Anne Neville

by Michael Hicks

  It is unfortunate that this episode is so ill-documented, since it was the pivotal moment when Anne made the choices that shaped the rest of her life. If Anne was undoubtedly a victim, she was not helpless. Within the limited scope apparently left to her, she was also in charge. Widows were legally free of masculine control and free to contract their own courtships and marriages. There seems to have been nobody to whom she could turn for disinterested counsel. Gloucester, who did advise her and whose blandishments were crucial, was certainly no disinterested party. Yet it was Anne’s self-conscious decision not to remain where she was, in Clarence’s kitchen or wherever. She also decided self-consciously not to become a nun and against whatever future, probably not including marriage, that her brother-in-law Clarence had in store for her. It was her decision to permit her abduction to St Martin’s, almost certainly with the rider that this was merely a first step towards marriage to Duke Richard. It was her decision also to marry far within the prohibited degrees. There can have been very few fifteen-year-old ladies, let alone princesses, who chose their marriage partners for themselves. Anne did. She transferred herself from one royal duke to another and duly married the second, tying her fortunes henceforth to his. All her ambitions were thereby fulfilled.

  Why Anne did this is only too obvious. Her current situation and prospects were unacceptable. We have seen what she had to gain. Only Gloucester dared to outface his brother of Clarence and only he could retrieve her inheritance. She had no alternative, certainly none if she wanted the wealth, prestige and rank to which she was born and bred. Without her inheritance, even Gloucester was not available. Anne could have aspired no higher. It helped of course that Anne was acquainted with Duke Richard: they had shared experiences from his sojourn in 1465–8 in her father’s household. Perhaps they knew one another quite well, despite their difference in years. In March 1472, when she was only fifteen and he was nineteen, a difference of nearly four years in age (fortyfour months) was substantial. How much more significant was the gap in age in 1468, when the sixteen-year-old duke had moved out of Warwick’s household and away from his twelve-year-old cousin! Any romantic interest dating back to that era appears improbable. Romance makes better sense in 1472, providing that they had the opportunity to develop their relationship, most probably before Clarence – understandably alarmed – secreted Anne away, but perhaps only following the abduction and after Anne’s initial flight. How irritating that we cannot know! Evidence of any sexual attraction – or indeed sexual starvation following the abrupt termination of Anne’s conjugal rights – is irretrievable. It is twenty-first-century standards that have made modern historians hope for the love-match that we take for granted today. For Anne, with her upbringing and contemporary expectations, love was not the prerequisite that we have subsequently made it. A love match appears unlikely here.

  There is no need to inject sentiment as an ingredient into Richard’s actions. He was a royal duke and he wanted the estates, wealth, and power within England to go with it. Not for him to be a pawn in King Edward’s foreign policy! Most of the lands that he had been given in the 1460s had been returned to their original holders or resumed by the crown. That was why he ceased to operate in Lancashire and Cheshire. The chief offices in Wales received in 1469 now reverted to the 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Edward IV gave Gloucester everything that he had to bestow arising from the forfeitures of the renegade Yorkists and the Lancastrians who had been defeated in 1471. Thus Richard accrued Warwick’s Neville estates in the North – Middleham, Sheriff Hutton and Penrith – to which neither Isabel nor Anne had ever been entitled: this was at the expense of their cousin George Neville, Duke of Bedford, the son of Warwick’s late brother John, Marquis Montagu. Richard was also granted all those lands in eastern England that had belonged to the earl of Oxford and a clutch of county gentry,21 which he had little use for and most of which he later renounced. There was little to recover from the returning Lancastrians, who had been attainted once already. Many of their possessions were restored to Clarence, who had held them before, whilst the possessions of the traitor duke of Exeter reverted to his estranged Duchess Anne, eldest sister to the king and to the royal dukes. If all Richard’s grants were added altogether – and assuming that Richard could overcome complications in the titles to certain estates – these grants could have brought Richard somewhat more than the qualifying income for a duke: 2,000 marks or £1,666 13s 4d. Altogether they fell well short of the revenues of the greatest magnates, such as Clarence and Buckingham. To match them – and Richard definitely wanted to match them – the duke needed to marry well within England. No potential partner offered more than the Princess Anne. From the start of his courtship, therefore, her inheritance was his key objective. Richard, moreover, was not prepared to wait for Anne’s mother to die. He wanted it all now. And that meant that Richard was not interested solely in securing Anne’s rights, largely prospective, but also in dispossessing Anne’s mother, his intended mother-in-law the countess of Warwick.

