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This was the creature that I woo’d and wonn
Over her bleeding husband stab’d by me:
Such different persons never saw the sunne
He, for perfection, I, deformitie,
She wep’t and smil’d, hated and lov’d in one
Such was her virtue, my hypocrisie;
Thus, women’s griefes, nor loves, are dyed in graine
For either’s colour, time or men can staine.
From ‘The Ghost of Richard III’, anonymous poem, 1614

Forgive me, Heaven, that I forgave this Man.

O may my story told in after Ages,
Give warning to our easie Sexes ears:
May it Unveil the hearts of Men, and strike
Them deaf to their dissimulated Love.
Queen Ann(e), in ‘Richard III’, Colley Cibber, 1699

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for Rufus and Robin

First published 2013

Amberley Publishing
The Hill, Stroud
Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP
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Copyright © Amy Licence 2013
The right of Amy Licence to be identified as the Author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with the
Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in
writing from the Publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-4456-1153-2 (PRINT)
ISBN 978-1-4456-1177-8 (e-BOOK)
Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing.
Printed in the UK.

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Contents
Genealogical Trees
Introduction
Anne and Warwick
1 - Battles and Births, 1453–1456
2 - Castle Life, 1456–1458
3 - Warring Cousins, 1458–1460
4 - Boy and Girl, 1461–1465
5 - Romance and Chivalry, 1465–1469
6 - Queens in Waiting, 1469–1470
7 - Lancastrian Princess, 1471
Anne and Gloucester
8 - A Strange Courtship, 1471–1472
9 - Richard’s Wife, 1472–1483
10 - Crisis, Summer 1483
11 - Queen, July–December 1483
12 - Disquiet, 1484
13 - Elizabeth of York, 1484–1485
14 - Eclipse, 1485
Picture Section
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography

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1. Anne and Richard’s shared ancestry.

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2. Edward III’s Yorkist and Lancastrian descendants.

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Introduction
Act One, Scene Two. The air is hazy. The room seems to be part medical,
part industrial, yet there is a sense of neglect and disrepair. Tiles line the
walls and a man in a long white coat stands with his back to the camera,
busy over his work. A couple of brown glass bottles and a wooden crutch
are visible in the foreground on the right. Rays of opaque light stream
through the windows, creating a sort of misty underworld. Discordant jazz
plays, low and melancholy.
The double doors in the middle of the scene open and she appears.
Only a dark silhouette at first, she steps into the room; a slim, young
woman dressed in a black coat with a large fur collar, glamorous with her
lipstick, pearls, heels and dark glasses. Yet it is clear from her demeanour
that she is in mourning. Reaching behind her, she pulls the door firmly shut
before the camera draws close, foregrounding her face as she removes her
glasses. Her expression is an uneasy mixture of subdued horror and
resignation.
The scene before her is a mortuary. Three bodies lie on marble plinths
in a low-ceilinged room where the windows have been shortened with
plaster board, making it feel subterranean. She approaches the dead, with
her form bathed in shadow, and stops before the corpse of a young man. He
lies white and maimed, visibly wounded on the forehead and chest. She
leans on the plinth as if the sight of the corpse weakens her, before taking it
in her arms and delivering her speech.
*
This is Anne Neville. Or at least it is the actress Kristin Scott Thomas,
playing the role of Anne, in Ian McKellen’s 1995 film version of
Shakespeare’s Richard III. But it is not Shakespeare as the playwright
would have recognised it. The settings and costumes date the action to the
first half of the twentieth century; it is martial, modernist, Art Deco. This
Anne is more stilettos and sunglasses than kirtle and chemise. The mortuary
scene was shot in a lower storage room of the empty Pearl Assurance
Building, a vast, greying edifice constructed between 1912 and 1919 in
Holborn, London. It was not a ploy to keep down production costs: the
grimy, dimly lit basement was perfect for the film’s new setting. Written by
McKellen and Richard Loncraine, the screenplay updated the story to a
fictionalised England of the 1930s, ‘a decade of tyranny throughout Europe
… when a dictatorship like Richard III’s might have overtaken the UK’.1 It
was a fantasy, a parallel world exploring one of history’s ‘what-if’
scenarios; a vision of the Home Counties being administered by the Nazis
or Mosley’s Union of Fascists. Thus, a late medieval king was juxtaposed
with the rise of the Third Reich in London, echoed in the uniforms, music
and set design. Richard III’s story was co-opted as part of a wider history,
beyond anything the king himself could have imagined. Recalling the
process of writing, McKellen explained, ‘we talked about it in the near-
present tense and imagined it taking place yesterday rather than yesteryear.
This, I suppose, was what Shakespeare intended.’2 McKellen was right. As
the Bard was writing, in 1591, the events he described were part of recent
history, but as an entertainment, legend and a degree of dramatic licence
were central to his work’s success. In 1955, Laurence Olivier and Claire
Bloom’s memorable version of the scene followed more traditional lines
and forty years later, McKellen reinvented its setting to draw modern
parallels. In this way, Shakespeare’s play is subject to constant revision;
each generation adds a new chapter to the afterlife of the text, for better or
worse. Similarly, these changes continue the on-going narrative of Anne
Neville, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, the legendary Kingmaker. Her life
has undergone several phases of reinvention by later generations for the
purposes of entertainment and propaganda, which is the very reason her
brief existence is remembered. For the historian, Anne herself is not too
dissimilar from a ‘text’, a set of clues to be decoded according to the
standards of her day, which may have been mishandled and misrepresented
through time. The process began early. Just as Olivier and McKellen
adapted Shakespeare, so the Bard distorted actual events of the fifteenth
century to better serve his dramatic intentions.
The real Anne was not the sophisticated beauty Kristin Scott Thomas
suggests; by modern standards she was a child when the key events outlined
in this scene actually took place. In the year that she was widowed, 1471,
Anne was only fourteen years old. That year she also lost her father and
father-in-law, in violent circumstances, while she was alone among her
former enemies. She would have had reason enough to grieve. McKellen
altered Shakespeare again to portray her cradling the dead body of her
husband, rather than that of the murdered Henry VI, and Scott Thomas
leaves the audience in no doubt about the extent of her emotions. Yet the
grief that the role demands is misleading: Anne had been married for about
five months, but the union had been arranged for political reasons and was
possibly consummated only briefly. After a long association with the
Yorkists, Warwick had performed a dramatic U-turn and allied his younger
child with their Lancastrian foes. Anne barely knew her boy-husband and
no evidence survives to suggest she held him in any affection. The loss of
her father was far more significant. It meant that Anne was left alone in the
paradoxical position of the teenage widow, midway through the civil wars
that were commensurate with her lifespan.
Clearly Shakespeare’s ‘history’ was a fiction, re-animating well-known
figures from the past and putting words into their mouths, within an
abridged time-scale. Previous chroniclers, storytellers and historians like
Rous, More, Holinshed, Hall and Vergil had done no less. However,
Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the incident has become so famous that it
has almost entirely eclipsed historical fact in the popular imagination: the
powerful scene develops along familiar lines as Anne’s grief is interrupted
by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the alleged killer of her relatives.
According to the play of 1591, Anne recoils in horror from the blood-
stained apparition, which displays the often-repeated physical deformities
that were correlative in the Tudor mind with immorality and evil intentions.
McKellen follows this interpretation. Playing the part of the king himself,
his hunch-backed figure, dressed in military uniform, appears from behind
the widow as Anne bends over her husband’s corpse. Sensing his approach,
she turns in revulsion to see the ‘fiend’ and curses him, yet Richard is able
to manipulate her emotions to the extent that she agrees to become his wife
before the exchange ends. Even as the villain, the character’s Machiavellian
powers of persuasion cannot fail to impress.
In reality though, Richard was an old friend, perhaps more. His father,
the Duke of York, had married Anne’s great-aunt and the young Gloucester
had spent several years living as Warwick’s protégé at the family home of
Middleham Castle. The earl may even have been the boy’s godfather. The
children would have been brought together regularly, in ceremonial and
informal situations, so it is not impossible that an early friendship had
blossomed between them, surviving Anne’s arranged marriage with the
enemy. After all, her family’s sympathies lay first with the Yorkists, then
with her Lancastrian husband: next she would marry the boy she had
known, whose family had made her a widow. Shakespeare truncates this:
Richard forces Anne to accept his ring alongside her husband’s corpse,
despite her curses. The actual ceremony took place over a year later in July
1472 and the pair lived together, apparently in harmony, for over a decade.
It may even have been a love match. The eighteenth-century Ricardian
Horace Walpole mentioned that Catherine, Countess of Desmond described
him as ‘the handsomest man in the room’. There is no denying though, that
the alliance was financially expedient to both, so much so, that they were
prepared to enter a marriage that was possibly invalid in the eyes of the
medieval Church. Together, they were crowned in 1483: Anne was
Richard’s companion, his wife, the mother of his child and his queen. Did
he then go on to murder her, as Shakespeare suggests?
McKellen shows a rapidly deteriorating Anne. The haggard appearance
of the wife contrasts sharply with the earlier elegance of the widow. In the
back of a limousine she hitches up her skirt and, according to McKellen’s
screenplay, ‘finds the appropriate spot in her much-punctured thigh’. Her
unnamed drug of choice is described in the screen play as ‘calming’ and she
closes her eyes and ‘waits for it to work’, while the orchestra plays
triumphantly. Later she appears ‘doleful’ and sad, later still, in a drugged
stupor, in a world of her own and finally, catatonic.3 The last the audience
see of her is a motionless form, lying in bed with wide, staring eyes. A
spider descends and lands on her face, scurrying away as she remains
unblinking. McKellen’s Anne Neville is dead. Obviously, the fifteenth-
century queen’s death was not attributable to recreational drugs but the
rumours of her demise were just as sinister. Popular culture has upheld
Anne as another of Richard’s victims, with Shakespeare placing her among
the accusatory ghosts that disturb his sleep before battle. This is
unsurprising as the circumstances of her death are shrouded in mystery and,
for once, the corrective facts are harder to establish. In early 1485, the
corridors of Westminster Palace whispered of jealousy, flirtations, affairs
and illness, as some contemporaries suggested Richard might have been
planning his second marriage while Anne was still alive, perhaps to a
foreign princess, perhaps to his own niece. Aged only twenty-eight, the
queen passed away amid an eclipse of the sun and the chroniclers were
swift to draw their conclusions. Did Richard really play a part in her death?
Did he ‘eschew her bed’ as she was fatally ill, possibly contagious? Was she
poisoned to make way for a younger, more fecund model? Perhaps she was
lovingly tended, yet unwittingly administered with medicines that could
themselves prove fatal. The truth of Anne’s demise remained unresolved at
the time and the dramatic regime change that followed compromised the
objectivity of many witnesses and chroniclers. It is time to tease out the
facts from the fiction.

