Anne Neville: Richard III's Tragic Queen

by Licence, Amy

  A picture of the royal household emerges from the appointments Richard made over the following months. John Kendall became the king’s secretary and Stephen Fryon was Master of the Signet and secretary in the Gallic tongue, while the royal physician was one William Hobbes, who was granted £40 a year on 12 December 1483. More grants were confirmed by Richard’s first and only Parliament, which met in the January of 1484. In spite of Margaret Beaufort’s recent treachery, her husband, Thomas Stanley, was made a king’s counsellor in February 1484 and awarded a grant for £100 in his role as Constable of England. A London goldsmith, Hugh Brice, and his son James, were appointed as clerks of the king’s mint, money and exchange within the Tower of London in March 1484, while Henry Wedehoke was made yeoman and Keeper of the King’s Armour within the Tower of London, receiving 6d daily for wages, and William Daubeney became Clerk of the King’s Jewels. One Ralph Bygot was named as Master of the King’s Ordinance, or keeper of his firearms, and John Crochard was appointed chief smith within the Tower of London at a fee of 8d a day. A Thomas Hunte became Clerk of the Works at Westminster, Windsor, Tower of London and all the king’s manors, with commission to control workmen, materials and to sell branches, bark and residue of the trees within the royal parklands. Thomas Wyntersell was made sergeant of the king’s ‘herthoundes’ and John Piers was made Master of the King’s Vine at Windsor in February 1484, while Simon Dowsing was made Keeper of the King’s Garden at the Tower of London the following month. In April, John Hudde and Walter Mathyn, yeomen purveyors of the office of the poultry of the household, were granted the right to acquire fowls, lambs and other dairy products for daily provision. William Poche became Keeper of the Beds within the Tower of London, ‘alias the office off the little wardrobe within the tower’ at a salary of 6d daily and 3d provision for two grooms under him, while the Windsor Castle beds were given into the keeping of Thomas Cresey. Parliament’s final grants and rulings for the provision of Edward IV’s daughters were concluded towards the end of March, 1484.14

  As spring began to spread across the country, Richard and Anne headed out of the capital on a second progress. Perhaps it was the lure of the North that summoned him, or Anne’s desire to see her son, or the imperative to maintain order with his presence. Their first stop was Cambridge, where they stayed for a week and made gifts to King’s and Queen’s Colleges. By 20 March, they had arrived at Nottingham Castle. When antiquarian John Leland visited the place, in the sixteenth century, it was already partly in ruins but a stately bridge crossed the drawbridge, ‘with pillars bearing beasts and giants’. Inside was ‘a fair green court fit for any princely exercise’ with stone staircases leading through the rock to the river and an underground ‘vault, [with] rooms cut and made out of the very stone, in the walls whereof the story of Christ’s passion and other things are engraven, by David, King of Scotland, [as they say] who was kept prisoner there’. Later records mention the extensive meadows, the dovecote and the cony gate, where rabbits were caught. There had once been a chapel dug out of the rock under the castle, as well as three others on the site, and a college of secular priests.15 It was while they were staying there, on 20 April, that terrible news reached Richard and Anne. In their absence, their son had died at Middleham.

  Surrounded by his long-term household, Anne Idley, the Burghs and his treasurer, John Dawney, Edward of Middleham had slipped away on 9 April 1484. He was probably aged between seven and ten but the cause of death is unclear. The records are full of medieval children of all classes falling victim to various illnesses, accidents and diseases and the usual attribution of tuberculosis may well apply in Edward’s case. He had been too ill to go with his parents to London for their official Coronation and had needed to be carried into York on a litter for his investiture as Prince of Wales that August. Either he was suffering from a long-term debilitating illness, of which his parents were aware, or else he experienced a series of different complaints as Croyland implies, when he states that the boy was ‘seized with an illness of but short duration’. Rous called it an ‘unhappy death’ and one twentieth-century historian suggested appendicitis. There is no doubt, though, about his report of his parents’ reaction: ‘You might have seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness, by reason of their sudden grief.’ The irony was not lost on the chronicler, who stated a popularly held belief that this loss was somehow a punishment for the fate of the Princes in the Tower, Richard’s nephews. Croyland expresses a typically medieval satisfaction in the turning wheel of fortune, stating ‘it was fully seen how vain are the thoughts of a man who desires to establish his interests without the aid of God’, juxtaposed with a reminder that this was almost exactly a year since the death of Edward IV.

