Anne Neville (22 page)

Prince Edward’s death was a personal grief, but it was much more than that. It left his parents childless, and this was in particular worrying for King Richard. We may readily believe that he ‘began to complain unto many noble men of his wife’s unfruitfulness, for that she brought him forth no children, and that chiefly did he lament with Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York’, who supposedly repeated the story with his own riders. Rotherham is an unexpected confidant, since he was the chancellor who allegedly surrendered the great
seal to Edward IV’s widow and whom Gloucester therefore superseded. Since the archbishop died in 1500, several years before our source the historian Polydore Vergil came to England, this anecdote reached Vergil at best at second-hand from Rotherham’s audience.
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Politically the prince’s death was especially important because it left Richard bereft of an heir. He desperately needed one. The future of his dynasty required that retainers and subjects had the security that more than his own life stood between the regime, their careers and fortunes, and oblivion. That security was a male heir. Richard’s own future demanded that commitment. Without it, he could not hope to continue: ‘Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass’, Shakespeare made the king say.
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First Richard seems to have turned to his nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of his brother Clarence, but he soon changed his mind. This may have been because he realised that Warwick’s hereditary claim was better than his own. The fact that Warwick was only nine years old and hence merely a figurehead may have been more significant. Instead Richard designated another nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, son of his sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, who at least was of age. A de la Pole pedigree of the time does identify Lincoln as Richard’s heir.
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Richard also foregrounded his bastard John of Pontefract:
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if he ever considered making him his heir, he surely decided – as his great-nephew Henry VIII was to do with his bastard Henry, Duke of Richmond – that this would be counter-productive. Probably John was also too young to be really useful.

Such measures, however, were merely stop gaps until Richard could produce another legitimate son of his own.
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He was still in the prime of life. Apparently he was still sleeping with Queen Anne.
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Reading between the lines, indeed, he may have made a final effort to impregnate his queen. Anne, however, was in ill health: she began, says Crowland, to ‘sicken most vehemently’.
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Perhaps she had tuberculosis. Her chances
of conceiving may already have been recognised to be slim. She was breeding stock that had ceased to breed. Given that she was aged only twenty-eight, Richard might have had to wait many years and perhaps all his life to remarry and try again for a legitimate heir. His great-nephew Henry VIII was famously to dispense with four superfluous consorts by other than natural means, two by execution. Henry set a precedent where hitherto there was none. Such predecessors as Richard I, Richard II and Henry IV were less inventive and had to stick with barren queens.

Queen Anne died on 16 March 1485. She was promptly on cue. So convenient was her death that there was understandable speculation that King Richard had helped her on her way. The historian John Rows was not alone in reporting that Richard had poisoned her. The rumour was current on 30 March, only a fortnight after, when Richard denied it. The allegation occurs also in the
Great Chronicle of London
and Vergil’s
English History
.
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Vergil reports, at several removes, that Rotherham mused that Queen Anne would not live much longer ‘and foreshadowed the same to divers of his friends’:
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presumably he expected Richard to help her on her way. The story duly passed into Tudor myth and was broadcast to later generations by Shakespeare. Taken together, Richard’s denial, repetitions by later chroniclers, and the prophetic speculations of the archbishop are grounds to believe the story. But none of our sources can have had access to reliable medical information – if the diagnoses of poisoning of fifteenth-century doctors is to be credited – and no better data is likely to emerge now. Besides, there was no need to kill her. Queen Anne had been ailing for some months before she died. It was on the doctors’ advice that Richard abstained from sexual intercourse.
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A natural death is indicated. There is no reason to doubt the grief that Richard asserted, ‘that he was as sorry & in heart as heavy as man might be’,
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albeit sorrow not untinged with relief. Yet
there are good grounds for crediting Shakespeare’s story, that Richard had in mind a consort as Anne’s successor. If Anne had passed her sell-by date, nevertheless King Richard required a consort to bear him an heir and to fulfil all the other functions required of queens. His first choice apparently was his own niece, Elizabeth of York, the daughter of his brother Edward IV, who had been bastardised by the precontract story and whom he is supposed to have designated even before Queen Anne was dead. This allegation requires more careful consideration than it has ever received to date.

