Lord Stanley – A Man for All Allegiances

One of the most difficult choices that any 15^th century English nobleman had to make was where his loyalties lay.  In theory it should be a simple matter of pledging his loyalty to the King, but in the troubled times of the War of the Roses the political terrain was a great deal more complicated, and there were tangled family ties and loyalties to consider as well as a duty to crown and country.  In this conflict some men would lose their lives for their loyalty, some would be executed for their disloyalty, but there was one nobleman who managed with great dexterity to play on both sides at once and keep his head very firmly on his shoulders.  This politically adroit baron was Thomas Stanley, 1^st Earl of Derby, who throughout his long career would seamlessly slip between support for the Lancastrian cause and the Yorkist cause, and then found that he could just as happily embrace the new Tudor monarchy, just so long as he was well rewarded and retained his titles, estates and fortune.

Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby

He was born in 1435 and was the eldest son and heir of Thomas Stanley, 1^st Baron Stanley and his wife Joan Goushill.  Through his mother he was related to the royal family, as she was a descendant of the great warrior King Edward I.  The Stanley family wielded great influence in the North West of England and during his life Lord Stanley would own great estates, such as Lathom House and Tatton Park, in Cheshire and Lancashire.  He was introduced to public life at the royal court early and in his youth he acted as one of King Henry VI’s squires.  He seemed at this stage of his career to be a loyal and staunch follower of the King, but the political scene in England was just about to get a whole lot more complicated and Stanley was to produce a master class in how to navigate your way successfully through tricky, dangerous situations with your skin in one piece and adding to your power and possessions along the way. In 1457 he married Eleanor Neville who was the daughter of the powerful baron Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury.  Her brother was Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and at this time the Neville family were strongly promoting the cause of the Duke of York.

In 1459 Stanley’s father died and he inherited his titles and great estates, including the title of King of Mann.  He was now a very important and influential baron, and one that England’s monarch needed to keep on side if at all possible. King Henry had been in Yorkist hands since the first Battle of St Albans in 1455, but the discontent between the two factions rumbled on and came to a head in 1459, when Richard of Salisbury put his forces into the field of battle against the King’s men at the Battle of Blore Heath.  Henry VI’s French wife, Queen Margaret of Anjou, was the real power behind the throne, as her royal husband was a feeble and ineffectual monarch, and had at one time slipped into a catatonic state that lasted many months. In the male dominated, warrior climate of the late Middle Ages, the barons respected power, leadership and skills in battle, and as far as many of them were concerned a simpleton like Henry, whose only interest seemed to be religion, just did not cut the mustard, and his closest supporter were thought by the Yorkist faction to be corrupt and avaricious.

Margaret of Anjou wanted her husband back as he was an important part of her power base, and gave orders that Stanley was to raise an army to stop Salisbury, who was marching through the Midlands, from linking up with the main Yorkist forces in Ludlow. But although he had 2,000 men-at-arms at his disposal, he chose to sit the battle out.  His brother, Sir William Stanley, threw his hat into the ring and fought on the side of the Yorkists and got attainted for his troubles.  That Lord Stanley was secretly supporting the Duke of York and his faction, is borne out by allegations that he had managed to prevent a number of Cheshire levies from fighting on the Lancastrian side and had also managed to covertly help the Yorkists.  Blore Heath was a savagely fought and bloody battle that was won by Salisbury and cost the life of the Lancastrian battler commander Lord Audley.  However, just to make sure that he was covered on both sides, after the battle Lord Stanley sent his congratulations on the victory to the Earl of Salisbury and wrote to the Queen to offer his apologies and excuses for why he had not seen fit to commit his men to the battle. Margaret of Anjou cannot have been too convinced or impressed by his explanations, but nevertheless when Parliament petitioned for his attainder later that year they were not successful; in the fluctuations of the Wars of the Roses she needed all the friends and support that she could get, even those as unreliable as the slippery Lord Stanley.

Lord Stanley joined the Yorkist Council soon after the Battle of Blore Heath, when Richard, Duke of York dropped his bomb shell that he wanted to claim the crown of England himself, rather than just be the most influential baron guiding Henry VI’s royal career. This naturally did not go down well with Margaret of Anjou, who wanted the English throne for her young son Edward of Lancaster. She managed to eliminate her nemesis the Duke of York and his key supporter the Earl of Salisbury at the Battle of Wakefield in December 1460, and had their heads put on public show on the Micklegate Bar in York, along with those of York’s son Edmund, Earl of Rutland and Richard Hanson. The Queen’s forces defeated the Earl of Warwick at the second Battle of St Albans early in 1461 and regained possession of the King, but were then decisively defeated in March of the same year by an army led by Edward Earl of March, the Duke of York’s eldest son.  Edward had himself crowned as King Edward IV and Margaret, having once more lost possession of her husband, fled to France via Wales and Scotland. Lord Stanley had demonstrated his usual survival skills and had not fought at either Wakefield or Towton, though he had aided the Earl of Warwick in besieging some northern castles that held for Lancaster.  The Earl of Warwick was now one of the most powerful men in England, as well as being Stanley’s brother-in-law and it seemed that at this time the two powerful barons enjoyed cordial relations.  However, as history was to show, family loyalty would not be enough to ensure Stanley’s support, as this was a man who always liked to come out on the winning side.

The honeymoon period for the new Yorkist monarch was not destined to last for very long, as fractures in the relationship between Edward IV and Warwick soon began to show.  Warwick was known as the ‘Kingmaker’ and expected to be well rewarded by the new monarch as well as to be the key influence on royal policy. But although he was young, and grateful for Warwick’s aid in putting him on the throne, Edward IV had a mind of his own and liked to make his own choices.  While Warwick was trying to secure a diplomatically useful match for him with a French princess, Edward was dallying with a Lancastrian widow behind his back.  He married this widow, Elizabeth Woodville, in secret and when Warwick found out he was furious.  Further salt was rubbed in his wounds when Edward IV started arranging very favourable matches for her very large family, some of which were detrimental to Warwick’s own family. Lord Stanley was married to Warwick’s sister Eleanor Neville, but when Warwick, aided and abetted by Edward IV’s own brother the Duke of Clarence, rebelled in March 1470, Lord Stanley did not step in to help him. Stanley then did an about turn when Warwick, having fled to France and allied himself with Margaret of Anjou, returned in 1471 to England to place the hapless Henry VI once more on the throne. To all outward appearances it seemed as though Lord Stanley had thrown his lot in with the Lancastrian cause, but as usual looks were deceiving.  His brother William hastened to Edward IV’s side when he landed at Ravenspur to reclaim his throne, but as usual big brother Thomas hung back and took no part in the Battle of Tewkesbury which saw Margaret’s forces decisively defeated and the young Edward of Lancaster killed.

The newly restored King Edward IV decided to give the powerful magnate the benefit of the doubt, and rewarded Stanley’s non-participation in the conflict by appointing him steward of the king’s household and inviting him to sit on the royal council.  Very conveniently for him, his ties to the dead and discredited Earl of Warwick were severed when his Neville wife Eleanor died in 1472.  He promptly married Margaret Beaufort, the dowager Countess of Richmond.  This was not an obvious match for a supposedly fervent supporter of the Yorkist monarchy, as her son Henry Tudor was the last surviving Lancastrian claimant to the throne and was living in exile in Brittany. However, throughout Edward IV’s reign he played the part of a loyal subject, accompanying his King to France on campaign in 1475 and being awarded a pension by the French king Louis XI at the treaty of Picquiny, and he also fought in Scotland with the king’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester in 1482, and helped him capture the key town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

It was the unexpected death of Edward IV in 1483 that once more upset the political apple cart. The King’s heir was his eldest son, who became Edward V.  His uncle, Richard of Gloucester, had been appointed Lord Protector and arranged to meet the delegation, including several of the new king’s Woodville relatives, who were accompanying Edward V to London at Stony Stratford. A fracas broke out, and the Duke of Gloucester secured possession of the new monarch and took him to reside in the Tower of London.  This was not the odd choice that it may seem, as the old Norman fortress was where monarchs traditionally lived in the days before their coronation.  Elizabeth Woodville had fled into sanctuary at Westminster with the rest of her family, and there were repeated rumours of plots and conspiracies.  One of these erupted in June 1483 when Richard stormed a royal council meeting being held at the Tower and arrested several of the noblemen in attendance.  Lord Stanley was injured in the ensuing scuffle and briefly imprisoned, but Lord Hastings was condemned on the spot and summarily beheaded.

