Anne Neville

by Michael Hicks

  Three contemporary sources report that Richard was considering his match with Elizabeth ahead of Anne’s death: the Clerkenwell declaration, Crowland’s chronicle, and the report of a letter in her own hand from Elizabeth herself to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk.

  The original of Elizabeth’s letter is lost. Perhaps it never existed and was forged by our source, the pro-Ricardian Jacobean historian Sir George Buck. Yet Buck himself reported its existence (and provided a paraphrase) in 1619 ‘among precious jewels and rare monuments’ in the ‘rich and magnificent cabinet’ of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, heir of the recipient, to whom it had descended.22 Arundel was interested in his family’s history and was a noted connoisseur and collector. It was in his cabinet that the scholarly earl displayed all his particular treasures. A royal letter (autograph?) of a princess and a future queen to an ancestor was just such a treasure. Buck wrote for publication: surely he expected his reference to be pursued? Moreover, it seems to have been overlooked that Buck not only acknowledged the earl’s permission to consult the letter, but also dedicated his book to him. Had it ever been published, Arundel would have received a presentation copy, which – as a scholar himself – he could be expected to read. Obviously the earl knew whether such a prized letter was actually in his cabinet. By seventeenthcentury standards, this was as good a provenance and as precise a citation to a publicly accessible location where the original was to be found as could be imagined at the time. For all these reasons forgery is unlikely. Partly because the original, four centuries further on, is now lost and partly because Buck’s manuscript history was damaged by fire in 1731, modern historians anxious to rebut the story as discreditable to Richard have questioned exactly how the original text read.23 Buck rendered into the third person what must originally have been in the first person, but the version published in 1647 by Buck’s nephew certainly confirms the meaning that his uncle had intended if not his actual words.24 After an appropriately respectful introduction,

  First she thanked him for his many courtesies and friendly offices and then she prayed him as before to be a mediator for her in the cause of the marriage to the king, who as she wrote, was her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was his in heart and in thoughts, in body, and in all. And then she intimated that the better half of February was past, and that she feared the queen would never die.25

  If genuine, Elizabeth’s letter indicates that the marriage was indeed projected and that Elizabeth herself had consented to it – indeed, in highly enthusiastic terms! She fancied her uncle as well as wanting a crown. This was in February 1485, more than a fortnight before Queen Anne died. If not quite explicit about Richard’s intentions, it indicates that there was opposition to the match. It was to win over Norfolk and to secure his support in persuading Richard to proceed that Elizabeth’s letter purports to have been written.26 This conforms to Crowland’s statement that there were those who knew about it despite Richard’s denials that such a project was afoot.27 Since Buck had also read Crowland’s account, however, consistency between it and any letter that he might have forged is to be expected and the two sources cannot safely be considered to substantiate one another. Furthermore, Crowland, it could be argued, may not only have been wrong to disbelieve the solemn denials of a king he disliked, but he may also have read the rumours of the proposed marriage that were current in the spring of 1485 back to Christmas 1484. He may have found it difficult to separate what happened before Queen Anne’s death from what ensued afterwards. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Later developments can make better sense of what happened earlier.

  On 1 March 1484 Richard had made a deal with Elizabeth Wydeville that enabled Edward IV’s erstwhile queen and her daughters to emerge from sanctuary and to live under his protection, evidently at court.28 The deal was definitely not struck with the marriage between King Richard and Princess Elizabeth in mind, as Vergil says,29 for Prince Edward was still living and the oaths of allegiance to him had just been administered. The prince still took priority. The contract survives. It contains nothing about such aspirations,30 for which it is at least nine months too early. As the eldest and most adult daughter, Elizabeth of York was present at Richard’s court at Westminster Palace for the Christmas celebrations of 1484. She attracted much attention. In Crowland’s case, it was highly disapproving. Elizabeth’s conduct that Christmas was amongst the ‘things unbefitting’ and ‘evil examples’ with which ‘the minds of the faithless’ should not sullied. ‘There are many other things besides, which are not written in this book and of which it is grievous to speak’, wrote Crowland.

  Nevertheless it should not be left unsaid that during this Christmas feast too much attention was paid to singing and dancing and to vain exchanges of clothing between Queen Anne and Lady Elizabeth, eldest daughter of the dead king, who were alike in complexion and figure. The people spoke against this and the magnates and prelates were greatly astonished; and it was said by many that the king was applying his mind in every way to contracting a marriage with Elizabeth either after the death of the queen, or by means of a divorce for which he believed he had sufficient grounds. He saw no other way of confirming his crown and dispelling the hopes of his rival.31

  People were acutely conscious of differences in status. The 1483 sumptuary law set monarchs apart from royalty and royalty from mere nobility. Whether a princess or a bastard, Elizabeth was not Queen Anne’s equal in rank. For them to wear similar outfits – and even exchange them – struck the wrong note immediately and excited the suspicions that Crowland relates. We would be wrong to underrate the importance of what he reports. We may, however, reasonably wonder whether Crowland was attaching undue significance to these celebrations in the light of later rumours and whether he perhaps also read public disapproval back a few weeks in time, although this chronicler was usually scrupulous in guarding against such dangers. One circumstance, however, demonstrates that this is not a correct interpretation, and that at this point Crowland’s recollections were strictly contemporary.

  When dispensing with his consorts, Richard III’s greatnephew Henry VIII resorted to divorce on two occasions. Divorce did not involve sundering a valid knot as it does today. Adultery, cruelty or mere incompatibility were not yet grounds for divorce, still less the brief period of separation that enables so many millions of valid marriages contracted ‘till death us do part’ today to be terminated prematurely and routinely. There were two categories of divorce in this period. The first, the divorce a mensa et thoro, was not a divorce at all by our standards but a legal separation, which neither terminated the marriage nor permitted either party to marry whilst the other was still living. The second type that applies here, the divortium a vinculo, did release both parties from the marriage, but was possible only because the marriage had never really occurred, because forbidden or because never consummated, and was thus null from the outset. Henry VIII could divorce Katherine of Aragon because she was his dead brother’s wife: they were therefore, at canon law, tantamount to brother and sister and thus related within the degrees within which marriage was forbidden. So closely were they related, moreover, so Henry alleged, that the Pope could not dispense the impediments away. Under 1485, Crowland also reports that Richard was contemplating ‘a divorce for which he believed he had sufficient grounds’.32 Crowland did not state what these grounds were, almost certainly because he did not know – indeed, had no idea and had not thought further about it. On his own admittance, he was not a doctor of theology; if a canon lawyer, he had not practised for many years. Had he known what Richard’s grounds were, as we shall see, he would surely have made much of it both here and earlier in his chronicle.33 A divorce, of course, presupposes a living wife. This report must therefore antedate Anne’s death and when it was first expected, which Elizabeth’s letter locates some time before late February. Crowland demonstrates that Richard’s intent to remarry preceded Anne’s death. Divorce could serve no purpose thereafter. It seems that Richard first considered divorc
e, but then Anne’s ill health and death rendered it unnecessary. At the latest that was in the last days of February 1485. Any idea of divorce must therefore be earlier.

  Divorce between the king and queen was feasible because the marriage between the duke and duchess of Gloucester – brother- and sister-in-law – had never been properly validated by a papal dispensation. In this event, the act of 1474 resettling the Warwick inheritance had anticipated a divorce – that their marriage might be declared null. Because the 1472 dispensation had not covered the key issues, the 1474 parliament ‘ordained that if the said Richard Duke of Gloucester and Anne, be hereafter divorced and after lawfully married’ – that if the Church applied the letter of the law to nullify their union and subsequently allowed them to remarry – that then the parliamentary settlement of the Warwick inheritance would be ‘as good and valid’ as if there had been no divorce and as if Anne and Richard had been married throughout. However, if they were divorced and not allowed to remarry, and if Richard did his utmost to remain married and did not marry anyone else during Anne’s life – only possible with a divorce a vinculo – then he could retain her lands during her life and for his life after her death.34 In 1474, of course, it had been so important to Richard to retain Anne’s lands that he was prepared to forego any other marriage. Companionship and sex was available without. Up until 1484, of course, it had been in the interests of Anne and Richard to affirm the validity of their union and to conceal this crucial flaw. That they were married was just another lie that they successfully concealed. Nobody questioned the royal marriage at the time, Laynesmith reminds us.35 Richard had wanted Anne’s estates by inheritance, both to secure his title and to transmit it to his own descendants. Anne had no incentive to undermine her own position. Once monarchs, neither King Richard nor Queen Anne wanted to cast doubt on the legitimacy of their son Prince Edward, the hope of their dynasty, nor indeed the moral probity which they denied in Edward IV. Even though children remained legitimate if born to unions within the prohibited degrees in which the partners were ignorant of affinity, this did not apply if they were aware of the impediments at the time of Edward’s conception, as Richard and most probably Anne emphatically were.36

