‘LadyScroop Daughter of K. Edward’: an Enquiry.

PAULINE SHEPPARD ROUTH

IT IS NOT UNUSUAL for a monument to be mistakenly identified. Two of the six notable Harewood monuments were for many years wrongly attributed,l and the boy at Sheriff Hutton continues to be so by some.2 The usual reasons are misinterpretation of evidence becoming accepted as fact with the passage of time, or a local tradition perpetuated because unquestioned. Fortunately, through research, such anomalies are becoming fewer. But what of the identification of a monument which has not existed for nearly 300 years? On 31 July 1711 the medieval church of St. Alkmund, Whitchurch, in Shropshire, collapsed into ruin. Two effigies survived, one recorded as John Talbot, Rector of Whitchurch and founder of the Free School; the other, erected by Sir Gilbert Talbot, commemorating his famous grandsire, John first Earl of Shrewsbury, ‘great Talbot’. We are indebted to a seventeenth-century antiquary, Thomas Dingley, who in the course of his itineraries, visited Whitchurch, ‘...a wealthy market town and great thoroughfare’, and in the church recorded monuments, arms and inscriptions, accompanied in many cases by sketches which, if not beautiful, are useful.3 He did not alas, sketch the monument of which he left this intriguing account following that of the Shrewsbury monument: Opposite to this in ye midst of ye high chancel is seen a monument of white marble adom’d with sundry small figures it is of one Lady Scroop Daughter of K. Edward. she lyeth buried in a stone sepulchre.‘ This description points to a fifteenth or early sixteenth centurydate for the monument; ‘marble’ is often identifiable at that period with alabaster, the carving medium that had become increasingly popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.’ There is some ambiguity in that it is not explicit that there was an effigy upon the monument, though the presence of ‘sundry small figures’ — weepers — makes it likely. But if the whole monument was indeed, as Dingley seems to say, of alabaster, it is difficult to reconcile ‘she lyeth buried in a stone sepulchre’. He could perhaps have meant that the effigy was of the former material, and the tomb- chest of stone.6 The fact that the monument was in the middle of the chancel argues

410 the person commemorated to be of some importance. Dingley is categorical in saying ‘it is of one Lady Scroop’, but had there been an identifying inscription, following his usual practice, he would surely have transcribed it. The ascription therefore would appear to fall into the ‘tradition’ category, but no further evidence has surfaced to point the tradition’s origin, or indeed any later corroboration of it. It must therefore be considered whether this identification-could have any foundation in fact. Based on a fifteenth century dating, the King Edward referred to could only be Edward IV, and the marriages of his daughters are in the main, well documented: Elizabeth, destined to be the consort of Henry VII; Cecily, married to Henry’s uncle, J’ohn Viscount Welles, and after his death, to an unidentified gentleman named Kyme; Anne, married to Thomas How'ard, Earl of Surrey; Katharine the wife of William Courtney, Earl of Devon; the youngest daughter Bridget, destined to be the bride of Christ. But in the case of the Princess Cecily the story is incomplete. From an early age she had been a politidal pawn. In 1474, when she was five years old, her father had betrothed her by *proxy 'to James, the son and heir of James III of Scotland] but Edward ignored this arrangement when in 1482 he promised her to the brother of King James, Alexander, Duke of Albany, pretender to his brother’s throne,'who was already divorced from one wife and married to another. Fortunately for Cecily, this arrangement too, came to nothing. Edward died in 1483, and the following year Cecily and her sisters with their mother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, came out of sanctuary into the protection of their uncle, King Richard, who promised to find suitable husbands for them' as they became of mzirriageable age. It was also in 1484 that, after years of active hostility, the Scots sued for peace, and at a meeting of the plenipo‘tentiaries of King James with King Richard at Nottingham, a treaty was concluded, in which a marriage‘of the ‘prince of Scottis and one of the Kynges blood' was one of the conces‘sions.“ In the event ‘the Kynges blood’ was represented, not by the Princess Cecily; but by Anne de la Pole, another niece of the King, and the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk. 9 This marriage never took place; the contract was broken on Richard’s death,and Anne lived out her life 1n the nunnery of Syon. Possibly by this time the very young Cecily was already married, and possibly as much by her own choice as-her uncle’s — the bridegroom was no great catch for a princess of . Certainly sometime during Richard’s short' reign, and after her leaving sanctuary, she became the wife of a young man in Richard’s household,'Ralph Scrope, a younger brother of Thomas, sixth Lord Scropc of Masham and Upsall. When Thomas succeeded his father-in i'the barony in 1476 he ' was still a minor, and his widowed mother Elizabeth Lady Scrope (daughter of Ralph Lord Greystoke) made an agreement with Richard Duke of Gloucester, as he then was, to take the young Lord and his servants and tenants into his service, in return for which Richard contracted ‘to be good and louyng lord to the seid Elizabeth, Thomas her sone and all her seid serviauntes, tenauntes and inhabitantes."° Ralph, who in 1476 was a young boy, may have joined the Duke's household at that time, in which case Richard must have watched him grow to manhood. The accession of Henry VII in 1485 brought disruption into many lives, and Yorkists'upporters must have endeavoured to keep a low profile. On 6 December . was granted a ‘General pardon to Ralph Scrope, late of Upsall, co. York, Esq. alias

