Anne Neville: Richard III's Tragic Queen

by Licence, Amy

  The alternative story of Edward’s murder began to gain credence soon after his death. Weeks after the battle, Bettini wrote to the Duke of Milan that the Yorkists had ‘not only routed the prince but taken and slain him, together with all the leading men with him’.10 As early as 1473, one French chronicle, the Histoire de Charles, dernier duc de Bourgogne, claimed he had been surrounded and murdered in cold blood by his enemies. Vergil’s account has King Edward asking the ‘excellent yowth’ why he took up arms against his sovereign, to which the prince replied bravely that it was to free his father from miserable oppression and regain his usurped crown. Then Edward waved him away to be ‘cruelly butchered’ by his brothers, which is repeated by Hall and Holinshed. Based on this, local tradition still points out a house in Church Street, Tewkesbury, nearly opposite the marketplace, as that in which the young prince was stabbed in the presence of the king. Predictably, Shakespeare has Gloucester himself wielding the sword, in King Henry VI, Part 3 Act 5 Scene 5. The prince declares to his enemies,

  I know my duty;, you arc all undutiful:

  Lascivious Edward, and thou perjured George,

  And thou misshapen Dick, I tell ye all

  I am your better, traitors as ye are:

  And thou usurp’st my father’s right and mine.

  However, in Richard III, written around the same time, the killing has already taken place before the action begins, as it is an earlier part of the same cycle. Now, though, Richard denies his involvement to Anne, stating instead that the prince was ‘slain by Edward’s hand’. In response, Anne cites her witness, Queen Margaret, who saw his ‘murderous falchion smoking in his blood’. The dramatic irony of Richard’s admission of guilt to the audience once Anne leaves the stage is a timely reminder of the duplicitous nature of public denials and that those responsible were hardly going to advertise the fact.

  Fabyan, a London chronicler of 1516, describes the murder as having taken place in the presence of the king, in no way singling out Richard of Gloucester. Edward, he says, ‘strake him [the prince] with his gauntlet upon the face, after which stroke, so by him received, he was by the king’s servants incontinently slain’. The seventeenth-century George Buck, ‘on the authority of a faithful contemporary manuscript’, asserts that when the bloody attack was made on the young prince, ‘the Duke of Gloucester only, of all the great persons, stood still, and drew not his sword’, giving rise to the theory that Richard was unwilling to participate in the murder of Anne’s husband, because of his existing affection for her, ‘whom he loved very affectionately, though secretly’. Shakespeare goes one better and has Richard try to convince Anne that it was for the sake of her beauty that her husband was slain, bereaving her of him in order ‘to help thee to a better husband’. At least one later historian has suggested that the murder, if it was murder, was in retaliation for the death of the seventeen-year-old Edmund, Earl of Rutland, the fourth Yorkist brother, who had been killed alongside their father at Wakefield in 1460. This is not impossible. The question of his death is something of a historical misnomer though. All noblemen participating in battle could expect to be killed during the conflict or in a brief trial in the aftermath, as had been established since the First Battle of St Albans. Violent death was no stranger to those who vied for the throne, particularly since the death of the Duke of Suffolk in 1450, followed by that of the 1st Duke of Somerset in 1455, which had set the tone for the wars. Of course Edward would be killed if he were taken. To expect otherwise, to hope for some sort of leniency in view of his youth or status, would have been naïve. Death was death, whether it happened in the thick of fighting or came at the end of an axe or dagger in the midst of the enemy camp. However Prince Edward died, and the plaque in the abbey states he was ‘slain in battle’; the result was the same for Anne, who was left a widow at the age of fourteen. Now she and Margaret were at the mercy of the York brothers.

