Like any other writer of his age, Shakespeare was convinced of the wrongfulness of Richard III’s seizure of the crown and of his destruction of the princes. King Richard was a usurper, a tyrant, and a murderer. How then could Anne possibly have believed his claims and gone along with them? Since she did, she had to be presented as a passive victim, albeit adding to the prophecies of destruction that lie ahead. Here imagination, not evidence, reigns. The descent of the play to destruction proceeds too rapidly helter-skelter to allow Anne’s death, Richard’s incestuous plans for his niece, or even the murder of the princes, for all of which he possessed good sources, to be presented on stage. The build-up to the crown presented other villainies in such detail that explicit treatment of those that followed was not required. Shakespeare may also have been understandably reluctant to make too much of a mercifully unfulfilled matrimonial project for the ancestress of the ruling royal house, Elizabeth of York, and the arch-villain himself.
Though incorrect in detail and sometimes indeed depicting what can never have happened, Shakespeare certainly did capture the family character of the Wars of the Roses. Then, as now, most murders occur within the family: besides fratricide, most homicides, regicides, and infanticides were perpetrated by relations of the victim. In such a context, Shakespeare was right to perceive the necessity for co-existence, co-operation and even intermarriage amongst former foes, between those wronged and their wrongdoers, all of which Anne Neville’s career so poignantly and repeatedly illustrates.
Shakespeare forged Richard III into one of the theatre’s greatest villains and into one of the worst of history’s kings. Essentially that was what he had extracted from his sources. Sir Thomas More was not at all unusual in perceiving Richard as unnatural, his unnatural life and violent death foreshadowed by an unnatural birth, his inner vice betokened by his twisted body. Most of these elements appeared twenty years before in the History of John Rows, who had known Richard at first hand. For More, Shakespeare and their age, physical disability was not mere misfortune to the sufferer, but an indication of the distorted character that lay within. Richard was a usurper, a tyrant, a murderer of innocents comparable to the biblical King Herod, and a monster. Anne, therefore, was the wife of this usurper, tyrant, murderer and monster, shared her bed with this cripple and her private life with this villain, tyrant and monster. What this meant in practice even Shakespeare could not conceive. He depicted a Lady Anne who had entered into her marriage with Richard with her eyes open, but was seduced by his charm and way with words, and who came bitterly to regret their liaison. Thus he presents Anne Neville as just another of Richard’s victims. This was the ‘tradition [that] declares she abhorred’ Richard’s crimes that was still current in the 1840s.7
Actually, Shakespeare knew only the half of it. He offers us no access to the rest of Anne’s life, much of which is as impenetrable to us as it was to him. Anne Neville (1456–85) was the consort of one of the most short-lived of English medieval kings. She had reigned for only twenty-one months: less than any English queen since the Norman Conquest. Her only son, whilst still a child, predeceased her. Her kingly husband was to lose his throne. Defeated and disgraced, notorious in his own lifetime as a usurper, tyrant, and slayer of the princes,8 for half a millennium Richard has been numbered amongst the most wicked of medieval kings, into whose character and motivation no further exploration or perception was required. If Queen Anne was his victim or his instrument, we cannot perceive it in the evidence we have. If she was his partner or accomplice, it can only be by inference, for actually she is quite obscure. We know as little about her as any of our medieval queens and much less than most of them. If Perkin Warbeck and Edward V are dubious candidates for biography, why should historians bother with a consort who appears to have done nothing independently or of note and is frankly unknown?
Yet Anne was engaged in great events – the Wars of the Roses of 1455–85 – and lived out her whole life amongst them. Both a victim and a victor, she was an important participant, who had her own decisions to make and whose status gave her behaviour a special significance. That we can seldom divine her conduct does not reduce its significance. Her interactions with such key actors as her father and husbands really mattered. Even a ‘pawn in politics’ deserves attention.‘Tacit acceptance’ of Richard’s crimes was a decision. Even passivity, acquiescence, or deference to the men in her life is revealing. For Anne should not be perceived just as an individual. She also represents a type of person and progressed through a series of roles or stereotypes during the twenty-eight short years of her life. There are models to which she conformed and from which she diverged, and these offer us access both to Anne herself and to her time. Moreover, her life illustrates not just well-worn topics such as the critical importance of lineage, inheritance, marriage and gender stereotypes within her era, but also others, less often examined, which underpinned, conditioned and perhaps determined public opinion and hence on occasion had an impact on political events.