411 Ralph le Scrope, son of Thomas Lescrope, of Masham, Knt. alias Ralph Scrope, esq. late of the household of Richard III, late, in deed and not of right, King of England. ’“ His marriage to Cecily was destined for early dissolution. In the following year, for whatever reason, the case of the noble lady Cecily Plantagenet against Radulphus Scrope of Upsall came before the Consistory Court at York, and the union was annulled. '2 Cecily, once more a pawn, was thus free to be given in marriage at the King’ s pleasure. Ralph eventually married Eleanor, daughter of Andrew Lord Windsor, and was granted another general pardon on' the accession of Henry. VIII." The barony of Scrope of Masham and Upsall was fated to rapid decline. It passed from the eldest brother Thomas, to his only child, a daughter, Alice, but thereafter reverted to her uncle, the second brother, Henry. He dying without progeny, Ralph, the third brother succeeded, and it was as the Lord Scrope of Upsall that he was knighted at the battle of Floddén Field m 1513. " He died childless two years later, and stipulated burial before Our Lady of Pity' 1n Rievaulx Abbey. '5 The barony then devolved on the fourth and youngest brother, Geoffrey, also childless, on whose death as the ninth Lord, it fell into abeyance between his three sisters. . The King, himself now married to the Princess Elizabeth, Cecily’s elder sister, planned to marry the latter to his kinsman, John Viscount Welles, the younger son of Lionel sixth Baron Welles by his second wife, Margaret Beauchamp. King Henry's mother Margaret, Countess-of Richmond, was the daughter of the Viscount’s mother by an earlier marriage to John Beaufort, first Duke of . The Welles family was ardently Lancastrian: Lionel died fighting for Henry VI at Towton, and his elder son Richard, and his grandson Robert, were both beheaded in 1470, supporting the Warwick/Clarence insurrection. John Welles should have succeeded to the barony of Welles on the death of Robert’ 5sister Joan, circa 1474, but attainders obtaining at that time prevented it, and it was as plain ‘John Welles of Maxey, co. Northampton’, that he was granted a general pardon in 1478.'6 He joined the Duke of Buckingham in his unsuccessful rebellion against Richard III in 1483, and was himself attainted,” but escaped physical retribution by fleeing to Brittany, returning to England in 1485 in the train of Henry Tudor, who knighted him on their arrival at Milford-Haven.l8 The attainders of himself and his family were reversed at the end of 1485, and the Welles lands restored to him. The new King created him Viscount Welles, and later, a knight of the Garter. Not long after the coronation of Henry’s Queen in 1487, the hand of her sister, Cecily, was bestowed upon him. Clements Markham’s description of him in this context, as Henry’s ‘old uncle Lord Welles’” is somewhat misleading: he cannothave been ‘ more than forty, and was probably. less.20 Even so, he was,o]d enough to be-his bride’s father, Cecily beingonly eighteen. It is said that there were two daughters of the marriage, but neither survived infancy,2l and after eleven years the death of Viscount Welles in 1499, according to the Complete Peerage ‘aged about 50’, left Cecily a widow. Her husband was buried in Westminster Abbey.22 Even if the marriage was in the firstjnstance one of ‘arrangement’, it would seem that Lord Welles felt a very real affection for Cecily. In his will he leaves all to her, twice calling her ‘my dere beloved lady and wife’ , and once, ‘my dere beloved wife’ .3 Cecily at this date,was still a young woman, and some little time-later, was married for the third time to one Thomas Kyme, a gentleman probably of the

