Anne Neville: Richard III's Tragic Queen

by Licence, Amy

  Returning from Burgundy in 1461, aged almost nine, Richard of Gloucester initially lived at Sheen and Greenwich with his siblings Clarence and Margaret, attending Edward IV’s Coronation on 27 June. It is likely that Anne and Isabel Neville were also present at this momentous occasion, given their father’s role in his accession. Perhaps they stood with their mother in Westminster Abbey, dressed in velvet or damask, or the other impressive fabrics that their rank permitted, while the countess sported one of the new winged or butterfly headdresses, watching the proceedings. Among the feasting and jousting that inevitably followed, Warwick’s children and Edward’s siblings would have come into contact, either seated at the head table or enjoying the entertainment. Anne and Isabel may well have attended key events at court, staying at their father’s town house of the Erber, when not at their northern base of Middleham. So it is likely that Richard was known to them both by the time he joined Warwick’s household. It was customary among the nobility and aristocracy to place teenage children among families of equivalent rank in order for them to receive social or military training suitable for their future positions. For girls, their education as ladies would encompass traditional skills such as needlework, dancing and music as well as those required to run households of their own in the future. Adolescent boys, known as ‘henxmen’, were trained in the art of warfare and chivalry, as well as languages and those skills of diplomacy that would open doors at the highest level. Often, they grouped around a young man of similar age, establishing friendships and loyalties that would last a lifetime.

  The date of young Richard’s arrival at Middleham is uncertain; it may have been as early as 1461, although other historians have suggested he did not enter Warwick’s tutelage until 1464. Certainly in 1461, the nine-year-old boy was mentioned in the king’s household accounts, when his goods were conveyed to and from Leicester and the capital, as well as the necessary furnishings for his time at Greenwich. Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was related to the Yorks by marriage, received compensation for supporting the king’s brothers ‘for a long time and at great charges’ so Richard may well have been resident in his household for a period of time.9 While nine years old was not too early for Richard to begin his chivalric training, it appears that his elder brother George, Duke of Clarence, had begun this process when he was ten. Clarence was now the centre of his own establishment at Greenwich, continuing his chivalric training among his peers. The sons of the aristocracy matured early, when youth and strength were often as crucial as experience when it came to combat. Fourteen was considered to be a significant milestone in the maturation of boys and Edward himself would declare Richard of age when he reached sixteen, after which he would take an important administrative and legal role, before fighting his first full battle at the age of eighteen. Edward IV had become king just before his nineteenth birthday. Now it was the role of the Earl of Warwick to prepare his young charge for this military and chivalric future.

  It is possible that Richard was already a frequent visitor to Middleham Castle or Warwick’s other properties. Certainly, he would have been familiar to the Neville family. Several historians have suggested that the earl was Richard’s godfather and, as such, he would have played a parental role in his education even before the boy became a more permanent resident under his roof. This would have begun as early as 1461, certainly when Warwick was at Westminster or about the king’s business. The relationship between the king and the earl had never been stronger than in the year of his accession. After that, things would slowly sour and, by 1464, major disagreements of policy had already arisen between the cousins, although they had not yet reached the proportions of later years that resulted in their complete breach. Edward was clearly making arrangements for his siblings in 1461 as, that November, his Parliament instructed the Sheriff of Gloucester to pay Richard £40 a year for life.10 Around 1465, an entry in the Roll of the Exchequer recorded money ‘paid to Richard, Earl of Warwick, for costs and expenses incurred by him on behalf of the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s brother’, so he was clearly at Middleham by then. Additionally, to pay for the boy’s upkeep, Edward awarded Warwick the wardship of Francis Lovell, heir to Lord Lovell. Two years younger than Richard, Lovell probably arrived in Wensleydale on the death of his father in around 1463, but the pair were to become lifelong friends. Also present were Robert Percy of Scotton and Richard Radcliffe, or Ratcliffe, of Lancashire, who were to fight and die alongside their future king. Ratcliffe’s grandfather was comptroller of the household of Edward IV, a position that the young Robert Percy would assume for the duration of Richard’s reign. Thomas Huddleston and Thomas Parr, Richard’s future esquire, were also probably present as the sons of Warwick’s Cumbrian retainers, along with James Tyrell of Ipswich. Warwick’s schoolroom may have been even larger; other boys may also have passed under his tutelage during those years in a hothouse for the environment that one historian has referred to as the ‘flowering of British chivalry’. There is also another possibility. Young aristocrats were often sent away to be raised in households of their intended future partners. Perhaps, even at this early stage, Warwick was considering the king’s brother as a match for one of his daughters.

