Lady Eleanor Talbot

Eleanor Talbot was the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. In 1449 or 1450 she married Sir Thomas Butler (son of Ralph Butler Lord Sudeley), who died before March 1461. In the political turmoil surrounding the change of monarchs then, the widowed Eleanor's father-in-law took back one of the two manors he had settled on her and her husband when they married, but he did not complete the required paperwork by obtaining a license for the transfer of title, and the new king Edward IV seized both the properties.

Just as happened with Elizabeth Woodville about two years later, Eleanor went directly to King Edward to ask him to return to her the property she was entitled to from her dead husband. Edward (who seems to have preferred women older than himself) was more interested in her person than her property, but she insisted on marriage. Edward therefore married her in secret (or, at least, made a legally binding contract to do so). The priest who testified to having performed the ceremony was Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells. Edward married Elizabeth Woodville in 1464, and it is surmised that one reason the marriage was not announced publicly was the danger that Eleanor would come forward with the news of her earlier marriage to the king. Eleanor died in a convent in June 1468 and was buried in the Church of the White Carmelites, Norwich (England).

Edward made Stillington Chancellor of England, along with other powerful and lucrative posts, and this may have been a reward for keeping the secret about Eleanor. But in the 1470s Stillington apparently let the cat out of the bag about Lady Eleanor to King Edward's unstable and untrustworthy brother, George, Duke of Clarence. Edward threw his brother and Stillington into the Tower of London; Clarence was tried before Parliament (with Edward himself as his accuser) in January 1478, convicted, and sentenced to be executed.

The reason Clarence was killed privately in the Tower, whether he was really drowned in a "butt of Malmsey" wine or not, may have been that Edward wanted to ensure that he did not have an opportunity to disclose in public the secret that would make his brother's children illegitimate and himself the next in line for the throne. Stillington, Edward believed, could be trusted to have learned his lesson from that example (or, as some historians suggest, Stillington's having possession of the documents proving the pre-contract may have been what protected him). Only after Edward's death did Stillington come forward with that evidence to prevent Edward IV's son from being crowned as Edward V. This left Richard III, a younger brother of Edward IV, the only heir to the throne.

At a meeting of the upper houses of Parliament on 9 June 1483, Stillington presented the evidence of the pre-contract, including documents and other witnesses, and Buckingham told Morton afterward that he had believed that evidence when he saw it but had now changed his mind. Those records were lost, along with all the others about the case, when Henry VII ordered them to be destroyed with being read as soon as he came to the throne; so efficiently were his orders carried out that only one copy of Titulus Regius has ever been found.

After Richard's death, adherents of the Tudor dynasty claimed that Elizabeth Lucy had been the woman Stillington testified he had married to Edward, but this was a ruse to throw doubt on the whole story of his prior marriage. Some historians do think Elizabeth Lucy was the mother of Edward IV's bastard son Arthur (Plantagenet), Viscount Lisle (1461-1542), but most say Arthur's mother was Elizabeth Wayte. (Arthur was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1540 on suspicion of plotting to betray Calais to the French; when the verdict came in acquitting him, he had a heart attack and died.)