  The blow for Anne and Richard must have been appalling. Even if they had known the extent of his illness, their absence during the boy’s last hours intensified their pain; perhaps it had even been Edward’s inability to travel that underpinned their own northern itineraries. They left Nottingham at once and arrived in Middleham on 5 May, probably in time to arrange his funeral, although this was already almost a month after his death. The battered tomb in the church at Sheriff Hutton, topped with its alabaster effigy, which has usually been claimed for Edward, does not contain his bones. The window contains Yorkist imagery but the vault is empty and the body lies elsewhere. Edward of Middleham’s final resting place remains unknown to this day. His death had a significance beyond the personal; now Richard had no direct heir, the next in line being Clarence’s son, the young Earl of Warwick. It made the king vulnerable, as Henry VI had been, and made the prospect of his overthrow all the more attractive to his enemies. Some went so far as to suggest this was a divine punishment for various crimes attributed to Richard, such as the deaths of Henry VI and the Princes, as Rous had recorded. This must have been in the king’s mind as the couple made their way back to York at the end of May. Archbishop Rotherham repeated an ungracious tale that Richard had complained ‘unto many noble men of his wife’s unfruitfulness, for that she brought him forth no children’.16 Richard may have regretted his lack of legitimate heirs but Rotherham was a strange choice of confidant, as he still had to prove himself a friend to the new regime.

  Edward’s death marked the turning point in Anne’s life; sadly, she would never be as happy, secure or healthy again. Nor would she enjoy as close a relationship as she had had with her husband during the Middleham years. She was not old, her twenty-seventh birthday was only weeks away, but the loss of her only child must have proved a heavy burden. It was equally momentous for Richard, raising the question of divine disapproval and the reality of a disputed inheritance. From this point onwards, there appears to have been a shift in the marriage, as if Edward had been a bond which broke them with his death. Perhaps Richard did direct some of his grief and anger at the wife who had not been able to provide him with the dynasty he required. Perhaps he felt the irony of her current situation, surrounded by her profusion of nieces, when she had only been able to produce one child. It may have seemed unjust that Edward IV had almost had too many children when his one legitimate son was taken. From this point onward, Richard and Anne’s marriage was torn apart by rumours and resentment, grief and illness.

  For much of 1484, the threat of a Scottish invasion and the establishment of a council at York kept Richard busy. In May he was in Durham, in June naval matters occupied him at Scarborough and July was spent launching the quarterly Council for the North. Where exactly was Anne during this activity? Records seem to confirm that she was with him at Scarborough, staying in the ‘square’ or ‘queen’s tower’ as he supervised a fleet for the repulsion of Henry Tudor. She may well have also been with him in York that summer but changes made to Sheriff Hutton, now the official home of Edward, Earl of Warwick, suggest she might have been there. That July, the property was designated the king’s ‘Household in the North’ under the rule of his nephew and heir, John de la Pole. Elizabeth of York and her sisters are likely to have
been present there too, included in provisions which were made for ‘the children’ that also covered Richard’s illegitimate offspring. Sheriff Hutton, an old Neville property which had been granted to Richard after the Battle of Barnet in 1471, was close enough to York to allow the pair to see each other during the inauguration of the council. Commanding an impressive view over the Vale of York, it had four towers of reddish stone and long ranges lit on the first floor by large square windows and heated by 6-foot-wide fireplaces.

