The Mothers of Richard's Illegitimate Children.

Discoveries new to history, from the cutting edge of research

The mystery of the identity of the mother(s) of Richard's illegitimate children has formed, and continues to form, the central focus of our interest in the life and career of Richard III. We have invested thousands of pounds in the hiring of trained, professional Archivists who are diligently and thoroughly searching the archives of the world in their investigation of this matter.

Whilst we are not prepared at this stage to divulge the fullest extent of our expensively-gotten results, we are nevertheless happy to provide you with a good framework pertaining to our work and to the direction in which our discoveries have taken us thus far.

First of all, however, I would like to cover individually the supposed illegitimate children of Richard III and add a word regarding our views of their genuineness.

Richard III's illegitimate children are variously named as follows:

1) John of Gloucester

2) Katharine Plantagenet.

3) Richard of Eastwell

4) Stephen Hawes

There are also a further three alleged children mentioned in various modern works, whose names have not come to our knowledge. These children have not been concentrated upon and are not therefore considered in what follows here.

1) and 2).First, Dame Katharine Plantagenet and John of Gloucester were both, to our satisfaction, genuinely children of Richard III's. Dame Katharine married the prominent Yorkist William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, in 1484 and John of Gloucester was named Captain of Calais (although in name only; he did not actually act in that capacity) in 1485. Both were openly acknowledged by their father.

3).The case of Richard of Eastwell, however, is one which arouses some suspicion in us. In or around the year 1547,when he as a very old man, he claimed to be a latin-educated natural son of King Richard's, who had been brought up in secrecy and had been taken before his father but seldomly, and fled after Bosworth into the obscurity of working as a bricklayer in Kent.

It is considered by ourselves that such a course of action by him would not have provided the obscurity that he sought; his "upper-crust" accent for example would, against such a background, have made him most conspicuous. His story would therefore have been more convincing if he had hidden himself in some middle-class occupation such as Lawyery, where not only would his accent have blended in better but he would also have been better able to secure and protect himself during the reigns of the Tudors, who seem to have had this curious bent towards finding legal covers for their various clandestine acts of ridding themselves of their political opponents.

The commonsense conclusion would therefore seem to be that Richard of Eastwell was a low-born bricklayer who aspired to something better, saved money through remaining unmarried, paid to learn to read, taught himself Latin, perhaps modified his accent slightly, and then tried....successfully.... to secure himself a retirement cottage by proffering to the owner of Eastwell Place the story of his being an illegitimate son of Richard's.

We would concede, however, that his story does derive some colour from the fact that to make such a claim in Tudor times, irrespective of ones accent or background, was highly dangerous.

4).Stephen Hawes is something of a mystery to us. He is quoted here and there in modern works as a natural son of King Richard's. Frankly, however, although we admit that we have not allocated many of our resources to his case, we have failed to find a single contemporary, or even old, reference to him. We are aware of a Stephen Hawes who was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII, and who was also a poet, but if this man had been Richard's illegitimate son then Henry VII would have made very short work of him.

Hawes is the name of a small town in Yorkshire, very near Middleham.

We now come to the mainstream of our research work.

1). John of Gloucester.

We are working on the following hypothesis, namely:

That John of Gloucester was the illegitimate son of Richard III by Miss Katharine Holte, who was a Lady in Waiting at Pontefract Castle, that her father John Holte was a Pontefract man and that John of Gloucester was conceived in September 1469 and was born in June 1470.

The reference to Gloucester in his name is curious to us: we can find no connection between John, or Katharine Holte, and Gloucester; presumably it simply derives from his father's title Duke of Gloucester. Katharine Holte later married one Mr. Richard Buteller and went to live in Worcestershire, although presumably for personal reasons Richard appeared unprepared to refer to her by her married name. We have no idea what became of her.

2) Dame Katharine Plantagenet.

We are working on the following hypothesis, namely:

That Dame Katharine Plantagenet was the illegitimate daughter of Richard III by Lady Katharine Montferant, who was a Flanderian/Burgundian lady of noble birth, a few years older than Richard and came from what is now Montferland in the south of the Netherlands, that her father was called Lord Bertrand of Montferant, that her mother was called Dona Petronilla, and that Katharine met Richard in late 1470 when he was in exile in Flanders with Edward IV.

We further consider that:

Katharine Montferant was connected to the Woodvilles by way of a connection between her mother Dona Petronilla and Jacquetta Woodville (de Luxembourg) of nearby St. Pol., and for a time was in service with her there, that she conceived her child with Richard at Christmas 1470 in a chateau located at a place called Oostcamp which seems to have belonged to a friend of Edward IV's one Louis de Bruges, Lord of Gruuthus, who knew Lord Bertrand, that Richard left her with child to return with Edward IV to England (Yorkshire) in March 1471, that she sailed to Margate to follow him and then sought refuge in Edward IV's court under Jacquetta's daughter Elizabeth Woodville, (Edward IV's queen), that she subsequently had to endure Richard's marriage to Anne Nevill only months after the birth of her own child by him, and was then allocated in 1472 by Elizabeth Woodville to Woodville property in Bedfordshire, and that she was still there in Richard's reign where, having suffered very badly financially during the deposition of the Woodvilles by Richard in 1483,she was rewarded by him with a grant of £20 a year upon the occasion of their daughter's marriage to William Herbert in 1484. His backdating of this award (by 6 months) gave her some capital for the occasion.

We have not discovered what became of Katharine Montferant.

3) and 4).Relatively little work on Richard of Eastwell and Stephen Hawes has to date been carried out by ourselves.

The Fate of Richard's Illegitimate Children.

1). John of Gloucester was almost certainly judicially murdered by Henry VII, probably in 1488 upon accusation of conspiring with Yorkist dissidents the year before to flee to Ireland. We have no knowledge of any grave. He would have been just months either side of 18.

2) Dame Katharine Plantagenet's death, at the age of approximately 15 3/4, appears to be something to do with the aftermath of the Battle of Stoke in June 1487. Henry VII seems to have murdered her, although it remains possible that she died in childbirth.

In 2003 in the College of Arms we found a reference to a “Lady Herbert, Countess of Huntingdon” having been buried in London, together with data to the effect that there was no tombstone. Unfortunately, neither was there a date. However a second source we found seemed to suggest that “Lady Herbert” and “the Countess of Huntingdon” might not be the same person, but further research then suggested that irrespective of who Lady Herbert was, the only Countess of Huntingdon whose body is not accounted for during this period is actually Katharine Plantagenet, unless there was another marriage of Lord Herbert’s of which we have no record, but this is unlikely.

Anyway whatever the situation the burial location is the church of St. James Garlickhythe, just up the road from Baynard’s Castle where her grandmother lived. We have no idea where abouts in the church she is.

3) Richard of Eastwell appears to have died of old age in 1550. Certainly the church registers of Eastwell record his death in December of that year. His body is buried either in the church or in the churchyard at Eastwell, (Kent). If his story is true, then he would have been 81. There is no known grave marker; a tomb ascribed to him at the site is almost certainly not his.

4) Stephen Hawes is a mystery to us. We have nothing whatsoever on his death.

This is the current state of affairs with regard to our working hypotheses. Doubtless they will continue to change as further information comes in.

NOTE

Other researchers and interested parties are asked to respect the fact that we have gone to great expense to obtain the information which has led to the formation of our working hypotheses above, and we have yet to exploit our findings in a way which may recover for us as much of our outlay as possible in order to fund further research elsewhere. Naturally therefore we shall not be releasing any further information free of charge until we are ready to do so.

---Michael Alan Marshall

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