Coldridge Church; Conspiracy; the Canns, Connections and Beatrix Cresswell; Part Three; White Rose and Golden Broom

 

Part 3; White Rose and Golden Broom

 (Read Part 1 and Part 2)

'He was taken to Taunton and accompanied the king as a prisoner on the triumphal march to Exeter where the monarch was welcomed with jubilation…Perkin's wife Katherine was fetched from St Michael's Mount. The king took a shine to her, and she was accepted into his court under the wing of the queen and eventually remarried. While she was in Exeter, Perkin was humiliated by being forced to repeat his confession in front of her …' (Devon Perspectives).

'Perkin Warbeck, another pretender to Henry VII’s throne, was given a similar Tudor spin – an odd name, humble background, documented torture, beatings to the face – to paper over the strong possibility, backed by crowned heads across Europe, that he was the genuine Richard, Duke of York (the youngest of the princes in the Tower).'  (British Heritage)

Cast of White Rose & Golden Broom

C20 Coldridge links; Beatrix Cresswell ‘s Pageant

‘It is a spell! A spell! That I have drawn from Classenwell’ (From White Rose and Golden Broom)

    Although along the various paths of my research I’d noticed that White Rose and Golden Broom; a Drama of Exeter, a pageant written by Devon author Beatrix F Cresswell had been performed on 15th June 1910 in the Palace Gardens of Exeter Cathedral, I didn’t really expect to go out of my way to get a copy of the text. 

Exeter Cathedral from the east
cc-by-sa/2.0 - © David Smith -
geograph.org.uk/p/3539908

In this day and age, when on demand we can get our fill of historical fix through media streaming, this play's title didn’t sound too enticing. I knew that the pageant's subject was Katherine/Catherine Gordon, sometime wife of infamous impostor Perkin Warbeck, but she I'd believed to be an inconsequential medieval lady who I’d not ever thought of as being of great interest to us Devon folk. Yes, I was curious, but from what I knew of her assumed many other of Cresswell’s texts would be more significant than the script of a probably minor pageant; White Rose and Golden Broom sounded an obscure drama. But after visiting Coldridge church and stumbling upon the information about the medieval mystery that may be held within the hidden capillaries of the building's stones and ancient wood,  I soon changed my mind. Anyone involved in the Devon network of familial or social networks focused around the puzzle of the lost princes is worthy of scrutiny and, as  its subject was widow of one of those who’d impersonated the younger of the princes, a text featuring Katherine/Catherine Gordon deserved at least a look in. What take did Beatrix Cresswell have on that lady – about who until now the only fact at my fingertips was that reputedly she was one of the most beautiful women of her age?

So thanks to my local and still open branch of West Somerset Libraries I ordered a copy of the pageant via Inter library loans. I waited its arrival eagerly…

    … We know that Beatrix Cresswell visited and wrote about Coldridge Church. Several of the ‘John Evans is Edward V researchers’ mention her as ‘expert’ in her identification of the stained glass picture at the Chancel Chantry as an authentic portrait of the young king – (though her expertise is I note taken for granted rather than esteemed)! They mention that Cresswell connected Coldridge with Cecily Bonville (See end of Part Two). They also say that Cresswell confirmed that the portrait on the stained glass is of Edward V: ‘The early 16th century stained glass portrait of Edward V. Confirmed by expert Beatrix Cresswell to be genuine’. (See MedievalPotPorri). Cresswell’s expertise is frequently called up in descriptions of Coldridge church and (though as yet I’ve not been able to read her notes first hand) it seems that she was one of the first Devon historians to express puzzlement about its singular features:

‘Early in the 1920’s, the notable church historian, Beatrix Cresswell, puzzled why the isolated village of Coldridge had such a significant church and also why it contained one of the very few stained glass portraits of Edward V, one of the Missing Princes in the Tower. For students of the Wars of the Roses, St Matthew’s should not be missed!’ (Visit MidDevon) 

The same commentator notes that:

'As far back as the writings of Beatrix Cresswell in the early 1900’s, learned authors have been puzzled by the rare stained glass window of Edward V in the Evans Chantry at Coldridge Church, Devon, one of only four contemporary depictions of him in glass’. (A Portrait of Edward V)

And another says

'We have a wonderful hand written account of the church by Beatrix Cresswell around 1905 when she comments: "The church is built on a plateau and around it gather the few cottages of which the village now consists … In former times it may have been of greater importance. Nothing now remains to explain why this distant, and somewhat dreary spot (!!) should have so fine a church'. (I’ve mislaid the source of this quote, will insert when located again).

    You may notice a discrepancy in these commentators’ attribution of the year of Cresswell’s own visit to Coldridge; one casually refers to the early 1920s, whilst the latter one above specifies 1905. Why does this matter? Well, after White Rose and Golden Broom arrived from the library airwaves and I began browsing through to get the gist of the text I kept wondering if Beatrix Cresswell had been impelled to write the drama because of her curiosity following her trip to the church.

