Anne Neville (7 page)

Whilst obviously coming together much more frequently than we can know, for procreation, on important feasts and perhaps on many other occasions, it was normal for lords and ladies to have separate and self-sufficient households, and for them often to be apart. Warwick’s busy life often kept him and his family separate. In the absence of direct evidence, the households of the earl and countess were surely like many others that we do know about. Most members worked in the service departments that handled the food, drink, transport, laundry and washing up: the lower household that sustained the upper household, where the lord and lady lived and entertained. Warwick’s household came to be exceptionally large and the scale of his open-handed hospitality quite outstanding.
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When the Neville daughters were there, they found roasted meats prominent on the menu. Bar the laundress, the earl’s household was entirely male, but in the smaller replica that was the countess’s establishment there were females, both
gentlewomen (damsels) and domestic servants. Based on other parallels, there were probably both married women, the wives of his officers, and spinsters, although actually only one widow – the earl’s flighty cousin Dame Margaret Lucy
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– is known by name. It was a female world that aristocratic girls like the Neville sisters inhabited. Men there were in plenty, both in the service departments, in office upstairs, in business transactions with their mother, and in polite society, but such maidens were always chaperoned and insulated against potential male predators except under the most strictly controlled circumstances.

Whilst little, the earl’s daughters lived with their mother. Mothers took general responsibility for the upbringing of their children.
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The image of St Anne teaching her daughter the Blessed Virgin Mary to read become popular in the fourteenth century. At this stage in history ladies did not suckle their babies or undertake themselves the physical care of their offspring. That was the work of a wet-nurse, from whom girls progressed to a governess – in a great household a gentle-woman – and boys to a master. The Warwicks, of course, had no sons, but at least two other boys, their ward Francis Lord Lovell and also the royal prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, were brought up in their household;
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female wards and other girls may also have been. Whatever their sex, all the children learnt at least to read and write in English, perhaps in Latin also, to say the Lord’s Prayer (
Paternoster
) and Hail Mary (
Ave
), and were taught about religious observance: there were religious services everyday, usually several times a day. They also learnt who they were: their family, its genealogy, its traditions, legends and renown. It was here, surely, that Anne Neville learnt about Guy of Warwick and her remarkable grandfather Earl Richard Beauchamp, about her Despenser, Montagu and Neville forebears. They must all have learnt to ride. Thereafter the routes for boys and girls separated. Boys were taught to a higher academic standard and also about the martial arts appropriate
to future warriors. The upbringing of girls was designed to fit them for their role in life as gentlewomen, mothers, managers of households and members of polite society. They needed to attract good husbands and to make the most of their married lives. For the latter role, they needed to learn housewifery. Sewing and the working of textiles feature prominently in all the books of instruction. They learnt how to handle servants. Girls also needed to learn courtesy, proper deportment, the etiquette, procedures and good manners expected of polite society. The Neville girls must have been taught to eat as daintily as Chaucer’s
Prioress.

The content of education, as ever, was not everything. The Knight of the Tower wrote his book so that his daughters ‘ought to govern them self and to keep them from evil’. Academics and caring fathers alike sought to set girls on the right course, to inculcate proper values, and to cure them of the besetting female sins, of which a considerable list was compiled. Girls should avoid gossip, take care in what they said, not answer back, eschew idleness, extravagance and over-attention to their physical appearance, such as the painting of faces and plucking of eyebrows, and hence both vanity and pride. ‘Every good woman’ should ‘behave herself simply & honestly in her clothing and in the quantity of it’. Humility, obedience to men and silence were enjoined. That such advice had to be devised implies, of course, that many girls were not like this. If we cannot be sure that Anne Neville conformed, nevertheless great effort and staffing was surely deployed to ensure that Warwick’s daughters were brought up properly. Above all, girls must be chaste, virgins before marriage and monogamous afterwards. Girls were of course secluded from male society and chaperoned at all times, but that alone was not enough. Knowing that their future lay in marriage, even young girls were surely alert to male suitors and sexually aware, at least in theory, and liable to temptation. From their own first-hand
experiences, both the Knight of the Tower and Peter Idley warned against predatory and ineligible males, who flattered inexperienced girls, promised marriage to seduce them, and threatened their reputations. Girls should curtail such inappropriate conversations and preserve their reputations – for honour was crucial among females – and hence their attraction to serious suitors. Constancy and courage were urged as antidotes to the temptations they were bound to encounter. As models they were offered the virgin martyrs, like themselves always beautiful, nubile and desirable, who had successfully resisted all blandishments, worldly advantage and threats to preserve their chastity. We may safely presume that Anne was kept unsullied for her marriage at fourteen.

