Anne Neville (14 page)

There is no need to inject sentiment as an ingredient into Richard’s actions. He was a royal duke and he wanted the estates, wealth, and power within England to go with it. Not for him to be a pawn in King Edward’s foreign policy! Most of the lands that he had been given in the 1460s had been returned to their original holders or resumed by the crown. That was why he ceased to operate in Lancashire and Cheshire. The chief offices in Wales received in 1469 now reverted to the 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Edward IV gave Gloucester everything that he had to bestow arising from the forfeitures of the renegade Yorkists and the Lancastrians who had been defeated in
1471. Thus Richard accrued Warwick’s Neville estates in the North – Middleham, Sheriff Hutton and Penrith – to which neither Isabel nor Anne had ever been entitled: this was at the expense of their cousin George Neville, Duke of Bedford, the son of Warwick’s late brother John, Marquis Montagu. Richard was also granted all those lands in eastern England that had belonged to the earl of Oxford and a clutch of county gentry,
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which he had little use for and most of which he later renounced. There was little to recover from the returning Lancastrians, who had been attainted once already. Many of their possessions were restored to Clarence, who had held them before, whilst the possessions of the traitor duke of Exeter reverted to his estranged Duchess Anne, eldest sister to the king and to the royal dukes. If all Richard’s grants were added altogether – and assuming that Richard could overcome complications in the titles to certain estates – these grants could have brought Richard somewhat more than the qualifying income for a duke: 2,000 marks or £1,666 13s 4d. Altogether they fell well short of the revenues of the greatest magnates, such as Clarence and Buckingham. To match them – and Richard definitely wanted to match them – the duke needed to marry well within England. No potential partner offered more than the Princess Anne. From the start of his courtship, therefore, her inheritance was his key objective. Richard, moreover, was not prepared to wait for Anne’s mother to die. He wanted it all now. And that meant that Richard was not interested solely in securing Anne’s rights, largely prospective, but also in dispossessing Anne’s mother, his intended mother-in-law the countess of Warwick.

Such an interpretation has appeared too cynical for some supporters of Richard III, who would much prefer a love match. It was ‘a delicate and honourable consideration for her feelings’ that prompted Richard to remove Anne from sanctuary, wrote Miss Wigram long ago, rather than his desire for her inheritance.
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Unfortunately, this is one point about which we can be certain. John Paston II reported that Clarence conceded her person, but not her livelihood:
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Richard, however, declined. He insisted on the inheritance also. If this appears heartless and calculating to modern eyes, bestowing women in marriage with property was commonplace in late medieval arranged marriages. Their endowment frequently determined the choice.‘Love matches sometimes occurred’, wrote Jennifer Ward, ‘but were frowned on by noble society’.
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It is surprising how quickly Anne progressed from her first husband to her second. If Anne’s first marriage was definitely not a love match – she cannot have known the bridegroom before her betrothal – yet Edward of Lancaster was her husband and, however briefly, he had shared her bed. Her mourning was brief indeed. Within eight months at most, Anne had adjusted to her loss – to all her losses, her father included – and had pledged herself to another. Whilst it is not difficult to think of other young widows who moved on to further consorts with such precipitate haste, it was not what was expected – not seemly conduct – even by fifteenth-century standards. Is not a cynical and calculating materialism on Anne’s part implied here? Was she one of those girls who succumbed to the material or sexual temptations that the conduct books warned against? Or was Anne merely an unstable and/or emotional and/or impressionable fifteen-year-old on whom Duke Richard had imposed his stamp? We cannot be sure.

