Anne Neville (15 page)

Next the estates had to be valued, the detailed division agreed, the legal niceties determined, and the actual transfer of properties carried out. When parliament next met (October 1472), only after Anne had pledged herself to Richard and the partition was agreed in principle, it was petitioned by Anne, Countess of Warwick for livery of her jointure and inheritance, without success. The only copy of her petition is in Gloucester’s cartulary: presumably he had a copy taken when the issue was still in the balance.
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But her plea came too late. The decisions had been made. Discussion of the petition and its progress were presumably halted and certainly came to nothing. Clarence, who was the loser, obstructed implementation of the partition of the inheritances by refusing to give up what he held and perhaps also with violence, comprehensibly since Gloucester was not yet legally married to his new duchess. Hence the stakes were raised. Early in June 1473, Gloucester’s agent Sir James Tyrell removed the Countess Anne from sanctuary in Beaulieu Abbey to Gloucester’s castle at Middleham. It may well be, as Rows was later to state, that she ‘fled to him as her chief refuge’, in which case she was to be sadly disappointed.
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At the time it was reported that the king was to restore
her inheritance, so that she could grant it to Gloucester. That King Edward was indeed complicit is suggested because the abbot of Beaulieu had to be released by him from her custody.
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Gloucester already had a track record of coercing old ladies. Implicit in this action was the king’s backing for the countess’ restoration to her whole inheritance and its transfer to the duke and duchess of Gloucester, leaving Clarence with almost nothing. Perhaps this threat was sufficient. Perhaps it was the additional penalty of the resumption of Clarence’s prized honour of Tutbury (Staffs.) in December 1473
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– or maybe that was Edward’s punishment of Clarence
for non-compliance – that brought Clarence to heel and enabled the implementation of the 1472 agreement. The whole estate was valued, a partition was agreed – we possess the list of Gloucester’s share – and the legal formalities were concluded in 1474 and 1475.
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There can be no doubt that both parties were greedy. Both Clarence and Gloucester were acquisitive. Whether their duchesses were also we cannot tell. Isabel and Anne may have been fully consenting parties: more probably, they were merely the means that their husbands exploited as they acted nominally on the ladies’ behalf. Possibly, however, Anne played a larger role, since Rows writes, with reference to the treatment of her mother the countess, of Anne’s ‘election’ (
electio
) or choice.
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Crowland was present in the royal council at which the two dukes pushed their cases in person.

So much disputation arose between the brothers and so many keen arguments were put forward on either side with the greatest acuteness in the presence of the king, sitting in judgement in the council-chamber, that all who stood around, even those learned in the law, marvelled at the profusion of the arguments which the princes produced for their own cases.
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It is hard to realise that the elder of the two dukes who debated so confidently was aged only twenty-three and that Richard, Duke of Gloucester was not yet twenty!