  Edward was not the only significant casualty of the battle. As the Lancastrian army scattered, Somerset turned on Warwick’s ally, Lord Wenlock, and, according to Hall, killed him with an axe for ‘holding back’. Somerset’s younger brother, John Beaufort, was also slain in the fighting, and the duke, along with many of the defeated lords, took shelter in nearby Tewkesbury Abbey. There, the Yorkists offered prayers for their victory and gave Abbot Strensham their word as permission for the dead to be buried and for the sheltering Lancastrians to be pardoned. However, something changed in the following days. Only two days later, on 6 May, Somerset and the others were dragged out of the abbey and beheaded. A fifteenth-century depiction of this scene in a late Ghent manuscript appears to exonerate Richard and his brothers from actually carrying out the deed, as it depicts King Edward watching the executioner, who stands on a block to wield the axe and is a clearly older man, sporting a little pot belly. As a result of the violence, the abbey had to be cleansed and reconsecrated a month later. Edward, Prince of Wales, was interred within its walls and, today, his final resting place is marked by a plaque on the floor. Also losing out at Tewkesbury were Jasper Tudor and his nephew Henry, whose brief hopes for the restoration were dashed, sending them both into exile. It marked the beginning of a fourteen-year separation between Henry and his mother, Margaret Beaufort. Her second husband, Henry Stafford, had been so badly wounded after Barnet that he would die of his injuries that October, leaving her a widow for a second time. She would not see her son again until he was a grown man at the head of an invasion army in 1485, but for another mother, her namesake, the battle at Tewkesbury was to have the worst possible outcome.

  At some point, probably late in the day of the conflict itself, the terrible news was carried to the women waiting in the convent. Thomas Stanley may have been the messenger, as suggested by John Abbott, as he had been married to Warwick’s sister and would soon take Margaret Beaufort as his second wife. Thus, Anne heard the news from her uncle. Their defeat was absolute, for Margaret as a mother as well as a queen: Vergil describes the remainder of her life as being lived in ‘perpetuall moorning’. However deep their grief, Margaret and Anne were themselves in danger and fled to a church near Tewkesbury, where they were arrested two days later by another Stanley brother, William, who conducted them to King Edward at Coventry. Anne’s own grief would have been determined by the extent of her feelings for her dead husband. Even if love had not blossomed between them, they had been in each other’s company for the past nine months and shared the mixed fortunes of exiles. Anne had thrown in her lot with the Lancastrians, with the possibility of a future at Edward’s side in Westminster: she had known and shared his aspirations – and probably his fears and determination – before the battle. There is no evidence that she welcomed his death, as some historical novels have suggested; in fact, as his wife, she had every reason now to expect harsh treatment from his enemies. As she rode with Margaret in captivity towards Coventry, her emotions must have been turbulent, wondering just how lenient the king was prepared to be. Her age and gender were on her side, as was the past she had shared with both King Edward and Richard. How far would that go towards saving her now?

  On 11 May, Margaret and Anne appeared before King Edward at Coventry. Given Margaret’s later humiliating return to London, driven imprisoned in a chariot for the baying crowds to see, there was probably little sympathy for the ex-queen. Alison Weir alleges that Margaret screamed abuse and curses at Edward to the extent that he considered ordering her execution. Having witnessed her grief, Anne may well have felt compassion for her mother-in-law, although, as Warwick’s daughter, she was aware that it was now a battle for individual survival. She could not ally herself with Margaret now, as her future did not lie with her. It would not have been clear exactly where that future did lie but if she was wise, Anne would have tried to tread a careful political path and wait to see how events would unfold. Once again, her youth and gender probably served her well in this. It was likely that her arrival at Coventry as a prisoner also marked her brief reunion with Richard of Gloucester, now
cast in the role of victor. A romantic interpretation of the meeting would stress the resurfacing of old affections, as their eyes met across the room, full of assembled war-weary lords. On a practical level, it was probably a painful and difficult encounter, given the distance that the last two years had placed between the childhood friends. In the aftermath of battle, Anne’s widowed status was undeniable, making her available for remarriage, but if Richard conceived any intention of making her his wife at this stage, it was purely theoretical. The proceedings of that day were likely to have been formal and practical, to determine arrangements for the prisoners. Richard may not even have been present, or only briefly so, as he went south fairly soon after Tewkesbury in order to deal with an uprising among Kentish rebels. The ex-queen then began her journey south to the Tower on 14 May, where Henry VI was still housed, while Anne was released into the custody of her sister and Clarence. Vergil narrates a little anecdote in his 1513 history, whereby Margaret had foreseen her husband’s death after the Battle of Barnet: ‘she bewayled the unhappy end of King Henry, which now she accountyd assurydly to be at hand’. She was quite correct that the loss of her son removed the safeguard to her husband’s life. While Prince Edward had lived, his father’s death would only have transferred his claim to a younger, more competent man, but the extinction of the Lancastrian line sealed the old king’s fate.

  The same night that Margaret arrived at the Tower, her husband lost his life. It is unlikely that they were reunited first. Popular legend has him praying on bended knee at midnight in the Wakefield Tower when the unknown assassin struck. Edward IV was re-crowned the following day and Henry’s bleeding body was carried through the streets and lain on the pavement outside St Paul’s Abbey, where it continued to ‘blede newe and fresche’, according to Warkworth. While the Fleetwood Chronicle states that ‘of pure displeasure and melancholy, he died’ and the Arrivall agrees that his end was hastened by grief on hearing of the death of his son, others lay the blame for the deed at the feet of the Yorkists. There were precedents for such descriptions, euphemistically used for the demise of the usurped Richard II in 1399. Writing about three weeks later in mid-June, Bettini asserted ‘King Edward has had him put to death secretly … he has in short chosen to crush the seed’.11 Rous’ second, post-Tudor version of events takes relish in personally implicating Richard, who ‘as many believe, [killed] with his own hand, that most sacred man King Henry VI’. This is repeated as fact by Commines: ‘Immediately after this battle, the Duke of Gloucester either killed with his own hand, or caused to be murdered in his presence, in some spot apart, this good man King Henry,’ making the first mention of the weapon, apparently a dagger, although how he was so certain of these details is unknown, being at the time in France. Fabyan echoed the idea of popular belief in helping to ascertain guilt. ‘Of the death of this prince,’ he says, ‘diverse tales were told, but the most common fame went that he was stykked with a dagger by the hands of the Duke of Gloucester.’ Vergil confirms that common report attributed the crime to Gloucester. ‘Henry VI,’ he says, ‘being not long before deprived of his diadem, was put to death in the Tower of London,’ adding that the weapon of choice was a sword, while More says of Richard, ‘he slew … with his own hand, as men constantly say, King Henry VI, being prisoner in the Tower’.

  These accounts influenced the most famous depiction of the king’s death, where Shakespeare has Richard brutally interrupt Henry’s long speech:

  King Henry: The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign;

  The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;

  Dogs howled, and hideous tempests shook down trees;

  The raven rook’d her on the chimney’s top,

  And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.

  Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain,

  And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope;

  To wit, an indigest deformed lump,

  Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree.

  Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,

  To signify thou cam’st to bite the world;

  And, if the rest be true which I have heard,

  Thou cam’st…

  Gloucester: I’ll hear no more. Die, prophet, in thy speech. [Stabs him.]

  There is no evidence that Richard was the murderer of Henry VI; equally, there is no decisive evidence that he was not. Whoever wielded the sword was certainly acting under instructions from King Edward and Richard’s position as a Constable of England would have made the execution of such duties his responsibility, either by his own hand or by delegation. It is possible that Richard was present in the Tower that night but he was more likely to have been at Westminster, celebrating his family’s success. Thomas Rymer’s Foedera, published early in the eighteenth century, claims that two esquires, Robert Ratcliffe and William Sayer, with no fewer than ten or eleven other persons, were appointed to attend upon the unhappy monarch. As a friend of Richard from Middleham days, Ratcliffe’s presence could be interpreted as sinister but, on the other hand, it is to be expected that the Yorkists would man the Tower with men they could trust. The Warkworth Chronicle also places Richard at the scene when Henry was ‘putt to dethe’ between 9 and 10 o’clock at night, ‘beinge thenne at the Toure the Duke of Gloucestre’, but then goes on to add that ‘many other’ were there too. Just as with later reports of the deaths of the Princes in the Tower, common fame and later accounts continued to use Richard as a convenient villain.

  After the threats to the Yorkist regime in the period 1469–71, Henry VI and his son were too dangerous to be allowed to live. Their removal was no more remarkable than the deaths of Richard, Duke of York, the Earl of Rutland, the Duke of Suffolk, both Dukes of Somerset and the Earls of Warwick and Montagu, which were shocking in their own way, yet were simply the realistic outcome of civil conflict. In each case, their killers, where known, have escaped the sort of censure reserved for the death of the Lancastrian king. The killing of Henry has captured the popular imagination because of the passive, saintly nature of the victim and his helplessness in the face of his supposedly ruthless enemies. If ever there was a pawn in the course of these wars, it was him. Considering that his half-nephew, Henry VII, later attempted to have him canonised, it is unsurprising that the majority of accounts, which were written after the advent of the Tudors, should seek to implicate the Yorkists. The Cousins’ Wars were marked by acts of ferocity and brutality; increasingly it was a question of kill or be killed. In all likelihood, the unfortunate Henry was put to death by royal command, which is more significant than the identity of the servant who carried out the order. When Henry’s tomb was opened in 1910 and the contents examined at Cambridge University, his skull was found to be broken and the remaining hair still matted with blood; there seems little reason to disagree with the archaeologists’ findings that he suffered the ‘violent death’ that the majority of chroniclers describe.12 Richard may have wielded the sword but ultimately, responsibility lies with Edward IV.

  Henry’s body was put on display at St Paul’s, as Warwick’s had been, in order for the public to view him and ascertain that he was, in fact, dead. After this, he was buried in Chertsey Abbey, with his body being later transferred to St George’s chapel, Windsor in 1484, on the order of Richard, then king. These events would have been relayed to his one-time daughter-in-law, Anne, as she remained under the watchful eyes of Isabel and Clarence, probably at Coldharbour House. Into her mouth, Shakespeare puts a description of his ‘murderer’:

  O, gentlemen see, see! dead Henry’s wounds

  Open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh.

  Blush, blush thou lump of foul deformity;

  For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood

  From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells;

  Thy deed, inhuman and unnatural,

  Provokes this deluge most unnatural.

  Anne probably did not attend the funeral procession or burial of Henry VI. Her feeli
ngs towards her future husband, described here as an ‘unnatural’ ‘lump of foul deformity’, were far more complex than the playwright suggests.

  Soon after the death of Henry VI, miracles were recorded in his name in a volume at St George’s chapel, Winsdor. Typically they included curing the sick, saving the unjustly condemned and raising the dead. Edward IV attempted to quash these accounts but, interestingly, by the time of his reign, Richard himself became an advocate of the late king’s sainthood. It was Richard who ordered the removal of his body from Chertsey and the re-interment at Windsor and who initiated the record which, by 1500, contained 174 stories. His personal effects were also put on display as relics and his velvet cap was recorded by Stowe as being able to cure headaches. It is ironic, then, that his cult was developed by the Tudors in contrast to the later perceived ‘villainy’ of Richard and, in tandem with reports of his role in the king’s death, as a foil for their favourite Yorkist villain. Richard has been ascribed various motives for this, from cynical manipulation through to genuine piety: all are unsubstantiated. Henry’s canonisation was advocated by his half-nephew, Henry VII, and by the 1520s, papal representatives were seeking to verify the stories, although this was abandoned with the Reformation.

  Appearing as a ghost on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, Henry is given the following words, by Shakespeare, with which he accuses Richard III: