Anne Neville (12 page)

From Cerne Abbas the Lancastrians proceeded to Exeter, thence (presumably via Wells) northwards to Bath, which they reached on 29 April.
⁶⁶
After recruiting for a fortnight – the whole duration of some of the campaigns of the Wars of the Roses – the Lancastrian forces were still too few to take on King Edward with confidence. Their preference was to join up with the Lancastrians of Wales, who were being recruited by Henry VI’s half-brother Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, and of Cheshire and Lancaster, which done, so they hoped, they could defeat the Yorkists.

Edward IV had other ideas. Instead of waiting to be attacked, he took the initiative, proceeded to Cirencester, and sought out the Lancastrians in battle. Although initially evaded, he was able to prevent them from combining their levies, forced them to stand and fight, and decisively defeated them at Tewkesbury (4 May 1471).

The Yorkist
Arrival
records the elaborate manoeuvres, feint and counterfeint, and then the desperate chase northwards from Bristol through the Vale of Berkeley to Gloucester and on to Tewkesbury. If the forced march of thirty-six miles on the last day saw the ladies on horseback,
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it was surely exhausting, frightening and dispiriting for a princess who was still short of her fifteenth birthday. Doubtless the ladies preceded their weary army, which reached Tewkesbury only about 4p.m., and were accommodated within the abbey or the manor house. These were familiar surroundings for Anne, who had visited the town and abbey frequently. Her grandmother Isabel was buried there, together with her Despenser and De Clare ancestors. Her mother was foundress of the abbey. Perhaps she and her husband stayed in her family’s residence; perhaps at the abbey itself. Since Prince Edward took his leave of his mother early on the morrow, Queen Margaret and Princess Anne were probably lodging together.
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That Saturday morning the Lancastrian army was drawn up with its back to the abbey and the town, into which it was scattered by the victorious Yorkists. The town, the abbey, and doubtless the foundress’ residence were sacked. Although unrecorded, we may presume – as soldiers habitually behave in such circumstances – that violence, wanton destruction, sacrilege and rape were visited on the non-combatant civilians, priests, women and children. Those Lancastrians who took refuge within the abbey were lured out, on royal promises of immunity, and some of them were then executed: a story that the Yorkist
Arrival
took pains to conceal. Others were slain in the abbey cemetery. Both the abbey and
churchyard were polluted and had to be reconsecrated later by the bishop of Worcester. Most of the Lancastrian commanders who survived the battle were executed afterwards – Somerset, Dorset, Devon, Wenlock and St John among them. This was on Monday.

Also slain was Anne’s husband of six months. Prince Edward of Lancaster was fighting his first battle. His presence was important for Lancastrian morale, although the direction of the battle appears to have rested in the older but inexperienced hands of the duke of Somerset, disastrously. The prince ‘was taken, fleeing to the town ward, and slain, in the field’, reports the
Arrival
. A Tewkesbury Abbey chronicle and other early sources take the same line. ‘And there was slain on the field, Prince Edward’, states
Warkworth’s Chronicle
, ‘which cried for succour to his brother-in-law the Duke of Clarence’. A much later source,
Hall’s Chronicle
, states instead that he was taken alive, hauled before King Edward to whom he was impertinent: the king struck him and those about him, the king’s brothers Clarence and Gloucester and Lord Hastings, then despatched him.
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Since Gloucester was to be second partner of the prince’s wife Anne Neville, Hall is the source and inspiration for Shakespeare’s belief that Anne remarried to her first husband’s killer and of the celebrated (albeit wholly fictional) scene of the duke’s wooing of the widowed princess. Professor Myers has applied the accepted academic principle that the earliest accounts are closest to the original and hence more reliable to demonstrate the elaboration of the story down to Hall.
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A desire by later writers to blacken the failed tyrant Richard III, formerly duke of Gloucester, also may have played a part. Hall’s tale lacked any contemporary authority and was dismissed as fiction. Recently, however, historians have become aware of an illustrated French version of the
Arrival
, perhaps dating to this very year, which shows a scene very like that described by Hall. Pinioned, the prince, identified by his coat
of arms, faced King Edward wearing his crown, and was struck down.
⁷¹
Whether Gloucester was one of the killers is not apparent, nor is it material, since it was his role as constable of England to preside over the summary military proceedings that duly despatched those taken in battle and other traitors. In any case it was the king’s responsibility. Like Henry VI, who was killed soon afterwards, Prince Edward was too dangerous to let live. It seems therefore that Hall’s account may be authentic: that we should credit this last picture of the spirited, arrogant, fearless adolescent who was Anne’s first husband.

Where was Princess Anne during the battle and its aftermath, the sacking and the bloodbath? Not at Tewkesbury, we must hope, but we cannot know for sure. What happened to Anne was of no interest to the author of the
Arrival
, who did not recognise his future queen, and left her out of his history. Most probably she escaped the terror of the defeat, the sacking and the bloodbath because she was with Queen Margaret, who ‘withdrew herself from the adventure of the battle’ early that Saturday morning ‘for the surety of her person’ to some ‘poor religious place’ across the River Avon on the Worcester road. Probably Evesham Abbey was meant, although it does not match this belittling description. There, reports the
Arrival
, King Edward found the queen (and most probably the princess) on 7 May on his way to Worcester. Queen Margaret ‘was borne in carriage before the king at his triumph in London’.
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She was never to be at complete liberty again. This refuge of the queen and princess is consistent with the listing by the abbey chronicle of thosehere taken and presented to the king, and pardoned’, who included ‘Lady Margaret, Queen, [and] Lady Anne, Princess’.
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The
there
, however, surely betokened Tewkesbury. Two other ladies who were also pardoned, the countess of Devon and Lady Katherine Vaux, were probably attendant on the queen. It is possible therefore that Margaret and Anne were brought back to Tewkesbury prior to the king’s
departure. If so, they witnessed the aftermath of defeat – the destruction, the bloodshed, the display of quartered bodies of their kin and friends, and so on: traumatic sights. Thereafter their paths diverged, Queen Margaret as the king’s prisoner and Anne as Clarence’s charge: they may never have met again. Nor indeed was Anne to meet her father-in-law Henry VI, probably last encountered in 1460, who was eliminated a few days later in the Tower.

Neither Margaret nor Anne saw Prince Edward alive after he left their company that Saturday morning. Whether they could have seen him dead or attended his funeral may depend on where the king took them into custody. Presumably no burial service or masses were possible in a church that had been deconsecrated by bloodshed.
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Prince Edward was interred in a prime position ‘in the midst of the convent choir’
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– an appropriate position for a member of the founder’s family, given that the circle of chantry chapels around the high altar was complete and that in 1477 the vault even of Anne’s sister Isabel had to be located in the ambulatory. Perhaps, therefore, Edward’s burial place reveals Anne’s choice, but it may be that the convent selected such a prominent site on its own account. A simple brass was erected over his tomb. The cult of Edward II, which financed the remodelling of Gloucester Abbey’s choir, was a nearby reminder of the potential value of political saints. There are two references to a cult for Edward of Lancaster, but it failed to take off.
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As their founders’ chronicle makes plain, the monks of Tewkesbury saw themselves as safeguarding the interests of their patrons. All the other Lancastrian leaders also received honourable burial within the church and a careful record was compiled of who was buried where. The king may also have had some input in the final resting place of his former royal rival. Although there is no indication that any monument ever marked the prince’s tomb or that any special masses were ever held in his honour, yet Princess Anne could
certainly have located Edward’s tomb without difficulty had she returned to Tewkesbury. This was to be expected, given Tewkesbury’s status as the greatest of her family’s religious foundations. Actually, however, her future lay elsewhere. There is no proof of her presence at Tewkesbury again. It is just possible that in 1483, when she took a different route from King Richard III from Windsor to Warwick, that Queen Anne dropped in at Tewkesbury Abbey and searched out her first husband’s tomb, but, if so, it is not recorded. It is possible, but not likely.

A
nne was scarcely married before she was widowed. Her acquaintance with her first husband Prince Edward was brief indeed: not more than nine months in all, at most six months of matrimony. Briefly, ever so briefly, she was a princess, by name and in the estimation of that limited company that was with Queen Margaret in France and returned with her to England and amongst Lancastrians generally, but without ever the courtly and luxurious life that should have gone with it. With her husband’s death at Tewkesbury, Anne found herself a widow. She was dowager-princess of Wales. She was entitled to dower from the possessions of her husband – the principality of Wales, duchy of Cornwall and earldom of Chester. She should have had a right to her jointure too, but no jointure had been settled on her. But of course there was a hitch: her husband Edward had been a Lancastrian prince and after 4 May England was Yorkist again. Anne was princess only to a Lancastrian audience. Who dared to be Lancastrian after Tewkesbury? Since 1460 Yorkists had discounted any hereditary rights to the house of Lancaster. In 1471 King Edward IV firmly rejected the house of Lancaster, the Readeption, and hence any claims that Prince Edward had possessed either to the crown or his principality. To King
Edward IV and the Yorkist victors after Tewkesbury, Edward of Lancaster had never been prince of Wales. He had never taken seisin of any of the possessions that normally belonged to the king’s heir; had he done so, it would have been wrongfully. Thus Prince Edward had nothing with which to dower his princess. Moreover, he had perished an enemy and a traitor. If he was never attainted, this was because there was nothing to confiscate. Furthermore, King Edward now had his own infant prince, the future Edward V, on whom he was to confer all the properties earmarked for the heir of throne after resuming whatever had been granted to anybody else.
¹
As princess, therefore, Anne was entitled to nothing. Her title of princess of Wales was obsolete, empty, useless, probably unusable, and raised undesirable associations. Although more elevated, princess of Wales was a title that she ceased to use once she became duchess of Gloucester, if not before.

At least King Edward had received her, accepted her submission, and had pardoned her. He could do no less. The Wars of the Roses were not waged against women. None were slain in battle, only three attainted as traitors by parliament. Even the most partisan ladies were merely confined (usually in monasteries) and restrained from supporting their recalcitrant menfolk.
²
Princess Anne posed Edward no threat. If the wife or widow of a traitor peer was reduced to begging, like Anne’s aunt Margaret, Countess of Oxford, King Edward was induced to relieve her:
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it was chivalric expectation. Just as Edward was expected to, and did, see his rival honourably buried, so too he had to tolerate Prince Edward’s consort and, if necessary, finance her. Until 11 June 1471, moreover, Anne was only fourteen years of age.

Laynesmith has revived speculation about what might have been had Anne been already pregnant by Prince Edward.
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That was certainly an objective of the marriage which Prince Edward surely strove for. If Anne had been with child, she
could have renewed the Lancastrian line that had just been eradicated. Whilst nobody could have been certain, the fact that Henry VI perished unnaturally on 20 May, a murder that was pointless as long as he had an heir living, may be evidence that Anne was believed not to be with child. Had she been pregnant, an accident – life-threatening to her baby if not herself – might have been engineered. Such speculation, however, is more than usually groundless. There is no contemporary evidence of any such interesting condition, not even any contemporary suspicions.

Anne was above the age of majority. Although entitled in law to half the Montagu/Salisbury lands (less her mother’s dower and jointure), she was not a royal ward. She was also a widow and thus
femme sole
: a single woman entitled to manage her own affairs without male intervention, unlike any spinster or wife. A fifteen-year-old widow without property, however, had no means to exercise her theoretical independence. Nor could Anne look to her mother for sympathy, guidance or protection, except perhaps by post, since the Countess Anne was in custody at Beaulieu and was also unable to assert her own rights.

Anne Beauchamp, now dowager-countess of Warwick, could expect no dower from her late husband’s estate, since, to Yorkist eyes, her husband Warwick had been a traitor. She was still entitled to her jointure – the properties settled jointly on her and her husband at their marriage.
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Moreover, her vast Beauchamp and Despenser inheritances were still legally her own. That all the lands that Warwick held in his own or her right were seized in 1471 and occupied by Clarence was a common enough error that should have been corrected when better evidence of the actual title was produced. Whatever the legal situation, however, many bereaved ladies seem to have had difficulties with their jointures, apparently sometimes because they were not properly secured at law: the king’s own queen
and two of his mistresses found their in-laws unwilling to honour the deals after their husbands’ death.
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Their inheritances, however, were different: their rights of inheritance were beyond debate – quite incontestable. These were rights that could not be denied. Understandably the countess found it difficult to secure livery of her estate whilst in sanctuary. She needed to come to the king and make her case direct as, for instance, the king’s future bedfellows Dame Eleanor Butler, Dame Elizabeth Grey and Dame Margaret Lucy had done.
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But the countess found that realising her rights was in practice quite unattainable. As she was to protest to parliament, she had not done anything wrong. She had not betrayed King Edward as Warwick himself had done. She had taken sanctuary for her own safety and to pray ‘for the weal and health of the soul of her said [deceased] lord and husband as right and conscience’ demanded. Within five days or thereabouts, therefore even before the battle of Tewkesbury, she had asked the king for a safe-conduct. Instead, ‘to her great heart’s grievance’, he had ordered her strict confinement, so that she was unable as she wished to come to court to sue for livery of her inheritance, jointure and dower. In October 1472 or even later, not less than eighteen months after she first took sanctuary, the countess was still not allowed to leave Beaulieu Abbey, where she was living poorly and lacked even a clerk, she said implausibly, to pen her plea. She