Anne Neville (13 page)

hath written letters in that behalf to the King’s Highness, with her own hand, and not only making such labours, suits and means to the King’s Highness, sothely also to the Queen’s good grace, to my right redoubted lady the King’s mother [Cecily Duchess of York], to my lady the King’s eldest daughter [Elizabeth of York], to my ladies the King’s sisters [Anne Duchess of Exeter and Elizabeth Duchess of Suffolk], to my lady of Bedford, mother to the Queen [Jacquetta Duchess of Bedford], and to other ladies noble of this realm.
⁸

Obviously she expected other ladies to be sympathetic to her in her predicament: the Duchesses Cecily, Anne and Jacquetta had all struggled to recover their rights after their husbands’ death or forfeiture. She expected the intervention of this ladies’ union to be effective with the men. Given that the war was over, surely nobody thought that the widowed countess posed any further threat to national security? Yet she was confined to Beaulieu at the king’s command. Why did the king command it? Why did the countess not solicit the intercession of her daughter Isabel or her son-in-law Clarence? The answer in all cases is surely the same. Surely she did seek the support of Isabel and Clarence, to no avail. Actually it was Isabel and Clarence (and perhaps later Anne and Gloucester) who opposed her rights. It was in their interests that the king kept her confined to Beaulieu after any risk to the public had passed. The royal ladies, to whom the countess wrote, may well have put first the interests of their brothers and brothers-in-law Clarence and Gloucester. In the meantime, of course, the countess could be no effective help to her daughter Anne.

We left Anne in the king’s company at Tewkesbury or at Worcester in early May 1471. Whilst we cannot delve into her first marriage, we may safely presume a succession of emotions – fear during the long pursuit and decisive battle, apprehension at the result, grief at her husband’s death, trauma at the bloodshed, and undoubtedly also concern for her own safety and for her own future. What was to befall her was far from clear. If safe from actual destitution or execution, her prospects now looked very bleak. Personally dowerless, she had only her expectations of inheritance to sustain her and to attract a male protector. At midsummer 1471, in view of her father’s death at Barnet and her mother’s flight, that heritage was purely speculative. Under such circumstances, the protection of her powerful brother [-in-law], her sister Isabel’s husband Clarence, was surely very welcome. All the more so if, as seems
likely, he took her in at Tewkesbury itself, immediately after the battle and her submission to the king, and conveyed her home to Warwick en route for London, whence he engaged in a further campaign in Kent against the Bastard of Fauconberg. Clarence was Anne’s guardian angel. As with other wives of traitors, the king may well have consigned Anne to Clarence’s custody by word of mouth or in some undocumented way, but he cannot have granted him the wardship and marriage of a widow who was of age.

COURTSHIP OF A PRINCESS

Unfortunately we have no detailed knowledge of where Anne was and what she did for the next eight crucial months. We must deal in likelihoods. Clarence’s easiest course of action was to receive his widowed sister-in-law into the household of the Duchess Isabel. We may doubt how agreeable were the relations now resumed of the two reunited sisters, the elder of whom was married to the man who had betrayed the younger’s father and husband, both with fatal results. Probably Anne accompanied her sister wherever she went, to London, and into society. A widowed princess was an honoured guest. Also probably it was during this period and at London, most probably at the Christmas and New Year celebrations of 1471–2, that Anne again encountered her brother[-in-law] Richard, Duke of Gloucester, resumed their acquaintance, and determined to take him as her second husband.

Anne cannot have planned all this in advance. Doubtless she was relieved initially to be rescued and was pleased to lie low. Her mother remained in sanctuary at Beaulieu. Isabel was to hand, but the interests of the two sisters were not identical. When Clarence had deserted Warwick and rejoined King Edward, the two royal brothers were reconciled. Clarence’s offences were wiped out. Subsequently he had served in the
king’s army at Barnet, a close-run battle in which the duke’s contingent, estimated by the
Arrival
as 4,000 strong, was essential for victory. As reward for his defection and services at Barnet, Clarence had immediately been granted all the Warwick inheritance which Isabel had been entitled to inherit. A court was held in their name at Erdington in modern Birmingham as early as 16 April.
⁹
The Neville lands in the North, to which Isabel had no claim, were excluded. Having secured everything to which she had rights of inheritance, naturally George and Isabel wanted to keep it all – it was the heritage of their unborn children – and did not want to surrender any of it to the Duchess Isabel’s mother, nor indeed to divide it with her sister Anne. In her distant sanctuary at Beaulieu, the countess of Warwick was out of the picture: indeed, she was kept out of the picture, the abbot receiving ‘right sharp commandment’ from the king to hold her there.
¹⁰
Naturally also George and Isabel wished to prevent Anne marrying again, for any husband would surely wish to assert her rights and recover for himself her half-share. Their case cannot be put more succinctly than it was somewhat later by the Milanese ambassador: ‘because his brother King Edward had promised him Warwick’s country, [Clarence] did not want the former [Gloucester] to have it, by reason of the marriage with the earl [of Warwick]’s second daughter’.
¹¹
They wanted to keep what was theirs, their entitlement, what the king had given them. Presumably it was only after Gloucester had showed an interest in Anne that they concealed her from the prying eyes of aspirant husbands. This apparently was at the duke’s London house, Coldharbour, near Dowgate. Whether she was concealed as a maid in the duke’s kitchen, as Crowland claimed, sounds unlikely
¹²
– women were not normally employed in great households and Anne cannot have possessed many relevant skills – but the concealment story is surely authentic. Crowland’s kitchen story is reminiscent of the Cinderella rags to riches story. It implies that Gloucester
was a knight errant who rescued her rather than, alternatively, a predatory seducer. We cannot know what the Clarences had in mind for Anne next. In similar circumstances we know of male heirs who consigned their nieces to nunneries – William, Earl of Suffolk in 1423, for instance
¹³
– and of brothers-in-law who tried to exclude their sisters-in-law from their inheritance.
¹⁴
If the Clarences offered Anne the alternative of taking the veil, we must presume that she declined. As an heiress, in theory, she was materially secure, but to make good her rights she needed a male protagonist and to marry.

The pressure that George and Isabel, her protectors, could exert on the fifteen-year-old Anne may have appeared almost irresistible: though we cannot know, of course, whether they coerced her at all. The best evidence of such pressure, perhaps, is that Anne was to greet Clarence’s brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester as her saviour, her rescuer, and that she allowed him to whisk her away to sanctuary. In medieval parlance, this abduction was a rape – as so often committed, in medieval terms, with the full consent of the lady. By then, presumably, Anne had reconciled herself to remarrying – the destiny after all to which such aristocratic ladies were born and brought up. Independence, as a helpless and destitute
femme sole
, could not do the trick and had no attraction for her.

Whether Anne was right to see Richard in such a favourable light, however, is not so certain. Doubtless she embarked on the course that she took with her eyes open. Obviously there was an irony to such a match. Whether or not Richard had a part in her husband’s death and whether this was publicly known, both of which now appear more likely in view of the redis-covered Burgundian illumination, and whether or not he had presided over the elimination of her father-in-law Henry VI, nevertheless the duke had certainly fought on the side adverse in the battles at which Anne’s father, husband and uncle had been slain. This was as one of many, against a cause that was
now obsolete and beyond revival. To the Yorkists and hence everybody else who mattered politically in 1471, Anne’s menfolk had been traitors legitimately slain in the rightful Yorkist cause. A post-Lancastrian and post-Warwick reality had to be accepted. There was nothing to be salvaged or revived from the Lancastrian cause and no mileage in resentment or vengeance. If revenge ever featured in Anne’s thoughts or emotions, she lacked the power to exact it and let it drop even when, in bed, Richard was at his most vulnerable. In the perilous limbo in which Anne found herself in 1471, such reflections were pointless, indeed counterproductive, and best forgotten. Moreover Anne had as many kindred on the winning as the losing side. Until 1470 it had been the winners whom she knew and the Yorkists with whom she interacted. The answer to Shakespeare’s rhetorical question – ‘Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’ – was surely no, not even in this case. However ironical, the issues were never as stark or as conflictive as Shakespeare was to imagine.

Whatever Richard’s physical limitations – we know him to have been short, slight, and perhaps even a hunchback – Anne had everything to gain materially from matrimony with him that she could hope to attain. She would have the ducal and royal rank her father had planned with a bridegroom that he may originally have favoured and (according to Waurin) had actually selected; respect; a princely establishment and great wealth; and the prospect of motherhood, the normal fulfilment of any late medieval lady. It was her birthright and her destiny. Given all that, her hereditary rights were of secondary importance for her, but they were crucial for Duke Richard. Without her, they were inaccessible. Neither the duke nor any other potential husband could secure Anne’s inheritance except by marrying her. That was her best hope for the future and her security. Marriage, of course, was only a first step. It was perhaps attainable by mere squires, like Owen Tudor who
had notoriously coupled with Henry V’s queen Katherine of France or Richard Wydeville, who had wed Jacquetta of Luxemberg, the widow of the Regent Bedford. There were many for whom marriage to a princess was exaltation: already a prince, Gloucester was not among them. To secure Anne’s inheritance in the teeth of the royal duke of Clarence required her to marry not just any genteel squire, but somebody equally powerful and just as influential with the king as Clarence was. Sir John Risley was later warned by Edward IV not to buy land with a suspect title from Gloucester, which demanded all the power of the duke to retain it.
¹⁵
All these necessary criteria in this case were satisfied by Richard, Duke of Gloucester and, perhaps in the early 1470s, only by him. No other potential suitor could be so confident of success.

Undoubtedly Richard wanted Anne for his wife. Crowland tells us so, adding how astutely he tracked her down, found her whereabouts, and spirited her into safekeeping.
¹⁶
He was not deterred by any obstacles, personal or political, familial or moral, and he confronted his brother Clarence head on. The abduction was another crucial upheaval and another decisive turning point in Anne’s short life. We merely know, thanks to Crowland, that Duke Richard removed Anne initially from Clarence’s custody to the celebrated sanctuary in the city of London of the College of St Martin-le-Grand, which was located between the Guildhall and St Paul’s.
¹⁷
That was sometime before 16 February 1472.
¹⁸
Anne may have spent half a year or more in Clarence’s care. Actually we may deduce rather more. After receiving the submission of the Kentish rebels at Sandwich on 26 May, Richard was sent to combat the last vestiges of resistance in the North, where he tried and executed the Bastard of Fauconberg. At Norwich about 23 August,
¹⁹
he dated from the North grants on 30 August, 4 and 6 October, 20 November and 11 December 1471.
²⁰
Unless therefore he reached his understanding with Anne in the early summer, in
June and July 1471 and immediately after the death of her first husband, the whole courtship had to be fitted into the two months from late December 1471 to the Sheen council of 16 February 1472. A whirlwind wooing indeed!

It is unfortunate that this episode is so ill-documented, since it was the pivotal moment when Anne made the choices that shaped the rest of her life. If Anne was undoubtedly a victim, she was not helpless. Within the limited scope apparently left to her, she was also in charge. Widows were legally free of masculine control and free to contract their own courtships and marriages. There seems to have been nobody to whom she could turn for disinterested counsel. Gloucester, who did advise her and whose blandishments were crucial, was certainly no disinterested party. Yet it was Anne’s self-conscious decision not to remain where she was, in Clarence’s kitchen or wherever. She also decided self-consciously not to become a nun and against whatever future, probably not including marriage, that her brother-in-law Clarence had in store for her. It was her decision to permit her abduction to St Martin’s, almost certainly with the rider that this was merely a first step towards marriage to Duke Richard. It was her decision also to marry far within the prohibited degrees. There can have been very few fifteen-year-old ladies, let alone princesses, who chose their marriage partners for themselves. Anne did. She transferred herself from one royal duke to another and duly married the second, tying her fortunes henceforth to his. All her ambitions were thereby fulfilled.

Why Anne did this is only too obvious. Her current situation and prospects were unacceptable. We have seen what she had to gain. Only Gloucester dared to outface his brother of Clarence and only he could retrieve her inheritance. She had no alternative, certainly none if she wanted the wealth, prestige and rank to which she was born and bred. Without her inheritance, even Gloucester was not available. Anne could
have aspired no higher. It helped of course that Anne was acquainted with Duke Richard: they had shared experiences from his sojourn in 1465–8 in her father’s household. Perhaps they knew one another quite well, despite their difference in years. In March 1472, when she was only fifteen and he was nineteen, a difference of nearly four years in age (fortyfour months) was substantial. How much more significant was the gap in age in 1468, when the sixteen-year-old duke had moved out of Warwick’s household and away from his twelve-year-old cousin! Any romantic interest dating back to that era appears improbable. Romance makes better sense in 1472, providing that they had the opportunity to develop their relationship, most probably before Clarence – understandably alarmed – secreted Anne away, but perhaps only following the abduction and after Anne’s initial flight. How irritating that we cannot know! Evidence of any sexual attraction – or indeed sexual starvation following the abrupt termination of Anne’s conjugal rights – is irretrievable. It is twenty-first-century standards that have made modern historians hope for the love-match that we take for granted today. For Anne, with her upbringing and contemporary expectations, love was not the prerequisite that we have subsequently made it. A love match appears unlikely here.