Anne Neville: Richard III's Tragic Queen

by Licence, Amy

  The armies met in the compact little town of St Albans on 22 May 1455. Before any arrows were fired, York attempted to negotiate with Henry, who had arrived with Somerset’s army, asking him to hand over his unpopular counsellors. Somerset had, he claimed, been ‘disloyal to his country’, lost French territories and ‘reduced the entire realm of England to a state of misery’.9 The hard-line reply which the messengers brought back only inflamed the situation. Prompted by his favourites, Henry wrote that anyone arming against the king was guilty of treason and would suffer the usual penalty of hanging, drawing and quartering. He then dressed in full armour, sat astride his horse and raised his standard in the marketplace, but it was a military gesture he was unable to sustain and he would remain there throughout the conflict, finally retiring when wounded in the neck by an arrow. As historian Robin Storey has stated, ‘if Henry’s insanity was a tragedy, his recovery was a national disaster’. The king’s reinstatement and reliance upon the faction headed by his wife and Somerset had made conflict inevitable between the dukes. When he read the official response to his attempts to negotiate, York knew he must defend himself and his claim to the throne, or risk losing his position and now, his life. Fighting swiftly broke out. The town was ill equipped to contain what may well have been close to 7,000 men, locked in hand-to-hand combat through the narrow streets and back lanes, into the inhabitants’ gardens and homes, with witnesses describing the piles of dead bodies, running with blood. The townsfolk must have thought that hell had descended.

  For the families living around the market square and those engaged in trade and business, the impact of this carnage has often been overlooked in historical accounts. Many locals must have been drawn in, attempting to defend their property or repel intruders intent on claiming their living spaces as an arena for slaughter. With fighting taking place literally on their doorsteps, the wise may have fled out into the fields surrounding the town or into sanctuary at the abbey and waited until the chaos was over. Surviving objects from the fifteenth century on display in the Museum of St Albans, such as thimbles, needles, pegs and shoes, serve as powerful reminders that the fighting ranged over a primarily domestic landscape. The scene when the families returned must have been nightmarish; property damaged, gardens trampled, blood pooling in the gutter and the familiar transformed into the horrific. In the market square, the heart of the town, where the fighting was at its thickest, it is not difficult to imagine the faces of terrified residents behind the windows, watching events unfold. Safe in the abbey, Abbot John Whethamstede described the troops breaking down houses and through back gardens between two inns, blowing trumpets, shouting ‘á Warwick’ and ‘slaying all those that withstood them’. The horror of the experience is brought vividly to life in his descriptions that followed: ‘I saw a man fall with his brains beaten out, another … with his throat cut and [another] with a stab wound in his chest, while the whole street was strewn with corpses.’10

  The period of fighting, though, was blessedly short. Having once been told of a prophecy that he would die ‘under a castle’, Somerset was indeed killed with a poleaxe outside the marketplace’s Castle Inn, although some sources have described it more as a formal execution. York and Warwick may have deliberately targeted him, using a manoeuvre that took them through private gardens into the main square. His death effectively ended the fighting. All was over in less than an hour. Revolted by the sight of blood, much of the royal army now deserted, leaving Henry bleeding from a wound to the neck inflicted by a stray arrow. He took refuge in the nearby home of a tanner, cursing those who would ‘smite a king anointed so’. About seventy lords were killed beside Beaufort; others hid in the abbey, hiding their armour and disguising themselves as monks. While the day was a decisive victory for the Yorkist faction, the locals’ ordeal would continue as the jubilant troops rampaged through the streets, looting and destroying homes, although they stopped short of pillaging the abbey, where Henry had retired for the night. It was not until the following day that York, his father Salisbury and Warwick escorted the king back to London, where York assumed Somerset’s title of Constable of England.

