Anne Neville (17 page)

Since there is no accurate record of Edward’s birth, we know nothing of the rejoicing, the baptism, or the churching that followed – surely the highest points of his mother’s short married life? That he was called Edward suggests forcibly that his godfather was the king, but that cannot be confirmed either. Presumably Anne was responsible for Edward’s upbringing just as the Countess Anne had been for her own. As was customary at this time, the duchess did not suckle her son herself, but deputed that chore instead to a woman who had recently had her own baby. His wet-nurse was Isabel Burgh, the wife of Henry Burgh, who was rewarded with annuities by the duke.
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Perhaps in succession, by 1480 Edward was in the care of Anne Idley, ‘mistress of our [ducal] nursery’.
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Mistress Idley was the widow of Peter Idley, an Oxfordshire squire and the educationalist who wrote
Instructions to his Son
. She may therefore have been known to have an interest in education.
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Our only evidence suggests that Anne was pregnant only once – or had only one live birth – during approximately twelve years of marriage. Probably she had to wait five years, until 1477, to produce a son. That was all. One son was
enough, provided Edward of Middleham survived. Anne had performed the minimum to be expected of a wife, a duchess or a queen. But she never had another baby. Perhaps it was already likely by 1483, when she was only twenty-seven, that there would be no more children. History repeated itself: her mother’s history. Yet Anne and Richard continued to try. Under 1485, Crowland reports that Richard then spurned his consort’s bed.
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The implication is that hitherto he had continued resorting to it and was known to have done so. Crowland was in a position to know. Lords and ladies, let alone kings and queens, did not normally share the same bed, nor the same chamber, nor even same household. Sharing the same bed was therefore a conscious decision made solely for the purposes of procreation – for sexual intercourse. It was also a public decision, obvious to the chamber staff of both households. The king could be observed commuting. Highly visible movement of the king from his apartments to those of the queen was required for intercourse to take place. Christmas 1484, like Christmas 1483, was celebrated at Westminster, where Crowland worked. Crowland knew the location of the apartments of both the king and the queen:
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he or his colleagues were well-placed to monitor the king’s sleeping (and therefore) marital sexual arrangements. We can therefore be confident that King Richard and Queen Anne continued trying to reproduce until 1485.

Edward of Middleham was an asset whether he was earl of Salisbury or prince of Wales. Had he survived, he was destined first to be duke of Gloucester and latterly King Edward VI, to continue the family line, and immeasurably to strengthen his parents’ hold on and management of their estates. Whether he was seven years old in 1483 or older, it was not too early for his parents to be thinking of his marriage. Sir Thomas More reports agreement in principle for his marriage to a daughter of Henry, Duke of Buckingham (d.1483), the wealthiest other
magnate of the blood royal:
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although within the prohibited degrees and no heiress, she was certainly eligible. As More tells it, moreover, it was a cement to the alliance that made Richard king. His account is unsubstantiated and the match anyway was soon outdated by Buckingham’s rebellion. The boy’s marriage became instead a factor in his father’s diplomacy.

RICHARD’S BASTARDS

The relationship of Anne and Richard was certainly a sexual one. However, it was not exclusive, for Edward was not Richard’s only child. He had at least two bastards and perhaps three. Whilst this is well known, Richard’s modern supporters have argued that they were oats sown in the bachelor years before his marriage and are not evidence of infidelity to Anne.
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That is a rather anachronistic line to take, applying modern morality (but not any longer, perhaps, contemporary morality) to a past period that had different standards. Women, married or unmarried, were expected to be chaste. For men, that was not so. There was a double standard. Numerous aristocrats had bastards, who were often publicly acknowledged: John of Gaunt’s Beaufort by-blows, the bastards of Clarence and Fauconberg, are well known. There was not the stigma attached to it of later ages. Whilst one of Richard’s bastards may predate his marriage, another probably did not. Anne, doubtless often separated from her husband, was not his sole source of sexual satisfaction.

Peter Hammond carefully examined the attribution of one Richard of Eastwell in Kent and concluded, almost certainly correctly, that Duke Richard was not his father.
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Once king, however, Richard did acknowledge two bastards, a daughter Katherine Plantagenet and a son – ‘the lord bastard’ of his signet letter book – John of Pontefract, whom Richard knighted at York in 1483.
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On 28 February 1484 Richard negotiated Katherine’s betrothal as second wife to the thirty-year-old widower William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon. She had died by 1487. Katherine must indeed have been ‘in her young age’ as one pedigree puts it, since her father King Richard was only thirty. There were clauses in the contract requiring the bridegroom to settle jointure on her and her father to settle lands on them jointly. The wedding was to be concluded by Michaelmas (29 September), before which the earl was to make a settlement on them both jointly and Richard was to do likewise.
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They were married before May, but not apparently by 3 April 1484, when Richard had indeed granted them revenues worth £152 a year.
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Presumably lands could only be conveyed to Katherine after she had reached the female age of majority – fourteen. If that deduction is correct and Katherine was already fourteen in 1484, she was the product of a bachelor liaison dating from before Richard’s wooing, betrothal or marriage to Anne. Most probably Katherine was born before Richard went into exile in 1470 – perhaps even some years earlier when Richard was in his mid-teens. Katherine is tangible evidence that Richard commenced his sex life early, though not unduly precociously. Tantalisingly, there is another Katherine, to whom the duke was paying an annuity of £5 from his East Anglian estates in 1476, but granted at least one financial year earlier.
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She was Katherine Haute, presumably the Katherine wife of Jacques Haute, a kinsman of the queen, whose relationship with Richard could antedate her marriage. Such an annuity indicates services separate from any husband which, with the coincidence of forename, prompted Rosemary Horrox in 1989 and the present author, for lack of alternatives, to suggest that Katherine Haute may be the mistress by whom Richard had Katherine Plantagenet.
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The name intrigues, since it implies a particularly close connection between Richard and the family of Edward’s Wydeville queen during Edward IV’s first reign.
The marriage indicates simultaneously Richard’s awareness of his daughter, that he cared enough for her to provide for her, and her political utility to him as king.

The other known bastard, John of Pontefract, was presumably born at Pontefract, perhaps to a local girl. John’s birth could also antedate Richard’s exile in 1470. Assuming that he was born where he was conceived, he could have resulted from a liaison in 1465–8 when Richard was in the household of Warwick, who as chief steward of the duchy of Lancaster in the North and constable of Pontefract had the use of the great castle. Apart from Richard’s youth, this appears unlikely, both because Warwick can never be shown to have been at Pontefract and because so early a birth would have made John a teenager mature enough in Richard’s reign to have been used much more extensively than he was. Only after Prince Edward’s demise does John crop up in records: as ‘the Lord Bastard’ escorted to and from Calais by Robert Brackenbury late in 1484. In March 1485, just a few days before Queen Anne’s death, a payment was made for his clothing and he was appointed titular captain of Calais.
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Perhaps Anne would have objected to such elevation earlier? From 1471 Duke Richard had also been chief steward of the northern duchy and constable of Pontefract and certainly visited it. He was there on 27 April 1473, moved there from Middleham in October, and was there between 1 March and 7 May 1474.
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Possibly significantly, he was at Pontefract on 1 March 1474 when he granted his beloved gentlewoman Alice Burgh (
dilecte nobis Alesie Burgh generose sibi
) ‘for certain special causes and considerations’ an annuity for life from Middleham: a highly unusual event, especially as the sum, £20, was also substantial.
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Alice was a lady most probably attendant on the Duchess Anne – a common source of mistresses for princes! Most likely she was a cadet of the Burghs of Knaresborough, a modest family of Yorkshire gentry. Was Alice Burgh, perhaps, Richard’s mistress
and the mother of John of Pontefract? The annuity was still due from Middleham in January 1485, when she was also drawing another 20 marks from Warwickshire,
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evidence of further services that Richard evidently valued highly. Henry Burgh and his wife Isabel, surely kinswomen, were also feed (20 marks) from Middleham during Richard’s reign. Isabel had been nurse to Prince Edward.
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Was she the sister-in-law of Alice, perhaps selected because of Alice? There are too many occurrences of both forenames in grants and payments for Isabel and Alice to be identical. This is regrettable: how sad that the titillating possibility that Richard’s mistress was wet-nurse to his legitimate son cannot apply. That John of Pontefract first appears in July 1483 at York is evidence perhaps that he was brought up in Yorkshire. However that may be, it appears much more likely that John was the product of a sexual liaison
after
Richard’s marriage: evidence not necessarily that Richard was dissatisfied with his wife, sexually or otherwise, but that their relationship was not exclusive.

We know of Richard’s bastards because he acknowledged them when he became king – more than that, he treated them with distinction, finding Katherine an earl for a husband and raising John to princely office. Whilst enticed by grants worth 1,000 marks a year (£666 13s 4d),
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Huntingdon clearly did not feel disparaged by the bend sinister, but saw instead advantages, influence and favour at court in consequence. Richard also was not ashamed of his bastards. We cannot tell whether he was as blatant before his accession – could he have been so damnatory about his brother’s peccadilloes had his own been known? – but if he was, one might expect it to be uncomfortable or even painful for his spouse. Here, however, our twenty-first-century reactions may mislead. Anne had of course to accept any by-blows who antedated their own relationship. We cannot know when she first learnt of their existence – at the latest when her husband the king brought
John and Katherine into public view. Anne’s age observed a double standard, which permitted, condoned and perhaps even expected husbands to take sexual solace outside marriage, which wives were denied. Richard’s brother Edward IV was a notorious practitioner.

If many magnates had bastards,
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most of them were ungenerously treated. They were, after all, illegitimate. Anne’s father Warwick had been exceptional in marrying his bastard daughter to the heir of a substantial gentry family, and in providing an attractive endowment.
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That, surely, was the most that Katherine and John could have expected, had their father not become king. His accession was a boon that they did not live long enough to enjoy.

MARRIED LIFE

John Rows states that Richard and Anne were ‘unhappily married’, but these two words cannot be accepted as a definitive verdict on their married life. Not only is his comment over-brief, but he was ill placed to witness almost all of it and was writing in the later Latin version,
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after Anne’s final months that did deserve the title unhappy, her death, and possibly Richard’s own fall. As consort of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Anne should have accompanied him to public functions – ceremonial state occasions – and presided over his household. In reality she cannot be shown to have done any of these things. She was not mentioned in the heraldic accounts of the receptions of the Burgundian Lord Gruthuyse at Windsor and Westminster in 1472, at the creation of the queen’s son as marquis of Dorset at Westminster in 1475, at the reburial of the king’s father at Fotheringhay in 1476, at the marriage of the king’s second son at Westminster in 1478, or at the funeral of Princess Mary at Windsor in 1482, all but the last attended by her husband. Heralds were not much interested in ladies, but
surely she should have been there? Actually it is impossible to write a satisfactory account of Anne’s married life.

Scarcely any relevant records survive between 1472 – or whenever matrimony commenced – and 1483. In some respects, this can be no great surprise. This was after all an era in which a married lady’s property was regarded as her husband’s and in which actions recorded as his may actually have been hers. That ‘married women were often regarded as infants before the law’ means ‘that wives are often invisible in written records’.
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By remarrying, Anne had surrendered the momentary autonomy that she had so briefly enjoyed as
femme sole
. We have already seen how little is known of the thirty-five-year marriage of her mother the Countess Anne. Moreover, a wife’s sphere, even a wife who was a duchess, was domestic and not the stuff of public records, which do reveal some political actions of the duke. Not that even Richard occurs in such sources as frequently as many other magnates and princes did. Scarcely any private records survive of their affairs: a mere handful of accounts of receivers of estates in eastern England, one year’s worth of accounts of one of their northern lordships, a cartulary of title deeds, a dozen or so miscellaneous deeds preserved by the recipients, and the impression of the ducal couple on other record-keeping bodies, such as the town council and Corpus Christi Guild at York, Durham cathedral priory, and bishops’ registers. In total, it is not an impressive archive. Moreover, it relates almost entirely to Richard, scarcely at all to Anne.