One must moreover deplore the immorality of the match. A custodial sentence and registration as a sexual offender would result today for any man like Duke Richard guilty of sexual intercourse with a fifteen-year-old girl, but fifteenth-century standards permitted such relations and indeed regarded them as normal and legitimate. In another way, however, this match did offend contemporary values. Whilst always aware that Anne and Richard were related within the prohibited degrees,
historians have downplayed the significance. The medieval Catholic Church forbade marriages between kinsfolk who were much more distantly related than those that exercise us today. Often we are scarcely conscious of our first cousins, let alone aware who are our second cousins and more remote relatives, and, in this age of divorce, we are generally unfazed by the coupling of in-laws and even step-siblings unconnected by any blood ties. Such unions are not infrequent in soap operas, feature films, and real life. Incest, for us, involves parents and children, siblings, uncles and nieces. Hence we regard Clarence’s need for a dispensation to marry his first cousin once removed as a curious technicality. Even less objectionable, to us, was Anne’s first match, when neither party was closer than four generations from their common ancestor John of Gaunt (d.1399). A dispensation had to be obtained for that too. We have seen that Warwick would allow neither of his daughters to marry until impediments had been removed. The spiritual kinship created by Clarence’s mother as Isabel’s godmother appears scarcely conceivable to us. Dispensation, from our angle, was simply a necessary mechanism to remove technical obstacles to what ought to have been perfectly acceptable. That, however, was not how fifteenth-century people regarded the issue. For them, marriage within the prohibited degrees was incestuous and therefore rightly prohibited. It was because they were related in the third and fourth degrees that the wedding of Edward IV’s second son in 1478 was barred at the door of the chapel royal at Westminster, an impediment that was removed very publicly when the dean produced the requisite papal bull.
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Breaches were sinful even if accidental. To contract such matches deliberately and in full consciousness of the offence was a heinous sin and potentially damnable. Such unions ran the risk of being compulsorily dissolved and any consequent children bastardised. Bastards were excluded from inheritance.
The Calendar of Papal Letters
contains many instances of
partners who discovered the defect after their marriages and were so troubled by conscience that they revealed their offence to the papacy and secured papal authority to remain married and for their offspring to remain legitimate. Often, admittedly, impediments were set aside and illicit matches were confirmed retrospectively, but dispensations were sometimes refused, even for princes.
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Warwick had had great difficulty in securing the necessary dispensation for Clarence and Isabel. Dispensations could not be presumed.

Gloucester and Anne were already related in the same degrees as their siblings Clarence and Isabel, to which a further distant tie was created by Anne’s first wedding to a distant cousin of them both, and they were yet more closely connected by the marriage of Richard’s brother to Anne’s sister. The impediments multiplied. Anne and Richard were brother-in-law and sister-in-law, related in the first degree of affinity. In fifteenth-century parlance, Richard was Anne’s brother and Anne was Richard’s sister. This was not just a matter of words: to their contemporaries, that was their relationship. Any sexual encounter between them, in or out of wedlock, was incestuous, sinful, prohibited, deeply shocking and probably incapable of being dispensed. Neither Richard nor Anne can have been ignorant of this. Each should have rebuffed anything beyond fraternal friendship. To persist nevertheless, to pledge to each other and to resolve on marriage, required both parties to reject contemporary standards of morality – to flout what others thought – and to override the law in pursuit of their own wishes. Whether Anne was motivated by sexual attraction, ambition or merely by a desire to escape from an impossible situation, she was, by contemporary standards, quite wrong. She ran the risk, moreover, that her marriage would be dissolved after the event, that she would be left in limbo – unmarried, property-less, unmarriageable – and her children illegitimate. However difficult her situation may have appeared, it cannot,
on current evidence, have been sufficiently impossible to justify such a step. As for Richard, desperation cannot be pleaded in extenuation. That they appear to have escaped the penalties for a dozen years does not alter the case.