As far as we know, Anne did not have her portrait painted. Certainly none survives, unlike those of her husband, Edward IV’s queen Elizabeth Wydeville, and all subsequent queens. There are several stylised images of Anne Neville, in the Beauchamp Pageant, Rows Rolls, and Salisbury Roll as a queen, or in a lost stained glass window at Skipton-in-Craven (Yorks.),9 but these are not realistic or representative of reality and probably tell us little if anything of her actual physical appearance. Was she tall, short, fat or thin? All we do know is that she was like her niece Elizabeth of York in build and complexion and that they probably fitted the same clothes:10 that Queen Anne, at twenty-eight, after at least one pregnancy, was of similar height, build, and measurements as a girl of eighteen. Later in life, after several pregnancies, Elizabeth of York appears somewhat stolid in her portrait, which depicts her aged thirtyseven – the date of her death – or less. Elizabeth is portrayed at Canterbury Cathedral in glass with flowing golden tresses. That was a contemporary ideal that was applied to both ladies and to Elizabeth’s own mother in illuminations, but which may nevertheless be telling us the truth. It is best therefore to imagine Anne Neville as an English rose – a slim blonde, so Laynesmith suggests,11 – and probably unremarkable.
Anne has no monument. Her tomb at Westminster Abbey is marked only by a modern brass and archaeology would be required to detect it.12 We do not know how King Richard intended to mark her resting place; nor indeed can we know whether Westminster was actually destined to remain her resting place, rather than – for instance – York Minster, where, it has been speculated, Richard hoped to be interred himself. After her death – or, at least, by five months after her death, when her husband was destroyed – there was nobody who cared enough about her memory to commission even a modest tomb. They may have been afraid of associating themselves too closely with the disgraced usurper. Henry VII himself, who did provide honourable interment after an interval for King Richard, failed to do the same for Queen Anne. Because Richard III left no heir to continue his memory, no cause to be continued, and attracted no historian in a position to speak out for him, so Anne, too, has been forgotten. Glimpses of her are provided by the Crowland Continuator and by the cantarist John Rows, but neither can be said to have known her in person – as opposed to her rank and pedigree – and what they have recorded for us can be counted in a few sentences.13 Yet there was much more than this to Anne and more, fortunately, can be recaptured and reconstituted.
We can never know Anne Neville the individual as well as, for instance, Margery Kempe or Margaret Paston, whose autobiography and correspondence survive, or even Alice Bryene or Margaret Hungerford, whose household accounts or pious dispositions expose much about their everyday life or inner thoughts. Yet historians cannot confine themselves to the best documented individuals in the past. That would be elitist and sexist, would rule all but a tiny handful of unrepresentative individuals out of historical study, and would render history impoverished and limited indeed. Anne is capable of be
ing studied. Moreover she is worth studying. And finally, because of who she was and especially because of who her husband was, many historians and many ordinary people today want to know about her – to know whatever there is to be known. That is the justification for this book.
WOMAN, LADY AND QUEEN
Anne, of course, was a woman. Historians used to suppose that there could be no history of women, especially medieval women, and certainly none that was worth the recounting. Initially, perhaps, this was because historians (especially male historians) had no wish to write about members of the other sex. They subscribed to the presumption that history was about politics, in which women have traditionally played little part. Women’s failure to participate in what really mattered in the past meant that women themselves were unhistorical and unworthy of the historian’s attention. It is certainly true that there is relatively little evidence relating to women in the conventional historical sources that deal with high politics. Women were, of course, everywhere in the past, as numerous if not more numerous than the men, sharing their upbringings, their adult lives, social and economic activities, their households and their beds, conceiving, bearing and bringing up each future generation. Women’s presence en masse cannot be denied. And new generations of historians, not necessarily themselves women, have decided that these other aspects of the past and women themselves are as worthy of research as the most eminent of politicians. Moreover, they have demonstrated triumphantly that if one wishes to know about women, then the appropriate sources and techniques to do so can be found. There are now relative riches published in this field.14 Anne Neville played many roles in her short life and can be perceived in all these contexts.
Of course women do pose further problems to the historian that relate to their inferior status and restricted opportunities. In a patriarchal society which was becoming more patriarchal, according to Goldberg and as enjoined by St Paul, women were inferior and rightly subordinate to men.15 No matter how active and strong in character, first as spinsters and then as wives, they were obscured in the sources by their menfolk, who made the formal decisions for them, held their property, and represented them in politics. It was only as widows that women could create their own records and emerge into the light. We do know about many late medieval widows, aristocratic or burgher. Yet widows are hardly representative. Some widows admittedly were young, but most were not, and their study by definition cannot reveal them as spinsters, wives, nor during their reproductive years. Besides, it is only certain aspects of their lives, in particular their piety, that are usually illuminated. Even the best known widows are obscure. They suffer the disadvantages of all the subjects of medieval biography, that we lack the revealing sources of later eras, and that we cannot really grapple with their personalities. Yet women can be categorised as recognisable types, whose characteristics can be deduced rather than observed. Anne, as we shall see, passes through several such types.
