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

  [The story] says that a little boy fell into a well, and there he found a wonderland – a city with great surrounding walls and, as I recall, honey, rice pudding, toys …

  (N. Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (trans. J. Ashdown-Hill) 7th ed. (Athens: 1973, pp.212–13)

  * * *

  LIST OF THE CHILDREN OF RICHARD AND

  CECILY, DUKE AND DUCHESS OF YORK

  ‘Sir aftir the tyme of longe bareynesse,

  God first sent Anne, which signyfieth grace,

  In token that al her hertis hevynesse

  He as for bareynesse wold fro hem chace.

  Harry, Edward, and Edmonde, eche in his place

  Succedid; and after tweyn daughters came

  Elizabeth and Margarete, and afterward William.

  John aftir William nexte borne was,

  Which bothe be passid to goddis grace:

  George was next, and after Thomas

  Borne was, which sone aftir did pace

  By the path of dethe to the hevenly placev

  Richard liveth yet: but last of alle

  Was Ursula, to him whom God list calle’.

  from ‘The Dialogue at the Grave of Dame Johan of Acres’

  Friar Osberne Bokenham OSA

  Clare Priory, Suffolk, 1456 (K. W. Barnardiston, Clare Priory (Cambridge, 1962), p.69.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. Family Background

  2. Irish Beginnings

  3. English Childhood

  4. The Loss of a Father

  5. Life in the Low Countries

  6. Heir to the Throne

  7. Matrimonial Problems, Part 1

  8. Matrimonial Problems, Part 2

  9. High Rivers

  10. Yorkist or Lancastrian?

  11. Matrimonial Problems, Part 3

  12. Thomas Burdet’s Secrets

  13. The Act of Attainder

  14. An Unusual Execution

  15. Burial at Tewkesbury

  16. The Clarence Vault

  17. The Surviving Bones

  18. The Clarence Posterity

  Appendix 1: Children of the Duke and Duchess of York

  Appendix 2: Mottos of the Family of George, Duke of Clarence

  Appendix 3: George, Duke of Clarence Family Trees

  List of Abbreviations

  Bibliography

  Plate Section

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  No one could write about George, Duke of Clarence, without acknowledging a debt to Michael Hicks and the various material he has published on George over a number of years. Professor Hicks has done a huge amount of very valuable work on the surviving documentation relating to George’s property, associations and political roles. Without attempting to rival his work in these spheres, this new book on George tries to offer new insights into aspects of his character and attempts to deduce how these might have come about. At the same time, it offers exciting new information relating to George’s death, burial and the ultimate fate of his physical remains – not to mention the fate of his posterity.

  My thanks are also due to all those who helped me at Tewkesbury: Rev. Canon Paul Williams, the Vicar of Tewkesbury; Graham Finch, churchwarden; Dr Richard Morris, former archaeologist to Tewkesbury Abbey; Pat Webley, honorary archivist of Tewkesbury Abbey; Neil Birdsall, former architect of Tewkesbury Abbey; Philip Comens, head verger; Andrew Moore, verger; Pat Horseley, assistant curator of the abbey’s archaeological collection; and Dr Joyce Filer. Dr Filer’s findings, based on her preliminary re-examination of the surviving bones, were, of course, tentative, but I hope that the interpretations offered here are consistent with her report. My thanks also go to Maria Gilgar and Norrah Harris for their help with information about Dublin, to Annette Carson and Marie Barnfield, who read drafts of parts of the text and gave me their comments, and to Dave Perry, who checked the proofs. Richard Morris, Pat Webley, Annette Carson and Marie Barnfield are acknowledged in my notes as [RM], [PW], [AC] and [MB] respectively.

  Finally, I should like to thank the many descendants of the Duke of Clarence who have contacted me in connection with my discovery of Richard III’s mtDNA, and my work on the genealogy of the House of York – and most particularly the five people who kindly contributed details of their family background and their thoughts on George to this book’s final chapter.

  INTRODUCTION

  One estimate of George, Duke of Clarence, penned about a century after his demise, suggested that he ‘was a goodlie noble prince, and at all times fortunate, if either his owne ambition had not set him against his brother, or the envie of his enimies his brother against him’.1 Would this unsuccessful, would-be ‘Duke of York’, ‘Duke of Burgundy’ and ‘King of England’ have described himself as fortunate? It seems unlikely. But George is a mysterious figure, less well known – and less studied – than his brothers, Edward IV and Richard III. His relationship with those brothers was varied and unpredictable, while his personality appears to have been very much his own.

  Shakespeare tells us that George was murdered by his younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester (the future Richard III) – but this is drama, not history. The fifteenth-century rolls of Parliament show that George was openly arrested by King Edward IV, who had his brother tried before Parliament, then ultimately executed him. Even George’s execution was extraordinary – he was drowned, it is said, in a barrel of wine. Since the late fifteenth century, historical writers have been struggling with this strange and unlikely-sounding tale of his death.