Richard seized the throne for himself and was crowned King Richard III. Lord Stanley had obviously been fully forgiven, although maybe not entirely trusted as his eldest son Lord Strange was married to a niece of Elizabeth Woodville, as he was allowed to carry the mace at Richard’s coronation and his wife, Margaret Beaufort, carried Queen Anne’s train.  He was also allowed to carry on in his role as the steward of the king’s household and joined the Order of the Garter, taking over the executed Lord Hasting’s vacant stall.  This was an age which did not allow for sentiment, and Lord Stanley was not a nobleman who would have worried overly much about sitting in a dead friend’s chair.  His survival skills were once more called upon late in 1483, when King Richard’s closest advisor, the Duke of Buckingham rebelled.  Despite the fact that his own wife, Margaret Beaufort, and her crony Morton were deeply implicated in the plot as they were brokering a marriage between Elizabeth of York and Henry Tudor, Stanley and his brother William helped the King suppress the rebellion.  The Duke of Buckingham lost his head, Margaret Beaufort was formally placed in her husband’s custody to keep her out of trouble, Morton had to make himself scarce and once more Lord Stanley was lavishly rewarded with estates forfeited by the rebels and Buckingham’s position of High Constable of England.  It was perhaps the biggest mistake that Richard III ever made that he did not execute Margaret Beaufort and put an end to her intrigues and plotting on behalf of her son Henry Tudor, but although retribution for men was often swift and savage during the Wars of the Roses, executing nobly born women would not become the rage until Tudor times.

Richard III endured the death of his only son and heir and then his wife Anne Neville during his short reign, and then in 1485 he had to face an invasion by the forces of Henry Tudor. Lord Stanley asked permission to leave court at this time, but Richard evidently did not trust him as he made him leave his oldest son Lord Strange in custody as a pledge for his continued good behaviour.  Both he and his brother William were, however, in contact with Henry Tudor when he landed in Wales and without Sir William’s lack of intervention his forces would never have been able to progress into England as they did.  Both the Stanley brothers were ordered by King Richard to raise an army to support him, and when the King discovered that Sir William had effectively cleared the path for Henry Tudor, he ordered his older brother to join him immediately.  Lord Stanley suddenly discovered that he was too unwell to answer his King’s summons and when his son, Lord Strange,  was caught trying to escape from Richard’s clutches, he admitted that both he and Sir William had been plotting with Henry Tudor. It has been said that Richard III gave orders that Lord Strange be executed during the Battle of Bosworth, to which Stanley’s response was reputedly ‘Sire, I have other sons’.  Fortunately for Lord Strange, the orders were never carried out.

So there were four armies headed towards Bosworth on that fateful day in August 1485, Richard III’s, Henry Tudor’s, Sir William Stanley’s and Lord Stanley’s. Take a guess as to whose army once again didn’t take an active part in the battle? As had happened several times before, Lord Stanley kept his fighting men out of the proceedings, although it is thought that he may have met with Henry Tudor on the eve of the battle. Sir William was once again a little bolder and intervened in the fighting and helped win the day for Henry Tudor. King Richard III was slain in the fighting, and Lord Stanley, despite his earlier absence, was conveniently on hand to pick up Richard’s fallen crown and place it on the head of the new king, Henry VII.  In a move that perhaps signalled the future ruthless nature of the new Tudor dynasty, Henry VII conveniently dated the start of his new reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, declaring all those who had fought against him traitors. So Lord Stanley’s stepson was the new King of England and as usual he reaped the rewards, becoming Earl of Derby in October 1485 and in the following year he was confirmed as the High Constable of England and appointed High Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster.  When Henry VII’s first son was born in 1486, he was chosen as godfather for the infant Prince Arthur, and it looked as though from that point on life would be relatively plain sailing for the all powerful baron.

However, the Yorkists had not quite yet run out of steam and in 1487 a rebellion was raised in support of a pretender called Lambert Simnel, who was supposedly Richard, Duke of York, one of the Princes in the Tower.  Henry Tudor must have been quite relieved when Lord Stanley did actively participate in putting this rebellion down, and did not stand aside hedging his bets as usual.  After the Battle of Stoke, he once again reaped great rewards for his assistance and was given lands forfeited by the rebels, which included the estates of Francis Viscount Lovell, Sir Thomas Broughton and Sir Thomas Pilkington. He once again in 1489 helped the Tudor monarch to suppress a rebellion in Yorkshire, but his brother Sir William Stanley eventually slipped up by backing the wrong side when he fought for the pretender Perkin Warbeck and was executed for his treason.

Lord Stanley died at his estate of Lathom House in Lancashire on 20^th July 1504, and was buried among his ancestors in the family chapel of Burscough Priory.  His eldest son Lord Strange had already died, so he was succeeded by his grandson Thomas, who became the 2^nd Earl of Derby.  For a nobleman who had played such a prominent political role throughout the Wars of the Roses, he was very fortunate to have died naturally at home, instead of on a battlefield or on the scaffold.  It had taken great skill to not only have stayed alive, but to have enriched himself and his family in the process, even though no monarch, however powerful, could ever completely rely on his loyalty or support.  Expediency was his watchword and Lord Stanley’s allegiances would shift in the winds of change, always ready to altered and adjusted if the situation demanded it.

Thomas Stanley image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Ancient Egyptian Queens – The Mystery of Kiya

Canopic Jar of Kiya - Metropolitan Museum of Art

Have you heard of an Egyptian queen called Kiya? Many of us know the names and a little bit about the lives of the most famous of the ancient Egyptian queens, such as Cleopatra, Hatshepsut and the beautiful Nefertiti, but how much do we know about the scores of other women who once wore the crown of Egypt?  An Egyptian pharaoh could have more than one wife, and he would usually have one senior queen who was called his ‘Great Royal Wife’, as well as several secondary wives and ladies of the harem, or ‘royal ornaments’. In order to consolidate his claim to the throne and carry on the royal blood line, a pharaoh would usually marry a royal princess who was quite often also his sister or half-sister.  

There are also instances where a pharaoh married his own daughters, but whether these were merely political unions undertaken for reasons of State or real marriages is still open to debate. Also, sometimes foreign princesses were sent to Egypt as a wife for pharaoh, in order to cement alliances and strengthen international relations. We do not even know the names of many of these shadowy women who lived out their lives within the walls of pharaoh’s palaces, but sometimes history does reveal fragmentary details and scraps of evidence that give us some tantalising hints and a glimpse into the life of one of these more obscure Egyptian queens, such as the mysterious Kiya who was a secondary wife of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten.

Akhenaten was a pharaoh who reigned towards the end of the 18^th dynasty during Egypt’s New Kingdom.  He is infamous for breaking away from the traditional Egyptian gods and promoting a new religion that contained only one deity, the Aten or the sun disc.  Akhenaten tried to erase all traces of the old religion, shutting the temples, getting rid of the priests and erasing inscriptions and images of the gods.  Initially he built new temples dedicated to the Aten in traditional centres like Thebes, but after ruling for several years he uprooted the whole administration of Egypt and relocated to a new city he had built on the banks of the Nile.  

He called this new city Akhetaten or ‘Horizon of the Aten’, now known as Amarna. This new capital city was lavishly decorated with images of Akhenaten, his Great Royal Wife Nefertiti and their growing family of six daughters worshipping the Aten and also with many relaxed, informal scenes of daily life within the royal family.  These depictions of the royal couple being affectionate with each other and the young princesses were rendered in a completely new, natural manner that had never been seen in Egypt before, as all art had previously been very formal and based on tradition.

However, although Amarna had been explored and excavated by many Egyptologists the existence of another important wife of Akhenaten was not even suspected until around 1959 when William C Hayes made note of an inscription on a small cosmetic container housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that gave the name and titles of a royal favourite called Kiya.  It is believed that it had been purchased from Howard Carter, the famous discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun, about thirty years before then, but it had no provenance so it could not be verified where it had been discovered.  The short inscription reads:

               

‘The wife and greatly beloved of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Living in Truth, Lord of the Two Lands, Neferkheperure Waenre, the Goodly Child of the Living Aten, who shall be living forever and ever Kiya’.