Start of Introduction of White Rose and Golden Broom

    In light of the play’s conclusion, in which Cresswell apparently envisages a future in which England is peopled by an ‘offshoot of Plantagenet’, implying an eventual unbroken Royal line of Plantagenet monarchs, I am tempted to think she may have been inspired to write her play after seeing first hand the stained glass with the rare portrait of Edward V and the other unique church features which are discussed by those who write about the Coldridge mystery (see Medieval PotPourri). However, until I’ve had a chance to see first hand when the writer visited Coldridge, and if the play was first drafted shortly afterwards it is only a hunch on my part.

    For Cresswell’s pageant may also have been influenced by earlier literary texts. Devon’s C17 dramatist John Ford had written a play titled Perkin Warbeck, then more recently Mary Shelley’s novel The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck; a Romance, published in 1830, had re-imagined the events around Perkin Warbeck’s rebellion. Most importantly Shelley’s initial premise was that Perkin the impostor was actually and really Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York - younger brother of Edward V and the other lost prince  - an opinion that recent researchers into the Coldridge mystery are very much in tune with.

'It is not singular that I should entertain a belief that Perkin was, in reality, the lost Duke of York ... no person who has at all studied the subject but arrives at the same conclusion.' Mary Shelley, See Preface to Perkin Warbeck). 

(There is much current debate as to whether P/Richard made a brief diversion en route to Exeter to meet up with his elder brother Edward, alias John Evans at or near Coldridge - (eg See Medieval PotPourri). But no, I have not yet read Shelley’s Warbeck novel, though given the complementary reviews it attracts I hope to find time and space to do so one day. (See for example 'The politics of ambivalence: romance, history, and gender in Mary W. Shelley's Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck').

    A very quick browse of and around Fortunes is enough to tell me that the novel is not superficial in its re-imagining of Perkin Warbeck as Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, for Shelley obviously immersed herself in her subject; The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck has a formidable cast of characters and comes with an incredibly impressive understanding of all political, social, historical and genealogical repercussions pertaining to the events of that rebellion. Was Beatrix Cresswell familiar with Shelley’s fictional version of Perkin Warbeck? Perhaps it was the determined argument of the novel that persuaded the Devon author to give credence to the theory that Warbeck was Richard of Shrewsbury and not impostor.

    Cresswell’s work certainly suggests she was as equally determined as Mary Shelley to investigate relevant historical sources. Although she doesn’t mention Shelley’s novel in her Introduction to White Rose and Golden Broom, the author specifically refers to one or two other literary predecessors whose texts had influenced her understanding of her drama’s background, the chronicler/poet Bernard of Toulouse (Bernard Andre) and Miss Strickland (Agnes Strickland) - both of whom had commented on the events which had led to Katherine /Catherine’s arrival in Exeter at the same time as her husband. Toulouse described how Henry VII had ‘summoned Catherine from Cornwall, confronted her with her husband and forced Perkin to confess his imposture to her ..’. Miss Strickland had written that ‘Catherine was very much attached to Warbeck and [perhaps a crucial observation for Cresswell] certainly at the time of her marriage she believed him to be Richard Duke of York’ (see Lives). In her Introduction Cresswell also explains the play’s real links with Exeter’s past. However, notwithstanding her acknowledgment of her pageant’s historical backdrop and its background sources Cresswell says that her own take on the drama is ‘wholly fictitious.’. She adds that

'[her story] represents Catherine Gordon returning to Exeter some years after Warbeck’s death, to look for a child, his son and heir, abandoned in the city when she was brought here by Henry VII'. (See White Rose and Golden Broom, available through Devon Library Services)

    Not all of the plot of the pageant is fiction however. It is often quoted that Catherine Gordon did have a son with her husband Perkin Warbeck; the child was born in 1496; and according to some sources another baby was born, but didn’t survive. Similarly, sources suggest that when Perkin Warbeck left Cornwall to prepare for battle the son was left with his mother on St Michael’s Mount, and therefore must have been with her when she arrived in Exeter. However, in another version, an alternative account of the rebellion, Catherine had a miscarriage. Anyway, whatever the ‘truth’ about a real son, in the reinvented pageant version by Cresswell Catherine has recently born a son, it’s implied his birth was shortly before her arrival in Exeter:

‘Scarce twice seven days had shone upon his life,/before by Henry’s order I arrived/in this sad city … my babe, son of the hapless youth/called Perkin Warbeck – Richard Duke of York …' (From White Rose and Golden Broom)

     In Cresswell’s pageant the plot’s development is construed around the device of ‘crossing wires’, a mix-up between two key characters, which inevitably resolves at the final denouement. Catherine’s return to Exeter with her second husband to find her once deserted child is mirrored by the intent of her husband Sir Matthew Cradock, who has accompanied his wife on her visit, but with an ulterior motive; ‘I have come to Exeter on matters of my own’ … he informs Amyas Bampfield, adding that Catherine has ‘taken our childless state most grievously to heart’ and that ‘since my wife is so set upon finding an heir’ [they have come to Exeter] ‘to supplicate at the holy shrines here for an heir’. However, Sir Matthew's  intent is to ‘find an heir this very day’. He is looking for a son, an heir, a child he can ‘adopt’, to take the place of their non-existent son; she is seeking to reunite with the real son she left behind in Devon. Inevitably, in their corresponding search, both husband and wife settle upon the same boy – Edmund, a ‘foundling without fortune’, who has been brought up as chorister at the cathedral.

