The Princes in the Tower, page 36
Philippa Langley
One can imagine the carnage of Stoke Field, with that gentle English hill littered with the dead and dying, and the cries of injured men and the cawing of feasting crows. And then amid that terrible scene, a young man and a boy are led away, one is wounded and in distress, the other plucked from anonymity and promised food and warmth in the royal kitchens in exchange for silence.
Henry Tudor had won another bloody battle, but his throne was vulnerable. He would need to control public opinion, and that would require devious means. He also had to consider the wishes of his young wife. Strategically, he had already put the brakes on Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, and Elizabeth Woodville, preventing them from assisting the injured young man to take the throne by placing Dorset in the Tower and having Elizabeth constrained at Bermondsey.
Coldridge is a small hilltop village in deepest Devon. It is situated well away from major towns, with Exeter 18 miles distant, Barnstaple 17 miles and Tiverton 16 miles. Medieval access to the village was limited to cart tracks. There was no navigable water nearby. If the imprisoned Dorset wanted somewhere on his own property to secrete his half-brother, he would find no better location.
Although this village is not known for any significant historical events, it has been the source of much interest by historians. Over 100 years ago, the renowned author and church historian Beatrix Cresswell commented on St Matthew’s Church:1
Standing on the summit of a steep hill, the church forms one of a line of towers, that, thus situated, are conspicuous landmarks above the surrounding scenery. It 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 … the portrait of Edward V, is a most unlikely monarch to find in sixteenth century stained glass.
At about the same time Cresswell was writing, Reverend H.J. Hodgson reviewed the church, ‘This very interesting building is, for a village church, unusually large … The church seems at one time to be even larger.’
Over the course of many years, the late Professor Chris Brooks and Dr Martin Cherry investigated St Matthews. Their 1992 essay ‘The Prince and the Parker’ raised several questions:
Contemporary representations of Edward V in any medium are so rare that the survival of one glass in deepest rural Devon raises intriguing questions as to patronage and purpose … The patron of the chantry remains elusive, being almost wholly absent from the documentary record … Modest as it is though, this little chantry links Coldridge, far down in the south west, with the turbulent reign of Richard III and the demise of the House of York, and with the dynastic history of the Tudors.2
And then in 2007, Peter Bramley responded to the call to Coldridge in his A Companion and Guide to the Wars of the Roses:
Coldridge [awarded four stars by Bramley] may be in the depths of North Devon countryside but, whatever you do, do not miss this one, for this little church contains one of the most fascinating survivals from our story … Why such politically charged stained glass in a tiny Devon church? … So who was John Evans? … Could he have been the real thing?3
The reason for this longstanding fascination with Coldridge, as we have seen, centres on the rare Edward V window and its patron, the elusive John Evans. To further this investigation, a team was established in 2018 under the guidance of Philippa Langley and The Missing Princes Project.
The team have taken a narrow, objective focus to look at the origins of the window, the background of John Evans and possible connections with Edward V. The possibility that Edward V had been given the new identity of John Evans, either prior to or after the Battle of Stoke, has been considered and certainly not discounted. Recent evidence has come to light that reinforces this possibility. This submission starts by giving an overview of the evidential base at Coldridge and then discusses this scenario.
Who was John Evans?
John Evans was a man who had been granted a considerable estate – the manor of Coldridge with two farms, Coldridge Barton and Birch, and a sizeable, well-stocked deer park. Brooks and Cherry postulated that he could have been a Yeoman of the Crown and it is true that under Henry VII and Henry VIII there are records of a John Evans (Evan or Jenan) acting at various times as a Yeoman of the Chamber or a Yeoman of the Crown.4 Henry VIII also had a falconer called John Evans, who was active and had got married around 1530.
Henry VII had formed his Yeomen after Bosworth and they contained many Welshmen, so it is probable that there were a number of Yeomen with variants of the Evans name. However, although many were granted deer parks and estates by the king, there is no record of Coldridge in these.
Evans’ predecessor Robert Markenfield is clearly shown as having received the grant of Coldridge estates from Richard III in 1484. If John Evans had been a Royal Yeoman, one would have expected some symbolism of this on his tomb effigy or on other inscriptions in the church. As Brooks and Cherry commented, Evans was elusive and almost wholly absent from the documentary record.
However, we do have information from the Cecily Bonville Estate Records of 1525.5 This confirms that at that time Evans had estates and the deer park at Coldridge, he had a son, also named John, and another named Humphrey, who in turn had a son, Edmund. There is no factual evidence of where Evans originated from before Coldridge, nor whether he received the grant from Dorset, the owner of the estates prior to his death in 1501, or later, from his widow, Cecily Bonville.
No record has been found of Evans’ date of death, but if he was alive in 1525 with grandchildren, then he may have been around 50 to 60 years of age at that time.
The Evans Chantry
By 1511, Evans had constructed a chantry in the church. Chantries were built in the belief that it would hasten one’s journey through purgatory and, with age expectancy as it was, one would assume that Evans would have completed the building by the age of 40. The chantry contains his tomb monument (see image opposite) with his recumbent effigy carved in Beer stone, looking up at a window containing the Edward V glass and some other stained-glass fragments. He is dressed in armour under a surcoat but there are no indications that he was a knight. The monument is empty of remains.
Tomb of John Evans (d. before 1525), Evans Chantry Chapel, St Matthew’s Church, Coldridge, Devon. Possible burial location of Edward V. (John Dike)
There is some iconoclasm damage to the figure, with the removal of the hands in prayer and the feet, as well as the head of a cherub. By his left side is a helmet, and to his right a shield with the inscription ‘JOHN EVAS’.
Just below the inscription is carefully placed inverted graffiti, which appears to say ‘King’, and below that are nine inscribed lines. Inverted images, presumably intended to give a hidden comment, are also present in the rood screen, where there are three small, inverted images of a lady with a Tudor headdress. They appear to have long tongues, which could be a reference to the biblical ‘sins of the tongue’. These refer to lies, gossip, idle chatter, exaggeration, harsh attacks and uncharitable remarks. As will be seen later, they could be a critical depiction of Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. Hidden carvings like these are extremely rare and almost unheard of in English churches.
The tomb effigy of John Evans has a pronounced scar across the chin. Closer inspection of this scar reveals the presence of scratch marks outside the line of the scar, indicating that it had been cut with a sharp blade, possibly at a later time than the original sculpture.
Fortunately, there are two pieces of evidence that date the chantry. When it was built Evans equipped this chapel with heavy furniture, and of particular interest are two prayer desks. One was a massive oak structure inscribed, ‘Pray for John Evans, Parker of Coldridge, maker of this work in the third year of the reign of King Henry the Eighth’.6 And on the other desk, ‘Pray for the good estate of John Evans, who caused this to be made at his own expense, the second day of August in the year of the Lord 1511’.7
By 1930 these desks were in poor condition. The Rural Dean found them jumbled behind the choir stalls and requested that they be sorted out, repaired, renovated and placed in a suitable position, as he considered them very interesting and valuable. A local parishioner undertook this task and decided to combine the remains into just one desk with a facsimile of the first inscription above. As the Evans Chantry is now the vestry, this desk is now in the South Chapel.
It is believed that when Evans referred to ‘maker of this work’, he was referring to his chantry and probably the rood screen which dates to that period. Between the Evans Chantry and the chancel is a parclose screen of ornate Breton design. This is a most unusual screen to be found in Devon and is very similar to the parclose screens in the nearby churches of Colebrooke and Brushford. It has been suggested that Evans was the donor of these screens,8 in which case he must have been involved with Sir John Speke, who, among other estates, held the manors of Wembworthy and Brushford, which bordered Coldridge.
The chantry that Evans constructed has several columns. At the head of these columns is placed the inscription ‘Orate pro anima Johes Evans’ – ‘Pray for the soul of John Evans’. (Note that Evans is spelt in full, unlike the legend ‘Evas’ on the tomb.) One column top has the engraving ‘IX’ next to a crown, possibly referring to the death of Henry VII in 1509 or possibly to the completion date of the stonework.
The Stained Glass
The Coldridge team spent considerable time investigating the origins of the stained glass at St Matthews. As with many churches, all that remained after the iconoclasm of Henry VIII and Edward VI were tiny fragments of the rich window glass that would have adorned the church in 1511 when John Evans built his chantry. It is probable that the Evans family, as wealthy landowners, were able to save images of a mainly secular nature, relating to their family, from hands bent on destruction.
The window in the Evans Chantry has most of the remaining glass. In the bottom left of the window is a fragment of ‘Orate pro …’. This would indicate that the window still had significance to the Evans family when the fragments of saved glass were placed in it: we may assume that these selected fragments reflected their earnest sentiment to ‘Pray for John Evans’.
The window contains two further images. To the left is a full-length portrait of Edward V, and to the right, just the head of another figure that originally would have been of a size, full-length, similar to the Edward V image (see p. 318).
As previous historians have indicated, the presence of a stained-glass portrait of Edward V in a small and remote Devon village raises many questions. There are only two other glass portraits of Edward that date from that time; one is in the Royal Window, Canterbury Cathedral, c. 1482 (now a later copy, post-1660s); the other is in the East Window, Little Malvern Priory Church, c. 1482. And there are two paintings, one in the Oliver King Chantry, St George’s Chapel, Windsor, c. 1493; and one in miniature, of Lord Rivers presenting his book to Edward IV and family (The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, later printed by Caxton, 1477).
The Authenticity of the Edward V Portrait
There have been suggestions that the Edward V portrait was really depicting Edward VI, but that was discounted many years ago, first by Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), an author of over 1,200 publications and composer of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, then Beatrix Cresswell,9 and more recently, Brooks and Cherry.10
The glass has been dated to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and shares design features with the glass at the Church of St Michael, Doddiscombsleigh, Devon, which was believed to have been created by ateliers in the Exeter glass workshops prior to 1500. If Evans completed his chantry in 1511 then this date is assumed as likely for the Edward V glass.
Above the crowned figure of Edward is a floating larger crown containing an ermine lining. Most unusually, the ermine is not spotted with the usual heraldic depictions of stoats’ tails, but the spots are shown as deer, possibly a hidden message linking the Coldridge Deer Parker with royalty. The deer spots total forty-one which, if subtracted from 1511, would give a figure of 1470, the year that Prince Edward was born. The ermine cloak on the main figure has the traditional stoats’ tails markings.
The church records refer to an early letter from the Keeper of Ceramics at the Victoria & Albert Museum, ‘I should hesitate to suggest whether parts of it are restored (the large crown must, however, have been separate from the figure) … The inscription seems to read ‘Prenys Eduard the feyte, which must surely read fifth …’ (Prince Edward the fifth).
The Large ‘Floating’ Crown
The concept of the floating crown above a monarch who was apparently never actually crowned is repeated in the painted image at St George’s Chapel, but in that painting there is only one crown present. It is believed that the floating crown at Coldridge was one of the post-Reformation remnants that were rescued and replaced in appropriate positions when the windows were repaired during the reign of Mary I. As there were few remnants of stained glass left, it is easy to see why the floating crown would have been positioned above the Edward V image, and confirms that whoever did it was in no doubt that the image actually depicted Edward, but the fact that he was already wearing a crown suggests that this was not its original position.
A comparison of the dimensions of the floating crown with the central bay of the larger chancel window shows that this could have been its original location. It is more likely that the floating crown was originally above a coat of arms or a royal badge; it would be too large to be over another image similar to the Edward V portrait in the Evans Chantry.
The Coldridge estates were passed from the Bonvilles to the Greys. Their coats of arms included a coronet, not a crown carrying the royal insignia depicted on the Coldridge crown. If this was part of a royal coat of arms, it would be most unusual in a small, remote village. One might assume that such a motif would indicate the presence in the area of a person of royal stature and that the rare deer spots in the ermine may provide a link to the Coldridge Deer Parker.
This crown also contains the Yorkist emblem of a falcon in a fetterlock, which was probably a badge of Edward V.11 This would indicate the presence in the church of at least two images dedicated to the prince, which is highly significant. The Falcon and Fetterlock was also the badge of Edward V’s grandfather, Richard, Duke of York (d. 1460), and was used by Edward IV.
The Small Portrait
Of great interest is the fragment of glass in the Evans chapel that portrays just the head and shoulders of a man. This person bears a resemblance to the carved image of John Evans on the tomb. This depiction is most unusual in that it appears to be drawn from life, ‘warts and all’. In particular, the mouth appears to lack lips, exposing the teeth, and there is a line across the chin that could depict a scar similar to the one on the tomb effigy.
Surviving fragment of stained-glass window, Evans Chapel. Portrays head and shoulders of a man with injury to his mouth and chin. Bears resemblance to the carved image of John Evans on tomb. (John Dike)
Brooks and Cherry considered that this image either depicted John Evans, or it could be a very rare image of Richard III.12 Their publication suggested that an image of Richard III would be an example of Tudor propaganda by local factions objecting to him taking the throne, with the image made more grotesque by removing a lip and twisting the countenance in the interests of deformity.
This fragment of the portrait appears to show a crown, similar to the floating crown in the Edward V portrait, being carried in front of the chest. Brooks and Cherry were assisted by David Evans, who reproduced the crown as it might have been. They considered the idea that this was an image of a royal person, in their opinion Richard III stealing the crown of England, but propaganda of this type would have little effect in such an isolated location, so it is more likely to be a person subject to more local sentiments.
A study of a facially injured Edward V is thought to be a more likely candidate, but this would obviously raise the very intriguing question of the real identity of John Evans, as his tomb effigy has a similar injury. The facial injury raises important questions. A deep cut in this area of the chin would render the mentalis muscle useless. This muscle is located at the tip of the jaw:
The mentalis muscle supports the lower lip and chin pad. Its damage results in chin and lower lip ptosis with resultant excessive lower tooth show.’13
This injury would have exposed the teeth (as seen in the second portrait), making it difficult to articulate, and would have been facially disfiguring.
John Evans, the Deer Parker
We know from the inscriptions on the old benches that John Evans had been granted the position of the Coldridge Deer Parker. Contemporary records show that the deer park, located at the rear of the church, was held by John Evans in 1525.14 ‘The said park contains in circumference 3,000 paces, and by view of the officers there are now 140 beasts of the chase vis bucks and does … and good wood.’
Tristram Risdon wrote, in 1632, ‘In this parish was not long since a park, garnished with goodly woods and timber; now so wasted, that in future time the place may better brook his name for want thereof.’15 However, it may have been in better condition when ‘Parcus de Colrudge’ was granted to James Bassett by Mary I in 1557 after she executed the previous owner, Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk.
The award of the deer park to Evans was a prestigious appointment and gave him the ability to enjoy the benefits of timber and venison in return for the administration of the park. He would also be instructed to give venison to persons selected by Dorset or Cecily Bonville as gifts or in return for favours. Evans was also granted the flour mill, Parker’s Mill, adjacent to the park, which was powered by a leat from the River Taw and provided flour to the village.