  Such an interpretation has appeared too cynical for some supporters of Richard III, who would much prefer a love match. It was ‘a delicate and honourable consideration for her feelings’ that prompted Richard to remove Anne from sanctuary, wrote Miss Wigram long ago, rather than his desire for her inheritance.22 Unfortunately, this is one point about which we can be certain. John Paston II reported that Clarence conceded her person, but not her livelihood:23 Richard, however, declined. He insisted on the inheritance also. If this appears heartless and calculating to modern eyes, bestowing women in marriage with property was commonplace in late medieval arranged marriages. Their endowment frequently determined the choice.‘Love matches sometimes occurred’, wrote Jennifer Ward, ‘but were frowned on by noble society’.24

  It is surprising how quickly Anne progressed from her first husband to her second. If Anne’s first marriage was definitely not a love match – she cannot have known the bridegroom before her betrothal – yet Edward of Lancaster was her husband and, however briefly, he had shared her bed. Her mourning was brief indeed. Within eight months at most, Anne had adjusted to her loss – to all her losses, her father included – and had pledged herself to another. Whilst it is not difficult to think of other young widows who moved on to further consorts with such precipitate haste, it was not what was expected – not seemly conduct – even by fifteenth-century standards. Is not a cynical and calculating materialism on Anne’s part implied here? Was she one of those girls who succumbed to the material or sexual temptations that the conduct books warned against? Or was Anne merely an unstable and/or emotional and/or impressionable fifteen-year-old on whom Duke Richard had imposed his stamp? We cannot be sure.

  One must moreover deplore the immorality of the match. A custodial sentence and registration as a sexual offender would result today for any man like Duke Richard guilty of sexual intercourse with a fifteen-year-old girl, but fifteenth-century standards permitted such relations and indeed regarded them as normal and legitimate. In another way, however, this match did offend contemporary values. Whilst always aware that Anne and Richard were related within the prohibited degrees, historians have downplayed the significance. The medieval Catholic Church forbade marriages between kinsfolk who were much more distantly related than those that exercise us today. Often we are scarcely conscious of our first cousins, let alone aware who are our second cousins and more remote relatives, and, in this age of divorce, we are generally unfazed by the coupling of in-laws and even step-siblings unconnected by any blood ties. Such unions are not infrequent in soap operas, feature films, and real life. Incest, for us, involves parents and children, siblings, uncles and nieces. Hence we regard Clarence’s need for a dispensation to marry his first cousin once removed as a curious technicality. Even less objectionable, to us, was Anne’s first match, when neither party was closer than four generations from their common ancestor John of Gaunt (d.1399). A dispensation had to be obtained for that too. We have seen that Warwick would allow neither of hi
s daughters to marry until impediments had been removed. The spiritual kinship created by Clarence’s mother as Isabel’s godmother appears scarcely conceivable to us. Dispensation, from our angle, was simply a necessary mechanism to remove technical obstacles to what ought to have been perfectly acceptable. That, however, was not how fifteenth-century people regarded the issue. For them, marriage within the prohibited degrees was incestuous and therefore rightly prohibited. It was because they were related in the third and fourth degrees that the wedding of Edward IV’s second son in 1478 was barred at the door of the chapel royal at Westminster, an impediment that was removed very publicly when the dean produced the requisite papal bull.25 Breaches were sinful even if accidental. To contract such matches deliberately and in full consciousness of the offence was a heinous sin and potentially damnable. Such unions ran the risk of being compulsorily dissolved and any consequent children bastardised. Bastards were excluded from inheritance. The Calendar of Papal Letters contains many instances of partners who discovered the defect after their marriages and were so troubled by conscience that they revealed their offence to the papacy and secured papal authority to remain married and for their offspring to remain legitimate. Often, admittedly, impediments were set aside and illicit matches were confirmed retrospectively, but dispensations were sometimes refused, even for princes.26 Warwick had had great difficulty in securing the necessary dispensation for Clarence and Isabel. Dispensations could not be presumed.