 
    The eventual resolution, the clearing up of confusions and play’s conclusion – when Catherine is reunited with Edmund – indicate a degree of historical revisionism on the part of the author.  I read the play's ending as suggesting that Edmund the son-found-again, as heir of Catherine’s disgraced husband, last of the Plantagenet line, is not son of an impostor, but as descendant of Richard Duke of York, is progenitor of a renewed Plantagenet line. Catherine's belief in her husband's true status as the real deal is prefigured at the beginning of the play when she explains to her servant Alice that

 'though my ill-starred husband had confessed

 A base imposture it may be that threats 

Of torture wrung from him the sordid tale.

His death was fore-determined, sentence passed.

It little matters unto dying men

Under what name they die sure their true names are writ Heaven.'

and at the play's conclusion, when both the Priest and Matthew, now accepting of the couple's 'new', son, apparently reassure Catherine on her sudden change of mind and consequent outburst of doubt about Edmund's ancestry: 'since branch and flower of Royal Plantagenet/are dead and withered like this withered broom'. The priest consoles her:

Lady, not so, thou know'st plantagenista

is evergreen, and does not fade away.

But since the day that Geoffrey of Anjou

First pluckt and wore it in humility

It grew and flourished till in toppling pride

This weakling stood supporter of a throne.

Though now no longer it may wreathe a crown.

Yet I declare that as this golden flower

Still gleams in beauty on the withered stem,

So shall the Royal name Plantagenet

In England ever be an honoured name

Since what is great and noble cannot die.

and Matthew adds 

'Tis so, the world in future times shall see

In days to come, no ancient house shall stand

But that from sire to sire is reckoned back

To some ancestral off-shoot of Plantagenet.

And far and wide in continents unknown

Where English feet shall tread and English tongues

Shall break the silences of virgin woods,

The English people peopl'ing half the world

Building new homes 'neath unfamiliar stars,

Though men of English race to Britain's skies

Unknown, shall yet know this, and make a boast

Of their descent from Royal Plantagenet.

 

Devon Canon/s

     Whatever its take on the repercussions arising from the real-life drama of Perkin Warbeck in Exeter in the C15 I believe that, just as many other long-forgotten or and now sidelined texts by women linked with the county of Devon, Beatrix Cresswell’s little pageant deserves to be brought to the literary light again, reinstated as part of Devon’s literary compendium. Ok, I’m sure there’ll be people who stumble on this blog post one day for whom both author and text will come across as being obscure and utterly irrelevant in our social-media judgement driven age. They’ll quickly pass on by. But speaking from the point of view of someone (yes, me) who is often/always probably writing from the edges, living an interior life in the dreamy shadows well away from the central stage, White Rose and Golden Broom is a real find. Cresswell’s play is filling in gaps, reinventing a lost Devon his/her story from the perspective of a woman from the deep past whose own forgotten role in our county’s narrative journey can now be brought back from the shadows and reassessed – especially in light of this post and its links with the current preoccupation with rejigged scenarios around the events of the disappearance of the two princes. One of my themes in this post’s Part 2 has been to suggest that research into the scenario ‘John Evans may be Edward V’ at Coldridge should take into account the possibility of contemporary women (many of whom lived within reach of Coldridge) having an active role in events, or at least providing us with the chance to scrutinise their genealogical charts to suss out more hidden connections between individuals of the time who may have been involved.

    The ‘heroine’ woman in question in the pageant, the play’s main character, ie Catherine Gordon, is someone not considered particularly central to Devon’s history. As such she, outlying Devon female from her-story, stands for many women who have popped in and out of focus through the centuries, whose journeys through their landscape and times have been more or less erased from historical consciousness - except for traces of names on old documents such as genealogical charts and/or old records of land transactions etc. We can only readmit the hidden women into a viable chronology through imaginative reconstruction, out of the box thinking, which usually takes some kind of research into those who circled around their lives so as to intuit into the blanks where they still roam around in the shadowed corners.

Catherine Gordon enters the pageant.

    Apparently obscure dramatic scripts such as White Rose and Golden Broom may not read as important stand alone texts, but they are noteworthy as literary samples written by women in and about their local landscapes (topographical and historical, metaphorical) where the texts rejig the accepted and default narrative journey of a community’s past. As such, they are literary gold dust.

