Richard III's 'Beloved Cousyn' by John Ashdown-Hill

Author:John Ashdown-Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752486710
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

Elizabeth Lambert

For the sake of clarity we had perhaps better establish that Edward IV’s last known mistress, Elizabeth Lambert, is the person who still frequently masquerades under the pseudonym of ‘Jane Shore’. This confusing alias was completely unknown during her lifetime, but was invented for her many years after her death by two seventeenth-century playwrights.39 No records appear to survive specifically linking Howard’s name with hers. However, we can be certain that he must have known her because very concrete evidence does exist to show that Howard was very well acquainted with her sometime husband William Shore.

Elizabeth Lambert had been married to William Shore by her father’s arrangement at a relatively early age. The marriage was evidently not a success, and Elizabeth claimed that Shore was impotent and incapable of consummating their union. Following her seduction by Edward IV she petitioned the Bishop of London for an annulment on the grounds of non-consummation. Her case was referred to the pope (1476). No doubt a commission of suitably experienced women was then appointed locally to carry out the usual physical examination, on behalf of the church, of William Shore’s capacity to consummate his marriage.40 After this somewhat embarrassing procedure Shore’s marriage with Elizabeth was, in due course, annulled. Having thus been formally declared impotent, William was subsequently unable to remarry.

He had been born in Derby in about 1436. In 1451–52 he was apprenticed to John Rankyn, citizen and mercer of London, and his apprenticeship may have included a period in Ghent.41 His sister married John Agard of Foston in the early 1470s. John Agard had been married before and had a son, Ralph, by his first wife.42 This step-nephew was later associated with William Shore. Shore was by this time both a mercer of London and a merchant adventurer, and was developing business connections in East Anglia.43 During the 1470s Lord Howard apparently became his patron.44 This must have been at about the same time as William’s wife (as Elizabeth Lambert then was) became Edward IV’s mistress, and the validity of the Shore marriage was first called into question.

Shore’s business links with John Howard can be discerned not only through Howard’s accounts, but also via the Colchester borough records. Shore, described as a merchant (mercator), first figures in the Colchester Court Rolls towards the end of 1476, when he appeared in person at Colchester’s Moot Hall to prosecute John Williamson in respect of a debt of 26s. 8d.45 Conducting the case for Shore was a Colchester lawyer, Richard Hervy, who was probably a relative of John Hervy, Colchester’s town clerk in the 1480s, and a lawyer known to have acted for Lord Howard.46 The alleged debt owed by a Colchester man to William Shore implies that this was not Shore’s first connection with the town. The following spring (on Thursday 19 March 1476/7) William appears again in the court rolls. Described this time as ‘citizen and mercer of London’, he is associated with Ralph Agard, gentleman, in the prosecution of Roger More of Colchester for debt.

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