  Now that Prince Edward was dead, however, and Anne appeared incapable of supplying a replacement, the situation was radically changed. With access to the resources of the crown, possession of Anne’s estates was no longer essential for her husband. King Richard now had good reason to seek release from his marriage. All that was necessary was to reveal the absence of a dispensation and the Church would decree that the original marriage was null and that it had indeed never been valid. No doubt Richard could purport to discover the impediment just as he had with his brother’s precontract. The king could then marry again. That was why, around Christmas 1484 and in the New Year of 1485, Richard may have considered himself eligible for a divorce. That he did indeed think thus is indicated by Crowland’s report with its reference to his case for a divorce – a case that Crowland did not understand. To report what he did not understand is the surest evidence of veracity: Crowland had no ulterior motive. Had he understood, the truth would certainly have shocked him. To live openly as man and wife when related in the second, fourth, fourth, and fourth degrees of consanguinity, knowingly without a valid dispensation, was prohibited, incestuous and sinful, though matters might have been righted in arrears by a dispensation if appropriately penitent. To do so openly with one’s brother-or sister-in-law, a relationship in the first degree of affinity, was yet more grave and perhaps beyond what could be dispensed. To combine all five impediments was obviously worse. It had not occurred to Crowland that the original match between Anne and Richard might not be dispensable, nor that the impediments had not been dispensed. Had Crowland appreciated that no dispensation had been obtained, not only must he have understood why Richard thought a divorce to be feasible, but this stern critic would surely have referred to it both at this point and in the passages relating to Richard’s first marriage, about which Crowland’s narrative was anyway sharply disapproving.37

  We may be sure of this because of Crowland’s horror at Richard’s proposal to marry his niece incestuously. Evidently he was ignorant that Richard’s first marriage was also incestuous. Uncle and niece constituted another blood relationship that was normally regarded as incestuous in the fifteenth century and is still so considered today. Princess Elizabeth herself was also, of course, closely related to Anne and to Richard through other lines also. The number of impediments is impressive. Crowland was horrified. He was certainly not unusual in his reaction. Just as horrified, he indicates, were the nobility, the bishops and even the general public.38 Richard’s ‘unlawful desire’, so the two historians Polydore Vergil and Edward Hall declared, ‘provoked the ire of God and the sword of vengeance against him, whereby his final ruin and fatal fall shortly after ensued’…39 It was public opinion that Richard sought to still in his declaration at Clerkenwell.

  That Richard knew the value of sexual morality and immorality for propaganda purposes emerges in his successive denunciations of Edward IV’s precontract and bastardy, the sexual adventures of the Wydevilles and Greys, and Henry Tudor’s bastardy on both sides. Opposition to his proposed second marriage worried Richard. Perhaps it caused him to waver, as Elizabeth’s letter implies, if not to drop the project, which he appears extremely reluctant to abandon. It was opposition that provoked his qualms, not the message itself that what he projected was incestuous and damnable. That evidently did not trouble the king. After all, he had done it before. A man who could marry his sister [in-law] in defiance of convention and indeed religious law – an incestuous union by the standard of the time – was unlikely to be deterred by another such union, in this case marriage to his niece. Of incest Richard was a serial practitioner. To coin a phrase, he was a ‘serial incestor’. Maybe another marriage was to be celebrated and consummated ahead of the arrival of (or request for) a dispensation. Could he afford to wait on negotiations at the papal curia that were bound to be protracted if they were to achieve their objective? The instant, automatic negative that was to be expected would be difficult to overcome. Too much depended politically on the match to enable him to wait on prior papal approval.

  Besides, the Lady Elizabeth was willing enough. Presumably her mother was too. How imperfect once again appear the moral standards of the house of York! Did its members regard the prohibited degrees and papal dispensations as mere technicalities that could be squared rather than the moral issues and dictates of God that Crowland and public opinion so respected? Richard could do it and therefore he would do it.

  Certainly the king did appreciate that the projected match was bound to arouse hostility. Hence it was politic to keep it secret and to deny any such plans in public, but not at once to abandon it. If Crowland is to be believed, he floated his project with key advisers – perhaps including the Duke of Norfolk, recipient of Princess Elizabeth’s supposed letter. They were averse. After Anne’s death, his councillors invoked a special session of council – maybe even a great council – for this issue alone. It met in late March, between 17th and 30th, and it sounds as though opposition was unanimous. Richard denied having any such match in mind or ever having intended it, which, apparently, was not regarded by those who knew him best as evidence that he would be deflected from his purpose. ‘Some at that council’, states Crowland, ‘knew well enough that the contrary was true’. When the king denied it, therefore, Sir Richard Ratcliffe and the esquire William Catesby, key advisers and agents, retorted

  That if he did not deny any such purpose… the northerners, in whom he placed the greatest trust, would all rise against him, charging him with causing the death of the queen, the daughter and one of the heirs of the earl of Warwick and through whom he had obtained his first honour, in order to complete his incestuous association with his near kinswoman, to the offence of God.

  They also produced more than a dozen doctors of theology who stated that the Po
pe could not dispense so close a degree of consanguinity.40

  Perhaps the doctors were right, although the opinion of canon lawyers was more relevant on such a topic than those of theologians, and canonists are likely to have been divided. Although Leviticus chapter 18 verses 12–13 banned the marriage of a man to his aunt, it did not explicitly proscribe the marriage of a man to his niece, although the nature and proximity of the relationship was the same. Taking the literal meaning rather than the spirit of God’s law, what Richard proposed was not explicitly forbidden. Perhaps, therefore, the marriage of the king and the princess was not in breach of divine law, which was absolute, but human law, which could be dispensed. Precedents could be found both for such marriages being allowed and disallowed.41 All dispensations to set aside canon law required serious grounds, popes usually placing the desires of kings into that category. The curia found it hard to rebuff kings and princes. In practice royalty secured dispensations covering the greatest impediments, which mere nobility and gentry could not, whilst ordinary mortals could not obtain them at all. Hence, perhaps, clerics and gentry deplored a union that Richard and Elizabeth of York thought acceptable. Their senses of Christian morality differed.

  The Great Chronicle suggests that ‘a licence purchased’ would permit this union42 – a dispensation by another name – and Professor Kelly considers that such a dispensation was not altogether impossible.43 Kelly reviewed what a range of canonical authorities had to say and examined several case studies, all of which Richard’s advisers may have known. One aunt-nephew marriage in direct contravention of Levitical decrees was when Henry IV’s son Thomas, Duke of Clarence was allowed to remain married to his aunt by marriage, Margaret, widow of John, Earl of Somerset (d.1410). Despite this precedent, Cardinal Torquemada and some other notable canonists considered that popes could not dispense for marriages between uncles and nieces. Perhaps that represented the balance of canonical opinion, but from the next decade a whole series of matches involving royalty and contradicting the Levitical decrees were indeed dispensed. Thus Pope Alexander VI allowed King Ferrante of Naples to marry his Aunt Joanna and a series of marriages to siblings-in-law involving offspring of Ferdinand and Isabella were permitted.44 That was in the future and cannot have been known to Richard, who also could not have waited on lengthy deliberations at the curia. Moreover, Kelly considered the case in isolation, without considering all the other degrees in which Richard and Elizabeth were related. What of his first wife, aunt to his proposed second wife, and her cousin several times over? Even if her marriage was invalidated, the carnal relationship remained, and of course Richard had not secured (or even sought) the necessary dispensation.