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1

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Battles and Births
1453–1456
His lords are lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the
sea is lost, France is lost
Complaints of Jack Cade’s rebels, 14501
It was summer 1453, the thirty-first year in the reign of the Lancastrian
Henry VI. The nights were long and warm and the royal household had left
its overcrowded lodgings in the Palace of Westminster in favour of some
sport and relaxation in the country. By August, the court had settled into
Clarendon Palace, near Salisbury, to enjoy riding, archery and pursuing the
hart in the surrounding royal parkland. A former hunting lodge, the location
had been a favourite one with English kings since before the Norman
Conquest, where spacious rooms of 40 feet in length stretched over two
floors with vaulted ceilings, tiled floors and fireplaces flanked by marble
pillars. As the heat of the day mounted, the glazed windows with their
stained glass images were thrown open and the scents of summer flowers
and herbs drifted up from the formal gardens outside. It was an idyllic
retreat for a monarch who increasingly eschewed worldly cares and allowed
his wife and her favourites to take over the reins of government. Early in
the morning, as the Palace was stirring, Henry could be found on his knees
in the chapel, offering up his devotions to its marble altar and crucifix
flanked by the figures of Mary and John. The king was known for his piety,
asceticism and dislike of suffering but he was still a young man and
relatively healthy according to the standards of the day. It was completely
unexpected, therefore, when he suddenly suffered a seizure and took to his
bed, lifeless as if paralysed, unable to speak or understand what was being
said to him.
Suddenly, panic took hold. Nobody knew what to do or how to react
when the king suffered his collapse. At first, his puzzled courtiers merely
helped him into bed, hoping that a good night’s rest would prove
restorative: in hushed tones, they summoned his most intimate assistants,
advisers, his confessor and sent word to his wife, the queen. Footsteps
echoed along the tiled floors and up stone staircases; horse hooves clattered
into the courtyard outside and urgent whispers filled the royal bedchamber.
The king was urged to eat, to drink and finally, when these proved fruitless,
to sleep; perhaps he had simply overtired himself and all would be well the
next morning? But when Henry’s servants went to rouse him in the early
light, they found him unchanged. Weeks passed and the king did not
improve. In fact, his condition appeared to be worsening, verging on the
catatonic: he had descended into a deep state of shock, similar to receiving
bad news or a sudden fright, as Norfolk landowner John Paston suggested
in a letter home. Other contemporaries described Henry losing control of
his body and wits, as if the man himself had withdrawn, leaving just the
physical shell. Keen to conceal the extent of his incapacity, his servants
waited for two months before packing up the household at Clarendon and
removing to Windsor, where he was put to bed in more familiar
surroundings. It was given out that he was resting; the country must not yet
know that its king was as virtually useless as he had been when he inherited
the throne as a baby. Still nothing could rouse him from his stupor and
members of his court tiptoed about his room, where the wan figure lay
among the velvets and silks of the impressive bed of state. Old favourites
leaned over him and spoke in soft tones, yet the king could not distinguish
them from the servants bringing in his food or building up the fire. Nor
could he recognise his heavily pregnant wife, Queen Margaret, her dress
unlaced across her expanding belly, soon to deliver the much longed-for
Lancastrian heir.
Yet there was no obvious cause for such a dramatic collapse. The
doctors summoned to Windsor could offer little real help, as their
understanding of mental illness was as imperfect as their knowledge of the
workings of the human body. They would have made their observations of
his appearance, consulted the king’s astrological chart and examined his
urine, before reaching a diagnosis based on the four Galenic humours,
which categorised patients according to differing degrees of heat and
moisture. Three physicians and two surgeons administered him with
powerful drugs to no avail and soon he was in the sole care of Gilbert
Keymer, Dean of Salisbury, ‘an expert, notable, and proved man in the craft
of medicine’.2 The royal diet was adjusted to allow for the humours to be
balanced according to the properties present in his food, so an over-heated,
dry patient would be given meals of cold, wet ingredients like lettuce while
the fiery seeds of mustard were to be avoided at all cost. The king’s
condition would have necessitated force-feeding by a trusted and intimate
servant, reducing him to the status of a baby; passive, dependent and
helpless. The initial response to Henry’s collapse was probably the
universal remedy of bleeding, applied to almost every ailment, to draw
dangerous matter out of the body, which in this case, was deemed to be an
excess of black bile. He would also have been given various medicines,
ointments and powders mixed from natural ingredients chosen for their
medicinal and superstitious qualities. But ultimately, the doctors were
baffled and, as usual in the medieval period, when events defied logical
explanation, superstitious and religious answers were sought. Madness was
interpreted as a function of individual morality, as a punishment for sin or a
test of character, although Henry’s pious lifestyle placed him above the
usual reproaches. Perhaps some witnesses considered it the trial of a man
unsuited to kingship, a response not too dissimilar from modern
interpretations, though their explanations would encompass divine and
supernatural causes rather than schizophrenia or depression.
The autumn days passed but the king did not improve. His absence
was beginning to be noticed and those citizens and courtiers who believed
in the real power of witchcraft feared he was the victim of some form of
enchantment. Henry’s condition was dangerously suggestive of daemonic
possession or the influence of maleficium, the Latin term for ‘mischief,’ or
magic of evil intent. These were very real and active threats in the fifteenth
century; it was believed that spells, chants and magic rituals could injure
and even kill, as could the presence of evil spirits. In 1484, the Pope would
issue a ‘witch-bull’ outlining the activities of witches and a manual of
witch-hunting, Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, appeared in
print. It was a subject that was given considerable credence and importance
in late medieval logic. Only twelve years had passed since Eleanor, Duchess
of Gloucester, wife of the heir to the throne, had been convicted of
treasonable necromancy and paraded through the streets of London. She
had finally died, in the summer of 1452, after spending the remainder of her
life in captivity, the news no doubt stirring memories of her activities for
the inhabitants of the capital. Priests may have been summoned to
Westminster to pray for the king to overcome any evil spirits holding his
soul and sanity in their grip. Making their devotions in the Abbey, they may
well have brought holy relics, the consecrated host and phials of blessed
water, across the short distance to the king’s bedchamber, or even
conducted their ceremonies there.
Once the spiritual remedies had failed, the physical alternatives
encompassed a range of painful possibilities. It was not unknown for
patients to undergo the highly dangerous process of trepanning, when a hole
was drilled into the skull to release humours or demons, as described in
some contemporary medical tracts and images.3 Doctors might also use
cautery; the application of heat in the same way that wounds were
cauterized, in order to divert inflammation away from another part of the
body, such as the brain. They also recognised the likelihood that his
condition was genetic. Henry’s madness of 1453 may well have been
inherited from his maternal grandfather, the French King Charles VI, who
suffered from intermittent periods of mental illness, claiming different
identities, being unresponsive and believing himself to be made of glass. As
a result, France had become embroiled in political turmoil and power
struggles; now the same fate threatened to befall England. In a deeply
superstitious age, where the king’s health was held to be a mirror of the
health of the nation, strong leadership was required to maintain peace and
this illness was a potential disaster. It was imperative that his madness
should be cured.
Writing in the sixteenth century, physician Andrew Boorde’s advice on
the treatment of ‘them the whiche be madde and out of theyr wytte’ clarifies
the dangerous overlap of medical understanding with superstition. He
identified three different kinds of madness – lunatics, frantics and possessed
‘daemonics’ – but the regime to which they were all subjected sounds
sufficient, to the modern mind, to ensure the total loss of any remaining
sanity. Primarily, such individuals were considered a danger to others and
should be kept in ‘savegarde … in some close howse or chamber where
there is lyttell light’. The room must not have painted walls or hangings, nor
pictures ‘for such thynges maketh them full of fantasyes’. Citing the case of
a murderous maniac named Mychell, who killed his wife in a fit, Boorde
advocates that the lunatic must be ‘allowed no knife or shears or girdle’ and
be guarded over by a keeper ‘whom he fears’. No words must be spoken to
him, except for ‘reprehension or gentyll reformacyon’. He must be shaved
once a month, drink no strong liquor and eat a little warm meat and
‘moderate suppings’ three times a day.4 These instructions had unique
implications when the sufferer was of royal blood. As an anointed king,
Henry VI’s status as the ruler and protector of his people was undermined,
for his lunacy transformed him into a potentially malignant force, with the
resulting ramifications for his country. Frailty of any kind could potentially
prove the downfall of a ruler; as Shakespeare’s Claudius states about his
step-son Hamlet, ‘madness in great ones must not unwatched go’. If Henry
had previously been considered a weak, easily led king, he never fully
recovered from this redefinition, even after his madness abated.
Henry VI had inherited the throne in 1422, when he was only nine
months old. His warmongering father was a hard act to follow, even if his
son had been a grown man on accession. Revered as a hero in his own
lifetime for his victory at Agincourt and the conquering of vast swathes of
French territories, Henry V had contracted dysentery and died suddenly at
the age of thirty-five, fulfilling his own brother’s prophecy that he was ‘too
famous to live long’. The baby’s inheritance was a dubious one. Having
been engaged in expensive wars for over the eponymous Hundred Years,
the country had amassed a wealth of foreign properties which the boy felt
obliged, by the memory of his father, to maintain. The young Henry VI was
crowned in England 1429 and then, as King of France, at Notre Dame in
1431, following the burning of Joan of Arc. His two uncles, John, Duke of
Lancaster, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, whom Henry V had
appointed Regent and Lord Protector and who oversaw his upbringing, had
died in 1435 and 1447 respectively. After that, keeping a foothold in the
many English territories abroad was to prove difficult. And it was a
difficulty the young man did not seek. By nature he was gentle and
unworldly, unable or unwilling to make decisions and easily manipulated;
he had no inclination for the martial arts or desire to prolong a state of war.
One condition of his marriage to Margaret of Anjou in April 1445 had been
his agreement to relinquish the provinces of Maine and Anjou to France, a
clause that was initially kept secret and was as controversial as expected
when it became public knowledge in 1446. By 1451, the English-held
territories in Normandy, Bordeaux and Gascony had been lost through the
incompetence of Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, as Commander
of the French Campaign. In 1453, the final blow came when English forces
were routed at Castillon, marking the traditional end of the Hundred Years’
War. It may be that this loss precipitated Henry’s collapse. The royal
finances were also in disarray with huge debts being owed to the Court’s
suppliers. On one infamous occasion, the royal family sat down to dine,
only to be told there was nothing to eat! The royal routine continued, ‘but
payment there was none’, causing additional, unpopular taxes to be levied.5
An anonymous chronicler of the 1460s described the king as ‘simple and
led by covetous council and owed more than he was worth’. Many
attributed this mismanagement, as well as much of the bad decision-making
of the 1450s, to the king’s unpopular favourites. Now that John, Duke of
Lancaster, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, were out of the way, a
number of ambitious English noblemen saw their opportunity to pull the
strings of government. Many of them clustered around the real power
behind the throne, Henry’s young wife, Margaret of Anjou.
The young queen found herself in an awkward position at the onset of
Henry’s illness in 1453. As a couple, they were temperamentally very
different. According to their contemporary, Henry’s adviser and Carthusian
monk John Blakman, the king was pure, truthful and devout; he rejected the
immodest fashions of the day and frivolous pastimes in favour of reading
the scriptures and worship. Famously, he was scandalised at the sight of
naked bathers and desired them to be clothed, disliking the fashion that
allowed the female neck to be exposed. His views on sex were equally
prudish and his confessor continually advised him not to have ‘his sport’
with the queen. Margaret, however, was young, intelligent, energetic and
beautiful; at the time of her marriage, when she was fifteen, she was
‘already a woman, passionate and proud and strong-willed’.6 She conceived
after almost eight years of marriage and the inevitable rumours implicated
the unpopular Duke of Somerset as the potential father. As Henry lay
incapacitated, he may have heard the screams of his wife, coming from her
apartments in the Palace, when she went into labour that October. The child
proved to be a boy. After his birth, Edward of Westminster was shown to
the king for his blessing on New Year’s Day 1454, but Henry said nothing.
He merely looked at him and cast his eyes down again, supposedly refusing
to acknowledge the child, although this may have been more to do with his
inability to communicate. When he did finally recover, the following
Christmas, he expressed surprise at the existence of the infant, whom he
said must have been conceived by the Holy Ghost. Others at court favoured
a different explanation.
Somerset had already replaced Margaret’s previous ally, William de la
Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who had met an untimely death on board a ship on his
way to exile in 1450. These favourites were felt to have an undue influence
over a young man who was unsuited for kingship and was content to let
others fill his regal shoes. Now that Henry VI had fallen ill, Margaret and
her faction were in a position to assume almost complete power over the
invalid and, by extension, her son. It appeared that the same conditions that
had caused chaos in France were about to disrupt England’s already fragile
monarchy. Factional rule, bankruptcy and national humiliation over French
losses led to public calls for reform and retaliation against those considered
culpable. Civil conflict was looming; in 1450, Jack Cade had headed a
rebellion against the ‘false council’ of Henry’s advisers but his death had
not silenced the widespread complaints of the day. Chaos seemed to lurk
just over the horizon. Boorde’s suggestion that a madman required a ‘feared
keeper’ was a difficult one, too: who would be prepared to rule the king in
his incapacity and what would happen to them in the event of Henry’s
return to health? Several prominent candidates emerged at the Westminster
Court, including the Duke of Somerset, whose own claim to the throne was
not inconsiderable. However, there was another duke, whose inheritance
placed him even closer in blood to the king, who was not prepared to stand
by and watch his rivals dominate. The challenge that he mounted to them in
the 1450s stemmed partly from bitter personal rivalry but was also for the
wider ‘common weal’, which he saw as being adversely affected by the
current status quo.
Ambitious and driven, Richard, Duke of York, was head of the
Plantagenet family. The rivalries of the fifteenth century stemmed, in part,
from Edward III fathering so many children and now the order in which
three of those sons had been born was of crucial importance. First had been
Edward, the Black Prince, whose early death meant his son Richard II had
become king in 1377, next in line was Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of
Clarence, and finally, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. In 1399, Richard II
had been deposed and murdered by the Lancastrian line of descent through
Gaunt, which had placed his son, Henry Bolingbroke, on the throne as
Henry IV. In turn, he was succeeded by his son Henry V and grandson
Henry VI. However, as the great-great-grandson of the second Plantagenet
sibling, Lionel of Antwerp, Richard of York should have taken precedence
over the claim of this younger branch of the family. It also placed him
before Somerset, another cousin as a result of the descent from John of
Gaunt he shared with the king. York considered he had been passed over
unfairly because his claim was carried through the female line, rather than
the all-male exclusivity of the Lancastrians, which was thought superior.
Additionally, his family had suffered disgrace when he was a child. His
father’s title and lands had been attainted after his involvement in a plot
against Henry V but when the boy’s uncle died at Agincourt, the four-year-
old was allowed to inherit the Dukedom of York. Before Queen Margaret
gave birth in October 1453, York was the heir to the throne and had
previously attempted to assert his rights for the ‘common weal’: he was
rumoured to have been responsible for Suffolk’s death in 1450 and later
marched on London, intent on dislodging the other unpopular favourites.
The rivalry between York and Somerset had become increasingly personal
when Beaufort had replaced his cousin as Lieutenant of France in 1448,
after which the majority of the remaining English possessions there had
been lost. York blamed Somerset for this and attempted to oust him from
power but his rival had tricked him into being captured, forcing him to
promise not to take up arms again. York’s subsequent appointment as
Lieutenant of Ireland had briefly removed him from the scene but now he
was the leading duke of the land and the man to fill Henry VI’s shoes.
Despite their common ancestry, the contrasts between the duke and the
king could not have been more profound. York was ambitious, organised
and soldierly yet he was more than his royal cousin’s equal in terms of
wealth, being the second-greatest landowner in England after him. His
annual income was almost £6,000, twenty times that of Somerset, although
by 1450, the crown owed him something in the region of £40,000. Queen
Margaret loathed him and deliberately excluded him from consultations
over Henry’s future but when the extent of the king’s illness became
apparent, Parliament recognised York’s claim and he was appointed Lord
Protector. One of his first acts was to impeach Somerset and have him
imprisoned in the Tower, in spite of the queen’s protests. Finally, with his
enemy out of the way, the capable York had the reins of government in his
hands and national disaster could be averted. He was also in a position to
reward his supporters, none of whom had been more loyal than his nephew-
in-law, Richard Neville, who came to be known as Warwick the Kingmaker.
Neville’s father, Salisbury, was the brother of York’s wife Cecily. It was
through this connection that the Neville family, including their two
daughters, Isabel and Anne, would play a central role in English politics in
the coming decades.
It was Cecily Neville who provided the initial connection between
Richard of York and Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. A granddaughter of
John of Gaunt, she was known as the beautiful ‘rose of Raby’, after the
castle where she was born, and ‘proud Cis’. At fourteen, she had married
the duke and went on to bear him thirteen children, of whom six survived to
adulthood. Cecily and her brother Salisbury had themselves come from a
large family. One of the youngest of an impressive twenty-three children,
she was only thirteen years older than her nephew, the Earl of Warwick. He,
in turn, was betrothed to the wealthy heiress Anne de Beauchamp in 1434,
when they were children of six and nine, and married two years later at
Abergavenny, perhaps in the castle chapel or else in the church of
Benedictine Priory. Such early marriages were not uncommon among the
biggest landowning families of the day, although the pair were young by
even that standard and would not be expected to live together as man and
wife for many years to come. At first, there was no question of rebellion or
of siding with York against the king. The young man’s career advanced
quickly at his cousin Henry VI’s Lancastrian court; in 1445, he was
knighted at the Coronation of Margaret of Anjou and later is likely to have
seen military service with his father, the Earl of Salisbury, in the Scottish
wars of 1448–49. On the death of the previous heir, he was permitted to
inherit the Warwick title through his wife, although the claim was subject to
dispute over the coming years. One of those questioning his right was the
unpopular Duke of Somerset, who had married Anne de Beauchamp’s elder
half-sister and laid claim to the lands Warwick inherited in the 1440s. Thus
York and Warwick already had a common enemy in Edmund Beaufort.
On a personal level, Warwick appeared charming, charismatic and
capable. The Tudor chronicler Edward Hall sang the praises of ‘a man of
marvellous qualities … witty and gentle demeanour … among all sorts of
people he obtained great love, much favour and more credence, which he
increased by his abundant liberality and generous housekeeping’, bringing
him ‘favour among the common people’.7 By the time of the king’s illness,
Richard and Anne were already the parents of a daughter, Isabel, born on 5
September 1451. Considering that their marriage was probably
consummated in the mid-1440s, when Richard reached his mid-teens, the
birth of one female child could scarcely be considered prolific and the
family legacy was entailed in such a way that only a male child could claim
it in its entirety; otherwise the various lands, wealth and titles would be
split. As yet, the much-desired son had not materialised to inherit the entire
package but the couple were still hopeful. In the summer of 1453, when
Margaret’s favourite, Somerset, looked poised to take charge, Warwick
joined forces with Richard of York and supported his appointment as Lord
Protector. From this point onwards, the lives of these two men and their
offspring would be closely linked. York’s success brought Warwick
increased power, yet it also made him more enemies.
Even though the birth of Queen Margaret’s son in October 1453 was a
cause for national celebration, York was not content. Edward of
Westminster had supplanted him as heir to the throne and he had been
relieved of his regency in February 1455, after Henry’s recovery appeared
to be lasting. It was not easy being relegated from his position of power,
when he considered he had done a better job than Henry or Somerset.
During his tenure, he had also won many nobles over to his side as a
preferable ruler to the king or the queen’s favourites and introduced the
strong leadership and relative stability that impressed the citizens of
London. The contemporary ‘Davies’ chronicler claimed the common people
loathed Somerset ‘and loved the Duke of York because he loved the
Commons’.8 The unpopular minister had been imprisoned in the Tower but
was now released and it appeared that things would return to the way they
were before, if not worse, while others asserted that baby Edward of
Westminster was actually Somerset’s son. Henry was finally able to
acknowledge the boy but the possibility of a Beaufort-dominated minority
in the event of his relapse or death could push York out completely. While
the duke was keen to regain some of his former influence, the queen was
equally desperate to oust him and when Margaret and Somerset called a
meeting of the Great Council at Leicester, to deal with the king’s enemies,
York and Warwick found themselves excluded. One informal explanation
was given – that the queen feared the duke and earl would arrive bearing
arms – but the clear implication was that they were the problem and the
meeting had been called to discuss how best they could be disabled. This
proved sufficient to provoke York to action. Gathering his allies, he raised
an army of almost 2,000 and marched towards London, intent on destroying
the hold of the court party on the king. A manifesto of their intentions was
sent to Henry, who was still in the capital, but it was intercepted and
destroyed by Somerset who raised troops of his own and began to march
north.
The armies met in the compact little town of St Albans on 22 May
1455. Before any arrows were fired, York attempted to negotiate with
Henry, who had arrived with Somerset’s army, asking him to hand over his
unpopular counsellors. Somerset had, he claimed, been ‘disloyal to his
country’, lost French territories and ‘reduced the entire realm of England to
a state of misery’.9 The hard-line reply which the messengers brought back
only inflamed the situation. Prompted by his favourites, Henry wrote that
anyone arming against the king was guilty of treason and would suffer the
usual penalty of hanging, drawing and quartering. He then dressed in full
armour, sat astride his horse and raised his standard in the marketplace, but
it was a military gesture he was unable to sustain and he would remain there
throughout the conflict, finally retiring when wounded in the neck by an
arrow. As historian Robin Storey has stated, ‘if Henry’s insanity was a
tragedy, his recovery was a national disaster’. The king’s reinstatement and
reliance upon the faction headed by his wife and Somerset had made
conflict inevitable between the dukes. When he read the official response to
his attempts to negotiate, York knew he must defend himself and his claim
to the throne, or risk losing his position and now, his life. Fighting swiftly
broke out. The town was ill equipped to contain what may well have been
close to 7,000 men, locked in hand-to-hand combat through the narrow
streets and back lanes, into the inhabitants’ gardens and homes, with
witnesses describing the piles of dead bodies, running with blood. The
townsfolk must have thought that hell had descended.
For the families living around the market square and those engaged in
trade and business, the impact of this carnage has often been overlooked in
historical accounts. Many locals must have been drawn in, attempting to
defend their property or repel intruders intent on claiming their living
spaces as an arena for slaughter. With fighting taking place literally on their
doorsteps, the wise may have fled out into the fields surrounding the town
or into sanctuary at the abbey and waited until the chaos was over.
Surviving objects from the fifteenth century on display in the Museum of St
Albans, such as thimbles, needles, pegs and shoes, serve as powerful
reminders that the fighting ranged over a primarily domestic landscape. The
scene when the families returned must have been nightmarish; property
damaged, gardens trampled, blood pooling in the gutter and the familiar
transformed into the horrific. In the market square, the heart of the town,
where the fighting was at its thickest, it is not difficult to imagine the faces
of terrified residents behind the windows, watching events unfold. Safe in
the abbey, Abbot John Whethamstede described the troops breaking down
houses and through back gardens between two inns, blowing trumpets,
shouting ‘á Warwick’ and ‘slaying all those that withstood them’. The
horror of the experience is brought vividly to life in his descriptions that
followed: ‘I saw a man fall with his brains beaten out, another … with his
throat cut and [another] with a stab wound in his chest, while the whole
street was strewn with corpses.’10
The period of fighting, though, was blessedly short. Having once been
told of a prophecy that he would die ‘under a castle’, Somerset was indeed
killed with a poleaxe outside the marketplace’s Castle Inn, although some
sources have described it more as a formal execution. York and Warwick
may have deliberately targeted him, using a manoeuvre that took them
through private gardens into the main square. His death effectively ended
the fighting. All was over in less than an hour. Revolted by the sight of
blood, much of the royal army now deserted, leaving Henry bleeding from a
wound to the neck inflicted by a stray arrow. He took refuge in the nearby
home of a tanner, cursing those who would ‘smite a king anointed so’.
About seventy lords were killed beside Beaufort; others hid in the abbey,
hiding their armour and disguising themselves as monks. While the day was
a decisive victory for the Yorkist faction, the locals’ ordeal would continue
as the jubilant troops rampaged through the streets, looting and destroying
homes, although they stopped short of pillaging the abbey, where Henry had
retired for the night. It was not until the following day that York, his father
Salisbury and Warwick escorted the king back to London, where York
assumed Somerset’s title of Constable of England.
By that autumn York was effectively King of England in all but name,
as he had been as Protector and Defender of the realm. The death of
Somerset created a temporary vacuum at the heart of the queen’s party and
Margaret was increasingly occupied with her husband’s health, although the
dead duke’s heir looked to pose a considerable threat once he had recovered
from his battle wounds. One of York’s first steps was taken to ensure his
own safety. His first Parliament passed an Act defending the role he had
played at St Albans as an attack upon the ‘great tyranny and injustice’ of
Somerset’s government. None of York’s allies were to be ‘empeched, sued,
vexed, hurt or molested in thaire bodies, goodes or lands’ as a result of the
events of 22 May.11 The pardon was secured and a peace of sorts had been
reached but there was still an undercurrent of suspicion. York and Warwick
clashed with Parliament over the sensitive issue of who should accept
responsibility for the battle, prompting their followers to stuff ‘their Lordes
barges full of wepon dayly unto Westminster’ in case of attack before the
passing of the Bill exonerating York and his followers from any blame,
which was ‘groged [begrudged] full sore’ by many.12 A letter in the archives
of Milan, written to the Archbishop of Ravenna, stated that King Henry had
forbidden anyone to speak of the recent battle ‘upon pain of death’ and that
York now ‘had the government’ and ‘peace reigned’ at which the people
‘were very pleased’.13 Yet the anonymous correspondent did not realise that
the Lancastrian king was virtually under house arrest.
Parliament might have cleared York and his associates of accusations
of treason but it did not clear the air. His most powerful enemy, Queen
Margaret, was temporarily occupied at Greenwich, as Henry VI’s mental
state began to deteriorate again. In spite of the best medical care the era
could offer, his previous symptoms reappeared, casting doubt on his ability
to resume control, if he had ever managed it in the first place. However, the
situation was not the same as it had been in August 1453, as Henry now had
a living male heir. If York temporarily held the reins of power, it was only
ever to be until young Edward reached his majority and was able to reward
or punish his Protector as he saw fit. And, as the son of the ‘warlike and
hostile’ Margaret of Anjou, the latter was more likely. The queen was keen
to assert her son’s rights and keep York at a distance, to which purpose she
had had the boy invested as Prince of Wales at Windsor the previous year
but, as an only child, he was still vulnerable. While his extreme youth
rendered him incapable of rule, York must have been mindful of the
circumstances in which Henry VI had acceded, back in 1421, and been
anxious to avoid a similar situation. As York and Warwick were now in
control, exploiting the loss of their mutual enemy, the royal family
retreated. The tradition of royal nurseries at Greenwich may well have been
established at this time: the little boy was probably there with his parents,
while Margaret desperately tried to regather her supporters and rouse her
husband again. Among other things, York was responsible for the settlement
of 10,000 marks a year on the two-year-old prince: in a decade or so, the
boy would be considered able to exercise his own will and York had no
doubt that the queen’s influence meant he was potentially nurturing his
future worst enemy.
Born in 1453, Edward of Westminster was one of four children whose
lives would shape the coming decades and the course of English history. At
the time of his birth, he had the full expectation of becoming king after
Henry VI, just as his father and grandfather had succeeded; he was invested
as Prince of Wales at the age of two and raised for this role. His mother,
Queen Margaret, was still young at twenty-three when she gave birth, but
she would not conceive another child, perhaps due to the sexual
incompatibility between her and Henry VI. This could have been the result
of his disinclination, fuelled by long-term mental illness or other medical
issues. Young Edward’s conception and birth had been controversial but this
was not insurmountable. Although popular rumours regarding his paternity
might have exploited the unlikelihood of the king fathering a child, in order
to spread the damaging theory that he had been supplanted in his wife’s bed
by any one of her favourites, there was no proof. In fact, it was not
uncommon for couples to experience difficulties in trying to start, or build,
a family: some branches of other noble medieval families became extinct as
a result.
While opposing the queen’s faction at court, Warwick and his countess
were confronted by questions as to their own fertility and parenthood. With
only one surviving daughter, it is possible that other children had been
conceived and lost during the 1440s and 50s. One note in the family
accounts lists that eggs were provided for the countess during Lent 1453,
due to her weakness resulting from sickness and pregnancy, which may not
necessarily have been related to her earlier live birth. It is quite likely that
she was pregnant at the time, two years after Isabel’s birth, but later lost the
baby. Both her own siblings had recently died young: her brother Henry had
only produced one daughter, who had not survived infancy, while her half-
sister had produced four children. On the earl’s side, there were no obvious
problems with fertility, as he was one of the ten of his parents’ offspring to
reach adulthood, and although one of his sisters, Cecily, bore only a single
surviving girl, another, Alice, bore eleven children. The Warwicks must
have wondered whether they would ever become parents again. However,
in the autumn of 1455, soon after the Battle of St Albans, Anne conceived.
It was good timing, coinciding with the Yorkists’ success and Warwick’s
new position at the duke’s side. For standing by his ally in the Parliament of
February 1456, when Henry VI resumed personal control, Warwick was
rewarded with the lucrative position of Captain of Calais. By this time, the
countess’s pregnancy would have been confirmed and, although the couple
would not have wished to tempt fate, the first cautious provisions for the
child’s arrival would have been put in place.
In late May or early June 1456, Countess Anne took to her chamber at
Warwick Castle and awaited the start of her labour. Situated on high ground
in a bend of the River Avon, the earliest parts of the building were datable
as far back as the Norman Conquest, but later additions had so significantly
improved its defences and levels of comfort that, by mid-fifteenth-century
standards, the castle had become known as the Windsor of the North. Anne
would have had every material comfort to assist her lying-in: her chambers
hung with tapestries and closed off to exclude draughts and daylight,
provisioned with candles, linen, religious relics and texts. Women of the
household would have brought regular supplies of food and drink and
whatever was required on a daily basis, while friends, relations and a local
midwife kept her company. Anne knew she would be lucky to survive the
ordeal. As she lay secluded in her darkened rooms, she recalled from
experience that the coming hours would test her to the limit; she would
have known of women who had lost their lives or those of their babies in
labour.
The pregnancies of Anne’s aunt-in-law, Cecily Neville, illustrate just
how precarious young lives could be in the mid-fifteenth century. Her
experiences as a mother began just three years after Anne’s betrothal to the
Duke of York, with the birth of her short-lived first daughter, Joan. All
through the countess’s youth and early married life, Cecily continued to
deliver children, at a rate of approximately one a year until the occasion of
Anne’s second confinement, in 1456, a year after Cecily delivered her
thirteenth and final child. That baby, a girl named Ursula, did not live long,
leaving the four-year-old Richard of York as Cecily’s youngest child. Of her
complete family, only seven babies reached adulthood, giving her an infant
survival rate of just over 50 per cent, which was not uncommon. The
Duchess of York was fortunate to have survived such a number of births, so
closely spaced, across a span of seventeen years. In cases of straightforward
deliveries, the rate of maternal mortality has been estimated at between 1
and 2 per cent14 but as soon as complications arose, the chances for both
mother and child lessened significantly. For those in attendance, there was
no formal training or regulation and certainly no understanding of the
nature of germs or the need for basic cleanliness, in fact, religion and
superstition superseded hygiene. The countess would have prayed to the
saints for intercession in their labours or may have held religious or
superstitious artefacts; the consecrated host or holy water may have been
brought into her chamber from the castle chapel or a cross may have been
laid on her swollen belly. While pain relief was forbidden on religious
grounds, the oils of lilies and roses were thought to lessen the pains of
contractions, while some followed more bizarre rituals, including chants,
charms and talismen. The event was so significant that Warwick absented
himself from Parliament in order to be present. He must have been waiting
anxiously in one of the many impressive chambers of Warwick Castle,
hearing the screams of his wife as the hours wore on. Finally, on 11 June,
the child arrived. It was another girl. They named her Anne.
This is the story of four children born in the 1450s. Richard of York
(1452), Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales (1453), and Anne Neville
(1456) were the first three. The fourth, who had been conceived shortly
before Anne’s birth and would arrive the following year, would outlive
them all. In November 1455, a marriage had taken place between the niece
of the recently deceased Earl of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort, and the
king’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor. Henry VI himself is said to have chosen
twelve-year-old Margaret, who was Edmund’s ward, for this match;
Edmund, at twenty-four, was twice her age. He was one of at least six
children born to Henry V’s French widow, Catherine of Valois, and the
keeper of her wardrobe, Owen Tudor, in a secret and illicit match. Even by
the standards of the time, Margaret was unusually young to enter into
marriage in its full sense but, in fact, she had already been ‘married’ once
before, as an infant, before the connection was annulled for political
reasons. As an heiress and the sole surviving child of her father, her
wardship was a valuable commodity for those who could ally her with their
own families, although consummation was usually delayed until girls
reached the age of fourteen, considered to be the onset of physical maturity.
Within months of the marriage, though, Margaret was pregnant. Soon
afterwards, she was also widowed, when the Lancastrian Edmund was
captured by Yorkist William Herbert and imprisoned in Carmarthen Castle,
where he died of the plague. The girl awaited the birth of her child at
Pembroke Castle, Wales, under the care of her brother-in-law Jasper. As
might have been predicted, even then, the process of labour was long and
difficult for a thirteen-year-old, bringing her close to death and possibly
resulting in lasting physical damage. Yet she survived, as did her son, Henry
Tudor, born on 28 January 1457, who would, ironically, become Herbert’s
ward and later use his dead father’s family connections to ascend the throne
as Henry VII.
Richard, Edward, Anne and Henry. As children of the mid-fifteenth
century, they were lucky to survive birth, infection, illness, accident and
murder. Their average age at death would be thirty-three, although one of
them would attain just half these years and only one other would live
longer. This was pretty much the average life expectancy for aristocracy
males, when a healthy baby might be expected to die before his thirty-fifth
birthday, factoring in childhood disease and death in battle. For baby girls,
who might expect to be engaged in frequent childbirth, expectations varied,
although every pregnancy and birth made her more vulnerable. Born within
five years of each other, these four children were the inheritors of a civil
turmoil that had been the making of their parents’ generation, through
which they had to forge their own path. All three boys had claims to the
English throne and two of them would be crowned king. Two of them
would also become Anne’s husbands, and she herself would experience a
splendid Coronation of her own. They grew to maturity amid conflict
caused by inheritance, royalty, insanity and marriage, in which their own
struggles to assert their claims against those of their rivals would prove
deadly. As they lay in their cradles, took their first steps and began to form
their first words, these paths were still waiting to evolve. It is hindsight
which now dictates this juxtaposing of their arrivals, although the imminent
future may not have proved such a surprise as, even in the mid-1450s, many
of these impending changes were already unfolding. Henry VI’s incapacity,
in comparison with the Duke of York’s ability, indicated where power was
about to shift. For the infant Anne Neville, though, the political intrigues of
the next few years would be distant in more ways than one. She was about
to leave the English shores over which the three boys would later fight to
the death.

