The Last Days of Richard III and the Fate of His DNA

by John Ashdown-Hill

  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 Ell
en 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 place
s 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: