Arms of Francis Viscount Lovell (Wikimedia Commons)
The following guest post is from Ted White, author of a definitive article – Destinations and Departures – on Francis Lovell and his disappearance for the Richard III Society. I drew much from this article for my two posts – A Summary of the life of Francis Viscount Lovell and his Mysterious Disappearance – Part one and Part two
Thank you very much Ted. Over to you…..
HE DROWNED IN RIVER TRENT ACCORDING TO EDWARD HALL IN 1548
In his Chronicle, Edward Hall stated that ‘some affrme athat the lorde Lovell toke his horsse & would have fled over Trent, but he was not hable to recover the fartherside for the highnes of the banke and so was drowned in the ryver.’
The river makes a loop a mile or so to the north of the battlefield as it flows from Nottingham towards Newark.
MAP OF ESCAPE FROM STOKE FIELD.
Hall makes no attempt to identify the source of this explanation but it is hard to imagine that eye-witnesses to Lovell’s departure from the battlefield were able to describe exactly what happened 61 years later.
This explanation is unlikely because the river could be crossed easily prior to the dredging that made it the commercial highway it is today. When William Jessop surveyed the river in 1782, he found that there were about seventy shallows, with depths ranging from 21 inches (53cm) to 27 inches (69cm) in the 71 miles between Cavendish Bridge at Shardlow, Derbys. and Gainsborough, Lincs. and in 1825 Richard Brooke found that ‘The Trent, in the summer time… is fordable for horses, and even men’ and in 1828 Richard Shilton reported that ‘on the 20th of June, 1826, the River at this place measured but 47 yards in width and 21 inches in depth.’
In the previous twenty-four hours, the entire rebel army had crossed the river on its way to the battlefield apparently without mishap so they would have been aware of any difficulties the return journey presented.
Whilst it is possible for someone wearing armour to drown in shallow water that would not be very likely to happen to Lovell because as one of the commanders of the rebel army, it is very likely that Lovell left the battlefield with an escort of men-at-arms who would have been able to assist him in any difficulties.
DOUBTS
1. Hall provides no explanation of the source of his information.
2. The river was easy to ford at the time of the battle.
3. As a leading member of the rebel army Lovell would be expected to have an escort to protect him against accident or capture.
HE LIVED IN A CAVE ACCORDING TO FRANCIS BACON IN 1616
In his History of Henry VII, written in 1616 Francis Bacon suggested that ‘he lived a long time after in some cave or vault’. This statement is ambiguous because a cave is a natural opening in a hillside whilst a vault is part of a building.
If Bacon meant the former, the consequences would have been a complete change in Lovell’s lifestyle because it meant that he had to fend for himself instead of having servants to do his every bidding. Whilst it is not possible to know the size of Lovell’s household, some idea can be gleaned from the Ordinances and Regulations of the court of Edward IV which said that a Viscount was expected to have eighty attendants.
Not only would Lovell be deprived of servants, he would be without a bodyguard to protect him against detection and capture by Henry VII who as Bacon himself having described Henry’s spies abroad says ‘ He was not, indeed, without his spies at home, but it was by these means that he got to the bottom of the many conspiracies against him. and if spies are lawful against lawful enemies, much more against conspirators and traitors: besides, the people knowing spies were employed, it kept conspiracies under.’
DOUBTS
- Lovell was probably not capable of surviving ‘ for a long time after’ in such an unfamiliar environment as a cave.
2. He would have been very vulnerable to being captured by Henry’s spies but there is no record of this happening.
HE LIVED AND DIED IN AN UNDERGROUND VAULT AT MINSTER LOVELL MANOR HOUSE ACCORDING TO WILLIAM COWPER IN 1737
This explanation takes up the second possibility raised by Bacon that Lovell lived ‘a long time after…in a vault’ and comes from a letter from William Cowper, Clerk of the Parliaments written on 9th August 1737 to Rev. Francis Peck. In it Cowper recalled a conversation he had with the Duke of Rutland in 1728 when Rutland related a story he had heard twenty years earlier in 1708 so whilst the story appears to have a degree of provenance having come from an apparently reliable source, it amounts to nothing more than hearsay.
The letter says that … on the 6th of May, 1728, the present Duke of Rutland related in my hearing, that about twenty years then before, viz. in 1708, upon occasion of new laying a chimney at Minster Luvel, there was discovered a large vault or room under ground, in which was the entire skeleton of a man, as having been sitting at a table, which was before him, with a book, paper, pen, &c. &c., in another part of the room lay a cap, all much mouldered and decayed. Which the family and others judged to be this Lord Luvel, whose exit has hitherto been so uncertain.
Other versions appeared soon afterward, James Anderson writing in 1742 described the human remains as being a ‘ Man, in very rich Cloathing, seated in a Chair,- with a Table and a Mass-Book before him. The Body of whom was yet entire, when the Workmen entered, but upon Admission of the Air, soon fell to Dust’ so Anderson describes a dry atmosphere whilst Cowper refers to the mould and decay of a damp atmosphere. Then in 1750, Thomas Carte described the body as being, ‘the figure of a venerable old man sitting in a great chair, resting his elbow on a table, and supporting his head with one of his hands‘. If Lovell had survived to be a ‘venerable old man’ he must have been in hiding a long time because he was 31 years old at the time of the battle of Stoke.
In 1708, Minster Lovell Manor house was owned by the Coke family but Edward Coke had died on 13 April 1707 and his wife Carey on the 1st August 1707 leaving their son Thomas an orphan. Thomas was born on 17 June 1697 so he was eleven years old in 1708 when he told the story to his friend John Manners who later became the Duke of Rutland. John was born on 21 October 1696 so he would have been twelve years old but he was sufficiently impressed by the story to enable him to recall it many years later.
The manor house at Minster Lovel would not have been a good choice of hiding place because Henry had granted ‘the manors and lordships of Mynstrelovell’ together with other properties in southern England to his uncle Jasper Tudor on 2 March 1486, more than a year before the battle of Stoke.
The room is described by Cowper as being ‘a large vault or room under ground’. The ruins of Minster Lovell Manor House lie close by the River Windrush which frequently floods the site of the building, most recently in 2014 as shown below. The close proximity of the River Windrush ensures that the construction of any underground room would be futile because it would soon become waterlogged.
Minster Lovell with the Windrush in flood. Photo thanks to @Derek Hall at picturesofengland.
The picture shows Minster Lovell Manor House during the floods of 2014 which completely engulfed one of the towers. The site has been in public ownership since 1935 with English Heritage as the current custodians. They recount the story of the underground room in their guide book written in 1958 but it continues by saying ‘The cellar, if cellar it was, has not been found again’.
More recent enquiries show that none of the more than 220 records on the EH database for the house make any reference to the discovery of any trace of an underground room and a search by their staff in 2016 has failed to reveal any evidence of a vault or a chimney as reported below. ‘Despite an extensive search of our archival holdings I regret that I have been unable to find any evidence to confirm the existence of either vault or a chimney in our archive collections’. This finding is confirmed in the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire which states that ‘no such vault has ever been found’.
Choosing a hiding-place that required the assistance of someone outside to release the inmate is very unwise and rather surprising for a man whose career at the courts of Edward IV and Richard III meant that he must have usually made sound judgements. Even if the only available hiding-place had no internal door-latch it should not have been too difficult to improvise some means of emergency escape (like a piece of string).
DOUBTS
- Contradictory descriptions of the room emerged within a few years.
2. The story was originally told by an eleven-year old boy to his twelve-year old friend so it was hearsay from thirty years before Cowper wrote his letter.
3. The house belonged to Jasper Tudor granted to him by his nephew, Henry VII.
4. Any underground room would be waterlogged and unfit for use as a hiding place.
5. No evidence of an underground room has ever been found.
6. Hiding in a room which had no means of opening the door from the inside is not a credible action of a person like Lovell.