The virgin martyrs were maidens, what we call adolescents, suspended between childhood and adulthood. ‘Sufficiently physically developed to engage in procreation, and sufficiently intellectually and morally developed to understand the nature of the bond’ of marriage, maidens had reached the perfect age of the ‘youthful, sexually mature yet virginal young woman’. The late medieval ideal was that female ‘beauty was associated with the slenderness of youth and virginity’.
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By the mid-1460s, Isabel and Anne Neville too were maidens shaped by their upbringings and were still being shaped to an ideal devised by men to make them attractive to male suitors and good wives and mothers thereafter. Anne was blonde and conventionally described as ‘beauteous’ by John Rows.
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Heiresses did not have to be beautiful, with even the insane finding husbands, but as they attracted royal dukes perhaps the Neville sisters were.

Damsels like Isabel and Anne were commonly placed in other gentle households, where perhaps they were more easily disciplined in their adolescent years. We have no evidence of this for the Neville sisters. There was no queen’s household in which to place them until 1464, when Isabel was twelve
and Anne eight. Perhaps Warwick did not want to place them with Edward’s Wydeville queen, about whom he had decided qualms, and whose kinsfolk competed vigorously for such places. We should imagine Isabel, Anne and other girls living in an upper household dominated by mature and married gentlewomen with their mother and accompanying her wherever she moved, albeit less frequently than their restless father. With both parents they are recorded making offerings with the king at St Mary’s Warwick, probably in January 1464.
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Most likely they were also with their parents at York in September 1465 in company with young Duke Richard, their two uncles by marriage Lords FitzHugh and Hastings and hence probably their aunts, Warwick’s sisters Alice and Katherine. That, regrettably, is all.

Probably Warwick’s two little girls moved increasingly into society during the 1460s. From historical records, of course, it was only on occasions – and very special occasions – that they did emerge from obscurity and into our vision. Always they were in their best clothes and on their best behaviour. It was only their presence that was reported. Although unrecorded by the heralds, almost certainly both were present with almost all their kindred at Bisham Priory on 14 February 1463, where their grandfather Richard, Earl of Salisbury and their uncle Thomas Neville, both slain at Wakefield in 1460, were ceremonially reburied, and their recently deceased grandmother the Countess Alice was first interred. The king’s own father and brother, both also killed at Wakefield, were not to receive their similar reburial until 1476. The heir of the throne, the king’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, was among Warwick’s distinguished array of guests at Bisham. So splendid was the occasion that the heraldic record became the model for the funeral of an earl. There is no record of the wedding of their youngest aunt Margaret c.1462 to John, Earl of Oxford. Just as remarkable as Bisham in September 1465 at Cawood Palace
near York were the celebrations of the enthronement of their uncle George Neville as archbishop of York. Two thousand guests were feasted on the most lavish scale at thirteen tables in the great hall, in the chief, second and great chambers, the lower hall and in the gallery. Almost all their relations were there. Their father Warwick himself was engaged as steward, his countess was seated with other adults in the second chamber, and ‘two of the Lord of Warwick’s daughters’ were placed in the great chamber: testimony, perhaps, that their society manners at twelve (Isabel) and nine (Anne) could be trusted. Also at their table was another child, the earl’s ward, the thirteen-year-old Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, ‘the king’s brother’, and three adult ladies to keep order. The ladies were Duke Richard’s grown-up sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, a cousin of the Neville girls, their distant in-law the countess of Westmorland, and their aunt by marriage (and Warwick’s sister-in-law) Isabel, Countess of Northumberland. It was both a family get-together and the nursery table.
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The heraldic records of the other major ceremonies of the 1460s, which the countess and her daughters may well have attended, such as the marriage of Queen Elizabeth (1464), her coronation (1465) and churching (1466), over which Warwick presided, and the Smithfield tournament of the Bastard of Burgundy with Lord Scales in 1467, prioritised male participants and made no mention of either Isabel or Anne. Presumably they were absent from the marriage of the Princess Margaret in Burgundy in 1468 since the earl himself was elsewhere.