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2

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Castle Life
1456–1458
I am ful yong
I was born yisterday
Death is ful hasty
on me to ben werke.’1
The infant Anne arrived safely inside the impressive grey stone bastion of
Warwick Castle. In her first moments, she was carefully checked by the
midwives and her umbilical cord was cut, anointed with balm and tied. She
would have been rubbed in scented oil and had her mouth washed in wine
or sugar water, in front of the fire, before being tightly bound and lain in her
cradle. Like her mother, she was fortunate in having survived the birth
process but the next few months could potentially prove fatal. The women
of the household would keep a special eye on the new child and make sure
her linen and bedclothes were scrupulously clean, as well as washing down
the floors and walls of the chamber where she slept. Animals, undesirables
and those suffering from any sort of illness would be kept out. As the
countess recovered from the rigours of labour, finally allowed to rest, she
would have looked across to the tiny form sleeping soundly, with only its
little pink face visible through the layers of fabric, and felt relieved that the
child was alive and had no visible defects. This may have been the point
when her husband Richard tiptoed in to congratulate his wife and take a
peek at the newborn. Did his smile conceal his disappointment that the child
was not a boy?
Born into one of the leading aristocratic families of the day, Anne’s
chances were probably better than many of her contemporaries but her
wealth could not insulate her from the many childhood infections, illnesses
and accidents that were a frequent part of medieval life. Parish records in
rural Essex villages indicate that mortality rates in the under-fives were
between 30 and 50 per cent2 but in such communities, survival could be
determined by unpredictable and uncontrollable factors such as the weather,
which affected the yield of harvests and the survival of animals. At
Warwick, Anne would have benefited from the closed community of castle
life, with tradesmen, craftsmen, cooks, storerooms and clean water being
accessible within the walls. Built to withstand attacks and sieges, the little
enclosed community could survive on its own for months and would have
had doctors, nurses and clergymen on the staff. The countess also would
have been in charge of a still-room, where the essences of flowers and
plants were ‘distilled’ to make medicines, perfumes and treats; there would
be potions and lotions, balms and charms available if either mother or child
fell ill. The prevalence of certain diseases such as the plague, pox and forms
of the dreaded sweat during the fifteenth century made it a particularly
dangerous time for fragile members of society, especially the very old and
very young. Even royal families were not immune to the sudden deaths of
their juvenile heirs: Joan of Navarre, the second wife of Henry IV, had lost
her first two babies while, closer to home, Anne’s own cousin had died at
the age of five, passing the Warwick title into the Neville family.
At birth, Anne Neville had every conceivable material advantage. By
being born wealthy and one of only two infants in the household, she
improved her chances a little more, although she may have adversely
affected those of Isabel, then turning six. The terrible catalogue of juvenile
fatalities listed in contemporary court records show that older siblings were
more at risk when a new baby entered the family, perhaps because maternal
attention was divided. Yet this was of particular concern in urban
environments, where many more immediate dangers lurked on the doorstep
and there were fewer attendants for the average middle-class child. Isabel
was fortunate that her parents’ wealth meant she was well cared for while
their focus shifted to the new arrival. On average, though, girls stood less
chance of survival than boys. London statistics of the 1440s reveal that
female children were 22 per cent more likely to die young than their
brothers, although this may highlight the relative value and greater care
placed on male heirs by a late medieval society.3 It has been estimated that
a quarter of all medieval children died before their first birthday, an eighth
were lost between the ages of one and four, while a further 6 per cent did
not reach their tenth birthday.4 To ensure her salvation, even if the worst
occurred, Anne was baptised soon after her birth, at the nearby collegiate
church, St Mary’s, in Warwick, the resting place of many of her de
Beauchamp ancestors.
Anne would scarcely have remembered her early days, yet they would
have been typical of fifteenth-century views of childrearing among the
aristocracy, consisting of little more than feeding and sleeping. In common
with most ladies of rank, Anne’s mother would not have breastfed her child,
as it was considered to interfere with her role and duties. To be tied to a
routine of constant lactation would have prevented a noblewoman from
managing her household and honouring social and administrative
commitments, perhaps even appearing at court. If her husband’s role
necessitated his absence, she would be required to take over the running of
their estates, as is illustrated from the letters of Margaret Paston at this time,
who had to repel continual attacks upon the family’s property while her
lawyer husband John was in London. She may also need to be available to
listen to and resolve the complaints of locals, in an extension of her
husband’s good lordship. It also meant her fertility returned more quickly
and she was able to conceive another child sooner. The conception patterns
of some, taken from Essex parish records, indicate that this did actually
happen within a few months, although, for the countess, there were to be no
more children.
The Earl of Warwick, though, was a different matter. It is rumoured
that he had an illegitimate daughter, born in the North of England, who was
named Margaret. She was married in June 1464, placing her birth date
around 1450 or slightly earlier, possibly indicating that her conception took
place when her father was campaigning in Scotland in 1448–9. On her
marriage to Richard Huddleston of Coverdale, Warwick made her an annual
settlement of 6 pounds and settled on her the estates of Upmanby and
Blennerhassett, in Cumbria, after which she went on to bear three children
of her own in the 1470s and 80s. Her husband and a John Huddleston were
trusted enough to be called upon by Edward IV to muster troops in Cumbria
in 1480, in the event of a Scottish invasion. In July 1483, Richard was
granted the ‘lordships, manors and lands’ of Thomas Grey, Marquis of
Dorset, who had fled to Brittany after his involvement in a failed rebellion.
That December, the office of Master Forester and Keeper of the Forest in
Snowdon, North Wales, was added to Huddleston’s titles, for which he
received ‘the accustomed fee’ and the castle of Beaumaris.5 Margaret was
to serve at her half-sister Anne’s court and outlive her, remarrying when
widowed and dying well into the reign of Henry VII. The Thomas
Huddleston who entered the Middleham household as a young man in the
1460s may have been a relation of her husband, perhaps a cousin or sibling;
one younger brother, William, was to marry Warwick’s niece Isabel. The
earl was not alone in producing illegitimate children and it would not have
been considered to be a reflection of the success of his marriage. Such
liaisons were common. Edward IV and Richard III were both to father
extramarital offspring and there was little choice for their wives but to
endure the situation.
The baby Anne had her own mini-establishment separate from those of
her parents. In all probability, this was an extension of that already created
for Isabel, with a few special extra appointees to meet the needs of an
infant. Her days were overseen by a mistress, or lady governess, which was
a position of privilege and responsibility held by a trusted associate or
member of the extended family unit, even, possibly, a figure from the
countess’s own childhood. The mistress would be assisted by a dry nurse
and other servants to supply the basics of food, clean linen and basic
hygiene. The wet nurse to whom Anne would have been handed for feeding
may have been a new arrival, unless there was another suitable, recently
pregnant woman within the castle walls. Whoever had suckled Isabel
Neville following her birth in 1451 may well have been no longer lactating,
as parish records and diaries of the period suggest that the term of
breastfeeding lasted on average between nine months and a year. However,
women did become professional wet nurses, suckling a string of babies and
prolonging lactation. It is possible that the Neville’s first wet nurse had
sustained her milk supply by working for other families but equally likely
that a new woman was appointed. Possibly she came with a
recommendation from another family of rank, but at this time, women of
lower social ranks were considered most suitable to the task. The criteria for
her appointment would have been physical and moral. She must be of good
character and not drink too much nor eat garlic and spicy foods but,
typically, appearances were taken as a mirror of health. The wet nurse
should have clear eyes and skin, good teeth and no visible signs of illness or
weakness, as these were thought to be transferable through her milk, as was
her character. Anne’s mother and the mistress of the girls’ household
probably examined several possible girls from the surrounding town before
selecting the most suitable. Where wet nurses were not available, children
were fed with animal milk sucked from rags or horns and bread soaked in
milk.
Anne’s first year would have been an inactive one, as babies were
swaddled tightly in their cots for the majority of the time to prevent
inadvertent and self-inflicted injury. The air was also considered damaging
to their skin and babies were regularly rubbed with butter or oil to close up
their pores. A series of Italian images by Lumberto da Montevarchi
depicting the 1479 miracle of Monna Tancia show the sort of tight
swaddling Anne would have experienced, with a child wrapped in bands
from the shoulder down to the ankles. Other contemporary church frescoes
also portray this method, such as the Santa Liberato in St Peter’s chapel,
Vercelli, where two infants are reduced to white cocoons with only their
heads protruding. One modern reproduction of a cot dating from around
1465 has been made at the archaeological site of an abandoned medieval
fishing village at Walraversijde in Belgium. Woven from straw or reeds,
like a basket, it is a deep, kidney-bean shape set on rockers. Some
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts depict cots as more shallow,
rather like large temporary trays, such as in Bologna’s image of the birth of
John the Baptist, which sits flat on the floor with low sides. At Pembroke
Castle in Wales, a reconstruction of the room where Henry Tudor was born
in 1457 includes a solid rectangular wooden crib with minimal detail on its
rails and knobs. Hanging and swinging cradles survive from the time, as do
those with impressive geometric, natural and animal carvings: impressive
eagles would have sat guard over the occupant of one surviving crib, dating
from around 1500. As the daughter of one of the richest landowners in the
country, Anne’s cot would have been more substantial and highly decorated,
probably made from oak. She would have spent a lot of time in it.
At court, the royal baby, Edward of Westminster, had been amply
provided for. The arrangements would have been overseen by Margaret of
Anjou, probably with minimal involvement from the king. Besides the lady
governor, the boy’s first household included a nursery nurse, four rockers
for his cradle, yeomen, grooms and officers ‘for the mouth’ whose job it
was to ‘see the nurses meate and drinke be assayed [tested]’ so long as she
was employed, while later a physician was to keep watch over whatever she
fed her young charge. Boys were more likely to be suckled for longer, up to
the age of two or three, whereas girls tended to be weaned soon after the
age of one.6 Edward’s state cradle, hung with buckles of silver and
pommels, lined with ermine, velvet and cloth of gold, was equipped with a
mattress, two pillows and numerous coverings of similar rich materials.
Anne may have slept in something more like the smaller, practical crib
described in 1486 by Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor. Made ‘of
tree’, it was painted ‘with fine gold and devices’, a yard and a quarter in
length. Five silver buckles were set on each side to hold the swaddling
bands, and therefore the child, in place. The accompanying bed linen was
scarlet, grey, blue and gold.7
As the spring of 1457 approached, Anne was released from her
swaddling bands and encouraged to take her first steps in the safety of her
chambers. An illustration from a 1440 book of hours completed for
Catherine of Cleves, showing the Holy family at work, places a toddling
Jesus in an early walking frame. Made from twelve pieces of wood, in the
form of an open box or cube, it is narrower at the top than the bottom where
four large wheels help the child move, while giving some protection in an
environment where carpentry and weaving is being done. Anne may have
learned to walk inside a similar frame or else been guided by her nurse. Her
world would have encompassed little more than the great chamber, the solar
and the family’s private living quarters, usually on the first floor above the
Great Hall where servants and other castle employees were fed and slept.
The medieval manor house of Stokesay Castle in Shropshire has a well-
preserved solar of this type, reached by an interior wooden staircase.
Warwick Castle had been extended during the late fourteenth century and
the domestic buildings date from then, hung with tapestries and warmed by
large fireplaces. A bed, recorded among the castle descriptions of 1400, was
made of red damask embroidered with ostrich feathers, with a coverlet and
dressings, three curtains of red tartarine, eighteen matching tapestries and
six red damask cushions. When improvements were made in the 1420s to
these rooms, plaster of Paris was used to enhance the whiteness of newly
built walls. As the daughters of an earl, who had access to the rich diversity
of London’s international trade, the girls would have been surrounded by
the best-quality furnishings and fashions of the day.
Anne wouldn’t have remembered her early months at Warwick. In any
case, the family were about to relocate and the world she knew would be
left behind. Before her first birthday, her father was appointed to the
prestigious position of Captain of Calais, an important strategic territory
which had been in English possession since shortly after Edward III’s
victory against the French at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. The eleven-month
siege, described by the chronicler Froissart, had resulted in the famous
capitulation of the burghers of Calais and the town’s transference into
English hands. Froissart records that one of the first ‘conquerors’ of the
town was the then Earl of Warwick, so Anne’s father’s position had
historical precedence, although he would not have been wise to emulate the
previous earl’s record. In 1347, the first English rulers of Calais were
commanded to expel the town’s men: ‘Take here the kayes [keys] of the
towne and castell of Calys … putte in prison all the knyhts that be there and
all other soudyours [soldiers] that came there symply to wynne their lyveng,
cause them to avoyde the towne and all other men, women and children, for
I [Edward III] would re-people agayne the towne with pure
Englysshemen.’8 Such national cleansing was common in conquered
territory but hardly made for an auspicious start, helping to exacerbate the
conflicts which followed. Calais was still a much-desired territory, coveted
by the French and Burgundians on either side, creating an uneasy tension
for the English inhabitants, which Anne and her family now became.
Packing up the household, they waited for weather conditions to be
favourable before embarking on one of Warwick’s own ships across the
Channel. Perhaps the six-year-old Isabel was old enough to be excited at
her first glimpse of her new home, the walled medieval city with its
imposing churches, towers and castle.
This ‘brightest jewel in England’s crown’ covered an area of about 20
square miles, including the fortified town and surrounding marshland, with
the defensive castles of Guines and Hammes. Although Calais lies only 20
miles from England as the crow flies, the Channel crossing could represent
considerable difficulties for a fleet of wooden vessels in bad weather. This
meant that, although it was technically English territory, the geographical
distance represented a real political limbo and sanctuary for its inhabitants,
which Warwick would exploit. By 1400, as many as 12,000 people lived
within the city walls, while one map of 1477 shows the ‘pale’ extending
north to include Ghent and Bruges and south beyond Arras and
encompassing those residents too. Placed between the warring King of
France Louis XI and Phillip III, Duke of Burgundy, it allowed England to
maintain a European gateway for the staple trades of wool, tin, lead and
cloth as well as relationships with both countries, neither of whom wished
to see the area fall into enemy hands.
Calais itself was an impressive city. The manuscript illustrations from
Jean de Waurin’s Chroniques d’Angleterre make a feature of the town’s
high, smooth defensive walls and pointed turrets which the Warwicks would
have glimpsed as their ship approached. A later map, drawn in the reign of
Henry VIII, shows the walled town in some detail with its castle, church
and marketplace, while the Cowdray engravings of 1545 give a vivid
flavour of the port, forts and buildings. The crenelated town walls with their
many towers are passable through an impressive gateway, giving out into
the closely packed streets where a significant number of smooth and crow-
stepped gable roofs are visible. In the picture, the thirteenth-century Calais
Castle is also drawn, outside the walls, a solid, square structure clearly built
for defence with a tower in each corner. Its windows are tiny and high,
along with a number of the traditional arrow slits. Although the castle no
longer stands, replaced by the sixteenth-century citadel, the comparable
Castle Olhain north of Arras may give an impression of its appearance, with
squat, round towers and drawbridge. Fort Risban, standing at the entrance
to the harbour, was a reminder of the Crécy siege that could scarcely have
been forgotten; then the fort had been a wooden structure; by Anne’s day it
was walled and mounted with cannon. Much of medieval Calais was
destroyed in the conflicts of the twentieth century, but a description of the
visiting Paul Hentzner in 1598 lists the still extant St Mary’s church, or
Église Notre-Dame, with its early fifteenth-century tower. The twelfth-
century Watch Tower is another rare survivor, despite being split into two
by an earth tremor in 1580!
Warwick and his countess were resident in the castle soon after his
appointment in May 1457. Isabel and Anne were almost certainly with
them, although there were other precedents for the care of aristocratic
children in their parents’ absence. In 1419, Margaret, Duchess of Clarence,
took her sons with her when she went to join her husband in Normandy but
left her daughters behind under the care of the prioress at Dartford. The
girls, Joan and Margaret, were then thirteen and ten respectively. Others
were sent out to board with respectable families, as were Anne and
Elizabeth Bassett, aged twelve and eleven, step-daughters of Lord Lisle,
who was appointed to the Calais captaincy in 1533.9 Anne’s extreme youth
may have been both an argument for her residence with her parents and a
reason for her to stay in England. On balance, it seems most likely that she
and Isabel did go, crossing the Channel sometime in mid-1457 with her
retinue of nurses and rockers. As the family would have been lodged within
Calais Castle and Anne’s household and routine were resumed, the
difference between her old life and the new may not have been that great;
she was simply exchanging one medieval fortified castle for another.
Just as at Warwick, Anne would have found life in a medieval castle
divided into two realms; the separate households of her father and mother.
The nursery was probably a subsection of those chambers presided over by
the countess; an exclusively female zone, where a secluded life was
encouraged and the girls were chaperoned when they interacted with the
men in her father’s employ. From the beginning, Anne and Isabel would
have been brought up in the expectation of their future roles as wives and
mothers. Their presence in Calais would have brought them into contact
with French and Flemish, as well as their own native tongue, but speaking
other languages was more common than an ability to write them among
noblewomen of the day. The education they received is not to be compared
with modern standards or concepts of the term; it was to fit medieval girls
for the running of their own households, teaching them courtesy and
deportment, how to handle servants and etiquette as well as such useful
skills as the use of medicinal herbs, spinning, sewing and the production of
domestic textiles. The main educators of girls of all classes were their
mothers; unlike their brothers, the majority stayed at home in their early
years, as observers and participants in the daily lives of their elders. Thus,
female education was part of an oral tradition, dependent upon the skills
and abilities of the mother and the social sphere she occupied.
There was time for play while the girls were still young. Toys dating
from around 1300, recently discovered on the banks of the Thames, suggest
that some figurines, such as knights, were mass produced in moulds and
that girls may have played with smaller versions of the family’s crockery
and tableware.10 Anne and Isabel would also have had their own ‘poppets’,
wooden or cloth dolls, probably made by their mother, or women of the
household. They would have sung songs, recited tales and learned simple
prayers in their early years, as they learned the more formal process of
reading essential for their future duties to check domestic documents and
accounts. If Anne’s contemporary Margery Paston could read and write
fluently, as her letters demonstrate, there is no doubt that the Earl of
Warwick’s daughters could. The remnant of Richard III’s library held in the
modern British Library contains books bearing the signatures ‘Anne
Warrewyk’ and ‘R Gloucester’. It is probable that prayer books
commissioned for the girls, which would be read to them until such a point
as they could read for themselves. The Babees’ Book of 1475 was ‘turned
out of Latin into my common language’11 to help infants learn the alphabet
by negative example; ‘be not too Amorous, too Adventurous nor Argue too
much’. The book advocated moderation in all activity and emotion.
Babbling or the synonymous ‘jangling’, tale-bearing and meddling were
also undesirable qualities, as were excesses of excellence, gladness,
kindness and lovingness. Anne may have learned through games such as
‘Crambo’, a variant of the 1430 ‘ABC of Aristotle’ or similar poems that
explore rhyme.
Other children’s entertainments of the time included Barley-Break, Cat
after Mouse and other chasing games, variants of hopscotch and skipping,
nine pins and shuttlecock, whip-tops and marbles, although the earl’s
daughters may not have got to play the rowdier Hot Cockles or Blind Man’s
Buff. There is the possibility that there may have been other children in the
castle, perhaps those of the family’s employees, who were considered of
sufficient, albeit lower, status to play with the girls. Many of their class
would have had pets of some kind, especially dogs or birds, separate to
those used for hunting and hawking. Within the walls of Calais Castle, they
may have had a small garden to attend and flowers to pick and store or dry
for medicinal and household use. Indoor pursuits included cards, dice,
chess, tric-trac or backgammon, juggling and games like the popular Penny
Prick, which involved throwing stones at pennies balanced on pins, and the
well-known game referred to by Chaucer called Drawing Dun out of the
Mire. Some versions of well-known board games like chequers were
considered unsuitable, such as Queke-Board and Hand-yn-Hand-out, which
were banned under a statute passed by Edward IV in around 1478.12 The
girls would also have spent hours at embroidery and learning to play
instruments. Undoubtedly, as daughters of an earl, Anne and Isabel would
have had some opportunities for play, although this would be more than
balanced with training for their intended future roles. They would not be
children for long.
Many of the instructional manuals of the day were aimed at boys, but
one notable exception sheds a little light on the qualities considered
desirable in the rearing of girls. In the 1430 poem ‘How the Good Wife
Taught her Daughter’, the ultimate goal for both subjects is the girl’s
marriage: the mother instructs her child ‘full many a time and oft’ ‘a full
good woman to be … if thou wilt be a wife’. The qualities most valued are
piety, good husbandry, modesty, thrift and honesty. Before marriage, the
daughter must
Look wisely that thou work
Look lovely and in good life
Love God and Holy Kirk
Go to Church whene’er thou may
Look thou spare for no rain.
Of particular relevance for wealthy children, like the Nevilles, was the
message of charity and generosity:
Gladly give thy tithes and thy offerings both
To the poor and the bed-rid – look thou not be loth
Give of thine own goods and be not too hard
For seldom is the house poor where God is steward.13
Other texts like Symon’s ‘Lesson of Wisdom’, from around 1500, The Little
Children’s Book and John Russell’s 1460 Boke of Nurture urge children to
be obedient, God-fearing, humble, clean, kind to animals and respectful
towards their parents. In one, they are instructed to rise at six, perform their
devotions, wash face and hands, cast up their bed, dress in clean clothes
according to rank and be off about their business. The slightly later Young
Scholar’s Paradise urged them to shake off their ‘sluggishness’ after a
‘moderate sleep’ of seven hours and think ‘of things that for thy soul’s
health sweet melody brings’. They should follow four key principles: to
have a virtuous and godly mind, aim at the liberal arts, act moderately and
grow up to be civil. However, while Anne and Isabel were being instructed
in the arts of becoming young ladies, the world around them was becoming
increasingly less civil, to the point of national conflict. Playing with their
poppets and singing rhymes within the tapestry-hung walls of Calais Castle,
they would have been aware of their father’s absences but with no real
understanding of how significant his role was to prove in the coming
struggle.