She was also often referred to as ‘the Favourite’ and these were the titles that, with some minor variations, would always be used on monuments and artefacts dedicated to Kiya, and they seem to show that she had not been born an Egyptian princess or a member of the royal family. She was never referred to as ‘Heiress’, ‘King’s Daughter’ or ‘Great Royal Wife’ on monuments which she would have been if she had had royal blood. In addition, her name was also never written enclosed in a cartouche and she was never depicted wearing a royal uraeus. 

So if Kiya was not royal then who was she and where did she come from?  Kiya is not a common Egyptian name which has led to some Egyptologists speculating that she may have been a foreign princess sent to live at the court of Akhenaten as one of his minor wives.  In 1887 some 300 baked clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform were discovered by a peasant woman at Amarna, who had been digging for ‘sebakh’ or ancient, decayed mud brick to use as fertiliser.  These proved to be the diplomatic archives of Akhenaten’s administration, written mainly in Akkadian, and were the correspondence between Egypt and foreign courts.  

Some of this correspondence related to a daughter of King Tushratta of Mittani, who had been sent as a wife to Pharaoh Amenophis III during the latter part of his reign and on his death was inherited by his son Akhenaten.  This Mittanian princess was called Tadukhipa, and it has been suggested that Kiya was a shortened version of this foreign name.  However, this remains just a theory as there is no hard archaeological evidence that links these two royal ladies.

Talatat - Kiya and her Daughter

Kiya may well have been an Egyptian and Cyril Aldred in his book ‘Akhenaten’ suggests that her name could have been derived from the Egyptian word for a monkey ‘Ky’. In fact, the only archaeological evidence of Kiya’s life comes from Amarna during the middle years of Akhenaten’s reign, and from some articles of usurped funerary equipment found in the mysterious tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings.  

These funerary articles from KV55 included a badly damaged, but elaborately decorated gilded coffin in the ‘rishi’ or feathered style that had originally been inscribed for an Amarnan royal woman and also an exquisite set of alabaster canopic jars carved with the head of a beautiful Egyptian woman wearing a Nubian style wig that was very fashionable during the latter years of Akhenaten’s reign.  The inscriptions on the canopic jars had also been altered, but there is enough evidence to show that they had originally been inscribed for Kiya and had been made for her for use in her own tomb.

Her name has also been discovered on several carved blocks from Amarna, and there are also a few vases and pieces of kohl-tubes that bear her inscriptions.  Aside from the carved faces on the canopic jars, it is also thought that some of the sculptor’s studies found in the remains of the house of the sculptor Thutmose when it was excavated at Amarna bear Kiya’s likeness.  However, the existing evidence also points to Kiya having mysteriously disappeared from the royal court a few years before the death of Akhenaten.  

A wine docket from one of Kiya’s estates has been found that is inscribed with Year 11 of Akhenaten’s reign, but there is no other evidence of her after this date.  It is not known what happened to Kiya; whether she died naturally or whether a darker fate overtook this beautiful queen.  There have been several theories put forward as to what could have happened to Kiya, and there is some evidence that she could have fallen into disgrace, which might have led to her being sent from the Court or even killed.  Was Akhenaten’s Great Royal Wife Nefertiti jealous of the love and attention that her husband showered on Kiya, and so plotted to get rid of her beautiful rival?

One location at Amarna where Kiya’s name and titles had been prominent was at the temple known as the Maru-Aten that once stood in the southern part of Akhenaten’s glittering new city.  However, in the last years of the heretic pharaoh’s reign her inscriptions and images were usurped and re-carved with the names and titles of the Princess Meritaten, who was the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.  Elsewhere in the city, a small ‘sunshade’ temple at the Per-Aten the largest temple in the city that had been dedicated to Kiya was re-inscribed for Meritaten and her younger sister Ankhesenpaaten.

Some Egyptologists believe that Kiya may have died in childbirth.  She had been shown in one carved image with a daughter, and there is also a decorated wall in the royal tomb at Amarna depicting the death of an Amarnan royal woman, where there is a nurse shown carrying away a newly born infant, that indicates that she may have died giving birth.  We do not know the name of this infant princess, but some experts think that Kiya’s daughter might have been Princess Baketaten even though this little known royal child is usually thought of as a daughter of Amenophis III and Queen Tiye.  

Kiya was also once thought to have been the mother of the boy king Tutankhamun and her ability to produce a son and heir was thought to be one of the possible triggers for Nefertiti’s jealousy and fury, as she had only produced six daughters. However, in recent years Dr Zahi Hawass and Carsten Pusch have undertaken genetic studies on the Egyptian royal mummies.  These studies have shown that Tutankhamun’s natural mother was someone only known as the ‘Younger Lady’, as her unidentified mummy was found in the cache of royal mummies discovered in KV35, the tomb of Amenophis II in the Valley of the Kings.  

However, the DNA evidence also showed that the ‘Younger Lady’ was a daughter of Amenophis III and Queen Tiye and therefore a sister of Akhenaten.  This would tend to eliminate the possibility of Kiya being the mother of Tutankhamun, as she is never referred to in inscriptions as being a ‘King’s Daughter’ or a ‘King’s Sister’.  However, there is also no archaeological evidence that has yet come to light to show that Akhenaten ever married one of his sisters, so the sands of Egypt still has many secrets to reveal from the Amarna period.  The ‘Younger Lady’ could potentially be Sitamen, Henuttaneb, Isis or Nebetah or a royal daughter of Amenophis III and Tiye that is still unknown to history.

Valley of the Kings

So if the mummy of the ‘Younger Lady’ is not that of Kiya, then where was she buried and where is her mummy now?  There is some evidence that she was initially buried in the royal tomb at Amarna, and while it was thought that she was Tutankhamun’s mother there was a theory that after he moved the royal court back to Thebes that he brought his mother’s mummy and funerary equipment back to the Valley of the Kings for a secret burial close to his own tomb.  Before it was proved that the newly discovered tomb KV63 was a cache used for storing the linen and equipment used during mummification, Dr Zahi Hawass stated in a press release that it was his belief that KV63 was the tomb of Kiya, as it is situated just across from Tutankhamun’s tomb, KV62, in the Valley of the Kings.  

However, there were no artefacts or inscriptions found in KV63 to link the tomb to Kiya, and her final resting place still remains a mystery.  As her usurped coffin and canopic jars were found in KV55, having being used for another burial, does this mean that her mummy was destroyed in antiquity?  If it was, this would support the theory that she had been disgraced at some stage, and that her superb funerary equipment was taken and reused as an act of revenge.

So will we ever unravel the mystery of Kiya?  Hopefully, future excavations in Egypt will bring more evidence to light that gives us further information about this fascinating period of history.  There is still so much to learn, and maybe one day the tomb and mummy of Kiya will be discovered and her secrets revealed.

The Cathars and the Start of the Inquisition

For many of us the Inquisition brings up frightening images of black robed men questioning terrified prisoners, torturing them and then having them burned at the stake. Most of us also associate the Inquisition with the Spanish Inquisition in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, which was set up to guarantee the orthodoxy of people who had converted to Catholicism from Islam and Judaism. So you may be surprised to learn that the Inquisition had actually been set up much earlier in the 13^th century by the Papacy, in response to a heresy that had swept the Languedoc region of south west France. This heresy that so alarmed the Church, was Catharism, a dualist sect that believed that the material world was intrinsically evil and ruled by a dark deity that was sometimes called Rex Mundi or King of the World and that the god of light and goodness, whom they worshipped, existed entirely in the spiritual realms. The Catholic Church dominated most of Europe during the Middle Ages, and this Church, headed by the Pope in Rome, demanded that the beliefs and rituals that they espoused were adhered to rigidly and uniformly across the continent. Even powerful rulers could not escape the controlling hand of the Church, as the Pope routinely punished Kings who stepped out of line by excommunicating them or putting their lands under interdict, which punished the whole populace by closing churches and not allowing sacraments such as marriage, baptism or anointing of the sick to take place.