Of all these types, queens were pre-eminent. Each queen was particularly prominent, in history as in life. It is not surprising that, as the most eminent of females in their own age and the leaders of female society, all English queens achieve the salute of a life in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, some admittedly fuller and more elaborate than others. None is shorter or more vestigial than that by the present author of Anne Neville.16 Of course, her husband Richard III had one of the shortest reigns of any post-conquest English king, a mere twenty-six months, and she predeceased him. Anne therefore had little time to make an impression. None of her own records survive. Almost no independent actions can be identified. That does not make Anne into a personal nonentity nor indeed render her insignificant, but it does make her quite exceptionally inaccessible, which is all the more regrettable given the fame, notoriety, and modern fascination with her husband Richard III. How much we would like to know the inner secrets of his family life! What did his wife think? We cannot know.
Before she became queen, Anne Neville was a noble lady, a spinster, princess of Wales, a widow, and duchess of Gloucester. She illustrates a whole series of the ‘life-cycle stages’ that are now perceived as ‘modifiers’ of ‘medieval women’s gendered identity’.17 In each case, regrettably, there are no special sources. Anne was amongst the most obscure instances of her type. If Anne had not become a queen – and queen, moreover, to Richard III – nobody would have selected her for study. Yet each of these categories is a type that historians have studied and illuminated. Much is known about young medieval women, medieval widows, medieval ladies and medieval queens, and whole books have been written recently on each.18 In the last five years there has been a relative epidemic of studies of the last medieval queens.19 These provide templates against which Anne can be measured and contexts into which she can be set. Anne symbolises a series of stereotypes. She was successively a stage on her family tree, her father’s daughter, the consort of two husbands, and the queen of a reigning king. She was also a bride, widow, a bride again, a mother, moreover a bereaved mother, and almost, anachronistically, a divorcee. But Anne does much more than pose for these established tableaux. Merely to reveal that she conforms to norms is hardly worth the undertaking. But actually Anne Neville did not conform to type. What little we know about her reveals her life to be remarkable, not merely for its eminence, and well worth investigating. Close analysis casts more light on Anne herself and also – and perhaps more intriguingly – on the extraordinary men who shared her life. Poor Anne. She died so young and suffered such a sequence of tragedies in her short life. Much more than an object of the activities of others and a victim, it is nevertheless as a victim that Shakespeare has commemorated her. Most historians have followed.
Shakespeare’s view of Richard III no longer prevails. Most people today suppose Richard to be not as bad as Shakespeare presented him. Many think him the victim of Tudor propaganda. That is the achievement of many individuals – perhaps most influentially Josephine Tey and Paul Murray Kendall – and of the Richard III Society, which allows no opportunity to pass to correct critical comments in books, paper, television and other media. If Richard was a good man and a good king, then perhaps he was also a good husband and Queen Anne was happy with her lot. Perhaps theirs was a love match, their marriage companionate, and we should imagine them like any happily married couple of today. At times, certainly, it has seemed essential to the new Ricardian myth to cast a romantic aura over their relationship. If so, the loss of Anne’s son and her own childlessness – Anne’s failure to fulfil this essential function – looks more tragic yet.
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Anne Neville did matter. She was a queen. She did bear Richard his only legitimate son, the tragically short-lived Prince Edward of Middleham. She brought him the resources in her Neville inheritance that enabled Richard to dominate the North and the means to usurp the throne. She shared his coronation and other regal ceremonies of his reign. And she survived too long, apparently to be spurned by a husband to whom she was a political burden, an obstacle to the reconstruction of his power, and supposedly, indeed, his victim. She packed into her short life incident enough for many adventurous careers, but always, apparently, as a passive instrument of a succession of others. This book seeks to research her career properly, to bring out its implications, and to explore in depth the remarkable shifts and turns of her fraught and ultimately unrewarding career.
The life of Anne Neville illustrates much that makes medieval England different from today. Clearly Anne is an example of a medieval lady, whose life illustrates both the normal experiences of medieval ladies and contemporary attitudes towards them. Her life illustrates repeatedly the making of the medieval marriage. However we might wish it were not so, Anne may never have married for love, but was rather the object – and the financial beneficiary – of two materially prudent marriages. In her life the key role played by inheritance – its sanctity, both theoretical and practical – has to be constantly reiterated.
Anne Neville was born to be a
wife and mother. So far as we know, the only respectable alternative – life in a nunnery
– was never considered. From early childhood, her parents were seeking an appropriate spouse – to arrange a marriage, certainly for her benefit, but with many ulterior motives in mind. The arranged marriage was the norm. People of her station did not marry merely to please themselves and those who did, like Edward IV and Margery Paston, offended contemporary standards and were strongly condemned. The love match, which we take for granted, was deplored. Anne’s first marriage was the handiwork of her parents. When it was terminated by Prince Edward of Lancaster’s death, a further marriage was the only palatable option: another, less acceptable, may have been broached. Although apparently the work of the two parties, Anne’s union to Duke Richard was unexceptionable and unobjectionable – what her parents would have approved and may indeed once have sought – and was furthermore approved by the king. If the partiality of Anne for Richard went beyond the businesslike – even to Shakespeare’s stormy wooing – it fell within the parameters of eligibility and mutual advantage.
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