  Actually, Warwick was frequently absent from home during 1464–65. Always favouring a French alliance over the Burgundian match Edward IV favoured, he had travelled back across the Channel to negotiate a marriage for the king, which had been called off, much to the earl’s chagrin. However, he was kept busy in the royal service, visiting the Cinque Ports on the Kent and Sussex coast in November. At the end of the month he was at York and, after celebrating Christmas, was at Coventry on 10 January and six days later, at the opening of Parliament in Westminster, staying at his London home, the Erber, where he remained until that March. Between mid-May and mid-July, he was in Calais, then back in Warwick in August before being recorded making offerings at the church of St Mary’s, Warwick, along with the countess, their daughters and Richard, Duke of Gloucester in September 1465.11 Richard may well have accompanied him on some of these minor missions or, alternatively, was in residence at other Warwick properties such as Barnard Castle, Penrith and Sheriff Hutton.

  Given the routine of the Warwick household, Richard and Anne Neville would have seen each other regularly while he was at Middleham. Although Anne’s existence would have been more sequestered and her presence in the Great Hall less frequent, the pair’s proximity cannot but have bred a degree of intimacy. Out of the window, the little girl may have seen the youths tilting in the yard or riding out with hounds and hawks; indoors, she may have heard them reciting their Latin, listened to them practise their instruments in the evening or knelt beside them in prayer in the chapel. Isabel was closer to Richard in age and it is even possible that friendship developed between them first. All three are recorded as attending the enthronement of the girls’ uncle, George Neville, as Archbishop of York in September 1465, at Cawood Castle, participating in the legendary feast that saw the consumption of gargantuan quantities of fish, flesh and fowl. According to Leland’s account, Warwick was acting in the honoured role of steward and among the ‘estates sitting in the chief chamber’, Richard was seated alongside ‘the earl’s daughters’, under the watchful eyes of the Countesses of Suffolk, Westmorland and Northumberland, clearly considered to be part of the Warwicks’ intimate family. The countess was placed separately in the second chamber; obviously at the ages of nine and fourteen, Anne and Isabel’s table manners were considered up to scratch, as modelled in Hugh Rhodes’ Boke of Nurture:

  An ye be desired to serve, or sit, or eat meat at the table,

  Incline to good manners, and to nurture yourself enable…

  Before that you sit, see that your knife be bright

  Your hands clean, your nails pared is a good sight.

  When thou shalt speak, roll not too fast thine eye;

  Gaze not too and fro as one that were void of courtesy.12

  Rhodes himself was a member of Edw
ard IV’s chapel, a man ‘of worship, endowed with vertuuse moral and speculatiff … modestiall in all other manner of behaving’. He would have composed his advice to young people at the same time as Richard and the Neville girls were growing up; perhaps Warwick and his countess used his advice, or else their own version of it. At table, Anne and Isabel would have learned not to fill their spoons too full, not to dip bread in their soup, slurp too loudly or put their meat in the salt cellar, to eat small morsels and not to quaff or scratch, fidget or pick their teeth. Displaying good manners towards their table companions was essential:

  An a stranger sit near thee, ever among now and then,

  Reward him with some dainties like a gentleman

  If thy fellow sit from his meat and cannot come thereto,

  Then cut him such as thou hast, that is gently to do.13

  Seated together, the young trio would have eaten through their share of the dishes prepared by the sixty-two cooks in the kitchens that day. Recorded by Leland, the three courses included such delicacies as frumenty with venison, hart, mutton, cygnets and swans, capons and geese, peacock and rabbits. The small birds eaten numbered woodcocks, plovers, egrets, larks, redshanks, martinets, partridges and quails, while among the sweets were dates, fritters, quinces, wafers as well as the marzipan subtleties in the forms of a dolphin, dragon, St William and St George. This did not even include the fish courses, with salmon, sturgeon, lobster and lampreys, conger eels, trout and turbot among many others. Around 300 tuns of ale were consumed and 100 of wine and under the quantities listed, the amount of ‘spices, sugared delicates and wafers’ made was recorded as ‘plenty’. Around 13,000 puddings were consumed. Following the feast, guests were given damask (rose) water to wash in and hippocras to drink. The three children cannot help but have been impressed, even accustomed as they were to the finest cuisine and the most formal of occasions. Forbidden by etiquette to discuss the food, perhaps their formal manners allowed for little conversation in spite of the friendship that existed between the families. Perhaps even at this stage, the thirteen-year-old boy and the nine-year-old Anne were already fond of each other; was Anne already more than just one of ‘the earl’s daughters’ to Richard, Duke of Gloucester?

  5

  Romance and Chivalry

  1465–1469

  In person she was seemly, amenable and beautiful and in conditions full commendable and right virtuous1

  What did he look like, this young man who came into Anne’s Middleham world? The question of Richard’s appearance has proved contentious since the late fifteenth century. A flurry of accounts written in the aftermath of Bosworth quickly established the myths of deformity that the Tudors required as a correlative to the late king’s perceived moral distortion. Shakespeare’s Richard of 1591 manages to use his powers of persuasion to make Anne submit to a match with a ‘bunch-backed toad’ but no taint of abnormality was present when the two children were growing up in the 1450s. The origins of this misrepresentation stem from the use of two words in a poem, ‘A Dialogue between a Secular and a Friar’, recording the family’s history in the Clare Roll. According to the chronicler, Richard was the eleventh child of twelve, some of whom had already perished. Other sources list another short-lived or stillborn daughter, Joan, born earlier in the marriage around 1438.

  Sir, aftir the tyme of longe bareynesse,

  God first sent Anne, which signifyeth grace,

  In token that at her hertis hevynesse

  He as for bareynesse would fro hem chace.

  Harry, Edward, and Edmonde, eche is his place

  Succcedid; and after tweyn doughters cam

  Elizabeth and Margarete, and aftir William.

  John aftir William nexte borne was,

  Whiche bothe he passid to Goddis grace:

  George was next, and after Thomas

  Borne was, which sone aftir did pace

  By the pathe of dethe into the heavenly place.

  Richard liveth yet; but the last of alle

  Was Ursula, to him God list calle.2

  The penultimate line, stating that ‘Richard liveth yet’, has been interpreted as an indicator of his poor health, leading to descriptions of him as a sick and weakly child. There is no other evidence to support this, though, and recent historians have argued that it is more a statement of fact in comparison with his deceased siblings. The author was simply stating that Richard had survived in comparison with Thomas and Ursula, his immediate siblings. At the time of writing, Richard was still a child ‘in his pupilage’ and therefore still at risk from various infantile illnesses. The statement that he ‘liveth yet’ could, in fact, be an affirmation rather than indication of any physical problem; rather, it suggests strength and survival.

  The Neville family chronicler, John Rous, was initially favourable to Richard, describing him in 1484 as a ‘most mighty prince’ who ruled ‘commendably … cherishing those who were virtuous’ to the ‘great laud of all the people’. The line drawing which accompanies his text shows a knight holding a sword, whose limbs appear in perfect proportion, his features regular, almost beneficent. It is not too dissimilar to an illustration featured in the chronicle of French writer, Jean de Waurin, where a figure in a green hat, thought to represent Richard in his early twenties, clearly has well-formed limbs, straight spine and even shoulders. It may be that Waurin and Rous were diplomatically flattering their ruler by glossing over his impediments or perhaps, that these defects were not necessarily visible at the time of writing or were hidden under clothes. After the victory of Henry VII in 1485, Rous produced a second version of his history, although he was unable to access and amend his original, positive account. This later, Tudor-friendly version introduced the idea of Richard’s monstrous birth, which depicts him arriving after an impossible two-year gestation period, sporting a full set of teeth. Rous’ dramatic U-turn may have been his attempt to curry favour with the new regime, or else he could have been influenced by his belief that Richard was responsible for the death of Anne, whose family were his patrons. Whatever prompted Rous to rewrite history, his second account of 1491 was to trigger the legends of the late king’s deformities.