Cathars Being Expelled From Carcassone 1209

Although many heretical sects sprung up during the Middle Ages, it was the Cathars who seemed to be especially loathed by the Church of Rome. The Languedoc in medieval times was a vibrant, prosperous region that was culturally diverse and unusually tolerant of other religions. The Catholic Church also enjoyed an incredibly bad reputation in the region, as the local clergy were regarded as lazy, ignorant, grasping and dissolute. They were so venal and corrupt that they had become figures of fun, and increasingly the local populace was failing to pay their tithes and even laughed off the excommunications that the hapless clergy handed out as punishments. Practise what you preach certainly was not one of their mottoes and even Pope Innocent III scathingly referred to the clergy of Narbonne as ‘dumb dogs who can no longer bark’. In sharp contrast, the Cathar holy men and women, who were known as Perfect, led stringently ascetic lives of prayer, self denial, fasting and preaching.  Not only that, the Cathar Perfect were also supremely indifferent to what their followers, known as credentes, did in their material lives, as everything concerned with matter was tainted by evil. So activities that horrified the Catholic Church, such as not paying taxes, not attending church services, drinking too much, or having sex before marriage were not judged, and until a soul chose to follow the hard path of a Perfect and free themselves from the endless cycle of reincarnation, regarded as irrelevant. The Cathar Perfect preached a litany of peace, light and tolerance and even believed in the spiritual and material equality of women, much to the horror of the medieval Catholic Church.

At first the Papacy tried to stem the tide of heresy by debate and persuasion. Pope Innocent III sent three papal legates, Arnold Amaury, Peter of Castelnau and Brother Raoul into the Languedoc to bring the heretics back into the fold of the true faith. Although Innocent III’s instincts would have been to toss the Cathars straight onto the nearest bonfire, they had powerful protectors in the local nobility. These nobles, men such as Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, Count Raymond Roger of Foix and Viscount Raymond Roger Trencavel, were themselves in the main Cathar sympathisers, who had relatives and friends who were Cathar Perfect. These local noblemen provided the venues for these debates, which attracted huge crowds of spectators, between the papal legates and the Cathars, and provided security for the heretics. These intense, theological debates could last as long as a week, with the Cathars airing their extensive knowledge of the New Testament and using the example of their blameless and holy lives against the Catholic’s arguments of orthodoxy and submission to an all powerful Church.  The three papal legates travelled the length of the Languedoc, trying to cajole and argue the heretics back to orthodoxy, in great style, with a large retinue and all the pomp due to the Pope’s representatives. However, they were rarely welcomed in a town or village and were treated with derision and even death threats. By 1206 the three papal legates were exhausted and admitting defeat in Montpellier, when they were approached by two Spanish friars, one of whom was the future St Dominic and founder of the Dominican order. The two Spaniards suggested a different approach and persuaded the weary legates to resume their journeying, but this time to travel on foot, begging alms and living the simple, ascetic lives of their Cathar Perfect opponents. So they took to the road again, accompanied by two Spaniards, but their level of conversions back to the ‘truth faith’ was still pitiful.

Innocent III’s patience was beginning to wear thin and in 1200 he issued a decree that allowed for the property of a convicted heretic to be seized by their persecutor, and also ensure that their family was disinherited.  Moreover, the decree stated that any Catholic who refused to ferret out and hunt down heretics was also liable to lose all their property and possessions. A major thorn in the flesh of the Pope, was Raymond VI of Toulouse, who had made a career out of being excommunicated, and would routinely promise to hunt down the heretic Cathars and then never quite get around to it. As the debates were not producing converts in any great numbers, Innocent III had come to the conclusion that a military campaign would have to be undertaken against the Languedoc to bring it back into submission to the Church. He tried to interest the rulers and nobility of Europe in this undertaking, but unfortunately for him Raymond VI of Toulouse was in theory a vassal of King Philippe Auguste of France, and these feudal loyalties kept the French ruler from the fray. However, in 1208 the spark that Innocent III needed to fuel his war plans was ignited, when one of the papal legates, Peter of Castelnau, was murdered on the road, after having spent time negotiating with Raymond VI on the subject of his latest excommunication and set of punishments. Raymond, who had been heard threatening Peter of Castelnau, was the prime suspect and voluntarily submitted himself to the humiliation of a public scourging before fleeing north to join the Crusade that was now massing against the Languedoc.

For the next few decades the Languedoc was torn apart by invading armies, who besieged towns, destroyed crops, and held mass burnings of any Cathars and their sympathisers that they could get their hands on.  The Cathar Perfect themselves did not fight or take part in any of the violence, but their credentes and many of the local Catholics fought valiantly to defend them. One of the most famous quotes of the conflict reputedly uttered by Arnold Amaury just before the massacre at Béziers in 1209 was ‘Kill them all, God will know his own’, showing that the Crusaders were at least equal opportunity killers. However, for the Catholic Church, even after all the bloody years of warfare, they still had not totally eradicated the Cathars and their followers.  They needed a new way to mop up the remnants of the heresy and to ensure that it could never flourish again. The bishops had always had the option of calling a diocesan court to interrogate and condemn heretics, before they were ‘relaxed to the secular arm’ for a swift and fatal trip to the bonfire. However, many bishops did not show the rigour and enthusiasm for pursuing heretics that the papacy would have liked, and so when Gregory IX ascended the papal throne in 1227 he appointed special papal legates, gave them wide sweeping prosecutorial powers and sent them into the Languedoc to deal with the Cathars once and for all. These papal attack dogs offered cash bounties to anyone who was willing to denounce a Cathar, with the added bonus that the heretic’s property would also be seized and split between the informer, the Church and the Crown.  But even with these cash incentives, the local population showed no real enthusiasm for betraying their neighbours, and the numbers of Cathars betrayed remained small.  So in 1233 the Pope put together a task force, recruited from the Dominicans, dedicated to the total suppression of Catharism and installed these papal inquisitors in Albi, Toulouse and Carcassonne.

St Dominic Presiding Over a Cathar Burning by Pedro Berruguete

These inquisitors were experts in breeding an atmosphere of terror and suspicion, were excellent administrators and record keepers, and were not prone to showing any mercy. They were, unsurprisingly, despised by the Cathars and their sympathisers, and also by the local clergy, as they were backed directly by the Pope, so could ride roughshod with impunity over the local religious administration. The way it worked was that the inquisitor would arrive in a town or village with his clerks and armed guard and set up shop. After a swift consultation with the local churchmen, the inquisitor would then summon all men over the age of fourteen and women over the age of 12 to make a profession of orthodox faith. Any person who did not comply was put first in the queue for questioning. Any Cathar Perfect caught up in the proceedings would always the first to be winkled out, as the swearing of oaths was against their beliefs. The rest of the population was then read a sermon that exhorted them to examine their lives for any potentially heretical activities and gave them a seven day period of grace in which to denounce themselves or their neighbours. The inquisitors had a wide range of offenses in their armoury to prosecute people with, including being a Cathar Perfect, an offence which always attracted the death penalty, protecting a Perfect, giving the melioramentum when meeting a Perfect, being a witness the Cathar ritual of the consolamentum, or simply not being prepared to grass on your friends. The only way to prove decisively to the Inquisition that you had forsaken your heretical activities and associates was to name names, the more names the better, as the Inquisition was putting together an exhaustive register of all the Cathars and their sympathisers who had managed to survive in the Languedoc.

If you were unlucky enough to have been interrogated by the Inquisition you would have been subjected to hours of repetitive questioning that was designed to unsettle you, and make you wonder who exactly it was that denounced you and what they had told the inquisition about you and your family. You probably would have not been told what the charges were against you, as that would have given you the right to know who had accused you. If you wanted a lawyer to speak for you, the unfortunate lawyer would swiftly find themselves condemned also for supporting heresy.  Appeals were not allowed, and like modern referees in sport, the inquisitors’ decision was final. Over the years, the inquisitors began to introduce torture, and by 1252 the use of torture had been officially sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV in his papal bull ad extirpanda.  Supposedly, only one session of torture was allowed in order to obtain a confession, but the resourceful inquisitors found many ways to get around this inconvenient ruling, as well as other rulings such as not torturing underage children, not shedding blood or killing prisoners under torture.  However, technically the inquisitor could not even get the ball rolling unless people were prepared to denounce their neighbours or even their own family members, as to secure a conviction the inquisitor had to get two witnesses.

