[142a] Holinshed’s Chronicles. The mills are shown in the engraving of Tewkesbury, given in Dyde’s History of Tewkesbury.
[142b] Sir John Delves was of the old Cheshire family of Delves of Doddington.
[142c] Lel. Collect, vol. ii. fo. 506. Stow’s Annals, p. 424.
[142d] Lel. Collect, vol. ii. fo. 506.
[143a] It will be recollected that the Duke of Clarence was put to death in 1477–78, in the Tower of London. He was interred at Tewkesbury. See Stow’s Annals, p. 431; the Catalogue of Nobility, &c. by Ralph Brooke, p. 52; Additions to Camden’s Britannia, by Gough, edition of 1789, vol. i. p. 269; Sandford, p. 413; Rapin, vol. i. (in Notis, p. 624). Those accounts appear to be corroborated by the circumstance, that the Duke’s wife Isabel was interred in a stone arched vault, near the high altar, in the Abbey Church there. Leland, in his Itinerary, vol. vi. fo. 92 [p. 81], states that she died at the Castle of Warwick, on the 22nd of December, 1476, and was buried at Tewkesbury, of which she was the patroness. The entrance to the vault is covered by a large blue stone, under which is a flight of eight steps, which lead to the vault, which was opened and examined in 1826, on the occasion of some repairs, when the skulls and some bones of a man and a woman were discovered in it; besides which there were also six large stones at the south end of it, which apparently had been placed there, in order to support two coffins abreast; which adds not a little to the supposition that he was buried in the same tomb with the Duchess. Sandford expressly states that the Duke was buried at Tewkesbury, near the body of his Duchess. It was evident that the vault had been long previously entered, probably at the time of the dissolution of abbeys, or of the parliamentarian wars, and rifled of every thing worth taking away. The floor of the vault was paved; and extending nearly the length and breadth of it, was the representation of a cross, formed by the insertion of bricks, some of which contained the arms of England, of the Clares, &c.; and others contained representations of fleurs-de-lis, birds, ornamented letters, &c. Under the belief that the mortal remains so discovered, were those of the ill-fated Duke of Clarence, and of Isabel his wife, the skulls and bones were collected, placed in an ancient stone coffin, and the vault again closed up. It furnishes us with an impressive moral, and appears like an awful and just retribution, that so soon after the Duke had assisted in, or at least countenanced, the murder of Prince Edward, after the battle of Tewkesbury, his own death by violence, by the tyrannical orders of his brother, Edward IV., should have occurred, and his corpse should have been deposited in the Abbey Church, within sight of which the murder was committed.
[144] Fabyan says, that it was the King’s servants who committed the murder. If, as seems improbable, he means domestic servants, it does not make any difference in the crime, whether the noblemen present committed the murder with their own hands, or sanctioned its commission by domestics.
[145a] It is said that human bones were found there; but it is unfortunate that no full and detailed account seems to have been preserved of the examination of the grave, or what kind of human bones, whether male or female, old or young, were discovered, for they might have done much to throw light upon the subject. I could not obtain any further information relative to it, from the person who showed me through the Abbey Church. The practice of interring corpses in stone coffins continued a considerable time after the date of the battle of Tewkesbury. The corpse of Richard III. was interred, after the battle of Bosworth, in 1485, in a stone coffin, in the Grey Friars Church at Leicester. His remains were, at the time of the destruction of religious houses, disturbed, and the stone coffin was converted into a watering-trough, at the White Horse Inn, in Gallow Tree Gate, and was so used until it was broken to pieces.—Hutton’s Battle of Bosworth, pp. 142, 143. See also Sandford’s Genealogical History, p. 410, where he mentions that the stone coffin was made a drinking-trough for horses at a common inn.
[145b] Additions to Camden’s Britannia, by Gough, published in 1789, vol. i. p. 269. That account evidently refers to a prior examination to that already noticed, as having occurred before the inscription (of which a copy has been given) was placed there, in 1796, because Gough’s edition of Camden’s Mag. Brit. was published in 1789.
At present there is not any monument to the memory of the Duke of Clarence or his wife, nor did I hear that any was known to have ever been there.
[146a] Hall, p. 32. Holinshed says it occurred on the 7th.