THE ELIZABETH OF YORK STORY

The best contemporary evidence for these aspersions is that on 30 March 1485 King Richard held a news conference in the great hall of St John’s Priory at Clerkenwell, at which he made a statement to the mayor, aldermen, councillors, and livery companies of London, whom he had summoned to hear it.

Whereas a long saying and much simple communication among the people by evil disposed persons contrived and sown to very great displeasure of the king, showing how that the queen as by consent and will of the king was poisoned for and to the intent that he might marry and have to wife Lady Elizabeth, eldest daughter of his brother, late king of England deceased, whom God pardon etcetera. For the which and other the king… showed his grief and displeasure aforesaid and said it never came in his thought or mind to marry in such manner wise nor willing or glad of the death of his queen, but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be, with much more in the premises spoken. For the which he admonished and charged every person to cease of such untrue talking on peril of his indignation.
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As our source is a record made at the time and as it was the king himself who reported these aspersions against him, we cannot doubt that the allegations of poisoning, of remarriage, and of his selection of Princess Elizabeth were in circulation in the spring of 1485 immediately following Anne’s death, nor that Richard vehemently and publicly denied them. He cannot have wished to give currency to such damaging rumours. It was because they were already in circulation that a denial was needed and that he could afford to be explicit. A king’s word should normally have been conclusive and the story quelled.

Unfortunately, Richard’s public statement failed to do the trick. The poisoning reappears both as fact in Rows’
History
and at least as a possibility to Polydore Vergil and the London chronicler
c
.1512, who all accept his rumoured remarriage.
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Moreover, we know that Richard made this public declaration because his councillors insisted that he did so, as Crowland reports in his chronicle.
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Note that the record of the Clerkenwell declaration confirms much of Crowland’s narrative. Crowland also reveals, at first hand, that in spite of Richard’s repeated denials, he himself believed that Richard did indeed intend to marry Elizabeth of York, and that he, Crowland, personally disbelieved that part of the king’s denial. At second hand, Crowland states that other royal councillors and especially the key figures of Sir Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby shared his own views. To Crowland’s mind, they knew.
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He did not mention the poisoning charge and presumably did not credit it. Although he can hardly have been unaware of the story, which was current at the time and mentioned by the king himself, Crowland presumably disbelieved it. He knew murder to be unnecessary, since he also knew that Anne had been ailing for several months and that her death was apparently expected several weeks in advance. What Crowland did relay was damaging enough.

Even in the fifteenth century, convention demanded a decent interval for mourning between the death of one wife and the wedding of another. The planning of a second marriage before the ending of the first was not approved. Many forthcoming widowers must have foreseen such an eventuality, especially when there were young children to care for and households to run. Post-Reformation parish registers frequently reveal rapid remarriages. Kings, furthermore, were always a special case. Reasons of state undoubtedly demanded on occasions both a precipitation and a calculation in matrimony to be eschewed by ordinary mortals. Once single, Richard was free to marry again. It was not so much his intention to marry that aroused criticism – that was to be expected and was actually his public duty – but his supposed choice of bride. Because of the supposed precontract between her father Edward IV and another lady, Princess Elizabeth had been bastardised just as much as her younger brothers the Princes in the Tower, who had disappeared, who were believed to be dead, and whom Elizabeth surely thought had suffered at Richard’s hands. Of all the noble young ladies who could bear him sons, it was her claim to the crown, Elizabeth must have realised, that singled her out. Elizabeth of York was also closely associated with her mother Elizabeth Wydeville, who was no longer categorised as a queen at all, her uncle Anthony, Earl Rivers and half-brother Lord Richard Grey, both of whom Richard had had executed, on whose behalf, so Crowland reports, Richard’s supporters feared her vengeance.
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If Shakespeare was seeking a paradox, a marriage between those whom past events should have made incompatible opposites, surely it should have been Elizabeth of York and Richard III in 1485 rather than Anne Neville and Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Furthermore, Elizabeth was Richard’s niece: a blood tie so close to the king that Crowland (and, on his evidence, many others) considered any such joining into one flesh to be incest.
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So did the Reformation
Parliament, which legislated against such matches. It was for this latter reason, not mere decorum, that Richard had publicly to deny any such plan.