  When he died, in February 1477/8, George, Duke of Clarence was a mere 28 years old. Much activity had been fitted into his short but turbulent life. Conceived, perhaps, in France, and born in Ireland, during the course of his twenty-eight years he visited Eire, England, the Netherlands, Belgium and France (to use the modern terminology). At different times in his life he had apparently been both a Yorkist and a Lancastrian. For about six years, George was the second highest-ranking person in the realm – the heir presumptive to the English throne. He attained that giddy height without having received any proper preparation for the role, at the early age of 11.

  It has been said that ‘we scrape around in the lives of the famous dead, like squawking chickens pecking at every piece of gossip and scandal.’2 The historians who are responsible for such ‘scraping’ invariably have their own agendas. In my case, the motive for my interest in George has several facets. Richard III’s subsequent claim to the throne, based on Edward IV’s bigamy, has long been of interest to me. Was George the first to advance that claim? Another factor is my ten years’ work on mitochondrial DNA of the royal House of York – George’s mtDNA. But in the final analysis, of all the Yorks, George is of most particular interest to me because some of my fifteenth-century Dorset ancestors appear to have been in his service. Presumably they wore his livery, and bore his bull or gorget badges. I have thus inherited an obligation to him. I possess one of George’s bull livery badges but, frustratingly, I have been unable to establish for certain what livery colours he used in his adult life. Strange to think that this long-forgotten, simple and basic everyday detail of his household and military establishment was probably very well known to some of my forebears – as, perhaps, were some of the now disputed elements of George’s life story.

  I am fascinated by what motivated the Duke of Clarence. How did he really feel about his brothers? Why did he sometimes betray his own family�
�s cause? What was his relationship with his sister, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy? And why did she and the other women of his family apparently try so hard to protect him and to reconcile him with Edward IV? What was his physical appearance; his hair colour and type; his height? Was he a drunkard, or is that simply a myth, inspired by the accounts of his death? Finally, how did he really die, and what then became of his mortal remains? Can the mtDNA sequence I discovered in 2004, first published in 2006, and which recently helped to identify the remains of King Richard III, now be used once again to identify the bones of Clarence? These are some of the principal questions my book will attempt to answer.

  NOTES

  1. HCSP, p.175.

  2. P. D. James, The Private Patient.

  FAMILY BACKGROUND

  The fourteenth-century king Edward III had several sons. Subsequent rivalry amongst his descendants was one of the factors that led to disputes over the crown in the fifteenth century. These disputes are traditionally characterised as York versus Lancaster, but this is an oversimplification. The real dynastic contest – in which George, Duke of Clarence was to play a varied and vacillating role – was more complex, more nuanced.

  Edward III’s direct heirs were his son and grandson Edward, Prince of Wales (‘the Black Prince’) and King Richard II. But the Black Prince predeceased his father and, in spite of two marriages, Richard II produced no direct heirs. Richard was ultimately dethroned by one of his cousins, who then claimed the crown for himself, thereby founding the royal House of Lancaster. That cousin was King Henry IV, whose claim was by no means beyond dispute, as the family tree overleaf clearly shows.

  Henry IV was the son of Edward III’s third surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. After Richard II, Henry was the senior male-line descendant of Edward III. But if female lines of descent also offered valid claims to the English throne, then Richard II’s heirs were not the descendants of John of Gaunt, but the descendants of John’s elder brother, Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence. Since the founder of the Plantagenet dynasty, King Henry II, and his erstwhile rival, King Stephen, had both claimed the English throne on the basis of their maternal descent, and since Edward III himself had later laid claim to the throne of France through his mother, it is evident that in England female-line descent was widely regarded as offering a valid claim.

  Within the royal family, attitudes to female-line claims varied at different times in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and there was no consistent official ruling on the matter. In fact, it is evident that the attitudes of individual princes at any given moment depended entirely upon the outcome they wished to achieve. As we shall see, when it suited them, Henry VI, Richard, Duke of York, and the latter’s son George, Duke of Clarence, would all assert the primacy of male-line claims.

  The heirs of Edward III (simplified).

  In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, however, it had suited the leaders of the House of Lancaster (John of Gaunt and his son, Henry IV) to accept the capacity of female members of the royal family to transmit rights to the crown. Thus the initial Lancastrian claim was explicitly based upon Henry IV’s descent from Henry III, as Henry IV himself said in Parliament:

  In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster, claim this realm of England, and the crown with all its members and its appurtenances, inasmuch as I am descended by right line of the blood from the good lord King Henry the third.1

  Since Henry IV was Edward III’s grandson on his father’s side, the only possible reason for stating that he was claiming the throne based upon his descent from his much more remote ancestor, Henry III, has to be that his claim was based upon his maternal line descent.2

  In the late fourteenth century, England saw the genesis of the dispute later – and inaccurately – called the ‘Wars of the Roses’.3 It was during the reign of the childless Richard II that the first signs of this dispute were discernible. Richard is said to have accepted the senior living (but female-line) descendant of Lionel, Duke of Clarence as his rightful heir in October 1385,4 for in that year, ‘when Richard II was still a youth, Parliament had attempted to forestall trouble by declaring that his heir was his young cousin, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March’.5

  How far Parliament, or the king himself, really went on this point is a matter of some dispute. Nevertheless, it is clear from the subsequent conduct of Richard II’s uncle, John of Gaunt, that the latter did fear that Roger, his great nephew, might inherit the throne. Thus John of Gaunt attempted to assert not his own male-line claim to the throne, but the claim of his son, the future Henry IV. When referencing the male line of succession from Edward III, John took precedence over his son. Why, then, did he advance his son’s claim rather than his own? Because his son enjoyed a different line of royal descent via Henry’s mother, John’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster.

