Anne Neville (25 page)

Anne’s life was not all positive, of course. There was plenty of bereavement. Much of it was unpredictable, as wholesale slaughter eliminated most of her uncles and great-uncles and exaggerated the complement of widows within her extensive family. One should stress the violent deaths of Anne’s father, grandfather, first husband and brothers-in-law, but perhaps none of them was particularly close to her. The death of her sister (presumably in childbirth), her stillborn nephew and the
death of her son touched her more closely, but such premature deaths, for reasons that could have been averted today, were commonplace, to be expected, natural and indeed facts of life. Perhaps her extensive experience of mortality was not as traumatic as we ourselves might expect. It is not at all the same today, when infant mortality is minimal, violent death (even on the roads) is relatively uncommon, few people are struck down in their prime, the old are really old, and death is no longer a familiar occurrence to the young. We should not suppose, therefore, that each death of a loved one made the impact that it does nowadays nor, indeed, collectively.

More difficult for us to accept, perhaps, is marriage without love. The arranged marriage is something that we find difficult to understand, and hence we encourage and rejoice in those daughters of Asian immigrants who repudiate spouses designated for them and marry for love. We find it hard to understand that such arranged marriages could be companionate and satisfying, so that mothers seek them out for their offspring, and that Anne’s twelve-year marriage to Richard as duke and king could have fallen into that category. Much has been made of the tragedy of her end, when she was no longer wanted and was threatened by divorce. Divorce as a way to dispense with an unwanted spouse is less drastic, of course, than murder by poisoning, which now looks highly unlikely. If we are right to regard divorce as tragic, it is an everyday tragedy in our modern age, the breakdown of marriage that literally millions of people currently endure, and from which they recover. Nowadays there are plenty of divorcees of twentyeight with their whole lives ahead of them. We take divorce far less seriously than did people in the past. Of course it carries less stigma than a generation ago, when the queen declined to receive divorced people. Even whilst we recognise that divorce is not the end of the world and that it can be a new beginning, perhaps for Anne too, we should not underestimate the
blow to her
amour propre
, as she was potentially degraded, and the shame to be incurred not so much from the divorce but from her decade of illicit unmarried fornication. Marriage was what she was bred for – marriage her whole destiny – and that, potentially, was what she was about to lose. What all this meant to Anne, therefore, depended on her sense of values and on those of her age by which she was judged, and which we, at five centuries removed and in a very different era, find hard to comprehend and, still more, to appreciate and apply. Perhaps Anne was lucky that death intervened and saved her the horrors that she surely saw ahead.

Anne was a central figure in great events, yet she appears a powerless one. Perhaps she was. In part, this is the reality of the inferiority of women, even duchesses, princesses and queens, which Anne was born into, lived with and surely accepted. In part perhaps it was because Anne’s father Warwick and husband Richard III were particularly powerful, Richard indeed as autocratic and egotistical as any husband. He seems to have denied his duchess many of the trappings of autonomy that other noblemen extended to their consorts. Yet partly this is a problem of the sources. If we possessed for Anne the household and estate accounts of Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Wydeville, the privy purse expenses of Elizabeth of York, the letters of Margaret or her own register of correspondence, Anne might be found doing much more than we can actually reveal, and being far more in control of and managing her own affairs. Certainly Anne went along with Warwick’s choice of partner, shacked up with Duke Richard and operated as his wife and queen as he wished, went along with his accession, and remained with him through all the unsavoury scandals of his reign. Had she a choice? Was this the helplessness, the passivity that Shakespeare depicts, or did she believe in it? Surely she must have believed in her father’s insurrections in 1469–71, just as he, public opinion and many generations of historians
have believed as well? It was Anne herself, as we have seen, who leapt into the arms, bed and ducal coronet of Richard, Duke of Gloucester. If there is a case for the precontract, which some at least believed, even possibly her husband, may not Anne have believed it too? Why should she not wish her husband to be king and herself to be queen? Because Richard failed, because in retrospect he has been seen to be a bad thing, because Tudor subjects like Shakespeare found it impossible to suppose that anybody really accepted his arguments or supported him, it does not mean that he did not possess supporters who believed in him and in his cause, and wanted him king. We know he did. And it is entirely conceivable, indeed probable, that Anne was among them. We possess not a jot of evidence to the contrary. She was crowned with him, was his queen, and acted out the role until her end.

At the end of this book, as at the beginning, Anne remains an enigma. How could it be otherwise? The sources speak to us – but not at length or in depth. In their absence, nobody speaks. The gaps, actually enormous gulfs, are insurmountable. There is just too much we cannot know. This book has not added significantly to the hard facts about Anne’s life and about her age. What it has shown is what these events mean or may mean – the implications, the options, and wherever possible the choices that were made and Anne’s role within them. If Anne was the model daughter, wife and queen, as she appears, who fulfilled the dictates of her menfolk, yet she was also highly exceptional both in her choice of second husband and the lie that they lived for most of their adult life. If she made it possible for Richard to be king, her death may have deprived him of the means to survive. Did she matter to him more in death than life? What is certain is that Anne herself counted, that she was more than merely a symbol, stereotype or sidekick, and that in 1471–2 she herself chose the course that brought her, until her final illness, the most successful of marital careers.

1   
WHY STUDY ANNE NEVILLE?

1    W. Shakespeare,
Richard III
, ed. E.A.J. Honigman, New Penguin Shakespeare (1995), Act 1 scene 2 ll.227–8.

2    
Ibid
. Act 2 scene 1 ll.1-239.

3    
Ibid
. Act 1 scene 4 ll. 1-62.

4    
Ibid
. Act 4 scene 2 ll. 59-431.

5    
Hall’s Chronicle
, ed. H. Ellis (1809), 301.

6    
RP
v.478; vi.193–5.

7    Laynesmith, 20.

8    Hicks,
Richard III,
169–82.

9    
Rows Rolls
, no.62;
The Beauchamp Pageant
, ed. A. Sinclair (Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 2003), pl. lv; A. Payne, ‘The Salisbury Roll of Arms, c.1463’,
England in the Fifteenth Century
, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge, 1987), pl. viii; BL MS Egerton 3510 f.104.

10  
Crowland
, 174–5.

11  Laynesmith, 52 & n.

12  See below p.212

13  
Crowland,
121–2, 132–3, 174–5;
Rows Rolls
, no.62.

14  E.g. P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Women’,
Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England
, ed. R.E. Horrox (Cambridge, 1994), 112–31;
Medieval London Widows 1300–1500
, ed. C.M. Barron and A.F. Sutton (1994); P.R. Coss,
The Lady in Medieval England 1000–1500
(Stroud, 1998);
Young Medieval Women
, ed. K.J. Lewis, N.J. Menuge, and K.M. Phillips, (Stroud, 1999); J.C. Ward,
English Noblewomen in the Later Middle Ages
(Harlow, 1992); F. Swabey,
Medieval Gentlewoman. Life in a Woman’s Household in the Later Middle Ages
(Stroud, 1999); Laynesmith.

15  Goldberg, ‘Women’, 112.

16  
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
64 vols (2004), ii.180–1.

17  Lewis, Menuge and Phillips, xi.

18  Barron and Sutton,
Medieval London Widows
; Lewis, Menuge and Phillips; Ward,
English Noblewomen
; Laynesmith
passim.

19  E.g. H. Maurer,
Margaret of Anjou. Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England
(Woodbridge, 2003); D. Baldwin,
Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower
(Stroud, 2002); A. Okerlund,
Elizabeth Wydeville: The Slandered Queen
(Stroud, 2005); Laynesmith
passim
.

20  R.H. Helmholz,
Marriage Litigation in Medieval England
(Cambridge, 1974), 77–87; C. McCarthy,
Marriage in Medieval England. Law, Literature and Practice
(Woodbridge, 2004), 35, 140–1; H.A. Kelly, ‘Canonical Implications of Richard III’s Plan to Marry his Niece’,
Traditio
xxiii (1967), 270–311.

2   
WHO WAS ANNE NEVILLE?

1    Unless otherwise stated, this section is based on
GEC passim
;
Warwick
, 7-28.

2    
Warwick,
7, 16.

3    J.R. Lander,
Crown and Nobility 1450–1509
(1976), 95–6.

4    J.M.W. Bean,
The Estates of the Percy Family 1416–1537
(1958), 83.

5    
Rows Rolls
, no.50;
Beauchamp Pageant
, passim.

6    
Rows Rolls
, no.56.

7    
Warwick
, 26–8.

8    
Ibid
. 37–48.

9    C. Wood, ‘The Nature and Extent of the Royal Family 1399–1509’ (BA dissertation, King Alfred’s College, 2002).

10  
Rows Rolls
, no.62.

11  
Rows Rolls; Beauchamp Pageant;
A. Payne, ‘The Salisbury Roll of Arms,
c
.1463’,
England in the Fifteenth Century
, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge, 1987). Coincidence of date, rather than anything explicit, links each to Anne as queen.

12  Richard: 2 daughters; Thomas: childless; John: 5 daughters,
GEC
ix.93n; xii.ii.393.

13  Lander,
Crown & Nobility
, 97.

14  
An English Chronicle 1377–1461
, ed. W.Marx (Woodbridge, 2003), 73.

15  
Rows Rolls
, nos 50, 57.

16  Hicks,
Rivals
, 342.

17  Bodleian Library MS Top.Glouc.d.2.

18  
Warwick
, 9–10.

19  
Ibid.
17–18.

20  Thus Anne was depicted with Neville arms in a church window at Skipton (Yorks.), BL MS Egerton 3510 f. 104.

21  Hicks,
Rivals
, 324.

22  
Rows Rolls
, no.58.

23  
Calendar of Papal Letters 1447–55,
151.

24  
Rows Rolls
, no.62.

25  
Ibid
. no.59.

26  The fullest account of the rule of the Nevilles is now
Warwick
, ch.8.