Neither Isabel Neville at seventeen nor Anne Neville at fourteen were particularly young by contemporary standards when they were married. They were the products of the sort of upbringing that has been described. How successfully they internalised its messages we cannot tell. Anne’s moral code, as we shall see, may have been imperfect. It was at fourteen that she left her parents’ hearth. She may never have returned
to Warwick again until she was queen. Hence John Rows knew her less well than her mother or her sister and therefore has little that is personal to tell us. If he could, he would have recorded distinctive details, especially of her piety, but was instead reduced to the most general of platitudes. Her manner was decorous and amiable, he records, her conduct commendable and virtuous, and she was ‘full gracious’. The
Great Chronicle
also records her reputation as gracious.
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At least, therefore, she had been brought up to her rank.

MARRIAGE

The destiny to which all aristocratic ladies were born was marriage and motherhood. That was the fate of both Isabel and Anne. Maidenhood, childhood, and even infancy, was not too early to ask. The earl and countess of Warwick had been children aged seven and eleven when they were married. Warwick’s own father Salisbury had been part of the most remarkable child marriages in medieval England. If the Countess Anne’s parents had been adults when they married, in each case for the second time, both had been under-age on the first occasion, her mother indeed not yet fourteen. Child marriage was a family tradition. Logically the earl and countess ought to have been thinking along these lines. Yet there seems to have been no intention to marry Isabel, the eldest, until the mid 1460s, when she was at least thirteen. At least there is no such record.

The delay is easy to explain. The Nevilles had contracted brilliant dynastic matches in the first forty years of the fifteenth century with extraordinary ease, principally because of their close kinship to the Lancastrian royal house, but as the generations passed their relationship had ceased to be special. Warwick’s brother John was not married until 1458 and his youngest sister Margaret did not wed John, Earl of Oxford
until about 1462. Providing for his siblings took priority in Warwick’s time over his daughters. Secondly, as head of his family, Warwick took a direct interest in advancing all his kindred: nephews, such as George Neville, son of his brother John, Earl of Northumberland; his niece Alice, daughter of his sister Alice Lady FitzHugh; and Margaret Lucy, daughter of his greataunt Anne, Duchess of Exeter, who tried to conceal her sexual and matrimonial adventures from her disapproving cousin. Warwick expected – and was expected – to choose spouses for his daughter. Father did know best. He was very choosy, quite unwilling to match his heirs to any but the noblest in the land. The progeny of mere barons and knights – even the earl of Oxford and Lord Lovell – were insufficiently grand. And, to be fair, with the Wars of the Roses and the repression of the northern Lancastrians, Warwick had plenty on his plate.

The status of Isabel and Anne was an important third factor. The girls had no concerns about their material future. They were too young for that. Moreover, as daughters of an earl, actually the greatest and best connected of earls, they had obvious attractions on the marriage market. Warwick could easily have found well-breeched husbands for them, the heads of prosperous gentry families and even of the lesser nobility, who were well able to maintain them in genteel comfort, had he so wished. Had he possessed a son to take precedence, or even extra daughters, that perhaps is what he would have arranged. However, Isabel and Anne were heiresses – amongst the greatest heiresses of their era. Precisely when it first occurred to their parents – and then became painfully apparent – that there was to be no son to carry on the huge accumulation of family estates, titles and honours, we cannot tell. Reality seems to have been recognised, however, by 1464, when Isabel was thirteen and Anne was only eight. That they were heiresses made them much more attractive on the marriage market and probably also made their parents far more selective in their choice of bridegrooms.