by Licence, Amy
Richard also had a daughter, Katherine Plantagenet, who was married between March and May 1484 to William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, son of the Earl of Pembroke, Henry Tudor’s old guardian. Although matches were made between aristocratic children, the illegitimate Katherine had probably reached the minimum age of fourteen, dating her birth, also, to the years preceding Richard’s marriage. As king, he financed her nuptials and settled, on her and her heirs, lands worth 1,000 marks a year, although she would die three years later, possibly in childbirth. A third potential son, Richard Plantagenet, a stonemason of Eastwell, Kent, was reputed to have been born in 1469 and died in 1550, although he is now widely believed not to have been a son of York. The question of his identity was raised by the local parish register and impressive altar tomb in the ruined Eastwell church but if he was Richard’s son, the king never publicly acknowledged him.10 While the evidence suggests all Richard’s bastards were conceived before the summer of 1472, it cannot be stated categorically that he was faithful to Anne, nor would standards of the day necessarily have expected it. Most famously, her sister-in-law, the beautiful Elizabeth Wydeville, had little choice but to turn a blind eye while King Edward pursued a number of other women.
It was not until after the birth of their son that Anne and Richard’s marriage settlement was finalised, in 1474. Clarence had been loath to share Isabel’s inheritance but the king ruled that Anne must receive her share of her mother’s Beauchamp and Despenser legacy, so Parliament divided the Countess of Warwick’s lands as if she were dead. Richard had liberated his mother-in-law from her confinement at Beaulieu the previous year and the forfeiture of her estates may have been her side of a mutually beneficial bargain. In July 1484, he would allocate her a yearly pension of £80, but ironically, she would go on to outlive both her daughters and sons-in-law. The settlement allowed Richard to step into Warwick’s shoes and take over the loyalty of his retainers even though Clarence was to keep the title. Through his years under Warwick’s tutelage at Middleham, as well as his birth at Fotheringhay, Richard was already known in the area. He took steps to consolidate this by assuming the mantle of the old earl’s good lordship by creating ties of patronage and clientage. On 13 May 1473, he was at Nottingham to settle the long-running Percy–Neville feud, agreeing to be a ‘good and gracious lord’ to all those involved.11 The following July he was at Alnwick Castle, where an indenture was drawn up between him and his cousin, the newly reinstated 4th Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy. The earl had previously been imprisoned and stripped of his title, which had been granted to John Neville, following the death of his father, the third Earl, at Towton. Now, Percy petitioned the king for his inheritance to be returned, along with his estates. Richard oversaw this claim, making the new earl promise to be his ‘faithfull servaunt … at all tymes’ and do him ‘lawfull and convenient’ service, as well as pledging his allegiance to Edward IV and his heirs. In turn, Gloucester would be his ‘good and faithful lorde’, to ‘sustain’ the earl in his rights and not challenge any grants he may receive from the king or the activity or offices of his servants.12
From the early 1470s until his succession as king, Richard established a network of obligations and endowments that made him the most powerful magnate in the North. His birth and childhood at Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire, followed by an adolescence at Middleham, made him a man shaped by and committed to his geographical area. He had this in common with Anne and the pair would have travelled together in the region, establishing order and being familiar faces at ceremonial occasions. Sometimes Anne deputised for her husband, such as in 1475–76, when she represented him at York during his absence in France. This may well have involved arbitrating when it came to disputes and hearing minor court cases; she certainly corresponded with the Mayor and Aldermen of York. Once married, they made their permanent base at Middleham Castle and Richard secured a licence from Edward so the town could hold fairs twice yearly, as well as planning to endow a college there. Between them, they also held a number of properties across the North. Sandal Castle in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, had belonged to Richard’s father and witnessed his death in 1460 but now Richard established it as another base of the Council in the North. Situated overlooking the River Calder, his improvements of the 1470s included a new tower, bakehouse and brewhouse, although its associations with the death of his father and brother cannot have been welcome.
In 1471, before marrying Anne, Richard had already claimed Penrith Castle, south of Carlisle, newly built to be a defensive post against the Scots, where he added a banqueting hall later that decade. The same year saw him acquire the Norman Pontefract Castle, in Wakefield, which had been his official residence for a year, as Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster. With Warwick’s settlement of 1474 came the impressive Scarborough Castle, overlooking the sea, which Richard and Anne visited in June 1484 and, in the following year, they gained Barnard Castle in County Durham. Richmond Castle was also among their possessions, confiscated from the Tudors, which the duke had been promised back in 1462, although it had been granted instead to Clarence. The other main residence used by the Gloucesters during this time was Sheriff Hutton, conveniently located about 10 miles to the north of York. A long-standing Neville property, it had passed to Richard after the death of Richard Neville at the Battle of Barnet. Anne was probably familiar with it from her childhood and, after her marriage, was able to revisit it, along with the other Ducal properties. Travelling between and overseeing the administration of all these estates must have been almost a full-time occupation.
As Edward’s representative on the Council of the North, Richard was a frequent visitor to York in the 1470s. The citizens presented him and his councillors with bread, rabbits and wine at the session of 1475, although this did not prevent the insurrection he returned to subdue in 1476, at the head of 5,000 men. The citizens also sought his help to resolve conflict in certain cases, such as the removal of salmon traps from the river, which was proving a hazard for shipping, and a case of vandalism and theft at the Holy Trinity Priory at Micklegate.13 He would not have been present when the cathedral was reconsecrated after extensive repairs in July 1473 but both he and Anne would have visited at some point in the following decade. It was an important site of pilgrimage with its impressive Gothic transepts and beautiful glazed Great East Window, fitted at the start of the fifteenth century. Anne would have been accustomed to the bustling streets of medieval York, with its markets, hospitals and religious orders. Together, they may have joined the stream of pilgrims praying and making offerings at the shrine of the city’s patron saint, William Fitzherbert. While visiting, they would stay in the Augustinian priory, the smallest of the city’s religious houses. Richard would create Friar William Berwyck ‘surveyour of our works’ there in 1484; the friar would also be the recipient of boards left over from the staging of pageants to welcome the new king and queen in 1483, which were used to build a closet.14
York was also an important centre for trade, where Anne would have gone to make any special purchases, either in person or deputizing to a servant. At that time, the city’s taxation records indicate the six main areas of activity: wool, leather, metal, construction, victuals and specialist craft workers. York was not what it had once been; the fifteenth century marked a period of decline for it, as it did for many urban centres. However, it still had the advantage of being a port, on the junction of the Rivers Ouse and Foss, so foreign ships regularly brought supplies of luxury items such as the rich spices that would have graced the dining table at Middleham. There was also a high proportion of goldsmiths, producing ceremonial and decorative items such as the Middleham jewel, an engraved, diamond-shaped pendant of gold, set with a large sapphire, unearthed by a local metal detectorist in 1985. Possibly a reliquary, an inscription on the border, indicates it may have also been used as an amulet to protect against the ‘falling sickness’ or epilepsy. The jewel dates from Anne’s residency at the castle but perhaps it is going too far to suggest that y
oung Edward may have suffered from this.
What constituted a good wife in the 1470s? One contemporary sermon on wives and widows stated that love founded on profit, pleasure and honesty would lead to true friendship and that ‘the spouse you have is the spouse ordained for you by God’. There were practical jobs for a wife to carry out, or oversee, as a woman in Anne’s position would have done. These included the running of the kitchen, granary, storage and supply of provisions, besides the usual sewing, knitting and spinning of domestic clothing and linen. Marriage was advocated as a blessing for single men, who were apparently incapable of keeping themselves clean and tidy, sleeping ‘in a pit’, with the ‘sheets never changed until they are torn’. Equally, the bachelor’s dinner hall floor was ‘littered with melon rinds, bones and salad peelings’, his cloth was laid with little care and ‘dogs lick[ed] his trenchers [bread plates] clean’.15 Luckily for Anne, a small army of servants would have ensured she never had to bend down and pick up the dropped bones!
Christine de Pisan also had advice for ‘young women living on manors’ whose husbands might be absent on courtly or administrative business. According to her 1405 Book of the City of Ladies, a routine was essential; a lady should rise early and busy herself about the house, to set an example to her employees. She should possess sufficient skills to be able to cope with the household accounts, not being too polite to ask how much her income is and how much revenue she gets from her lands. If her husband was reluctant to disclose this, she must use ‘kind words and sensible admonitions’ to encourage his confidence so that they could live within their means. When it came to administration, a wife must be thoroughly knowledgeable regarding land, law and rents, according to customs of the region, to avoid falling victim to deception and so that she could best represent her dependants. Good lordship was also, by extension, good ladyship, otherwise, according to Pisan, ‘it would be a burden on the souls of her and her husband until they make amends for it’. A good business head must combine with empathy though, as the lady must be ‘more compassionate than strict’ towards the poor. With Richard so often away for sessions of the London Parliament and administering justice in the North, Anne must have been trusted with the necessary information and managed to run their home to his satisfaction.
Another source of wifely decorum, dating from the 1390s, the fictional manual Le Ménagier de Paris, advised a wife to translate her obedience and respect for her husband into practical care. She should keep him in clean linen, for he will ‘go and come and journey hither and thither, in rain and wind, in snow and hail, now drenched, now dry, now sweating, now shivering, ill-fed, ill-lodged, ill-warmed and ill-bedded. And naught harmeth him because he is upheld by the hope that he hath of the care that his wife will take of him on his return.’ When he returned home, he should ‘be unshod before a good fire … have his feet washed and fresh shoes and hose, to be given good food and drink’ before being ‘well bedded in white sheets and night caps, well covered with good furs and assuaged with other joys and desports, privities, loves and secrets of which I am silent’. There should be no fleas in the bed, so the good wife would strew it with alder leaves and bread soaked in glue and set a lighted candle in the middle to draw them out. In the bedroom, she should hang up sprigs of fern to ward off the flies or ‘tempteth them with a bowl of milk and hare’s gall’, failing those, a raw onion and honey might just do the trick. According to the narrator ‘husband’, such services make a man love and desire to return to his home and see his goodwife. It was one of the strange anomalies of Anne’s life that her position as a duchess could encompass the supervision of pest removal and the dispensation of justice.
In June 1475, Edward launched a joint attack on France with the Burgundians, with the intention of dividing the country between them. Richard went with him, bringing 1,000 archers and over 100 men-at-arms, mustered from his northern estates. However, the men were to see no fighting. Terms were quickly reached with Louis XI, resulting in a large pension for Edward and various gifts for Richard and Clarence, who dined with the French king on 31 August. Far from being cowardly, as some later writers have asserted, Edward had made sufficient gains without needing to spill a drop of his men’s blood. Rather than being disappointed by this, Gloucester would have been pleased to spare his men, who were Yorkshire locals, known to him personally from the farms and estates surrounding his own and probably indentured to him. Anne may have spent the intervening time waiting in London, where the Gloucesters were reunited. She was certainly there between 3 and 6 December, when payments to city merchants were made in both their names. They could well have remained in the capital to celebrate Christmas that year.
The couple were regular visitors to London, dictated by Richard’s seat on the royal council. On 9 November 1477, he attended a feast hosted by his nephew, Prince Edward, soon after his seventh birthday. On Clarence’s demise, the following year, Richard and Anne came into possession again of the Erber, Anne’s old childhood base in the capital. At some point between 1475 and 1483, the Gloucesters leased Crosby Place, a house built in 1466 in Bishopsgate. An extant floor plan shows how the building encroached into the space occupied by the Priory of St Helen, comprising a number of small chambers, rear garden, outer court, parlour and hall, which had a carved ceiling and minstrels’ gallery. In disrepair by the twentieth century, the house was demolished and rebuilt, brick by brick, in Chelsea in 1910. According to More, Richard held informal council meetings at Crosby Place and it was there that his association with the Duke of Buckingham developed. The Gloucesters would also have had access to the London home of Richard’s mother, Cecily, at Baynard’s Castle and perhaps Coldharbour House, which remained in the family after Clarence vacated it.
In July 1476, all three York brothers attended the re-interment of their father Richard, Duke of York, and their brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, in the mausoleum at the church of St Mary and All Saints, at their childhood home of Fotheringhay. The family had come a long way since their deaths at Wakefield over fifteen years earlier. The Chester Herald, Thomas Whiting, described how Richard, dressed in mourning, followed the funeral chariot, which was draped in black, up to the church door, where Edward IV and Clarence were waiting. Their father’s body had been dressed in a suitably regal ermine furred mantle and draped with cloth of gold. Anne would have been waiting inside the church, alongside her mother-in-law Cecily and sisters-in-law Elizabeth, the queen, and Isabel, then six months pregnant. After masses were said, seven pieces of cloth of gold were laid to make a cross upon his body before it was interred in the choir. His son, Rutland, was buried in the Lady chapel. Around 5,000 local people came to receive arms and the following banquet, held in the king’s pavilion, was rumoured to have fed 20,000, for which the bill was in excess of £300. It was probably the last time Anne and Isabel were together.
It was around Christmas 1476 when bad news arrived at Middleham. Two and a half months after giving birth, Isabel, Duchess of Clarence, had died at Tewkesbury, aged only twenty-five. The cause was probably complications following childbirth; perhaps some sort of delayed post-partum fever, an illness contracted during her period of recovery, or else consumption. It is likely that her two surviving children, the 3½-year old Margaret and Edward, not yet two, came into Anne’s care at some point soon afterwards, perhaps at Sheriff Hutton, where Richard would establish a ‘household’ for them. If they did not arrive at once, they probably found their way there soon after the bizarre events that overcame their father. After his wife’s death, Clarence’s behaviour, always volatile and grandiose, became increasingly strange. In April 1477, he ordered the arrest of Ankarette Twynho, an elderly gentlewoman who had been in attendance on his wife and whom he now claimed had poisoned her. Dragged from her house, she was brought from Somerset to Warwick where, four days later, she was tried and sentenced to death. The jury heard that she had supposedly ‘given to the said Isabel a venomous drink of ale mixed with poison, of which the latter sickened until the Sunday be
fore Christmas’. Considering that this draught had apparently been administered on 16 October, ten days after Isabel delivered her last child, it took a long time to take effect. Regardless of this, the old woman was dead within three hours of her conviction, being hanged from the city gallows.
After this incident, Clarence became convinced that none less than King Edward himself was seeking to poison him ‘as a candle is consumed by burning’. When three members of his household were arrested on the charge of ‘imagining the king’s death’ and suffered the full fate of traitors at Tyburn, Clarence disrupted a meeting of the Privy Council and tried to petition them against his brother. For the king, who had forgiven his many various acts of treachery, this was the final straw. That July, Edward summoned him to Westminster, where he was charged with dangerous conduct and sent to the Tower. He languished there until January, when a Bill of Attainder accused him of plotting to usurp the throne and threatening the lives of Edward’s family by spreading rumours that the king used witchcraft and that he was illegitimate. On February 16, Clarence met his end in the Tower. Richard was undeniably involved, as was every lord on the council who heard the evidence and passed the Bill. As with the death of Henry VI, the responsibility was ultimately Edward’s. The legend that Clarence was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine was first mentioned by Italian diplomat, Mancini, over a century before Shakespeare wrote his version. Edward had been very forgiving when it came to Warwick and Clarence’s treachery: now, the duke had simply pushed his luck too far.