Pageant tradition

    And Beatrix Cresswell was not the only woman from Devon to write a pageant for performance in celebration of a historical occasion. Several pageants written by other local female writers were staged by local performers during the early to mid C20. Indeed, whereas in the post-modern media driven world pageant as important literary form tends to be dismissed as of minor import, at the beginning of the C20 according to one recent source pageants in general became a popular literary trend:

 

Today pageants are certainly not forgotten, but they are rarely per- formed and do not attract the number of performers, organisers and spectators that they did in their heyday. It is easy, therefore, to overlook their importance in communities across the country during the twentieth century. Pageants generated considerable comment in the press, both local and national, and featured frequently in novels and plays. Moreover, they spawned a substantial culture of printed ephemera and souvenirs, including programmes and books of words, cutlery and crockery, com- memorative medals and so on.The verb ‘to padge’ or ‘to paj’, meaning to participate in a pageant, was in popular usage during the first third of the twentieth century. (See Restaging the Past; Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain; Edited by Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Alexander Hutton, and Paul Readman).

    There may well be intertextual connections between some of the local Devon-authored pageants. Cresswell’s Exeter drama of 1910 certainly apparently became some kind of model for at least one other female writer. In 1932 Mary Kelly, founder of The Village Drama Society, wrote A Pitiful Queen: an Episode in the Civil War June 30 1644, which, like that of her predecessor’s is also set in Exeter. A Pitiful Queen takes as its subject another royal woman (Henrietta Maria) who visited Exeter during the Civil War and gave birth to her daughter Princess Henrietta Maria Stuart in the city.  Fair enough, the apparent similarities between the two pageants may just be coincidence; Kelly may just have been conforming to the by then established pageant convention, which according to Restaging the Past ‘not infrequently blended fact and fiction … [was] always primarily concerned with the past and its representation in the present’. Also apparently key to the pageant tradition as it developed was a plot which kept in line with the facts as they were known about the history it represented:

'Many pageants insisted on faithfulness to the historical record and strove for ‘authenticity’, as far as possible, in costume, dialogue and content.’ (Restaging)

     It would be fascinating to study both these pageants in terms of links between the authors'  approaches and their faithfulness to historical facts. I have not yet had a chance to read the text of Kelly’s A Pitiful Queen (and to do so would be a remit beyond this blog post), but certainly (as she noted in her Introduction Cresswell’s White Rose and Golden Broom is ‘wholly fictitious’, its narrative straying quite radically from the known facts about Catherine Gordon’s links with Exeter.

    However, as already noted above, for the most part White Rose and Golden Broom describes real events of Exeter’s (and its Cathedral’s) history, including representations of real local characters presented against an authentic local background which include evocations of Devon landscapes such as Dartmoor. But slightly deviating away from absolute authentic depiction of its plot’s background, the pageant merges its realism with fragments taken from folk-tale, legend and local myth. Cresswell would have been steeped in Devon’s surfeit of tales that especially swirled around its moorland landscapes. One of the pageant’s characters, ‘The Witch of Classenwell Pool’, the soothsaying ‘crooked aged crone’ who ‘shuffles across the pavement’ to stir up the action in Act 1 is a renamed ‘witch of Sheepstor’, who according to legend haunted the pool, now usually named Crazywell, which was said to be bottomless and thus source of various local lore. 

'What crooked aged crone/shuffles across the pavement?'

According to folk-tales the Sheepstor witch was said to give incorrect, twisted information to those who consulted her for advice. In White Rose Cresswell’s witch declares ‘I am the power that dwells at Classenwell/ … there Perkin Warbeck once/climbed arduously to learn what should befall/his future, and he read the fated words/across the mystic pool’. 

As far as I’m aware there is no factual or a priori historical linking of Perkin Warbeck with either witch or pool; Cresswell’s plot is perhaps a version of traditional lore in which it is the C14 Piers Gaveston who seeks to know the future from gazing into pool’s depths.

    In my imagination I like to believe that Beatrix Cresswell's creative decision to think out of the default historical box was connected to her visit to Coldridge church. In my fantasy she decided to construct a narrative whose main plot involved bringing Catherine Gordon, Perkin Warbeck’s (Richard Duke of York’s) widow back to Exeter to reunite with her baby son so as to suggest, via the symbolic association of planta genista, the broom plant, that Perkin Warbeck was the real deal, the lost prince assumed dead who’d returned to reclaim the Plantagenet royal line; a descent which therefore wasn’t stamped out, but in actuality through the imagined descent of sons from Catherine’s son onwards, is still thriving. I read Cresswell’s pageant as a recasting of our understanding of the chronology of the past, a creative strategy which she may have been inspired to use after coming upon the portrait of the lost prince Edward V at Coldridge church and pondering on its implications.

 

(PS apologies if not all of the sources quoted above have been attributed).

Coldridge Church; Conspiracy; the Canns, Connections and Beatrix Cresswell Part One

 

Coincidentally, and to my delight and surprise - a week after I posted this trio of pieces inspired by Coldridge and the unsolved Edward V affair the mystery has made national news, I believe for the first time, Here is a link to the version published in The Mail. I've not read the first account in The Telegraph as I don't subscribe to that paper but see Edward V The Coldridge Mystery and it's also available on Yahoo

Part 1

Setting the Scene/s

‘And finally did Elizabeth Wydville who died in 1492 in Bermondsey Abbey go to her grave with the knowledge that at least one of her sons was safe and living in rural Devon on his half-brother’s property?’ MedievalPotporri

‘When the princes’ mother, Elizabeth Woodville, sent her daughters out of sanctuary and into Richard III’s care in spring 1484, can she really have believed he had killed his nephews months earlier? Her daughters were a threat to Richard; the eldest, Elizabeth of York, was to marry Henry Tudor if he could win Richard’s throne. Yet they all survived. The simplest explanation for all this is that she knew her sons were safe’. The simplest explanation for all this is that she knew her sons were safe’.(Princes in the Tower)

         It began with a mid Devon church ...

        It is not often that apparently disparate passions and projects come together in and from an unexpected source - in such a way that they demand that one stop everything else and step off at a tangent from a schedule to explore a different journey than originally planned - then lead unexpectedly to a new project interweaving all of them. Such happened to me back in the late summer during and after a mini day trip back to explore a couple of churches in Devon.

 
     We all love a conspiracy! Such I found out of the blue in the second church of my tour. (The first church, Nymet Rowland, just up the rolling Devon hills from Lapford, with its porch entrance carvings of ancient spirals, sun-circle iconography and mysterious Roman letters spelling EMER was equally fascinating). 

Photo Nymet Rowland church

But when I reached Coldridge Church, - 

where, just as with neighbouring St Bartholomew’s at Nymet Rowland, the door was not locked - and not only that, but the church was beckoning me inside with the seasonal visual and scented arrangements of its recently arranged glories of local harvest fruits and flowers still displayed on the window sills and tables. The porch displayed a dazzle of golden sunflowers and inside, gracing one of Coldridge’s ancient Chantry Chapels, when I saw the green apples circling the base of a vase of sunshine whose light cascaded upon the bowl of the season’s last yellow roses, I knew something special was in store; and not just harvest’s feast of apples.

Photo Harvest display Coldridge

Happily taken back to various nostalgias of my own childhood in other not far away Devon churches quickly it felt as if I was being pulled back, firstly to childhood where, every year in North Tawton and Cheldon, two other nearby churches, I’d spent many childhood and teenage autumnal hours decades ago, along with my mother and other local women, decorating ancient brass paraphernalia with garden and nature’s glories, ready for the forthcoming Harvest service spectacular. (Sadly in my case the splendid floral arrays didn’t ever materialise; my artistic talents did not, and still do not lie in the realms of flower arranging – much I’m sure to my mother’s disappointment).

       (A small digression here. A moan! How different here the church’s fate from that of Cheldon, the tiny church - which I still visit fairly regularly to place flowers on my parents’ grave). Here, at Coldridge and Nymet Rowland, the churches are obviously cherished; whether out of religious fervour or commitment, or purely because they are places of deep beauty and historical fascination, as soon as the visitor steps inside he or she is aware of a local community taking care to reach out care for and preserve their parish church, to celebrate it as unique fount of historical knowledge. In contrast, at Cheldon, lately neglected and (though arguably in accordance with the demands of rewilding) left to the attention of nesting swallows, prolific weeds, and general deterioration, there’s a sense of abandonment - which almost veers towards contempt for the Old and old-fashioned; even an aggressive security alarm sounding out to anyone who dares to venture to the nearby gate to contemplate at the beauty of the wooded Little Dart valley down there below the meadows).

***

     In the fifties, from fields near our home on the ridge north of nearby North Tawton we could see Coldridge on the sky line; it’s only four miles away and my friends and I, child sleuths, would sometimes decide to have an ‘adventure’ (mode of Lone Pine Club or Famous Five), take our duffle bags stuffed with sweets and drinks and wander through the fields and along paths and into nearby Ashridge woods. We’d get the occasional glance of the village on the far ridge. There'd be a mystery to solve. We were certain. We must wander along the lanes over the fields until we reached the place. But no, we didn’t ever quite make Coldridge. Usually our need to get back for dinner or for my friends to go back down to their own home at the bottom of our town called us back before we’d reached the end of the back lane out of Ashridge. Anyway, even if we had trekked that far, in those days the treasures of Coldridge church would have eluded us, although I’m sure we realised that the place was another of our special local landscape sites. We were daughters of the ridge and longed to become as familiar with the village on the other ridge as we were with our Wildridge … and Ashridge …

    In the present day, I wandered round the nave at Coldridge investigating the church’s obvious and astounding historical treasures – the stunning pulpit with its grape-frieze; its C15 oak rood-screen with carved oak leaves and floral bosses; the barrel-vaulted roof with Tudor rose bosses and fantastic creatures - DevonChurchland calls the overall effect a ‘bobby-dazzler’. 