  Gloucester and Anne were already related in the same degrees as their siblings Clarence and Isabel, to which a further distant tie was created by Anne’s first wedding to a distant cousin of them both, and they were yet more closely connected by the marriage of Richard’s brother to Anne’s sister. The impediments multiplied. Anne and Richard were brother-in-law and sister-in-law, related in the first degree of affinity. In fifteenth-century parlance, Richard was Anne’s brother and Anne was Richard’s sister. This was not just a matter of words: to their contemporaries, that was their relationship. Any sexual encounter between them, in or out of wedlock, was incestuous, sinful, prohibited, deeply shocking and probably incapable of being dispensed. Neither Richard nor Anne can have been ignorant of this. Each should have rebuffed anything beyond fraternal friendship. To persist nevertheless, to pledge to each other and to resolve on marriage, required both parties to reject contemporary standards of morality – to flout what others thought – and to override the law in pursuit of their own wishes. Whether Anne was motivated by sexual attraction, ambition or merely by a desire to escape from an impossible situation, she was, by contemporary standards, quite wrong. She ran the risk, moreover, that her marriage would be dissolved after the event, that she would be left in limbo – unmarried, property-less, unmarriageable – and her children illegitimate. However difficult her situation may have appeared, it cannot, on current evidence, have been sufficiently impossible to justify such a step. As for Richard, desperation cannot be pleaded in extenuation. That they appear to have escaped the penalties for a dozen years does not alter the case.

  Past historians have had good reason to deduce that Anne and Richard had no papal dispensation to validate their marriage. Long ago, C.A.J. Armstrong twice searched the Vatican archives in search of one, unsuccessfully. In his day, the registers of the papal penitentiary were not accessible. Now that they are, it has been discovered that a dispensation was actually applied for on behalf of Richard, of Lincoln diocese wherein he had been born (at Fotheringhay), and Anne Neville, woman (mulier) of the diocese of York. This was to dispense impediments in the third and fourth degrees of affinity. His petition was approved by the papal penitentiary on 22 April 1472. A declaratory letter was also issued,27 which doubtless stilled the objections of Cardinal Bourchier, the officiating clergyman, or any other cleric present at their subsequent wedding. Richard and Anne were related in the same degrees as their siblings Clarence and Isabel in 1469: that is, in the second degree (as first cousins) and twice in the fourth degree of consanguinity. As Richard, like Anne’s first husband Edward of Lancaster, was a great-grandson of John of Gaunt, there was yet another fourth degree of consanguinity to be dispensed. Finally, of course, Richard and Anne were brother-in-law and sister-in-law, related in the first degree of affinity. What they needed was a dispensation that covered impediments in the first degree of affinity, another in the second and three in the fourth degrees of consanguinity. This one, which dispensed only in the third and fourth degrees of affinity, not consanguinity, was therefore insufficient to validate their marriage. If the clerks of the penitentiary routinely dispensed impediments in the third and fourth degree, the second degree of consanguinity (as Clarence had found) was more serious, and affinity in the first degree was yet more so. Such a dispensation was more difficult to obtain. It would certainly take more lobbying, more time, and might indeed prove unattainable. Rejection was predictable.

  The 1472 dispensation was therefore inadequate, as Richard must have perceived. At no point can he have been unaware of the consanguinity that linked Anne to him, that they were first cousins once removed and siblings-in-law. Another, more wide-ranging dispensation was needed before Anne and Richard could contract a valid union, but they did not wait for that. That they decided to marry in defiance of canon law is astonishing. To marry before securing a valid dispensation – and, indeed, in full knowledge of it – was a further sin to be absolved. Both partners had to be eligible to marry one another and to make a valid marriage, even though by 16 February 1472 (at the latest) they had evidently pledged themselves to one another, all that in normal circumstances was required to make an unbreakable contract in this period. Even Clarence was obliged to accept that the marriage would happen – John Paston’s phrasing, however, indicates that it had not happened yet.