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3

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Warring Cousins
1458–1460
But loe I found another thing,
I was disdained of the king,
And rated as a varlet base,
that so betraid the good dukes grace1
Calais had become a problematic inheritance for many reasons, both for
England and for Warwick. Although it provided an important gateway for
trade, it was also a significant drain on the English coffers; Parliament had
refused to pay the garrison’s wages in 1454, totalling a huge £40,000. Given
that the town housed the largest standing army of professional soldiers of
different nationalities, the blocking of proper funding for weapons and
manpower left the area weakened when an attack was mounted by the
resentful French in May 1455. Queen Margaret, fearing Warwick’s
intentions regarding such a large sum, withheld it, so he began to regain the
trust of the soldiers by paying their arrears and wages out of his own
pocket, before leading them in an expulsion of the invaders. Soon, though,
the problem grew beyond Calais’ walls. As an island, dependent on sea-
based trade, England had always been vulnerable. Foreign attacks had been
feared back in 1452, when Henry VI had summoned all South and East
Coast ship owners to assemble at Sandwich in case of Channel raids. The
Confederation of Cinque Ports had been designed to protect local ships
from becoming prey to foreign pirates, although its members often indulged
in acts of piracy themselves. It was not until August 1457, however, that a
French general, a previous friend of Margaret, mounted a devastating attack
on the English seaport of Sandwich, setting off renewed fears of a full-scale
invasion. Now the queen had little choice but to trust the earl. As a result,
Warwick was given the commission of Lord High Admiral to keep the seas
clear for three years and granted £1,000 expenses. It is difficult to
overestimate how powerful this position was, considering that Warwick was
already head of England’s largest standing army, at Calais, and was now
able to control sea traffic. It also gave him license to indulge in his own acts
of piracy.
There was a long history of piracy between England and France,
dating back to before the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War. One of the
most famous, whose legend lingered into Anne’s lifetime, was John
Hawley, politician, merchant, privateer and pirate, whose adventures were
already legendary at the time of his death in 1408. His fleet seemed to be
ubiquitous, appearing wherever he was feared and avoided: ‘Blow the wind
high, blow the wind low, it bloweth good to Hawley’s Hoe.’2 It has been
suggested that Chaucer, visiting Dartmouth in the 1370s, used Hawley as
his model for the character of the Shipman in The Canterbury Tales,3 who
had no conscience when drawing draughts of Bordeaux wine as the trader,
or owner, slept and never lost a fight:
Ful many a draughte of wyn had he ydrawe
Fro Burdeux-ward, whil that the chapman sleep.
Of nyce conscience took he no keep.
If that he faught, and hadde the hyer hond,
By water he sente hem hoom to every lond.4
The role of a pirate often overlapped that of a privateer, a private sailor
authorised to defend their country. Chaucer was, in fact, sent by Richard II
to arrange for the release of a Genoese merchant ship that Hawley had
captured, but by 1403, the privateer’s reputation had improved and he was
honoured for repelling a Breton raid. However, Hawley then got in trouble
when he preyed upon the ships of Breton merchants which were under the
protection of Sir John de Roche, resulting in a court case that lasted eight
years. His fortunes plummeted again when he was imprisoned in the Tower
until he promised to return his plundered goods. In 1449, another
Dartmouth man, Captain Robert Wenyngton, captured a number of trading
vessels from Brittany, the Low Countries and Prussia, which he held on the
Isle of Wight, so that Henry VI was forced to compensate them for their
losses. In 1450, piracy was so proliferate in the Channel that over fifty
Hanseatic ships were seized that year alone, with their cargoes of salt being
sold in London. In 1458, two cases appear in the Close Rolls which
highlight the nature of the piracy taking place on England’s south-west
coast under Warwick’s rule. One Portuguese ship, the Saint Mary de
Nazareth, under the command of Lewis Vaskes, had put into the port of
Dartmouth the previous December and had not yet been allowed to leave.5
Another fleet of Calais ships and soldiers, ‘furnished and arrayed for war’,
took, by force, three Dutch vessels at Tilbury Docks in Essex. In these, they
found letters of patents from Henry VI to a Venetian merchant, allowing
them to intercept cargoes of wool from London ships, which they disposed
of ‘at their pleasure’. For this crime, they were fined £3,200 and the
aggrieved wool owners were granted passage to trade with Italy until they
had recuperated their losses.6 They had got off lightly, as one William
Maurice had been hanged, drawn and quartered for his activities back in
1421. In the spring of 1458, Warwick was heading back to England but in
the light of his recent activities and the queen’s distrust of him as an ally of
the Duke of York, he would have to tread carefully. His piracy could give
Margaret the ammunition she needed. On the surface, though, all appeared
amicable.
On Lady Day, 25 March 1458, the rival factions behind the throne
were drawn together in a last-ditch attempt at solidarity. Crowds were
converging outside St Paul’s Cathedral and the atmosphere in the capital
was tense. Londoners were unsettled by the presence of armed troops, who
had been arriving for weeks and kicking their heels while waiting for their
opponents to put in a presence. York, Warwick and his father, the Earl of
Salisbury, had been invited to attend a special reconciliation with the king,
organised by Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury. This meeting
was to be followed by a mass of thanksgiving, when enemies would walk
hand in hand, known to history as the Loveday. However, it was all a sham;
there was little love felt between the queen and the Yorkists, whom she held
responsible for the massacres and looting after the Battle of St Albans.
Heading a large number of troops, Warwick had already evaded one attempt
to capture him on his way to Westminster and knew that, in spite of
appearances, the queen was his sworn enemy. The crowds watched uneasily
as the combatants emerged from the cathedral. Warwick was arm in arm
with Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, York’s son-in-law, who was reputedly
furious at having been replaced as Lord High Admiral, and the young Henry
Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, burning with hatred at the man whom he held
responsible for his father’s death at St Albans. A contemporary ballad
recorded the public truce:
In Yorke, in Somersett, as y undyrstonde
In Warwikke also ys love and charite
In Salisbury eke [also] and yn Northumberlond
That every man may reiouce the concord and unite.7
A series of magnificent jousts followed at the Tower, held in Margaret’s
honour, although perhaps only Henry VI was deceived by his enemies’
‘lovely countenance[s]’ and ‘token that love was in the heart and thought’.8
The optimism of popular ballads, calling on the citizens to rejoice in the
new peace, overlooked the tension created by the thousands of armed
guards that thronged the streets. A marriage was also arranged between the
queen’s seventeen-year-old ward, Isabella Ingaldsethorpe, and Warwick’s
younger brother, John. However, within months, hostilities had broken out
again. The owners of German merchant ships, upon which Warwick had
been preying in the Channel, appealed to Henry and Margaret for support,
providing the queen with the opportunity she needed. In the autumn of
1458, she attempted to have the earl indicted for piracy and rumours
followed that Somerset’s men were about to break into his London property
with murderous intent. Warwick appeared at court in order to answer the
summons, guarded by 600 men. Margaret insisted he should stand trial and
he retaliated by accusing her of insincerity on the Loveday. The next day,
Warwick’s supporters rioted in London and later, as he visited Westminster,
the earl narrowly avoided being killed by an ‘accident’ in the palace
kitchens. Some accounts have suggested that Warwick embroidered this
event, which was little more than an accident, but it indicates the depths that
mutual hostilities had reached and is not at all impossible. That November,
at a council meeting, his men clashed again with those of the queen, after
which there was little the earl could do but flee; he fought his way to his
barge, waiting on the Thames, and fled back to Calais.
After this, the descent to civil war was rapid. Margaret attempted to
establish an alternative power base in the North, where she raised an army
and ordered 3,000 bows to be made. A Royal Council was summoned to
Coventry in 1459 to deal with the thorny problem of Henry VI’s enemies,
but York, Warwick and Salisbury were excluded, leaving little doubt who
those ‘enemies’ were and that significant steps were to be taken against
them. In response, the Earl of Salisbury held a family meeting at
Middleham Castle to declare allegiance for the Duke of York and when, that
autumn, Warwick brought an army across the Channel from Calais, a
pitched battle could hardly be avoided. Warwick and Salisbury both set off
to march to York’s stronghold at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh border. The
intention was to join forces and head south to London but the queen’s men
intercepted Salisbury midway between their strongholds of Ludlow and
Middleham.
It was a Sunday morning, 23 September 1459, St Tecla’s day, when the
armies met at Blore Heath, part fields and part woodland. The weather was
wet and the muddy ground churned over by the feet of horses and men. The
king’s forces, which have been estimated as numbering between 6,000 and
12,000, were ranged behind a huge hedge across a brook from Salisbury’s
much smaller army of 3,000–6,000. However, Warwick’s father, then aged
about sixty, was a seasoned commander of the Scottish Wars and the long-
running Percy–Neville family feud. He might have been outnumbered but
his superior military tactics allowed him to win the day. In order to protect
his men, Salisbury ordered huge defensive ditches lined with sharpened
sticks to be dug, encircled them with carts and wagons and waited to be
attacked. Seeing the odds stacked against them, though, his army initially
feared the worst and supposedly fell to their knees and kissed the earth,
which they believed would be their final resting place. They underestimated
their commander, though, who, by drawing the royal army out towards
them, was able to feign a retreat before turning on the enemy and
slaughtering the leaders. Salisbury’s men shot the horses out from under the
opponents, which led to the defection of around 500 terrified men to their
side. After about an hour of hand-to-hand fighting, many Lancastrians
deserted and Margaret’s army collapsed, yet the engagement continued well
into the early hours. Salisbury ordered cannon to be fired into the darkness
to give the appearance that the fighting was lasting longer than it had and
deter further attacks. According to Gregory’s Chronicle, ‘the batayle …
lastyd alle the aftyr none, fro one of the clocke tylle v aftyr non, and the
chasse lastyd unto vii at the belle in the mornynge’.9 About 3,000 men lay
dead, the majority of whom were Lancastrians.
The queen herself is rumoured to have watched the battle from the
church spire at Mucklestone and, witnessing the defeat, instructed her
blacksmith to reverse her horseshoes, to deceive her enemies about her
flight. She is then supposed to have executed the smith, one William
Skelhorn, in order to preserve his silence, to which ‘Skelhorn’s anvil’ stands
testament in Mucklestone churchyard today. Legend has it that little Prince
Edward, then aged six, may have been with her; it appears she had him
order and witness the executions of his enemies in the coming years. This
story has all the trappings of a highly unlikely romantic legend but it is
consistent with contemporary portrayals of the martial and cunning nature
of Henry VI’s wife and the impression perpetrated of her as a mother.
Margaret may have watched from nearby but it is unlikely to have been at
Mucklestone, as the village was located behind Yorkist lines at that point.
Another account has both king and queen arriving together at the battlefield
the following morning, only to find it deserted in the wake of the Yorkist
victory. From there, Salisbury had headed off to join Warwick and York at
Ludlow, where, it was planned, their combined forces should be able to
defeat the Lancastrians decisively. Blore Heath was to guarantee nothing,
though. It was after this victory that their fortunes began to turn.
That October, the triumphant Yorkists occupied Worcester and headed
for the cathedral. Overlooking the River Severn, there had been a place of
worship on the site since the seventh century and, by the accession of Henry
VI, it had been developed and extended as a home to a community of
Benedictine monks. Warwick would recognise the green limestone and
yellow sandstone details still standing today, the crypt and circular chapter
house as well as the newer additions of the central spire and cloisters. In
1459, it was to play host to a symbolic display of loyalty. Kneeling before
the altar, the Duke of York and Earls of Warwick and Salisbury swore an
oath of loyalty to the king. It was a move designed to repudiate the charges
levelled against them and reinforce the stance they had taken over St
Albans. Once again, they stated their dispute was not with the person of the
king himself but the influence of his ‘evil councillors’. Their words were
written down and handed to the king in person by the Bishop of Worcester:
Henry VI, however, or rather Queen Margaret, was not impressed. She was
still convinced that York intended to supplant her son Edward, then days
short of his sixth birthday, correctly as it turned out. As the royal armies
approached Worcester, the trio headed back towards Ludlow but were
pursued. Again, they attempted to offer their loyalties in a letter addressed
to Henry lamenting the complaints of his true subjects; this was intercepted
by Margaret’s men, who forged a reply, inviting them to meet the king on
the battlefield. This was the challenge they had anticipated, so the Yorkists
decided to take a stand at nearby Ludford Bridge. On 12 October, they set
up their guns and awaited reinforcements.
Those reinforcements did not come. Unexpectedly, the Yorkists were
seriously outnumbered, almost two to one, and morale plummeted. At Blore
Heath they had fought against the troops of ‘unpopular favourites’ while
Henry was elsewhere. It did not help now that the royal standard was
visible in the Lancastrian camp, indicating the presence of the king himself,
which meant that to engage with his armies was a different act entirely.
Much has been made by modern historians of Henry’s absence during key
battles or the stories of him wandering about dazed, to be discovered sitting
under trees, but the view of Henry VI as completely ineffectual has not
gone unchallenged. No doubt his presence in full armour was a significant
factor here, regardless of the role he played in the fighting; it may well have
contributed to the overnight defection of 600 men Warwick had brought
from Calais. York tried to counter their fears by putting out a rumour that
the king had died but as Henry himself remained visible, this only cost him
further support. As news of further desertions arrived, the Yorkist leaders
envisioned a crushing defeat and recognised this was the moment to
withdraw rather than engage. At midnight, they feigned a visit to Ludlow
for supplies, leaving their armies in the field and did not return. It was a low
point in their command. York and his second son, Edmund, Earl of Rutland,
fled to Wales then on to Ireland. Warwick, Salisbury and York’s eldest son,
Edward, Earl of March, headed to the West Country where a supporter, Sir
John Dynham, provided them with a boat for Calais. The armies they left
behind were pardoned but Cecily, Duchess of York, and her two youngest
sons, George and Richard, were left at Ludlow to become Lancastrian
prisoners under the care of their aunt, Anne, Duchess of Buckingham. This
was the seven-year-old Richard’s first experience of the changing fortunes
that battle could bring.
The king’s troops then went on to plunder Ludlow, described by the
chronicler Gregory as a terrible act of misrule; they were ‘wetshod in wine’,
as the town was looted and women ‘defouled’.10 York Castle was robbed
and the properties and estates of Yorkist lords were desecrated. According
to the Davies chronicle, the king’s advisers then began to gather ‘riches
innumerable’ from the poor and ‘rightful heirs’; for which ‘the hearts of the
people were turned away from them that had the governance of the land,
and their blessings were turned to cursings’.11 Not only was England no
longer safe for the Yorkists, it was becoming a dangerous, lawless place for
many of the king’s subjects. The failure to curb these destructive activities
would seriously damage the Lancastrian cause in the next few years.
The whereabouts of Warwick’s family is unclear during this period. It
is possible that he left them in the safety of Calais Castle during the
upheavals of 1458–9, but there is also the chance that, at some point, they
crossed the Channel with him and were for a short time resident again in
Warwick Castle. If this was the case, the eight-year-old Isabel would
certainly have been aware that her father was in danger, even if her younger
sister was not; perhaps the family prayed together in the chapel for his safe
return. At this point, the Warwicks were still hoping to conceive a male heir,
so it is likely that husband and wife took every opportunity to be together.
The dynastic imperative among the aristocracy was strong: it was engrained
in them from their early years, so Richard and Anne may not have wished to
have wasted valuable months or years, as both were now in their thirties
and considered comparatively middle-aged by the standards of the day.
Records of births indicate that many noblewomen of the era experienced
their menopause in their mid- to late thirties, so time was running out if the
countess was to produce a son. Cecily of York frequently travelled with her
husband through England and France, as the birthplaces of her children in
Rouen, Dublin and Fotheringhay indicate. Wherever the family had been
during this episode, they were reunited in Calais that autumn, along with
Anne’s paternal grandparents, Earl Richard and Alice, Countess of
Salisbury, Warwick’s uncle, Lord Fauconberg, and the seventeen-year-old
Earl of March, York’s son, Edward. He was a tall, handsome young man of
athletic build, already skilled on the battlefield and a lover of good
company, women and entertainment. In the years ahead, the Neville girls
would come to know him better, as their king and as brother-in-law to them
both.
That November, a royal council was summoned to Coventry, which
came to be known as the Parliament of Devils. Led by the Lancastrian Dr
John Morton, later Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VII, it passed
Acts of Attainder against York and his sons, Warwick and Salisbury. York’s
wife Cecily and young sons were brought into the chamber to witness his
disgrace in his absence and hear the lords swear a new oath of allegiance to
Margaret and Edward. Such Acts represented serious capital crimes, the
penalties of which extended to the families and heirs of those on whom they
were passed: their lands, income and titles were confiscated, making their
heirs legally ‘dead’. A large proportion of the confiscated estates were given
to Owen Tudor, father-in-law to Margaret Beaufort. This attainder was the
final straw which put aside all pretence of reconciliation and incited open
attack. And none were more willing to attack than the young Duke of
Somerset, Henry Beaufort, whose personal vendetta against Warwick now
led him to plan an invasion of Calais. Following Warwick’s disgrace,
Beaufort had been appointed to the position of Captain of Calais, but
holding the theoretical title and taking possession of the town were two
different things entirely. Hearing of this, Warwick made a pre-emptive
strike on Sandwich, where Somerset had been gathering his forces; a
number of distinguished prisoners were taken and the entire enemy fleet
was captured. Having also been deprived of his position as Admiral, to
which Exeter had been reappointed, Warwick’s best means of attack was
surprise. Six months later, he was planning an invasion.
In July 1460, Francesco Coppini, the papal legate to England, wrote to
King Henry VI explaining his recent actions. Coppini had been appointed
by Pope Pius II to try to end the civil conflicts and involve the Lancastrians
in a crusade against the Turks; he was successful in neither but his record of
the mounting insurgence in Calais remains. First, Warwick had attempted to
find a peaceful solution – ‘The lords of Calais had called me, requesting me
to mediate for the conclusion of peace and extinction of civil discord in
your realm’ – after which Coppini ‘besought [Henry] piously to ponder
these matters’. His efforts were rejected by Margaret of Anjou, after which
the legate ‘found everything in confusion, in consequence of a new state of
things and fresh accidents, and that the lords were on the point of crossing
over to England, saying they could wait no longer by reason of
emergencies’. To Henry, he wrote that Warwick and his men were still
‘disposed to be devoted and obedient to your Majesty, and desirous to
maintain and augment the commonweal of the kingdom’ but wished to be
‘restored to favour’, which the ‘envy of their rivals’ had cost them. Warwick
implored Coppini to mediate for him with the king in order to avoid
bloodshed and offered to ‘accept whatever was fair and just’, making their
pledges in writing.12 Soon after this, the earl launched his invasion with
about 2,000 men, using the already reconnoitred Sandwich as his foothold.
From there, he marched to Canterbury and on to London. By the time he
reached the capital in early July, he had amassed between 20,000 and
30,000 men. With Margaret attempting to establish a royal power-base
further north, the city willingly opened the gates and not only welcomed the
Yorkists but advanced them a loan of £1,000. Warwick headed to St Paul’s
to give thanks. Coppini had travelled to England in support of the ‘lords of
Calais’ and witnessed the next three battles of the wars, leaving his own
record in letters. It would cost him his job: two years later, he would be
dismissed in disgrace for taking sides.
Two battles, fought over the next six months, were to prove decisive in
the struggle between the cousins and turn the wheel of fortune decisively
against Anne’s family again. The first came in July 1460, when Warwick’s
army met that of the king at Northampton, resulting in a significant victory
for the Yorkists. Much had changed since the royal standard had waved
proudly at Ludford Bridge; the plunder following the battle had shifted the
mood of the people against the king and many were now willing to take up
arms against him as he sheltered from the rain in his tent. Later, the
behaviour of the Lancastrians and their armies at Ludlow would be
described in Parliament as tyrannical and remorseless. They were accused
of ‘destroying and despoiling the realm on their way, not sparing God’s
church or refraining from its violation, and that of his ministers; ravishing
and seducing nuns, maidens, widows and men’s wives; shedding innocent
blood like tyrants’, which was enough to strike fear into the heart of the
realm and allow Yorkist support to spread out of the capital and further
north.13 In contrast, Warwick had learned from the mistakes made at St
Albans in 1455 and gave orders that his men should not show violence
towards ordinary soldiers once the day was won.
Mirroring the dismal national mood, the armies faced each other amid
terrible weather. The heavy downpour turned the field into a marsh and
rendered the carefully prepared Lancastrian cannon useless. Now Warwick,
Salisbury and Edward, Earl of March, easily had the upper hand. Part of the
king’s forces defected, allowing Warwick to march into the enemy camp
and take Henry into his custody; after only about half an hour, all was over.
Around 300 Lancastrians lay dead in the field and the queen fled west to the
Welsh stronghold of Harlech Castle with Prince Edward. Warwick returned
to London, making public displays of loyalty to the king, in whose name a
new Parliament was summoned that October. Henry VI was present when
Warwick’s brother, George Neville, Bishop of Exeter, preached a
humiliating sermon on the failings of his reign. However, none of the
assembled lords had any idea just how dramatic the occasion would
become.
More than one influential player was absent. Margaret and Prince
Edward remained in Wales, attempting to raise troops to liberate Henry, but
also, Richard, Duke of York, had been in exile in Ireland during the battle.
Now he was on his way back to Westminster and was planning an
extraordinary entrance. His arrival in the city must have been impressive,
heralded by trumpeters, followed by an army dressed in his livery of blue
and white, with his great sword carried before his horse, in the custom of
kings. Over his head flew the royal standard, a reminder of his superior
descent from Edward III. Abbot Whethamstede recorded the well-known
story of the duke marching into the palace with more trumpeters and armed
men, crossing the great hall and entering the chamber ‘where the king
usually holds his Parliament with the commons’, where he put his hand on
the king’s throne, ‘like a man taking possession’.14 However, the necessary
audience was missing. An anonymous correspondent, describing the scene
to John Tiptoft in a letter, confirms that when York arrived at 10 a.m., the
lords were in the Parliament chamber ‘except the kyng’ and the commons
were in session in their ‘place acustumed’, which at this period was the
monks’ refectory. In a highly symbolic gesture, York went to stand under
the cloth of estate to assert his hereditary claim to the throne over that of
Henry VI, announcing that ‘he purposed nat to ley daune his swerde but to
challenge his right’.15 Word quickly spread along the corridors of
Westminster and people hurried to witness his declaration. However, York
had misjudged the mood. Shuffling in embarrassment, they did not react as
the duke had hoped, prompting his son Edward to act as messenger between
those assembled that day. First, Warwick warned him that the people would
turn against him if he tried to strip Henry of his crown and then, even Henry
himself reminded them they had all sworn loyalty to him. Technically,
although York’s right was strong, the declaration was made in a time of
peace, when Henry VI was under Yorkist control and very much alive.
Parliament hastily withdrew to Blackfriars to discuss how to deal with
this insistent and overmighty subject. The more the lords explained to York
the awkwardness of the situation, the more the duke insisted on his right
and began to make plans for his Coronation, which Waurin claims he had
planned as early as 13 October, although others cite 1 November. Ever keen
to interpret the symbolic or superstitious, one record related how the
Commons’ discussions were interrupted when the crown, which hung in the
middle of the house, suddenly fell down, ‘which was take for a prodige or
token that the reign of King Henry was ended’.16 According to Vergil, the
falling crown incident had happened earlier, when it rolled off Henry’s head
as he took his seat in Parliament: either way, it was taken as a ‘signe
prodigious’. Finally, a compromise was reached in the Act of Accord.
Henry was to continue to reign, with York resuming his role as Lord
Protector and being named his formal heir. It gave the duke a degree of
protection: ‘If any person or persons scheme or plot the death of the said
duke, and are provenly convicted of overt action taken against him by their
peers, that it be deemed and adjudged high treason.’ At a stroke, Henry VI’s
own son, Edward of Westminster, was removed from the line of succession:
‘The heirs of the body of the same King Henry IV, did or do possess a
hereditary right to the said crowns and realms, or to the heritage or
inheritance of the same, shall be annulled, repealed, revoked, negated,
cancelled, void and of no force or effect.’17 Perhaps Henry had little choice
but to agree; perhaps he had listened to the rumours about the boy’s
paternity: in any case, the Act was passed. It was to be expected, though,
that the boy’s mother would not accept this: if nothing else, Margaret was
tireless in her fight to protect her son’s rights and immediately sent a letter
to London written in her son’s name, asserting his right to the throne. It was
clear to the queen that there would no longer be a peaceful solution; her
enemy, York, had to be permanently removed.
Prince Edward’s disinheritance swung a little public sympathy back in
his family’s favour but Margaret needed to act decisively. In Wales and
Yorkshire she was able to recruit large numbers of troops under Henry VI’s
half-uncle, Jasper Tudor, while she sailed north to attempt to draw the Scots
into her cause. York and Salisbury knew they had to strike back before they
were outnumbered, so leaving Warwick in charge of Henry VI in London,
they marched north to meet her challenge.
It has been suggested that the children’s nursery rhyme ‘The Grand
Old Duke of York’, marching his 10,000 men up and down the hill, might
date from the encounter that followed, or even the colourful mnemonic
‘Richard of York gave battle in vain’. The rout that led to the Battle of
Wakefield certainly entered the history of the conflict as memorable and
decisive. York, along with his second son, Edmund, and Salisbury, kept the
Christmas of 1460 at Sandal Castle. An impregnable stronghold close to the
city of Wakefield, it was an old Norman motte-and-bailey settlement, built
on a natural ridge. The keep was circular, with towers rising four stories
high, surrounded by a 6-foot wall and deep moat. Here, York and his family
and their troops, numbering between 3,000 and 8,000 men, were
surrounded by a Lancastrian army from Pontefract. The anticipated support
from Warwick or Edward, Earl of March, who was then in Wales, had not
yet arrived but York decided not to wait. If his men had remained within the
castle walls, they would have been safe, but for some reason, they ventured
outside to confront their enemies: Hall and Waurin suggest half the enemy
force was concealed in the woods, or that they displayed false colours or
lured the inhabitants out under promise of a ceasefire. At a loss to explain
the lapse in York’s usual military abilities, historians have suggested that
Salisbury’s nephew, John Neville, may have betrayed them or else they
were caught out when foraging for food after a long siege. Hall described
York’s position as ‘like a fish in a net or a deer in a buckstall’, although
when cornered, he fought ‘manfully’. Perhaps it was trickery, perhaps
bravery. The result was the same. York was killed in battle, as was his
brother Thomas; his sixteen-year-old son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, was cut
down as he fled and Anne’s grandfather, Salisbury, was taken prisoner to
Pontefract Castle where he was beheaded. The heads were displayed on the
Micklebar Gate, the traditional entry point for monarchs into York, as a
‘terror to the rest of thadversaryes’,18 with the duke’s dressed in a paper
crown.
For Margaret, it was a decisive victory. Now she needed to bring her
troops south and convert it into the readeption of her husband and
reinstatement of her seven-year-old son. However, one man in particular
stood in her way: Anne’s father. With so many of his Yorkist allies wiped
out in one stroke, Warwick became, in the words of Vergil, ‘thonely man
upon whom all the weight of the war depended’. This was not strictly true,
as the eighteen-year-old Edward, Earl of March, now took on his father’s
role as head of the family and his claim to the throne. Between them, the
future king and his kingmaker would continue to fight York’s battle; their
fortunes had plummeted but there were more battles to come, which were
still to bring them their greatest victory. Writing in January 1461, Coppini
advised a fellow Italian, staying with Queen Margaret and Henry Beaufort,
to warn his hosts not to ‘be arrogant because of the trifling victory they
won, owing to the rash advance of their opponents’, otherwise they would
bring ‘desolation upon the whole realm’ because the ‘feelings of the people
are incredibly incensed against them’. Coppini’s advice would prove
correct, as the Lancastrian triumph at Wakefield proved to be short-lived:
soon they would be ejected from the English throne entirely. York’s death
had made way for a new commander in the field, a soldier of experience
and daring, who, for a while, appeared undefeatable. He was also a family
man, a husband and father to two small girls. Warwick’s success would
bring Anne back home.

