I know some people in Cairo are a little slow on the uptake, but there are several independent sources, as shown by the Revealing Richard III blog. In a recent series of articles in the Ricardian Bulletin, the team cite:

  1. Titulus Regius, as composed from the petition to the Three Estates on 26 June 1483;
  2.  Richard III’s letter to Lord Mountjoy, Captain of Calais, two days later;
  3. The Crowland Chronicle, which independently confirmed the above letter;
  4. Phillippe de Commynes‘ (above left) contemporaneous (1483) reports to Louis XI;
  5. Eustace de Chapuys‘ (below left) 1533-4 letters to Charles V, showing that Henry VIII had a lesser dynastic claim to the English throne than Catherine of Aragon, his patron’s aunt;
  6. A 1486 Year Book, detailing Henry VII’s attempts to persuade Bishop Stillington to confess so that Titulus Regius could be annulled and not just destroyed unread.
    The last three all name Stillington or refer to the “Bishop of B”, such that only Bath and Wells fits that description in England during 1483-7. Birmingham, Blackburn, Bradford and Bristol didn’t have Bishops in those days.

In fact, by building on John Ashdown-Hill’s decade of painstaking research, the Revealing Richard team even link to the text of Titulus Regius. These points don’t even mention Stillington’s imprisonment, the Desmond executions, Clarence’s imprisonment and execution, Catesby’s execution, Lady Eleanor’s land dealings and testament together with Lord Sudeley’s adverse treatment and More‘s “Lady Lucy” false trail.


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  1. They prefer to believe that Richard made it up, working from his card index of available ladies in the 1460s and the squaring it with the lady’s surviving relatives, who never made any protest about it, even after 1485. (Presumably his ghost was too scary.)

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  2. […] course, despite those who still claim that Edward IV’s 1461 secret marriage didn’t happen, Louis XIV, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Andre Previn and Ed Sheeran have all […]

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  3. […] as their father was already married when he tied the knot with Elizabeth Woodville. The woman was Lady Eleanor Talbot sister of Elizabeth, the mother of Anne Mowbray the deceased child bride of Richard Shrewsbury. Now […]

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  4. […] was a rumour that Edward had first (secretly) contracted to marry a lady called Eleanor Talbot. She, like Elizabeth, was a widow, and (also like Elizabeth) she wouldn’t give in to Edward’s […]

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  5. […] this charming portrait  be of Elizabeth Talbot, Viscountess Lisle –  Lady Eleanor Butler/Boteler nee Talbot’s niece –  as  suggested by the late historian John Ashdown-Hill?  Elizabeth was born about […]

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  6. […] had the wit to marry Elizabeth Woodville publicly in a church, the tale of his previous marriage to Lady Eleanor Talbot would have fallen at this hurdle, unless Eleanor had made a protest at the wedding. Would she have […]

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  7. […] of paraphrasing. Now then, we all know that Edward’s “marriage” to Elizabeth Woodville was bigamous and the children […]

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  8. […] is indeed descended from the first Earl of Shrewsbury, “Old Talbot”, whose daughter Lady Eleanor was Richard’s sister-in-law.2) Sir Gilbert Talbot II, whose father was among Barbara’s […]

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  9. […] a casual matter of picking up his phone and calling his lawyers! But no! Half a tick! The marriage was invalid! It was bigamous because naughty Edward had got himself another wife first. Tut, tut. Richard, of […]

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  10. […] Talbot, Duchess of Norfolk, lived there and was also buried there. She was the younger sister of Eleanor Talbot, first wife of Edward IV. Her only child, Anne Mowbray, was buried at the Minories. She’d been […]

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  11. […] including the dramatic climax in the council chamber at the Tower of London on the 13th June.  The Talbot pre-contract,  i.e. marriage,  is covered and mention of the letter written by Cicely Neville to her son, […]

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  12. […] Edward appears to have been careless enough to have entered into a precontract with someone else, Lady Eleanor Talbot. This awkward tangle meant that Elizabeth wasn’t really married to Edward at all, she was his […]

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  13. […] Warner‘s latest tome has arrived and soon raised memories of Ashdown-Hill’s Eleanor, as two of the daughters in question – Joan of Acre (twice) and Elizabeth of Rhuddlan – […]

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  14. […] she is, joining the list with Edward IV (twice), Louis XIV, John Lennon, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Sir Andre Previn, Ed Sheeran, Dan Snow […]

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  15. […] Sudeley Castle, as that establishment is glad to claim to this day. It also had connections with Eleanor Talbot (Butler). Richard, of course, fought at Tewkesbury, which the Yorkists won […]

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  16. […] the Isabella-Mortimer regime. She is the only one of the trio to be the ancestress of her namesake, Lady Eleanor Talbot, whose death occurred exactly 131 years after […]

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  17. […] know for a fact that the lady involved was Eleanor Talbot-Butler, not Elizabeth Lucy. So here More is stating a plain untruth. That he states the Duchess of York […]

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  18. […] This post is prompted by a recent forthright statement on social media to the effect that Edward IV was not married to Lady Eleanor Talbot. […]

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  19. […] illegitimate because Edward IV neglected to marry their mother. Rather carelessly, he already had a secret wife.  So, was Richard to stand by and knowingly allow a baseborn boy to ascend the throne? Thus […]

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  20. […] Bath and Wells.  This precontract was basically an earlier marriage that Edward IV had made with Lady Eleanor Butler, nee Talbot daughter of John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, which, obviously,  left him unfree to marry anyone […]

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