From Richard’s angle, Elizabeth’s disqualification was a pity. A match with her had obvious political advantages. She could only strengthen Richard’s title. For any Yorkists sceptical of the bastardy of Edward IV and his children, Elizabeth was their preferred claimant. At the very least, such a match would disarm their opposition to Richard. At the best, Richard could enlist their support. Besides, the king’s rival Henry Tudor had pledged himself at Christmas 1483 to marry Elizabeth in order to secure the support of Yorkist fugitives from Buckingham’s Rebellion and their adherents within England for his candidacy as king. Tudor even secured a papal dispensation for his marriage to Elizabeth on 27 March 1484, albeit an insufficient one and obtained without her consent.
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If Richard did marry Elizabeth, Tudor could not do so himself: where was he to find so advantageous a replacement? Such a union was surely the necessary incentive for recalcitrant Yorkists to swallow their hostility, to relinquish their plans to dethrone the king, and to seek instead his forgiveness and the restoration of their forfeited properties, which Richard was prepared to concede. Elizabeth, moreover, had other advantages. Now eighteen, she was nubile, physically healthy, and no doubt attractive. Apparently she so resembled her aunt the queen physically in height, build, colouring etc. that they could wear the same clothes.
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Queen Anne, after all, was less than ten years her senior. Perhaps Elizabeth reminded Richard of what had first attracted him to Anne Neville. Elizabeth could be expected to provide the desired heir speedily. Her Wydeville kin were as prolific as the Nevilles: Elizabeth was the eldest of ten children. Elizabeth, in short, could quickly supply the defects in title and expectations that Richard in 1485 so obviously lacked. She was more than an adequate
substitute for Queen Anne: to a beleaguered and desperate usurper, she was ideal.

Three contemporary sources report that Richard was considering his match with Elizabeth ahead of Anne’s death: the Clerkenwell declaration, Crowland’s chronicle, and the report of a letter in her own hand from Elizabeth herself to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk.

The original of Elizabeth’s letter is lost. Perhaps it never existed and was forged by our source, the pro-Ricardian Jacobean historian Sir George Buck. Yet Buck himself reported its existence (and provided a paraphrase) in 1619 ‘among precious jewels and rare monuments’ in the ‘rich and magnificent cabinet’ of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, heir of the recipient, to whom it had descended.
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Arundel was interested in his family’s history and was a noted connoisseur and collector. It was in his cabinet that the scholarly earl displayed all his particular treasures. A royal letter (autograph?) of a princess and a future queen to an ancestor was just such a treasure. Buck wrote for publication: surely he expected his reference to be pursued? Moreover, it seems to have been overlooked that Buck not only acknowledged the earl’s permission to consult the letter, but also dedicated his book to him. Had it ever been published, Arundel would have received a presentation copy, which – as a scholar himself – he could be expected to read. Obviously the earl knew whether such a prized letter was actually in his cabinet. By seventeenthcentury standards, this was as good a provenance and as precise a citation to a publicly accessible location where the original was to be found as could be imagined at the time. For all these reasons forgery is unlikely. Partly because the original, four centuries further on, is now lost and partly because Buck’s manuscript history was damaged by fire in 1731, modern historians anxious to rebut the story as discreditable to Richard have questioned exactly how the original text read.
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Buck
rendered into the third person what must originally have been in the first person, but the version published in 1647 by Buck’s nephew certainly confirms the meaning that his uncle had intended if not his actual words.
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After an appropriately respectful introduction,