  Anne and Richard were back in London that August when the bones of Henry VI were transferred from Chertsey Abbey to St George’s chapel, Windsor. How did Anne feel, standing over the tomb of her father-in-law, recalling the events of over a decade ago? The re-interment had been made at Richard’s request, and perhaps she appreciated this small, retrospective gesture of respect. It may be that the king decided it was time to give his fellow monarch a more suitable resting place, or maybe he was responding to the many reports of miracles carried out in Henry’s name, which had already begun to develop into a minor cult. The bones were laid to rest to the south-west of the altar, incurring £5 10s and 2d in expenses. Richard had also commissioned the original tomb which was a flat alabaster slab, featuring a recumbent Henry, bearded and in armour, with a leopard and antelope at his feet and an angel bearing his shield of arms on the side. It no longer stands, having been dismantled around 1600; Henry VI is commemorated today by a slab set into the floor.17

  Whatever reunion the pair might have had was short-lived as, by the following month, Richard had left London again, to return to Nottingham Castle. From this point, according to Paul Kendall, he referred to the place as his ‘Castle of Care’; a continual reminder of the news he had received there. Now, it was a venue for the visit of a delegation of Scottish ambassadors, who proposed a three-year truce and marriage between Richard’s niece, Anne de la Pole, and James III’s son and heir. Richard remained there all through October before returning to London on 11 November. He was welcomed back into his capital, being met by the mayor and alderman, dressed in their brightly coloured ceremonial robes. The scarlet and violet velvet must have been vivid on the autumnal day of St Martin, traditionally the occasion when animals were slaughtered for the winter. Anne was probably already waiting for him, having spent the intervening time at Greenwich, now moving back into Westminster. Settling back into their royal apartments overlooking the Thames, a winter of discontent certainly lay ahead for Richard and Anne. And for both of them, it would be their last.

  That December saw the trial of William Collingbourne, whose apparently light-hearted efforts to mock the new regime belied the serious nature of his treasonable activities. Once employed in the household of Cecily Neville, and therefore probably known to Richard in his youth, Collingbourne is best known as the author of the lampoon, ‘The Catte, the Ratte and Lovell our dogge rulyth all Englande under a hogge.’ These heraldic references to Richard, Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell (the king’s spaniel whose badge featured a wolf) were demeaning when pinned on the door of St Paul’s Cathedral that summer. However, it proved to be just one example of the ‘various bills and writings in rhyme’ that proclaimed the author’s Lancastrian sympathies.18 Collingbourne was the probable author of a longer version of the couplet and its explanatory key, which first appeared in Fabyan’s chronicle in 1516 and then in the 1559 cautionary poetry collection, Mirror for Magistrates. This was more explicitly critical of Richard and the circumstances of his succession, although the references to his ‘crooke-back’ may suggest a post-Tudor authorship:

  The Cat, the Rat and Lovell Our Dog

  Doe rule all England under a Hog.

  The crooke-backt Boar the way hath found

  To root our Roses from our ground.

  Both flower and bud he will confound

  Till King of Beasts the swine be crown’d.

  And then, the Dog, the Cat and Rat

  Shall in his trough feed and be fat.19

  The author’s ‘key’ described Catesby as ‘a craftee lawyer catching all he could’, while Ratcliffe was ‘a cruel beast’ who ‘gnawed on whom he should’. Lovell, in turn, ‘barked and bit whom Richard would’ but such an explanation would hardly be required by an audience of 1483.20 All three of Richard’s close friends had helped in suppressing the Buckingham rebellion and received lands and grants as rewards.

  After Collingbourne’s arrest, it was proved that he had been in contact with Henry Tudor and other exiles, encouraging his invasion plans. It has been suggested that he was a disgruntled ex-employee who had lost his place after being implicated in Buckingham’s revolt or that he wrote in revenge for the loss of lands and offices he had been promised: he had served as a commissioner for the peace in Wiltshire, in July 1483, but did not feature in the records by December of that year. On trial at the Guildhall, a commission of dukes and earls convicted him of high treason. He was then taken to Tower Hill and suffered the horrific hanging, drawing and quartering reserved for traitors. More fortunate that season was John Morton, Bishop of Ely, who received a general pardon on 11 December for his role in Buckingham’s rebellion.