  By that autumn York was effectively King of England in all but name, as he had been as Protector and Defender of the realm. The death of Somerset created a temporary vacuum at the heart of the queen’s party and Margaret was increasingly occupied with her husband’s health, although the dead duke’s heir looked to pose a considerable threat once he had recovered from his battle wounds. One of York’s first steps was taken to ensure his own safety. His first Parliament passed an Act defending the role he had played at St Albans as an attack upon the ‘great tyranny and injustice’ of Somerset’s government. None of York’s allies were to be ‘empeched, sued, vexed, hurt or molested in thaire bodies, goodes or lands’ as a result of the events of 22 May.11 The pardon was secured and a peace of sorts had been reached but there was still an undercurrent of suspicion. York and Warwick clashed with Parliament over the sensitive issue of who should accept responsibility for the battle, prompting their followers to stuff ‘their Lordes barges full of wepon dayly unto Westminster’ in case of attack before the passing of the Bill exonerating York and his followers from any blame, which was ‘groged [begrudged] full sore’ by many.12 A letter in the archives of Milan, written to the Archbishop of Ravenna, stated that King Henry had forbidden anyone to speak of the recent battle ‘upon pain of death’ and that York now ‘had the government’ and ‘peace reigned’ at which the people ‘were very pleased’.13 Yet the anonymous correspondent did not realise that the Lancastrian king was virtually under house arrest.

  Parliament might have cleared York and his associates of accusations of treason but it did not clear the air. His most powerful enemy, Queen Margaret, was temporarily occupied at Greenwich, as Henry VI’s mental state began to deteriorate again. In spite of the best medical care the era could offer, his previous symptoms reappeared, casting doubt on his ability to resume control, if he had ever managed it in the first place. However, the situation was not the same as it had been in August 1453, as Henry now had a living male heir. If York temporarily held the reins of power, it was only ever to be until young Edward reached his majority and was able to reward or punish his Protector as he saw fit. And, as the son of the ‘warlike and hostile’ Margaret of Anjou, the latter was more likely. The queen was keen to assert her son’s rights and keep York at a distance, to which purpose she had had the boy invested as Prince of Wales at Windsor the previous year but, as an only child, he was still vulnerable. While his extreme youth rendered him incapable of rule, York must have been mindful of the circumstances in which Henry VI had acceded, back in 1421, and been anxious to avoid a similar situation. As York and Warwick were now in control, exploiting the loss of their mutual enemy, the royal family retreated. The tradition of royal nurseries at Greenwich may well have been established at this time: the little boy was probably there with his parents, while Margaret desperately tried to regather her supporters and rouse her husband again. Among other things, York was responsible for the settlement of 10,000 marks a year on the two-year-old prince: in a decade or so, the boy would be considered able to exercise his own will and York had no doubt that the queen’s influence meant he was potentially nurturing his future worst enemy.

  Born in 1453, Edward of Westminster was one of four children whose lives would shape the coming decades and the course of English history. At the time of his birth, he had the full expectation of becoming king after Henry VI, just as his father and grandfather had succeeded; he was invested as Prince of Wales at the age of two and raised for this role. His mother, Queen Margaret, was still young at twenty-three when she gave birth, but she would not conceive another child, perhaps due to the sexual incompatibility between her and Henry VI. This could have been the result of his disinclination, fuelled by long-term mental illness or other medical issues. Young Edward’s conception and birth had been controversial but this was not insurmountable. Although popular rumours re
garding his paternity might have exploited the unlikelihood of the king fathering a child, in order to spread the damaging theory that he had been supplanted in his wife’s bed by any one of her favourites, there was no proof. In fact, it was not uncommon for couples to experience difficulties in trying to start, or build, a family: some branches of other noble medieval families became extinct as a result.

