Anne Neville (5 page)

Yet inheritance was not merely a matter of accumulation – of castles, lordships, wealth, honours, titles and progeny. There was a genetic inheritance too. No doubt, as always, there were family likenesses. Anne’s genetic inheritance may perhaps have been a negative one. It makes sense to argue that inheritances accrued because families ran out, that heiresses then occurred only when their families failed to produce or successfully to bring up sons, and that families that repeatedly married their sons to heiresses rendered themselves more liable to inherit infertility, sterility or susceptibility to disease, and hence to produce no heirs themselves. Such an argument must be mere speculation uninformed by the medical lore or genetic know-how that we can bring to the subject today, but some of the circumstances are suggestive. Alarmingly fertile though the Nevilles had been, several of the branches were to
terminate only in daughters. Salisbury’s brother William Lord Fauconberg left three daughters. Salisbury’s three married sons produced numerous daughters, but not a single son that they raised to maturity.
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Whereas Anne Beauchamp, as we shall see, bore only two daughters, these daughters had only five children between them, three of whom died young. Anne Neville herself produced only a single son who died before the age of ten. Gynaecological misfortune, perhaps a genetic inheritance, shaped Anne Neville’s whole life and came ultimately (and tragically) to overshadow it.

The marriage of Anne’s parents, in the meantime, took years to become a reality. Richard, after all, was only seven years old, his bride Anne Beauchamp being already ten. Whilst they grew up, Warwick’s three brothers reached maturity – the youngest, George, becoming a bishop – and his sisters were married off to the earl of Arundel, Lord Stanley and Lord FitzHugh. Anne’s four sisters had peers for husbands. Moreover, the older generation survived – in the 1450s Salisbury had four brothers and five brothers-in-law in the House of Lords.
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Almost everyone who was anyone was related to the Nevilles. Anne Neville had a host of uncles, aunts, even great-uncles and great-aunts. The Wars of the Roses, when they happened, were genuinely a family affair. Kinship, which often entails disputed inheritances, can divide as well as unite. Different branches of this vast family network developed contradictory interests and antagonisms. It was to slay two brothers-in-law that the Neville earls were to fight at St Albans in 1455;
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other kin followed at the battles of Northampton in 1460 and Towton in 1461.

It was crucial that Anne Neville was born not to rank and wealth, but to ancient lineage, ancient contacts and ancient loyalties. The Beauchamps, Despensers, Montagus and Nevilles had held their titles and their estates by right for so long that they had come to be seen as natural, permanent and enduring. Such long-established families were stable, capable of
surmounting temporary minorities and forfeitures, and were extremely difficult to uproot.‘New men’ raised from the dust by royal grants found that it took time to make more of their estates than the chance and temporary agglomeration of properties. They needed strength of character, attractive personalities and material inducements to secure the service they desired and which ancient families could take for granted, to construct the connections that were required in politics, and to ensure that these held firm at the first shock. That took decades, even generations. Long-standing inheritances, which had endured over time, conferred all these advantages on each successive tenant for life. Nobody doubted their right to exist and their natural associates – the tenants on their estates, retainers and officers – expected them not only to remain, but their heirs to continue after them. Such dependants had an interest in the inheritance, in the family and in its traditions. All the components of the Warwick inheritance were ancient, by medieval standards, and possessed this character. They had traditions remembered by lords and servants alike, whose memory was cherished and perpetuated by such custodians as the monks of Tewkesbury Abbey, canons of Coverham Abbey and the Warwick chantry priest John Rows, and as imparted to successive lords and their offspring, certainly to Anne Neville. The interest of the lords was to foster and ideally develop these traditions, which indeed Duke Richard and Anne Neville did. Anne Neville inevitably was imbued with these traditions, if not always at first hand.

Anne Neville was born at Warwick, the principal seat of the earls of Warwick, where there remains today one of the most imposing seigniorial castles to survive and which was still inhabited by its lord until very recently. Apart from its castle, the modest Midlands town was dominated by the religious foundations of successive earls, who had also enhanced it with privileges, walls, parks and other improvements. The
earls of Warwick proudly traced themselves back beyond the Norman Beaumonts to the legendary past. The first earl, it was believed, had been a giant, Guy of Warwick, a hero of medieval romances, whose cave at Guyscliff to the north of Warwick still survived. The Beauchamps’ respect for the legend was displayed by nomenclature – there was one Earl Guy of Warwick (d.1315) and a grandson was scheduled to be a second – and there was a huge Guy’s Tower at Warwick Castle. Guy’s supposed arms were quartered with their own and were to be quartered indeed with those of Anne, her sister, their husbands and Anne’s sons. It was in the Warwick tradition that Anne Neville’s maternal grandfather Earl Richard Beauchamp was credited with an ambitious, extremely expensive and perhaps technologically impractical plan to transform Warwick economically by making the River Avon navigable from Tewkesbury up to Warwick. In 1423, when he had feared that the inheritance would terminate with his daughters and he yearned for heirs male to continue his line, the Beauchamp name and title, Earl Richard Beauchamp had remarried to the much younger Isabel Despenser. He had also rebuilt Guyscliff Chapel, with its giant statue of Guy hewn from the rock, and had endowed a two-priest chantry to serve it. The chapel was only finished in 1454. Anne Neville’s father, the kingmaker, supposedly planned to augment it with an almshouse of noble poverty for retired retainers like that which he had despoiled at St Cross, Winchester.
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So attests John Rows, the graduate who was cantarist there for almost sixty years until his death in 1491. Rows made himself into the historian both of Warwick and its earls so successfully that he superseded whatever it was that had previously reminded the family of their heritage and which, regrettably, has been lost. Earl Richard Beauchamp bound his son Henry, if promoted, to retain the Warwick title, which indeed he did when created in 1446 duke of Warwick. Moreover, through another line, the Thonys,
the Beauchamps were heirs of the legendary Swan Knight, another hero of medieval romance, whose golden cup was kept at Warwick Castle and shown to visitors. From the fourteenth century, the Beauchamps made the ancient college of St Mary Warwick into their mausoleum. It was there that Earl Thomas I (d.1369), Earl Thomas II (d.1401) and Earl Richard (d.1439) were buried. They rebuilt the choir. In his will Earl Richard Beauchamp commissioned for himself the Beauchamp Chapel, one of the finest – if not the finest – chantry chapels of medieval England, which was under construction throughout Anne Neville’s childhood and was consecrated only in 1472. From 1459, when Earl Richard Beauchamp’s monument was completed,
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Anne could identify her parents by their coats of arms amongst the weepers ranged alongside the effigy of her grandfather. Doubtless she did.

En route from Warwick to Cardiff lay Tewkesbury Abbey, the mausoleum of Anne’s De Clare and Despenser forebears, where her grandmother Isabel Despenser lay buried and where Anne’s own sister still rests. The Benedictine monks of this greatest religious house still in lay patronage regarded themselves as repositories of their founders’ ancestral renown. The eastern apse had been refashioned by her Despenser ancestors, who were all depicted in its early-fourteenth-century glass, and a semi-circle of chantries commemorated the founders from the legendary origins down to Anne’s own grandmother the Countess Isabel (d.1439). Most of them, including Anne’s father, are depicted in miniature in the
Founder’s Chronicle
.
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Presumably the same role was performed by the Augustinian canons of Bisham Priory, the mausoleum of the Montagus, in the earlier versions of the Salisbury Roll.
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A younger lineage, undoubtedly, the Montagus nevertheless had their hero – William Montagu, the 1st Earl of Salisbury (d.1344) – and a century of distinction, to which Anne’s maternal grandmother the Countess Alice was the last heir.

Although he was not to inherit until 1460, the kingmaker was acutely conscious of his own lineage, the Nevilles, who, as we have seen, traced themselves back to the Norman Conquest and indeed beyond. Their family genealogy, originating at the abbey of St Mary at York and continued at Coverham, as revised for Earl Ralph and updated c.1443, celebrated their roots in Richmondshire, where Middleham lay, and their military renown.
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Some versions stressed the direct line and others all the siblings, male, female and prematurely deceased, in each generation. Surviving in multiple copies and perhaps hung up on the wall, the genealogy indicated to members of the family, such as Anne Neville, exactly where they fitted and everything to which they were heirs. The Nevilles were everywhere in the North. As Anne Neville was to find, Neville’s Cross marked a notable victory over the Scots in 1346, in Durham Cathedral there was both a Neville chantry and a Neville screen, and at York her father and uncle were to found St William’s College. Not only was she to feel at home in the North, but northerners regarded Anne Neville – in turn the Lady Anne, the Duchess Anne and Queen Anne – as very much their own.
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BIRTH
1456

A daughter like Anne Neville benefited from her complex pedigree and luxuriant traditions, but she was decidedly not their intended culmination. A daughter who was an heiress, still more a daughter who was a co-heiress, threatened to bring everything to the end – the family name, its titles, its honours, its traditions, its patronage and its connections. The future would be shaped by a husband who knew of none of these, perhaps cared little for them, and had his own counterparts to each to protect.