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4

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Boy and Girl
1461–1465
Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;
Not separated with the racking clouds,
But sever’d in a pale clear-shining sky.
See, see! they join, embrace, and seem to kiss,
As if they vow’d some league inviolable:
Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun.
In this the heaven figures some event.1
Anne’s world, and that of her contemporaries, was changing. The fortunes
of those four babies born in the 1450s had fluctuated as the rivalry between
Lancaster and York deepened. Now aged four and a half, Anne was
suddenly the daughter of the most powerful man in England, on whose
shoulders rested the responsibility of defending the City of London and
guarding King Henry VI, while the queen’s pillaging troops marched south.
At a remove from the action in Calais, Anne would have been unaware just
how critical the situation in London had become, although her mother’s
sympathies must have been roused by the plight of York’s widow and
children; perhaps their prayers were also extended to them in the castle
chapel. In England, though, grieving for her husband and second son, with
her eldest boy Edward, Earl of March, leading an army of his own, Cecily
of York took steps to protect her babies. Following the defeat at Wakefield,
she had been in the ‘custody’ of her sister Anne, Duchess of Buckingham,
but now she sent her two youngest sons, Richard and George, to Utrecht
under the protection of Philip the Good, whose son their sister Margaret
would eventually marry. Aged eight and eleven, they arrived at the
Burgundian household without any indication of the length of their stay, or
whether they would even see their home again.
On the other side, the fortunes of Edward of Westminster had
improved with the death of York. As the newly reinstated heir to the throne,
his early years had been spent in flight from the scene of battlefields and he
was used to scenes of conflict and bloodshed. Legend has it that the boy
himself pronounced the death sentence on those knights who had failed to
prevent his father’s capture. Queen Margaret had used him as a rallying
point in the North, relying on his presence to draw men to his cause and
rewarding them with badges of loyalty. Early in 1461 it appeared that he
was about to be fully restored to his former life, with only the Earl of
Warwick remaining of the old enemy. However, his mother and Henry
Beaufort had mismanaged their armies, unable to control the continual
looting as they progressed south. This meant that Westminster, after which
the seven-year-old was named, was now terrified of the boy’s approach.
Three more battles early in 1461 sealed the Lancastrian party’s fate.
On 2 February Edward, Earl of March, won a decisive victory at
Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire against Henry VI’s father-in-law, Owen
Tudor. Following the death of Henry V, his widow, Catherine of Valois had
contracted a secret match with her groom, Tudor, and borne him at least two
sons, the now deceased Edmund, father of Henry VII, and Jasper, who
fought at his father’s side. Now a widower aged about sixty, Owen Tudor
appeared at the head of a Lancastrian army in order to defend his son-in-
law’s right. The signs were not propitious though, with even the planetary
forces seeming to support the Yorkists. Before the fighting began, Edward
of March witnessed the phenomenon of a parhelion, or ‘sun-dog,’ which
appeared as three suns in the sky, taken to be a sign of divine favour. Using
Welsh recruits, he was able to prevent the different parts of his enemies’
forces from meeting up and captured Tudor, who was later beheaded. As the
old man laid his head incredulously on the block, he commented that it had
been used to ‘lie in Queen Catherine’s lap’. Jasper Tudor survived the
encounter and escaped into exile, although his young ward, Henry Tudor,
was left behind. The four-year-old boy was removed from his mother at the
Tudor’s residence of Pembroke Castle and placed under the guardianship of
the loyal Yorkist, William Herbert of Raglan Castle, who had fought for
Edward’s victory.
Elsewhere in the country, the Earl of Warwick had met with less
success. He and Edward of March had intended to join forces to defeat
Margaret but Edward had been forced to engage with the Tudors at
Mortimer’s Cross before they could meet up. This left the earl
outnumbered. Only two weeks later, with Henry VI in his custody,
Warwick’s army met a Lancastian force at St Albans and the unfortunate
town was again subjected to intense fighting and destruction. Six years had
passed since the destruction of that terrible first battle, time enough for the
physical damage to have been cleared away, with properties and gardens
repaired and replanted. The memories, however, remained. Aware of
Warwick’s technique of dividing his army into three and his north-facing
positioning, the Lancastrians swung round to take him by surprise. Fighting
was again concentrated within the town and in the domestic settings of back
yards and houses, lasting several hours until Warwick’s troops were finally
repelled. Henry VI had supposedly spent the duration of the battle singing
and laughing under a tree; now he was reunited with his wife and son,
knighting the young Edward, who then went on to knight thirty more
Lancastrians himself. Nothing should have prevented their victorious army
marching straight into London and reclaiming the throne. Except they
didn’t. Their hesitation was fatal to their cause, allowing Edward, Earl of
March, fresh from his triumph at Mortimer’s Cross, to enter the city himself
and gain its support. London welcomed the handsome, strong, 6-foot-4
warrior, who went on to declare his hereditary right to the throne.
Both sides thought they had won a decisive victory. March’s position
in London gave him the advantage but a final encounter was needed to
settle who was to emerge as the winners and claim the throne. The opposing
armies met at Towton, on Palm Sunday, 29 March. Yorkist leaders Edward,
Warwick and the earl’s uncle, Lord Fauconberg, faced a Lancastrian army
headed by Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, while Henry VI and Queen
Margaret waited to hear the outcome at York. The Lancastrians also had Sir
Andrew Trollope, who had served under Warwick at Calais before defecting
to the other side, Henry Percy, 3rd Earl of Northumberland, with whom the
Nevilles had long been in dispute, and Sir Henry Holland, who was married
to Anne of York, March’s elder sister.
What followed has been called the largest and bloodiest battle on
English soil, after which Edward himself estimated that more than 28,000
soldiers lay dead on the snow-driven field. Modern scholars have put the
number somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000. Trollope and Percy were
killed and Holland fled north to join Henry VI and his family in their
Scottish exile. His wife, Anne of York, received his lands and officially
separated from him in 1464. At least three-quarters of the noble families of
England had members who fought on that day and after the battle, 113
attainders were issued. The fighting had lasted for hours but the Yorkists
eventually emerged as the victors; Henry VI and his family fled to Scotland
and Edward of March was crowned, as King Edward IV, at Westminster
that June.
It was around this time that Warwick’s family packed their bags and
returned to England on a more permanent basis. Edward had rewarded his
right-hand-man with the position of Admiral of England and King’s
Lieutenant in the North, which required him to leave Calais behind. The
transportation of a great household like the earl’s would have entailed much
organisation and hard work before the piles of crates and boxes were finally
loaded into the ships sitting waiting in Calais harbour. Anne and Isabel
would have watched their mother overseeing the servants’ activities and
perhaps helped to select which items they most wanted to take. Bulkier
objects were likely to have been left behind although much of the furniture
of the period was designed to be dismantled. Other chattels would follow on
later ships; perhaps the family and their belongings required a small fleet,
given the requisite numbers of dresses and accoutrements that society
required a countess and her daughters to possess.
The surviving household accounts made in the aftermath of the deaths
of noble and aristocratic individuals makes clear the extent of their
wardrobes. An inventory of Catherine of Aragon’s effects, made in 1536,
when she was living in disgrace with a pared-down household, lists forty-
eight separate hangings for walls and windows, seven sets of embroidered
bed linen including counterpanes, testers, curtains and canopies, five
cupboard cloths, nine carpets, fourteen cushions, twenty-one pillows,
twenty-four sheets and eight blankets. This was before account was made of
the finer linen in her ‘wardrobe stuff’ and that designated for use at her
table. The general household and ‘kitchen stuff’ does not begin to list her
own personal effects and items of clothing: comparable lists for the
countess and her daughters would have been exhaustive even before the
chests of clothes, gowns, kirtles, surcotes and all the layers of under-linen
were loaded on board ship.2 Whenever they travelled and however long it
took, Warwick’s family were back in residence at Middleham at some point
in 1461.
It seems logical to suppose the Nevilles’ arrival coincided with Edward
IV’s Coronation, when other significant exiles returned to the country,
including the young York brothers, now second and third in line to the
throne. Finally, it was considered safe enough for Edward’s brothers,
Richard and George, to leave their Burgundian exile, where their mother,
Cecily, had sent them after the crushing defeat at Wakefield. They had fled
from England as the sons of an attainted traitor and returned as part of the
ruling royal family. That June they were made Knights of the Bath and
given the titles by which they have come to be known in popular history
and drama; the eleven-year-old George became Duke of Clarence while
eight-year-old Richard was elevated to the Dukedom of Gloucester.
Anne’s base for the next few years was to be Middleham Castle in
Wensleydale, Yorkshire, an impressive twelfth-century bastion which had
been acquired by the Nevilles through marriage in 1270. In its heyday, it
would have had the appearance of a typical defensive stronghold, with its
moat and drawbridge, huge walls, towers, gate and the three-story keep
with 12-foot-thick walls encompassing the family’s living quarters. At 32
by 28 metres square, this keep was one of the largest in England, placed
squarely within the castle’s solid walls. Early in the fifteenth century,
Anne’s great-grandfather, the fourth Lord Neville, had undertaken a
significant programme of rebuilding, improving the south and west ranges
and making more modernisations to accommodate his large family. The
new rooms were mostly given over to domestic use, with latrines, fireplaces
and views over the countryside; wooden bridges were built on the first floor
to connect the new range with the family’s original rooms in the keep. The
family would thus be elevated above the squalor created by the castle’s
catering arrangements, such as cooking, slaughter and provisioning, which
took place on the ground floor. Most of the community’s activity centred
around the Great Hall, which would serve as a local court and meeting
place as well as for the usual feasting and entertainment that punctuated the
daily and annual routine. At the back of the hall stood the chapel, added
around 1300, as well as the entrance to the Great and Inner Chambers,
which Anne would have known well. Divided by a wooden partition, each
had a fireplace, cupboard, small side room or ‘closet’ and latrine.3 The
fourth Lord Neville also converted a tower into a gatehouse, with stone
seating on the inside; perhaps the young Anne sat here and watched the
household traffic pass by as millers brought flour to be baked in the new
ovens, animals were herded for slaughter, hops delivered to the brewhouse
or horses led through to be shod in one of the many workshops that enabled
the castle to be self-sufficient.
The thick walls of Middleham Castle would have enclosed a large
household, supporting around 200 people in a microcosm of the royal court
and of wider medieval society. These would have included a variety of
ranks, from those among the immediate family, to the dean of the chapel,
almoner, cofferer, marshall, clerks, ushers and those waiting at table,
washing laundry or cleaning. Anne’s father, Warwick, would have spent a
lot of time engaged in acts of ‘good lordship’, overseeing the smooth
running of the local area and investigating disputes: on a national level, he
was also away more on diplomatic and government business. During the
early 1460s, he fought alongside his brother John, Lord Montagu, to repel
the Lancastrian attacks on the Scottish borders, where Queen Margaret was
hoping to invade and reclaim the throne for her husband. Anne spent more
time, therefore, with her mother, who was described by the family
chronicler, John Rous, as a devout lady: decorous, generous and with a
strict sense of etiquette; exactly what was expected of a great lady of her
day. Rous notes that one of her particularly favoured duties was to attend
the deliveries of children in the neighbourhood. Other duties expected of a
lady included in the 1412–13 Household Accounts of Dame Alice de Bryene
are overseeing her many staff and making purchases for the household,
especially of luxury items such as spices, salt, wax and candles. The even
earlier Manual for his Wife, written by the Householder of Paris in 1392,
listed among her tasks the skill and cultivation of a garden, particularly
grafting and the cultivation of roses in winter; she should also know how to
order meals and give instructions to her butcher, poulterer and spicer and
that she should be skilled in the preparation of soups, sauces and meat for
the infirm and ill. The author also allowed his wife her pleasure in ‘rose
trees and … violets’ and her desire to ‘make chaplets and dance and sing’.
After all, she was only fifteen. Perhaps the young Anne Neville also took
delight in such things.4
The Orders and Rules of the Princess Cecill,5 written sometime after
1495, outlines the daily routine of Richard’s mother, Cecily Neville, later in
life. It gives an impression of the lifestyle of those of similar rank, much of
which would be relevant for the household of her future daughter-in-law.
The day started when she rose at seven, dressed for the day and heard mass
in her chamber before she proceeded into her private chapel for more
devotions. After this she ate her first meal at eleven, called ‘dinner’, during
which religious texts were read aloud, usually the lives of female saints
such as Maude, Bridget or Katherine. After eating, she gave an hour’s
audience to any who were waiting to see her, followed by a short nap.
Rising after fifteen minutes, she spent the rest of the afternoon in prayer
until roused by the ‘first peal of evensong’. Then, until the last peal of the
bell, she ‘drinketh wyne or ale at her pleasure’, before attending chapel
again. Supper followed at five, which was clearly a more social occasion,
during which she recited the lessons heard during dinner to those assembled
to eat with her. Finally, the time had come for recreation: now Cecily
‘disposeth herself to be famyliare with her gentlewomen’ to the season of
‘honest mirth’, then, an hour before bed, drank wine and retired to her
private closet to pray, before laying down to sleep at eight.6
However, this routine was not representative of the entire life of ‘proud
Cis’, as the locals nicknamed her; perhaps the later strictures of the widow
were partly a penance for the throne room she created at her home of
Fotheringhay Castle, where she received visitors with ‘the state of a queen’
or the thousands of pounds she and her husband spent on clothes and
jewels. For aristocrats of their rank, though, second only to the king, this
was expected, even desired as a necessary indicator of their status, as
outlined by Sir John Fortescue in De Laudibus Legum Anglae. Cecily’s gold
cup cost £54, one shopping trip to London acquired £606 worth of clothes
and the duke’s ‘white rose’ collar cost £2,666.7 It may have been even more
important for the Yorks to maintain their regal status in contrast with King
Henry’s preference for a simple life and dislike of contemporary fashions
and worldly goods, which had prompted Fortescue’s work. Richard and
Cecily’s surviving sons, Edward, Edmund, George and Richard, would
grow to adulthood with a strong sense of entitlement and the understanding
of the need to physically project their majesty.
The Orders and Rules for Cecily’s household lay out the terms of
service for the castle’s large staff. Head officers and married ladies were
assigned quantities of bread, ale, fire and candles; breakfast was not offered
except to the officers resident at the castle, as some were housed in the
town. Those who fell ill were permitted ‘all such thinges as may be to thaire
care’ and those who became ‘impotent’ or unable to carry out their work
were to have the same wages as long as Duchess Cecily lived. Three days a
week, the family was served with roast beef or mutton; on fast and fish days
they had salt fish and two fresh dishes; presumably the estate encompassed
some ponds as its position inland would have made regular supplies
difficult. The payments for fresh produce were made weekly on a Friday,
and on Saturday they had butter and eggs. No mention is made of children,
although Cecily and Richard of York had a large family. Compiled after her
death, and most of theirs, it probably represents her routine as a widow,
although her lifelong practices are likely to have influenced the habits of
her sons, as Edward IV’s household reforms, the Liber Niger Domus Regus
Angliae, may suggest. Conscious of her position, the surviving images of
Cecily and her daughter Margaret, reared under this regime, speak of
elegance and opulence.8 Life for the Countess of Warwick would have not
been too dissimilar and, soon, one of Cecily’s sons was to come and live
under her regime at Middleham.
Returning from Burgundy in 1461, aged almost nine, Richard of
Gloucester initially lived at Sheen and Greenwich with his siblings
Clarence and Margaret, attending Edward IV’s Coronation on 27 June. It is
likely that Anne and Isabel Neville were also present at this momentous
occasion, given their father’s role in his accession. Perhaps they stood with
their mother in Westminster Abbey, dressed in velvet or damask, or the
other impressive fabrics that their rank permitted, while the countess
sported one of the new winged or butterfly headdresses, watching the
proceedings. Among the feasting and jousting that inevitably followed,
Warwick’s children and Edward’s siblings would have come into contact,
either seated at the head table or enjoying the entertainment. Anne and
Isabel may well have attended key events at court, staying at their father’s
town house of the Erber, when not at their northern base of Middleham. So
it is likely that Richard was known to them both by the time he joined
Warwick’s household. It was customary among the nobility and aristocracy
to place teenage children among families of equivalent rank in order for
them to receive social or military training suitable for their future positions.
For girls, their education as ladies would encompass traditional skills such
as needlework, dancing and music as well as those required to run
households of their own in the future. Adolescent boys, known as
‘henxmen’, were trained in the art of warfare and chivalry, as well as
languages and those skills of diplomacy that would open doors at the
highest level. Often, they grouped around a young man of similar age,
establishing friendships and loyalties that would last a lifetime.
The date of young Richard’s arrival at Middleham is uncertain; it may
have been as early as 1461, although other historians have suggested he did
not enter Warwick’s tutelage until 1464. Certainly in 1461, the nine-year-
old boy was mentioned in the king’s household accounts, when his goods
were conveyed to and from Leicester and the capital, as well as the
necessary furnishings for his time at Greenwich. Thomas Bourchier,
Archbishop of Canterbury, who was related to the Yorks by marriage,
received compensation for supporting the king’s brothers ‘for a long time
and at great charges’ so Richard may well have been resident in his
household for a period of time.9 While nine years old was not too early for
Richard to begin his chivalric training, it appears that his elder brother
George, Duke of Clarence, had begun this process when he was ten.
Clarence was now the centre of his own establishment at Greenwich,
continuing his chivalric training among his peers. The sons of the
aristocracy matured early, when youth and strength were often as crucial as
experience when it came to combat. Fourteen was considered to be a
significant milestone in the maturation of boys and Edward himself would
declare Richard of age when he reached sixteen, after which he would take
an important administrative and legal role, before fighting his first full
battle at the age of eighteen. Edward IV had become king just before his
nineteenth birthday. Now it was the role of the Earl of Warwick to prepare
his young charge for this military and chivalric future.
It is possible that Richard was already a frequent visitor to Middleham
Castle or Warwick’s other properties. Certainly, he would have been
familiar to the Neville family. Several historians have suggested that the
earl was Richard’s godfather and, as such, he would have played a parental
role in his education even before the boy became a more permanent resident
under his roof. This would have begun as early as 1461, certainly when
Warwick was at Westminster or about the king’s business. The relationship
between the king and the earl had never been stronger than in the year of his
accession. After that, things would slowly sour and, by 1464, major
disagreements of policy had already arisen between the cousins, although
they had not yet reached the proportions of later years that resulted in their
complete breach. Edward was clearly making arrangements for his siblings
in 1461 as, that November, his Parliament instructed the Sheriff of
Gloucester to pay Richard £40 a year for life.10 Around 1465, an entry in
the Roll of the Exchequer recorded money ‘paid to Richard, Earl of
Warwick, for costs and expenses incurred by him on behalf of the Duke of
Gloucester, the king’s brother’, so he was clearly at Middleham by then.
Additionally, to pay for the boy’s upkeep, Edward awarded Warwick the
wardship of Francis Lovell, heir to Lord Lovell. Two years younger than
Richard, Lovell probably arrived in Wensleydale on the death of his father
in around 1463, but the pair were to become lifelong friends. Also present
were Robert Percy of Scotton and Richard Radcliffe, or Ratcliffe, of
Lancashire, who were to fight and die alongside their future king.
Ratcliffe’s grandfather was comptroller of the household of Edward IV, a
position that the young Robert Percy would assume for the duration of
Richard’s reign. Thomas Huddleston and Thomas Parr, Richard’s future
esquire, were also probably present as the sons of Warwick’s Cumbrian
retainers, along with James Tyrell of Ipswich. Warwick’s schoolroom may
have been even larger; other boys may also have passed under his tutelage
during those years in a hothouse for the environment that one historian has
referred to as the ‘flowering of British chivalry’. There is also another
possibility. Young aristocrats were often sent away to be raised in
households of their intended future partners. Perhaps, even at this early
stage, Warwick was considering the king’s brother as a match for one of his
daughters.
Actually, Warwick was frequently absent from home during 1464–65.
Always favouring a French alliance over the Burgundian match Edward IV
favoured, he had travelled back across the Channel to negotiate a marriage
for the king, which had been called off, much to the earl’s chagrin.
However, he was kept busy in the royal service, visiting the Cinque Ports
on the Kent and Sussex coast in November. At the end of the month he was
at York and, after celebrating Christmas, was at Coventry on 10 January and
six days later, at the opening of Parliament in Westminster, staying at his
London home, the Erber, where he remained until that March. Between
mid-May and mid-July, he was in Calais, then back in Warwick in August
before being recorded making offerings at the church of St Mary’s,
Warwick, along with the countess, their daughters and Richard, Duke of
Gloucester in September 1465.11 Richard may well have accompanied him
on some of these minor missions or, alternatively, was in residence at other
Warwick properties such as Barnard Castle, Penrith and Sheriff Hutton.
Given the routine of the Warwick household, Richard and Anne
Neville would have seen each other regularly while he was at Middleham.
Although Anne’s existence would have been more sequestered and her
presence in the Great Hall less frequent, the pair’s proximity cannot but
have bred a degree of intimacy. Out of the window, the little girl may have
seen the youths tilting in the yard or riding out with hounds and hawks;
indoors, she may have heard them reciting their Latin, listened to them
practise their instruments in the evening or knelt beside them in prayer in
the chapel. Isabel was closer to Richard in age and it is even possible that
friendship developed between them first. All three are recorded as attending
the enthronement of the girls’ uncle, George Neville, as Archbishop of York
in September 1465, at Cawood Castle, participating in the legendary feast
that saw the consumption of gargantuan quantities of fish, flesh and fowl.
According to Leland’s account, Warwick was acting in the honoured role of
steward and among the ‘estates sitting in the chief chamber’, Richard was
seated alongside ‘the earl’s daughters’, under the watchful eyes of the
Countesses of Suffolk, Westmorland and Northumberland, clearly
considered to be part of the Warwicks’ intimate family. The countess was
placed separately in the second chamber; obviously at the ages of nine and
fourteen, Anne and Isabel’s table manners were considered up to scratch, as
modelled in Hugh Rhodes’ Boke of Nurture:
An ye be desired to serve, or sit, or eat meat at the table,
Incline to good manners, and to nurture yourself enable…
Before that you sit, see that your knife be bright
Your hands clean, your nails pared is a good sight.
When thou shalt speak, roll not too fast thine eye;
Gaze not too and fro as one that were void of courtesy.12
Rhodes himself was a member of Edward IV’s chapel, a man ‘of worship,
endowed with vertuuse moral and speculatiff … modestiall in all other
manner of behaving’. He would have composed his advice to young people
at the same time as Richard and the Neville girls were growing up; perhaps
Warwick and his countess used his advice, or else their own version of it. At
table, Anne and Isabel would have learned not to fill their spoons too full,
not to dip bread in their soup, slurp too loudly or put their meat in the salt
cellar, to eat small morsels and not to quaff or scratch, fidget or pick their
teeth. Displaying good manners towards their table companions was
essential:
An a stranger sit near thee, ever among now and then,
Reward him with some dainties like a gentleman
If thy fellow sit from his meat and cannot come thereto,
Then cut him such as thou hast, that is gently to do.13
Seated together, the young trio would have eaten through their share of the
dishes prepared by the sixty-two cooks in the kitchens that day. Recorded
by Leland, the three courses included such delicacies as frumenty with
venison, hart, mutton, cygnets and swans, capons and geese, peacock and
rabbits. The small birds eaten numbered woodcocks, plovers, egrets, larks,
redshanks, martinets, partridges and quails, while among the sweets were
dates, fritters, quinces, wafers as well as the marzipan subtleties in the
forms of a dolphin, dragon, St William and St George. This did not even
include the fish courses, with salmon, sturgeon, lobster and lampreys,
conger eels, trout and turbot among many others. Around 300 tuns of ale
were consumed and 100 of wine and under the quantities listed, the amount
of ‘spices, sugared delicates and wafers’ made was recorded as ‘plenty’.
Around 13,000 puddings were consumed. Following the feast, guests were
given damask (rose) water to wash in and hippocras to drink. The three
children cannot help but have been impressed, even accustomed as they
were to the finest cuisine and the most formal of occasions. Forbidden by
etiquette to discuss the food, perhaps their formal manners allowed for little
conversation in spite of the friendship that existed between the families.
Perhaps even at this stage, the thirteen-year-old boy and the nine-year-old
Anne were already fond of each other; was Anne already more than just one
of ‘the earl’s daughters’ to Richard, Duke of Gloucester?

