In this instance, legal arguments took second place to political ones. Accordingly, as his councillors insisted, Richard declared publicly at St John’s Hall Clerkenwell that he had never intended any such thing. ‘Many people’, including Crowland, did not believe him.45 But his project to marry Elizabeth was dropped – as far as we know.
Of course the marriage did not happen. Because Anne died, divorce was unnecessary. So was murder. The poisoning of his queen nevertheless became a highly effective piece of Tudor propaganda against Richard, which was silenced neither by his denial or by improbability. So was Richard’s incest with his niece.46 The London chroniclers knew the whole story. About 1512, the Great Chronicle states:
But after Easter much whispering among the people that the king had put the children of King Edward to death, and also that he had poisoned the queen his wife, and intended with a licence purchased to have married the elder daughter of King Edward. Which rumours and sayings with other things have caused him to fall in much hatred of his subjects as well as men of [good be]haviour as of others. But how so[ever] the queen were dealt with, were it by his means or the visitation of God, she died shortly after… which was a woman of gracious fame, upon whose soul & all Christian [soul]s, Jesus have mercy. Amen.47
Whether the charges were true or false, including those relating to the queen’s death, Anne was exonerated, but public opinion blamed her husband, so the chronicler testifies.48 Yet how much more effective would such propaganda have been had it related to the fact of an incestuous marriage rather than merely an incestuous intent, and had it been revealed that Richard’s twelve-year-long first marriage had also been illicit, incestuous, sinful and surely damnable. He was a serial incestor. Because Anne died, it never became expedient for Richard to reveal his first marriage as invalid. Richard was induced to repudiate Elizabeth of York. Approaches were made to appropriate princesses of Spain and Portugal. King Richard perished at Bosworth, still single, on 22 August 1485. Whether he would have revived his matrimonial project had he been victorious we cannot tell. That he contemplated the match – and did so whilst Anne was still living – we cannot doubt any more. Strangely his apparently willing partner appears to have escaped unsullied: within the year, Elizabeth of York had married his successor and was crowned and was on course to be ancestress of the Tudor, Stuart and all subsequent dynasties. It is remarkable that in 1485 such a potentially anti-Tudor story was written of the fiancée of the current Tudor king.49
LAST DAYS
Following the distressing death of her son, therefore, and perhaps the king’s last desperate attempt to father another, Anne’s last days were clouded indeed.‘Unhappy’(infelix), as Rows said, may her marriage have become.50 The king spurned her bed:51 he considered repudiating her as his spouse and potentially as his queen. The death of her son had removed the cement to their relationship: shared sorrow did not keep them together, but threatened a decisive parting of the ways. Whether or not illegitimacy really disqualified a king who had been publicly recognised and acclaimed, as historians have questioned, the slur certainly sufficed to strip Edward V of his crown and kingdom, and would have done so also in Anne’s case. Richard wished to marry another lady, henceforth his queen, and could do so, because Anne had never been married to him. Crowned and anointed or not, she could not have continued as queen – a proper ecclesiastical court could not have adjudicated her marriage valid – and would certainly have lost her dower as queen to her supplanter, and perhaps also, one wonders, the Warwick inheritance that the 1474–5 acts had assured to Richard himself for life. There was not as yet the comfortable single life after marriage of Katherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves as divorced queens to serve as a precedent. What was to become of Anne? Although no divorce in the modern sense was necessary, Anne was no longer useful to her husband King Richard and was, in modern parlance, past her sell-by date. Vergil has another unattractive story how Richard had her death rumoured whilst she was still living, which came to her ears and which she raised with him and which he denied in reassuring terms.52 Since there is no confirmation of this – which, indeed, is incompatible with Crowland’s circumstantial analysis – it can be rejected, yet talk of divorce or remarriage could still have been rather a nasty psychological tactic designed to hasten her end (and more likely, surely, to loosen her wits than to kill her) as Hanham suggests?53 Sorrow, rather than poisoning, was Vergil’s preferred cause of death.54 Queen Anne was aware, of course, of the grounds for divorce. Did she perceive in Elizabeth her potential successor? Were her last days clouded by the apprehension that she would be set aside, disgraced, and/or suffer from qualms of conscience arising from her illicit marriage, for which the death of her son was punishment? Did she see all her misfortunes as punishment for her sin and fear for her soul? We cannot tell: she has not left us her will. That in itself is surprising, since her death was anticipated by others if not herself: surely Anne wished to compose herself and to settle her earthly accounts before she died? Whilst married women, even queens, possessed no property of their own, it was by no means unusual – and surely normal in her circumstances – for her husband to allow her some testamentary dispositions. Moreover, she was unwell, languishing, and died, unattended and indeed unregretted by her husband. If heavy at heart over her death, nevertheless it served Richard’s purpose and appeared to offer him a way forward. If Richard’s treatment of Anne was ruthless and cruel, his assessment purely material and utilitarian, we must recognise also that his action was the desperation of a rat in a trap as Shakespeare indeed so clearly perceived and need not preclude a genuine affection for her.
Anne died on 16 March 1485 at Westminster, ‘on the day when the great eclipse of the sun took place’:55 an omen that Crowland cannot have been alone in recognising. She was buried not at any of her family mausolea – not at Bisham with her father Earl Richard Neville, not at Warwick with her grandfather Earl Richard Beauchamp, not at Tewkesbury with her grandmother or her sister Isabel, Duchess of Clarence, not at her colleges of Barnard Castle, Middleham or York, where she and Richard may formerly have intended to be interred, but with previous monarchs at Westminster Abbey. No heraldic account survives for her funeral, unlike those for other members of the house of York, yet Crowland tells us that she was buried ‘with honours no less than befitted the burial of a queen’.56 Presumably King Richard was present. She was interred in the presbytery in front of the high altar, reported Rows, but the Great Chronicler, after all a Londoner, locates her ‘by the south door that leads into St Edward’s Chapel’.57 No monument was ever erected over her tomb. Perhaps none was intended. Far more probably, however, her husband’s reign ended before any such project could be undertaken. Her sepulchre, however, was nobler than those of either husband, Edward of Lancaster at Tewkesbury Abbey or Richard III in his unmarked grave at Leicester.
Besides a monument to Anne, Laynesmith speculates that Richard intended ‘perhaps even a double one to share her privileged position in the sanctuary’ of Westminster Abbey.58 Of course the couple’s earlier plans for colleges implied their interment together. Once Richard was thinking of a second queen, perhaps even of repudiating Anne both as his spouse and queen, this was surely far from his thoughts. He had other things on his mind. Both his queen at Westminster and his son at Sheriff Hutton were allowed to rest where they fell. Longer term planning was left to the longer term – which never arrived. But if Richard had indeed remarried, Anne and Edward were less likely to feature in any re-interments or grandiose monuments.
Ratcliffe and Catesby touched a vital nerve when they drew attention to Anne’s Warwick inheritance and especially the Warwick connection of which they were a part.59 However egotistical he was and however much his own man, Richard had founded his power on Anne’s inheritance. Even though the Neville lands had been in tail male, Anne was regarded as Warwick’s, Salisbury’s and Westmoreland’s heiress. Much more than a miscellany of properties or indeed an assembly of employees incentivised by pay and spoils of o
ffice, Anne brought Richard a devoted following united by family tradition focused on herself that caused them to hazard their lives on her behalf and that endured beyond the grave.60 However little control he allowed her of her own affairs as duchess and queen, they remained hers. The Neville retainers were the core of the northern army that had watched over Richard’s usurpation and that had enabled him to rule the insurgent South. Richard could not count on adherents of the house of York or the Yorkist establishment of his brother Edward, many of whom indeed had become his foes, nor had he much opportunity to build up much committed support from his own subjects. If Anne’s death enabled Richard to look for another consort capable of extending his support, it also threatened to deprive him of his original power base. Deploying his son and residual heirs in the North may have reinforced traditional ties. Whether Anne’s death actually did weaken his connection is unclear. Richard had legal tenure for life. Certainly Ratcliffe and Catesby did not fail him: both were at Bosworth, Ratcliffe falling in battle and Catesby being executed thereafter. The division of his army that Northumberland failed to engage in battle most probably included Anne Neville’s northern retainers. Whether they were lukewarm to their erstwhile lord – absent inadvertently or by design – we cannot tell. King Henry, however, was anxious to ensure that the connection never operated effectively again. At first in the North, then everywhere, he destroyed it. The Warwick inheritance and Neville connection hardly outlived Anne Neville.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Epilogue
By any standards, Anne crammed a great deal into her twenty-eight years. She had a full life. She enjoyed status and high rank – the highest which any woman could attain. She experienced high society and lots of parties, two husbands, fashionable and expensive clothes, plenty of sex, child-bearing, and lots of admiration and deference. Anne was a housewife who ran a big establishment with lots of servants, had several homes and entertained on the most lavish scale. Even in our modern era of careers for women, we are familiar with advancement by marriage, the trophy wives, husbands who marry for money, and proud mothers who resort to a lot of childcare. Anne exemplified all these types in their fifteenth-century form: it was, moreover, what she was meant to do – the female ideal – and what she was trained for. It was surely not just the aspiration of her father to make her into the queen that she became.
Anne’s life was not all positive, of course. There was plenty of bereavement. Much of it was unpredictable, as wholesale slaughter eliminated most of her uncles and great-uncles and exaggerated the complement of widows within her extensive family. One should stress the violent deaths of Anne’s father, grandfather, first husband and brothers-in-law, but perhaps none of them was particularly close to her. The death of her sister (presumably in childbirth), her stillborn nephew and the death of her son touched her more closely, but such premature deaths, for reasons that could have been averted today, were commonplace, to be expected, natural and indeed facts of life. Perhaps her extensive experience of mortality was not as traumatic as we ourselves might expect. It is not at all the same today, when infant mortality is minimal, violent death (even on the roads) is relatively uncommon, few people are struck down in their prime, the old are really old, and death is no longer a familiar occurrence to the young. We should not suppose, therefore, that each death of a loved one made the impact that it does nowadays nor, indeed, collectively.
More difficult for us to accept, perhaps, is marriage without love. The arranged marriage is something that we find difficult to understand, and hence we encourage and rejoice in those daughters of Asian immigrants who repudiate spouses designated for them and marry for love. We find it hard to understand that such arranged marriages could be companionate and satisfying, so that mothers seek them out for their offspring, and that Anne’s twelve-year marriage to Richard as duke and king could have fallen into that category. Much has been made of the tragedy of her end, when she was no longer wanted and was threatened by divorce. Divorce as a way to dispense with an unwanted spouse is less drastic, of course, than murder by poisoning, which now looks highly unlikely. If we are right to regard divorce as tragic, it is an everyday tragedy in our modern age, the breakdown of marriage that literally millions of people currently endure, and from which they recover. Nowadays there are plenty of divorcees of twentyeight with their whole lives ahead of them. We take divorce far less seriously than did people in the past. Of course it carries less stigma than a generation ago, when the queen declined to receive divorced people. Even whilst we recognise that divorce is not the end of the world and that it can be a new beginning, perhaps for Anne too, we should not underestimate the blow to her amour propre, as she was potentially degraded, and the shame to be incurred not so much from the divorce but from her decade of illicit unmarried fornication. Marriage was what she was bred for – marriage her whole destiny – and that, potentially, was what she was about to lose. What all this meant to Anne, therefore, depended on her sense of values and on those of her age by which she was judged, and which we, at five centuries removed and in a very different era, find hard to comprehend and, still more, to appreciate and apply. Perhaps Anne was lucky that death intervened and saved her the horrors that she surely saw ahead.
Anne was a central figure in great events, yet she appears a powerless one. Perhaps she was. In part, this is the reality of the inferiority of women, even duchesses, princesses and queens, which Anne was born into, lived with and surely accepted. In part perhaps it was because Anne’s father Warwick and husband Richard III were particularly powerful, Richard indeed as autocratic and egotistical as any husband. He seems to have denied his duchess many of the trappings of autonomy that other noblemen extended to their consorts. Yet partly this is a problem of the sources. If we possessed for Anne the household and estate accounts of Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Wydeville, the privy purse expenses of Elizabeth of York, the letters of Margaret or her own register of correspondence, Anne might be found doing much more than we can actually reveal, and being far more in control of and managing her own affairs. Certainly Anne went along with Warwick’s choice of partner, shacked up with Duke Richard and operated as his wife and queen as he wished, went along with his accession, and remained with him through all the unsavoury scandals of his reign. Had she a choice? Was this the helplessness, the passivity that Shakespeare depicts, or did she believe in it? Surely she must have believed in her father’s insurrections in 1469–71, just as he, public opinion and many generations of historians have believed as well? It was Anne herself, as we have seen, who leapt into the arms, bed and ducal coronet of Richard, Duke of Gloucester. If there is a case for the precontract, which some at least believed, even possibly her husband, may not Anne have believed it too? Why should she not wish her husband to be king and herself to be queen? Because Richard failed, because in retrospect he has been seen to be a bad thing, because Tudor subjects like Shakespeare found it impossible to suppose that anybody really accepted his arguments or supported him, it does not mean that he did not possess supporters who believed in him and in his cause, and wanted him king. We know he did. And it is entirely conceivable, indeed probable, that Anne was among them. We possess not a jot of evidence to the contrary. She was crowned with him, was his queen, and acted out the role until her end.
At the end of this book, as at the beginning, Anne remains an enigma. How could it be otherwise? The sources speak to us – but not at length or in depth. In their absence, nobody speaks. The gaps, actually enormous gulfs, are insurmountable. There is just too much we cannot know. This book has not added significantly to the hard facts about Anne’s life and about her age. What it has shown is what these events mean or may mean – the implications, the options, and wherever possible the choices that were made and Anne’s role within them. If Anne was the model daughter, wife and queen, as she appears, who fulfilled the dictates of her menfolk, yet she was also highly exceptional both in her choice of second husband and the lie that they lived for most of their adult
life. If she made it possible for Richard to be king, her death may have deprived him of the means to survive. Did she matter to him more in death than life? What is certain is that Anne herself counted, that she was more than merely a symbol, stereotype or sidekick, and that in 1471–2 she herself chose the course that brought her, until her final illness, the most successful of marital careers.
Abbreviations
CCR
Calendar of the Close Rolls
CFR
Calendar of the Fine Rolls
Clarke
Clarke, P.D., ‘English Royal Marriages and the Papal Penitentiary in the Fifteenth Century’, English Historical Review cxx (2005)
CPR
Calendar of the Patent Rolls
Anne Neville Page 19