Anne Neville: Richard III's Tragic Queen

by Licence, Amy

  This was the creature that I woo’d and wonn

  Over her bleeding husband stab’d by me:

  Such different persons never saw the sunne

  He, for perfection, I, deformitie,

  She wep’t and smil’d, hated and lov’d in one

  Such was her virtue, my hypocrisie;

  Thus, women’s griefes, nor loves, are dyed in graine

  For either’s colour, time or men can staine.

  From ‘The Ghost of Richard III’, anonymous poem, 1614

  Forgive me, Heaven, that I forgave this Man.

  O may my story told in after Ages,

  Give warning to our easie Sexes ears:

  May it Unveil the hearts of Men, and strike

  Them deaf to their dissimulated Love.

  Queen Ann(e), in ‘Richard III’, Colley Cibber, 1699

  for Rufus and Robin

  First published 2013

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberley-books.com

  Copyright © Amy Licence 2013

  The right of Amy Licence to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-4456-1153-2 (PRINT)

  ISBN 978-1-4456-1177-8 (e-BOOK)

  Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing.

  Printed in the UK.

  Contents

  Genealogical Trees

  Introduction

  Anne and Warwick

  1 - Battles and Births, 1453–1456

  2 - Castle Life, 1456–1458

  3 - Warring Cousins, 1458–1460

  4 - Boy and Girl, 1461–1465

  5 - Romance and Chivalry, 1465–1469

  6 - Queens in Waiting, 1469–1470

  7 - Lancastrian Princess, 1471

  Anne and Gloucester

  8 - A Strange Courtship, 1471–1472

  9 - Richard’s Wife, 1472–1483

  10 - Crisis, Summer 1483

  11 - Queen, July–December 1483

  12 - Disquiet, 1484

  13 - Elizabeth of York, 1484–1485

  14 - Eclipse, 1485

  Picture Section

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  1. Anne and Richard’s shared ancestry.

  2. Edward III’s Yorkist and Lancastrian descendants.

  Introduction

  Act One, Scene Two. The air is hazy. The room seems to be part medical, part industrial, yet there is a sense of neglect and disrepair. Tiles line the walls and a man in a long white coat stands with his back to the camera, busy over his work. A couple of brown glass bottles and a wooden crutch are visible in the foreground on the right. Rays of opaque light stream through the windows, creating a sort of misty underworld. Discordant jazz plays, low and melancholy.

  The double doors in the middle of the scene open and she appears. Only a dark silhouette at first, she steps into the room; a slim, young woman dressed in a black coat with a large fur collar, glamorous with her lipstick, pearls, heels and dark glasses. Yet it is clear from her demeanour that she is in mourning. Reaching behind her, she pulls the door firmly shut before the camera draws close, foregrounding her face as she removes her glasses. Her expression is an uneasy mixture of subdued horror and resignation.

  The scene before her is a mortuary. Three bodies lie on marble plinths in a low-ceilinged room where the windows have been shortened with plaster board, making it feel subterranean. She approaches the dead, with her form bathed in shadow, and stops before the corpse of a young man. He lies white and maimed, visibly wounded on the forehead and chest. She leans on the plinth as if the sight of the corpse weakens her, before taking it in her arms and delivering her speech.

  *

  This is Anne Neville. Or at least it is the actress Kristin Scott Thomas, playing the role of Anne, in Ian McKellen’s 1995 film version of Shakespeare’s Richard III. But it is not Shakespeare as the playwright would have recognised it. The settings and costumes date the action to the first half of the twentieth century; it is martial, modernist, Art Deco. This Anne is more stilettos and sunglasses than kirtle and chemise. The mortuary scene was shot in a lower storage room of the empty Pearl Assurance Building, a vast, greying edifice constructed between 1912 and 1919 in Holborn, London. It was not a ploy to keep down production costs: the grimy, dimly lit basement was perfect for the film’s new setting. Written by McKellen and Richard Loncraine, the screenplay updated the story to a fictionalised England of the 1930s, ‘a decade of tyranny throughout Europe … when a dictatorship like Richard III’s might have overtaken the UK’.1 It was a fantasy, a parallel world exploring one of history’s ‘what-if’ scenarios; a vision of the Home Counties being administered by the Nazis or Mosley’s Union of Fascists. Thus, a late medieval king was juxtaposed with the rise of the Third Reich in London, echoed in the uniforms, music and set design. Richard III’s story was co-opted as part of a wider history, beyond anything the king himself could have imagined. Recalling the process of writing, McKellen explained, ‘we talked about it in the near-present tense and imagined it taking place yesterday rather than yesteryear. This, I suppose, was what Shakespeare intended.’2 McKellen was right. As the Bard was writing, in 1591, the events he described were part of recent history, but as an entertainment, legend and a degree of dramatic licence were central to his work’s success. In 1955, Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom’s memorable version of the scene followed more traditional lines and forty years later, McKellen reinvented its setting to draw modern parallels. In this way, Shakespeare’s play is subject to constant revision; each generation adds a new chapter to the afterlife of the text, for better or worse. Similarly, these changes continue the on-going narrative of Anne Neville, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, the legendary Kingmaker. Her life has undergone several phases of reinvention by later generations for the purposes of entertainment and propaganda, which is the very reason her brief existence is remembered. For the historian, Anne herself is not too dissimilar from a ‘text’, a set of clues to be decoded according to the standards of her day, which may have been mishandled and misrepresented through time. The process began early. Just as Olivier and McKellen adapted Shakespeare, so the Bard distorted actual events of the fifteenth century to better serve his dramatic intentions.