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5

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Romance and Chivalry
1465–1469
In person she was seemly, amenable and beautiful and in conditions
full commendable and right virtuous1
What did he look like, this young man who came into Anne’s Middleham
world? The question of Richard’s appearance has proved contentious since
the late fifteenth century. A flurry of accounts written in the aftermath of
Bosworth quickly established the myths of deformity that the Tudors
required as a correlative to the late king’s perceived moral distortion.
Shakespeare’s Richard of 1591 manages to use his powers of persuasion to
make Anne submit to a match with a ‘bunch-backed toad’ but no taint of
abnormality was present when the two children were growing up in the
1450s. The origins of this misrepresentation stem from the use of two words
in a poem, ‘A Dialogue between a Secular and a Friar’, recording the
family’s history in the Clare Roll. According to the chronicler, Richard was
the eleventh child of twelve, some of whom had already perished. Other
sources list another short-lived or stillborn daughter, Joan, born earlier in
the marriage around 1438.
Sir, aftir the tyme of longe bareynesse,
God first sent Anne, which signifyeth grace,
In token that at her hertis hevynesse
He as for bareynesse would fro hem chace.
Harry, Edward, and Edmonde, eche is his place
Succcedid; and after tweyn doughters cam
Elizabeth and Margarete, and aftir William.
John aftir William nexte borne was,
Whiche bothe he passid to Goddis grace:
George was next, and after Thomas
Borne was, which sone aftir did pace
By the pathe of dethe into the heavenly place.
Richard liveth yet; but the last of alle
Was Ursula, to him God list calle.2
The penultimate line, stating that ‘Richard liveth yet’, has been interpreted
as an indicator of his poor health, leading to descriptions of him as a sick
and weakly child. There is no other evidence to support this, though, and
recent historians have argued that it is more a statement of fact in
comparison with his deceased siblings. The author was simply stating that
Richard had survived in comparison with Thomas and Ursula, his
immediate siblings. At the time of writing, Richard was still a child ‘in his
pupilage’ and therefore still at risk from various infantile illnesses. The
statement that he ‘liveth yet’ could, in fact, be an affirmation rather than
indication of any physical problem; rather, it suggests strength and survival.
The Neville family chronicler, John Rous, was initially favourable to
Richard, describing him in 1484 as a ‘most mighty prince’ who ruled
‘commendably … cherishing those who were virtuous’ to the ‘great laud of
all the people’. The line drawing which accompanies his text shows a
knight holding a sword, whose limbs appear in perfect proportion, his
features regular, almost beneficent. It is not too dissimilar to an illustration
featured in the chronicle of French writer, Jean de Waurin, where a figure in
a green hat, thought to represent Richard in his early twenties, clearly has
well-formed limbs, straight spine and even shoulders. It may be that Waurin
and Rous were diplomatically flattering their ruler by glossing over his
impediments or perhaps, that these defects were not necessarily visible at
the time of writing or were hidden under clothes. After the victory of Henry
VII in 1485, Rous produced a second version of his history, although he
was unable to access and amend his original, positive account. This later,
Tudor-friendly version introduced the idea of Richard’s monstrous birth,
which depicts him arriving after an impossible two-year gestation period,
sporting a full set of teeth. Rous’ dramatic U-turn may have been his
attempt to curry favour with the new regime, or else he could have been
influenced by his belief that Richard was responsible for the death of Anne,
whose family were his patrons. Whatever prompted Rous to rewrite history,
his second account of 1491 was to trigger the legends of the late king’s
deformities.
This dramatic horror story influenced another account of Richard’s life
and reign, written by Thomas More between 1512 and 1519, in which the
boy was breech-born, little, ‘croke-backed’ and ‘hard-faced’, which served
his purpose in presenting the dead Yorkist as a villain. Equally, the author
had served as a page in the household of the Lancastrian Archbishop
Morton and may have based his version of events on conversations with
one of Richard’s adversaries. Tudor historian Polydore Vergil built on
More’s account, which was further developed by Edward Hall in the 1540s,
seeking to justify the Tudor invasion of 1485. These three negative
portrayals formed the main influence on Shakespeare’s interpretation,
which developed Richard into the ‘poison bunch-backed toad’ that was the
supposed physical manifestation of his wickedness. By the time the play
was composed, in around 1591, the tradition of the king’s deformity was
well established and, by 1614, it had inspired an anonymous author to
produce the poem ‘The Ghost of Richard III’, drawing together the worst of
the legends about his appearance and deeds, which survives in a single
manuscript copy in the Bodleian Library:
My mother Languish’t many a tedious houre…
My legges came foremost, an unequall payre…
Hollow my cheeks, upon my brest black hayre,
The characters of spleene and virulent deedes;
My beetle-brow, and my fyre-cyrcled eye
Foreshow’d me butcher in my cruelty…
So, mountaine-like was I contract behind
That my stretch’t arms (plumpe with ambitious veines)
Might crush all obstacles and throw them downe
That stood betwixt my shadow and a crowne…
Th’amazed women started, for each jaw
Appear’d with teeth, which mark made these ils good
That I should worry soules, suck humane blood.3
However, none of the contemporary chroniclers, Mancini, Commines and
Croyland, make any mention of Richard’s deformities. The Italian, Mancini,
certainly had a motive to do so, writing in 1483 about the ‘suspicious’
disappearance of the princes, which were even then reputed to have been
killed by their uncle. Based in London, Mancini never met Richard but he
certainly repeated the rumours of the day. He had no compunction about
giving his opinion on the new regime, titling his account The Occupation of
the Throne by Richard III. When he left the country that summer, he had
little need to flatter the new king and could have presented any unpleasant
truths without fear of reprisals. The Burgundian Commines had probably
never visited England but wrote an account based on meetings with
Richard’s contemporaries in exile, notably his nemesis Henry Tudor. While
he states that King Louis of France thought Richard a ‘cruel and evil’
murderer, he does not exploit the opportunity to discredit his appearance.
The English Croyland Chronicle calls Richard’s later activities ‘seditious
and disgraceful’ but makes no mention of his looks.
Accounts written by those who knew Richard give the impression that
the thirteen-year-old boy took after his father, the Duke of York, in
appearance, being dark-haired and wiry. The Silesian, Nicolas von Popplau,
who visited Richard’s court in 1484, described him as slim and lightly built
with slender arms and thighs, although he admitted the king was actually
three fingers taller than himself. The Scottish Ambassador, Archibald
Whitelaw, confirmed in the same year that Richard was small, although
none seemed to doubt his strength and prowess in battle. Horace Walpole
claimed that Catherine, Countess of Desmond, remembered Richard and
had called him the ‘handsomest man in the room’ although her death in
1604, at the reputed age of either 120 or 140, may push credibility to the
limit. It hardly seems possible that she lived to such an advanced age and
could remember him herself: perhaps she was recalling what her mother or
grandmother had passed down, or even her much older husband, as
suggested by John Ashdown-Hill. Her marriage in 1529, assuming it was
her first and that her death date is correct, might suggest a birth date of
between 1500 and 1515.
Handsome or not, Richard was clearly an impressive youth, being
made Admiral of England at ten, Commissioner of Array for nine counties
at the age of twelve and Constable of England a few years later. While
Vergil paints a bleak picture of Richard during the reign of Henry VIII, one
description he gives confirms the late king had been ‘slight in figure, in face
short and compact like his father’. Taken in isolation, this is probably quite
close to the truth. The earliest surviving portraits of Richard from 1516
onwards, based on lost originals, have shown signs of tampering and cannot
be trusted. The famous ‘broken-sword’ picture, held at the Society of
Antiquities, has been x-rayed to expose the crudely painted hump that was
added by a later artist. Although the post-Tudor depictions of Richard have
eclipsed those written during his lifetime, their dubious veracity and ulterior
motives should not be allowed to distort less well-known portrayals of
Richard as a young man. The thirteen-year-old boy whom Anne Neville
came to know was probably short, strong and slender with dark hair.
When Richard’s body was discovered in a Leicester car park in
September 2012, a number of scientific tests run by the University of
Leicester were finally able to establish the truth about his appearance.
According to the skeletal analysis, Richard was of ‘unusually slender’ build
and had both arms of similar size, of which he would have had normal use,
although they were almost ‘feminine’ in delicacy, confirming von Popplau’s
description. He would have been above average height, at around 5 foot 8,
except for the presence of spinal curvature, which would have significantly
affected how tall he stood. The bones made it clear that Richard suffered
from idiopathic adolescent onset scoliosis, a condition that caused his spine
to bend into an ‘S’ shape. He was not born with this and the reason for its
development is unclear; it would have begun some time after his tenth
birthday and may have caused back pain and breathlessness, as a result of
the additional pressure on his heart and lungs. It can result in uneven
muscular development on the back and uneven limb length, rib prominence
and slow nerve reaction, yet the young man was clearly to become a
competent and strong soldier. As Richard was still a child at the onset of his
condition and had not yet undergone his adolescent period of growth, he
was likely to have experienced greater spinal curvature as he aged, although
his life expectancy did not differ from that of his peers. Investigators at the
University suggested that his spine would have had a ‘stiff’ and ‘abnormal’
curve and resulted in asymmetry to the chest wall. However, with this
concealed under his clothing, he may still have looked and walked like
anyone else, with perhaps one shoulder slightly higher. An examination of
the end of his clavicles, the two bones that form the collar, showed the
right-hand side to be larger than the left and may have resulted in one
shoulder being held higher than the other. If this was a mild condition,
diplomacy would probably have dictated that it went unmentioned during
his lifetime. After his ignominious death, however, such apparent signs of
divine displeasure would have been exaggerated.
Also, in February 2013 a facial reconstruction was completed, based
on Richard’s skull. Rebuilt by Professor Caroline Wilkinson at the
University of Dundee, a series of pegs were attached to the bones, allowing
for the muscles and flesh to be laid over them. Gradually as the layers built
up, a recognisable face emerged, not unlike the earliest portraits, dating
from the 1520s. The face of Richard III had a strong nose and jaw but the
reconstruction captured a pleasantness, a softness about the mouth and eyes,
even a half smile. Dressed in dark wig and soft velvet cap with its dangling
jewel, after the style of the portraits, it exudes a certain unexpected
charisma. It was not difficult to see the man whom Anne Neville may have
fallen in love with.
The appearance of the young Anne is even less certain. While
Richard’s physical shape has occupied historians for centuries, hers has
barely merited any attention. One depiction of her in the Beaufort Pageant
gives a stylised glimpse of her head and shoulders only. Her long hair hangs
down, while her sloping form and sketchy facial features are typical of
fifteenth-century ideals of beauty, which give a mere representation and
evoke little personality. The Rous Roll shows a young woman with hair
down to the waist, while her face has the simplicity of a woodcut, with its
wide forehead, high arched brows, straight nose, prim small mouth, strong
chin and eyes cast down to the left. John Rous, the Chaplain of Guy’s Cliffe
near Warwick, was born in 1411 and was therefore likely to have seen Anne
in person, although his many images of her ancestors and family are too
similar to be very helpful. The representation of queens in all forms was
bound by conventions of beauty, loyalty and status. Rous’ illustration of a
young woman conforms with these, depicting her with long, flowing hair
brushed back off her face and the heavy-lidded eyes popularised by the
legendary beauty of Elizabeth Wydeville. Other contemporary manuscript
images and statuary depict young women with a recognisable set of
aesthetic ideals; sloping shoulders and large forehead, the wide hips thrust
forward and rounded belly suggestive of fertility. Rous’ pen portrait of Anne
as ‘seemly amiable and beauteous and in conditions full commendable and
right virtuous and according to the interpretation of her name, full gracious’
is similarly platitudinous.
It was also a consistent act of late medieval flattery to describe
aristocratic beauties, especially queens, as golden-haired, with all its
correlations to wealth and fecundity, even if this was obviously a departure
from the truth. Writing about the cult of the Virgin Mary, Marina Warner
identifies the association of fertility, innocence and purity with blonde hair,
resonant of haloes.4 Other royal attributes included fair skin, sparkling eyes,
fine features, curved brows, red lips and cheeks, blue or grey eyes and the
sinuous, large-bellied body. On attaining regal status, women seem to have
miraculously acquired these, with the notable exception of the foreign and
therefore ‘dark’ Margaret of Anjou. As a literary conceit, this form of
beauty is found in Chaucer, the Pearl poet, Boccaccio, Matthew of
Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Guy of Warwick and others; it is also the
traditional depiction of many virginal saints such as those written by Osbern
Bokenham in the 1440s. The Croyland Chronicler remarks that Anne was
‘alike in complexion’ to her niece, the blonde Elizabeth of York, ten years
her junior, whose interchanged clothing also suggested Anne was slender as
a teenager.
Her elder sister Isabel, now fourteen, was probably of similar
appearance. Thirteen months older than Richard, it may have been she who
developed a friendship with the young duke first. Anne was only nine years
old, which is a significant remove from the sort of companionship two
young teenagers would be able to offer each other. Hindsight has led the
majority of historians and novelists to speculate whether the Duke and
Duchess of Gloucester’s marriage was based in juvenile affection which
developed during his time at Middleham. The other romantic possibility,
though, was that Richard was actually drawn to Isabel, who was
subsequently wed to his brother, although this has received little
consideration and is pure speculation. Emotion aside, if Richard was
considering one of the Neville girls as a suitable future wife, he may not
necessarily have had a preference for one over the other. When early
marriages were contracted, death sometimes intervened and the intended
spouse was replaced by a sibling near in age, in order to preserve the
settlement. When negotiations were being drawn up for the marriage of
Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, to Charles, the Dauphin of
France, clauses were inserted to allow the young man to marry one of her
sisters in the event of her premature death. This safeguard did prove
necessary early in the following century, when the death of Prince Arthur
led to the remarriage of his teenage widow, Catherine of Aragon, to her
brother-in-law Henry VIII. By the time Richard was in a position to take a
wife, and hoped to assume Warwick’s mantle, Isabel was unavailable.
The three children would have come to know each other well during
the 1460s. However, on one occasion, the relationship between the king and
Warwick was to foreshadow their later opposition. In 1465, Richard would
have attended a significant event at which the girls may not have been
present: the Coronation of Edward IV’s queen. Through the early 1460s,
Warwick had been working towards a French alliance, cemented by a
marriage between the king and Bona of Savoy, the teenage sister of Queen
Charlotte, wife of Louis XI. At the last minute, just as the arrangements
were on the verge of being concluded, Edward made the startling admission
that he was already married. His bride of five months was the widowed
Lancastrian Elizabeth Grey, née Wydeville, a beautiful blonde from a large
and aspirational family. The ceremony had been conducted in secret on May
Day 1464, at the Wydeville seat of Grafton Regis, where Edward had
arrived on the pretext of hunting. The unexpected news came as a personal
blow to Warwick, who had previously worked in harmony with Edward,
whose secrecy and encouragement of the French marriage made the
Kingmaker look a fool. He already had cause to quarrel with the family, as
Elizabeth’s brother, Anthony, Earl Rivers, had been responsible for
amassing a fleet at Sandwich with the intention of invading Calais in 1460.
The plot had failed, resulting in the capture of Scales and his parents as they
lay in bed in Sandwich town. They were then brought to Calais as
Warwick’s prisoners, where he had berated them as traitors and the ‘sons of
knaves’ in Edward’s presence. Now Scales was made a Knight of the Garter
and his sister was England’s queen. The family were also pro-Burgundian
and resented the influence Warwick had previously exerted over the king.
Warwick himself was not present at her splendid Westminster Coronation at
Whitsun 1465, having been sent on an embassy to Burgundy, so it is
unlikely that the countess and her daughters may have attended. There is the
chance that Anne’s mother may have had some ceremonial role to fulfil as
the wife of the most powerful magnate in the country, but no record remains
of her duties. One fact suggesting this is her absence from Middleham for
most of that year, when she may have been occupied with the new queen’s
establishment or else visiting her other properties at Warwick, Hanley
Castle in Worcestershire, Tewkesbury or Cardiff.
Elizabeth and Edward had met, according to local legend, in the forest
near her family home of Grafton. She was the daughter of the aristocratic
Jacquetta of Luxemburg, whose first marriage to John of Lancaster had
made her the first lady in the land after Queen Margaret and a staunch
Lancastrian. Her second union with Richard Wydeville, Earl Rivers, was a
forbidden love match, which produced fourteen children, the eldest of
whom was Elizabeth. The blonde beauty, variously described as ‘icy’ and
‘haughty’ by her enemies, had been married to Sir John Grey and bore him
two sons before his death at the Second Battle of St Albans in 1461. The
late medieval and early Tudor chroniclers agree that the amorous Edward
was struck by her beauty upon seeing her and determined to have her, as he
had many other women on whom his fancy had fallen. Elizabeth held out
for more, though. Refusing to become his mistress, she became, instead, his
queen. It was an unpopular match among the king’s family and Parliament
from the start.
Besides Warwick’s existing dislike of the Wydevilles and the
humiliation over his attempts to conclude a French alliance, the rise of
Elizabeth’s relatives upset many of the old established figures at court who
were bypassed in favour of the parvenus. The Great Chronicle of London
commented on the increasing hostility and Warwick’s annoyance that
Edward ‘maketh more honourable account of new upstart gentlemen than
the ancient houses of nobility’. Rivers held the position of Lord Treasurer,
and, wealthy through a profitable marriage himself, was also Governor of
the Isle of Wight and Elizabeth’s other siblings were matched above their
previous station. Warwick was particularly incensed by the match between
Katherine Wydeville and Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, the queen’s
ten-year-old ward, suggesting that he had intended Buckingham as a
husband for one of his daughters. According to Mancini, Edward’s second
brother, George, Duke of Clarence, did not try to conceal his personal
dislike of the new queen, nor did their mother, Duchess Cecily, who
attempted unsuccessfully to persuade her eldest son to abandon the
marriage. Edward, however, would not be influenced and Richard, at the
age of twelve, was more diplomatic. If he was shocked or displeased by the
secret marriage, he did not show it. Unsurprisingly, it was from this
marriage that the seeds of discord were sown among the brothers and their
cousins. Later historians have even gone as far as to trace back the fall of
the House of York to this rash, romantic act which propelled the Wydevilles
into the centre of national politics. By the middle of 1465, though, it was
clear that the queen and her relatives were staying put; that summer,
Elizabeth conceived a child and by the autumn, her growing belly
advertised her success.
The earl, countess and their daughters were certainly present at the
christening of Edward’s eldest child, Elizabeth of York, born in February
1466. The visiting Bohemian Gabriel Tetzel recorded that there were eight
duchesses and thirty countesses in attendance, standing in silence as the
queen was seated on a golden chair.5 As the girl’s godfather, Warwick
fulfilled a ceremonial role and probably remained in London to witness the
queen’s churching that March. The family would have stayed in their town
house of the Erber, where, rumour had it, the household was so large that
six oxen were consumed at breakfast each day. From its location on Stowe’s
map, between Newgate and old St Paul’s, the family could access
Westminster by road via Charing Cross along the Strand, or else take a boat
upstream from Blackfriars or Puddle Wharf. Perhaps Anne and Richard
were reunited for the three-hour feast that followed, or else enjoyed the
music and festivities that night, where Edward’s sister Margaret was
recorded as dancing with two dukes, who were quite possibly her brothers
George and Richard. They may also have been at court during the process
of negotiations that led to the foreign alliance Edward had long sought.
While Warwick continued to push for closer Franco–English relations, his
rival Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, had led a party that visited Bruges in
the spring of 1467, following the signing of a peace and trade treaty with
Philip of Burgundy.
That June, Anthony, Comte de la Roche, the ‘Grand Bastard of
Burgundy’, son of Philip and half-brother of Charles the Bold, arrived in
England for an extended visit. An impressive figure, with an international
reputation for jousting, a crusader against the Moors and holder of the
Order of the Golden Fleece, he took part in a magnificent tournament held
at Smithfield as the guest of Edward and Earl Rivers. In Rivers’ own words,
the purpose of the joust was to avoid slothfulness ‘and to obeye and please
my feire lady’. The event may have been designed to entertain such fair
young ladies as Warwick’s daughters but it could also be brutal. According
to Gregory’s Chronicle, de la Roche’s horse ‘was so brusyd that he dyde a
whyle aftyr’. The chronicler recorded how, whether by ‘fortune, crafte or
cunnynge’, the Bastard ‘lay out’ all men and horses in the field. Seated
prominently in the specially erected scaffolding, Anne would no doubt have
witnessed, with interest, everything that took place. Smithfield itself was a
large grassy space or ‘smoothfield’, long used for livestock markets, public
gatherings, executions and drying laundry. It was situated on the eastern
side of the Tower, accessible by the Postern Gate, which for the Warwicks
would have required a journey home through the heart of the city itself,
along one of its major thoroughfares such as Thames Street, taking them as
far west as they needed to go before turning north at Blackfriars.
There was a long precedent of tournaments held at Smithfield, with the
impressive spectacle of 1442 still in recent memory, when Henry VI acted
as umpire between Sir John Astley and the Chevalier Philip Boyle of
Aragon. This encounter was depicted in the Hastings Manuscript, written
around 1475, where the complicated dress of the combatants was described,
from their woollen hose and thick cordwain shoes to the satin-lined doublet,
mail gussets and full metal armour. Another contemporary manuscript, How
a Man Schall be Armyd, provides the only surviving image of a knight
being dressed for combat on foot, as his valet ties on his mail skirt before
beginning to assemble the complex jigsaw of body pieces, with the
traditional weapon of the poleaxe and more unusual ahlspiess, a four-sided
spike, depicted at the side.6 Quadrangular lists were erected, in which the
combatants faced each other wearing embroidered armour and wielding
axes.7 The arena was immediately beside the west doors of St
Bartholomew’s church, where trials by combat had been held since the
1350s. The most defining encounter was that organised by Richard II in
1390, when sixty knights, accompanied by sixty ladies from around Europe,
descended on the capital, where preparations had been made by Chaucer in
his capacity as the king’s clerk and records of the event were made by the
French chronicler Froissart. Etiquette for such events was set by Margaret
of Anjou’s father René, in his 1406 vividly detailed tournament book, which
lists that ‘noble and rich prizes should be given by ladies and damsel’. It
would not have been a passive experience for Anne: the ladies are
constantly referred to by René as visiting and observing coats of arms,
attending suppers, making complaints, exercising compassion and the most
beautiful and noble of them leading processions.8 Among the ritualised
responses, the knights were bound to promise their patronesses:
I humbly thank my ladies and damsels for the honour it has pleased
them to do to me: and although they could easily have found others
who could do this better, and who merit this honour more than I,
nevertheless I obey the ladies freely and will do my loyal duty, asking
always that they forgive my mistakes.9
Then, when it came to receiving prizes, the King of Arms must say,
Behold here this noble lady, my lady of such a place N., accompanied
by the knight or squire of honour and by my lords the judges, who
have come to give you the tourney prize, because you have been
judged the knight or squire who has fought best today in the melee of
the tourney, and my lady prays that you will take it with good will.
As René outlined,
the lady should uncover the prize, and give it to him. Then he should
take it and kiss her, and the two damsels if he likes. And then the king
of arms, heralds and pursuivants should shout his battle cry around the
whole room. And this done, he should lead the lady to the dance, and
the judges, the knight of honour, the king of arms and the pursuivants
should lead the two damsels back to their places, without sounding the
trumpets any more.10
As the daughters of the leading magnate of the land, Anne and Isabel may
well have played a part in the distribution of prizes, perhaps receiving
kisses and even taking part in the dancing. A great hall was set aside for
this, with hanging wooden chandeliers, bowls to hold torches, tapestries,
minstrels’ gallery, a side board of pewter and silver as well a dressing-room
for the women to ‘refresh themselves or rest’.11 Along with feasts and court
pageantry, such encounters would have been the most exciting form of
entertainment for those in Anne’s circle; the pinnacle of what fifteenth-
century secular culture had to offer and not to be missed. When Anne’s
husband, Richard of Gloucester, became Constable of England, part of his
job was to update the rules for tournaments; perhaps Anne recalled the
Smithfield event and made her own contribution.
The primary motive for the 1467 visit of the Burgundians was to
discuss the proposed marital alliance between Charles the Bold and
Margaret of York. With relations between the two countries improving
along cultural, trading and political lines, Edward was encouraged to host a
lavish tournament at Smithfield for his guests. In fact, though, it was the
magnificent three-day duel on horse and foot, fought between Earl Rivers
and the Bastard of Burgundy, which turned out to be the memorable event,
eclipsing the true diplomatic purpose of the visit. Warwick would have
wished to keep an eye on the development of the negotiations, still holding
out his vain hopes that Edward would ultimately return to the idea of a
French alliance. This occasion, with all its protocol and pageantry, marked a
final glorious flourish in the tradition of late medieval tournaments; in fact
it was also the last recorded use of the Smithfield site. Later incarnations
under the Tudors would take different forms and represent a nostalgic return
to older traditions.12 It was certainly the Burgundians who led the way in
the elaborate ceremonial and pageantry of these formalised conflicts by the
1460s but what Anne may have witnessed at Smithfield was impressive
enough. In fact, the 1467 festivities became a prototype for the perfect
tournament, being copied a decade later for the celebrations of the marriage
of the four-year-old Richard, Duke of York, to Anne de Mowbray. By this
date, her marriage would have made Anne the boy’s aunt, so it is likely that
she was there to witness the splendid occasion. The party of 1467 was cut
short, however, by the death of Philip of Burgundy and accession of his son,
Charles the Bold, which sent his courtiers hurrying back home. If anything,
this cemented the proposal and Warwick had to accept that the match would
go ahead, regardless of his dislike.
In the summer of 1468, Earl Rivers was given the honour of leading
the party escorting Margaret to her wedding and the pomp and ceremony
was resumed. Warwick had ridden with her when she left Westminster but it
was Scales who accompanied her across the sea to Burgundy, marking a
reciprocal chivalric gesture but also, perhaps, a significant indicator of
Edward’s shift in trust. The bride arrived through decorated archways where
red and white wine flowed from the bows of archers and hippocras poured
from the breast of a pelican sitting in a golden tree. The wedding took place
on 3 July, in a temporary wooden hall, 140 feet by 70, with upper galleries,
turrets and glass windows with gilded shutters, its thirty-two rooms hung
with tapestries. Nine days of festivities encompassed banquets of swans,
peacocks and ‘unicorns’, dances, plays, wild animals, music and
‘mechanical surprises’. The pièce de résistance, though, was the tournament
of the Golden Tree, organised by the Bastard of Burgundy in Margaret’s
honour. A narrative thread linking all the events presented the ‘lady of the
Hidden Ile’, who required her knights to carry out three great tasks on her
behalf, encountering ogres, dwarves and mysterious figures lurking in the
woods; the victors hung their coats of arms on the golden tree itself. One
participant arrived chained inside a black castle from which only the ladies
could free him with a golden key. However extraordinary these fantasies
were, the ensuing fighting was real enough, with the host sustaining a
broken leg in action.
In the same year as the Burgundian wedding, the teenage Richard of
Gloucester was reaching maturity. The days of hunting, hawking and
practising in the tilt-yard were soon to be translated into royal service on a
national level and combat in the field. A little verse by John Hardyng neatly
sums up the transition from late medieval aristocratic boyhood to the
manhood of a leading magnate:
At fourteen they shall to field I sure
At hunt the deer; and catch a hardiness…
At sixteen year to war and wage
To joust and ride, and castles to assail.
When Richard turned sixteen that October, his elder brother, the king,
declared him officially of age and bestowed upon him the previously
Lancastrian titles of Halton and Clitheroe, in order to provide for his
upkeep. He was already a Knight of the Garter, having received the highest
order of chivalry at the tender age of fourteen. The youth was now also
given a commission of oyer and terminer, which were local courts, presided
over by an assize judge, designed to hear and rule on serious cases
including treason. In this capacity, Richard was now responsible for
condemning Lancastrian traitors. He was also a signatory on the document
whereby Edward offered his Burgundian brother-in-law, Charles the Bold,
the Order of the Garter and was still closely connected with Warwick, being
recorded as welcomed with him into the City of York. When Richard left
his mentor’s household at Middleham for Westminster by February 1469,
he may have been aware of Warwick’s increasing dissatisfaction with
Edward’s regime. Perhaps the earl concealed his feelings from the king’s
brother or perhaps his criticism lay behind the young man’s departure. By
the time Richard was appointed Constable of England that October, the
breach between the earl and the Yorkists was impossible to ignore. In fact,
Richard was soon dispatched to Wales as a temporary figurehead to restore
order, where one of his tasks was to recover territories from Warwick’s
rebellious supporters. When it came to his family, there was no doubting the
young duke’s motto of ‘loyaulte me lie’.
Warwick’s allegiances had been changing for a while. Even as the
Burgundian match had been secretly concluded, late in 1467, Edward
continued to allow him to pursue a French alliance in competition with the
Wydevilles’ ambitions. When the earl was disabused of this policy, it must
have been an unpleasant reminder of the deception the king had previously
practised over his own marriage. After the treaty was formalised in
February 1468, according to Croyland, Warwick ‘conceived great
indignation’ and loathed the queen’s family with ‘a most deadly hatred’,
feeling that, once again, they had been preferred over him. While liaising
with Louis XI, both men had made a number of attempts to sabotage the
marriage and, now, the discovery finally drove Warwick into the arms of the
French. To discredit the union, he attempted to harness the hostility and
fears of London tradesmen by planning an attack by his retainers on
Flemish merchants in the city, although the plot was discovered and the riot
prevented. Louis armed Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, who then laid
siege to Harlech Castle in the hopes of prompting the return of Henry VI.
As a result, though, Tudor was stripped of his title, which was bestowed
upon the Lancastrian William Herbert, then the guardian of Tudor’s
nephew, Henry.
In retaliation, Edward arrested several Lancastrian lords but wider
hostility to Edward’s reign was growing and Warwick’s dissatisfaction
chimed with the national mood. Londoners were angered by the large
enforced loans the king had not repaid and many felt he had failed to halt
the general lawlessness which he had criticised back in 1461. The same
year, rumours reached Edward of Warwick’s increasing sympathy towards
the Lancastrian cause: London chronicler Robert Fabyan recorded that
‘many murmurous tales ran in the city atween the Earl of Warwick and the
queen’s blood’. The king summoned his old friend to court to refute the
allegations but Warwick chose not to appear, replying instead in writing,
dismissing the accusations. He was not seeking to join the Lancastrians, he
wrote; his loyalties still lay with the House of York. In secret, though, he
was already considering siding with another powerful figure, also
dissatisfied by the rapid rise of the Wydevilles; in this, he had not deceived
Edward. Still declaring his Yorkist leanings, he transferred his sympathy
between brothers, turning now to the impulsive George, Duke of Clarence,
for support as the king continued to promote his in-laws. It seemed a further
deliberate insult to the earl when, in 1469, Anthony, Earl Rivers, was
promoted to the significant post of Lieutenant of Calais and Captain of the
King’s Armada, giving him the control of the seas which Warwick had once
enjoyed.
A further cause for Warwick’s dissatisfaction related to his elder
daughter. At eighteen, Isabel was already past the usual age of first
marriages among the nobility and as the first child of the leading magnate
of the country, she could expect a prestigious match. Yet there were
precious few young men of equal or higher rank to provide her with a
suitable partner. Warwick had already conceived of a match between her
and the nineteen-year-old George, Duke of Clarence, at least as early as
1467; although this may date back to the loss of Henry, Duke of
Buckingham, as a potential spouse. He had been matched at the age of nine,
against his wishes, with Katherine Wydeville, one of the queen’s sisters.
Clarence was next in line to the throne after Edward and the young man’s
increasing annoyance with the dominance of the Wydevilles made him an
ideal co-conspirator and son-in-law to the earl. ‘Seemly of person and well
visage’, Clarence was an attractive, if slightly visceral figure, who saw in
Warwick an outlet for many of the frustrations he was feeling at being
passed over. When the match was proposed, Edward had firmly rejected it,
perhaps due to the closeness of their family relations, but more likely to
prevent the union of two malcontents whose power would be increased
though the connection. Queen Elizabeth had yet to bear a son and the
prospect of Clarence fathering a male heir created a significant alternative
figurehead behind which rebels could gather and attempt to depose the
king. His refusal only inflamed Warwick further, who then sent Edward’s
own representative to negotiate with the Pope, resulting in the necessary
dispensation, which was dated to 14 March 1469. Aware that the king may
still try to prevent the ceremony from taking place, the earl secured a
further licence from Cardinal Bourchier, allowing the marriage to take place
in Calais.
For Isabel and Anne, politics aside, this was a momentous personal
occasion. The education of girls of all ranks of medieval society was geared
towards their eventual roles as wives and mothers. The attainment of a
suitable husband could be a matter of negotiation between families for years
and often resulted in the unions of young girls with older or unappealing
men. To be united with a young, influential and attractive man was a
significant triumph, even for a girl of such high rank as Isabel Neville. On a
political level, it was the best match she could make, becoming the wife of
the heir to the throne. Illness, accident or death on the battlefield could
easily remove Edward at any time, allowing the young couple, or any son
Isabel bore, to inherit. There is no doubt that Isabel was aware that this was
a factor in the match: it would have been perfectly natural for the eighteen-
year-old to have imagined herself as queen, picturing her Coronation and
the court she would create at Westminster.
The couple were already known to each other and close in age; there
may well have been a degree of attraction, if not affection, on her side. This
would have been an added bonus in an era when companionate unions were
not the norm for those of the Neville girls’ class. In the sequestered world
amid which the daughters of the aristocracy were raised, a good marriage
offered the life they had anticipated for years, with the opportunity to run
their own household, the fulfilment of physical relations, the birth of
children and increased social respect. Isabel’s match satisfied all the criteria
she could have hoped for, even if it was controversial and needed to be
conducted out of the reach of her future brother-in-law. There were
precedents for royal forgiveness in such cases though, with the queen’s own
parents marrying against the wishes of Henry VI and later being welcomed
back into court circles. While she probably knew that they were defying
Edward, it is unclear to what extent Isabel was aware of the insubordination
underpinning her father’s and husband’s co-operation, which would result
in treason. As she, her mother and sister began the preparations for the
match, sewing and preparing her linen and dresses, the occasion was more
the significant step in a young woman’s life cycle than an act of political
defiance. That spring they sailed for Calais from Sandwich, excited at the
prospect of the celebrations and the new life it offered.
The marriage took place on Tuesday 12 July 1469. It may have been
celebrated at the Calais church of Our Lady, the Église Notre-Dame, which
still stands in the town today. A rare survivor, with its twelfth-century
foundations, the majority of the remaining building was developed during
the fourteenth century. Alternatively, they may have become man and wife
in the chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, within the walls of Calais Castle
itself. Wherever they spoke their vows, the union was marked by
conspicuous festivities and pageantry. Warwick wanted to contrast the
occasion with the clandestine nature of the king’s own nuptials, staging the
advent of an alternative Yorkist royal family to replace Edward, whose
legitimacy he had questioned. Thus, he planned several days of splendour
suitable for a royal wedding, to which he invited those leading dignitaries
who dared attend, including five knights of the garter. The ceremony was
conducted by George Neville, Archbishop of York and Cecily, Clarence’s
mother, may have been present. She was recorded as being with them in
Canterbury, then in Sandwich, before the party departed, although this may
represent an attempt to dissuade them from going ahead with the union
against the king’s wishes, rather than her personal endorsement.
Anne played a leading role in both the preparations and ceremony of
the day. The girls would have been dressed in their finest; as new members
of the royal family of York, they needed their attire to proclaim their
enhanced statuses. While wedding dresses were not yet the standard white,
the occasion provided them with the opportunity to deck themselves in
cloth of gold, jewels and perhaps even the white rose emblem that
Clarence’s wife would be entitled to wear. Warwick was known for his
generosity in his London town house; no doubt the feasting would have
rivalled that the girls had experienced at their uncle’s enthronement in 1465.
However, Isabel may have been disappointed by what followed. There was
to be no extended honeymoon; Chronicler Waurin suggests there were only
two days of festivities and few guests. Five days later, Warwick and
Clarence returned to England, leaving the new bride behind. Perhaps Isabel
regretted that the first few days of her married life were cut short or that her
new husband hurried away so soon. Perhaps she realised the match had
been designed primarily to strengthen the ties between her family and his
on the eve of rebellion. On the other hand, though, she may have
understood the political expediency of the moment and, as did many wives
of the medieval nobility, recognised her dynastic role within the context of
the conflicts of the day. After all, like her sister, she was Warwick’s
daughter. No surviving evidence suggests that she was in any way a victim
or a pawn. Now she was a wife, the Duchess of Clarence, married to the
heir to the throne. Her situation also elevated her sister’s. With her elder
sister married, Anne’s own future came into sharper focus: who would she
marry and what path would she take?

