There can be no doubt that both parties were greedy. Both Clarence and Gloucester were acquisitive. Whether their duchesses were also we cannot tell. Isabel and Anne may have been fully consenting parties: more probably, they were merely the means that their husbands exploited as they acted nominally on the ladies’ behalf. Possibly, however, Anne played a larger role, since Rows writes, with reference to the treatment of her mother the countess, of Anne’s ‘election’ (electio) or choice.36 Crowland was present in the royal council at which the two dukes pushed their cases in person.
So much disputation arose between the brothers and so many keen arguments were put forward on either side with the greatest acuteness in the presence of the king, sitting in judgement in the council-chamber, that all who stood around, even those learned in the law, marvelled at the profusion of the arguments which the princes produced for their own cases.37
It is hard to realise that the elder of the two dukes who debated so confidently was aged only twenty-three and that Richard, Duke of Gloucester was not yet twenty!
Clarence wished to hang on to the whole of the Beauchamp (Warwick), Despenser and Montagu (Salisbury) inheritance in right of his wife Isabel rather than divide it with his sister-in-law Anne, the other co-heiress. Having pocketed the Neville inheritance, to which Isabel had no hereditary claim, Gloucester exploited his wife Anne to secure additionally her half-share of the Beauchamp, Despenser and Montagu estates as well. Both parties were agreed on the need to exclude the male heir of the Neville estates – Warwick’s nephew George, Duke of Bedford, son of his brother John, Marquis Montagu – and also, of course, their mother-in-law, the Countess Anne, rightful possessor of the Beauchamp and Despenser estates. If Clarence wanted to keep more than his duchess’ strict entitlement, in line with plenty of precedents, Gloucester also aimed to end up with all the Neville lands and half the rest, together much more than half. It is to Edward’s limited credit that the settlement he imposed treated them equally. Not too much praise should be heaped on him, however, for the whole quarrel, the aspiration of both dukes and duchesses, and especially the conclusion, affronted contemporary standards – property rights, rights of inheritance, filial respect, brotherly and sisterly etiquette, sexual and marital morality, chivalry and doubtless much else besides. Certainly Crowland, an informed and disinterested observer, was shocked: recognising that the inheritance properly belonged to the countess, whose rights were disregarded, and ‘leaving these wilful men to exercise their will’, he abandoned ‘further inquiry into this hopeless business’.38 Just as shocked was Rows, whose prime loyalty was to neither sister, nor their husbands, but the Countess Anne. ‘Which good lady had in her days great tribulation for her lord’s sake’, he wrote. ‘In her tribulations she was ever to the great pleasure of God full patient, to the great merit of her own soul and example for all others that were vexed with any adversity’.39 If oblique, muted and less than explicit in the Rows Roll that he may have presented to Queen Anne, he does not spare her in the History that he wrote after her death.40
Invaluable though Clarence’s services were in 1471, they would not have secured him such an enormous recompense – the greatest single act of patronage of any medieval English king – had not his Duchess Isabel been the real heiress. Similarly Edward IV would not have forced Clarence to disgorge so much for Gloucester – and probably, indeed, nothing – had not the latter married the other heiress Anne. Probably neither had the option of securing all they sought by a grant by their brother the king. Once the whole Warwick inheritance was reserved to them, however, it would have been much easier – technically much less difficult legally – for them each to have received their share by royal grant. All that was required was for Warwick to be attainted as a traitor: no problem there, as he undoubtedly was a traitor. He could be included in the act of attainder that was passed against other traitors of the Lancastrian Readeption. So could his brother John, Marquis Montagu: that would have terminated the rights as next in line of John’s son George Neville, Duke of Bedford. But this would have served only part of the purpose of Clarence and Gloucester and their wives, partly because it would not have given them everything – not, in particular, the lion’s share that properly belonged to the dowager-countess – and partly, as Professor Lander long ago showed, because title by royal grant was less secure.41 Inheritance was forever. Royal grants were subject to regular review and revision