threat to Henry Tudor and is reputed to have been disposed of because some unspecified Irishmen wanted to make him their ruler. The contrast in his fate to that of his cousin Arthur is quite striking and in the author’s mind can only be explained by the character of the two men. John may have been of a more independent and outspoken in his views and unwilling to accept the change in his circumstances, whilst Arthur was the complete opposite. Whilst Arthur flourished under the patronage of the first two Tudors, John paid the ultimate price.