  The real Anne was not the sophisticated beauty Kristin Scott Thomas suggests; by modern standards she was a child when the key events outlined in this scene actually took place. In the year that she was widowed, 1471, Anne was only fourteen years old. That year she also lost her father and father-in-law, in violent circumstances, while she was alone among her former enemies. She would have had reason enough to grieve. McKellen altered Shakespeare again to portray her cradling the dead body of her husband, rather than that of the murdered Henry VI, and Scott Thomas leaves the audience in no doubt about the extent of her emotions. Yet the grief that the role demands is misleading: Anne had been married for about five months, but the union had been arranged for political reasons and was possibly consummated only briefly. After a long association with the Y
orkists, Warwick had performed a dramatic U-turn and allied his younger child with their Lancastrian foes. Anne barely knew her boy-husband and no evidence survives to suggest she held him in any affection. The loss of her father was far more significant. It meant that Anne was left alone in the paradoxical position of the teenage widow, midway through the civil wars that were commensurate with her lifespan.

  Clearly Shakespeare’s ‘history’ was a fiction, re-animating well-known figures from the past and putting words into their mouths, within an abridged time-scale. Previous chroniclers, storytellers and historians like Rous, More, Holinshed, Hall and Vergil had done no less. However, Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the incident has become so famous that it has almost entirely eclipsed historical fact in the popular imagination: the powerful scene develops along familiar lines as Anne’s grief is interrupted by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the alleged killer of her relatives. According to the play of 1591, Anne recoils in horror from the blood-stained apparition, which displays the often-repeated physical deformities that were correlative in the Tudor mind with immorality and evil intentions. McKellen follows this interpretation. Playing the part of the king himself, his hunch-backed figure, dressed in military uniform, appears from behind the widow as Anne bends over her husband’s corpse. Sensing his approach, she turns in revulsion to see the ‘fiend’ and curses him, yet Richard is able to manipulate her emotions to the extent that she agrees to become his wife before the exchange ends. Even as the villain, the character’s Machiavellian powers of persuasion cannot fail to impress.

  In reality though, Richard was an old friend, perhaps more. His father, the Duke of York, had married Anne’s great-aunt and the young Gloucester had spent several years living as Warwick’s protégé at the family home of Middleham Castle. The earl may even have been the boy’s godfather. The children would have been brought together regularly, in ceremonial and informal situations, so it is not impossible that an early friendship had blossomed between them, surviving Anne’s arranged marriage with the enemy. After all, her family’s sympathies lay first with the Yorkists, then with her Lancastrian husband: next she would marry the boy she had known, whose family had made her a widow. Shakespeare truncates this: Richard forces Anne to accept his ring alongside her husband’s corpse, despite her curses. The actual ceremony took place over a year later in July 1472 and the pair lived together, apparently in harmony, for over a decade. It may even have been a love match. The eighteenth-century Ricardian Horace Walpole mentioned that Catherine, Countess of Desmond described him as ‘the handsomest man in the room’. There is no denying though, that the alliance was financially expedient to both, so much so, that they were prepared to enter a marriage that was possibly invalid in the eyes of the medieval Church. Together, they were crowned in 1483: Anne was Richard’s companion, his wife, the mother of his child and his queen. Did he then go on to murder her, as Shakespeare suggests?

  McKellen shows a rapidly deteriorating Anne. The haggard appearance of the wife contrasts sharply with the earlier elegance of the widow. In the back of a limousine she hitches up her skirt and, according to McKellen’s screenplay, ‘finds the appropriate spot in her much-punctured thigh’. Her unnamed drug of choice is described in the screen play as ‘calming’ and she closes her eyes and ‘waits for it to work’, while the orchestra plays triumphantly. Later she appears ‘doleful’ and sad, later still, in a drugged stupor, in a world of her own and finally, catatonic.3 The last the audience see of her is a motionless form, lying in bed with wide, staring eyes. A spider descends and lands on her face, scurrying away as she remains unblinking. McKellen’s Anne Neville is dead. Obviously, the fifteenth-century queen’s death was not attributable to recreational drugs but the rumours of her demise were just as sinister. Popular culture has upheld Anne as another of Richard’s victims, with Shakespeare placing her among the accusatory ghosts that disturb his sleep before battle. This is unsurprising as the circumstances of her death are shrouded in mystery and, for once, the corrective facts are harder to establish. In early 1485, the corridors of Westminster Palace whispered of jealousy, flirtations, affairs and illness, as some contemporaries suggested Richard might have been planning his second marriage while Anne was still alive, perhaps to a foreign princess, perhaps to his own niece. Aged only twenty-eight, the queen passed away amid an eclipse of the sun and the chroniclers were swift to draw their conclusions. Did Richard really play a part in her death? Did he ‘eschew her bed’ as she was fatally ill, possibly contagious? Was she poisoned to make way for a younger, more fecund model? Perhaps she was lovingly tended, yet unwittingly administered with medicines that could themselves prove fatal. The truth of Anne’s demise remained unresolved at the time and the dramatic regime change that followed compromised the objectivity of many witnesses and chroniclers. It is time to tease out the facts from the fiction.

  1

  Battles and Births

  1453–1456

  His lords are lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost

  Complaints of Jack Cade’s rebels, 14501

  It was summer 1453, the thirty-first year in the reign of the Lancastrian Henry VI. The nights were long and warm and the royal household had left its overcrowded lodgings in the Palace of Westminster in favour of some sport and relaxation in the country. By August, the court had settled into Clarendon Palace, near Salisbury, to enjoy riding, archery and pursuing the hart in the surrounding royal parkland. A former hunting lodge, the location had been a favourite one with English kings since before the Norman Conquest, where spacious rooms of 40 feet in length stretched over two floors with vaulted ceilings, tiled floors and fireplaces flanked by marble pillars. As the heat of the day mounted, the glazed windows with their stained glass images were thrown open and the scents of summer flowers and herbs drifted up from the formal gardens outside. It was an idyllic retreat for a monarch who increasingly eschewed worldly cares and allowed his wife and her favourites to take over the reins of government. Early in the morning, as the Palace was stirring, Henry could be found on his knees in the chapel, offering up his devotions to its marble altar and crucifix flanked by the figures of Mary and John. The king was known for his piety, asceticism and dislike of suffering but he was still a young man and relatively healthy according to the standards of the day. It was completely unexpected, therefore, when he suddenly suffered a seizure and took to his bed, lifeless as if paralysed, unable to speak or understand what was being said to him.

  Suddenly, panic took hold. Nobody knew what to do or how to react when the king suffered his collapse. At first, his puzzled courtiers merely helped him into bed, hoping that a good night’s rest would prove restorative: in hushed tones, they summoned his most intimate assistants, advisers, his confessor and sent word to his wife, the queen. Footsteps echoed along the tiled floors and up stone staircases; horse hooves clattered into the courtyard outside and urgent whispers filled the royal bedchamber. The king was urged to eat, to drink and finally, when these proved fruitless, to sleep; perhaps he had simply overtired himself and all would be well the next morning? But when Henry’s servants went to rouse him in the early light, they found him unchanged. Weeks passed and the king did not improve. In fact, his condition appeared to be worsening, verging on the catatonic: he had descended into a deep state of shock, similar to receiving bad news or a sudden fright, as Norfolk landowner John Paston suggested in a letter home. Other contemporaries described Henry losing control of his body and wits, as if the man himself had withdrawn, leaving just the physical shell. Keen to conceal the extent of his incapacity, his servants waited for two months before packing up the household at Clarendon and removing to Windsor, where he was put to bed in more familiar surroundings. It was given out that he was resting; the country must not yet know that its king was as virtually useless as he had been when he inherited the throne as a baby. Still nothing could rouse him from his stupor and members of his court tiptoed about his room, where the wan f
igure lay among the velvets and silks of the impressive bed of state. Old favourites leaned over him and spoke in soft tones, yet the king could not distinguish them from the servants bringing in his food or building up the fire. Nor could he recognise his heavily pregnant wife, Queen Margaret, her dress unlaced across her expanding belly, soon to deliver the much longed-for Lancastrian heir.

  Yet there was no obvious cause for such a dramatic collapse. The doctors summoned to Windsor could offer little real help, as their understanding of mental illness was as imperfect as their knowledge of the workings of the human body. They would have made their observations of his appearance, consulted the king’s astrological chart and examined his urine, before reaching a diagnosis based on the four Galenic humours, which categorised patients according to differing degrees of heat and moisture. Three physicians and two surgeons administered him with powerful drugs to no avail and soon he was in the sole care of Gilbert Keymer, Dean of Salisbury, ‘an expert, notable, and proved man in the craft of medicine’.2 The royal diet was adjusted to allow for the humours to be balanced according to the properties present in his food, so an over-heated, dry patient would be given meals of cold, wet ingredients like lettuce while the fiery seeds of mustard were to be avoided at all cost. The king’s condition would have necessitated force-feeding by a trusted and intimate servant, reducing him to the status of a baby; passive, dependent and helpless. The initial response to Henry’s collapse was probably the universal remedy of bleeding, applied to almost every ailment, to draw dangerous matter out of the body, which in this case, was deemed to be an excess of black bile. He would also have been given various medicines, ointments and powders mixed from natural ingredients chosen for their medicinal and superstitious qualities. But ultimately, the doctors were baffled and, as usual in the medieval period, when events defied logical explanation, superstitious and religious answers were sought. Madness was interpreted as a function of individual morality, as a punishment for sin or a test of character, although Henry’s pious lifestyle placed him above the usual reproaches. Perhaps some witnesses considered it the trial of a man unsuited to kingship, a response not too dissimilar from modern interpretations, though their explanations would encompass divine and supernatural causes rather than schizophrenia or depression.