Anne Neville: Richard III's Tragic Queen

by Licence, Amy

  When Anne arrived in London, she and Richard retired to Crosby Place. No doubt she was soon apprised of recent events – if he had not already communicated with her by letter – and must have quickly grasped what the implications were for her future. Richard explained how he had met with Buckingham on the way to London. There, something passed between them that either changed or confirmed his attitudes towards the Wydevilles. Perhaps he became convinced they were attempting to prevent him from accepting his role as Protector or else minimise his influence. Perhaps their vision for Edward V’s reign did not contain him. After spending what appeared to be a routine evening with Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, Richard had ordered his arrest the following morning. He had then intercepted and assumed charge of the royal procession, which he conducted to the Bishop of London’s Palace, summoning key citizens to swear loyalty to his nephew. Elizabeth Wydeville had fled into sanctuary with her children, which publicly demonstrated the depths of her mistrust of her brother-in-law. There is little indication, though, that any bad blood had existed between the queen’s family and Gloucester prior to this. In fact, it was with Anne’s family that they had, historically, been at odds. As the wife of the Protector, the Wydevilles may have feared she would seek to restrict their control of the boy king, as vengeance for her father’s death, or even to seek to punish those she blamed.

  Soon after arriving in London, Richard had met with the council, which had voted to move Edward V to the Tower of London and had confirmed his sovereign power, ‘just like another king’. The peers of the realm had been summoned to the capital for 18 June, in plenty of time for the Coronation, which was scheduled for four days later. It was then that Richard had begun to meet with various councillors at Crosby Place, where he was now imparting this news to Anne, while the others lords continued to meet at Westminster. Did Richard take this step because he distrusted some of the members, or was he trying to cause a division among them? It was probably both, and, unsurprisingly, when the secret meetings became public knowledge, they aroused suspicion. Paul Kendall described how ‘unease, restlessness, and doubt’ gathered ‘like mist at Westminster and the Tower. It is a thing of dark corners and the rustle of whispers, insubstantial but pervasive.’ To discover Richard’s intentions, Edward IV’s old friend, Lord Hastings, had employed his lawyer, William Catesby, to attend his Crosby Place meetings and report the content to him. Some had even begun to suspect Gloucester of conspiring against the king and doubted his trustworthiness. A surviving fragment from the commonplace book of a London merchant indicated that ‘divers imagined the death of the Duke of Gloucester’, and Hastings’ name was rumoured to be among them. In turn, Richard had used Buckingham to test Hastings’ loyalty and, according to More, had discovered that the lord would accept Richard as Protector, but not as king, responding ‘with terrible words’. This time-scale implies that Richard had already made his decision to seize the throne before Anne arrived in London. The explanation her husband gave her on the night of 5 June 1483 was determined by the nature of their marriage. If it was a strong partnership, equal as far as the times permitted, Richard would have been open with her as far as he could. If not, it may be going too far even to suggest he confided in her at all. Her presence and silent complicity may have simply been all that he required. But, if he actually told her, at this point, that he intended to become king, what impression did that make on her? Did she question his right? Or did she, at once, set her mind to helping overcome certain obstacles? Unfortunately, it is impossible now to know.

  Anne was at Crosby House during the dramatic events of June 1483. About a week after her arrival, Lord Hastings paid the price of his loyalty to Edward V. As late as 20 May, he had been confirmed in his role of Chancellor and Richard, as Protector, had promoted him to Master of the Mint. There is no doubt that Richard was very good at ‘keeping his powder dry’, thus it was a surprise to Hastings when, summoned to the council meeting of 13 June, he found himself accompanied by an armed knight. The meeting was most famously portrayed by More and Shakespeare but the truth behind that morning’s strange events is still baffling. At 9 o’clock, a smiling Richard entered the Tower, where his councillors were assembled. In conversation, he remarked that he would like some strawberries from Bishop Morton’s Holborn garden, which were sent for. He soon left, but returned at about 10.30 a.m., his manner completely changed, claiming that witchcraft had been used against him and ordering the arrest of Hastings, Morton and Rotherham, Bishop of York. All sources agree that Hastings was executed within minutes; the Great Chronicle stated that it was carried out ‘without any process of law or lawful examination’, while Croyland said that innocent blood had been shed, ‘and in this way, without justice or judgement, the three strongest supporters of the new king were removed’. Explanations for these events vary. On one side, Richard is accused of inventing a plot against himself in order to remove a man who would block his route to the throne. Hastings had employed spies against Richard and would not support his claim over that of Edward V. Therefore, Hastings had to go.

  However, Richard may well have genuinely believed that witchcraft was being used against him. During the course of the morning, he began to feel its effects. It is possible that the dish of strawberries, brought from Morton’s garden, produced a genuine allergic reaction which caused Richard’s arm to wither and other physical symptoms to develop. Bizarre as this may sound, allergic reactions caused by the proteins in strawberries can produce tingling limbs, breathing difficulties and red, puffy, itchy skin. These symptoms usually occur within two hours of eating the fruit, beginning with swelling of the lips and tingling in the mouth. More’s account has Richard fretting, frowning and ‘knawing at his lips’. Food allergies can emerge even after an individual has eaten a particular dish for years. When the body’s tolerance level is reached, the symptoms are triggered. Strawberries would have been seasonal, and therefore a rare treat. It is quite possible that Richard had a latent allergy to the fruit which emerged that June, causing the sudden physical responses in his body which he could only explain as witchcraft. Fifteenth-century people of all classes were deeply superstitious and believed that magic could be used to good and evil ends. Elizabeth Wydeville and her mother had both been accused and cleared of sorcery in 1469–70. More recently, Clarence had claimed that his brother Edward was conspiring against him through the medium of magic. It cannot be ruled out that, anticipating attacks from the Wydeville clan, Richard believed himself to have fallen victim to poison or enchantment. He stated that witchcraft had ‘wasted his body’. Perhaps he genuinely believed it had. The usual targets for such accusations were female. Richard had pointed the finger at Morton, Hastings and his mistress, Jane Shore, the one-time love of Edward IV. However, only Hastings lost his life.

  The intended day of Edward V’s Coronation came and went. Soon afterwards, Dr Ralph Shaa, brother of the Mayor of London, delivered the sermon ‘Bastard Slips Should Not Take Deep Root’ at St Paul’s Cross. As relayed by Mancini, the word spread across London that the ‘progeny of King Edward should be instantly eradicated, for neither had he been a legitimate king, nor could his issue be so’. Anne may have accompanied her husband and Buckingham to St Paul’s Cross to hear the sermon and her mother-in-law, Cecily Neville, may even have been with them, having come to London to attend her grandson’s Coronation. How did she react, when forced to choose between her son and her grandson? Were the women surprised at what they heard or was this a secret from the family closet? It was certainly in Richard’s interests that Edward V should be removed; the boy would have reached his majority within a few years and may have sought revenge on Richard for the death of his guardian Earl Rivers and other uncle, John Grey. One person with whom Richard had been consulting in his private meetings at Crosby Place was Richard Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells. Some time that May or June, the bishop had ‘unburdened his conscience’ to Richard, stating that in the early 1460s, Edward IV had been pre-contracted, if not actually alre
ady married, to Dame Eleanor Butler, née Talbot, who was now conveniently dead. The result was the legal confirmation that Edward’s children could not inherit the throne: ‘All the issue and children of the said king … be bastards and unable … to claim anything by inheritance.’ This made Richard the next direct Yorkist heir.

  Most subsequent evaluations of Richard’s character have rested on the integrity of Bishop Stillington. The credibility of his word determines whether Richard is seen as a dutiful son of York or a manipulative and murdering usurper. The report of Edward’s pre-contract was in keeping with what was known of his character; after all, he had married Elizabeth Wydeville in secret and bedded many other women on the basis of unsubstantiated promises. If Stillington had held on to this information for twenty years, what prompted him to publicise it now? There was another possible source though, dating from a more recent scandal. The bishop had been closely associated with the Duke of Clarence, even spending time with him in prison in 1478. During this time, the duke may have passed on this information, either as a genuine family secret, or part of his unstable accusations against his brother. Ironically, then, Richard’s replacement of Edward’s heirs was perpetrated by Clarence from beyond the grave. On the other hand, the whole story may have been concocted one night at Crosby House. Richard and Stillington had hit upon the single weapon that would bring the late king’s family down, by exploiting the vices in which Edward was known to have indulged. The story had credibility. Did Anne play any part in it? Was she tucked up in bed asleep or sitting at the fireside, listening as they plotted? Did she contribute any fine details? If the story was an invention, then it was on the bishop’s shoulders that the unlawful reign of Richard and Anne would rest.

  After Dr Shaa’s sermon, events moved quickly. Buckingham spoke for an hour and a half to the Mayor and Aldermen of London at the Guildhall, explaining the pre-contract and stating that kingship was ‘no child’s office’. When the council was recalled to Westminster, Mancini relates that it was still in the expectation of Edward V’s imminent Coronation. Instead they met Buckingham, armed with three reasons for the invalidity of Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Wydeville. Firstly, it had been made without the consent of the lords and through witchcraft; secondly, it was conducted in private without the edition of banns and, finally, it was bigamous, since Edward had already made a pre-contract with another woman. There were also rumours, once employed by Warwick, that Edward IV himself had been the result of an affair his mother had conducted with a Norman archer. The dates provided to support such a view are not conclusive, given the variation in individual terms of pregnancy and there seems little reason to suspect that a woman of Cecily’s breeding and stature would jeopardise her family bloodline.

  Now Richard moved against the Wydevilles. At Pontefract, Richard Ratcliffe, his friend from Middleham days, had assembled Elizabeth Wydeville’s brother, Earl Rivers, her son Thomas Grey and Thomas Vaughan, loyal to Edward V. On 24 June, they were condemned to death, without trial, for plotting against Richard. None were allowed to speak in their defence and they were executed the following day, to the universal condemnation of all contemporary writers. The Croyland chronicler observes that ‘innocent blood … was shed on the occasion of this sudden change’. According to Rous, they were ‘unjustly and cruelly put to death, being lamented by everyone, and innocent of the deed for which they were charged’. Thomas More states that their only fault was in being ‘good men, too true to the king’, while Polydore Vergil says that their only offence was to stand in the way of Richard’s ambitions. This act remains hard to defend. Richard may have believed in a plot against him, or else, by this point, the rapid removal of his enemies was expedient under any charge.

  Anne was probably at Richard’s side in Barnard Castle, the home of her mother-in-law, when Parliament came to petition him to accept the throne. Once again, queenship was within her reach, closer than it had ever been. Was she excited by this? Back in 1471, she had played a critical role in her father’s royal ambitions. Her marriage to Edward of Westminster had made her Princess of Wales and could have resulted in her rule at Westminster. Did she now scheme along with her husband in order to achieve the same goal? She had no love for the Wydevilles, whose father had been her deadly enemy, and may have viewed them as the justifiable casualties of a three-decade-long war. Did she see that moment in June 1483 as the culmination of everything her father had worked for? Was she even impatient with her husband? Richard did not accept the throne at once. When the lords returned the next day, he ‘reluctantly’ agreed to become king. Did Anne ‘reluctantly’ celebrate becoming queen? In reality, was she closer to a Lady Macbeth figure than the pathetic pawn some novels have portrayed her as?

  The version of events presented by later chroniclers upholds the villainous, murderous Richard who is familiar from Shakespeare’s play. Like the Bard, the majority of writers date his ambition from the decease of Edward and attribute it to the classic character flaws of tragedy. Vergil wrote that, as soon as the news reached Middleham, he ‘began to be kyndlyd with an ardent desyre of soveraigntie’ and ‘determynyd to assay his purposyd spytefull practyse by subtyltie and sleight’. Maybe as early as the middle of April, Richard and Anne were already plotting their route to the throne, considering whom they might trust and who needed to be removed. According to true dramatic convention, Vergil’s Richard’s ‘owne frawd, wicked and mischievous intent, his owne desperate boldenes, maketh him frantyke and mad’. Perhaps Anne was also consumed by this driving ambition, seeing a final chance to achieve what her father had aimed at for so long. The Croyland chronicler was in no doubt regarding the identity of ‘the sole mover at London of such seditious and disgraceful proceedings’, but had these moves already been carefully rehearsed at Middleham? Fabyan emphasised Richard’s duplicity, as he was able to behave ‘so covertly in al his matters, that fewe understode his wicked purpose’, although who else but Anne would have numbered among those ‘few’? This view of Richard is well known and hardly needs repeating. As an interpretation of his wife, Lady Macbeth-like, it is fairly unsubstantiated, although motivation and behaviour are hard to substantiate when sources do not survive or never existed. As his wife, Anne’s duty was to support Richard in all his endeavours, even if they ran contrary to legal or moral codes. Still the question remains of whether these ‘crimes’ should be considered as such. If Richard initially acted in good faith and was loyal to his nephews before receiving news of their illegitimacy, then he committed no crime. If he responded to a perceived threat from the Wydevilles, again, no law was broken. It would have been reprehensible if he had invented the witchcraft and pre-contract stories in order to bring about his enemies’ swift defeat. Fabricating these pieces of ‘evidence’ to condemn others for his own personal advancement would be criminal indeed. If Vergil is correct regarding his ambition, then his actions in the summer of 1483 did constitute a usurpation. Yet if Edward’s marriage had been invalid, perhaps a usurpation was exactly what was needed.

  This was nothing new. Usurpation had been a vital skill in the Kingmaker’s repertoire. The most recent precedent had been in 1399, when Henry of Bolingbroke usurped and probably murdered his cousin, Richard II, giving rise to decades of conflict. In Gloucester’s lifetime, his own brother and Warwick had deposed Henry VI, before the earl tipped Edward off the throne and reinstated the Lancastrian, followed by the Yorkist restoration and Henry VI’s death. If Richard had usurped a fully grown man, he would not have been the target of such contemporary and subsequent opprobrium. However, the two obstacles that blocked his path to the throne were children. His nephews, Edward and Richard, were aged twelve and nine in June 1483 when they disappeared in the Tower. What did Anne feel about this? A twenty-first-century response may begin with Anne’s motherhood: surely, as a mother she could not condone the incarceration and murder of her nephews, barely older than her own boy? Yet this is to transpose modern values onto past events, to apply culturally constructed stereotypes, suc
h as the ‘mother’, to an ambitiously driven aristocracy, with a unique standard of conduct. It does not follow that a royal mother of the fifteenth century would behave in the same way as a twenty-first-century ‘mum’: the acquiescence of Elizabeth Wydeville to Richard III demonstrates that. Perhaps Richard told Anne some acceptable lie regarding the boys; perhaps she chose to believe it. Maybe she guessed at their fate, or was even fully aware of it. Just as Margaret of Anjou fought like a lioness for the rights of her son, Anne may have recognised that certain obstacles had to be removed if her own boy was to become king. This possibility may be difficult to accept, yet it would make Anne a typical queen of her day. She cannot be retrospectively assigned the scruples of a modern woman in order to please modern sensibilities.

  Rumours of the boys’ death began to spread almost at once. While gossip is notoriously unreliable, it can give an indication of popular beliefs and opinions about the king and whether people believed him capable of the act. Mancini, author of The Occupation of the Throne by Richard III, may have got some of his information from a fellow Italian, Dr Argentine, who was in attendance on Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower. According to his account, the elder boy ‘like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins daily, in confession and penance because he believed that death was facing him’. This was also believed by Fabyan, who wrote that ‘King Richard … put to death the two children of King Edward, for which cause he lost the hearts of the people’, and was repeated in Weinreich’s Danzig chronicle of 1483 and the speech of Guillaume de Rochefort at Tours in January 1484. Later, Croyland would write that ‘the people of the south and … west … began to murmur greatly, to form assemblies … many were in secret, some quite open’ about the princes’ fate. More described people weeping in the streets when they thought of Edward V and his brother. One easy way to dispel these reports would have been for Richard to produce the princes and prove his innocence. Alternatively, he could have claimed they had died that summer or autumn from some illness or accident, which would at least have made their deaths palatable, even if it had been a lie. Given the extent of Richard’s intelligence and abilities, it is surprising that he failed to address this directly. However, he cannot have known the sympathy that the boys would evince and may have assumed that a general acceptance of their illegitimacy would quash public interest in their fates. In this he was mistaken.