The Death of Edward of Middleham, Prince of Wales

by Marie Barnfield

(This article first appeared in The Ricardian Bulletin, September 2017)

The two most tragic events of Richard’s reign (from his own personal point of view) were the deaths of his wife and their only legitimate child, Edward, Prince of Wales. The date of Queen Anne’s death, 16th March 1485, is clearly recorded, and a precise date – 9th April 1484 – is also given in many modern works for the death of Prince Edward.

Contemporary Sources

The dating, which has led to considerable puzzlement as to why the king and queen delayed so long before setting out for the north on 27th April, is based solely on the following passage from the Crowland Chronicle:

Shortly afterwards, however, they learned how vain are the attempts of man to regulate his affairs without God. In the following April, on a day not far off King Edward’s anniversary, this only son, on whom…all hope of the royal succession rested, died in Middleham after a short illness, in 1484 and in the first year of King Richard’s reign. You might have seen the father and mother, after hearing the news at Nottingham where they were then staying, almost out of their minds for a long time when faced with the sudden grief.¹

Crucially, therefore, Crowland claimed that the prince had died not on Edward IV’s anniversary itself but merely ‘on a day not far off’.² Richard is known to have been in Nottingham, where he received the news, between 4th and 27th April.³

Our only other early source for Prince Edward’s death is a history presented to King Henry VII in 1490 by the Warwickshire priest John Rous.⁴ Though famously guilty of some lurid and staggeringly unlikely claims regarding Richard (such as his two year gestation), Rous is nonetheless highly accurate on matters of genealogy pertaining to the Beauchamps and their heirs, and so is probably to be relied upon when he tells us that the prince died an inauspicious death at Eastertide (morte in fausta tempore Paschali). Easter Sunday in 1484 fell on 18th April. A literal modern translation of tempore Paschali (the dative form of tempus paschale) would be ‘at Easter time’, but tempus paschale also has a defined liturgical meaning In the Church calendar, it refers specifically to the period between the Easter Vigil (the night before Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday) and Pentecost; in English this period is known as Eastertide or Paschaltide.⁵ Rous, as a priest, is surely unlikely to have used tempore paschali in any other way than its recognised liturgical sense. If so, then he is telling us that Prince Edward died no earlier than the night of 17/18 April and no later than 27 April (on which date his parents set out for Doncaster, the first stop on their long journey to Middleham): an inauspicious death in the most auspicious period of the Christian year.⁶ We can reasonably go a little further and knock at least a day off either end of this time span, as Rous would surely have made it plain if the prince had died on Easter Sunday itself, and since it would have been practically impossible for the king and queen to have set off from Nottingham with their court on the very day that they received the news.

The Search for Contextual Evidence

The above statements by Rous and the anonymous Crowland Chronicler are the nearest we possess to dated records of Prince Edward’s death, and they are frustratingly vague. It is perhaps our misfortune that both Rous and Crowland were more concerned to make a moralising point than to record the precise date of the prince’s death; it is also possible that neither actually knew the precise date, as young Edward had died far away in the north. The obvious next step would be to look for clues in the form of alterations in the king’s planned itinerary or the pattern of royal business, and for the sake of completeness I shall do so, although the results are again inconclusive.

The sources cited by Rhoda Edwards in her Itinerary of King Richard III provide a useful rough and ready guide to the amount of government business being dealt with by Richard on any particular day. These show that, during his sojourn at Nottingham in April 1484, Richard typically issued between two and four properly dated documents a day. On 24th April, however, this pattern changes abruptly, with 16 such documents being generated on 24th April and a further 10 on the 25th before the level of business settles back down on the 26th, the eve of the king’s departure for Doncaster.⁷ Whether this spike was the result of Richard throwing himself into work to distract his mind from dreadful news just received, or simply the result of a practical attempt to deal with as much outstanding business as possible before setting out, it is unfortunately not possible to determine.

One major feast day that fell within the period between Easter Sunday and Richard’s departure from Nottingham is that of St George. this did have possible implications for Richard’s itinerary, since St George is the patron saint of the Order of the Garter and his feast day was thus the focus for the Order’s annual gathering at Windsor, the ceremonies normally beginning on 22nd April and continuing until after Mass on the morning of the 24th. Unfortunately, 1484 is one of the many years for which we have no surviving record of the Garter ceremonies, but it is often assumed that Richard ought to have been in Windsor by 22nd April in order to preside over them in accordance with his duties as sovereign of the Order. 1484 was, however, one of the years in which the normal schedule did not apply. The statutes of the Order stipulated that, in years when Easter Sunday fell less than two weeks before the feast of St George, the Garter Feast should be postponed until the second Sunday after Easter so that no knight companion should be forced to travel during the three days following Easter Day. But if that second Sunday should fall between 24 and 26 April or between 30 April and 4 May, then the feast had to be delayed by a further unspecified amount (in practice, always to another Sunday) in order to avoid a clash with any of the ‘double’  – i.e. particularly solemn – religious feast days that fell during those periods.⁸ In 1484 the second Sunday after Easter fell on 2 May, therefore the Garter Feast may be assumed to have been scheduled for a Sunday no earlier than 11 May. Nothing can therefore be read into Richard’s failure to set out for Windsor before 22 April.

If the king was unable to come to Windsor to preside over there ceremonies, he would normally appoint a deputy to do so on his behalf (on which occasions only a token couple of knights would attend), although amendments to the statutes did allow for the feast to be held at any place where the sovereign and his knight companions might be gathered together.⁹ It is unfortunate, therefore, that the records of the 1484 ceremonies do not survive, as they could add greatly to our understanding. All that we do have is the official record of a warrant issued by Richard on 24 April to the Keeper of the Great Wardrobe for the annual livery of surcoats (here described as ‘robes’), furs and garters to all the knight companions.¹⁰

The sum of the evidence is, therefore, far from conclusive. Both Crowland and Rous are agreed that Prince Edward died in April 1484, but Crowland specifies a date ‘not far off the 9th, while Rous points towards the latter half of the month. The issue of the order for the Garter livery at some time during 24 April may be an indication of business as usual but this is by no means clear, and in other respects 24 April, with its flurry of administrative activity, was not an ordinary working day. Perhaps in the various royal documents of 24 April we are seeing the traces of the king’s receipt of the bad news, but this really is by no means clear. All this article can do, therefore, is to set out the few currently available pieces of the jigsaw in the hope that one day enough further pieces will emerge to enable us to identify the picture.

Notes

1. N Pronay and J Cox (eds) The Crowland Chronicle Continuations, 1459-1486, Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1986, p 171. In the original Latin, the phrase ‘not far off King Edward’s anniversary’ reads non multum vario ab anniversario Regis Edwadi (ibid p 170).

2. The anniversary to which the chronicler refers would probably not have been that of King Edward’s birth on 28 April. The definition and examples given in the complete Oxford English Dictionary indicate that in the medieval period the word was being used to refer only to the annual commemoration of deaths (‘Anniversary, adj. and n.’, Oxford English Dictionary, OUP, online version, 2017).

3. R Edwards, The Itinerary of King Richard III 1483-1485, Richard III Society, 1983, pp 17-18.

4. T Hearne (ed), Joannis Rossi Antiquarii Warwicensis Historia Regum Anglie, Oxford, 1745, p 217. Rous’s history refers to King Henry as being possessed of offspring of both sexes (ibid p 219), indicating that it was completed after the birth of Princess Margaret on 28 November 1489. Rous himself died in January 1491 (L Toulmin Smith (ed), The Itinerary of John Leland, vol 2, London, 1908, p 42).

5. D J Rothenberg, The Flower of Paradise, OUP, 2011, p 18.

6. The historian Alison Hanham also seems to have taken this view, since in her translation she has rendered this phrase as ‘at Easter-tide’ (Richard and His Early Historians 1483-1535, Clarendon Press, 1975, p 123).

7. Edwards, The Itinerary of King Richard III, pp 17-18.

8. This rule was first introduced as an addendum to the statutes of Edward III (L Jefferson, ‘MS Arundel 48 and the Earliest Statutes of the Order of the Garter’, English Historical Review, vol 109, 1994, p 378) but was still in force in Richard’s day (P J Begent and H Chesshyre, The Most Noble Order of the Garter, Spink, 1999, pp 59-60, 256- I should like to thank Peter Hammond for this reference).

9. J Anstis, The Register of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, vol 2, London, 1724, pp 41, 42.

10. R Horrox and P W Hammond (eds), British Library Harleian Manuscript 433, vol 2, Richard III Society, 1979, p 129. For a fuller explanation of this annual livery, see E Ashmole, The History of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, London, 1715, pp 163-4.

I should like to thank Annette Carson for providing me with the original suggestion for this article, and Peter Hammond for his invaluable support and feedback.