by acts of resumption. Had the Neville lands been forfeited and granted to the dukes in their entirety, it would have been at the price that at some later date, when the dukes themselves were out of favour or deceased, the crown might take back from them or their heirs what had been given. In 1473 Clarence had lost his favourite lordship of Tutbury to such an act, Warwick had suffered similarly in 1467, and both dukes had ample experience of Edward’s changes of mind and consequent revisions of his patronage.42 Hence the dukes did not want Warwick and Montagu attainted. Without these attainders, however, the two royal dukes had no right to the Neville lands, since Isabel and Anne had no rights over them. Moreover, some attainders were necessary, since forfeiture was the basis for instance of Gloucester’s title to the lands of the De Veres, earls of Oxford. Ironically the only way in which the royal dukes could have their way was by authority of parliament, by special acts of parliament, which could be revoked by parliament in future just as easily as by acts of resumption. Ultimately they were.43
The circle of impossibility was duly squared. Parliament was induced to enable the two dukes to divide equally the whole inheritance, whatever the title and at once. First, in July 1474 Parliament accelerated Isabel and Anne’s inheritance of the Montagu/Salisbury, Beauchamp and Despenser lands and the two earldoms by debarring the Countess Anne ‘as if the said Countess were now naturally dead’.44 Despite the blatant injustice to her, there was nobody powerful enough to put her case. The ladies she addressed apparently declined to intervene or did so ineffectively.45 The Neville inheritance, which primarily interested the Gloucesters, had to wait for its act until the next parliamentary session in 1475. So did the act of attainder against the thirteen unfortunates selected for forfeiture out of all the rebels of 1469–71.
The Neville act was much more controversial, because it conferred by inheritance on the dukes lands to which neither they nor their duchesses had any rights and denied the inheritance to those who were entitled to it and who were, moreover, blameless and undeserving of such penalty. The next heir, George Neville, Duke of Bedford, had done nothing wrong himself, but would have lost out anyway had his uncle Warwick and father Montagu been attainted. No problem there, perhaps, except that through his mother he was a great heir of whom some account had to be taken. More seriously, however, he was not the last of the male line of the Nevilles covered by the entail created by Ralph, Earl of Westmorland (d.1425), because that earl had fathered other sons and indeed the youngest still has a male heir extant today in the marquis of Abergavenny. Next in line after George Neville was Richard Lord Latimer, born in 1469, who had powerful protectors in his guardian Thomas Bourchier, Cardinal-Archbishop of Canterbury and the cardinal’s brother the earl of Essex, treasurer of England, both uncles of the king. It was their pressure surely that compelled even the royal dukes to compromise. Parliament was induced to accept the disqualification of George Neville, but not to extinguish the rights in reversion of the other Neville male heirs after his death. The Neville inheritance was therefore assured to the dukes for as long as George Neville had male heirs living. Gloucester’s strategy thereafter was to buy out such reversionary rights before they arose. He failed.46
If the partition delivered the inheritance to the two couples immediately and made them the wealthiest magnates of their age, it satisfied neither of them. Both had wanted more and both still hoped for more. Certainly Clarence (together presumably with the Duchess Isabel) was aggrieved by what he had lost. Already the father of a legitimate daughter and by the 1475 act of a legitimate son, Clarence had heirs by Isabel’s body and most
likely hoped that if his rivals failed to secure a valid dispensation, the whole would revert to his own line on the deaths of Anne and Richard. The acts protected the reversionary rights of each line to the other’s share by forbidding any alienations out of it. Certainly Gloucester (and perhaps the Duchess Anne) received less than he had wanted. They compiled a wish-list of what they would have liked to have. Several times the settlement was adjusted by further acts of Parliament and a wish list of at least nine items was served on King Edward in 1478. By then, Anne’s sister Isabel was dead, probably the result of childbirth, and her brother-in-law Clarence was in prison, shortly to be attainted as a traitor and executed. Ahead of Clarence’s conviction and even his trial, and most probably in return for his support in it, Richard was allowed to consolidate Anne’s lordships in Wales, to adjust other boundaries, to degrade George Neville from the peerage and to wrest the earldom of Salisbury from Clarence for his own son. If nobody benefited more from Clarence’s death than Gloucester, adjustment to Anne’s inheritance was a crucial part of it.47