Clarence wished to hang on to the whole of the Beauchamp (Warwick), Despenser and Montagu (Salisbury) inheritance in right of his wife Isabel rather than divide it with his sister-in-law Anne, the other co-heiress. Having pocketed the Neville inheritance, to which Isabel had no hereditary claim, Gloucester exploited his wife Anne to secure additionally her half-share of the Beauchamp, Despenser and Montagu estates as well. Both parties were agreed on the need to exclude the
male heir of the Neville estates – Warwick’s nephew George, Duke of Bedford, son of his brother John, Marquis Montagu – and also, of course, their mother-in-law, the Countess Anne, rightful possessor of the Beauchamp and Despenser estates. If Clarence wanted to keep more than his duchess’ strict entitlement, in line with plenty of precedents, Gloucester also aimed to end up with all the Neville lands and half the rest, together much more than half. It is to Edward’s limited credit that the settlement he imposed treated them equally. Not too much praise should be heaped on him, however, for the whole quarrel, the aspiration of both dukes and duchesses, and especially the conclusion, affronted contemporary standards – property rights, rights of inheritance, filial respect, brotherly and sisterly etiquette, sexual and marital morality, chivalry and doubtless much else besides. Certainly Crowland, an informed and disinterested observer, was shocked: recognising that the inheritance properly belonged to the countess, whose rights were disregarded, and ‘leaving these wilful men to exercise their will’, he abandoned ‘further inquiry into this hopeless business’.
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Just as shocked was Rows, whose prime loyalty was to neither sister, nor their husbands, but the Countess Anne. ‘Which good lady had in her days great tribulation for her lord’s sake’, he wrote. ‘In her tribulations she was ever to the great pleasure of God full patient, to the great merit of her own soul and example for all others that were vexed with any adversity’.
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If oblique, muted and less than explicit in the
Rows Roll
that he may have presented to Queen Anne, he does not spare her in the
History
that he wrote after her death.
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Invaluable though Clarence’s services were in 1471, they would not have secured him such an enormous recompense – the greatest single act of patronage of any medieval English king – had not his Duchess Isabel been the real heiress. Similarly Edward IV would not have forced Clarence to disgorge so much for Gloucester – and probably, indeed, nothing – had
not the latter married the other heiress Anne. Probably neither had the option of securing all they sought by a grant by their brother the king. Once the whole Warwick inheritance was reserved to them, however, it would have been much easier – technically much less difficult legally – for them each to have received their share by royal grant. All that was required was for Warwick to be attainted as a traitor: no problem there, as he undoubtedly was a traitor. He could be included in the act of attainder that was passed against other traitors of the Lancastrian Readeption. So could his brother John, Marquis Montagu: that would have terminated the rights as next in line of John’s son George Neville, Duke of Bedford. But this would have served only part of the purpose of Clarence and Gloucester and their wives, partly because it would not have given them everything – not, in particular, the lion’s share that properly belonged to the dowager-countess – and partly, as Professor Lander long ago showed, because title by royal grant was less secure.
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Inheritance was forever. Royal grants were subject to regular review and revision by acts of resumption. Had the Neville lands been forfeited and granted to the dukes in their entirety, it would have been at the price that at some later date, when the dukes themselves were out of favour or deceased, the crown might take back from them or their heirs what had been given. In 1473 Clarence had lost his favourite lordship of Tutbury to such an act, Warwick had suffered similarly in 1467, and both dukes had ample experience of Edward’s changes of mind and consequent revisions of his patronage.
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Hence the dukes did not want Warwick and Montagu attainted. Without these attainders, however, the two royal dukes had no right to the Neville lands, since Isabel and Anne had no rights over them. Moreover, some attainders were necessary, since forfeiture was the basis for instance of Gloucester’s title to the lands of the De Veres, earls of Oxford. Ironically the only way in which the royal dukes could have
their way was by authority of parliament, by special acts of parliament, which could be revoked by parliament in future just as easily as by acts of resumption. Ultimately they were.
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The circle of impossibility was duly squared. Parliament was induced to enable the two dukes to divide equally the whole inheritance, whatever the title and at once. First, in July 1474 Parliament accelerated Isabel and Anne’s inheritance of the Montagu/Salisbury, Beauchamp and Despenser lands and the two earldoms by debarring the Countess Anne ‘as if the said Countess were now naturally dead’.
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Despite the blatant injustice to her, there was nobody powerful enough to put her case. The ladies she addressed apparently declined to intervene or did so ineffectively.
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The Neville inheritance, which primarily interested the Gloucesters, had to wait for its act until the next parliamentary session in 1475. So did the act of attainder against the thirteen unfortunates selected for forfeiture out of all the rebels of 1469–71.