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, there were always people who were ready to take this opportunity to rid themselves of a few enemies, and then as the list of names grew larger, the net of the inquisition was able to be cast ever wider throughout the community. The craftier locals when they were called for questioning gave out the names of members of the community who were already dead. The inquisition called their bluff in a manner that horrified the locals, as they then went to the local cemetery, disinterred the corpses of the accused deceased, marched the rotting corpses through the streets and then flung them into the flames of a hastily lit bonfire. The inquisitor would then move on to the surviving family members of the deceased heretics, seizing their property, imposing tough penances on them, throwing them in prison or making them wear garments that had a yellow crosses sewn on them to mark them out as being associated with heresy.

Not surprisingly, the Dominican inquisitors were hugely unpopular and feared throughout the Languedoc, and there were incidents where the inquisitors were abused, thrown down wells or severely beaten. By 1243 the Catholic authorities were seriously unamused at this harassment of their chosen representatives, which had been exacerbated by the massacre of two inquisitors and their retinue at Avignonet in 1242. The decision was taken that the last Cathar refuge, the fortress at Montségur, would be besieged and the Cathar Perfect and credentes sheltering behind its walls would be wiped out. After months of siege Montségur fell and around 200 Cathars were burned, although, in a rare fit of clemency, the garrison of the fortress were free to go if they abjured their support for heresy. The back of the Cathar heresy had been broken, but the Inquisition machine was implacable and relentless in its need to destroy every last trace of the heresy that so revolted them, and so they continued to terrorise the Languedoc for a hundred years after the end of the Albigensian Crusade, until the very last Cathar Perfect, Guillaume Bélibaste was burned at the stake in 1321.

Unfortunately, the inquisition would go on to grow and develop for the next six hundred years and bring terror and suspicion to many countries in Europe and Latin America, and thousands of innocent souls would lose their lives so that the Catholic Church could maintain its iron grip on the hearts and minds of Christendom. The Languedoc before the ravages of the Albigensian Crusade and the ensuing persecutions of the Inquisition had been a vibrant, tolerant, prosperous land, full of culture, learning and joy, but by the time that the inquisitors had left, the region was a ravaged, empty shell. The Languedoc was now just a poor, backwater region that had been assimilated into the kingdom of France and even these days it could be said that it has not fully recovered economically from these tragic events.

Cathar image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
St Dominic Presiding Over a Cathar Burning by Pedro Berruguete Image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Thomas of Lancaster – An Unlikely Saint?

Religious and spiritual life in Europe in the Middle Ages was dominated by the Catholic Church, and every person from the King down to the lowliest peasant lived lives that were ordered around the beliefs, ceremonies and doctrines of that Church. The medieval world was one where heaven, hell, angels, devils and saints were very real, and every parish church would have had brightly coloured murals and paintings depicting them and the relics of saints were big business.  In order to qualify for medieval sainthood the first step was of course to be dead, a person would also generally have had to have lived a holy, virtuous life, to have been a staunch adherent of the Church with not a taint of heresy, and being martyred for your faith certainly got you extra brownie points.  But one of fastest routes to swift canonisation was if miracles were reported occurring at your tomb, when your relics were present, at where you were killed or if something miraculous occurred when you were being implored in prayer to intercede with God on someone’s behalf.

Although this was quite a stiff set of qualifications to acquire before your name could be put forward to the Pope for canonisation, history did provide some very unlikely candidates.  One of these unlikely potential saints was a member of the English royal family, Thomas of Lancaster.  So how did a powerful, wealthy English baron become revered as a saint after his death, with the Commons petitioning for his canonization in the parliament of 1327 and King Edward III writing to the Pope three times to request that he was elevated to sainthood?  Especially a royal baron who had rebelled against his king and had been executed as a traitor?

Thomas of Lancaster

Thomas of Lancaster was born in 1278 and was a double royal as his father Edmund Crouchback, 1^st Earl of Lancaster was a son of King Henry III of England and his mother was Blanche of Artois, who had been Queen of Navarre before she was widowed. He was destined to become one of the most powerful and influential barons in England, and held many titles and owned many great estates.  Thomas of Lancaster inherited the earldoms of Leicester, Lancaster and Derby, and on his marriage to Alice de Lacey he also became the Earl of Lincoln and Salisbury, 11^th Baron of Halton and 7^th Lord of Bowland. Material wealth and more prestige seem to be all that this marriage brought him, as the couple did not have any children and was reputedly an unhappy one.  In a plotline straight from Hollywood, the unhappy Countess was abducted while she was staying at her manor at Canford in Dorset, by a knight called Richard de St Martin, who was a henchman of the Earl of Surrey, John de Warenne. Thomas of Lancaster was infuriated by this high handed behaviour, so he retaliated by divorcing the Countess and taking a couple of the Earl of Surrey’s castles by force.  This altercation between two such powerful barons was potentially very destabilising for England, so King Edward II was forced to step in and broker a shaky truce between the two men.  Unfortunately for the Countess, her now ex-husband got to keep his earldoms of Salisbury and Lincoln as their marriage contract had stipulated that he held these titles in his own right.

Although he was eventually to rebel, in the first few years of King Edward II’s reign he was a loyal supporter of his royal cousin.  He played an in important role at Edward II’s coronation in 1308, carrying the great sword Curtana that had once belonged to King Edward the Confessor. However, King Edward II was prone to having favourites, who he plucked from obscurity and showered with lands, titles and royal favours. Edward was not a monarch who was particularly skilful at playing the game of medieval politics, and he did not seem to comprehend the depth of his baron’s rage that their king was taking his counsel from lowly-born non-entities rather from themselves. In these feudal times rank, wealth and power were everything, and the senior barons of England, including Thomas of Lancaster, felt that Edward II had snubbed them and insulted them.

It was Piers Gaveston, a particular favourite of Edward II, who seemed to really get under Thomas of Lancaster’s skin and set him on the path to rebellion.  King Edward had raised Piers Gaveston from very humble origins, as he originally had been a mere Gascon squire, to be his most powerful advisor and constant companion. Thomas of Lancaster held Gaveston in total contempt referring to him as ‘the Fiddler’, and when Gaveston appealed to the King for the dismissal of one of Lancaster’s entourage he flew into a rage and planned vengeance.  He withdrew his support for the King and joined with the Lords Ordainers, who where a group of powerful barons who were insisting that Gaveston be dismissed from Court and banished and that they would effectively take over ruling the realm. In 1310-1311 Lancaster used his forces to separate Piers Gaveston from Edward II, and the King was forced to renounce his favourite and send him abroad. The barons also met to create Ordinances designed to curb the monarch’s spending and to impose control over the royal officers.

Edward II was, not surprisingly, very unhappy at this turn of events, and started fighting with the Lords Ordainers during 1312 to regain his royal prerogatives and his cherished companion. Gaveston managed to slip back into England, but he was captured by the barons, including Lancaster, who then tried him and had him executed.  Edward II was forced to pardon the barons, but the Ordinances that they had written were scrapped.  But King Edward was soon to face more grief, as on 23^rd June 1314 he was heavily defeated by the Scots under the command of Robert the Bruce.  Thomas of Lancaster had not accompanied his King on his attempted invasion of Scotland, and had sent the minimum of troops that feudal law demanded to join the royal army. In the following four years after Edward’s humiliating defeat Lancaster was the de facto ruler of England, but had huge trouble with Scottish raids across the border and continuing squabbles amongst the barons.

In the meantime, Edward II had found a couple of new favourites to lavish his attention on who were Hugh le Despenser, 1^st Earl of Winchester and his son Hugh the younger Despenser.  They joined forces with some of the barons who were also discontented with the stalemate of Lancaster’s rule and in 1318 they deposed him and stripped him of his powers to rule.  However, you can’t keep a good rebel baron down for long and Thomas of Lancaster rebelled against the King again in 1321.  His army was eventually defeated at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, and Lancaster was captured. This time there was no escape, and he was summarily tried and condemned by a tribunal comprising King Edward II, the Despensers and the Earl of Arundel.  He was not permitted to defend himself at the trial or have another speak for him, and he was beheaded just outside Pontefract Castle. Edward II also had around twenty of the other rebel leaders executed which was regarded as a shocking number even by the somewhat hardened attitudes of medieval England.