  Blanche’s father, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, had been the direct male-line descendant and heir of the 1st Earl of Lancaster, Edmund, known as ‘Crouchback’, a son of King Henry III. For lack of male heirs, following the death of Duke Henry in 1361, Blanche became her father’s co-heir (together with her elder sister, Maud). It was via Blanche, iure uxoris, that John of Gaunt acquired Lancastrian lands. Subsequently, in 1362, following the death of Maud, John’s father, Edward III, named him 1st Duke of Lancaster of the second creation. The inherited lands, the re-granted title and the toponym ‘of Lancaster’, which all came to John as a direct or indirect result of his marriage to Blanche, were subsequently inherited by John and Blanche’s son Henry, and by the ruling dynasty he founded. From the assertions made by John during his lifetime and later repeated by Henry’s supporters, it is evident that the first Lancaster line, of which Blanche was ultimately the sole heir, harboured an independent claim to the throne of England, which treated the then king, Richard II, and his three predecessors (Edward I, II and III) as usurpers.6

  This was spelled out in an argument in Parliament on the subject in 1394 between John of Gaunt and the Earl of March. The Lancastrian claim was that Edmund Crouchback had actually been the elder son of Henry III, but that his younger brother had been crowned as Edward I. Reputedly, Edmund had been unfairly excluded from the succession because of his disability.7 In reality, this was a lie. But the fact that Henry’s claim was advanced in this form by John of Gaunt – and also later by Henry IV himself (or, at least, by his party in its formal representations on his behalf)8 – shows clearly that they themselves were only too well aware of the weakness of any attempt to use a male-line claim through John of Gaunt to supersede the succession rights of living descendants of John’s elder brother.

  The Lancastrian usurpation in 1399 did not resolve the underlying conflict. Henry IV always viewed the Mortimer descendants of Lionel, Duke of Clarence as a potential threat. The marriage of Roger Mortimer’s daughter, Anne, to her cousin Richard of York, Earl of Cambridge was almost certainly one of the factors which led to the latter’s involvement in the Southampton plot, which aimed to depose the second Lancastrian king, Henry V, and to replace him with the then Mortimer heir – the Earl of Cambridge’s brother-in-law, Edmund.9 However, the nervous Edmund revealed the conspiracy to Henry V. Thus the Earl of Cambridge was beheaded on 5 August 1415, and given a less-than-royal burial in the Church of St Julien, Southampton (then the chapel of the Leper Hospital of St Julien – or ‘God’s House’).

  The Lancastrian claim to the throne.

  The executed Richard, Earl of Cambridge, and his wife, Anne Mortimer, were the parents of Richard, Duke of York, and it was this little boy, born in 1411, who ultimately fell heir to the Mortimer/Clarence claim to the throne – a claim which, because of the little boy’s title, has, rather misleadingly, become known to history as the ‘Yorkist’ claim. Of course, Richard, Duke of York was also (through his paternal line) the grandson of Edmund, 1st Duke of York, Edward III’s fourth surviving son. However, in its final form, the so-called ‘Yorkist’ claim to the throne was not based upon that
descent, any more than the original Lancastrian claim had been based on descent from John of Gaunt.

  It is true that, as we shall see, from 1447 until 1453, Richard, Duke of York, accepting the status quo and the Lancastrian kingship of Henry VI, would seek recognition as heir presumptive to the throne, based on his male-line descent from Edmund of Langley. On the same basis, during the Readeption of Henry VI (1470–71), George, Duke of Clarence would establish himself in the restored Lancastrian hierarchy as second-in-line to the throne (after Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales). Nevertheless, the ultimate ‘Yorkist’ claim to replace the House of Lancaster, as asserted by Duke Richard in 1460 and as subsequently defended by his sons, Edward IV and Richard III, depended on their female-line descent from Edward III’s second surviving son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence. Thus, the rivalry popularly perceived as York versus Lancaster might be more accurately described as the rivalry of the houses of Clarence and Lancaster. In that context, the Southampton plot – the first attempt to oust the usurping House of Lancaster and replace it with the descendants of Lionel, Duke of Clarence – was the first act of the so-called ‘Wars of the Roses’.10

  The execution of his father following this plot left the almost 4-year-old Richard of Cambridge an orphan. He had never known his mother, for Anne Mortimer had died on 22 September 1411 – the day after she gave birth to her son. The boy’s closest surviving relatives after his father’s execution were his two childless uncles, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March and Edward, 2nd Duke of York. But his paternal uncle was killed fighting for Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt on 25 October 1415, only two and a half months after the Earl of Cambridge had been executed. As a result, the 4-year-old orphan Richard then inherited his uncle’s title, and became the youngest Duke of York so far.11