    Then I turned my attention to why I’d travelled here in the first place. My original reason for wanting to explore Coldridge church was to see first-hand where one of my grandmothers x three was married, in November 1826, nearly two hundred years ago. Having been baptised and I believe born in the nearby parish of Bondleigh, the woman in question, twenty years old Nan Passmore, apparently had no direct connection with this village. Just like so many others of our family's foremothers Nan was just a scribble of a name (actually a series of names depending which record you looked at – Nan, Nann, Ann, and Nancy) - had no real identity other than her connection with the places that the archives listed as places of baptism and marriage and the facts of her links with the menfolk in her life. Nan’s married life had been spent in Broadwoodkelly, another parish within a crow-throw from Coldridge.

    Also, excitedly, Nan had married a man whose own ancestry I’d recently discovered led me as amateur genealogist into the exciting new territory of ‘Gateway’ ancestors - a lines of predecessors which when the amateur genealogist stumbles upon it means that an individual in your family tree links you to already known genealogies, usually from history’s great and good, thus allowing you as researcher to add a bounty of fascinating personages to their previously - at least superficially - nondescript family tree. As I understand it, a Gateway ancestor is invariably from a landed family with money and land, mostly just one degree from then royalty, which makes tracing this family-branch path through life pre-1837 much easier – and more or less without exception, means you will be linked up in a direct line to someone of real ‘status’ from the deep past, ie royalty or aristocracy. As a bonus, a Gateway ancestor also inevitably takes the family researcher back to fascinating places of history, such as large manorial estates and old castles!

    So, I’d wanted to follow Nan Cann, see where her wedding journey led me; step inside the church, stroll up the aisle, conjure the young bride, my great great great grandmother tying the knot with Bartholomew Earland, the bridegroom - who, baptised in another of the mid to north Devon parishes, at Iddesleigh - may have been linked with nearby Nymet Rowland. I wanted to rekindle Nan’s life-journey. I hoped to stumble upon something, a clue which might suggest why the couple were married here, hoped also to find a few gravestones outside that might open up new avenues for genealogical research. (I did note several stones with a family name, which may eventually lead something more productive about my quest after Nan. But hey, that’s another story)!

    Well, there you have it, one of my own personal passions - family history. Not directly connected to writing blogs or poetry or texts about neglected women writers from Devon you might think, or generally with the life-journey of a poet – one of my ‘other’ main creative passions - though in actuality during the long solitudes of lockdown the disparate interests had already begun to draw closer. As I began to trace some of the so-called Gateway ancestors ideas following the discovery of Bartholomew Earland, I’d started drafts of a sequence of poems whose focus was and is a kind of poetry ‘mapping’, an evocation of some of these long lost 'gateway' women, many of whom, even though their names and complicated kinships appear on archival records, have left not even a recorded snippet or trace of their own unique life-journey; and in this respect they are nigh identical to the other 'commoners' in one’s family history, whose names in the listings occur with the bare fact of an accompanying baptism, or and marriage or, and if you’re lucky, a burial date. In common, all these women, aristocratic, or poor as church mice, are history’s invisibles. Here is the beginning of one gateway poem in the as yet (unpublished) sequence: 

***

Before leaving Coldridge church I returned to sit in one of the pews to have another more careful read through the guide book. Make sure I’d not missed anything of importance. Well, I had! In behind the rood-screen (and not easily reached as its now used as vestry) there is an effigy, not your common-or-garden memorial of a once Lord of the local manor, but a late C15/early C16 mystery man. (Didn't get a photo when I was there but here is a link to the amazing image on the out of this world website Devon Churchland). 

That’s when it began to dawn on me why this old church is so uniquely intriguing; where the mystery, the conspiracy come in. I couldn’t believe I’d not heard of it all before. You can read a variety of comments about Coldridge’s possible connection with Edward V, the young ‘disappeared’ Prince who was briefly King, on various websites - especially this piece; but the general gist is that the young Prince may have turned up and spent his life in Coldridge in the guise of a certain Sir John Evans - whose monument it turns out is in the church behind the screen, behind the organ, in what was once the Evans Chantry originally built in about 1511. Then, in the Evans Chantry there's the rare portrait of Edward V. And it turns out the church contains other equally unique features. Here’s the companion account of the Coldridge conspiracy theory, taken from A Medieval Pot-porri:

‘The effigy is wearing chainmail under his robe and the story goes that John turned up in Coldridge in 1485 after the battle of Bosworth. IF he had been Edward he would have been around 15 at that time. There is however reason to believe that he had arrived earlier in 1484. His mother Elizabeth Wydeville had emerged from sanctuary at Westminster accompanied by her daughters on the 1st March of that year. She had reached an agreement with Richard III and wrote to her son Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, who had owned Coldridge prior to it being confiscated by Richard, but was now in France with Henry Tudor, to return home as Richard would pardon him. Two days later on the 3 March a trusted follower of the king, Robert Markenfield was sent from Yorkshire to Coldridge. Was this to keep an eye on the young lad who had been king for such a short time, Edward V, and who had been secreted away at the former property of his half brother, Dorset, a property which was about to returned to him if it had not already been done so?’ 

     Currently, I understand Philippa Langley, whose determination was responsible for the discovery Richard III at Leicester, is leading an investigation into the intriguing Mystery of the Princes and that one avenue of exploration is that centred on Coldridge. 

***

    And it is in the spaces of credulous unknowing that the second project I mentioned above comes in. My drafts of a manuscript about the lost history of Devon’ s women writers includes sections in which I try to re-imagine the lost lives of women of the higher classes from the deep past of our local history through non-fictional re-castings and fictional imaginings. For example, in Heliodora; an Excerpt I’ve tried to evoke two women of high status during Roman times, at the site of the large Roman fort, 'Nemetostatio' at North Tawton. I’ve researched and written about the mysterious medieval poet Marie De France, (whose identity is as yet un-established) and have concluded that it is possible that she may have been brought up in an aristocratic family in mid Devon. (See Excerpt How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?). I wrote a poem and then fragment of fiction about Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, who'd often stayed at her various manors in Devon. 

    I’ve also investigated and found records of names and fragments of writing that seem suggestive of networks of literary communication threading between women from various families of high status. When I came across papers written by Micheline White about some Devon based C16 literary ‘power couples’ I decided my theory was vindicated. ("See Power Couples and Women Writers in Elizabethan England: The Public Voices of Dorcas and Richard Martin and Anne and Hugh Dowriche.” In Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, edited by Rosalyn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal). 

    I’d come to believe that many of the forgotten noblewomen, chunks of whose lives were spent in and around their Devon estates, left traces of significant contributions to our lost literary history, which if known about might help challenge the norms of the canonical understanding of the county’s literary history. However, gradually I’ve almost reconciled myself to seeing that I was on to a lost cause. A non-starter. To begin with, as a background and by default Devon is often considered as a county on the side-lines of important history. Too many historical reports cast aside comments which denigrate Devon as a county of rural 'yokels’, a backwater of the country where people who mattered did not congregate or live and certainly did not feature in events of national significance. For example, apropos the Coldridge church, as the writer of the brilliant blog DevonChurchland, comments: ‘why would a small church ‘in a gritty little village lost in the boondocks of Devon’ have such a wonderful royal and extremely rare window?’ If Devon per se is not important in the unfolding of history's narratives, then the lives and writings of long lost and forgotten women whose secrets - literary and other - are squirreled away in the archival deposits of various Record Offices/Heritage Centres etc., might as well be denigrated and abandoned to their desolate fate. In actuality, this default belief is so far from the facts that it is ridiculous. Just as a start, as far back as the notorious murder of Thomas a Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury several of the murderers were Devon men. Then there’s the Sampford Courtenay or Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549; there’s the Spanish Armada 1588; connected to Coldridge's mystery there’s the Perkin Warbeck Rebellion (more of which later). Through the centuries intricate networks of powerful people of both sexes planted firmly on Devon’s soil contributed to the unfolding of history’s national happenings.  When it comes to the women, who frequently inherited lands and title and through marriage passed them onto add to the wealth of their often previously less well-off spouses, they are everywhere in archives, between lines in small print, often cast aside in favour of often detailed information about their husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles or cousins.

    And here is where the Coldridge mystery comes in. 

                      Coldridge: village green cc-by-sa/2.0 - 

            © Martin Bodman - geograph.org.uk/p/216476

    What fascinates – but, in light of consideration of the real import of Devon in our national history, doesn’t surprise me about Coldridge is that events from an unsolved puzzle of the past, which is implicitly of national importance, may have had their heart in Devon, too often, as noted, debunked as a county on the sidelines of history. Coldridge is one of a cluster of parishes in the vicinity of mid Devon which in medieval and Tudor times were controlled by and often inhabited by a tangled kin network of the most powerful in the land, many of whose genealogical charts linked them closely to the Crown. Key individuals who had links with Coldridge during the period when John Evans was in the parish included Robert Markenfield, Sir John Speke and Thomas Grey. And then there were a handful of important women linked with Coldridge (whose lives were to some extent documented) such as Anne Duchess of Exeter and Cecily Bonville, All of these immediately link up with extensive networks of other Devon-rooted and powerful people.