Past historians have had good reason to deduce that Anne and Richard had no papal dispensation to validate their marriage. Long ago, C.A.J. Armstrong twice searched the Vatican archives in search of one, unsuccessfully. In his day, the registers of the papal penitentiary were not accessible. Now that they are, it has been discovered that a dispensation was actually applied for on behalf of Richard, of Lincoln diocese wherein he had been born (at Fotheringhay), and Anne Neville, woman (
mulier
) of the diocese of York. This was to dispense impediments in the third and fourth degrees of affinity. His petition was approved by the papal penitentiary on 22 April 1472. A declaratory letter was also issued,
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which doubtless stilled the objections of Cardinal Bourchier, the officiating clergyman, or any other cleric present at their subsequent wedding. Richard and Anne were related in the same degrees as their siblings Clarence and Isabel in 1469: that is, in the second degree (as first cousins) and twice in the fourth degree of consanguinity. As Richard, like Anne’s first husband Edward of Lancaster, was a great-grandson of John of Gaunt, there was yet another fourth degree of consanguinity to be dispensed. Finally, of course, Richard and Anne were brother-in-law and sister-in-law, related in the first degree of affinity. What they needed was a dispensation that covered impediments in the first degree of affinity, another in the second and three in the fourth degrees of consanguinity. This one, which dispensed only in the third and fourth degrees of affinity, not consanguinity, was therefore insufficient to validate their marriage. If the clerks of the penitentiary routinely dispensed impediments in the third and fourth degree, the second degree of consanguinity (as Clarence had found) was more serious, and affinity in the first degree
was yet more so. Such a dispensation was more difficult to obtain. It would certainly take more lobbying, more time, and might indeed prove unattainable. Rejection was predictable.

The 1472 dispensation was therefore inadequate, as Richard must have perceived. At no point can he have been unaware of the consanguinity that linked Anne to him, that they were first cousins once removed and siblings-in-law. Another, more wide-ranging dispensation was needed before Anne and Richard could contract a valid union, but they did not wait for that. That they decided to marry in defiance of canon law is astonishing. To marry before securing a valid dispensation – and, indeed, in full knowledge of it – was a further sin to be absolved. Both partners had to be eligible to marry one another and to make a valid marriage, even though by 16 February 1472 (at the latest) they had evidently pledged themselves to one another, all that in normal circumstances was required to make an unbreakable contract in this period. Even Clarence was obliged to accept that the marriage would happen – John Paston’s phrasing, however, indicates that it had not happened yet.

The King entreats my Lord of Clarence for my Lord of Gloucester, and (as it is said) he answers that he may well have my lady his sister-in-law, but they shall divide no livelihood, as he says.
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Even though Clarence thought of both parties as his siblings, the morality, so it appears, was at this stage not his concern. Whilst the dukes themselves debated in council, they represented Isabel and Anne and not necessarily purely formally. At this stage Clarence fought to keep all the property, but found himself opposed by the king. Posing improbably as arbiter and ‘loving brother’, so Crowland ironically reports,
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Edward imposed a settlement that was much to Clarence’s
disadvantage. At this royal council it was determined that the whole Warwick inheritance was to be divided, not just the lion’s share in tail general that Clarence was occupying.

It was the best possible outcome for Anne. Duke Richard may have been her father’s preferred choice for her during the 1460s. She shared the vicissitudes in Warwick’s fortunes, into forfeiture and exile and then to next in the Lancastrian line of succession, and ‘after his decease’, as Rows put it, ‘marvellously conveyed by all the corners and parts of the wheel of fortune’. Widowed, childless, ruined, dependent on her foes and with only the most unpromising prospects, yet was ‘she exalted again’ to be duchess of Gloucester and subsequently (as Rows was aware) ‘higher than ever she was to the most high throne and honour’.
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It was an amazing transformation. Certainly Anne had made the right choice for herself.

PARTITION OF THE WARWICK INHERITANCE

The principles of the partition were already agreed. Evidently Gloucester was to have everything in the North and Clarence the lands in the Midlands and the South – he was created earl of Warwick and Salisbury. By deduction, Gloucester was to have the marcher lordships in Wales. The division was convenient, since Gloucester already occupied the Neville castles in the North, where the king had allocated him military responsibilities, and Clarence those in the West Midlands. Historians have usually presumed that this was the dukes’ preference, properties in Wales, the South, and elsewhere being little more than makeweights. Actually, however, the West Midlands had been more obviously home to the Duchess Isabel, the eldest sister who was entitled to have the first pick, whilst Anne’s youth, after Warwick came into his father’s Neville inheritance, may have been spent mainly in the North. The partition of the Warwick inheritance may therefore have conformed to the
preference of the two ladies, who could indeed have had some input in the result. Surely Isabel did.