So by now you might well be wondering how a rebel baron, who had divorced his wife, held fierce grudges, and spent his life firmly in pursuit of temporal power and wealth was ever regarded as a suitable candidate for sainthood?  Well it would seem that shortly after his execution, miracles began to occur both at the site of his execution and at his tomb in Pontefract Priory.  These miracles were reported to the King during the parliament that was held in York during April 1322, so they were supposedly occurring within weeks of Lancaster’s death. One chronicler wrote that a blind priest had a dream three nights running that if he went and prayed at the spot of Thomas of Lancaster’s execution that he would be able to see again.  The dream was so powerful, that the priest went to the execution site and prayed.  During his prayers his put his hand on the patch of ground where Lancaster had died, and some dried blood mixed with sand stuck to his hand.  He rubbed this mixture onto his eyes and miraculously regained his sight.  There was also reputedly a drowned child who miraculously revived after being dead for three days when it was placed on the tomb of the executed baron.  Although Thomas of Lancaster was venerated in England as a saint and a martyr because of these supposed miracles, he never officially became a saint as despite all the letters sent to the Pope, he was never canonised. So was this man really a saint, or just a baron who turned traitor against his king and was beheaded for his crimes?

Thomas of Lancaster image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Mystery People of History – Perkin Warbeck, Prince or Pretender?

Few mysteries of history have fascinated us as much and prompted so much speculation as the mystery of the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower.  Were the two young princes really murdered in their beds, and if so who by and why? Or were they somehow spirited away from the Tower of London in secret and taken to a safe place to live out their lives in obscurity?  Against the chaos and political instability of that period of English history known as the War of the Roses, it is perhaps not surprising then that several figures came forward during the reign of King Henry VII claiming to be one of the lost princes and becoming a focus for rebellion, and one of the most famous of these royal pretenders was a young man know as Perkin Warbeck.

After Henry VII defeated King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and claimed the English throne by right of conquest, his main tasks were to secure his kingdom and win the loyalty of his nobles and people.  He married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter King Edward IV, in an attempt to further legitimise his claim to the English crown and unite the Lancastrian and Yorkist factions, even though to do this he had to overturn the ruling that had declared that she and all her siblings were illegitimate due to their father’s alleged pre-contract of marriage with Lady Eleanor Talbot.  But if Elizabeth of York and her sisters were once again recognised as being the legitimate children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, then so too were her two brothers, King Edward V and Richard, Duke of York.  Many historians consider that to have overturned this ruling, Henry VII must have believed that the two young princes were indeed already dead, as if either of the two boys were still alive, they had a much greater claim to the throne than Henry himself, and he knew that there were still powerful forces both in England and across Europe who would back a Yorkist claimant to the throne.

Perkin Warbeck

One of these powerful forces was Margaret of Burgundy, the sister of the two dead kings Edward IV and Richard III and the aunt of the Princes in the Tower, and it was at her Court that Perkin Warbeck first came to public attention and claimed the throne of England. It is not known whether Margaret of Burgundy genuinely believed that Perkin Warbeck was her nephew or whether she was fully aware that he was a fraud and groomed him in the ways of the Yorkist Royal Family in order to create a focus of rebellion against Henry VII.  The other major European player to get involved was King Charles VIII of France, and both he and Margaret officially recognised Perkin Warbeck as King Richard IV of England.  For a while Perkin Warbeck was feted across Europe, attending the funeral in Vienna of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, and gaining the recognition of his successor Maximilian I, spending time at the French Court in 1492 and then residing at the Court of Burgundy. However, in 1492 Charles VIII signed the Treaty of Etaples with England to prevent a threatened invasion of France and part of the treaty was an agreement to expel Perkin Warbeck from French territory.  Warbeck’s presence in Burgundy rattled Henry VII so much that he imposed a trade embargo on Flanders in 1493, even though this would lose England a great deal of revenue.

Perkin Warbeck’s first foray into rebellion against the English crown had been in 1491 when he arrived in the Irish city of Cork, which had long been a Yorkist stronghold. The good people of Cork thought that Warbeck was actually the Earl of Warwick, the son of the hapless George, Duke of Clarence, who had been attainted for treason and executed in the Tower of London after trying the patience of his brother Edward IV one time too many, who was currently being held captive by Henry VII.  Warbeck’s English was apparently not very good, but he managed to deny his being the Earl of Warwick and declare himself as Richard, Duke of York. However, little became of this rebellion and he was forced to return to Europe.

With the support of Margaret of Burgundy, he tried his hand again in 1495 and landed with a small force in Deal on the Kent coast.  His small force was effectively routed and Warbeck was forced to sail on to Ireland without even disembarking onto English soil.  Once in Ireland, he gained the support of the Earl of Desmond and laid siege to the town of Waterford, but was once again unsuccessful.  He fled to the Court of King James IV of Scotland, where he was graciously received, given a pension of £1200 a year and the hand of the Scottish King’s cousin, Lady Catherine Gordon, in marriage.  At that time James IV was happy to use any means at his disposal to rile Henry VII, so he encouraged Perkin Warbeck to use his pension for funding for attempting to mount an attack across the English border.  However, Warbeck received no support whatsoever from the English and was forced to retreat back into Scotland.  Henry VII may still at this point in his reign have felt insecure on his throne, but he had set up an effective network of spies and had rooted out and dealt with any English supporters of Perkin Warbeck.  In 1495, Sir William Stanley was tried and executed for treason due to his support of Warbeck and the Yorkist cause, which is ironic in the light of the fact that he was the very same William Stanley who switched sides at the Battle of Bosworth ensuring the defeat of the Yorkist King Richard III. Henry VII’s steward Lord Fitzwalter was also attainted and executed and it seems that they were being informed on by one of their co-conspirators Sir Robert Clifford, who was secretly working for Henry.  Clifford’s reward for his participation in the conspiracy against the crown was not the more usual short trip to the scaffold but a full pardon and a hefty reward.

After Warbeck’s failed attempt to enter England, James IV of Scotland gave up on the idea of being a thorn in the side of the English King, and signed the Treaty of Ayton that brought him peace with England and Henry’s daughter Margaret Tudor as a bride. Warbeck was once more expelled and returned again to Ireland to make another attempt at laying siege to the town of Waterford.  This attempt was swiftly defeated and he was chased from Ireland by four English ships.  Left with only a handful of supporters, Perkin Warbeck sailed to Cornwall, where he hoped to capitalise on the discontent still fomenting there after the uprising that had taken place only a few months earlier. The Cornish people welcomed him and declared him King Richard IV on Bodmin Moor.  The support of the Cornish swelled his army by 6000 and he marched on Exeter and then on to Taunton.  Henry sent an army to counter Warbeck’s rebellion, and when Warbeck heard that this force had sighted he fled to Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, where he was captured. Henry VII was initially merciful to Perkin Warbeck, allowing him to stay at Court under supervision.  However, he attempted to run away, so was removed to the more secure environment of the Tower of London.  In 1499 he allegedly tried to escape again, this time supposedly in the company of the real Earl of Warwick, and was hanged at Tyburn.

So was Perkin Warbeck really Richard, Duke of York?  It is popularly believed that he was actually a Fleming born in Tournai in around 1474, the son of a French official called John de Werbecque and his wife, Katherine de Faro, and that he had spent his boyhood years working as a servant in several different households. He then became an apprentice for a fleece merchant called Pregent Meno, and it was while he was working for Meno that he first arrived in Ireland and declared himself to be Richard, Duke of York.  Perkin Warbeck also supposedly bore a strong resemblance to the dead Yorkist monarch, Edward IV, and it has been speculated that Warbeck could actually have been Edward’s illegitimate son. But what of Margaret of Burgundy’s support of Perkin Warbeck.  Would she really have supported an imposter as her nephew?  Would she really have wanted a non-royal foreigner on the throne of England, however much she despised Henry VII’s regime?  She declared that she recognised Warbeck as Richard of York because of certain birthmarks on his body and his supposedly detailed knowledge of what life had been like living in the English Royal Household.  In return for Margaret’s support, Warbeck had to promise to return all her lands in England to her that had been confiscated after the Battle of Bosworth when he gained the English crown. But was this enough to make her support an imposter? 