The Neville act was much more controversial, because it conferred by inheritance on the dukes lands to which neither they nor their duchesses had any rights and denied the inheritance to those who were entitled to it and who were, moreover, blameless and undeserving of such penalty. The next heir, George Neville, Duke of Bedford, had done nothing wrong himself, but would have lost out anyway had his uncle Warwick and father Montagu been attainted. No problem there, perhaps, except that through his mother he was a great heir of whom some account had to be taken. More seriously, however, he was not the last of the male line of the Nevilles covered by the entail created by Ralph, Earl of Westmorland (d.1425), because that earl had fathered other sons and indeed the youngest still has a male heir extant today in the marquis of Abergavenny. Next in line after George Neville was Richard Lord Latimer, born in 1469, who had powerful protectors in his guardian Thomas Bourchier, Cardinal-Archbishop of Canterbury and the cardinal’s brother
the earl of Essex, treasurer of England, both uncles of the king. It was their pressure surely that compelled even the royal dukes to compromise. Parliament was induced to accept the disqualification of George Neville, but not to extinguish the rights in reversion of the other Neville male heirs after his death. The Neville inheritance was therefore assured to the dukes for as long as George Neville had male heirs living. Gloucester’s strategy thereafter was to buy out such reversionary rights before they arose. He failed.
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If the partition delivered the inheritance to the two couples immediately and made them the wealthiest magnates of their age, it satisfied neither of them. Both had wanted more and both still hoped for more. Certainly Clarence (together presumably with the Duchess Isabel) was aggrieved by what he had lost. Already the father of a legitimate daughter and by the 1475 act of a legitimate son, Clarence had heirs by Isabel’s body and most likely hoped that if his rivals failed to secure a valid dispensation, the whole would revert to his own line on the deaths of Anne and Richard. The acts protected the reversionary rights of each line to the other’s share by forbidding any alienations out of it. Certainly Gloucester (and perhaps the Duchess Anne) received less than he had wanted. They compiled a wish-list of what they would have liked to have. Several times the settlement was adjusted by further acts of Parliament and a wish list of at least nine items was served on King Edward in 1478. By then, Anne’s sister Isabel was dead, probably the result of childbirth, and her brother-in-law Clarence was in prison, shortly to be attainted as a traitor and executed. Ahead of Clarence’s conviction and even his trial, and most probably in return for his support in it, Richard was allowed to consolidate Anne’s lordships in Wales, to adjust other boundaries, to degrade George Neville from the peerage and to wrest the earldom of Salisbury from Clarence for his own son. If nobody benefited more from Clarence’s death than
Gloucester, adjustment to Anne’s inheritance was a crucial part of it.
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Even so, the arrangement as a whole suffered from several flaws. Parliament agreed to debar George Neville, but not any subsequent male heirs. Gloucester had somehow to keep the boy alive and harmless and to buy out any contingent rights, which was to prove too difficult and which he failed to achieve. Duke Richard did secure the degradation of George Neville from his dukedom and indeed the peerage in 1478, and, following the death of his mother Isabel, Marchioness Montagu in 1476, obtained his wardship and marriage by 1480. He also did succeed in preventing the youth from marrying anyone dangerous. Unfortunately, however, George died without male heirs on 4 May 1483, at which point his rights passed to Richard Lord Latimer. All Gloucester’s efforts had failed to wrest Latimer from his guardians and, as a minor, he was not capable of surrendering his heritage to the duke. On 4 May 1483, Anne and Richard’s hold on the Neville lands that underpinned their northern hegemony was reduced to a life estate.
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At that point Anne’s home, heritage, and even the college they were jointly founding at Middleham ceased to be a part of their son’s inheritance.

Secondly, the countess of Warwick declined to die. At least the Gloucesters provided for her, but that may have been because potentially she was too dangerous and could yet overthrow the 1474–5 settlement. She was confined in the North ‘with the greatest strictness’, according to Rows soon after 1483, at her daughter Anne’s direction; a few years later it was Richard, Rows thought, who had ‘locked her up for the duration of his life’.
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She does not occur in any of our sources for the whole decade 1473–83. Was the Duchess Anne afraid that her mother, whose fiftieth birthday fell only in 1476, might remarry like many other noble dowagers to someone able to insist on livery of at least some of her inheritance and jointure? Actually the
countess, who survived until 1492, outlived both her daughters and both her sons-in-law and, following another dynastic revolution, was able in 1487, with parliamentary support, to disinherit the next generation of her grandchildren.
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Again the unfortunate lady had no choice.

Thirdly, and crucially for Anne Neville, it depended on the legality of her marriage to Richard. It was never valid.