    Ok, you may now be thinking, how could the beliefs about the lost networks of possibly literary linked medieval and Tudor women be relevant in any exploration of the Coldridge Edward V mystery? Well they may not be, but during my research I’ve uncovered various names of intriguing women whose direct connections with other parishes/places very near Coldridge -including North Tawton and Ashridge - could help lead to new threads of discovery about some of the important players involved in the dramas of the time. I’ll explore this idea further below.

***

    First though I want to return to where I began this post and introduce the next on my list of current what I thought were disparate projects which the visit to Coldridge launched - the next, ie this post of my Blog. During a time when we've all been preoccupied by pandemic issues I’ve been mulling over scraps of archival material about Devon historian/author Beatrix Cresswell; I wanted to write a post featuring Cresswell and her writings but didn’t know where to start as she was an extremely generous, prolific writer about all things Devonian. Then, out of the blue Holly Morgenroth FLS | Collections Officer at Exeter Museum, another generous researcher and reader of my blog sent me during one of the lockdowns in 2020 asking if I was interested in archival material about Beatrix, which Exeter Museum held, along with other documents about the Cresswell family. Holly then sent me some papers pertaining to Beatrix, They included a copy of an article/obituary, In Memorian; Miss B FC A G Cresswell. (published in Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries vol 21 - see image of first page above); and a typed page of a brief account of her life. It may be rather faint but here is the image of that page:

 Holly also sent me a link to information held in the Collections at ramm Exeter concerning Beatrix' father Richard Cresswell. All of these inevitably stirred me to look via Google into other related papers and information. 

    Any serious local historian studying Devon history will soon stumble upon a feature about a place or person which has been written by Cresswell. Amongst a wide variety of writings her most extensive work is the multivolume typescript account of every parish church in Devon arranged by deanery, which is held by the Westcountry Studies Library. Many of the sites which focus on the past of a church, parish or place take their information directly from the previous work of this significant author, And yet, other than the fragments and files held about and by her at Exeter Museum and Devon West Heritage Trust (mostly a series of her Diaries which may well be richly informative, but which as yet I've not had opportunity to view) and  The Cresswells of Winchmore Hill: A Gifted Victorian Family, the book about the  Cresswell family written by Peter Hodge, and little features such as the one linked with Crediton Museum, there does not appear to be any special paper or indeed book about Beatrix’ life and remarkable individual contribution - an amazing body of work - about Devon’s history and antiquities. Indeed, on a recent trip to locate Cresswell’s grave at Exeter's Higher Cemetery I found the site unmarked (except in cemetery records); there is no memorial). Perhaps one day that will be remedied.

    I wanted to begin some kind of write-up about Beatrix, but couldn’t decide how to focus it, so yet again I put off doing so. That changed following my visit to Coldridge. Reading the church guide book I smiled when I read that Beatrix Cresswell had been one of the first ‘experts’ to remark upon and verify the stained glass image in the chantry as being that of Edward V. Of course, it had to be her. Who else? Then, as I read about the people involved in the Edward V enigma and the events of the time within their historical context I stumbled across a reference to Perkin Warbeck’s wife and widow Katherine, or Catherine Gordon, and remembered I’d noticed several times that Beatrix Cresswell had written a short drama based on a fictionalised reinvention of an episode in Gordon’s life, which had been performed at Exeter at the beginning of the C20, I believe in 1910. Why would Beatrix choose to write about a medieval woman whose connections with Devon were minimal I’d wondered?

In Coldridge Church looking towards Rood Screen

    Yet, now, sitting in the atmospheric nave beneath one of the ornamental brass lamps which hang from Coldridge church's Rood Screen, I understood. 

Of course, when she visited the church and researched its strange links with Edward V,  Cresswell was probably reminded of the famous events during the Second Cornish Rebellion in 1497, when Perkin Warbeck travelled through the Westcountry with his wife and son. One of the spin-off theories from the Coldridge and Edward V mystery is that Perkin Warbeck was indeed Richard of Shrewsbury, the younger brother of Edward and that the two brothers might have met up when Warbeck was on the way to Exeter and his brother alias John Evans was at Coldridge. (See for example (Medieval Potpourri). I wondered what Cresswell's take on the Perkin Warbeck affair might have been and especially why she had chosen Perkin Warbeck’s widow as the focus for her pageant/play.

  I had to get a copy of the play and find out for myself ...

Acknowledgements 

I'm grateful for the generous help given by Holly Morgenroth of Exeter Museum. 

Links

Ian Churchward's songs inspired by Philippa Langley’s missing Princes project  

A Ricardian Argosy

 See Part Two - Through the Gateways

Coldridge Conspiracy; the Canns and Beatrix Cresswell's White Rose

 

A Trio of New Blog posts coming soon ... 

Coldridge Conspiracy; the Canns 

and Beatrix Cresswell's White Rose