4. HE WAS STILL BEING SOUGHT IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND ACCORDING TO A LETTER PUBLISHED BY JAMES GAIRDNER IN 1875
The letter in question was written to Sir John Paston by Lovell’s mother-in-law, Lady Alice FitzHugh on 24 February 1488 and consists of two paragraphs, each about a different subject. In the first paragraph, she says that she understands that Paston wants to know if she has agreed to a financial transaction he had proposed she should make with Sir William Cabell. Lady Fitzhugh confirms that she has agreed to it and expects her first interest payment at Midsummer.
In the second paragraph she says that her daughter Anne has made great efforts to find her husband Francis and sent Edward Franke to look for him in the north, but Franke returned with no information as to Lovell’s whereabouts.
‘Also my doghtyr Lovell makith great sute and labour for my sone hir husbande. Sir Edwarde Franke hath bene in the North to inquire for hym; he is comyn agayne, and cane nogth understonde wher he is.’
The contents of this paragraph raise the question of why Lady Fitzhugh chose to inform Paston of her daughter’s efforts to search for her husband when she had no need to raise the matter at all, having already answered Paston’s question about her financial affairs in the first paragraph. Sir John Paston was Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1486 and was thus an officer of the crown answerable to Henry VII. He also fought against Lovell at Stoke and was rewarded with a knighthood. Lady FitrzHugh must have had a reason to add her second paragraph and she appears to have added it to deceive Paston into thinking that Lovell was still alive.
By the time Lady FitzHugh wrote her letter, Lovell had been found guilty of High Treason by Henry’s Act of Attainder passed after Bosworth, and Franke by the corresponding Act after Stoke.
Thus It would have been Paston’s duty to arrest them both as he had earlier been exhorted to arrest Lovell in letters dated 19 May 1486 and 24 January 1487 from the Earl and Countess of Oxford.
DOUBTS
- Lady FitzHugh would have been extremely disloyal to her daughter and son-in-law if the letter had been a genuine attempt to assist Paston.
2. She appears to have used her letter to deceive Paston into believing that Lovell was still alive and hiding somewhere in the North of England.
HE OBTAINED SAFE-CONDUCT IN SCOTLAND – ACCORDING TO SHEILAH O’CONNOR IN 1987
The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland records the documents to which the seal had been applied and includes an entry for 19 June 1488 which says that the king had granted a letter of safe-conduct to Lovell and three companions. In translation it reads ‘The King grants a letter of safe conduct to Lord Luvel, Thome Brockton, Rogero Hartilton, soldiers, and Olivero Frank, English and their servants and all other English persons which in their opinion, may come hither themselves, of whatever rank, status of order for one year after the arrival of these persons in the kingdom and then later extended at the pleasure of the king.’
Royal letters of safe-conduct were granted to extend the protection enjoyed by Scottish subjects to foreigners like pilgrims and merchants during the time they spent in Scotland. The recipients were provided with a copy of the letter which they showed to the mayor of a town they were visiting or the commander of a castle garrison so that they could be provided with the necessary protection whilst they remained in their jurisdiction. As ‘soldiers’ which the record describes them, Lovell and his companions would not have needed this protection.
Letters of safe-conduct had to clearly define to whom they had to extend their protection and for how long. Lovell’s letter meets neither of these requirements because it extends protection beyond Lovell and his party to ‘all other English persons which in their opinion, may come hither themselves’ and it defines the period of protection for them as being ‘for one year after their arrival ‘ so the providers of the protection had no guidance as to whether the letter remained valid or not and whether to grant or deny protection.
Regardless of any ambiguities in the wording of the letter, the simple fact was that the King of Scotland was completely unable to provide protection for Lovell and his companions having failed to protect his own father from being murdered eight days earlier.
For some years prior to 1488 James III, King of Scotland had been in conflict with his nobles. Matters came to a head in February that year, when James, his fifteen year-old son and heir joined rebel nobles with the collusion of his guardian, James Shaw the custodian of Stirling castle. When he joined them, the younger James gave orders that the rebels must under no circumstances ’lay violent hands upon his father’ and according to one account he required them to sign a written oath to that effect. However, whilst fleeing from a skirmish with the nobles at Sauchieburn, near Stirling on June 11 1488 (just eight days before the issue of Lovell’s safe-conduct), James III was murdered leaving his son to succeed him.
