Anne Neville (24 page)

That if he did not deny any such purpose… the northerners, in whom he placed the greatest trust, would all rise against him, charging him with causing the death of the queen, the daughter and one of the heirs of the earl of Warwick and through whom he had obtained his first honour, in order to complete his incestuous association with his near kinswoman, to the offence of God.

They also produced more than a dozen doctors of theology who stated that the Pope could not dispense so close a degree of consanguinity.
⁴⁰

Perhaps the doctors were right, although the opinion of canon lawyers was more relevant on such a topic than those of theologians, and canonists are likely to have been divided.
Although
Leviticus
chapter 18 verses 12–13 banned the marriage of a man to his aunt, it did not explicitly proscribe the marriage of a man to his niece, although the nature and proximity of the relationship was the same. Taking the literal meaning rather than the spirit of God’s law, what Richard proposed was not explicitly forbidden. Perhaps, therefore, the marriage of the king and the princess was not in breach of divine law, which was absolute, but human law, which could be dispensed. Precedents could be found both for such marriages being allowed and disallowed.
⁴¹
All dispensations to set aside canon law required serious grounds, popes usually placing the desires of kings into that category. The curia found it hard to rebuff kings and princes. In practice royalty secured dispensations covering the greatest impediments, which mere nobility and gentry could not, whilst ordinary mortals could not obtain them at all. Hence, perhaps, clerics and gentry deplored a union that Richard and Elizabeth of York thought acceptable. Their senses of Christian morality differed.

The
Great Chronicle
suggests that ‘a licence purchased’ would permit this union
⁴²
– a dispensation by another name – and Professor Kelly considers that such a dispensation was not altogether impossible.
⁴³
Kelly reviewed what a range of canonical authorities had to say and examined several case studies, all of which Richard’s advisers may have known. One aunt-nephew marriage in direct contravention of Levitical decrees was when Henry IV’s son Thomas, Duke of Clarence was allowed to remain married to his aunt
by marriage
, Margaret, widow of John, Earl of Somerset (d.1410). Despite this precedent, Cardinal Torquemada and some other notable canonists considered that popes could not dispense for marriages between uncles and nieces. Perhaps that represented the balance of canonical opinion, but from the next decade a whole series of matches involving royalty and contradicting the Levitical decrees were indeed dispensed. Thus Pope Alexander VI allowed King
Ferrante of Naples to marry his Aunt Joanna and a series of marriages to siblings-in-law involving offspring of Ferdinand and Isabella were permitted.
⁴⁴
That was in the future and cannot have been known to Richard, who also could not have waited on lengthy deliberations at the curia. Moreover, Kelly considered the case in isolation, without considering all the other degrees in which Richard and Elizabeth were related. What of his first wife, aunt to his proposed second wife, and her cousin several times over? Even if her marriage was invalidated, the carnal relationship remained, and of course Richard had not secured (or even sought) the necessary dispensation.

In this instance, legal arguments took second place to political ones. Accordingly, as his councillors insisted, Richard declared publicly at St John’s Hall Clerkenwell that he had never intended any such thing. ‘Many people’, including Crowland, did not believe him.
⁴⁵
But his project to marry Elizabeth was dropped – as far as we know.

Of course the marriage did not happen. Because Anne died, divorce was unnecessary. So was murder. The poisoning of his queen nevertheless became a highly effective piece of Tudor propaganda against Richard, which was silenced neither by his denial or by improbability. So was Richard’s incest with his niece.
⁴⁶
The London chroniclers knew the whole story. About 1512, the
Great Chronicle
states:

But after Easter much whispering among the people that the king had put the children of King Edward to death, and also that he had poisoned the queen his wife, and intended with a licence purchased to have married the elder daughter of King Edward. Which rumours and sayings with other things have caused him to fall in much hatred of his subjects as well as men of [good be]haviour as of others. But how so[ever] the queen were dealt with, were it by his means or the visitation of God, she died shortly after… which was a woman of
gracious fame, upon whose soul & all Christian [soul]s, Jesus have mercy. Amen.
⁴⁷

Whether the charges were true or false, including those relating to the queen’s death, Anne was exonerated, but public opinion blamed her husband, so the chronicler testifies.
⁴⁸
Yet how much more effective would such propaganda have been had it related to the fact of an incestuous marriage rather than merely an incestuous intent, and had it been revealed that Richard’s twelve-year-long first marriage had also been illicit, incestuous, sinful and surely damnable. He was a serial incestor. Because Anne died, it never became expedient for Richard to reveal his first marriage as invalid. Richard was induced to repudiate Elizabeth of York. Approaches were made to appropriate princesses of Spain and Portugal. King Richard perished at Bosworth, still single, on 22 August 1485. Whether he would have revived his matrimonial project had he been victorious we cannot tell. That he contemplated the match – and did so whilst Anne was still living – we cannot doubt any more. Strangely his apparently willing partner appears to have escaped unsullied: within the year, Elizabeth of York had married his successor and was crowned and was on course to be ancestress of the Tudor, Stuart and all subsequent dynasties. It is remarkable that in 1485 such a potentially anti-Tudor story was written of the fiancée of the current Tudor king.
⁴⁹

LAST DAYS

Following the distressing death of her son, therefore, and perhaps the king’s last desperate attempt to father another, Anne’s last days were clouded indeed.‘Unhappy’(
infelix
), as Rows said, may her marriage have become.
⁵⁰
The king spurned her bed:
⁵¹
he considered repudiating her as his spouse and potentially as his queen. The death of her son had removed the cement to
their relationship: shared sorrow did not keep them together, but threatened a decisive parting of the ways. Whether or not illegitimacy really disqualified a king who had been publicly recognised and acclaimed, as historians have questioned, the slur certainly sufficed to strip Edward V of his crown and kingdom, and would have done so also in Anne’s case. Richard wished to marry another lady, henceforth his queen, and could do so, because Anne had never been married to him. Crowned and anointed or not, she could not have continued as queen – a proper ecclesiastical court could not have adjudicated her marriage valid – and would certainly have lost her dower as queen to her supplanter, and perhaps also, one wonders, the Warwick inheritance that the 1474–5 acts had assured to Richard himself for life. There was not as yet the comfortable single life after marriage of Katherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves as divorced queens to serve as a precedent. What was to become of Anne? Although no divorce in the modern sense was necessary, Anne was no longer useful to her husband King Richard and was, in modern parlance, past her sell-by date. Vergil has another unattractive story how Richard had her death rumoured whilst she was still living, which came to her ears and which she raised with him and which he denied in reassuring terms.
⁵²
Since there is no confirmation of this – which, indeed, is incompatible with Crowland’s circumstantial analysis – it can be rejected, yet talk of divorce or remarriage could still have been rather a nasty psychological tactic designed to hasten her end (and more likely, surely, to loosen her wits than to kill her) as Hanham suggests?
⁵³
Sorrow, rather than poisoning, was Vergil’s preferred cause of death.
⁵⁴
Queen Anne was aware, of course, of the grounds for divorce. Did she perceive in Elizabeth her potential successor? Were her last days clouded by the apprehension that she would be set aside, disgraced, and/or suffer from qualms of conscience arising from her illicit marriage, for which the death of her son
was punishment? Did she see all her misfortunes as punishment for her sin and fear for her soul? We cannot tell: she has not left us her will. That in itself is surprising, since her death was anticipated by others if not herself: surely Anne wished to compose herself and to settle her earthly accounts before she died? Whilst married women, even queens, possessed no property of their own, it was by no means unusual – and surely normal in her circumstances – for her husband to allow her some testamentary dispositions. Moreover, she was unwell, languishing, and died, unattended and indeed unregretted by her husband. If heavy at heart over her death, nevertheless it served Richard’s purpose and appeared to offer him a way forward. If Richard’s treatment of Anne was ruthless and cruel, his assessment purely material and utilitarian, we must recognise also that his action was the desperation of a rat in a trap as Shakespeare indeed so clearly perceived and need not preclude a genuine affection for her.

Anne died on 16 March 1485 at Westminster, ‘on the day when the great eclipse of the sun took place’:
⁵⁵
an omen that Crowland cannot have been alone in recognising. She was buried not at any of her family mausolea – not at Bisham with her father Earl Richard Neville, not at Warwick with her grandfather Earl Richard Beauchamp, not at Tewkesbury with her grandmother or her sister Isabel, Duchess of Clarence, not at her colleges of Barnard Castle, Middleham or York, where she and Richard may formerly have intended to be interred, but with previous monarchs at Westminster Abbey. No heraldic account survives for her funeral, unlike those for other members of the house of York, yet Crowland tells us that she was buried ‘with honours no less than befitted the burial of a queen’.
⁵⁶
Presumably King Richard was present. She was interred in the presbytery in front of the high altar, reported Rows, but the
Great Chronicler
, after all a Londoner, locates her ‘by the south door that leads into St Edward’s Chapel’.
⁵⁷
No monument was ever erected over her tomb. Perhaps none was intended. Far more probably, however, her husband’s reign ended before any such project could be undertaken. Her sepulchre, however, was nobler than those of either husband, Edward of Lancaster at Tewkesbury Abbey or Richard III in his unmarked grave at Leicester.

Besides a monument to Anne, Laynesmith speculates that Richard intended ‘perhaps even a double one to share her privileged position in the sanctuary’ of Westminster Abbey.
⁵⁸
Of course the couple’s earlier plans for colleges implied their interment together. Once Richard was thinking of a second queen, perhaps even of repudiating Anne both as his spouse and queen, this was surely far from his thoughts. He had other things on his mind. Both his queen at Westminster and his son at Sheriff Hutton were allowed to rest where they fell. Longer term planning was left to the longer term – which never arrived. But if Richard had indeed remarried, Anne and Edward were less likely to feature in any re-interments or grandiose monuments.

Ratcliffe and Catesby touched a vital nerve when they drew attention to Anne’s Warwick inheritance and especially the Warwick connection of which they were a part.
⁵⁹
However egotistical he was and however much his own man, Richard had founded his power on Anne’s inheritance. Even though the Neville lands had been in tail male, Anne was regarded as Warwick’s, Salisbury’s and Westmoreland’s heiress. Much more than a miscellany of properties or indeed an assembly of employees incentivised by pay and spoils of office, Anne brought Richard a devoted following united by family tradition focused on herself that caused them to hazard their lives on her behalf and that endured beyond the grave.
⁶⁰
However little control he allowed her of her own affairs as duchess and queen, they remained hers. The Neville retainers were the core of the northern army that had watched over Richard’s
usurpation and that had enabled him to rule the insurgent South. Richard could not count on adherents of the house of York or the Yorkist establishment of his brother Edward, many of whom indeed had become his foes, nor had he much opportunity to build up much committed support from his own subjects. If Anne’s death enabled Richard to look for another consort capable of extending his support, it also threatened to deprive him of his original power base. Deploying his son and residual heirs in the North may have reinforced traditional ties. Whether Anne’s death actually did weaken his connection is unclear. Richard had legal tenure for life. Certainly Ratcliffe and Catesby did not fail him: both were at Bosworth, Ratcliffe falling in battle and Catesby being executed thereafter. The division of his army that Northumberland failed to engage in battle most probably included Anne Neville’s northern retainers. Whether they were lukewarm to their erstwhile lord – absent inadvertently or by design – we cannot tell. King Henry, however, was anxious to ensure that the connection never operated effectively again. At first in the North, then everywhere, he destroyed it. The Warwick inheritance and Neville connection hardly outlived Anne Neville.

B
y any standards, Anne crammed a great deal into her twenty-eight years. She had a full life. She enjoyed status and high rank – the highest which any woman could attain. She experienced high society and lots of parties, two husbands, fashionable and expensive clothes, plenty of sex, child-bearing, and lots of admiration and deference. Anne was a housewife who ran a big establishment with lots of servants, had several homes and entertained on the most lavish scale. Even in our modern era of careers for women, we are familiar with advancement by marriage, the trophy wives, husbands who marry for money, and proud mothers who resort to a lot of childcare. Anne exemplified all these types in their fifteenth-century form: it was, moreover, what she was meant to do – the female ideal – and what she was trained for. It was surely not just the aspiration of her father to make her into the queen that she became.