Moreover, if Perkin Warbeck really spoke such poor English and was uneducated, would sophisticated monarchs like Maximilian I and Charles VII even have deigned to let him into their presence, let alone backed him as a pretender to the throne of England? In the 15^th century class was all important, and people rarely moved out of the milieu into which they had been born.  There was also a mystique and a reverence surrounding royal blood, and preserving royal bloodlines and family ties was regarded as all important, so encouraging someone who had worked as a servant to make a bid for a crown would have been almost unthinkable.  After all, the real Richard, Duke of York had been excluded from the possibility of ever sitting on the throne of England purely because his father might have made a pre-contract of marriage with another woman before he married Richard’s mother Elizabeth Woodville.

Like all great historical mysteries, we shall never probably really know the truth about Perkin Warbeck.  Perkin Warbeck made a confession before his execution that gave his parentage and early history, some of which has been backed up by documentary evidence.  But was he forced into this confession by Henry VII, who would have been very eager to ensure that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that that Perkin Warbeck was an imposter and not a Yorkist prince? Most likely he was just an apprentice from Flanders, who by chance bore an uncanny resemblance to a dead king and was in the right place at the right time, but there is always the chance, however slight, that he really was Richard of York and that he had been spirited away from his imprisonment in England and brought to Europe for safety.

Image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Famous Royal Mistresses – Prinny and Mrs Fitzherbert

When is a famous royal mistress not a royal mistress? When perhaps, like Mrs Fitzherbert, she may actually have been a royal wife? The British Royal Family has been much in the news recently, with the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton having just taken place at Westminster Abbey, but members of our Royal Family have throughout history found themselves the centre of attention, written about in newspapers and pamphlets and even finding themselves in the centre of a scandal. One royal who was no stranger to scandal was George, Prince of Wales, the son of King George III and Queen Charlotte, who went on to become Prince Regent and then King George IV. Known to his friends as ‘Prinny’, Prince George led a decadent life at the head of a group of beaus and dandies known as the Carlton House Set, spending his days gambling, drinking, decorating his houses and running up a huge amount of debt. When he was a young man, George was handsome and a great favourite with the ladies, but as he grew older the ravages of his lifestyle caused him to become bloated and pile on the weight, prompting Beau Brummell to utter his famous caustic remark ‘Alvanley, who’s your fat friend?’  Prince George also enjoyed an extensive and varied love life and had many mistresses throughout his life, but perhaps he ever only truly loved one of them?

Mrs Fitzherbert

The lady in question is known to history as Mrs Fitzherbert, although she was born Maria Ann Smythe on 26^th July 1756.  She was the eldest child of William Smythe and Mary Ann Errington, who were Roman Catholics and well-connected with the British aristocracy, as her mother was a half-sister of the Earl of Sefton. She was sent to Paris for her education, but was married at the age of 18 to Edward Weld, a wealthy Catholic landowner who was 16 years her senior. Unfortunately for the young Maria, her new husband was thrown from a horse only three months after their wedding, without having yet made a new will. This left the young widow in dire financial straits and in desperate need of a new husband to support her, so three years later she wed another older man, Thomas Fitzherbert of Swynnerton in Staffordshire. This time she was ten years younger than her spouse, and the couple had one son who tragically died very young. She was widowed again on 7^th May 1781, but this time she was more fortunate in the inheritance stakes as she gained a smart house in Park Street, Mayfair and a healthy annual income.

When she came out of mourning, Mrs Fitzherbert was sponsored into the glittering whirl of London Society by her uncle Lord Sefton and her half-brother Henry Errington. She was now a very eligible young widow, and probably had many suitors. But in the spring of 1784 she was introduced to the very cream of this Society, when Maria Fitzherbert caught the eye of the 22 year old Prince of Wales when she attended the opera in the company of Lord Sefton. Although, at 27, Mrs Fitzherbert was older than Prince George, the impressionable young prince was smitten and immediately began to pursue her. Rumours soon started flying around Polite Society that Mrs Fitzherbert was the Prince’s latest mistress. The pair seemed to be genuinely in love, and in July 1784 her besotted prince offered her a ring as a gift. The ring was initially refused, but Mrs Fitzherbert finally accepted the gift, after Prince George threatened to commit suicide. The ecstatic Prince believed that this acceptance of his ring meant that Maria Fitzherbert had agreed to marry him,  and knowing that marrying the Prince would be nigh on impossible she escaped to Europe.  Maria Fitzherbert’s whereabouts were eventually traced, and she returned to London in December 1785. It was at this point that the couple underwent a secret marriage ceremony in the drawing room of Mrs Fitzherbert’s house in Park Street.

So why was there so much secrecy surrounding this wedding? It was because under English law the marriage was regarded as invalid. This was because George was the Prince of Wales and the 1689 Bill of Rights stated that any heir to the throne who married a Roman Catholic would be lose their place in the succession and the Royal Marriage Act of 1772 required that the King’s consent had to be obtained before one of his children could wed. As Mrs Fitzherbert was a Roman Catholic and it was highly unlikely that King George III would give consent to his eldest son and heir marrying a Catholic widow, the couple can have been only too aware that it was unlikely that their marriage would ever be recognised by the Royal Family and legitimised. We may never know why the couple took the risk of getting married in secret, but there were rumours flying around Society at the time that Mrs Fitzherbert was pregnant, and being a Roman Catholic may well have been deeply worried about having a child out of wedlock. It must be remembered that before she met the Prince of Wales, Maria Fitzherbert had led the life of a very respectable woman and had a high standing in the Society of which she was a part. In fact, they had to approach three different clergymen before they found one who would perform the ceremony, and it was one of the Prince of Wales’s own chaplains, the Reverend Robert Burt who finally agreed. There has been speculation that Reverend Burt only agreed because the Prince had agreed to pay off his debts or even got him out of debtor’s prison, but there is no real evidence to support this, and Burt came from an affluent family who had made their fortune in the West Indies.

The rumours continued to fly about the Prince of Wales and Mrs Fitzherbert, but they lived together as a married couple until 1794. It was Prinny’s extravagance and decadent lifestyle that was to be their undoing as he had reached a point where he was unable to discharge his debts. He had already once been financially bailed out by his father, the King, and so to ensure that he stayed in his father’s good books, Prince George finally agreed to marry a foreign, protestant princess called Caroline of Brunswick. To complicate matter further, in 1794 George started a romantic liaison with Frances Villiers, the Countess of Jersey, who was strongly counselling him to marry Princess Caroline and get rid of his mountain of debts. Lady Jersey was very keen on retaining her status as his royal mistress, and felt that Caroline of Brunswick was much less of a threat to her position than Mrs Fitzherbert, a lady who he had been in love with for nearly a decade. The question has to be did Prince George really believe that he was already married, and if so was he worried and unhappy that in some people’s eyes he was committing bigamy by marrying another woman? Although how do you divorce someone that you may or may not be legally married to? When the Prince broke off his relationship with her, Maria Fitzherbert fled first to Margate, and then to Marble Hill in Twickenham, ending up in Ealing in the October of 1795.

It is quite safe to say that the Prince’s marriage to Caroline of Brunswick was a disaster, and by 1799 Prinny was once more back in the arms of Mrs Fitzherbert. They lived together in Brighton until around 1807 where Mrs Fitzherbert owned a house called Steine House that had been designed for her by the architect William Porden, and the Prince was building his fantastical piece of Eastern architecture, the Brighton Pavilion. The couple seemed to have had a shaky relationship for the next two years, but it seems that they had finally parted forever by 1811, the Prince having embarked on what would be a 12 year long affair with the somewhat curvaceous Lady Hertford.

Mrs Fitzherbert continued to live quietly in Brighton in Steine House until her death in 1837, and she was buried in the Roman Catholic church of St John the Baptist in the Kemp Town area of the town. One of the big questions asked about Mrs Fitzherbert was whether or not she ever bore the Prince of Wales any children? There were those rumours of her pregnancy at the time of her morganatic marriage, and many people believe that James Ord, who was born in 1786, was that child. James Ord was taken to the United States and became a Jesuit priest there, but left the order to first join the US Navy and then the US Infantry. However, In Maria Fitzherbert’s will there is no mention of a son, but in the second codicil she does make references to ‘two dear children’ who were Mary Ann Smythe and Mary Dawson-Damer. Mary Ann Smythe became Mary Ann Stafford-Jerningham after her marriage and was nominally a niece of Mrs Fitzherbert, and Mary Ann Dawson-Damer was known as the daughter of Admiral Lord Hugh Seymour and his wife Lady Anna Horatia Waldegrave. The Seymour’s son was one of the executors of Mrs Fitzherbert’s will and received a minor bequest from her, and his father has been a lifelong friend and confidant of the Prince of Wales. However, until concrete historical evidence comes to light, the question of whether Mrs Fitzherbert had any natural children with the Prince Regent will remain unanswered. The two women mentioned in her will may well just have been children that she had been very attached to and felt motherly towards, and we perhaps may never know the truth about James Ord either.