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6

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Queens in Waiting
1469–1470
And look to thy daughters that none of them be lorn
from the very time that they are of thee born
busy thyself and gather fast for their marriage
and give them to spousing as soon as they be of age1
The next few months were to prove turbulent ones for Anne and Isabel.
Their father’s determination to seize control of the English throne would
redefine his daughters’ status, as much by his relentless audacity as by his
apparent moments of indecision. Warwick was a shrewd opportunist, but
through the rapid changes of the coming months, he may not have fully
realised the consequences of restoring Henry VI to the throne.
‘Kingmaking’ was a feat he had already accomplished back in 1461, and
now, for personal reasons, he set about reversing that process. Of course,
his reasons for originally removing Henry had not changed. Then, he had
been able to exercise considerable influence over the young Earl of March.
Now, the rise of the Wydevilles placed him at a remove from the crown and
he saw that, by contrast, the weak Lancastrian would be easier to
manipulate. The rebels knew they were taking a huge gamble in attempting
to topple a strong king, as Edward IV had none of the unstable, pacifist
tendencies of his Lancastrian predecessor. By 1469, though, the appeal of
the handsome, 6-foot-4 son of York had been clouded by lawlessness,
nepotism and debt. When an independent pocket of discontent broke out in
the North, his enemies seized the opportunity to stand against their king.
Warwick sensed the national mood had turned sufficiently to prove a
serious threat to Edward’s reign. In Richmondshire, his supporters rose
simultaneously with rebels rallying under the leadership of a mysterious
Robin of Redesdale or Robin Mend-all. Although his identity is still
disputed, the folkloric Robin was probably one Sir John Conyers, or his
brother William, to whom Warwick was related by marriage and who was
acting at his prompting. Edward travelled north to disband their armies,
leaving the capital vulnerable, just as the Kingmaker had hoped. This left
the way clear for Warwick and his troops to land on the Kent coast, a region
notoriously prone to dissent, where the earl had already incited sailors using
the Sandwich–Calais route. Heading west, they received a warm welcome
at Canterbury and gathered more troops for the entry to London. The capital
had initially enjoyed a good relationship with Edward, welcoming him in
relief in 1461, and although the king’s pro-Burgundian stance had brought
trading benefits, the city merchants had been angered by his habit of
extracting money from them by enforced loans. Warwick’s and Clarence’s
manifesto placed the Wydevilles at the heart of national dissatisfaction and
called for their removal, a preventative measure to protect them from the
charge of treason, although their secret intention was to replace Edward
with Clarence. Aware of their approach, the king awaited them at
Nottingham, while William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and Humphrey
Stafford, Earl of Devon, raised their own armies and headed to join
Edward’s forces, hoping that a combined royalist army would defeat the
traitors.
However, the rebels missed the king, clashing instead with the royal
reinforcements which were coming up from the South. In a brief skirmish,
Warwick’s cousin, Henry Neville, was killed and the armies regrouped to
meet again to force a decisive victory the following day. Having taken the
initial advantage, Pembroke and Devon then disagreed and separated,
fatally dividing their troops and leaving Pembroke without the essential
archers that often played such a significant part in defending foot soldiers
during battle. The following day, 26 July 1469, the rebels won a decisive
victory at the shambolic Battle of Edgecote, before the king could arrive at
the scene. Pembroke’s decision to take the initiative and advance without
cover proved disastrous and, although he put up a brave defence, Devon’s
forces did not arrive until after midday. Seeing a part of Warwick’s troops
arrive, the royal army panicked and many fled the scene. Around 4,000
Yorkists were killed and Warwick was now in an unprecedented position of
power. Shortly afterwards, Edward himself was taken prisoner, along with
his queen’s unpopular father and brother, Richard Wydeville, and his son,
John.
Finally Warwick had his enemies in his hands. Now, however, he had
to decide what to do with them. He had no compunction in sentencing the
Wydevilles to death, executing them in Coventry and placing their heads on
spikes on the city walls. Edward, however, was another matter and he
temporarily imprisoned his former friend in Warwick Castle while deciding
what to do. Commines asserted that Warwick thought Edward ‘a little
simple’ and had behaved ‘like a father’ towards him, surrounding him now
with new servants ‘to make him forget’ the old ones. Rumours flew around
Europe predicting Edward’s fate, many of which were wildly exaggerated.
Sforza di Bettini of Florence, the Milanese Ambassador in France, wrote to
the Duke of Milan that, following a huge battle, Edward himself was dead
and ‘everything remains in the hands of the said Earl of Warwick, the
conqueror’. He had apparently been told this news ‘very joyfully’ by King
Louis XI himself, which he thought would give the duke ‘exceptional
pleasure’, as the English ‘tart would be divided’ between the ‘masters of the
country’, Warwick and Clarence.2 Louis and Bettini were wrong about the
king’s fate but right about the position of power Warwick had assumed. The
current state of affairs was neatly summarised in a comment made by
Governor of Abbeville to Louis that the English ‘have two rulers, M de
Warwick and another, whose name I have forgotten’.
The outcome of Edgecote proved significant for another of the
children born in the 1450s. The Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert, known
as ‘Black William’, had been a long-term ally of Warwick and Richard,
Duke of York, but now found himself on the opposing side. He had been the
guardian of the young Henry Tudor for the past eight years, raising him in
his Marches home at Raglan Castle and intending to marry him to his
daughter Maude. Herbert’s wife, Anne Devereux, had been particularly kind
to the young boy, to the extent that Henry would send for her to come to
London when he took the throne in 1485. After Henry’s mother, Margaret
Beaufort, married Henry Stafford in 1462, Anne was the closest thing he
had had to a constant maternal presence. Pembroke was executed after
Edgecote and the family unit was broken up. Anne then took the twelve-
year-old Henry, and her own children, to her family home, the Devereux
manor in Bodenham, Herefordshire. Thus, the young Henry Tudor spent the
summer of 1469 in the countryside of the Welsh borders, watching to see
how the national picture unfolded. Henry was certainly old enough to
understand his situation but perhaps still young enough to make the most of
his bucolic surroundings. The manor was recorded in the Domesday Book
of 1086 as being in possession of a large number of ploughs and, perhaps,
on its bend of the River Lugg, a particularly large and fertile location. The
river was navigable and particularly good for fishing, joining the Wye at
Hereford. Perhaps he attended the Assumption Day fair, held at the manor
every 15 August after a grant was issued to the Devereux family by Richard
II in 1378. Yet it was a tense time. Henry could only wait and see what
would follow: as the half-nephew of his namesake, Henry VI, his future was
dependent on the next move of the Kingmaker.
The battle also proved significant for Anne Neville. Her father’s
success may have prompted Warwick to summon his countess and
daughters to return to England. Only two weeks had elapsed since Isabel’s
wedding but the political scenery in England looked set to favour a change
in the regime, either with the restoration of Henry VI or the accession of
Clarence: as his new wife, Isabel had taken a step closer to the throne.
Assuming the match had been consummated in France, she already
conceived the child she would deliver the following April; if not, she and
Clarence must have been reunited pretty promptly, perhaps as her father and
husband debated their futures and that of their royal prisoner. Edward was
in their power. For a moment, they could shape the future of English
history. Yet Warwick failed to push his advantage. Rarely one to hesitate, a
number of issues now stayed his hand. He may have reconsidered his
former friendship with Edward, or the consequences of treason, or
Clarence’s mutability under the influences of his mother and younger
brother, Richard. He may have been reluctant take the decisive step of
ordering the imprisoned king’s death. Something caused the earl to pause
and release his prisoner, or at least to turn a blind eye when he escaped on a
hunting trip that October. The momentum was lost and Warwick had failed
to capitalise on his position. Clarence was forgiven by his brother after a
show of contrition orchestrated by the Yorkist women. Now the earl was
left embarrassed, out in the cold, as Edward headed back into his capital for
a temporary family reconciliation.
Apparently ‘pardoned’, Warwick retreated from court to one of his
northern properties, either Middleham or Warwick Castle itself, with the
countess and Anne. The pregnant eighteen-year-old Isabel and Clarence set
up home together, with ordinances dating from December that year,
outlining provisions for their household at the monastery in Waltham,
Essex. It is unclear whether they inhabited part of a religious house or
another property within the complex, which stood on the edge of Epping
Forest. They are likely to have divided their time between several rural
properties and their town house in central London. This may have been the
old Warwick property, the Erber, just to the north-east of St Paul’s and
below Newgate, which went with the title Clarence had inherited, or else
Coldharbour House, which they were known to use later. Isabel and
Clarence may have been present when Edward celebrated Christmas with
his family at Westminster but Warwick stayed away.
The reconciliation came slowly. In January, Edward’s eldest daughter,
the three-year-old Princess Elizabeth of York, was engaged to George
Neville, the young son of the Earl of Northumberland, Warwick’s brother,
as a reward for his continuing support for the Yorkists. Temporary peace
settled over the country while each side waited to see what the other would
do next; Warwick was fuming at his son-in-law’s desertion and the failure
of their plans, while Edward watched his brother cautiously, wanting to
believe in his declarations of loyalty. As the daughter of a traitor, even a
forgiven one, Anne’s position was again uncertain, but soon a powerful new
match would bring her closer to the throne than her sister had come.
Warwick may have failed to capitalise on his alliance with the Lancastrian
rebels but, in the year to come, he set his sights higher, on another royal
family.
With Henry VI in captivity since July 1465, Queen Margaret and her
son were still in exile in France. She had originally fled to the court of her
father René, living ‘in great poverty’ as her loyal Chief Justice, Sir John
Fortescue, described, ‘but yet the queen sustaineth us in meat and drink, so
as we beeth not in extreme necessity’. Through the 1450s, Margaret had
seen the Duke of York and Warwick as her bitter enemies. They, in turn, had
fought against her warlike influence on the docile Henry VI and the undue
power wielded by her favourites, Suffolk and Somerset. Gradually, though,
the earl was coming to the realisation that Clarence was too unreliable a
figure to prove a trustworthy replacement for Edward and that a union with
his former enemies and the restoration of the Lancastrian line may represent
his best chance. After all, Margaret had a son and the earl still had another
daughter. Her poverty and their combined need might make them necessary
bedfellows. Through the disturbances of 1470, it is likely that he considered
France and Margaret as his safety-net in the eventuality of defeat, which
was to prove fortuitous for him and decisive for his daughter Anne.
Convincing Margaret of the value of this alliance would not be easy,
though.
In the New Year, Warwick used his previous method of inciting
rebellion in the North in order to draw the king out of London. Once again,
Edward reacted promptly to the threat and Warwick was able to reconnect
with his son-in-law. Although Clarence had been forgiven, the political
landscape had changed little in the last twelve months and the unpopular
Wydevilles were as dominant as ever. Chafing under his dislike of them,
Clarence listened to the earl’s persuasion and defected to his side. Hearing
rumours of their intentions, Edward summoned them both to refute the
allegations but neither attended. Finally convinced of their duplicity,
Edward moved swiftly against them, summoning troops to deal with the
combined threat once and for all. The sides clashed at the Battle of
Empingham, on 12 March 1470, in an encounter which also came to be
known as Losecoat Field. As the rebel armies fled, they shed their coats of
Warwick and Clarence’s liveries, leaving no doubt about who lay behind the
uprising. This time the victorious Edward denied their request for a pardon
and their open treachery left little option but flight.
The obvious haven was Calais. As they had on his appointment as
Constable, Anne and the countess would accompany the earl. Warwick
probably went via Middleham to collect them on his way south, while
Isabel was with Clarence in Exeter. Heavily pregnant, she must have
already been making plans for her imminent lying-in, even though the
future looked uncertain. Now a frantic dash followed to pack and escape,
with Edward’s troops in hot pursuit. Warwick attempted to reach his newest
ship, the Trinity, which was expected to arrive shortly at Southampton and
could carry them across the Channel. The ship never managed to dock,
though, being repelled by Earl Rivers. An alternative ship and port were
needed. The family then travelled down to Dartmouth, from whence they
embarked on 7 April in a ship offered to them by a supporter. As they pulled
away from land and watched the coast recede, Warwick and his family must
have breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps Isabel, approaching her due date,
went below deck to rest from the journey. Anne may have gone with her for
company or else stood on deck, watching England disappear and wondering
when, or if, she would ever return. The women would have anticipated
Isabel giving birth to her child in her old childhood home at Calais, which
they sighted on 16 April. However, Edward’s orders had travelled faster
than the earl. Having crossed the Channel safely, in sight of the harbour and
castle, Warwick’s ship was unexpectedly denied entry to Calais by his
deputy, Lord Wenlock, acting under express royal orders which had arrived
only shortly before the rebels.
It was at this point that Isabel went into labour. Nine months after her
marriage, she may well have reached the natural point of delivery, or else
her labour was brought on prematurely through stress and the rigours of the
journey. As the ship plunged and rolled, her screams reached the sailors
awaiting their orders. Childbirth during the late fifteenth century could be
perilous at the best of times on dry land, with the benefit of herbal remedies
and the wisdom of local midwives. The countess was experienced in the
delivery room, according to John Rous, but there was little else to offer the
expectant mother in terms of relief or support. Warwick pleaded for
permission to land and, although sympathetic enough to send the party two
flagons of wine and suggest they land further round the coast, Wenlock
dared not openly disobey the king. Not even the family’s own domestic
servants, still resident at the castle, could help them. Sources disagree about
the gender of the child Isabel bore on board ship but there is no doubt about
its fate: the mother survived but the baby was lost. It was either taken
ashore at Calais or buried at sea. For the family this was a personal tragedy
borne out of political conflict. Isabel may well have delivered a stillborn or
weak child had she followed the usual protocol for delivery in the comfort
of her own home, yet the circumstances of the death of her first child must
have been a particularly bitter blow for herself, her mother and Anne. No
doubt they recognised the necessity for their exile but it must have flown in
the face of long-established oral traditions of female wisdom regarding
childbirth, which provided a month of retirement and inactivity for the
expectant mother. Nothing suggests that they resented Warwick or
Clarence; as products of their class and time, a belief in the divine order and
the existence of fate would have encouraged a pragmatic response. The
exhausted and bereaved party finally landed safely in Normandy on 1 May.
Edward IV reacted swiftly. The Milan archives contain information
from an ‘English Knight, on his way to Jerusalem’ that the king had
‘publicly outlawed’ Warwick and Clarence. According to this traveller,
Edward sent his retainers to seize the property and lands of the traitors but
‘the people rose and would not receive them’; an interesting indicator of the
loyalty felt towards the Neville family, if it is true. It was also rumoured
that one of Henry’s half-brothers, which at this date would have been Jasper
Tudor, was preparing lodgings in Champagne for the use of Edward, Prince
of Wales.3 Tudor was also uncle to Margaret Beaufort’s son, Henry, now
aged thirteen, who was now the strongest Lancastrian claimant left in
England. His mother had attempted to regain custody of him, through letters
and visits, but Edward had blocked her application. After Warwick’s
execution of his guardian, Henry Tudor had little cause to love either side in
the conflict now and he probably remained in Herefordshire for the time
being.
Now in exile, Warwick sought assistance from his old ally. Louis XI of
France was known as the ‘universal spider’ for his many dealings, including
any way of undermining any regime which favoured his enemies in
Burgundy. Commines relates how he had ordered the Bastard of Bourbon,
Admiral of France, to protect the fugitive’s fleet against attacks from the
Low Countries, whose navy was much feared. He received Warwick and
Clarence in ‘honourable and distinguished manner’ at Dengen, near Torsi,
riding three or four leagues to meet them. He was accompanied by all his
principal lords, who approached the fugitives honourably on foot and
embraced them ‘in the most friendly way’, according to Bettini. Louis then
took them to be greeted by his queen, Charlotte of Savoy, before proceeding
to his chambers in the castle, where they remained for two hours ‘most
privately and great familiarity’, engaged in ‘long discussions’. Louis
entertained his guests with feasts, ‘tournaments and dancing and everything
else that distinguishes’. A few weeks later, Bettini wrote that Louis was still
‘closeted and in secret councils … about these affairs of Warwick’.
According to the ambassador, Louis was trying ‘by every means in his
power, to get him to return to England’, even offering ships and troops for
the fight against Edward. A new Lancastrian leader was now suggested,
young though he was. One rumour claimed the earl would cross the
Channel with the sixteen-year-old ‘Prince of Wales, son of King Henry, and
will take the part of that king to see if, in that way, he will enjoy better
success than he did in the other’.4 It was Louis who officially proposed an
alliance between the old enemies. While Warwick awaited Margaret at
Vandoma, Clarence and the ladies went to Normandy: Anne was mentioned
specifically among them as the ‘other daughter, the future princess’.5 By 8
July, they were at Valognes, near Barfleur, a fortified stronghold dating back
to Roman times, which had been occupied during the second half of the
Hundred Years’ War by the English.
As defeated traitors, Warwick and his family were now reduced to the
same penurial exile as the ex-queen Margaret and her son Edward of
Westminster. Reputedly a bloodthirsty young man who spoke constantly of
beheadings,6 the Prince of Wales had been at his mother’s side for the
duration of the civil war. Now he was being named as a suitable husband
for Anne. If the idea had originated with Warwick, he needed Louis to be
his ambassador with his former enemy, so the French king now formally
made the suggestion. It is unlikely Anne knew about the proposal at this
stage, being removed from the scene at Barfleur, but her compliance was
assumed. This does not mean she was forced into a match against her will,
or that she was the manipulated pawn of legend. As a scion of the greatest
noble family, she had been raised for this and her destiny went hand in hand
with her father’s.
Languishing at the bottom of the wheel of fortune, neither side had
much to lose now, except their pride. To join forces might represent a
significant threat to the English throne, no matter how great a U-turn this
represented in their previous allegiances. The ex-queen did not embrace the
connection easily at first but Warwick was a clever diplomat who
recognised that his future depended upon whatever he could make of the
current situation. It has been suggested that such a match had previously
been mooted, as early as 1468, through Margaret’s exiled chancellor, Sir
John Fortescue. If this is true, it predates the earl’s breach with Edward IV
and was unlikely to have come to fruition. It also implies Margaret’s
approval, possibly her instigation. By 1470, though, matters had changed.
Louis arranged the reconciliation and offered to fund an invasion, inviting
both parties to visit him separately, where Warwick made the proposal to
Margaret, in exchange for her pardon. According to The Maner and
Guyding of the Earl of Warwick, the ex-queen was furious and ‘right
difficult’ at the prospect of an alliance with her bitter enemies, until Louis
persuaded her it was the best chance she had of restoring her husband’s
throne and securing a future for her son. Margaret also claimed she was
anticipating a match between the prince and Edward IV’s four-year-old
daughter, Elizabeth of York. It was to be expected that she would not
capitulate at once and, after famously keeping Warwick on bended knee for
a full quarter of an hour, she allowed him to present a mutually beneficial
arrangement, once he had retracted all his previous ‘slanders’. As Vergil
wrote, the discussions were lengthy: ‘Many moe condytions wer entreatyd
upon emongst them, which both the reason and weyght of the cause
requyryd.’ So much history had passed between the two, and each held the
other personally responsible for various losses they had suffered, that they
would never be easy bedfellows. Their children, though, could be.
Initially, Margaret could see ‘neither honour nor profit in it’ but was
persuaded into the union on the advice of her father René, King of Naples.7
It was, in fact, an extremely profitable match for Anne, but for Edward, as
potential Prince of Wales with the possibility of a future foreign alliance
with a princess of royal blood, it was a mark of his mother’s fall from grace
and desire to recapture her position. The speech Shakespeare gives
Margaret in Henry VI, Part 3, albeit at an earlier stage of her history,
summarizes her necessity of making the most of her misfortune.
I was, I must confess,
Great Albion’s queen in former golden days:
But now mischance hath trod my title down,
And with dishonour laid me on the ground;
Where I must take like seat unto my fortune,
And to my humble seat conform myself.
Fortune and her ‘humble seat’ were responsible for the alliance the ex-
queen now made with Warwick. Chronicler John Warkworth, Master of
Peterhouse College, Cambridge, claims that an omen was responsible for
what happened next, which he describes in almost Biblical terms:
Whenne the seide Duke of Clarence and the Erle of Warwyke were in
Fraunce here apperede a blasynge sterre in the weste, and the flame
therof lyke a spere hede, the whiche dyverse of the Kynges howse saw
it, whereof thei were fulle sore adrede. And thanne in Fraunce whenne
the seide lordes where, thei toke there counselle qwhat was beste for to
do; and thei coude fynde no remedy but to sende to Quene Margaret,
and to make a maryage betwex Prynce Edwarde, Kynge Herry sonne,
and an other of the seid Erle of Warwykys doughters.
The inclusion of this blazing star appears to lend a divine purpose to the
match, to which the superstitious and ambitious Warwick and Clarence
could find ‘no remedy’, yet whether they even saw this phenomenon, let
alone allowed it to influence their decision-making, is unknown. Perhaps it
was a physical manifestation of that ‘fortune’ alluded to by Shakespeare, or
perhaps simply poetic licence.
Presumably this ‘other’ daughter, the fourteen-year-old Anne, now
knew about their discussions, although she was excluded from them.
Having witnessed her sister’s recent experiences, she understood the role to
which she was born and that any personal feelings must be set aside.
Additionally, any affection that may have existed between her and Richard,
Duke of Gloucester, was now complicated by his loyalty to his brother,
making him theoretically her enemy. Two weeks later, on 25 July 1470,
Edward of Westminster and Anne Neville were formally betrothed in the
cathedral at Angers, making their oaths upon a ‘piece of the true cross’. The
subsequent marriage and consummation were to be conditional upon the
earl proving himself in battle against Edward, so a few days after the match,
he set sail again for England with 2,000 troops financed by Louis XI.
On 31 July, Margaret, Edward and fiancée left for Amboise, the
favourite residence of the French royal family, situated on a spur
overlooking the River Loire. Among its magnificent surroundings, Anne
was now in the company of those strangers she had long been accustomed
to consider her foes; her own mother was also present, and possibly Isabel,
whose whereabouts at this time are unclear. She knew little of her betrothed
but could not have escaped hearing much of the queen and her warlike
nature. Now this formidable woman was her guardian, soon to be her
mother-in-law, as well as her companion over the coming months. At the
age of forty, the ex-queen had been a driving force through the recent
decades of conflict and was considered to be aggressive and volatile. Her
deep-seated hatred of the Duke of York had transferred to his offspring and,
in her company, Anne would find no sympathy for her childhood friend,
Richard. There is nothing to suggest, though, that Margaret felt any hostility
towards her son’s young wife. It is quite likely that the necessity of civil
conflict had bred a sense of expediency in the resourceful queen, who now
welcomed the young girl as the future mother of her grandchildren, whom
she hoped would in turn inherit the English throne. Margaret had herself
been a bride at only fifteen and understood much of what Anne must have
been feeling, as well as being aware of the benefits the union brought to the
Lancastrian cause. From this point forward, Anne’s welfare would be her
mother-in-law’s concern. Rumours that Margaret wished Anne ill, or even
that she attempted to have her poisoned, are unsubstantiated and would
have achieved nothing. She had nothing to gain by alienating the young
woman and only delayed the actual marriage ceremony until the necessary
paperwork had arrived and Warwick had proved his loyalty in England by
restoring Henry VI.
Little is known about Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales. Born
amid his father’s main bout of instability, he had not been recognised by
Henry VI until he was almost a year old. Three years Anne’s elder, much of
his life had been spent on the road, in flight from the scenes of battle, a
witness to the barbarities and harsh justice of medieval warfare. As a small
child, he had been invested as Prince of Wales, then disinherited in favour
of the Duke of York, suffering the change in his fortunes before he was old
enough to understand them. In October 1458, around the time of his fifth
birthday, Italian Rafaello de Negra described the prince in a letter to the
Duchess of Milan, as ‘a most handsome boy’ who, in common with the rest
of the court, ‘always go on their knees’ when addressing the queen.8 After
the accession of Edward IV forced them into exile, Margaret had used him
as a figurehead to rally support, handing out little silver badges of his
personal device, the swan, which she had taken from his grandfather
Edward III, to their supporters and using his presence to soften the hearts of
outlaws and thieves.9 The most commonly quoted anecdote of Edward’s
early life is that of a child issuing the death sentence on his enemies
following the Second Battle of St Albans in 1461. It represents little more
than a seven-year-old trying to please his mother and punish those who had
failed to protect his father and cannot be taken as symptomatic. He was a
more complex individual than this suggests but he had learned the realities
of his situation early. Experiences of conflict and fluctuating fortunes had
shaped him to the degree that the Milanese Ambassador named him the
‘God of battle’ but the chances are that, as a fifteenth-century prince, he was
also pious, courageous and chivalrous. The rumours of his illegitimacy in
the 1450s, such as those recorded in letters by Coppini, which had ascribed
his paternity to the unpopular Duke of Somerset, remain only rumours.
What Anne made of her betrothed on a personal level is not recorded.
She and Isabel were young women of their time and, while marriage itself
raised their status significantly, they were probably more pragmatic about it
than some historians and romantic novelists have given them credit for. The
introduction to the Rous Roll claims it was Anne’s ‘unhappy destiny to be
made the pivot on which turned more than one state intrigue’, yet there is
no evidence that Anne was unhappy, or anything but complicit in these
‘intrigues’. Rather than being the exploited pawns of an ambitious, ruthless
father, the girls were more likely to have been willing participants in his
schemes. The earl’s motives overlapped their own, imbued as they were
with the sense of family and loyalty, which Richard of Gloucester was to
demonstrate in his personal motto, ‘loyaulte me lie’ or loyalty binds me.
Teenage noblewomen did repudiate the matches their parents attempted to
arrange for them and find their own husbands, the most famous
contemporary example being Margaret Paston in 1469. The future Henry
VIII also rejected his father’s arrangement for him to wed Catherine of
Aragon in 1505, although he did actually marry her four years later. The
significant age was fourteen. At that point, a young person was considered
to be capable of knowing their own mind and rejecting an undesired spouse.
Anne had reached that age and chose to marry Edward. Whether the young
pair maintained a formal distance or attempted to forge a more
companionate connection during these years of waiting is unknown. Anne
was not blessed with hindsight but she did have an imagination: now a
future unfolded before her in which she and Edward were partners for life,
as King and Queen of England. It must have been an attractive prospect.
Marriages were often conducted among the nobility when the spouses
were in their teens and pregnancy could follow soon after consummation, as
in Isabel’s case. Both Edward and Anne were past the age of consent and
the act of betrothal itself, rather than the marriage vows, frequently marked
a transition to physical intimacy, even full sexual relations. It was
customary for one party to reside in the household of another from an early
age and now, at sixteen and fourteen, the young couple were almost man
and wife. However, Margaret had made it clear that the finality of their
match was dependent upon events in England; closely watching Warwick’s
next move, it is unlikely she would have allowed her son to sleep with Anne
yet and it is doubtful that the teenagers would have had the will or
opportunity to initiate relations behind her back. It seems unlikely,
therefore, that this final step was taken during 1470. The period of waiting
allowed Anne to spend time with the young man who was to become her
husband and possibly her king. Edward certainly had qualities which
suggested he could be a successful ruler: some accounts paint him as driven
and ruthless: of course, he was still only in his teens, but his namesake,
Edward IV, had led victorious armies into battle at a similar age. The pair,
along with their mothers, passed the summer months in the beautiful castle
at Amboise, with its gardens overlooking the Loire, waiting to hear what the
future might bring. The news from England seemed promising.
In fact, the kingdom had fallen all too easily. Warwick’s brother-in-
law, Lord Fitzhugh, had reignited rebellion in Yorkshire, drawing Edward
north and allowing the rebels to march unimpeded into London. On
arriving, according to Vergil, Warwick had issued a proclamation calling all
men to arm themselves against Edward IV who had, ‘contrary to right and
law usurpyd the kingdom’, upon which thousands of armed men flocked to
his side and marched to the capital, where, the Milanese Ambassador
reported, he was actually received ‘in most friendly fashion’. Warwick
proceeded to the Tower and released the bemused Henry VI, whom he then
paraded through the streets in a ‘shabby blue gown’, ‘crowned and
proclaimed through all the town of London with the greatest festivities and
pomp as the true king and lord of England’. Yet he was ruler in name only
and Warwick, the ‘Kingmaker’, had not finished yet. Word soon reached
Edward of plans for his own arrest, leaving him in little doubt that his old
ally would show him no mercy. With the Lancastrian regime restored and
the capital occupied, he decided the only option was flight and headed for
the East Coast, along with Richard of Gloucester, only reaching the safety
of the Netherlands after terrible weather conditions and offering the coat off
his back in payment to the captain of the merchant ship that agreed to carry
him. Commines relates that, along with 700–800 followers, the brothers
escaped ‘without a penny between them’ in three small boats. As Bettini
reported in October, Warwick had ‘practically the whole island in his
power’ and Edward IV was a fugitive in exile.10
It is at this point that the Burgundian chronicler, Commines, was
himself sent on a diplomatic mission to France and visited Calais, giving a
portrait of the town Anne knew so well at the point of a change in
allegiance. In the spring of 1470, it was in turmoil due to the
unsubstantiated and conflicting reports of what had just happened across the
Channel: Lord Wenlock had been rewarded handsomely by Edward for
repelling his former master but his sympathies had always lain with
Warwick, later switching sides with him to the Lancastrian cause. Wearing
the Duke of Burgundy’s signet ring for protection, Commines received
Wenlock’s grant of safe conduct, proceeding without event to the castle,
which had been Anne’s home. Everyone in the town was wearing
Warwick’s livery of red jackets embroidered with ragged staffs and on the
door of the ambassador’s lodgings were pinned ‘more than a hundred’ white
crosses and rhymes asserting the unity between King Louis XI and
Warwick. Invited to dinner with Lord Wenlock, Commines found him
wearing the earl’s emblem as a badge on his hat. His host confided that
when the messenger had brought news of their master’s latest success, the
entire place had switched liveries, from York back to Warwick, ‘so hasty
and sudden was the change’. Commines was then shocked to find how
those previously supportive of Edward ‘were those who threatened him
most violently’. This episode reveals just how ‘unstable’ the situation was
and how swiftly circumstances and loyalties could change. The ‘treachery’
of which many key figures had been accused during the war, including
Margaret, Clarence, Warwick, Stafford, Wenlock, Montagu and
Northumberland, was, in fact, little more than necessity. Allegiances
determined the survival of an individual and their family; backing the right
side was important. At that moment, the Kingmaker was the man to back.
For Margaret, Prince Edward and Anne, it seemed that Warwick had
fulfilled all his promises and they could return to England and claim their
rightful positions. Yet they did not leave at once. Bettini recorded that ‘the
Queen of England and the Countess of Warwick, with their children, are
still here, as although his Majesty took leave of them some days ago for
them to return to England, yet he has changed his mind, and it is thought
that he will detain them until a reply has come from his ambassadors who
have gone to England, who left about twelve days ago. It is thought that
they will leave immediately the reply arrives.’11 It was November when
Margaret and her party arrived in Paris with a guard of honour, where she
was received as a queen, with tapestries hung out, flags and banners and
lodged in splendour at the palace.12 Bettini recorded their departure: ‘the
queen of England and the Countess of Warwick, with the prince and
princess their children, have left and returned to England, to the
unspeakable satisfaction and content of his said Majesty [Louis]’.13 Yet the
ambassador’s comments were premature as, the following March, he wrote
that Margaret ‘has delayed crossing up to the present, but now she is going
over in God’s name, and it is reckoned that at this moment she has either
crossed, or is on the sea in the act of doing so. She would have gone earlier
still if the escort to take her had come sooner, for she took leave of the king
at Amboise more than three months ago.’ The reasons for the delay are
unclear. Warwick’s success had already peaked by the time the royals-in-
waiting left France and, as a result, they missed their chance. In their
absence, Clarence was made heir to the Lancastrian line in the event of
Prince Edward dying childless and Henry VI was very clearly only a
puppet, allowed to make few decisions. To all intents and purposes, the
country was being ruled by Warwick, which was not the outcome either side
had desired. The presence of Margaret and her son would have added a
legitimacy and authority to the new regime in which people could believe.
More Lancastrians would then have rallied to their cause, instead of being
deterred by the power of Warwick, against whom many had recently fought.
It was to prove a fatal delay.
One reason that Margaret may have remained in France was her
uncertainty over her son’s marriage. Edward and Anne shared a common
ancestor in John of Gaunt, which required a formal dispensation before the
union was allowed to proceed. Louis made it his business to facilitate the
paperwork, dispatching his own man to Lyons in July and even urging the
couple to go ahead and wed without permission. He considered Anne to be
the wife of the prince, receiving her as such at his court from August
onwards, after the Pope had issued the first of three dispensations.
However, the final one did not arrive until 28 November, after which
preparations began in earnest. The ceremony took place at Amboise on 13
December, attended by Margaret and the Countess of Warwick, a small-
scale affair in comparison to Isabel’s in 1469. By this time, Anne’s husband
was no longer a stranger. If the match had not been consummated until then,
it would have been that night or soon after, just as her sister’s had been.
Only this act would make the marriage legitimate and without it, Anne
could be vulnerable to being discarded, should her father’s cause not go her
way. Conversely, it also removed her own escape clause, if Warwick and the
Lancastrians should ever part company again.
Commines was not alone in thinking ‘this was a strange marriage’,
given that Warwick had ‘defeated and ruined’ the Prince’s father. The
Croyland Chronicler claimed that the match was made so that Warwick and
Margaret’s ‘reconcilement and good faith towards each other might appear
in the eyes of future ages the more undoubted’. Yet Warwick had never
lacked ambition and was clearly driven by dynastic desire for the throne,
having placed both daughters in marriages with two prospective heirs to the
throne. By December 1470, when the wedding of Anne and Edward was
finally conducted, the situation had changed again. The birth of a son to
Edward IV displaced Clarence in the line of succession and Warwick was
finding it increasingly hard to trust his son-in-law. Therefore, the
Lancastrian marriage gave him the best option of having a grandchild to sit
on the English throne. Isabel had lost her first child and would not conceive
again in her father’s lifetime. If Anne could fall pregnant now, her baby
would pose a powerful threat to the Yorkist heir, now that regime appeared
to have fallen. The teenage couple passed their wedding night at Amboise
and, forty-eight hours later, had departed, heading north.
The readeption of Henry VI was also good news for the thirteen-year-
old Henry Tudor and his mother Margaret Beaufort, now Stafford. After the
death of Lord Herbert and the family’s flight to Herefordshire, Margaret had
tried unsuccessfully to regain custody of her son, whom she wished to have
live with her at Woking, but the rapidly unfolding events soon brought them
together again. With Edward in exile, the way was clear for a reunion and,
when Jasper Tudor returned to England, he took his nephew to London. The
Tudors received significant financial rewards from Henry and Warwick but
the boy was unable to inherit the title of Earl of Richmond, which had been
given to Clarence. However, mother and son were reunited at the new
Lancastrian court for about six weeks in October and early November,
where they dined frequently with the king. After Henry VI’s own Prince of
Wales and his half-brother Jasper, Henry Tudor was next in line to the
throne and was treated as such. The magnificent feasts at Westminster that
autumn must have seemed to usher in a new era of optimism for Margaret
and her son.

