Anne Neville

by Michael Hicks

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Between Princes

  1471–5

  Anne was scarcely married before she was widowed. Her acquaintance with her first husband Prince Edward was brief indeed: not more than nine months in all, at most six months of matrimony. Briefly, ever so briefly, she was a princess, by name and in the estimation of that limited company that was with Queen Margaret in France and returned with her to England and amongst Lancastrians generally, but without ever the courtly and luxurious life that should have gone with it. With her husband’s death at Tewkesbury, Anne found herself a widow. She was dowager-princess of Wales. She was entitled to dower from the possessions of her husband – the principality of Wales, duchy of Cornwall and earldom of Chester. She should have had a right to her jointure too, but no jointure had been settled on her. But of course there was a hitch: her husband Edward had been a Lancastrian prince and after 4 May England was Yorkist again. Anne was princess only to a Lancastrian audience. Who dared to be Lancastrian after Tewkesbury? Since 1460 Yorkists had discounted any hereditary rights to the house of Lancaster. In 1471 King Edward IV firmly rejected the house of Lancaster, the Readeption, and hence any claims that Prince Edward had possessed either to the crown or his principality. To King Edward IV and the Yorkist victors after Tewkesbury, Edward of Lancaster had never been prince of Wales. He had never taken seisin of any of the possessions that normally belonged to the king’s heir; had he done so, it would have been wrongfully. Thus Prince Edward had nothing with which to dower his princess. Moreover, he had perished an enemy and a traitor. If he was never attainted, this was because there was nothing to confiscate. Furthermore, King Edward now had his own infant prince, the future Edward V, on whom he was to confer all the properties earmarked for the heir of throne after resuming whatever had been granted to anybody else.1 As princess, therefore, Anne was entitled to nothing. Her title of princess of Wales was obsolete, empty, useless, probably unusable, and raised undesirable associations. Although more elevated, princess of Wales was a title that she ceased to use once she became duchess of Gloucester, if not before.

  At least King Edward had received her, accepted her submission, and had pardoned her. He could do no less. The Wars of the Roses were not waged against women. None were slain in battle, only three attainted as traitors by parliament. Even the most partisan ladies were merely confined (usually in monasteries) and restrained from supporting their recalcitrant menfolk.2 Princess Anne posed Edward no threat. If the wife or widow of a traitor peer was reduced to begging, like Anne’s aunt Margaret, Countess of Oxford, King Edward was induced to relieve her:3 it was chivalric expectation. Just as Edward was expected to, and did, see his rival honourably buried, so too he had to tolerate Prince Edward’s consort and, if necessary, finance her. Until 11 June 1471, moreover, Anne was only fourteen years of age.

  Laynesmith has revived speculation about what might have been had Anne been already pregnant by Prince Edward.4 That was certainly an objective of the marriage which Prince Edward surely strove for. If Anne had been with child, she could have renewed the Lancastrian line that had just been eradicated. Whilst nobody could have been certain, the fact that Henry VI perished unnaturally on 20 May, a murder that was pointless as long as he had an heir living, may be evidence that Anne was believed not to be with child. Had she been pregnant, an accident – life-threatening to her baby if not herself – might have been engineered. Such speculation, however, is more than usually groundless. There is no contemporary evidence of any such interesting condition, not even any contemporary suspicions.

  Anne was above the age of majority. Although entitled in law to half the Montagu/Salisbury lands (less her mother’s dower and jointure), she was not a royal ward. She was also a widow and thus femme sole: a single woman entitled to manage her own affairs without male intervention, unlike any spinster or wife. A fifteen-year-old widow without property, however, had no means to exercise her theoretical independence. Nor could Anne look to her mother for sympathy, guidance or protection, except perhaps by post, since the Countess Anne was in custody at Beaulieu and was also unable to assert her own rights.

  Anne Beauchamp, now dowager-countess of Warwick, could expect no dower from her late husband’s estate, since, to Yorkist eyes, her husband Warwick had been a traitor. She was still entitled to her jointure – the properties settled jointly on her and her husband at their marriage.5 Moreover, her vast Beauchamp and Despenser inheritances were still legally her own. That all the lands that Warwick held in his own or her right were seized in 1471 and occupied by Clarence was a common enough error that should have been corrected when better evidence of the actual title was produced. Whatever the legal situation, however, many bereaved ladies seem to have had difficulties with their jointures, apparently sometimes because they were not properly secured at law: the king’s own queen and two of his mistresses found their in-laws unwilling to honour the deals after their husbands’ death.6 Their inheritances, however, were different: their rights of inheritance were beyond debate – quite incontestable. These were rights that could not be denied. Understandably the countess found it difficult to secure livery of her estate whilst in sanctuary. She needed to come to the king and make her case direct as, for instance, the king’s future bedfellows Dame Eleanor Butler, Dame Elizabeth Grey and Dame Margaret Lucy had done.7 But the countess found that realising her rights was in practice quite unattainable. As she was to protest to parliament, she had not done anything wrong. She had not betrayed King Edward as Warwick himself had done. She had taken sanctuary for her own safety and to pray ‘for the weal and health of the soul of her said [deceased] lord and husband as right and conscience’ demanded. Within five days or thereabouts, therefore even before the battle of Tewkesbury, she had asked the king for a safe-conduct. Instead, ‘to her great heart’s grievance’, he had ordered her strict confinement, so that she was unable as she wished to come to court to sue for livery of her inheritance, jointure and dower. In October 1472 or even later, not less than eighteen months after she first took sanctuary, the countess was still not allowed to leave Beaulieu Abbey, where she was living poorly and lacked even a clerk, she said implausibly, to pen her plea. She

  hath written letters in that behalf to the King’s Highness, with her own hand, and not only making such labours, suits and means to the King’s Highness, sothely also to the Queen’s good grace, to my right redoubted lady the King’s mother [Cecily Duchess of York], to my lady the King’s eldest daughter [Elizabeth of York], to my ladies the King’s sisters [Anne Duchess of Exeter and Elizabeth Duchess of Suffolk], to my lady of Bedford, mother to the Queen [Jacquetta Duchess of Bedford], and to other ladies noble of this realm.8

  Obviously she expected other ladies to be sympathetic to her in her predicament: the Duchesses Cecily, Anne and Jacquetta had all struggled to recover their rights after their husbands’ death or forfeiture. She expected the intervention of this ladies’ union to be effective with the men. Given that the war was over, surely nobody thought that the widowed countess posed any further threat to national security? Yet she was confined to Beaulieu at the king’s command. Why did the king command it? Why did the countess not solicit the intercession of her daughter Isabel or her son-in-law Clarence? The answer in all cases is surely the same. Surely she did seek the support of Isabel and Clarence, to no avail. Actually it was Isabel and Clarence (and perhaps later Anne and Gloucester) who opposed her rights. It was in their interests that the king kept her confined to Beaulieu after any risk to the public had passed. The royal ladies, to whom the countess wrote, may well have put first the interests of their brothers and brothers-in-law Clarence and Gloucester. In the meantime, of course, the countess could be no effective help to her daughter Anne.

  We left Anne in the king’s company at Tewkesbury or at Worcester in early May 1471. Whilst we cannot delve into her first marriage, we may safely presume a succession of emotions – fear during the long pursuit and decisive battle, apprehension at the result,
grief at her husband’s death, trauma at the bloodshed, and undoubtedly also concern for her own safety and for her own future. What was to befall her was far from clear. If safe from actual destitution or execution, her prospects now looked very bleak. Personally dowerless, she had only her expectations of inheritance to sustain her and to attract a male protector. At midsummer 1471, in view of her father’s death at Barnet and her mother’s flight, that heritage was purely speculative. Under such circumstances, the protection of her powerful brother [-in-law], her sister Isabel’s husband Clarence, was surely very welcome. All the more so if, as seems likely, he took her in at Tewkesbury itself, immediately after the battle and her submission to the king, and conveyed her home to Warwick en route for London, whence he engaged in a further campaign in Kent against the Bastard of Fauconberg. Clarence was Anne’s guardian angel. As with other wives of traitors, the king may well have consigned Anne to Clarence’s custody by word of mouth or in some undocumented way, but he cannot have granted him the wardship and marriage of a widow who was of age.

  COURTSHIP OF A PRINCESS

  Unfortunately we have no detailed knowledge of where Anne was and what she did for the next eight crucial months. We must deal in likelihoods. Clarence’s easiest course of action was to receive his widowed sister-in-law into the household of the Duchess Isabel. We may doubt how agreeable were the relations now resumed of the two reunited sisters, the elder of whom was married to the man who had betrayed the younger’s father and husband, both with fatal results. Probably Anne accompanied her sister wherever she went, to London, and into society. A widowed princess was an honoured guest. Also probably it was during this period and at London, most probably at the Christmas and New Year celebrations of 1471–2, that Anne again encountered her brother[-in-law] Richard, Duke of Gloucester, resumed their acquaintance, and determined to take him as her second husband.

  Anne cannot have planned all this in advance. Doubtless she was relieved initially to be rescued and was pleased to lie low. Her mother remained in sanctuary at Beaulieu. Isabel was to hand, but the interests of the two sisters were not identical. When Clarence had deserted Warwick and rejoined King Edward, the two royal brothers were reconciled. Clarence’s offences were wiped out. Subsequently he had served in the king’s army at Barnet, a close-run battle in which the duke’s contingent, estimated by the Arrival as 4,000 strong, was essential for victory. As reward for his defection and services at Barnet, Clarence had immediately been granted all the Warwick inheritance which Isabel had been entitled to inherit. A court was held in their name at Erdington in modern Birmingham as early as 16 April.9 The Neville lands in the North, to which Isabel had no claim, were excluded. Having secured everything to which she had rights of inheritance, naturally George and Isabel wanted to keep it all – it was the heritage of their unborn children – and did not want to surrender any of it to the Duchess Isabel’s mother, nor indeed to divide it with her sister Anne. In her distant sanctuary at Beaulieu, the countess of Warwick was out of the picture: indeed, she was kept out of the picture, the abbot receiving ‘right sharp commandment’ from the king to hold her there.10 Naturally also George and Isabel wished to prevent Anne marrying again, for any husband would surely wish to assert her rights and recover for himself her half-share. Their case cannot be put more succinctly than it was somewhat later by the Milanese ambassador: ‘because his brother King Edward had promised him Warwick’s country, [Clarence] did not want the former [Gloucester] to have it, by reason of the marriage with the earl [of Warwick]’s second daughter’.11 They wanted to keep what was theirs, their entitlement, what the king had given them. Presumably it was only after Gloucester had showed an interest in Anne that they concealed her from the prying eyes of aspirant husbands. This apparently was at the duke’s London house, Coldharbour, near Dowgate. Whether she was concealed as a maid in the duke’s kitchen, as Crowland claimed, sounds unlikely12 – women were not normally employed in great households and Anne cannot have possessed many relevant skills – but the concealment story is surely authentic. Crowland’s kitchen story is reminiscent of the Cinderella rags to riches story. It implies that Gloucester was a knight errant who rescued her rather than, alternatively, a predatory seducer. We cannot know what the Clarences had in mind for Anne next. In similar circumstances we know of male heirs who consigned their nieces to nunneries – William, Earl of Suffolk in 1423, for instance13 – and of brothers-in-law who tried to exclude their sisters-in-law from their inheritance.14 If the Clarences offered Anne the alternative of taking the veil, we must presume that she declined. As an heiress, in theory, she was materially secure, but to make good her rights she needed a male protagonist and to marry.

  The pressure that George and Isabel, her protectors, could exert on the fifteen-year-old Anne may have appeared almost irresistible: though we cannot know, of course, whether they coerced her at all. The best evidence of such pressure, perhaps, is that Anne was to greet Clarence’s brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester as her saviour, her rescuer, and that she allowed him to whisk her away to sanctuary. In medieval parlance, this abduction was a rape – as so often committed, in medieval terms, with the full consent of the lady. By then, presumably, Anne had reconciled herself to remarrying – the destiny after all to which such aristocratic ladies were born and brought up. Independence, as a helpless and destitute femme sole, could not do the trick and had no attraction for her.

  Whether Anne was right to see Richard in such a favourable light, however, is not so certain. Doubtless she embarked on the course that she took with her eyes open. Obviously there was an irony to such a match. Whether or not Richard had a part in her husband’s death and whether this was publicly known, both of which now appear more likely in view of the redis-covered Burgundian illumination, and whether or not he had presided over the elimination of her father-in-law Henry VI, nevertheless the duke had certainly fought on the side adverse in the battles at which Anne’s father, husband and uncle had been slain. This was as one of many, against a cause that was now obsolete and beyond revival. To the Yorkists and hence everybody else who mattered politically in 1471, Anne’s menfolk had been traitors legitimately slain in the rightful Yorkist cause. A post-Lancastrian and post-Warwick reality had to be accepted. There was nothing to be salvaged or revived from the Lancastrian cause and no mileage in resentment or vengeance. If revenge ever featured in Anne’s thoughts or emotions, she lacked the power to exact it and let it drop even when, in bed, Richard was at his most vulnerable. In the perilous limbo in which Anne found herself in 1471, such reflections were pointless, indeed counterproductive, and best forgotten. Moreover Anne had as many kindred on the winning as the losing side. Until 1470 it had been the winners whom she knew and the Yorkists with whom she interacted. The answer to Shakespeare’s rhetorical question – ‘Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’ – was surely no, not even in this case. However ironical, the issues were never as stark or as conflictive as Shakespeare was to imagine.

  Whatever Richard’s physical limitations – we know him to have been short, slight, and perhaps even a hunchback – Anne had everything to gain materially from matrimony with him that she could hope to attain. She would have the ducal and royal rank her father had planned with a bridegroom that he may originally have favoured and (according to Waurin) had actually selected; respect; a princely establishment and great wealth; and the prospect of motherhood, the normal fulfilment of any late medieval lady. It was her birthright and her destiny. Given all that, her hereditary rights were of secondary importance for her, but they were crucial for Duke Richard. Without her, they were inaccessible. Neither the duke nor any other potential husband could secure Anne’s inheritance except by marrying her. That was her best hope for the future and her security. Marriage, of course, was only a first step. It was perhaps attainable by mere squires, like Owen Tudor who had notoriously coupled with Henry V’s queen Katherine of France or Richard Wydeville, who had wed Jacquetta of Luxemberg, the widow of the Regent Bedfor
d. There were many for whom marriage to a princess was exaltation: already a prince, Gloucester was not among them. To secure Anne’s inheritance in the teeth of the royal duke of Clarence required her to marry not just any genteel squire, but somebody equally powerful and just as influential with the king as Clarence was. Sir John Risley was later warned by Edward IV not to buy land with a suspect title from Gloucester, which demanded all the power of the duke to retain it.15 All these necessary criteria in this case were satisfied by Richard, Duke of Gloucester and, perhaps in the early 1470s, only by him. No other potential suitor could be so confident of success.

  Undoubtedly Richard wanted Anne for his wife. Crowland tells us so, adding how astutely he tracked her down, found her whereabouts, and spirited her into safekeeping.16 He was not deterred by any obstacles, personal or political, familial or moral, and he confronted his brother Clarence head on. The abduction was another crucial upheaval and another decisive turning point in Anne’s short life. We merely know, thanks to Crowland, that Duke Richard removed Anne initially from Clarence’s custody to the celebrated sanctuary in the city of London of the College of St Martin-le-Grand, which was located between the Guildhall and St Paul’s.17 That was sometime before 16 February 1472.18 Anne may have spent half a year or more in Clarence’s care. Actually we may deduce rather more. After receiving the submission of the Kentish rebels at Sandwich on 26 May, Richard was sent to combat the last vestiges of resistance in the North, where he tried and executed the Bastard of Fauconberg. At Norwich about 23 August,19 he dated from the North grants on 30 August, 4 and 6 October, 20 November and 11 December 1471.20 Unless therefore he reached his understanding with Anne in the early summer, in June and July 1471 and immediately after the death of her first husband, the whole courtship had to be fitted into the two months from late December 1471 to the Sheen council of 16 February 1472. A whirlwind wooing indeed!