Anne Neville: Richard III's Tragic Queen

by Licence, Amy

  12

  Disquiet

  1484

  But now all thes tryumphes are passed and set on syde

  For all worldly joys they wull not long endure

  They are sonne passed and away doth glyde1

  For Anne and Richard, Buckingham’s rebellion had shattered the triumphant mood established at the ‘second Coronation’ in York. Back in the capital, increasingly aware of the threat posed by dissidents within the kingdom as well as that of the exiled Henry Tudor, they set about rewarding their loyal friends and subjects. While Tudor had been sent back into exile with his tail between his legs, Richard knew from the experiences of his brother that medieval kingship was a constant battle against those who wished to challenge the existing regime. As a Yorkist, he would always be a target for Lancastrian sympathisers but, at the end of 1483, there was little reason to suppose that Richard, as a skilled commander, administrator and politician, would not be able to deal effectively with these attacks. At thirty-one, he might anticipate reigning for two decades or more, and it was important that he now established a household to demonstrate continuity with the rule of Edward IV. Those who had previously proved themselves faithful to Richard’s family were provided for over the coming months.

  According to the surviving Parliamentary Rolls, that December, John Lewes was granted 12d daily for his good service to the previous king, while a grant for life was awarded to Joan Malpas ‘for her good service to the king in his youth and to his mother the Duchess of York’. The twice-widowed Joan was likely to have been in the Yorks’ household at Fotheringhay and familiar to Richard since childhood. The following February John Smyth, one of the former sergeants at arms of Edward IV, received 12d daily and 10 marks went to Nicholas Harpisfield for good service to Richard’s father, the Duke of York and Edward in Ireland and during the 1470–71 exile in Holland. Robert Radclyff, perhaps the father of the Richard who had been a teenager at Middleham, received 60 marks for serving the family ‘in foreign parts and elsewhere’ and David Keting was granted the manor of Eskir, and its watermill in County Dublin, for loyalty to the king’s father Richard, Duke of York, and afterwards to Edward IV. Also, the town of Waterford in Ireland was compensated for expenses arising from the last visit there of Richard’s father, the Duke of York, in the 1450s. More recent servants from Middleham, Henry and Isabel Burgh, received ‘an annuity of 20 marks’ for their ‘good service’ to the king’s family, in particular to their son, Edward.2 Many of Edward IV’s household remained in their posts but, as Richard and Anne settled into their new role, they transported their existing Northern allegiances and extended family network into the country’s capital.

  While the Palace of Westminster remained the royal family’s main official residence, Anne established herself on a semi-permanent basis further out at Greenwich. Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Wydeville had made it their home during the previous regimes, living in ‘Bella Court’, which had been built in the 1420s by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and later called ‘Pleasaunce’ or ‘Placentia’. The original palace, pulled down in the seventeenth century to make way for the neoclassical ‘Queen’s House’, stretched 200 yards from the water’s edge to the foot of the hill in Greenwich Park. In 1443, Gloucester had received a grant from Henry VI to ‘embattle and build [it] with stone’ around at least one courtyard and ‘to enclose and make a tower and ditch within the same, and a certain tower within the park’. Edward IV had enlarged the park and filled it with deer, making certain improvements for the joust held to celebrate the marriage of his young son in 1478. Around 1480, a Grey Friars convent had been built adjoining the palace, comprising ‘a chauntrie, with a little chapel of the Holy Cross’.3 Anne was following in the tradition of queens by basing herself in Greenwich and the records of payments and arrangements for Richard’s journeys there show that he was a frequent visitor.

  While they preserved Greenwich as a peaceful retreat, the new king and queen kept Christmas 1483 at Westminster. The hostile Croyland called it their ‘pompous celebration of the feast of the nativity’ but Commines, who was not even in the country, described the ‘greater splendour and authority than any King of England’. Croyland was closer to the mark. Richard was short of ready cash, forcing him to sell some items from the royal household and treasury to the merchants of London and use others to raise loans. He used the money to present the city with a gift of a gold cup encrusted with gems, while members of his court received presents totalling £1,200. Christmas day itself was predominantly a solemn occasion, with the focus on devotion rather than celebration. Anne and Richard would have attended services in the abbey and perhaps given thanks, having come through the challenges of their first six months on the throne. Festivities gradually built over the twelve days following, culminating in the gift-giving of Epiphany and the masques and pageants that followed. The kitchens would have been kept busy preparing the traditional boar’s head, although, given his personal device, Richard may have opted instead for gilded peacock! It was washed down with ‘lambswool’, which was beer mulled with apples.4 The only note of sorrow was that their son, Edward of Middleham, remained in Yorkshire, still suffering from the illness that had incapacitated him during August and September.

  Two days after the festival of Epiphany, Richard was on the road again. He progressed briefly into Kent, which had been a stronghold of Warwick’s rebels, following the close connection that trade and travel had established between Calais and Sandwich. He reached the port in mid-January, stopping over at Canterbury, where he was presented with a gift of a purse containing £33 6s 8d in gold, contributed by the mayor, councillors and ‘the better sort of persons of the city’, although he did not accept it. The mayoral accounts indicate how the king was catered for through payments made to a local supplier: John Burton received £4 for ‘four great fattened beefs’ and 66s 8d for ‘twenty fattened rams’. Payments were also made for carpentry work and for the carriage of furniture and hangings to the royal lodgings.5 Traditionally, visiting monarchs would reside in the well-appointed, central Archbishop’s Palace or at St Augustine’s Abbey. However, a reference in the city accounts to Blene Le Hale, outside the walls, suggests Richard stayed outside the walls, possibly at Hall Place, which from 1484 was owned by a Thomas Lovell. Alternatively Tim Tatton-Brown places him in ‘large temporary buildings around a great tent called le Hale’6 on the edge of Blean forest, elsewhere called the Pavilion on the Blean.7 As he states, Henry VI and Edward IV were frequent visitors to Canterbury, along with their queens, so perhaps Anne was present on this occasion too.

  There may also have been a religious dimension to the king’s visit. Richard would have been based near St Nicholas’ Hospital on the hill, overlooking the cathedral at Upper Harbledown, which overlaps with the village of Blean. Founded for the treatment of lepers by Archbishop Lanfranc, with its easily cleaned, sloping floor, the hall housed pilgrims on the route to Becket’s shrine in the cathedral.8 From ‘hobble down’, shoes may have been removed to allow them to process the final mile barefoot and penitent, as visitors did at the Norfolk shrine of Walsingham. In Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century work, The Canterbury Tales, the village was also known as ‘Bobbe-up-and-down’, due to the poor condition of its roads. In 1484, payments were listed for repairs to the road in advance of Richard’s visit, which may well have been timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Lanfranc’s establishment of the hospital in 1084. If the king undertook the barefoot walk to make offerings at the shrine, he would have been walking in the footsteps of another monarch. Henry II had taken this route 300 years earlier as penance for his role in the death of Thomas Becket. Did Richard make an offering at the sainted archbishop’s tomb? Did he, like Henry, have a burden on his conscience that he sought to alleviate?

  Where was Anne during Richard’s brief progress into Kent? If she accompanied him, did she also stay outside the city and make the arduous walk downhill to the cathedral? Alternatively, she may have remained in London, possib
ly repairing to Greenwich Palace in his absence. Richard was back at Westminster in time for the meeting of his one and only Parliament, which convened for the first time on 22 January. Joining him there, Anne received news that the Act of Titulus Regius had confirmed her husband’s succession to the throne and her own queenship. Croyland relates how they met at Westminster, ‘near the passage which leads to the queen’s apartments’, and swore an oath of allegiance and ‘adherence to Edward, the king’s only son, as their supreme lord, in case anything should happen to his father’. Did this prompt Anne to think of another Edward, who had also been Prince of Wales, to whom men had also sworn their loyalty?

  Having bases in Greenwich and Westminster helped Anne maintain a division between her public and private roles. She had already fulfilled the first function of a queen by delivering a son and heir, although at least one spare was always desirable in the eventuality of illness and accident. Since his arrival, though, Anne had not produced another child. Stillbirths and miscarriages cannot be ruled out, although the Prince of Wales featured in national prayers as Richard’s ‘first-born son’. No doubt, like Anne’s parents, they continued to hope for another pregnancy and, according to Croyland, continued to sleep together until early in 1485. Edward’s existence added to Anne’s prestige, as it was more socially acceptable for her to take an active public role for the sake of her son than as the king’s wife. There was little differentiation in role between a queen and an aristocratic wife besides the rise in status. As Richard’s consort, her role was paradoxically ceremonial and informal. She was required to head her own establishment and appear at his side during important rituals and court occasions, yet her influence had to be informal. The recent example of Margaret of Anjou’s active and ‘warlike’ queenship was considered the antithesis of what a benign, modest and gentle woman should be. Equally, Elizabeth Wydeville had been criticised for her family’s ambition and her ‘haughtiness’. Anne had to forge her own style of queenship along different lines, acting as a patron of the arts, an intermediary between supplicants and the king and subtly influencing him with her ‘feminine wiles’. While this may sound, to the twenty-first-century reader, like a reductive cliché, the ‘advice’ of fifteenth-century manuals on female roles conform to this notion, particularly that written by a woman, Christine de Pisan. Her 1405 Book of the City of Ladies advocated that a ‘Good Princess’ speak softly, be kind, patient and humble, in the knowledge that she had ‘no strength, power or authority unless it is conferred on you by someone else’. She should ‘live in peace’ with her husband and be humble and welcoming, putting up with bad behaviour and ‘dissimulate wisely’.9 However, Anne and Richard already had an established marriage dating back a decade. There was little need to readjust to each other, and redefine the way they interacted in private. Perhaps publicly both of them were more guarded, but they assumed the mantle of leadership as a team. It was a team that had been working successfully, even harmoniously, for years.

  Anne’s household followed Richard’s in recruiting from among women who were her Northern relations. At over fifty, Alice FitzHugh, née Neville, had married into a prominent Yorkshire family based at Ravensworth Castle, which stood about 16 miles from Middleham. A formidable matriarch, Alice had outlived her brother Warwick, and her husband, and was now a vocal supporter of the new regime. She recruited a number of her children, the cousins Anne would have known in childhood, to her cause. Now, some of them joined her at the new queen’s court as ladies-in-waiting and received gifts of cloth in order to make new dresses. Alice’s daughter, Elizabeth Parr, had been married at the age of twelve and bore her first child at sixteen. By 1483 she was twenty-three and widowed with four small children, one of whom was the future father of Henry VIII’s final queen, Catherine Parr. Two more of Alice’s daughters were Agnes, or Anne, who had been married for seventeen years to Francis Lovell, and Margery, wife of Sir Marmaduke Constable, who served Edward IV on his French campaign of 1475 and helped crush the Buckingham rebellion. One of Alice’s sons, George, was elevated to Dean of Lincoln in 1483. Anne’s illegitimate half-sister Margaret Huddleston was among her waiting women listed in the Coronation records, along with Elizabeth Bapthorpe, Elizabeth Mauleverer, Grace Pullan, Joyce Percy, Katherine Scrope, Alice Skelton and Anne Tempest.10 Other women in Anne’s company may have been the Duchesses of Norfolk and Suffolk, who had been prominent at her Coronation, and perhaps Frideswide Norris, née Lovell, Francis’ sister, who had just become the mother of Henry Norris, a victim of the Anne Boleyn scandal. In 1485, Frideswide would be given a yearly salary of 100 marks and a Thomas Norris, perhaps her brother-in-law, received grants drawn from the Middleham estates, suggesting he was employed there. Possibly Agnes, Lady Scrope, wife of Richard Ratcliffe, and her half-sister Margaret, married to William Catesby, were also among the number. Shakespeare assigns her two women called Tressel and Berkeley.

  Likewise, Richard promoted those he could trust to key positions. Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell, known to history as the ‘cat’, the ‘rat’ and the ‘dog’ of Shakespeare’s play, were to feature prominently in the new regime. All were Richard’s contemporaries, their loyalty unquestioned. William Catesby had been a Warwick retainer in the service of Hastings and then briefly on the council of Edward V before being appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer on 30 June and, later, Speaker of the House of Commons. Ratcliffe and Lovell had progressed from being teenage henxmen at Middleham to soldiers fighting alongside Richard in Scotland in 1480. Now both were made Knights of the Garter. Lovell, who came to be known as ‘the king’s spaniel’, hence, the ‘dog’, became Lord Chamberlain and Chief Butler of England, which had been ‘voided by the death of Anthony, late Earl Ryvers’,11 while Ratcliffe received grants of the lands confiscated from traitors. John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, now aged around sixty, already had a long and distinguished career in the service of the House of York. He had been knighted by Edward IV on the battlefield at Towton in 1461, and had been among the party accompanying his sister Margaret to her wedding in Burgundy seven years later. Richard had awarded him his dukedom in June immediately after his succession, as well as the offices of Marshall of England and Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine.12 Another appointee was Robert Brackenbury, who had served as Richard’s treasurer during his time as Duke of Gloucester. A grant of 17 July 1483 made him Master and Worker of the King’s Money and Keeper of the Exchange as well as Constable of the Tower of London. The following March, he was rewarded with land and annuities for his good services against the rebels and was given custody of the lions and leopards in the Tower, receiving 12d daily for wages and 6d to feed the animals. Other kinsmen Richard promoted were William Berkeley, Earl of Nottingham, whose second wife was Joan Strangeways, niece of Cecily of York, and Humphrey Dacre, Lord Dacre, son of Philippa, another Neville sibling.

  In spring 1484, Anne received another group of girls into her household. Edward’s queen, Elizabeth Wydeville, had remained in sanctuary throughout the second half of 1483, with her surviving children, five girls. All had been disinherited by the Act Titulus Regius, which proclaimed them illegitimate as their parents’ marriage was supposedly invalid due to a pre-contract Edward had entered into with an Eleanor Butler, née Talbot. Their mother had come under increasing pressure to leave her Westminster confines, but, after the loss of her two sons, Edward V and Richard, was reluctant to do so. A plot had been uncovered and quashed soon after the Coronation, by which the girls were to be spirited away to safety overseas and, as Edward’s heirs, they retained a strong claim to the throne as well as popularity with the people. Given Elizabeth’s backing of the failed Tudor invasion, Richard was keen to keep the bastardised princesses within his reach and thus prevent any further suspicious alliances from being made. Early in the New Year, he conceded to Elizabeth’s request to swear a public oath to defend and protect her five remaining daughters, his nieces, and to become their protector, responsible for arranging suitable marriages for them all. Out of sanc
tuary came the five girls, Croyland’s ‘most sweet and beautiful children’. Named after her mother, Elizabeth of York had been her father’s favourite and was the eldest at seventeen, with her long, blonde hair and the good looks she inherited from both parents. Next came Cecily, almost fourteen and reputed to be the most beautiful of them all, followed by Anne, Catherine and Bridget, who were all under the age of ten. With their mother still in custody, they entered the queen’s household, based at Greenwich, where they had spent much of their childhoods already. What exactly was Anne’s role in their care? As their aunt, she oversaw the arrangements for their board and provisions but, given the girls’ desirability as potential figureheads of Lancastrian rebellions and alliances, she may also have been charged to be their guardian, even their keeper. Richard would have been aware that Henry Tudor swore an oath in Rennes Cathedral, on Christmas Day 1483, to marry Elizabeth of York. In private, he may have specifically asked his wife to keep a watch on the eldest princess’s correspondence and visitors, as well as her comings and goings.

  Anne was also involved in the provisions made for the care of her sister Isabel’s two surviving children, the eight-year-old Edward, Earl of Warwick, and his elder sister Margaret, now ten. Elizabeth Wydeville’s elder son from her first marriage, Sir John Grey, had been the boy’s guardian until his execution in the summer of 1483. The children now entered Anne’s household at Greenwich, possibly joining the routine already arranged for Edward IV’s younger daughters. Edward, though, would have required a different form of training and education if he was to fill his grandfather’s shoes and was later given his own establishment at Sheriff Hutton. In March 1484, Parliament ruled that John Fortescu(e), ‘the king’s servant’, was to receive an additional 10 marks annually during the minority of the king’s nephew and, on the same day, Robert Chambre and his wife Marion had their long-term annuity of 10 marks confirmed by Richard. This would have been originally given to them by Edward or Clarence himself, as they had been in the family’s employ as far back as 1477. This suggests they may have been family servants, perhaps in the household of the two children, whom, the grant’s renewal implies, they were continuing to care for. In the boy’s minority, provision was made for the maintenance of his lands, which were awarded to Richard’s allies in safekeeping until Edward attained his majority. A Roger Holdern was granted the manor of Sutton in February 1484, ‘to yield 2d daily during the minority of Edward, son of Isabel and Clarence’, and Robert Russell was to benefit from the £5 annuity from Elmeley Castle in Worcestershire. The actual castle of Warwick, where the king and his family had stayed during the northern progress, was bestowed on 15 November 1484 upon John Higgeford and Humphrey Beaufo or Beowfo, to be constable and steward at salaries of 10 marks yearly.13 Anne appears to have seen less of her own son, whose illness kept him at Middleham for much of the year. Included in the arrangements of July 1484 for the King’s Household in the North were provisions for ‘the children’ at Sheriff Hutton. Perhaps Edward had his cousins for company in his parents’ absence, or else this referred to expenses incurred by Richard’s illegitimate children, John and Katherine.