The oldies of old… examined by history man
But some born in the Middle Ages lived to be three or four times older
If there’s one thing we think we know about the past, that foreign country, it’s that it wasn’t a country for old men. Or old women, for that matter.
Until the 20th century, surviving childhood was something of an achievement. And in politics, in the Middle Ages at least, being a well-born child only made you a more valuable piece on the chessboard, which meant you could be traded in the marriage market or even sacrificed.
The most famous sacrificial lambs of the Middle Ages must be the ‘Princes in the Tower’. I use inverted commas because only one of them, at most, was a prince. Edward V and Richard of York disappeared from public view in 1483, aged twelve and nine, on the orders of their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester. According to Gloucester, they were mere nobodies, the illegitimate fruit of a bigamous union between their father Edward IV and their mother Elizabeth Woodville. Or if the future Richard III was spreading fake news, then young Edward was a king, not a prince.
Whatever they were, it put them in harm’s way. Most people think Uncle Richard is responsible for their deaths (I do, even if I can’t produce a smoking gun: he was the king, after all, and his nephews died on his watch).
The ‘princes’ are the most extreme illustration of the fact that people in the Middle Ages didn’t often make old bones. Richard III himself only made it to 32, his brother Edward IV died in his forties, and his next two successors lived only to their fifties. Outside the charmed (or cursed) royal circle, life expectancy hovered around 35 from the Wars of the Roses to the accession of Queen Victoria. That figure is skewed by the sad fact of death in infancy, often unavoidable before modern medicine. Naturally, many people did live into old age, and some of them didn’t go quietly, either.
One of my favourite medieval oldies is William Marshal, aka the Marshal, fourth Earl of Pembroke, born in the reign of King Stephen. In his youth, William was a fairly minor knight, but he became a star on the 12th-century tournament circuit. He was an ideal courtier, loyal, chivalrous and handy with a sword, which he used in the service of Henry II and Richard the Lionheart. His reward from King John was an earldom and a big chunk of west Wales.
When his fellow barons began to turn against John, William – aged seventy at the time of Magna Carta – stayed loyal, but he didn’t stay at home. John died unexpectedly, to be succeeded by his son Henry, another of those vulnerable medieval minors. The Marshal became Henry’s protector. He had a busy time of it. England was in the middle of a civil war, and had been invaded by the Dauphin, Prince Louis. William not only rallied support; he led the charge against the rebels and invaders. At the Battle of Lincoln (1217), he rode hard at the enemy, and knocked one rebel from his horse. Victory paved the way for expelling Louis. For another year, the Marshal carried on consolidating the young king’s grip on the crown, and was only stopped by his final illness, aged 73.
Or what about Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk? Born in the same year as poor Richard of York, 1473, Howard outlived him by seventy-odd years, surviving the reigns of Richard III, Henry VII, Henry VIII (just: he was in the Tower awaiting execution when Henry died), Edward VI (he spent the whole reign behind bars) and Mary I. He died shortly after leading a force of Londoners against Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion in 1554. He was described then as ‘by long imprisonment diswanted from the knowledge of our malicious world’. Well, he’d seen a lot: he was 81.
Thomas Howard’s contemporaries respected their elders but, later, a short-lived cult of longevity did get a bit out of hand. Walter Ralegh wrote that the Countess of Desmond, who ‘lived in the yeare 1589’, had been married in Edward IV’S reign. Horace Walpole claimed she had danced with Richard of Gloucester, and found him ‘the handsomest man in the room’. Considering that she died in 1604, she lived for over 120 years. She only succumbed, according to Robert Sidney, because she fell from a nut tree.
The most famous old man of the age was Thomas Parr of Herefordshire, allegedly born in 1483, at the end of Edward IV’S reign. He died in 1635 – aged 152 – ten monarchs later (eleven if you count Lady Jane Grey).
Parr led a life of almost total lack of incident. But it was not quite a blameless existence. During his first marriage, at the age of 102 (he settled down aged eighty), he had to do penance for adultery. He married again at 122 and, his second wife, Jane, claimed, carried on carrying on with her into his fourteenth decade. Thomas, like Lady Desmond, was snatched before his time. It was only after leaving his native county to visit London for the first time that he took ill and died. The capital was no city for an old man. Stick to the sticks.
David Horspool is author of ‘Richard III: A Ruler and his Reputation’ (Bloomsbury)