So to the world, Mrs Fitzherbert, may have been nothing more than another famous royal mistress, but I think that she sincerely believed that she was the true wife of the Prince of Wales. And although Prinny left her to make a marriage of convenience with a foreign princess, and enjoyed several other mistresses during his lifetime, it does seem that Mrs Fitzherbert was the woman who held his heart and whom he loved until his dying day. After his death in 1830, it was discovered that the recently deceased monarch had kept all of the love letters and correspondence that had passed back and forth between him and his beloved Mrs Fitzherbert, but, unfortunately for us, these undoubtedly fascinating documents were then destroyed. The new king was William IV, a brother of George, who offered Mrs Fitzherbert a dukedom when he came to the throne, to compensate her for all of the trials and tribulations that she had suffered at the hands of his sibling. Maria Fitzherbert turned this honour down stating that ‘she had borne through life the name of Mrs Fitzherbert; that she had never disgraced it, and did not wish to change it’. This was a lady who had done what she did for love and not to gain money or fancy titles; she just wanted to live her life as the beloved wife of her prince.

Image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Paneb – An Ancient Egyptian Bad Boy?

Have you ever heard of Paneb, the notorious Ancient Egyptian bad boy? These days we hear horror stories on the news all too often about people who commit murder, violence, and theft and display general bad behaviour. But would it be any comfort to you to know that these stories are nothing new, and that even in a small worker’s village in Ancient Egypt there was one of these rascally characters living and, for a while at least, flourishing?

This ancient Egyptian villain of our story was a man called Paneb, and he was born in the workman’s village of Deir el-Medina around 1244 BC during the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Deir el-Medina was a unique community set in a hollow of the cliffs on the west bank of the Nile at ancient Thebes, peopled by the workmen who cut and decorated the magnificent tombs of the pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings and their families.

Our bad boy Paneb was one of these workman, and he would have worked long hours in the dark, hot, stuffy conditions of the pharaoh’s tomb.  Paneb had been raised in the home of his adopted father Neferhotep, who had also generously provided Paneb with his education. At Deir el-Medina, jobs were passed down from father to son, and Paneb succeeded to Neferhotep’s coveted position as one of the two foremen of the gangs of workmen in the Valley of the Kings. Paneb, however, was not the type of guy who would repay these kindnesses with the respect and consideration due to his adopted father.

Deir el-Medina - Own Image

However, before we go on any further with Paneb’s tale of debauchery and criminal behaviour, we have to ask how come we know so much about an ordinary ancient Egyptian workman? Well we know so much about Paneb’s dubious career because of a remarkable papyrus, the Papyrus Salt 124, which is now housed in the British Museum.

Papyrus Salt 124 was probably initially found at Deir el-Medina and it arrived in the British Museum from the collection of the early 19^th century collector and Egyptologist, Henry Salt, who had obtained it in the Luxor area.  Putting an exact date on the papyrus is problematical, although a clue comes from a later recorded event where one of Paneb’s descendants in year 29 of the pharaoh Ramses III referred to Paneb’s trial taking place during the time of the Vizier Hori.

However, Hori fulfilled the office of Vizier from the reign of the pharaoh Siptah through to the reign of Ramses III, a period of many years.  The first translation of the papyrus was not released until 1870, when it was published by François Chabas with a short summary, and the first translation into English was in 1929 by Jaroslav Cerny. Papyrus Salt 124 is in the form of a letter to the Vizier of the day, Hori, and consists of  a list of accusations against Paneb all designed to let the Vizier know that Paneb was not fit to hold the post of foreman in the Valley of the Kings. The letter was written by a scribe called Amenakht, who, as he was Paneb’s adoptive father’s brother and believed that the post of foreman should have been his, was not what we might have called an uninterested and unbiased party.

It is fair to say that Amenakht did not hold back when it came to his accusations against Paneb, and the papyrus mentions murder, adultery, tomb robbing and general debauchery.  So whatever the truth is about these accusations, it is clear that he had managed to very badly rub Amenakht up the wrong way. Paneb was a married man and had produced at least ten children with his wife the Lady Wabet, but according to Amenakht’s accusations, this did not stop Paneb from committing adultery and even violating women of the village against their will.

One of the bitterest accusations in the papyrus is that Paneb had violated the Lady Yemyemwah against her will on top of a wall, which was very unwise of Paneb if it was true, as this lady was Amenakht’s sister. He also managed to fit in a very lengthy affair with a lady of the village called Hunro, who herself had gone through three different husbands in this time.  One of Paneb’s sons, who was called Aapakhte, was almost as disreputable as his father and even got involved in some of his exploits with the ladies.

Drunkenness and fighting were apparently a way of life for Paneb, and he reputedly managed one night to scrap with and injure nine successive men. Before his adoptive father Neferhotep was killed, Paneb had himself chased him and threatened to kill him. Neferhotep was murdered on the orders of a shadowy figure called ‘Msy’.  It is not really known who this ‘Msy’ was, but it could have been an ephemeral Pharaoh called Amenmesse or one of his agents.

By this time the area around the ancient city of Thebes was very unsettled, with the Pharaoh Seti II fighting for dominance in the region with Amenmesse, although evidence shows that Amenmesse did gain control over Thebes for several years during Seti II’s reign. Whether Paneb was involved in this incident is not known, but it was alleged that Paneb had bribed the Vizier Pra’emhab with a gift of five of Neferhotep’s servants in order to persuade him to give him Neferhotep’s job as foreman.

 Paneb also seemed to have had a very casual attitude towards other people’s time and property, even if the property belonged to pharaoh himself.  When he was promoted to foreman he was working on the tomb of Seti II, and one of the accusations in the papyrus was that he stole stone from the tomb and had the workmen use this stone to build pillars in his own tomb at Deir el-Medina.

He also allegedly took a chariot cover, a statue, and some fine oil, incense and wine that belonged to pharaoh. In the Valley of the Kings the tools used by the workers were very valuable, but that did not deter Paneb from taking them and even breaking one before he could return it. It seemed as though he used the workmen as his own personal workforce, as he made them build a plaited bed for him and also made their wives weave clothes for him.

Paneb was also accused of tomb robbing, which was regarded as a very serious crime because to disturb the eternal rest of a pharaoh was regarded as sacrilege. His rebellious act of sitting on the sarcophagus of Seti II, would have been seen as a hugely disrespectful act. Among the objects that he purloined from tombs supposedly included a mummified goose from the tomb of one of Ramses II’s daughters and a bed and other funerary articles from the tomb of a fellow worker called Nakhtmin.

No one is really sure what happened to Paneb in the end. Soon after these accusations were made against him, Paneb and his son Aapakhte disappear from the records of the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina. Some experts believe that he was executed for his crimes, as there is an ostraca dating from year 5 of Ramses III which refers to the ‘killing of the chief’.

This chief could well have been Paneb, but as there is no name mentioned on the ostraca, it may not have been him. Also this would have meant that Paneb would have been around 67 when he was executed, which was a very great age for an ordinary Ancient Egyptian worker. Paneb is also known from his damaged tomb in the cliffs at Deir el-Medina and also from a carved offering table that would have once stood at the entrance of his tomb, so that his descendants could make their offerings to their deceased ancestor.

So do you think that Paneb was really as bad as he was portrayed by the obviously bitter and resentful Amenakht? Or was he just a bit of character, who liked a bit of drunken debauchery and petty crime, which made it easy to make all those accusations stick?  Unless some further evidence is unearthed from the sands of Egypt, we shall probably never really know, but Paneb’s story shows that despite the passage of the years and our advanced technology, we are not so different from those Ancient Egyptians, and that human nature never really changes.