Cecily Bonville-Grey--Marchioness of Dorset by Sarah J. Hodder

Author:Sarah J. Hodder [Hodder, Sarah J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789049022
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The Early Tudor years

1485–1501

Christmas 1485 saw the Dorset family back together for the Yule celebrations for the first time in three years. England had now had several months to adjust to a new king on the throne and an end to the rule of the great Plantagenet kings. Henry Tudor was not only a new king, but he was also the first of a new dynasty. Declaring the start of his reign from the day before the battle of Bosworth, he ensured that all those who fought on Richard’s side would be classed as traitors.

Whatever Dorset’s relationship had been with Jane Shore, by the time he was back in the country in late 1485, Jane had been freed from prison and in an unpredicted turn of events, she was now a married woman. Whilst languishing in Ludgate prison, Jane had met a gentleman named Thomas Lynam. Thomas was the king’s solicitor who had visited her during her detention, and it seems that even at her least attractive in a prison cell, the charms that had won over a king shone through and the pair fell in love. King Richard, perhaps deciding she had been punished enough, agreed to the union, although not without expressing his disbelief. Writing to Bishop Russell in 1483, Richard mentioned the pending marriage: ‘signifying unto you that I showed unto us that our servant and solicitor Thomas Lynam, marvellously blinded and abused with the late [wife] of William Shore, now being in Ludgate by our commandment, hath made contract of matrimony with her, as it is said, and intendeth to our full great marvel, to proceed to effect the same. We for many causes would be sorry that he should be so disposed. Pray you therefore to send for him, and in that you goodly may exhort and stir him to the contrary. And if you find him utterly set for to marry her and none other will be advertised, if it may stand with the laws of the church, we be content, the time of the marriage being deferred to our coming next to London, that on sufficient surety being found of her good bearing, ye do send for her keeper and discharge him of our said commandment, by warrant of these committing her to the rule and guiding of her father or any other by your direction in the mean season.1 Presumably, whatever relationship had occurred between Dorset and Jane was now well and truly over. Jane and Thomas Lynam would go on to have a child together, and Jane herself survived well into her seventies outliving most of her contemporaries. Thomas More writing in his History of King Richard III in 1513, discussed her wit and beauty with the aside ‘and yet she liveth’.2 There is even a suggestion that he may have met her or at least seen her in person. She is believed to have died around 1527/28.

Upon his return to England, Dorset’s attainder was reversed by King Henry and his title of Marquis restored.

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