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7

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Lancastrian Princess
1471
In granting your love you shall purchase renown,
Your head shall be crowned with Englands crown
thy garments most gallant of gold shall be wrought
if true love with treasure with the may be bought.1
In March 1471, Edward IV landed in Yorkshire. The initial response from
his subjects was not warm but he managed to gain access to the City of
York by claiming he was only interested in the restoration of his dukedom.
Richard of Gloucester had been by his side during his exile and now,
Clarence, the prodigal brother, returned to the fold again. Marching south
and gathering troops intended for Warwick, he had succumbed to the
influence of his mother, uncles and sisters and was reconciled with the king.
However, he did then seek to act as an intermediary, urging Edward to
pardon his father-in-law. Isabel, who was also in England and perhaps in
communication with her father, must have found her loyalties seriously
compromised, as were those of many wives and mothers at the time,
especially her mother-in-law Cecily. According to the Historie of the
Arrivall of Edward IV in England and the finall recouerye of his Kingdomes
from Henry VI, Clarence knew himself to be held ‘in great suspicion,
despite, disdeigne and hatered’ by those who were ‘adherents and full
partakers’ of the Lancastrian cause. Through the arbitration of family
members, the brothers were brought to a ‘parfecte accord’, whereby
Clarence was ‘full honourably and trwly acquitted’ of his treachery.2 For
Warwick, this desertion must have represented a significant blow. However,
Edward extended a gesture of forgiveness as a result of Clarence’s
influence, presenting him with a kind of Hobson’s choice, as he was forced
to reject one of his daughters in favour of the other. If Warwick had
accepted and united again with the Yorkists, Clarence and Isabel, it would
have left Anne and the countess ostracised and friendless with their enemies
in exile. On the other hand, to refuse the king’s beneficence would protect
Anne, but estrange him from Isabel and lead to the inevitable conflict that
must result in the defeat and probable death of either the earl or the king.
Warwick refused Edward’s pardon. The Arrivall suggests he may have
‘dispaired of any … continuance of good accord betwixt the Kynge and
hym, for tyme to come, consyderinge so great attemptes by hym comytted
against the Kynge’, or else he could not break the vows he had made in
Angers Cathedral, on the ‘fragment of the true cross’, without terrible
consequences. He sent Lord Wenlock to accompany the countess, Queen
Margaret, Prince Edward and Anne back to England, planning for them to
embark from Honfleur on 24 March. Treacherous conditions in the Channel
delayed them though, with ‘great stormes, wyndes and tempests’3
preventing the fleet from sailing until mid-April. While Margaret’s party
waited in France for the storms to abate, King Edward entered and retook
London, welcomed back by the city whose trade had been threatened by
Warwick’s anti-Burgundian agenda. The city merchants were also keen to
receive the loans the Yorkist still owed them and, according to Commines,
were persuaded by their wives, who still held the attractive man in great
affection. Edward was reunited with his queen and introduced to the young
son she had borne in sanctuary the previous November, the future Edward
V, elder of the Princes in the Tower. Timing had played a crucial role in the
king’s return: the popular Warwick was only a day behind him and had
expected the city to remain loyal to him.4
The Lancastrian party finally arrived at Weymouth, ‘aftar longe
abydyng passage’, while Anne’s mother, in a separate ship, landed at
Portsmouth. As the shores of England had come into view, each must have
been exhilarated at the prospect of returning to a land newly conquered in
their name, a land over which they could expect to rule and be received as
royalty. No doubt they anticipated a triumphant procession to Westminster,
lauded as they rode through the streets of London, before their reunion with
Henry VI and instalment in the rich apartments of the Palace of
Westminster. The following day was Easter. It dawned mistily and, while
they prepared their celebrations, news arrived of a terrible battle being
fought at Barnet, a small town north of London. Vergil described the
slaughter: ‘Many wer slane every wher, whose rowmes fresh men dyd ever
of new supply.’ Anne’s father was among them. According to his account,
Warwick was impressive to the last, having ‘great confydence and hope of
victory’ and ‘vehemently encoragyd and hartyly desyryd his soldiers,
thowghe very weary, yet now to abyde this last brunt with valyant corage’,
until he was ‘thrust thoughe and slane … manfully fighting … having
almost the victory in his hand’. Although some accounts cite that Edward
had asked for Warwick to be taken alive, Commines places the blame for
his death at the king’s feet, as part of a wider policy of slaughter because
‘he had conceived a deep hatred against the people of England for the great
favour which he saw the people bore towards the Earl of Warwick’. While it
seems unlikely that the ‘great hatred’ was directed against his subjects,
Edward may well have understood the necessity of removing such a popular
alternative leader. One or other of them had to die.
For Anne the dream was quickly shattered; amid the thick fog,
confusion had led to chaos. The Great Chronicle of London estimated that
15,000 had been killed although Hall and Holinshed put the figure closer to
10,000: either way, the majority of losses had been sustained on the
Lancastrian side. The encounter also marked the eighteen-year-old Richard
of Gloucester’s first engagement in battle, fighting against a man under
whose roof he had lived as a youth, whom he had considered a friend and
mentor. Regret must have mingled with relief when he heard the day had
been won. Perhaps he spared a thought for Anne, her father and the days
they spent at Middleham, which must have seemed very distant then,
although they were in reality only a couple of years past. One romantic
story, dating from a Victorian biography, claims that Warwick encountered
the young Richard on the battlefield and spared his life out of affection for
him.5 What is more usually recounted is the earl’s break from his habit of
remaining on horseback, in order to support his brother Montagu on foot,
rendering him incapable of escape when the fighting turned against him. On
Easter Saturday, 14 April 1471, the Yorkists’ smaller force had emerged
victorious and, in spite of Edward’s supposed instructions, Anne heard that
Warwick had indeed been slain.
The triumphant Yorkists now returned to London, where the bodies of
Warwick and Montagu were ‘layid nakid’ on public display at St Paul’s
Cathedral, to ‘prevent newe murmors, insurrections and rebellyons among
indisposed people’,6 before being handed over to George Neville,
Archbishop of York, and laid in the family vault at Bisham Priory in
Berkshire. The tomb no longer exists, having been destroyed during the
Reformation, but the earl’s reputation was not so easily forgotten. Not even
the public display of Warwick’s naked torso could completely dispel the
belief that such a legendary figure and competent military leader could have
met his mortal end. Rumours flew around Europe and even Louis XI
himself was the recipient of incorrect reports of the aftermath of Barnet.
Christofforo de Bollate, Milanese Ambassador to France, recorded that
‘yesterday evening, his Majesty had a letter from the Queen of England,
saying that the Earl of Warwick was not dead, as reported, but he had been
wounded in the fight with King Edward and had withdrawn to a secret and
solitary place to get well of his wounds and sickness’. If such a letter
existed, it suggests that Margaret, and by association Anne, still held out
vain hopes for Warwick’s return. The second part of the letter, though,
‘contains not truth, as the women would well have known’. It stated that the
Prince of Wales, King Henry’s son, was ‘in London with a very large
following of men and with the favour and assistance of the greater part of
the common people and citizens’,7 when he was actually still with his
mother and wife in the west. It is more likely, then, that Margaret and Anne
had to swiftly accept the news that the earl had been lost. Perhaps Anne was
not alone in her personal grief; the Arrivall describes Margaret as being
‘right heavy and sorry’ at the news.
On hearing the news, the Countess of Warwick, who had by then
reached Southampton, fled into sanctuary at Beaulieu Abbey, which the
Arrivall claims was done ‘secretly’ as an act of defection, because ‘she
would no farther goo towards the Qwene’. If this is the case, she was also
turning her back on her daughter Anne, which may explain their later cool
relationship. Vergil claims that Margaret actually ‘swownyed for feare …
distrawght, dismayed and tormentyd with sorrow’, lamenting the ‘calamyty
of the time, the adversity of fortune, hir owne toyle and mysery’. She may
have allowed herself to indulge her grief initially but Margaret quickly
recovered her resolve and led her son and daughter-in-law to Cerne Abbey,
a tenth-century Benedictine monastery in Dorset, where they could reassess
their plans. Little remains now of the extensive abbey, which dominated the
area in the fifteenth century, yet the South Gate House and Guesthouse
would be recognised today by Anne. Here, amid such tranquil surroundings,
she watched as the stalwarts of the Lancastrian cause began to arrive,
including Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, second son of
Margaret’s former favourite, whom Warwick had killed at the First Battle of
St Albans. His elder brother had been executed after a minor battle in 1464.
Beaufort had been Warwick’s cousin but it is unlikely he had any sympathy
now for the dead man’s daughter. Also present were key Lancastrians
Dorset, Devon, Exeter and the Bishop of Ely, John Morton, who had been
educated at Cerne Abbey and may have suggested the location. It was
Morton who had led the Parliament of Devils which passed the act of
attainder against Anne’s family.
For the fourteen-year-old girl, no matter how brave and strong she felt,
with her loyalty transferred through marriage, such company must have
inspired mixed emotions and no small amount of fear. It is understandable
that those who had been loyal to Henry VI for years despised the marriage
his wife had forged for their son and did not wish to see Anne Neville
sharing the throne with Prince Edward. Ironically, it may well have been
her status as Princess of Wales which secured her position and her safety.
Perhaps they made the young wife swear oaths of allegiance, perhaps they
simply dismissed her as a child or considered her only as the bodily vessel
by which the dynasty could continue. Later historians and dramatists have
made much of Anne’s supposed ‘defection’ to the Yorkist side when she
remarried, but, as she waited at Cerne Abbey with her former enemies, she
may well have longed to welcome her childhood friends with open arms.
Margaret now listened to Somerset’s advice: they could proceed
without the earl and reclaim London, under the leadership of the determined
young Edward of Westminster. Commines claimed they had 40,000 troops
at this point, and, although this figure is exaggerated, more supporters kept
arriving. A letter from Zannotus Spinula to his father, now in the Milan
archives, related that many Lancastrians did not consider the earl’s death to
be detrimental to their cause, as they had never really trusted him in the first
instance: ‘there are many who consider the queen’s prospects favourable,
chiefly because of the death of Warwick, because it is reckoned she ought to
have many lords in her favour, who intended to resist her because they were
enemies of Warwick; Northumberland among others’.8 Warkworth notes
that the loss of Clarence was also ‘distruccion’ to them although, perhaps,
his absence was less mourned than railed over by those who had put their
trust in him. As news of Margaret’s arrival spread, more lords began to rally
to the Lancastrian banner, as the party headed for Exeter, and on via
Glastonbury, to Bath. Among her father’s former enemies, Anne may well
have feared for her own safety.
The Lancastrian force arrived in Bath at the end of April. From there,
they hoped to unite with Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, who had been
recruiting in the family stronghold of Wales, in order to give them the
advantage over the king’s army. Meanwhile, Edward IV had heard of the
scale of desertion. Knowing this could only prove disadvantageous to his
cause, he decided to seize the moment and engage the forces of the queen
and prince before Tudor could come to their assistance. Now it became a
race against time. Both sides were determined to find Tudor first. With the
king in pursuit, Margaret ordered her party to flee north, gathering up what
they could and taking to the roads as soon as possible. Did Anne look over
her shoulder as they rode at breakneck speed through the English
countryside? Their ride took them through Gloucester, which remained
loyal to Anne’s childhood friend, now its duke. More Yorkists prevented the
party from crossing the River Severn, forcing them to divert their route up
to Tewkesbury, arriving on the afternoon of 3 May. There, Anne was at least
on familiar territory, as her mother was a patroness of the abbey and it was
the final resting place of her grandmother. Perhaps it was even she who
suggested her family’s nearby manor house as a suitable place to stay.
Standing to the south-east of the modern town of Tewkesbury,
Gupshill Manor had been built in 1438 and originally stood in a small
hamlet of twenty houses. At the time, it was known as Gobes Hall. Now a
restaurant, the black-and-white timbered building comprises three sections
which retain many of the original features that Margaret and Anne would
have seen when they stayed there for the night before the fighting took
place. Other Lancastrian wives, including the Countess of Devon, who were
captured with them after the battle, may also have kept them company
there. It was here that Anne took leave of her young husband, wondering
under what circumstances they would meet again. Perhaps they prayed
together with Margaret, led by Bishop Morton, mindful of the possible
outcomes of the impending clash. Either the Lancastrian family would be
restored, and Anne would accompany her victorious husband on a
triumphant march to Westminster as a princess and eventually inherit the
throne or, alternatively, all would be lost. Probably none of them slept well,
if at all. As the dark hours of the night began to lighten, Edward rose and
said his final goodbyes to his wife. This was the closest Anne had ever
come to conflict but, with her father’s recent fate in mind, she must have
feared for the safety of the tall, determined seventeen-year-old as he
disappeared from sight.
That morning, Somerset led out his Lancastrian force of 6,000 men
from the direction of the abbey, south of the town. Waiting for them were
5,000 Yorkists, headed by Edward, flanked by Clarence, Gloucester and
Hastings. Vergil claims that the duke was overhasty, ‘drawing his men’ forth
‘against th’advice of th’other captaines’, because he knew that Edward IV
was approaching. It meant that the armies engaged before the arrival of
Tudor’s reinforcements, which may have proved decisive. The fighting took
place on uneven ground, among the surrounding ‘evil lanes’ and fields, with
the legendary ‘bloody meadow’ visible from the manor house window
although, by then, there was no one there. Anne and Margaret had fled the
scene and did not witness the battle. When the first reports came back of
defeat, they were being sheltered by a family living at Payne’s Place in
Bushley, before going on to Birtsmorton Court, where Margaret’s chamber
still stands.9 From there, they proceeded to Malvern Priory in
Worcestershire, where they were safer. Thus, Anne did not see that King
Edward had entrusted his eighteen-year-old brother Richard to lead a
division of the army, in the only battle where Anne’s two husbands faced
each other on the field. Richard’s section of the army came into direct
conflict with that of Somerset, who was hampered by a stream running
through his position, and beat him back towards the River Severn. Writing
in 1904, American historian Jacob Abbot has Margaret witnessing the battle
from a distance and attempting to rush onto the field to rescue her son,
‘frantic with excitement and terror’ from which her companions found it
‘almost impossible to restrain her’ until she swooned and was ‘borne away
senseless’ in a carriage to a convent. It is not difficult to imagine such a
scene, with Anne attempting to restrain her mother-in-law, but no evidence
exists for it. The women probably retreated early and did not see the
escaping Lancastrians being shot down by the archers Edward had placed in
nearby woodland. Nor did they witness the moment when the fortunes of
battle turned in favour of the Yorkists and Edward of Westminster, Prince of
Wales, lost his life.
Exactly how Anne’s husband met his death is unclear. Literary and
dramatic sources have presented a range of possibilities, implicating various
Yorkists in differing degrees. Of the contemporary chroniclers recording the
scene without being present, Commines agrees with the Croyland and Benet
chronicles, which clearly state that he fell on the field of battle, while the
Arrivall observes, ‘And there was slain in the field Prince Edward, which
cried for succour to his brother-in-law, the Duke of Clarence.’ Even having
sworn allegiance to him less than a year before, Clarence clearly did not
feel sufficiently moved to show the prince pity, stating in a letter to Henry
Vernon that the prince was ‘slain in playn bataill’, differentiating his death
from the ‘execution’ of Somerset also described in the correspondence.
Warkworth agrees that the prince ‘was taken fleeing … townwards, and
slain in the field’, perhaps heading back for the safety of the abbey, or ‘poor
religious place’, where his wife and mother waited. Tudor historian Andre
Bernard, writing in 1501, also stated that the prince was slain in combat,
even though, at that time, it would have been in his interests to slur the
reputations of the Yorkist brothers.
The alternative story of Edward’s murder began to gain credence soon
after his death. Weeks after the battle, Bettini wrote to the Duke of Milan
that the Yorkists had ‘not only routed the prince but taken and slain him,
together with all the leading men with him’.10 As early as 1473, one French
chronicle, the Histoire de Charles, dernier duc de Bourgogne, claimed he
had been surrounded and murdered in cold blood by his enemies. Vergil’s
account has King Edward asking the ‘excellent yowth’ why he took up arms
against his sovereign, to which the prince replied bravely that it was to free
his father from miserable oppression and regain his usurped crown. Then
Edward waved him away to be ‘cruelly butchered’ by his brothers, which is
repeated by Hall and Holinshed. Based on this, local tradition still points
out a house in Church Street, Tewkesbury, nearly opposite the marketplace,
as that in which the young prince was stabbed in the presence of the king.
Predictably, Shakespeare has Gloucester himself wielding the sword, in
King Henry VI, Part 3 Act 5 Scene 5. The prince declares to his enemies,
I know my duty;, you arc all undutiful:
Lascivious Edward, and thou perjured George,
And thou misshapen Dick, I tell ye all
I am your better, traitors as ye are:
And thou usurp’st my father’s right and mine.
However, in Richard III, written around the same time, the killing has
already taken place before the action begins, as it is an earlier part of the
same cycle. Now, though, Richard denies his involvement to Anne, stating
instead that the prince was ‘slain by Edward’s hand’. In response, Anne
cites her witness, Queen Margaret, who saw his ‘murderous falchion
smoking in his blood’. The dramatic irony of Richard’s admission of guilt
to the audience once Anne leaves the stage is a timely reminder of the
duplicitous nature of public denials and that those responsible were hardly
going to advertise the fact.
Fabyan, a London chronicler of 1516, describes the murder as having
taken place in the presence of the king, in no way singling out Richard of
Gloucester. Edward, he says, ‘strake him [the prince] with his gauntlet upon
the face, after which stroke, so by him received, he was by the king’s
servants incontinently slain’. The seventeenth-century George Buck, ‘on the
authority of a faithful contemporary manuscript’, asserts that when the
bloody attack was made on the young prince, ‘the Duke of Gloucester only,
of all the great persons, stood still, and drew not his sword’, giving rise to
the theory that Richard was unwilling to participate in the murder of Anne’s
husband, because of his existing affection for her, ‘whom he loved very
affectionately, though secretly’. Shakespeare goes one better and has
Richard try to convince Anne that it was for the sake of her beauty that her
husband was slain, bereaving her of him in order ‘to help thee to a better
husband’. At least one later historian has suggested that the murder, if it was
murder, was in retaliation for the death of the seventeen-year-old Edmund,
Earl of Rutland, the fourth Yorkist brother, who had been killed alongside
their father at Wakefield in 1460. This is not impossible. The question of his
death is something of a historical misnomer though. All noblemen
participating in battle could expect to be killed during the conflict or in a
brief trial in the aftermath, as had been established since the First Battle of
St Albans. Violent death was no stranger to those who vied for the throne,
particularly since the death of the Duke of Suffolk in 1450, followed by that
of the 1st Duke of Somerset in 1455, which had set the tone for the wars. Of
course Edward would be killed if he were taken. To expect otherwise, to
hope for some sort of leniency in view of his youth or status, would have
been naïve. Death was death, whether it happened in the thick of fighting or
came at the end of an axe or dagger in the midst of the enemy camp.
However Prince Edward died, and the plaque in the abbey states he was
‘slain in battle’; the result was the same for Anne, who was left a widow at
the age of fourteen. Now she and Margaret were at the mercy of the York
brothers.
Edward was not the only significant casualty of the battle. As the
Lancastrian army scattered, Somerset turned on Warwick’s ally, Lord
Wenlock, and, according to Hall, killed him with an axe for ‘holding back’.
Somerset’s younger brother, John Beaufort, was also slain in the fighting,
and the duke, along with many of the defeated lords, took shelter in nearby
Tewkesbury Abbey. There, the Yorkists offered prayers for their victory and
gave Abbot Strensham their word as permission for the dead to be buried
and for the sheltering Lancastrians to be pardoned. However, something
changed in the following days. Only two days later, on 6 May, Somerset
and the others were dragged out of the abbey and beheaded. A fifteenth-
century depiction of this scene in a late Ghent manuscript appears to
exonerate Richard and his brothers from actually carrying out the deed, as it
depicts King Edward watching the executioner, who stands on a block to
wield the axe and is a clearly older man, sporting a little pot belly. As a
result of the violence, the abbey had to be cleansed and reconsecrated a
month later. Edward, Prince of Wales, was interred within its walls and,
today, his final resting place is marked by a plaque on the floor. Also losing
out at Tewkesbury were Jasper Tudor and his nephew Henry, whose brief
hopes for the restoration were dashed, sending them both into exile. It
marked the beginning of a fourteen-year separation between Henry and his
mother, Margaret Beaufort. Her second husband, Henry Stafford, had been
so badly wounded after Barnet that he would die of his injuries that
October, leaving her a widow for a second time. She would not see her son
again until he was a grown man at the head of an invasion army in 1485,
but for another mother, her namesake, the battle at Tewkesbury was to have
the worst possible outcome.
At some point, probably late in the day of the conflict itself, the
terrible news was carried to the women waiting in the convent. Thomas
Stanley may have been the messenger, as suggested by John Abbott, as he
had been married to Warwick’s sister and would soon take Margaret
Beaufort as his second wife. Thus, Anne heard the news from her uncle.
Their defeat was absolute, for Margaret as a mother as well as a queen:
Vergil describes the remainder of her life as being lived in ‘perpetuall
moorning’. However deep their grief, Margaret and Anne were themselves
in danger and fled to a church near Tewkesbury, where they were arrested
two days later by another Stanley brother, William, who conducted them to
King Edward at Coventry. