Anne Neville (4 page)

On the other hand, compared with today, the age of consent mattered much less. There were ages of majority and ages of discretion, both younger than we permit today and surprisingly not identical for the two sexes. The age of consent, supposedly
that of puberty, was twelve for women and fourteen for men, the age of majority was fourteen for women and twenty-one for men. Such restrictions were not as absolute as they are today: whilst marriages younger than seven were disapproved and had to be confirmed at the age of consent, yet marriages at a young age – as with Anne Neville’s father Warwick – did happen.

Where fifteenth-century people denounced as incestuous the marriages of cousins and in-laws that we permit without any qualms, sexual relations were perfectly acceptable between those of different ages: relations that today we might label paedophilia and prosecute as child-abuse. The match between Anne and the future Richard III, apparently contracted when she was fifteen, would today label Richard as a sex offender, guilty of sexual relations with a minor or, in American parlance, of statutory rape, yet it excited no such condemnation or even disapproval in their own age. There are no rules on such issues applicable everywhere even today. Child-marriage at puberty, later ages of discretion, bigamy and gay marriage are to be found in other countries, religions and cultures, permitted in some parts of the world and prohibited in others. Doubtless their practitioners, like us, consider their standards to be the best. From our third-millennium, British, western, post-Christian and liberal standpoint we must be careful not to assert dogmatically that our own laws and conventions, which have changed enormously in the last forty years and are still evolving at breakneck pace, are right, absolute for all time, and applicable to the past as well as the present. Of course standards and values do vary with era, country, class and culture and are very largely why the past is so different from the present. Nor, indeed, should we be surprised if such unfamiliar standards framed patterns of conduct unfamiliar to us today. Why shouldn’t many children short of puberty with parental consent and support have been gearing themselves for courtship and arranged marriage? Some girls, quite legitimately and
legally, experienced pregnancy and childbirth and embarked on motherhood before they were fourteen. Henry VII was one such end product. It was not the problem we perceive today. Even if we believe, as surely we do, that we manage such things better today, our predecessors lacked this perspective. We cannot understand their actions unless we can suspend our disbelief and appreciate the standards that they lived by and applied. Nor can we impose our values on the past.

Anne Neville illustrates repeatedly the operation of these rules in practice. Yet the rules were far from absolute. Most bars, though not quite all, could be dispensed by the Church and set aside. It may even be that members of the elite, who almost always required dispensations for some impediments when it came to marrying their social equals, came to regard such matters as mere technicalities to be rectified for the appropriate fee, even retrospectively. Two princesses in this book appear to have taken this view. Perhaps aristocratic morality was somewhat deficient even by the current contemporary standards. Such issues did matter. Such matters constantly recurred throughout Anne’s life and were absolutely crucial at its end.

PRE-NATAL INFLUENCES

A
nne Neville (1456–85) was the younger of the two daughters – and hence one of the two co-heiresses – of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and Salisbury (‘Warwick the Kingmaker’) and his consort Anne Beauchamp. Anne Neville was thus born into the highest nobility, the top rank of English society, and was assured from birth of a great future. The course that her life was to take owed much more to her lineage and family wealth, the circumstances of her family and her birth, the careers and renown of her ancestors and parents, than it did to her own efforts. Such factors determined who she was and ensured that she mattered. Rarely indeed can Anne be demonstrated to have done anything at all, yet her role was often crucial and her significance not in doubt. Before detailing her own life, therefore, it is necessary to establish her context.

Who Anne Neville was, what she was to become, and what factors shaped her development were pre-determined, at least to some extent, by her pedigree. Pre-natal influences, most notably lineage and inheritance, are the essential keys to understanding Anne’s context. What follows is therefore a commentary on Anne Neville’s pedigree.
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Anne’s father, as we have seen, was Richard Neville junior, who made himself a household name as Warwick the Kingmaker in his own time and in all generations down to today. Richard was the son of another Richard Neville senior (d.1460) and Alice Montagu (d.1463). Richard Neville senior was the eldest of the children of Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland (d.1425) by his second wife Joan Beaufort. Earl Ralph was the most outstanding head of the great house of Neville – the culmination of many generations of Neville barons of Raby (Durham), Middleham and Sheriff Hutton (Yorks.) who had distinguished themselves repeatedly against the Scots ever since the Norman Conquest. Joan Beaufort, his second wife and his first countess, was the daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (d.1399) and third son of Edward III (1327–77), by his mistress and eventual third duchess Katherine Swynford. This royal marriage explains in part Ralph’s promotion as earl in 1397. He had the requisite qualifying income anyway and he had earned promotion by good service to the crown. However his elevation coincided with that of Joan’s brother John Beaufort as earl of Somerset. The Countess Joan was thus half-sister of the Lancastrian King Henry IV (1399–1413), aunt of Henry V (1413–22), great-aunt of Henry VI (1422–61), whole sister of Cardinal Beaufort (d.1447) and Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter (1425), both Lord Chancellors, and the aunt and great-aunt of the four Beaufort dukes of Somerset. Such a marriage made the Nevilles themselves royal. Earl Ralph, Henry IV’s brother-in-law, was frequently described in royal records, according to contemporary usage, as the king’s brother. His proximity to the king brought him high favour, a string of grants of office and of property that was settled in tail on the earl and his eldest son by his royal wife, Richard Neville, not the eldest son by his first marriage who was heir to the earldom of Westmorland. Doubtless persuaded by the Countess Joan, Earl Ralph also transferred many of his ancestral Neville estates to her children –
to Richard senior and his heirs male – away from the main Westmorland line. Following Earl Ralph’s death, the Westmorland Nevilles objected violently, but were obliged to accept reality in 1443. They retained the Durham properties, but it was Richard Neville senior who secured the Middleham estates in Richmondshire and Sheriff Hutton, Penrith and other properties in Cumbria, and the royal wardenship of the West March that made him the military commander west of the Pennines against the Scots. It was this patrimony to which Anne’s father Richard Neville junior was born in 1428.
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It was also this power-base that Anne Neville was to transfer to her second husband Richard, Duke of Gloucester in the 1470s. Gloucester used it to make himself dominant in the North and to usurp the throne in 1483.

Another fruit of the kinship of the Nevilles to the house of Lancaster was the most remarkable series of child marriages in medieval England. Earl Ralph fathered no less than twentytwo children, nine of them by his second wife Joan.
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The Nevilles were able to exploit the favour of the Lancastrians to secure grants of the marriages of the most desirable heirs and heiresses to marry their children, which Henry IV and V willingly conceded, especially when they were the offspring of former traitors whom they wanted safely married into loyal families. Neville spouses had become attractive to noblemen seeking husbands for their daughters. Hence Richard Neville senior was married to Alice Montagu, sole daughter and heiress of Thomas Montagu (d.1428), Earl of Salisbury, by Eleanor, one of the five heiresses of the Holland earls of Kent. Richard and Alice were Anne Neville’s grandparents. Quite apart from the title, which gave Richard Neville the earldom that his great estates demanded, and extensive lands mainly in southcentral England, his countess could trace herself through both lines back to Edward I. If not quite of the front rank – only the Stafford, York and Warwick inheritances were – Richard
Neville’s combined estates placed him firmly in the second rank among the top half-dozen dynasties of the 1430s and 1440s. He was certainly the equal of his rival and brother-in-law Henry Percy, 2nd earl of Northumberland.
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Anne Neville’s grandparents the Earl and Countess of Salisbury started searching in the nobility for partners for their own dozen children well before they reached their teens and indeed before the younger ones were yet born. Richard Neville junior, the future kingmaker, was their eldest son, heir to the earldom of Salisbury and to all their Holland, Montagu and Neville possessions. He was a considerable matrimonial catch. Given how many marriages the Nevilles had already contracted amongst the nobility, there were in reality few partners of sufficient standing who were not already too closely related to them within the prohibited degrees of affinity and thus genuinely eligible. One of the most promising of these was undoubtedly Anne Beauchamp, the youngest daughter of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d.1439) by his second wife Isabel Despenser (d.1439). Born in 1426, Anne Beauchamp was not an heiress, for she had an elder brother Henry (d.1446), the future duke of Warwick, but only his single life stood between her entitlement to a share, with her four half-sisters, of the Beauchamp and Despenser heritage. In any case, even the greatest families could not confine themselves to heirs and heiresses unless they were prepared to intermarry with those of lesser rank, mere gentry rather than nobility.

No objection could be found to Anne’s pedigree. The earls of Warwick traced themselves to the legendary Guy of Warwick. Earl Richard Beauchamp was the sixth Beauchamp earl, a soldier and indeed hero of chivalric renown, the ‘father of courtesy’, the tutor to King Henry VI himself and about to become king’s lieutenant in France.
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The Countess Isabel had been daughter and sole heiress of Thomas Despenser (d.1400), briefly Earl of Gloucester, who traced his descent from Edward
I, and Constance of York (d.1416), another granddaughter of Edward III. Her daughter Anne Beauchamp was indeed the ‘noble lady of the blood royal’ that John Rows alleged.
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The combined Beauchamp and Despenser estates, principally in the West Midlands around Warwick, Hanley Castle (Worcs.) and Tewkesbury (Gloucs.) and in south Wales (but including Barnard Castle in County Durham), placed them decisively in the front rank, one level above the Nevilles. Evidently it was Salisbury who really wanted a matrimonial alliance, most probably to unite his daughter Cecily Neville with Warwick’s son Henry, heir to the only magnate family to which the Nevilles were not yet closely connected. Earl Richard Beauchamp, we may deduce, was not so enthusiastic to dispose of the hand of his heir in this way. Henry was, after all, the greatest heir of any contemporary noble house, who ought really to have been advancing himself by marriage to a royal princess or to a well-endowed heiress, neither of which Cecily Neville was. Salisbury, however, made him an offer even Earl Richard Beauchamp could hardly refuse. Not only did he offer him a dowry with Cecily of 4,700 marks (£3,233 13s 4d), one of the largest marriage portions recorded in medieval England and very welcome given the great earl’s financial embarrassments, but Salisbury also threw in as makeweight the hand of his son Richard for Anne Beauchamp, which would make her a countess. This was decidedly better than the mere baronies that were all that Warwick had secured for his three elder daughters by his first wife. The double marriage, Henry Beauchamp to Cecily Neville and Richard Neville to Anne Beauchamp, was celebrated at Abergavenny in Wales on or about 4 May 1436.
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In the short run, as we shall see, these splendid matches produced the intended results. Following the deaths of the earl and countess of Warwick, their son Henry succeeded as earl and Cecily Neville as countess. Henry was elevated in quick
succession to be premier earl and then duke, but died in 1446. His infant daughter followed in 1449 and Cecily, now Duchess of Warwick, in 1450. What was unexpected was that in 1449 Anne Beauchamp scooped the pool. Richard Neville junior became earl of Warwick and acquired the whole of the vast Beauchamp and Despenser inheritance, to the chagrin, violent protest and ineffective resistance of his sisters-in-law. It was as earl of Warwick that he made his reputation – he was not Salisbury the Kingmaker, but Warwick the Kingmaker – and his parental inheritances did not fall in for another decade. This was why Anne Neville was born at Warwick, why her childhood homes were on the Beauchamp and Despenser estates, and why John Rows of Warwick was her family chronicler.
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Queen Anne Neville, as we have seen, was a product of this union. Her parents were destined to careers as great landowners in Yorkshire and the North-West and also in the central South. During the 1450s they periodically visited London for parliaments and great council, and regularly interacted with all the other great houses whom they numbered as their kin and with the royal family. Every generation that passed, of course, moved the Nevilles further from the throne, repeatedly creating more intimate royal families, so that by the 1450s the Nevilles were among the more remote of the 200 or so individuals who regarded themselves as royal.
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They ceased to benefit from extraordinary royal favour during the 1440s: the Kingmaker’s younger brothers, Anne Neville’s uncles, and his younger sisters, her aunts, had to wait until they were adults to marry, and even then matched themselves to mere barons and the heiresses of wealthy gentry. Even if no longer ranked with the royal by those who were undoubtedly royal, nevertheless Richard Neville and Anne Beauchamp – and hence their daughter Anne Neville herself – could pride themselves on descent from Edward III and earlier monarchs through five distinct lines. Her pedigree is a case study in endogamy, the
tendency of the nobility to marry within a limited circle of existing kin. Royal descent linked her inevitably with other royal lines: Valois, Wittelsbach, Bruce and Luxemberg, rulers of the Empire, France, the Spanish kingdoms and Scotland, back to Charlemagne and into the mythical mists of time. Genealogical rolls traced them back to Woden, Adam and Noah. The Warwick historian John Rows was right therefore to address Anne Neville as ‘the most noble lady and princess born of the royal blood of divers realms lineally descending from princes, kings, emperors, and many glorious saints’.
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Perhaps he was thinking of St Louis (Louis IX of France) and St Margaret of Scotland? Understandably Anne and her family took pride in its lineage, burnishing their buildings, glass, plate and vestments with the coats of arms and badges that they had inherited. Most probably it was Anne Neville who was to commission the
Pageant of Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick
– a celebration of her distinguished grandfather – and an updated edition of the
Salisbury Roll
: John Rows’
Roll of the Earls of Warwick
was a worthy gift.
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