  This dramatic horror story influenced another account of Richard’s life and reign, written by Thomas More between 1512 and 1519, in which the boy was breech-born, little, ‘croke-backed’ and ‘hard-faced’, which served his purpose in presenting the dead Yorkist as a villain. Equally, the author had served as a page in the household of the Lancastrian Archbishop Morton and may have based his version of events on conversations with one of Richard’s adversaries. Tudor historian Polydore Vergil built on More’s account, which was further developed by Edward Hall in the 1540s, seeking to justify the Tudor invasion of 1485. These three negative portrayals formed the main influence on Shakespeare’s interpretation, which developed Richard into the ‘poison bunch-backed toad’ that was the supposed physical manifestation of his wickedness. By the time the play was composed, in around 1591, the tradition of the king’s deformity was well established and, by 1614, it had inspired an anonymous author to produce the poem ‘The Ghost of Richard III’, drawing together the worst of the legends about his appearance and deeds, which survives in a single manuscript copy in the Bodleian Library:

  My mother Languish’t many a tedious houre…

  My legges came foremost, an unequall payre…

  Hollow my cheeks, upon my brest black hayre,

  The characters of spleene and virulent deedes;

  My beetle-brow, and my fyre-cyrcled eye

  Foreshow’d me butcher in my cruelty…

  So, mountaine-like was I contract behind

  That my stretch’t arms (plumpe with ambitious veines)

  Might crush all obstacles and throw them downe

  That stood betwixt my shadow and a crowne…

  Th’amazed women started, for each jaw

  Appear’d with teeth, which mark made these ils good

  That I should worry soules, suck humane b
lood.3

  However, none of the contemporary chroniclers, Mancini, Commines and Croyland, make any mention of Richard’s deformities. The Italian, Mancini, certainly had a motive to do so, writing in 1483 about the ‘suspicious’ disappearance of the princes, which were even then reputed to have been killed by their uncle. Based in London, Mancini never met Richard but he certainly repeated the rumours of the day. He had no compunction about giving his opinion on the new regime, titling his account The Occupation of the Throne by Richard III. When he left the country that summer, he had little need to flatter the new king and could have presented any unpleasant truths without fear of reprisals. The Burgundian Commines had probably never visited England but wrote an account based on meetings with Richard’s contemporaries in exile, notably his nemesis Henry Tudor. While he states that King Louis of France thought Richard a ‘cruel and evil’ murderer, he does not exploit the opportunity to discredit his appearance. The English Croyland Chronicle calls Richard’s later activities ‘seditious and disgraceful’ but makes no mention of his looks.

  Accounts written by those who knew Richard give the impression that the thirteen-year-old boy took after his father, the Duke of York, in appearance, being dark-haired and wiry. The Silesian, Nicolas von Popplau, who visited Richard’s court in 1484, described him as slim and lightly built with slender arms and thighs, although he admitted the king was actually three fingers taller than himself. The Scottish Ambassador, Archibald Whitelaw, confirmed in the same year that Richard was small, although none seemed to doubt his strength and prowess in battle. Horace Walpole claimed that Catherine, Countess of Desmond, remembered Richard and had called him the ‘handsomest man in the room’ although her death in 1604, at the reputed age of either 120 or 140, may push credibility to the limit. It hardly seems possible that she lived to such an advanced age and could remember him herself: perhaps she was recalling what her mother or grandmother had passed down, or even her much older husband, as suggested by John Ashdown-Hill. Her marriage in 1529, assuming it was her first and that her death date is correct, might suggest a birth date of between 1500 and 1515.