Anne Neville

by Michael Hicks

  Warwick’s success happened very quickly, but not all at once. The first years of his first daughter, Isabel, were surely spent with her mother the Countess Anne principally at Warwick. That was where Anne was born. But her father’s career took off first as keeper of the seas and then as captain of Calais, the principal military commands of the English crown in the aftermath of military defeat. Never had Calais and its captain been more important. Remarkably Warwick chose to take up residence in Calais. That was in May 1457.27 Earlier captains, such as Earl Richard Beauchamp and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had been absentees who acted through deputies. It was a formal decision by Warwick, not a chance visit that was somehow extended. Even more remarkably, Warwick took his countess with him. Perhaps he did not wish to be parted indefinitely from his lifelong partner and soul mate; more cynically, he could not pass by several years of opportunity to father a son. Probably, therefore, both his daughters were at Calais too. It could hardly have been intended to separate them from their mother for the space of years. Probably Anne Neville moved to Calais before her first birthday. Probably she, her mother and her sister Isabel resided at Calais for three years.

  Restless and apparently tireless, Warwick himself was frequently away, often on activities that carried a high degree of risk. Obviously his countess and daughters did not join him for his naval depredations against foreign shipping nor for negotiations with foreign neighbours in Calais’ hinterlands. The chroniclers do not record either whether his family joined him for his visits every so often to England for great councils, notably the three-month peace conference that culminated in the Loveday of St Paul’s in the winter of 1458–9, and which allowed him at least to make lightning visits to Warwick and other properties. These were political fraught occasions not without their own dangers: the first blows of the Wars of the Roses had been struck and there was an assassination attempt on Warwick in Westminster Hall in November 1458. Most probably, therefore, his countess and daughters remained at Calais.

  Certainly the Countess Anne was again at Calais, perhaps with her daughters, when Warwick arrived there on 2 November 1459 in flight from the debacle at Ludford. He was accompanied by his father – his daughters’ paternal grandfather Richard, Earl of Salisbury – and by Edward, Earl of March, son of Richard, Duke of York and the future King Edward IV. All the Yorkist peers were attainted as traitors at the Parliament of Devils. When Warwick consulted York in Ireland, many chronicles report what was evidently a celebrated feat, and he returned to Calais with his mother (and Anne’s grandmother), the now aged Countess Alice.28 Left behind during the successful invasion of the Yorkist earls in 1460, the two countesses (and presumably also Isabel and Anne) received the victorious Warwick in triumph at Calais on 7 August and were transported back via Sandwich to England, catching up with King Henry VI at Greenwich on 19th and proceeding with him to London.29 At that point Anne had just embarked on her fifth year.

  Young though she was, Anne’s earliest years in Calais ought to have been a formative experience. She was not in England in her early childhood. Physically she did not live in England, although she must have been told often enough, nostalgically, that it was her real and permanent home. The great household that she inhabited was little different from what it was in England, but her apparently static existence in Calais Castle was very different from the peripatetic nature of noble life in England. The beleaguered frontier town of Calais, a garrison town and an English colony in a foreign hinterland, was quite unlike anywhere else in England, except possibly the northern marcher fortresses of Carlisle and Berwick-upon-Tweed, and was certainly dissimilar from the provincial seats where her parents resided when in England. She may not have known Warwick, Hanley Castle (Worcs.), Tewkesbury, Cardiff or her mother’s other residences in Wales and the West Midlands as well as her sister Isabel, particularly as the earl’s northern heritage seems to have taken precedence after 1460; perhaps Rows knew her less well also. For six months in 1459–60 she lived in close proximity to her grandparents. Moreover at Calais Anne was exposed to francophone culture. If English was the principal language of her parents, their entourage, and indeed the people of Calais, French and Flemish were frequently spoken by native Frenchmen and Burgundians in her parents’ household and everywhere outside, doubtless sometimes to Anne, whom, one might surmise, quickly learnt to understand and also to speak French herself – a language that was both useful and a polite accomplishment. Surely she encountered Flemish too. If Anne grew up bilingual, it could have smoothed relations with her first mother-in-law Margaret of Anjou. Unfortunately, like so much else about Anne, there is nothing to confirm what was the impact in later life of her sojourn in Calais.