Even so, the arrangement as a whole suffered from several flaws. Parliament agreed to debar George Neville, but not any subsequent male heirs. Gloucester had somehow to keep the boy alive and harmless and to buy out any contingent rights, which was to prove too difficult and which he failed to achieve. Duke Richard did secure the degradation of George Neville from his dukedom and indeed the peerage in 1478, and, following the death of his mother Isabel, Marchioness Montagu in 1476, obtained his wardship and marriage by 1480. He also did succeed in preventing the youth from marrying anyone dangerous. Unfortunately, however, George died without male heirs on 4 May 1483, at which point his rights passed to Richard Lord Latimer. All Gloucester’s efforts had failed to wrest Latimer from his guardians and, as a minor, he was not capable of surrendering his heritage to the duke. On 4 May 1483, Anne and Richard’s hold on the Neville lands that underpinned their northern hegemony was reduced to a life estate.48 At that point Anne’s home, heritage, and even the college they were jointly founding at Middleham ceased to be a part of their son’s inheritance.
Secondly, the countess of Warwick declined to die. At least the Gloucesters provided for her, but that may have been because potentially she was too dangerous and could yet overthrow the 1474–5 settlement. She was confined in the North ‘with the greatest strictness’, according to Rows soon after 1483, at her daughter Anne’s direction; a few years later it was Richard, Rows thought, who had ‘locked her up for the duration of his life’.49 She does not occur in any of our sources for the whole decade 1473–83. Was the Duchess Anne afraid that her mother, whose fiftieth birthday fell only in 1476, might remarry like many other noble dowagers to someone able to insist on livery of at least some of her inheritance and jointure? Actually the countess, who survived until 1492, outlived both her daughters and both her sons-in-law and, following another dynastic revolution, was able in 1487, with parliamentary support, to disinherit the next generation of her grandchildren.50 Again the unfortunate lady had no choice.
Thirdly, and crucially for Anne Neville, it depended on the legality of her marriage to Richard. It was never valid.
THAT DISPENSATION
Duke Richard had taken Anne into his custody by 16 February 1472 when, as we have seen, Clarence reluctantly conceded that they could marry. At that point, therefore, Anne and Richard were definitely not married. Apparently they were still unmarried on 18 March. They are first unambiguously recorded as married on 6 June 1474.51 Within this twenty-seven-month timeframe the precise date of their marriage is unresolved. No wedding is recorded. Since it used to be supposed that their son Edward was born in 1473, some past historians located the wedding in 1472. Pauli in 1858 plumped boldly for 12 July 1472, the third anniversary of Isabel’s marriage to Clarence, but gave no reason and none has been uncovered since. The Complete Peerage agreed.52 The ceremony has often been located in the spring of 1472 although, actually, canon law forbade marriage during Lent. Since actually Edward’s birth was probably some years later,53 such speculation is unfounded. That the Warwick inheritance dispute still raged in November 1473 does not mean, as Peter Hammond wrongly supposed, that Anne and Richard were still unmarried then and that the marriage took place in 1474.54 Where was Anne in the interim? Did she remain in sanctuary throughout, which Crowland’s chronology did not exclude? Did she cohabit with the duke or reside under his protection, scarcely less morally dubious? Sheer convenience points to marriage as soon after the March council as possible. Allowing for the dispensation of 22 April 1472 and its transmission from Rome, it is likely that, as Clarke has deduced, the wedding took place in the late spring or early summer of 1472.55 Certainly it was concluded ahead of the comprehensive dispensation, since the act of June 1474, which settled Anne’s inheritance, made provision for their divorce.56 For divorce, read nullity. The act tells us that Anne and Richard had not yet secured a papal dispensation adequate to remove the impediments to marriage that was necessary for first cousins and siblings in law. It also foresees that if a dispensation was not granted, they might yet be put asunder. Richard protected himself against that eventuality.
