Anne Neville (6 page)

Young though they were, Richard and Anne were programmed by class and family expectations to reproduce, all the more so once her inheritances had devolved on them. Heirs were needed to perpetuate their line. Additionally heirs were of signal value as they combated the rival claims of their rival cousins. We may be sure therefore that Anne Beauchamp’s first pregnancy was welcome, how eagerly her first confinement was anticipated, and how disappointing was the birth – when it came - of a daughter. There can be little doubt that Isabel Neville was given the name of her maternal grandmother, the countess’s mother Isabel Despenser. Even daughters had their dynastic and political uses, however, and Isabel’s birth
was moreover an earnest of better things to come. Yet four years passed before the next childbirth, when events repeated themselves. It was in recognition that the countess’s pregnancies were few – and that the hoped-for son might materialise – that a special christening was prepared. Undoubtedly Anne Neville was wanted – but how much more disappointing must have been her sex. Anne was given her mother’s name. And so, in the absence of evidence, sexual intercourse persisted and the waiting continued. How soon it was that the Warwicks realised that there would be no more pregnancies or childbirths we cannot tell. Certainly by 1464, when the countess was forty, Warwick appears to have made his will and invested his hopes in heirs that did not include a son. The countess herself, of course, will have known when her periods ceased. Not to have a son that they both wanted so much was surely one of the sharpest disappointments of their married lives and perhaps their personal tragedy.

Earl Richard and Countess Anne thus produced only two daughters, Isabel and Anne Neville. Probably conceived at Warwick Castle, their principal seat and the countess’ home, it was there that Isabel was born on 5 September 1451.
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Most probably Warwick himself was present in the castle, although the labour was an all-female preserve. Nothing is recorded about her christening. Anne Neville also was born at Warwick on 11 June 1456 and ‘in our lady church there with great solemnity was she christened’
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at St Mary’s, Warwick College, the Beauchamp mausoleum where Earl Richard Beauchamp and his father were interred. Since Warwick missed the poorly attended great council that met at Westminster from 7 June, almost certainly he was at Warwick for the birth and for the christening, although the son that he so desired failed to materialise. Regrettably the Warwick cantarist John Rows, who reported the occasion, has not transmitted to us details even of who Anne’s godparents were. Presumably it was for the
intended son that the ceremonial (and noble godparents) were prepared: the most public statement possible to the Warwick connection that the Neville line was to endure.

UPBRINGING

The young married couple who unexpectedly became earl and countess of Warwick in 1449 fought off rivals for the Beauchamp, Despenser and Abergavenny elements of Anne’s inheritance. The earldom of Salisbury fell in following the deaths of Warwick’s father in 1460 and his mother in 1463. Substantial additions to his estates were added from the forfeited property of Lancastrian families such as the Percys, Cliffords and Rooses. Warwick now was the richest nobleman in England by a large margin – richer even, almost certainly, than Richard, Duke of York and than any other subject since John of Gaunt (d.1399). He had moreover accrued a host of offices – captain of Calais, chief forester of the North and chief steward of the northern estates of the duchy of Lancaster, great chamberlain of England, keeper of the seas, warden of the West March, constable and steward of a host of castles and lordships, even briefly king’s lieutenant of the North and steward of England. He conquered the North for Edward IV, not once but repeatedly, was the king’s principal ambassador, presided over the queen’s churching and, to foreigners at least, he appeared greater than King Edward himself. He dominated his brothers, whose personal success, John as earl of Northumberland and warden of the East March, and George as archbishop of York and chancellor of England, enhanced his own.
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Warwick’s success happened very quickly, but not all at once. The first years of his first daughter, Isabel, were surely spent with her mother the Countess Anne principally at Warwick. That was where Anne was born. But her father’s career took off first as keeper of the seas and then as captain of Calais,
the principal military commands of the English crown in the aftermath of military defeat. Never had Calais and its captain been more important. Remarkably Warwick chose to take up residence in Calais. That was in May 1457.
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Earlier captains, such as Earl Richard Beauchamp and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had been absentees who acted through deputies. It was a formal decision by Warwick, not a chance visit that was somehow extended. Even more remarkably, Warwick took his countess with him. Perhaps he did not wish to be parted indefinitely from his lifelong partner and soul mate; more cynically, he could not pass by several years of opportunity to father a son. Probably, therefore, both his daughters were at Calais too. It could hardly have been intended to separate them from their mother for the space of years. Probably Anne Neville moved to Calais before her first birthday. Probably she, her mother and her sister Isabel resided at Calais for three years.

Restless and apparently tireless, Warwick himself was frequently away, often on activities that carried a high degree of risk. Obviously his countess and daughters did not join him for his naval depredations against foreign shipping nor for negotiations with foreign neighbours in Calais’ hinterlands. The chroniclers do not record either whether his family joined him for his visits every so often to England for great councils, notably the three-month peace conference that culminated in the Loveday of St Paul’s in the winter of 1458–9, and which allowed him at least to make lightning visits to Warwick and other properties. These were political fraught occasions not without their own dangers: the first blows of the Wars of the Roses had been struck and there was an assassination attempt on Warwick in Westminster Hall in November 1458. Most probably, therefore, his countess and daughters remained at Calais.

Certainly the Countess Anne was again at Calais, perhaps with her daughters, when Warwick arrived there on
2 November 1459 in flight from the debacle at Ludford. He was accompanied by his father – his daughters’ paternal grandfather Richard, Earl of Salisbury – and by Edward, Earl of March, son of Richard, Duke of York and the future King Edward IV. All the Yorkist peers were attainted as traitors at the Parliament of Devils. When Warwick consulted York in Ireland, many chronicles report what was evidently a celebrated feat, and he returned to Calais with his mother (and Anne’s grandmother), the now aged Countess Alice.
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Left behind during the successful invasion of the Yorkist earls in 1460, the two countesses (and presumably also Isabel and Anne) received the victorious Warwick in triumph at Calais on 7 August and were transported back via Sandwich to England, catching up with King Henry VI at Greenwich on 19th and proceeding with him to London.
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At that point Anne had just embarked on her fifth year.

Young though she was, Anne’s earliest years in Calais ought to have been a formative experience. She was not in England in her early childhood. Physically she did not live in England, although she must have been told often enough, nostalgically, that it was her real and permanent home. The great household that she inhabited was little different from what it was in England, but her apparently static existence in Calais Castle was very different from the peripatetic nature of noble life in England. The beleaguered frontier town of Calais, a garrison town and an English colony in a foreign hinterland, was quite unlike anywhere else in England, except possibly the northern marcher fortresses of Carlisle and Berwick-upon-Tweed, and was certainly dissimilar from the provincial seats where her parents resided when in England. She may not have known Warwick, Hanley Castle (Worcs.), Tewkesbury, Cardiff or her mother’s other residences in Wales and the West Midlands as well as her sister Isabel, particularly as the earl’s northern heritage seems to have taken precedence after 1460; perhaps Rows knew her less well also. For six months in 1459–60 she lived in
close proximity to her grandparents. Moreover at Calais Anne was exposed to francophone culture. If English was the principal language of her parents, their entourage, and indeed the people of Calais, French and Flemish were frequently spoken by native Frenchmen and Burgundians in her parents’ household and everywhere outside, doubtless sometimes to Anne, whom, one might surmise, quickly learnt to understand and also to speak French herself – a language that was both useful and a polite accomplishment. Surely she encountered Flemish too. If Anne grew up bilingual, it could have smoothed relations with her first mother-in-law Margaret of Anjou. Unfortunately, like so much else about Anne, there is nothing to confirm what was the impact in later life of her sojourn in Calais.

Little more than a toddler and at a distance in Calais, Anne was insulated against the first of the Wars of the Roses of 1459–61, though her father’s absences – and some sense of the risks, the reliefs, and the victories – surely permeated down even to his youngest daughter. After the Greenwich reception in August, the earl and countess and presumably both daughters too went next to Warwick, before the earl met up with Richard, Duke of York at Shrewsbury, and preceded him to London,
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where the duke bid for the crown. The decisive battles ensued. Where the countess and daughters were in the meantime we cannot know. Warwick survived. He also won. The right side, the Yorkists, prevailed decisively at the battle of Towton on 29 March 1461. The Yorkist King Edward IV, whom his cousin Anne knew from his nine-month sojourn at Calais, supplanted the Lancastrian King Henry VI.

Perhaps Anne Neville at four and certainly her sister Isabel at nine were old enough to understand the high dramas of 1460–1, when the Yorkists secured control of the government, their grandfather was slain at Wakefield, their father was routed at St Albans and the Lancastrian army menaced London where,
most probably, they were at the time. Given the prominence of their parents, they were probably observers both of the formalities of King Edward’s accession on 4 March and his coronation in 1461. Their father set off northwards for the decisive battle of Towton and returned as victor. If never visible in our sources, Isabel and Anne cannot have been ignorant either of the stakes and risks nor other than grateful at consequences that surely answered their prayers.

Warwick was certainly head of his household and a model of the male authority to which daughters like Anne were taught to defer. To an extent even greater than as head of his great household in his provincial seats, the Earl of Warwick was in charge in Calais, where he actually ruled and where, when in rebellion, he actually was the final authority. He operated martial law and exercised power of life and death, notoriously despatching Osbert Mountford, King Henry’s naval commander, when he fell into his hands.
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Warwick’s power was the reality of Anne’s earliest years. Return to England did not radically change that situation. As early as Anne Neville became conscious of such things, her father was a great man. When she was four he was second only to the king or – so some said – greater than the king himself. Laden with honours and responsibilities, ‘he had all England at his leading and was dreaded and feared [doubted] through many lands’, and was ‘a famous knight and excellent greatly spoken of through the most part of all Christendom’, whose ‘knightly acts had been so excellent that his noble and famous name could never be put out of laudable memory’. That was the public face of what was to her ‘the most famous and dread and beloved lord’.
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How close that relationship was, how domestic was the comital household, how well Anne knew her father and what he meant to her in practice we cannot tell.

Of Anne’s mother we know a little more. The earl and countess resided principally at Warwick up to 1456, when Anne
was born, and then in Calais until 1460. Thereafter during the 1460s Warwick was constantly away on military or diplomatic business, most commonly in the North, at Westminster, and on continental embassies, on which his family can rarely have accompanied him. Clearly the earl and countess were less often together. Quite frequently recorded at Middleham and at Carlisle, the earl was rarely at Warwick after 1461 and does not occur again in Wales. Did the countess also base herself in the North? For the whole of 1464–5, the only year for which accounts survive, the Countess Anne was not at Middleham. Or did she reside more usually on her own estates in the West Midlands whence she came? She must certainly have possessed a household capable of operating apart from the earl and of moving about. After the earl’s exile in 1470, his countess lived in turn abroad, at Beaulieu and in the North, and returned to Warwick, if ever, only after John Rows had finished writing. Although this Warwick cantarist knew his countess well, and knew all about her subsequent sufferings and her reactions to them, yet he encountered her principally in 1449–57 rather than later. What he saw her daughters witnessed also. As a clergyman, Rows reports with approval that the countess ‘was ever a full devout lady in God’s service’ – that she attended religious services assiduously and fervently: he had more that was positive and distinctive to say about her elder siblings and would have liked, we may presume, to have something more concrete to praise about her piety. Rows also perceived in her ‘a noble lady of the blood royal’ and ‘by true inheritance countess of Warwick’, neither of which Anne can have overlooked. Anne’s mother was also an excellent example of feminine conduct for her daughters, even through masculine eyes. ‘She was also gladly ever companionable and liberal’, Rows wrote, ‘and in her own person, seemly and beauteous, and to all that drew to her ladyship, as the deed shewed, full good and gracious’. Translated into modern English, Rows
tells us that the countess was pleasing to the eye and acted with decorum. She was affable, courteous to all comers, and generous. She addressed all members of her household whatever their rank ‘according to her and their degrees’. A strict sense of hierarchy and etiquette and condescension to inferiors, which contemporaries thought proper and we call snobbery, is implied. Although apparently only twice in childbirth herself, Rows reports that the countess was ‘glad to be at and with women that travailed of child, full comfortable and plenteous of all things that should be helping to them’.
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Presumably these mothers-to-be were the gentlewomen of her household and the wives of her retainers and officers. It sounds as though they were her friends as well as her employees. Pregnancy, childbirth and babies were entirely familiar. Here surely Rows provides some insight into the feminine ambience within which Anne Neville was raised up to her early teens. Thereafter, as we shall see, she leapt into married life.