The Battle of Sauchieburn with Stirling Castle in the background as shown in a print 1836. Artist Thomas Allom. British Museum.
James was traumatised by his father’s murder and returned to Stirling where according to Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie he….daily passed to the Chapel Royal, and heard Matins and Evening-Song; in the which every Day the Chaplains prayed for the King’s Grace, deploring and lamenting the Death of his Father; which moved the King, in Stirling, to Repentance, that he happened to be counselled to come against his Father in Battle, where though he was murdered and slain… and he was constrained, by his Conscience, to use a Sign of Repentance and, for the same Cause, gart make a Girth of Iron, and weared it daily about him, and eiked, every Year of his Life, certain Ounces of Weight there to, as he thought good.’James wore the ‘Girth of Iron’ for the rest of his life as an act of mourning and repentance for failing to prevent the death of his father.
The extent of James’ remorse raises the question of how well he may have been able to protect others such as Lovell.
He was still wearing his ‘Girth of Iron’ when he married Henry VII’s daughter Margaret in 1503. James and Margaret Tudor. Seton Armorial. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
Whilst James IV was unable to take any action against the rebellious nobles, they were busily taking over the main offices of the Scottish state and revising its policy towards England by seeking alliances with Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy against Henry VII. Lovell and his companions would have been able to make significant contributions to such an action and the letter of safe-conduct was probably a means of trying to locate them and recruit them as allies.
DOUBTS
- Safe-conducts were issued to foreign nationals who were not able to defend themselves whereas Lovel and his companions were soldiers and perfectly capable of doing so.
2. The issue of a letter of safe-conduct in June 1488 has little prospect of securing protection for anyone because it is ambiguous in both the specification of who is entitled to receive safe-conduct and for how long.
3. The king of Scotland at the time was a traumatised fifteen-year-old boy who was unable to deliver protection to anyone.
4. A much more probable reason that the new regime produced their letter of safe-conduct was that they were using it as a means of locating English Soldiers who had rebelled against Henry VII in order to recruit them to the Scottish cause.
CONCLUSION
These five explanations of what happened to Lovell are all interpretations of subsequent ideas and discoveries: none of them take Lovell’s beliefs and actions at the time into account. A more detailed version of this article can be found in ‘Francis Lovell- Departures and Destinations’ in both the Members Research Papers and the Bulletin Archives sections of the Richard III Society website.
A new explanation of what happened to him, based on his belief in the Doctrine of Purgatory and chantry chapels together with documentary evidence from his time has been published in the June 2025 edition of the Ricardian Bulletin
NOTES:
1 Sir Henry Ellis (ed.), Hall’s Chronicle Containing The History of England During the Reign of Henry the Fourth and the Succeeding Monarchs to the End of the Reign of Henry the Eighth, Chronicle 1548, (1809), page 434
2 Francis Bacon, The History of Henry VII of England, written in the year 1616, now new written, (1796), page 44
3 Rev. Francis Peck, A Collection of Curious Historical Pieces, page 87, in Memoirs of the Life and Actions of Oliver Cromwell, (1740)
In 1732 Peck appealed to his readers to send him historical anecdotes which he published as Desiderata curiosa, or, A collection of divers scarce and curious pieces, in 1732 with a further volume in 1735. However, his readers continued to send him further anecdotes after he had published Desiderata curiosa so he published a further forty of them in a section called A Collection of Curious Historical Pieces he added to Memoirs of the Life and Actions of Oliver Cromwell when he published it in 1740.
4 James Gairdner (ed.), The Paston Letters, A New Edition Containing Upwards of Four Hundred Letters &c. Hitherto Unpublished, Volume III Edward IV. Henry VII. — 1471-1509. AD, (1875), Letter 889, page 326
5 Sheilah O’Connor, Francis Lovel and the rebels of the Furness Fells, The Ricardian, Vol. 2, March 1987, page 366
6 James Balfour Paul (ed.), The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland: AD1423 – 1513, (1882), entry 1738, page 370
An excellent, thought-provoking investigation. Thank you.