Richard’s brother Clarence and Anne’s sister Isabel had required a papal dispensation for their marriage because they were closely related several times over. Clarence’s mother Cecily, Duchess of York and Isabel’s grandfather Richard, Earl of Salisbury were sister and brother. Both of them and Clarence’s father Richard were descended from Edward III. They were related once in the second degree and twice in the fourth degree of consanguinity. There was moreover a spiritual tie, because the Duchess Cecily had been George’s godmother. The necessary dispensation had required hard negotiation: it was not at all to be taken for granted and indeed Edward IV thought that he had stopped it.57 Anne and Richard, also first cousins once removed, were also related in the second degree of consanguinity. Moreover, Richard was third cousin of Anne’s first husband Edward of Lancaster, who had been Anne’s third cousin: two further impediments in the fourth degree to add to those that Clarence and Isabel had to overcome. Numerous though these impediments were, none of them was proscribed by divine law – Leviticus – but only by the human laws, which popes routinely dispensed for people of their rank. Yet this was not all, because their siblings George and Isabel had also married. On this account Anne and Richard were related in the first degree of affinity. From 1469 to 1472 Anne and Richard must have been accustomed to regard one another, albeit briefly and intermittently, as brother and sister. Certainly Leviticus barred marriage to a blood sister and to a wife’s sister and such unions were to be specifically forbidden by statute in 1540.58 Canon lawyers were not agreed whether cases covered by Leviticus or similar to those in Leviticus could be dispensed by the Pope. There could be no certainty what would result from an application for a full dispensation that removed all the impediments. Perhaps that was why Richard applied initially for a dispensation that would enable him to marry Anne, but which he must have known did not address all the impediments. Surely here he was cynically manipulating the rules? Moreover, these impediments were exacerbated by blatant cohabitation when aware that the previous dispensation was insufficient. Perhaps the proximity of kinship and this multiplicity of impediments meant that no such dispensation could be forthcoming. Certainly another dispensation was absolutely necessary to validate such a union. Apparently no such dispensation was ever secured. Perhaps none was ever sought.
The absence of an adequate dispensation is implied by the 1474 act that settled the countess of Warwick’s lands on the two dukes. This is a public document; however, it does not appear to have become public knowledge. It may well be that it was Clarence who, having established the details of the 1472 dispensation, secured the provision in the 1474 act that if no valid marriage was contracted his own children – strictly Isabel’s children – would secure Anne’s share of the inheritance on Duke Richard’s death. If so, Clarence was gambling, calculating, perhaps even expecting, that no dispens
ation would be forthcoming. If not hitherto aware of the defects in his dispensation, Gloucester certainly knew about them afterwards. Alternatively, it may have been the duke himself who here was ensuring his continued tenure of Anne’s estates. Because officially the countess was dead, both dukes stood to gain from the clauses allowing them to keep the estates for life should their spouses predecease them: in Clarence’s case the clause corresponded to the normal convention of courtesy of England because he had a child by Isabel, but in Gloucester’s case no child was yet born to them. If he were to retain Anne’s lands after her death, it would be at the expense of the Clarences or their heirs.
John Rows states that Richard was the product of ‘true matrimony without discontinuance or any defiling in the law’.59 Richard was thus distinguished, by implication, from Edward V, who had just been dethroned on the grounds that his parents were not properly married and whose father’s legitimacy had also been impugned. Rows had no doubts that Anne and Richard were properly married, that Edward of Middleham was their ‘son and heir’, and ‘inheritor to both royal possessions’60 – that is, to both his parents’ possessions. Anne and Richard were accepted as such. Maybe there had been a public wedding of which we know nothing conducted by a priest conned by the papal letter declaratory, unaware of or unconcerned by the extent of their relationship. The undispensed impediments were not publicly known, neither to Rows, nor even (as we shall see) to Crowland. Evidently, Anne and Richard lived together openly as man and wife. None of the critics of Richard III in his own time ever queried his marriage. Its invalidity is a modern discovery.
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