  While opposing the queen’s faction at court, Warwick and his countess were confronted by questions as to their own fertility and parenthood. With only one surviving daughter, it is possible that other children had been conceived and lost during the 1440s and 50s. One note in the family accounts lists that eggs were provided for the countess during Lent 1453, due to her weakness resulting from sickness and pregnancy, which may not necessarily have been related to her earlier live birth. It is quite likely that she was pregnant at the time, two years after Isabel’s birth, but later lost the baby. Both her own siblings had recently died young: her brother Henry had only produced one daughter, who had not survived infancy, while her half-sister had produced four children. On the earl’s side, there were no obvious problems with fertility, as he was one of the ten of his parents’ offspring to reach adulthood, and although one of his sisters, Cecily, bore only a single surviving girl, another, Alice, bore eleven children. The Warwicks must have wondered whether they would ever become parents again. However, in the autumn of 1455, soon after the Battle of St Albans, Anne conceived. It was good timing, coinciding with the Yorkists’ success and Warwick’s new position at the duke’s side. For standing by his ally in the Parliament of February 1456, when Henry VI resumed personal control, Warwick was rewarded with the lucrative position of Captain of Calais. By this time, the countess’s pregnancy would have been confirmed and, although the couple would not have wished to tempt fate, the first cautious provisions for the child’s arrival would have been put in place.

  In late May or early June 1456, Countess Anne took to her chamber at Warwick Castle and awaited the start of her labour. Situated on high ground in a bend of the River Avon, the earliest parts of the building were datable as far back as the Norman Conquest, but later additions had so significantly improved its defences and levels of comfort that, by mid-fifteenth-century standards, the castle had become known as the Windsor of the North. Anne would have had every material comfort to assist her lying-in: her chambers hung with tapestries and closed off to exclude draughts and daylight, provisioned with candles, linen, religious relics and texts. Women of the household would have brought regular supplies of food and drink and whatever was required on a daily basis, while friends, relations and a local midwife kept her company. Anne knew she would be lucky to survive the ordeal. As she lay secluded in her darkened rooms, she recalled from experience that the coming hours would test her to the limit; she would have known of women who had lost their lives or those of their babies in labour.

  The pregnancies of Anne’s aunt-in-law, Cecily Neville, illustrate just how precarious young lives could be in the mid-fifteenth century. Her experiences as a mother began just three years after Anne’s betrothal to the Duke of York, with the birth of her short-lived first daughter, Joan. All through the countess’s youth and early married life, Cecily continued to deliver children, at a rate of approximately one a year until the occasion of Anne’s second confinement, in 1456, a year after Cecily delivered her thirteenth and final child. That baby, a girl named Ursula, did not live long, leaving the four-year-old Richard of York as Cecily’s youngest child. Of her complete family, only seven babies reached adulthood, giving her an infant survival rate of just over 50 per cent, which was not uncommon. The Duchess of York was fortunate to have survived such a number of births, so closely spaced, across a span of seventeen years. In cases of straightforward deliveries, the rate of maternal mortality has been estimated at between 1 and 2 per cent14 but as soon as complications arose, the chances for both mother and child lessened significantly. For those in attendance, there was no formal training or regulation and certainly no understanding of the nature of germs or the need for basic cleanliness, in fact, religion and superstition superseded hygiene. The countess would have prayed to the saints for intercession in their labours or may have held religious or superstitious artefacts; the consecrated host or holy water may have been brought into her chamber from the castle chapel or a cross may have been laid on her swollen belly. While pain relief was forbidden on religious grounds, the oils of lilies and roses were thought to lessen the pains of contractions, while some followed more bizarre rituals, including chants, charms and talismen. The event was so significant that Warwick absented himself from Parliament in order to be present. He must have been waiting anxiously in one of the many impressive chambers of Warwick Castle, hearing the screams of his wife as the hours wore on. Finally, on 11 June, the child arrived. It was another girl. They named her Anne.