  Little more than a toddler and at a distance in Calais, Anne was insulated against the first of the Wars of the Roses of 1459–61, though her father’s absences – and some sense of the risks, the reliefs, and the victories – surely permeated down even to his youngest daughter. After the Greenwich reception in August, the earl and countess and presumably both daughters too went next to Warwick, before the earl met up with Richard, Duke of York at Shrewsbury, and preceded him to London,30 where the duke bid for the crown. The decisive battles ensued. Where the countess and daughters were in the meantime we cannot know. Warwick survived. He also won. The right side, the Yorkists, prevailed decisively at the battle of Towton on 29 March 1461. The Yorkist King Edward IV, whom his cousin Anne knew from his nine-month sojourn at Calais, supplanted the Lancastrian King Henry VI.

  Perhaps Anne Neville at four and certainly her sister Isabel at nine were old enough to understand the high dramas of 1460–1, when the Yorkists secured control of the government, their grandfather was slain at Wakefield, their father was routed at St Albans and the Lancastrian army menaced London where, most probably, they were at the time. Given the prominence of their parents, they were probably observers both of the formalities of King Edward’s accession on 4 March and his coronation in 1461. Their father set off northwards for the decisive battle of Towton and returned as victor. If never visible in our sources, Isabel and Anne cannot have been ignorant either of the stakes and risks nor other than grateful at consequences that surely answered their prayers.

  Warwick was certainly head of his household and a model of the male authority to which daughters like Anne were taught to defer. To an extent even greater than as head of his great household in his provincial seats, the Earl of Warwick was in charge in Calais, where he actually ruled and where, when in rebellion, he actually was the final authority. He operated martial law and exercised power of life and death, notoriously despatching Osbert Mountford, King Henry’s naval commander, when he fell into his hands.31 Warwick’s power was the reality of Anne’s earliest years. Return to England did not radically change that situation. As early as Anne Neville became conscious of such things, her father was a great man. When she was four he was second only to the king or – so some said – greater than the king himself. Laden with honours and responsibilities, ‘he had all England at his leading and was dreaded and feared [doubted] through many lands’, and was ‘a famous knight and excellent greatly spoken of through the most part of all Christendom’, whose ‘knightly acts had been so excellent that his noble and famous name could never be put out of laudable memory’. That was the public face of what was to her ‘the most famous and dread and beloved lord’.32 How close that relationship was, how domestic was the comital household, how well Anne knew her father and what he meant to her in practice we cannot tell.

  Of Anne’s mother we know a little more. The earl and countess resided principally at Warwick up to 1456, when Anne was born, and then in Calais until 1460. Thereafter during the 1460s Warwick was constantly away on military or diplomatic business, most commonly in the North, at Westminster, and on continental embassies, on which his family can rarely have accompanied him. Clearly the earl and countess were less often together. Quite frequently recorded at Middleham and at Carlisle, the earl was rarely at Warwick after 1461 and d
oes not occur again in Wales. Did the countess also base herself in the North? For the whole of 1464–5, the only year for which accounts survive, the Countess Anne was not at Middleham. Or did she reside more usually on her own estates in the West Midlands whence she came? She must certainly have possessed a household capable of operating apart from the earl and of moving about. After the earl’s exile in 1470, his countess lived in turn abroad, at Beaulieu and in the North, and returned to Warwick, if ever, only after John Rows had finished writing. Although this Warwick cantarist knew his countess well, and knew all about her subsequent sufferings and her reactions to them, yet he encountered her principally in 1449–57 rather than later. What he saw her daughters witnessed also. As a clergyman, Rows reports with approval that the countess ‘was ever a full devout lady in God’s service’ – that she attended religious services assiduously and fervently: he had more that was positive and distinctive to say about her elder siblings and would have liked, we may presume, to have something more concrete to praise about her piety. Rows also perceived in her ‘a noble lady of the blood royal’ and ‘by true inheritance countess of Warwick’, neither of which Anne can have overlooked. Anne’s mother was also an excellent example of feminine conduct for her daughters, even through masculine eyes. ‘She was also gladly ever companionable and liberal’, Rows wrote, ‘and in her own person, seemly and beauteous, and to all that drew to her ladyship, as the deed shewed, full good and gracious’. Translated into modern English, Rows tells us that the countess was pleasing to the eye and acted with decorum. She was affable, courteous to all comers, and generous. She addressed all members of her household whatever their rank ‘according to her and their degrees’. A strict sense of hierarchy and etiquette and condescension to inferiors, which contemporaries thought proper and we call snobbery, is implied. Although apparently only twice in childbirth herself, Rows reports that the countess was ‘glad to be at and with women that travailed of child, full comfortable and plenteous of all things that should be helping to them’.33 Presumably these mothers-to-be were the gentlewomen of her household and the wives of her retainers and officers. It sounds as though they were her friends as well as her employees. Pregnancy, childbirth and babies were entirely familiar. Here surely Rows provides some insight into the feminine ambience within which Anne Neville was raised up to her early teens. Thereafter, as we shall see, she leapt into married life.

  Whilst obviously coming together much more frequently than we can know, for procreation, on important feasts and perhaps on many other occasions, it was normal for lords and ladies to have separate and self-sufficient households, and for them often to be apart. Warwick’s busy life often kept him and his family separate. In the absence of direct evidence, the households of the earl and countess were surely like many others that we do know about. Most members worked in the service departments that handled the food, drink, transport, laundry and washing up: the lower household that sustained the upper household, where the lord and lady lived and entertained. Warwick’s household came to be exceptionally large and the scale of his open-handed hospitality quite outstanding.34 When the Neville daughters were there, they found roasted meats prominent on the menu. Bar the laundress, the earl’s household was entirely male, but in the smaller replica that was the countess’s establishment there were females, both gentlewomen (damsels) and domestic servants. Based on other parallels, there were probably both married women, the wives of his officers, and spinsters, although actually only one widow – the earl’s flighty cousin Dame Margaret Lucy35 – is known by name. It was a female world that aristocratic girls like the Neville sisters inhabited. Men there were in plenty, both in the service departments, in office upstairs, in business transactions with their mother, and in polite society, but such maidens were always chaperoned and insulated against potential male predators except under the most strictly controlled circumstances.

  Whilst little, the earl’s daughters lived with their mother. Mothers took general responsibility for the upbringing of their children.36 The image of St Anne teaching her daughter the Blessed Virgin Mary to read become popular in the fourteenth century. At this stage in history ladies did not suckle their babies or undertake themselves the physical care of their offspring. That was the work of a wet-nurse, from whom girls progressed to a governess – in a great household a gentle-woman – and boys to a master. The Warwicks, of course, had no sons, but at least two other boys, their ward Francis Lord Lovell and also the royal prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, were brought up in their household;36 female wards and other girls may also have been. Whatever their sex, all the children learnt at least to read and write in English, perhaps in Latin also, to say the Lord’s Prayer (Paternoster) and Hail Mary (Ave), and were taught about religious observance: there were religious services everyday, usually several times a day. They also learnt who they were: their family, its genealogy, its traditions, legends and renown. It was here, surely, that Anne Neville learnt about Guy of Warwick and her remarkable grandfather Earl Richard Beauchamp, about her Despenser, Montagu and Neville forebears. They must all have learnt to ride. Thereafter the routes for boys and girls separated. Boys were taught to a higher academic standard and also about the martial arts appropriate to future warriors. The upbringing of girls was designed to fit them for their role in life as gentlewomen, mothers, managers of households and members of polite society. They needed to attract good husbands and to make the most of their married lives. For the latter role, they needed to learn housewifery. Sewing and the working of textiles feature prominently in all the books of instruction. They learnt how to handle servants. Girls also needed to learn courtesy, proper deportment, the etiquette, procedures and good manners expected of polite society. The Neville girls must have been taught to eat as daintily as Chaucer’s Prioress.