  It was not the first time that year that Richard had been forced to deal with slander and libel. One source of annoyance was the preferment of his Northern magnates in roles that had previously been held by Southerners. Croyland was exaggerating when he commented that Richard had ‘planted’ them ‘in every spot throughout his dominions … to the disgrace and lasting and loudly expressed sorrow of all the people in the South’, but the appointments had caused some annoyance. Although he did try to bind his critics to him with grants, alliances and titles, those with Lancastrian leanings, who had escaped punishment for the 1483 rebellion, began to resurface in hopes of a Tudor invasion. A surviving letter written by Richard on 5 April 1484 to the Mayor of Southampton shows the nature of the problem and his response. It had come to the king’s attention that ‘diverses sedicious and evil disposed persounes’ in London and elsewhere had begun ‘to sowe sede of noyse … ayenst our persoune and ayenst many of the lordes and estates of our lands’. Their purpose was to ‘averte’ the minds of loyal subjects to ‘theire mischevous entent and pourpos’ by setting up bills and messages and ‘sending furth of fals and abhominable languages and lyes’. Richard had called together a meeting of the London mayor and aldermen to ‘represse al such fals and continued invencions’ by apprehending all those attempting to ‘stir commontions’, raise ‘unlawful assembles, or any strif and debate aryse betwix lord and lord’. Such malcontents were to be ‘punisshed according to [their] defautes’.21 Fabyan’s chronicle is more specific regarding the rumours that surfaced around Easter. His marginal headings, ‘Innocents’ and ‘Death of the Innocents’, indicate the subjects of the accusations, which included such wild stories as smothering, poisoning and drowning. Fabyan even proposed that either Sir James Tyrell, High Sheriff of Cornwall, or an unnamed ‘servant of the king’ had murdered Edward IV’s sons in the Tower. He also says these rumours lost Richard ‘the hearts of the people’.

  Richard knew how damaging seditious speech could be and seems to have spent considerable time in the final year of his reign countering various rumours and challenges to his reputation. Of course, he had his advocates too. In a private letter to William Selling, prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, in the summer of 1483, Thomas Langton wrote that Richard ‘contents the people where he goes best that did prince … I liked never the conditions of any prince so well as his; God has sent him to us for the weal of us all.’22 The clerk of York later recalled Richard as a ‘most famous prince of blessed memory’ and Rous’ first version of his history was full of glowing praise. Archibald Whitelaw, a Scottish ambassador visiting England in 1484, wrote, ‘Never has so much spirit or virtue reigned in such a small body.’23 By the end of that year, though, new threats were to emerge to his person and his name. Around Christmas, he received information that the planned Tudor invasion force would be launched the following summer. Before that
, it was the state of his marriage that became the talk of Westminster.

  13

  Elizabeth of York

  1484–1485

  Her hands together can shee wringe,

  and with teares shee wipes her eye;

  ‘welladay, BESSYE!’ can shee sing.1

  Now the long winter nights began to draw in at the palace. As Anne looked out of the windows of the royal apartment, looking over the long, snaking line of the Thames, the sky was white and full of massing clouds. In her chamber, fires were built up in their wide hearths, cracking and blazing bright, yet the chill still managed to enter her bones. If she ventured out into the formal gardens, laid out to the north of the complex, the walkways and plants were often tinged with frost and, when she crossed the yard to pray in the abbey, her breath formed clouds in front of her eyes. As the nights grew darker, she would sit waiting in the light of the flickering candles, playing cards or dice with her ladies, reading, singing or watching while the young princesses danced to a tune played on a lute. Perhaps Richard would come and warm her bed that night. She waited for the soft knock on the door that announced his arrival, but it did not come. Where was he?