  This is the story of four children born in the 1450s. Richard of York (1452), Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales (1453), and Anne Neville (1456) were the first three. The fourth, who had been conceived shortly before Anne’s birth and would arrive the following year, would outlive them all. In November 1455, a marriage had taken place between the niece of the recently deceased Earl of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort, and the king’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor. Henry VI himself is said to have chosen twelve-year-old Margaret, who was Edmund’s ward, for this match; Edmund, at twenty-four, was twice her age. He was one of at least six children born to Henry V’s French widow, Catherine of Valois, and the keeper of her wardrobe, Owen Tudor, in a secret and illicit match. Even by the standards of the time, Margaret was unusually young to enter into marriage in its full sense but, in fact, she had already been ‘married’ once before, as an infant, before the connection was annulled for political reasons. As an heiress and the sole surviving child of her father, her wardship was a valuable commodity for those who could ally her with their own families, although consummation was usually delayed until girls reached the age of fourteen, considered to be the onset of physical maturity. Within months of the marriage, though, Margaret was pregnant. Soon afterwards, she was also widowed, when the Lancastrian Edmund was captured by Yorkist William Herbert and imprisoned in Carmarthen Castle, where he died of the plague. The girl awaited the birth of her child at Pembroke Castle, Wales, under the care of her brother-in-law Jasper. As might have been predicted, even then, the process of labour was long and difficult for a thirteen-year-old, bringing her close to death and possibly resulting in lasting physical damage. Yet she survived, as did her son, Henry Tudor, born on 28 January 1457, who would, ironically, become Herbert’s ward and later use his dead father’s family connections to ascend the throne as Henry VII.

  Richard, Edward, Anne and Henry. As children of the mid-fifteenth century, they were lucky to survive birth, infection, illness, accident and murder. Their average age at death would be thirty-three, although one of them would attain just half these years and only one other would live longer. This was pretty much the average life expectancy for aristocracy males, when a healthy baby might be expected to die before his thirty-fifth birthday, factoring in childhood disease and death in battle. For baby girls, who might expect to be engaged in frequent childbirth, expectations varied, although every pregnancy and birth made her more vulnerable. Born within five years of each other, these four children were the inheritors of a civil turmoil that had been the making of their parents’ generation, through which they had to forge their own path. All three boys had claims to the English throne and two of them would be crowned king. Two of them would also become Anne’s husbands, and she herself would experience a splendid Coronation of her own. They grew to maturity amid conflict caused by inheritance, royalty, insanity and marriage, in which their own struggles to assert their claims against those of their rivals would prove deadly. As they lay in their cradles, took their first steps and began to form their first words, these paths were still waiting to evolve. It is hindsight which now dictates this juxtaposing of their
arrivals, although the imminent future may not have proved such a surprise as, even in the mid-1450s, many of these impending changes were already unfolding. Henry VI’s incapacity, in comparison with the Duke of York’s ability, indicated where power was about to shift. For the infant Anne Neville, though, the political intrigues of the next few years would be distant in more ways than one. She was about to leave the English shores over which the three boys would later fight to the death.

  2

  Castle Life

  1456–1458

  I am ful yong

  I was born yisterday

  Death is ful hasty

  on me to ben werke.’1

  The infant Anne arrived safely inside the impressive grey stone bastion of Warwick Castle. In her first moments, she was carefully checked by the midwives and her umbilical cord was cut, anointed with balm and tied. She would have been rubbed in scented oil and had her mouth washed in wine or sugar water, in front of the fire, before being tightly bound and lain in her cradle. Like her mother, she was fortunate in having survived the birth process but the next few months could potentially prove fatal. The women of the household would keep a special eye on the new child and make sure her linen and bedclothes were scrupulously clean, as well as washing down the floors and walls of the chamber where she slept. Animals, undesirables and those suffering from any sort of illness would be kept out. As the countess recovered from the rigours of labour, finally allowed to rest, she would have looked across to the tiny form sleeping soundly, with only its little pink face visible through the layers of fabric, and felt relieved that the child was alive and had no visible defects. This may have been the point when her husband Richard tiptoed in to congratulate his wife and take a peek at the newborn. Did his smile conceal his disappointment that the child was not a boy?