  The content of education, as ever, was not everything. The Knight of the Tower wrote his book so that his daughters ‘ought to govern them self and to keep them from evil’. Academics and caring fathers alike sought to set girls on the right course, to inculcate proper values, and to cure them of the besetting female sins, of which a considerable list was compiled. Girls should avoid gossip, take care in what they said, not answer back, eschew idleness, extravagance and over-attention to their physical appearance, such as the painting of faces and plucking of eyebrows, and hence both vanity and pride. ‘Every good woman’ should ‘behave herself simply & honestly in her clothing and in the quantity of it’. Humility, obedience to men and silence were enjoined. That such advice had to be devised implies, of course, that many girls were not like this. If we cannot be sure that Anne Neville conformed, nevertheless great effort and staffing was surely deployed to ensure that Warwick’s daughters were brought up properly. Above all, girls must be chaste, virgins before marriage and monogamous afterwards. Girls were of course secluded from male society and chaperoned at all times, but that alone was not enough. Knowing that their future lay in marriage, even young girls were surely alert to male suitors and sexually aware, at least in theory, and liable to temptation. From their own first-hand experiences, both the Knight of the Tower and Peter Idley warned against predatory and ineligible males, who flattered inexperienced girls, promised marriage to seduce them, and threatened their reputations. Girls should curtail such inappropriate conversations and preserve their reputations – for honour was crucial among females – and hence their attraction to serious suitors. Constancy and courage were urged as antidotes to the temptations they were bound to encounter. As models they were offered the virgin martyrs, like themselves always beautiful, nubile and desirable, who had successfully resisted all blandishments, worldly advantage and threats to preserve their chastity. We may safely presume that Anne was kept unsullied for her marriage at fourteen.

  The virgin martyrs were maidens, what we call adolescents, suspended between childhood and adulthood. ‘Sufficiently physically developed to engage in procreation, and sufficiently intellectually and morally developed to understand the nature o
f the bond’ of marriage, maidens had reached the perfect age of the ‘youthful, sexually mature yet virginal young woman’. The late medieval ideal was that female ‘beauty was associated with the slenderness of youth and virginity’.37 By the mid-1460s, Isabel and Anne Neville too were maidens shaped by their upbringings and were still being shaped to an ideal devised by men to make them attractive to male suitors and good wives and mothers thereafter. Anne was blonde and conventionally described as ‘beauteous’ by John Rows.38 Heiresses did not have to be beautiful, with even the insane finding husbands, but as they attracted royal dukes perhaps the Neville sisters were.

  Damsels like Isabel and Anne were commonly placed in other gentle households, where perhaps they were more easily disciplined in their adolescent years. We have no evidence of this for the Neville sisters. There was no queen’s household in which to place them until 1464, when Isabel was twelve and Anne eight. Perhaps Warwick did not want to place them with Edward’s Wydeville queen, about whom he had decided qualms, and whose kinsfolk competed vigorously for such places. We should imagine Isabel, Anne and other girls living in an upper household dominated by mature and married gentlewomen with their mother and accompanying her wherever she moved, albeit less frequently than their restless father. With both parents they are recorded making offerings with the king at St Mary’s Warwick, probably in January 1464.39 Most likely they were also with their parents at York in September 1465 in company with young Duke Richard, their two uncles by marriage Lords FitzHugh and Hastings and hence probably their aunts, Warwick’s sisters Alice and Katherine. That, regrettably, is all.