  The King entreats my Lord of Clarence for my Lord of Gloucester, and (as it is said) he answers that he may well have my lady his sister-in-law, but they shall divide no livelihood, as he says.28

  Even though Clarence thought of both parties as his siblings, the morality, so it appears, was at this stage not his concern. Whilst the dukes themselves debated in council, they represented Isabel and Anne and not necessarily purely formally. At this stage Clarence fought to keep all the property, but found himself opposed by the king. Posing improbably as arbiter and ‘loving brother’, so Crowland ironically reports,29 Edward imposed a settlement that was much to Clarence’s disadvantage. At this royal council it was determined that the whole Warwick inheritance was to be divided, not just the lion’s share in tail general that Clarence was occupying.

  It was the best possible outcome for Anne. Duke Richard may have been her father’s preferred choice for her during the 1460s. She shared the vicissitudes in Warwick’s fortunes, into forfeiture and exile and then to next in the Lancastrian line of succession, and ‘after his decease’, as Rows put it, ‘marvellously conveyed by all the corners and parts of the wheel of fortune’. Widowed, childless, ruined, dependent on her foes and with only the most unpromising prospects, yet was ‘she exalted again’ to be duchess of Gloucester and subsequently (as Rows was aware) ‘higher than ever she was to the most high throne and honour’.30 It was an amazing transformation. Certainly Anne had made the right choice for herself.

  PARTITION OF THE WARWICK INHERITANCE

  The principles of the partition were already agreed. Evidently Gloucester was to have everything in the North and Clarence the lands in the Midlands and the South – he was created earl of Warwick and Salisbury. By deduction, Gloucester was to have the marcher lordships in Wales. The division was convenient, since Gloucester already occupied the Neville castles in the North, where the king had allocated him military responsibilities, and Clarence those in the West Midlands. Historians have usually presumed that this was the dukes’ preference, properties in Wales, the South, and elsewhere being little more than makeweights. Actually, however, the West Midlands had been more obviously home to the Duchess Isabel, the eldest sister who was entitled to have
the first pick, whilst Anne’s youth, after Warwick came into his father’s Neville inheritance, may have been spent mainly in the North. The partition of the Warwick inheritance may therefore have conformed to the preference of the two ladies, who could indeed have had some input in the result. Surely Isabel did.

  Next the estates had to be valued, the detailed division agreed, the legal niceties determined, and the actual transfer of properties carried out. When parliament next met (October 1472), only after Anne had pledged herself to Richard and the partition was agreed in principle, it was petitioned by Anne, Countess of Warwick for livery of her jointure and inheritance, without success. The only copy of her petition is in Gloucester’s cartulary: presumably he had a copy taken when the issue was still in the balance.31 But her plea came too late. The decisions had been made. Discussion of the petition and its progress were presumably halted and certainly came to nothing. Clarence, who was the loser, obstructed implementation of the partition of the inheritances by refusing to give up what he held and perhaps also with violence, comprehensibly since Gloucester was not yet legally married to his new duchess. Hence the stakes were raised. Early in June 1473, Gloucester’s agent Sir James Tyrell removed the Countess Anne from sanctuary in Beaulieu Abbey to Gloucester’s castle at Middleham. It may well be, as Rows was later to state, that she ‘fled to him as her chief refuge’, in which case she was to be sadly disappointed.32 At the time it was reported that the king was to restore her inheritance, so that she could grant it to Gloucester. That King Edward was indeed complicit is suggested because the abbot of Beaulieu had to be released by him from her custody.33 Gloucester already had a track record of coercing old ladies. Implicit in this action was the king’s backing for the countess’ restoration to her whole inheritance and its transfer to the duke and duchess of Gloucester, leaving Clarence with almost nothing. Perhaps this threat was sufficient. Perhaps it was the additional penalty of the resumption of Clarence’s prized honour of Tutbury (Staffs.) in December 147334 – or maybe that was Edward’s punishment of Clarence for non-compliance – that brought Clarence to heel and enabled the implementation of the 1472 agreement. The whole estate was valued, a partition was agreed – we possess the list of Gloucester’s share – and the legal formalities were concluded in 1474 and 1475.35