Royal Mistress (74 page)

Those few months in 1483 play out to us like a tragic opera, culminating in the disappearance of the princes and winding down to the execution of one of the key players, Henry Stafford, duke of
Buckingham. I was lucky enough to have a month of sunshine and quiet in a small town in Mexico in which to piece together what happened in what is now referred to as the Year of the Three Kings: Edward IV, uncrowned Edward V, and Richard III. There are many theories about the disappearance of the two princes; mine implicating Buckingham is a popular one. That Bishop John Morton conspired with Margaret Beaufort to put her son, Henry, on the throne is fact, and because we know Buckingham caught up with Richard at Gloucester on the king’s progress, and yet was seen very shortly after arriving galloping toward Wales (where Morton was his prisoner), led me to believe this was the beginning, and cause, of why Harry decided to rebel. Morton was there to feed into Buckingham’s insecurities. I hope, though, I have elicited enough interest in the time period for readers to do more research and come to their own conclusions. Believe me, there are many variables.

This leads me to explain the most difficult aspect personally of writing
Royal Mistress.
I firmly believe Richard of Gloucester was not the monster Shakespeare created in his brilliant play
Richard III,
but because I was having to look at the man from the point of view of Jane and Will Hastings, both of whom were ill-used by Richard, I became acutely aware of how perception is key in looking at motivation. I do not believe Richard hurried down from the north upon Edward’s death in order to seize the crown. He had never shown any inclination to overthrow his brother, as George of Clarence had. If I showed Richard’s character as one of duty, piety, and morality, then I could let Richard believe he was doing the right thing every step of the way. Thus he remains true to his character. The extraordinary obsession with morals in his proclamations following Buckingham’s rebellion (taken directly from the texts) told me Richard was acting out a fanatical and puritanical desire to clean up his brother’s court, and that in order to do God’s work, he had no choice but to punish those responsible. It was then clear to me that those who did not understand his character
or his motivations would see only ambition and deception. Hence his negative reputation. I hope I have succeeded in creating an enigmatic personality with flaws but one with humanity and empathy as well. Not a monster.

For readers unfamiliar with my first book,
A Rose for the Crown,
I have to confess that Kate Haute is the fictitious mother of Richard’s bastard children, John of Gloucester and Katherine Plantagenet, who are not imagined but who did indeed grow up in Richard’s household. We do not know with whom Richard had these two children, allowing for my fertile imagination to conjure and use her as a vehicle to tell a more truthful version of Richard’s life than Shakespeare did. I could not resist having the two royal mistresses bump into each other in this book and go across the street to the pub for a cup of ale and a chat.

Readers of that first book will remember Kate consulting with a lawyer about proving impotence for an annulment, and I use the same quote in this book from Thomas of Chobham’s twelfth-century law book that I found cited in Henrietta Leyser’s excellent
Medieval Women.
For though all women were disenfranchised in medieval times, they did have rights, including an expectation of intimacy and the chance to bear children once they were married. Jane’s annulment (the word
divorce
did not exist then) from William Shore was granted by three bishops in early 1476 and, very unusually, the cause was impotence. He did not contest it, probably because he knew he would have to prove it by what to us would be very primitive means: allowing several “wise” women to witness the wife try and arouse him and report their findings. I’m surprised more wives did not try it. It is possible he was bought off by the king, as I suggest, because William was given letters of protection from the king to enable him to start a business in Antwerp, where he remained as a merchant adventurer until his documented return to London in 1484. I am sure he was happier as an adventurer, which meant being celibate for the duration of one’s time abroad.

Although we know the date that Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, escaped sanctuary, we do not know his whereabouts for the next few weeks of that summer in 1483. He must have been with Jane at that time or she would not have been accused of “lying with him” in Richard’s proclamation. We know he was with his uncle, bishop of Salisbury, in Wiltshire at the time of Buckingham’s rebellion in October, and he did flee to join Henry Tudor in exile in Brittany and was attainted by Richard. But in an odd turn of events, he deserted Henry when he learned his mother, Elizabeth, had reconciled with Richard. On his way through France to return to his beloved parent, he was captured by the French and held for ransom until Henry repaid a loan from the French government. He was left behind during Henry’s invasion of 1485, Tudor having no use for the unstable Dorset, who could not make up his mind which side to support. Eventually, he returned to England but was never again allowed any influence at court. In 1487, when the loyal Yorkists rose in rebellion under a pretender, Lambert Simnel, Henry clapped Dorset in the Tower in case he changed sides again and joined the rebels. A few years later, during the Perkin Warbeck rebellion, he signed a pledge to the Tudor king that he would never again commit treason, and he died at age 45 in 1501, his wife, Cecily Bonvile, having given him fourteen children. One account of him says it all for me: Thomas Grey was a man of “mediocre abilities.” He certainly was not worthy of our Jane.

Jane’s belief in romantic love was a device to support my theme to show how humans can love in many different ways. Thomas was her first real romance, and I thought it useful to bring back the fashionable idea of courtly love from earlier centuries to better describe her infatuation with him. Knights and nobles would idealize a lady, meet her in secret, pass secret messages back and forth, and write her poems and songs. The lady was supposed to pretend to rebuff the advances, all the while leading the poor man on and occasionally deigning to let him kiss her. It was a courtly dance that
may have been born in Aquitaine in the twelfth century, and its rules were set down by Andreas Capellanus. The two rules I chose to have Jane remember were: “When love is made public, it rarely endures”; and “The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized.” Hence Jane is convinced Thomas is obeying the rules by suggesting they meet in secret, and that by not giving in to him, she makes herself more valuable.

I may be a writer, but I am not a poet, and thus I must confess to my paltry prose in the form of Jane’s little poems. They were often the hardest writing I tackled! Only the poem on pages 407-408 is borrowed from a popular ballad,
The Woeful Lamentation of Jane Shore,
from the Bagford Collection printed in the first part of the seventeenth century. Each stanza ends with the apt lines:

Then maids and wives in time amend

For love and beauty will have end.

Once again, as with the story of Perkin Warbeck in my third book,
The King’s Grace,
I am reminded of how much stranger fact is than fiction in Jane’s astonishing rise and fall. It is a tale that has resonated through the centuries in English literature, giving rise to many written works, from plays such as Shakespeare’s
Richard III
and Nicholas Rowe’s
The Tragedy of Jane Shore
(1714); ballads such as
A New Ballad of King Edward and Jane Shore
(1671) and the seventeenth-century verse
Woeful Lamentation of Jane Shore,
cited above; an
Epistle from Edward the Fourth to Jane Shore
by the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton; a long anonymous poem published in 1749 entitled “Jane Shore to the Duke of Gloster” (sic); and the poem used to punctuate the four parts of this book, “How Shore’s Wife, King Edward the Fourth’s concubine, was by description King Richard Despoyled of all her goods and forced to doe open Penance.”

These lines from Thomas More’s
Historie of King Richard III,
written around 1519, poignantly end my notes on Jane:

But it seemeth to me, she is so much more worthy to be remembered . . . as many other men were in their times, which be now famous only by the infamy of their ill-deeds. Her doings were not much less, albeit they be much less remembered because they were not so evil.

As well as those already cited in the Author’s Note, here are a few of the sources I used to write
Royal Mistress:

Richard III,
Paul Murray Kendall, Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1955.

Edward IV,
Charles Ross, Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1974.

Richard III,
Charles Ross, University of California Press, 1983.

Richard III and The Princes in the Tower,
A. J. Pollard, Sutton Publishing, 1991.

The Life and Reign of Edward IV, 2 vols.
, Cora L. Scofield, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1967.

The Wars of the Roses,
Desmond Seward
,
Penguin Books, 1993.

The Witchery of Jane Shore,
C. J. S. Thompson, Grayson & Grayson, 1933.

Medieval Women,
Henrietta Leyser, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995.

The Deceivers,
Geoffrey Richardson, Baildon Books, 1997.

The Great Chronicle of London,
ed. A. Thomas, Humanities Press Intl. Inc., 1983.

Medieval Costume and Fashion,
Herbert Norris, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927.

Food and Feast in Medieval England,
P. W. Hammond, Sutton Publishing, 1993.

Anne Easter Smith
Newburyport, Massachusetts
2013

arras
—tapestry or wall hanging.

attaint
—imputation of dishonor or treason; estates of an attainted lord are often forfeited to the Crown.

avise
—to look closely, study a person.

bailey—
outer wall of a castle.

basse danse—
slow stately dance.

butt
—barrel for wine.

butts—
archery targets.

caravel—
medieval sailing ship.

carol
—medieval circle dance.

caul
—mesh hair covering.

churching
—first communion given to a woman following the period of seclusion after giving birth.

curfew—
in large walled cities, all city gates were closed when the bell rang; taverns were shut and citizens returned to their houses or inns. Those discovered outside could be prosecuted.

coif
—scarf tied around the head.

conduit
—drinking fountain in a town or city with piped-in water.

coney
—rabbit or rabbit fur.

cote or cotehardie
—long gown worn by men and women.

crackows
—fashionable long-pointed shoes, said to have originated in Krakow, Poland.

escheator
—an officer who manages properties that have reverted to the Crown.

fermail
—ornamental buckle.

fox and geese
—medieval board game.

fustian
—cotton fabric.

garderobe
—inside privy where clothes were often stored.

groat
—silver coin worth about fourpence.

grosgrain
—ribbed worsted wool often mixed with silk.

gipon
—close-fitting padded tunic.

gong farmer
—man who removes waste from privies and carts it outside the city.

hennin
—tall conical headdress from which hangs a veil; steepled hennins were as much as two feet high; butterfly hennins sat on the head like wings with the veil draped over a wire frame.

jakes
—privy.

jennet
—saddle horse often used by women.

kermes
—red dye made from insect of same name.

kirtle
—woman’s gown or outer petticoat.

madder
—dark red-brown dye.

malmsey
—kind of wine.

midden
—refuse pile in a garden.

motte
—artificial mound on which to build the keep of a castle.

murrey
—heraldic term for purple-red (plum).

oyer and terminer
—commission to act as a circuit judge in the king’s name.

palfrey
—small saddle horse.

patten
—wooden platform strapped to the sole of a shoe.

pavane
—a slow stately dance.

pillion
—a pad placed at the back of a saddle for a second rider.

pipkin
—earthenware or metal pot.

plastron
—gauzy material tucked for modesty into the bodice of a gown.

plight-troth
—to be engaged or bound to someone, which, if witnessed, was tantamount to a marriage contract.

points
—lacing with silver tips used to attach hose to undershirt or gipon.

poppet
—a doll.

precontract
—see
plight-troth.

psaltery
—a stringed instrument like a dulcimer plucked with a feather.

puling
—whining, crying in a high, weak voice.

rebec
—a three-stringed instrument played with a bow.

rouncy
—a packhorse used by travelers or men-at-arms.

sanctuary
—place of protection for fugitives. Safe haven (perhaps in an abbey) usually for noble women and their children, who pay to stay.

sarcenet
—a fine, soft silk fabric.