Joy at Anne Neville’s birth (and her mother’s survival) was thus accompanied by apprehension for the future. For Anne
Neville herself, of course, her birth was her beginning. What that meant – how she was greeted and how her significance evolved – is also deserving of attention.

Formally married in 1436, Richard Neville junior and Anne Beauchamp needed time to grow up. Even allowing for that, however, their marriage was slow to bear its intended fruits: inheritance, children and heirs. Richard Neville senior (henceforth Salisbury) lived to be sixty: still vigorous and effective, his life ended violently. His countess Alice Montagu, our heroine’s grandmother, survived another two years. Anne Neville’s maternal grandparents died sooner, both in 1439. Her only maternal uncle Duke Henry died in 1446, his spouse Duchess Cecily in 1451, and their only baby daughter in 1449, all before Anne Neville was born. The duke’s infant left five aunts to divide her Beauchamp and Despenser inheritances. Had her father Duke Henry not come of age, they would have done, but because the duke had achieved his majority his only whole sister Anne Beauchamp took precedence over his four half-sisters: there was a common-law rule that favoured the whole blood over the half blood. As we have seen, the unforeseen beneficiaries were Duke Henry’s youngest sister and his daughter’s youngest aunt Anne Beauchamp and her husband Richard Neville, who became earl and countess of Warwick and secured the whole of both inheritances rather than merely the quarter and half shares that were all that could have been predicted. Anne Beauchamp’s half-sisters and nephew objected and resisted, ultimately without avail.
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For the heir of Richard and Alice, always heir presumptive to the Neville and Montagu lands and the earldom of Salisbury, an even greater future beckoned. Moreover, it began at once. In 1449, at the age of twenty, the younger Richard Neville became earl of Warwick. But for the Wars of the Roses and Salisbury’s violent death in 1460, Richard Neville junior might have remained an heir in waiting, overshadowed by his father, for much longer than
the thirteen years till his mother died. Instead he was able to become a great man at once, able to make a major impression on his age and indeed overshadow his own father Salisbury, without waiting to enter his parents’ shoes. It was not a hopeful heir, but the greatest of earls who begat Anne Neville.

As yet, however, there was no heir: no offspring of either sex. By 1449 the new earl and countess had been married for thirteen years. The absence of heirs is surprising. Without pretending the union of Richard and Anne to have been a love match – how could it have been, given their youth and differences in ages? – the Nevilles at least must have intended children to result. Child grooms and brides did not live together or indeed consummate their marriages until they were considered old enough. Even by contemporary standards, 1436 – when Richard was aged seven and Anne ten – was too soon. Margaret Beaufort was twelve, and bore the future Henry VII when only fourteen. Girls came of age at fourteen, which Anne reached in 1440 when Richard, at eleven, was still too young. After the death of both her parents in 1439, if not earlier, Anne was surely living with her in-laws. We have no evidence when Richard and Anne first slept together, first lived together, or first had their own establishment, but it was surely by 1446, when Duke Henry died, Anne being at the relatively advanced age of twenty and Richard aged seventeen, still more so by 1449 when they became earl and countess of Warwick, she being twenty-three years old by then and he aged twenty. And yet it was only on 5 September 1451 that their daughter Isabel was born
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– their eldest child so far as we can be aware. Presumably she was conceived at Christmas 1450 or New Year 1451. Given the committed interest in such events both of John Rows and the Tewkesbury Abbey chronicler, historians respectively of the Beauchamps and the Despensers, we should surely expect to know of any earlier daughter to be born and certainly of any son on whom the future of both houses
depended, if not necessarily of miscarriages and still-births. Richard and Anne must have been trying to beget children. Twenty-five was an advanced age for Anne to bear her first child. Perhaps the Countess Anne came to puberty very late. Perhaps she had miscarriages of which we are ignorant. That certainly is indicated by the papal dispensation she secured in 1453. Because ‘she is weakened by former illnesses and the birth of children’, she was allowed when pregnant to eat eggs and meat in Lent.
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Did she also have difficulty in conceiving? The second daughter and future queen Anne Neville was born when Anne was thirty, which was an early age for a lady to cease child-bearing. Women who experience puberty late today have early menopauses. We can presume, once again, that Warwick himself was anxious to breed a son and was engaging in the requisite intercourse with his countess. Nothing more materialised. If infertility could have been his fault, his bastard daughter Margaret is evidence of a sex drive that the Countess Anne alone did not satisfy, for he was married throughout his fertile life. Anne Neville’s genealogical inheritance included a gene bank that, it appears, may well have included the gynae-cological problems which, perhaps, explain or contributed to her own disappointing record of procreation.