412 Lincolnshire family of that name. They are said to have lived in the Isle of Wight, and that Cecily, who died 24 August 1507 aged thirty-eight“ was buried there at Quart Abbey}s W.H.Hamilton Rogers, under an engraving of the Abbey ruins, quotes from the eighteenth century antiquary, Sir Richard Worsley, a native of the Isle of Wight: ThevChapel also contained a monument to the Lady Cicely (sic) second daughter of King Edward IV .1“ This seems to rule out once and for all any likelihood of Whitchurch as a place of sepulture for Princess Cecily, and indeed there 1s neither reason nor evidence even to associate her with the place. Discounting then, the designation ‘daughter of K. Edward’ as a mistaken assumption, the question of what gave rise -to Dingley’s assertion that ‘Lady Scroop’ was represented on the monument,'impels further enquiry as to whether a Scrope/Whitchurch connection can be established, and if so, whether any firm conclusion can be reached. Sir Gilbert Talbot, mentioned earlier, 2’ and alleged to have brought from France the remains of his grandfather, killed at Castillon 1n 1453, to lie under a monument in the chancel at Whitchurch, married the lady also mentioned earlier" as the mother of Ralph Scrope, Elizabeth Greystoke, the widow of Thomas fifth Baron Scrope of Masham. This could be said to have been a union of differing loyalties, the Scropes supporting the House of York, the Talbots that of Lancaster. Sir Gilbert and his men joined the invading army of Henry Tudor and fought at Bosworth, where he received the accolade at the hands of the new king.” High in Henry's favour, among the rewards given to Sir Gilbert in the years that followed, were the estates of the attainted Humphrey Stafford, which included the manor of Grafton. He was also made a knight of the Garter. Elizabeth Scrope/Talbot, who had had four sons and three daughters by Thomas Scrope and two sons by Gilbert Talbot, died m 1490. Sir Gilbert married again, and fathered further progeny, dying in 1517. Leland tells us that he was buried at Whitchurch near his illustrious ancestor;’° it is strange' that Dingley mentions no monument or inscription recording the fact. It might be thought logical that his first wife Elizabeth would be buried there also, though admitted, she had died twenty-seven years before her husband. Thus the ‘_Lady Scroop’ tradition might have been shewn to have some foundation in fact. Elizabeth does have a monument that could be thought to fit Dingley’s description, but it is at in , not at Whitchurch. Grafton manor, seat of the Staffords of Grafton, which Sir Gilbert had acquired in 1486, lies very near Bromsgrove, and the church there houses two fine monuments relevant to the families involved, as well as that of Elizabeth Scrape/Talbot. The earlier is the table-tomb bearing the alabaster effigies of the Sir Humphrey Stafford killed opposing the Jack Cade rebellion in 1450, and his wife Alianora. Of a later date, 1550, is the impressive monument, also in alabaster, of Sir John Talbot of Albrighton and Grafton; son of Sir Gilbert and his second wife, Etheldreda.’I The efflgies of Sir John’s two wives, Margaret Troutbeck and Elizabeth Wrottesley, lie on either side of the knight’s. Because of its inscriptién, this monument achieved some prominence when the title of the eighteenth Earl of Shrewsbury was being established in the nineteenth century.32 The alabaster monument of Elizabeth Greystoke/Scropel'l‘albot lies against the

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Efligy ()fElizabelh, wife ofSir Gilbert Talbot ofGrafmn, died 1490. wall on the north side of the chancel. The tomb- chest has moulded niches with semi-circular cusped tops, and standing on a pedestal within each niche, a clerical figure wearing an alb and holding a shield. The effigy, 1n spite_ of mutilation, is a graceful one. She wears a sideless surcoat under a long mantle, and her head, which rests on tasselled cushions, is encircled by a decorative orle over. freely flowing hair. The attendant angels have lost their heads, and the lady her arms. It would be tempting to hypothesise that this monument was Dingley’s ‘Lady Scroop’ rescued after the collapse of the church at Whitchurch in 1711, and moved to Bromsgrove. Unfortunately this cannot be so. The antiquary Thomas Habington (1-560 1647) describes it in situ in Bromsgrove church thus: 3’ On the northe syde of the Chauncell lyethe on a fayre raysed tombe the portrature of a Lady with her mantel] lyned with ermyn to the foote on which she bearethe Barry Argent and Asure, three Garlandcs Gules, . shewing shee was Elizabeth daughter of Rafe Baron Greystock First wife of Sir Gilbert Talbot, knight of the Garter, Captayne of Calleys and Counsellor of State to Kingc Henry the Seaunth (sic) the secound some of John Earle of Shrewsbury and fyrst of that name who dwealt at Grafton. At the heade of thys Lady weare towe Angells and at her feete towe lyttell dogges. A drawing of the effigy appears in Cotton’ s history of Bromsgrove Church' m 1881, 3‘ and the description there includes the information that the headdress and the neck were originally ornamented with precious stones —"the jewels have long since vanished, but the holes into which they were fastened are plainly to be seen. "5 In 1781 the historian of Worcestershire, Dr Nash D ..,D tells us that the hair was ‘braided with pearls’, and adds that the monument was very much defaced. 3‘ He goes on to locate Sir John Talbot’s monument ‘somewhat higher on the right hand’— that is, across the chancel, ’7 as Habington also had done. 3“The Stafford tomb was in the middle of the chancel. 3’ A hundred years later, Cotton describes the Stafford monument as being at the east end of the nonh aisle,“ and that of Sir John Talbot as next to it. 4' These are. the positions they occupy today. This raises a further possibility with regard to Dingley’s ‘Lady Scroop’ —that the_ monument at Whitchurch did not exist at all; that Dingley was describing the Bromsgrove lady —-Lady Scroop opposite a Talbot - and that the mistake had occurred in transcribing his notes. Unfortunately Bromsgrove is not mentioned in History from Marble, but the manuscript, which is reproduced in facsimile, has so many gaps in its pagination, that it is not impossible that an account of Bromsgrove is missing from it. On the evidence we have, this seems, if not conclusive, at least the most-likely solution to the enigma of Dingley's “Lady Scroop’.

NOTES AND REFERENCES l. P. Routh and R. Knowles, The Medieval Monument: of Harewaod, Wakefield 1983, pp. 36-39, 49. 2. P. Roulh and R. Knowles, The Shenfi’Huuan Alabaster, a Re--assessmem, Wakefield 198]. .3. T. Dmgley, History from Marble,2vols Camden Society 1867-8 vol. 2 pp. 363- 368. 4. Ibid., p. 364. 5. Two Hmarblers as well as several ‘alabasterers’ are listed m the York Freemen’ 5 Rolls in the fifteenth

415 century. and John Leland writes of ‘many marblers working in alabaster' at Bunon on Trent in the first half of the sixteenth, J. Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland in about the Years 1535-1543. ed.. L.T. Smith, 5 vols., London 1907, vol. 5, p. 19. 6. The combination is not unusual. The Grey monument at Chillingham in Nonhumberland, the Mirfield monument at Batley in and the two'Neville monuments in Durham Cathedral, are cases in point. 7. John fifth Baron Scrope of Bolton stood proxy for Cecily a! this ceremony; Complete Peerage. vol. 11, p. 544. J. Gairdner, ed., Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, Rolls Series. London 1863, vol .1. . Rymer,Faedera, vol. [2, pp. 235,244. . L.C.Am'eed, An lndenture between Richard, Duke of Gloucester and the Scrape family of Masham and Upsall. Speculum, vol. 58 (1983). p. 1025. . W. Campbell, ed., Materials for a History of the Reign of Henry VI], 2 vols., Rolls Series. London 1873, 1877 . vol. 1., p. 200. Also recorded in Calendar of Patent Rolls 1485-1494, p. 54. . Bonhwick Institute of Historical Research. York. Consistory Act Book 1484 — 1489. CONS.AB. 4. ff.88r, 89r. 90r. The cause papers in the case have not survived. I acknowledge with thanks. correspondence with Dr Rosemary Horrox of Cambridge, Dr PJ.P. Goldberg of the University of York, and Dr D.M.Smith, Director of the Bonhwick Institute. . Calendar of Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 207. . W.A.Shaw, The Knights of England, 2 vols., London 1906, vol. 2, p. 37. . Testamenta Ebaracensia, vol. 5. Sunees Society vol. 79 (1884). p. 63. . CPR 1476-1485, p.92. . Rolls of Parliament, vol. 6, pp. 246-247. . Shaw, vol. 2, p.22. . . Sir C.R.Markham. Richard III: his Life and Character, London 1906, p. 27] . . His parents were married in 1447. CPR 1446-1452, p.44. . F.5andford, Genealogical History of the Kings of England, London 1677, p.418; N.H.Nicolas, Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York. London 1830. p.xxi. . Complete Peerage, vol. 12, pt. 2, p.449. . North Country Wills, Sunees Socie‘y, vol. ”6 (1908), p.68. . Calendar of Inquisition: Post Mortem, Henry VII, vol. 3. no. 447. . Complete Peerage, vol. 12, pt.2, p.450. . W.H.Hamilton Rodgers, The Ann'em Sepulchral Efiigies and Monumental and Memorial Sculpture of Devon. Exeter [877, p.394. . See above. . See above. _ . J.Gairdner, Hismry of the Life and Reign of Richard III, London 1898, p.364. quoting Harl. Ms 78, £31. . LLeland. Itinerary, vol.4 (pt .7) 9.2; vol.5 (pt.9) p.3. . For an account of this lady, see K.G.Bradberry, The World of Etheldreda Gardener. The Ricardian vol. 9 (l99l),pp.l46-153. . W.A.Cotton, Bromgrove Church: its History and Antiquities, London and Bmmsgrove 1881. p.75. . T.Habington. A Survey of Worcestershire, ed., 1 . Amphlett, 2 vols.. Worcs. Hist. Soc., Oxford 1895, 1893- 9. vol. 1, pp. 89-90. . .Cotton. plate 7, fig. 3. . lbid.. pp. 75,76. . T.Nash. Collections for the History of Worcestershire, 2 vols.. London 1781, vol. 1, p.16l. . Ibid., p.163. . Habinglon, vol. 1, p.90. . Nash,vol. 1,p.l63. . Collon.p.6l. . lbid.. p.71.

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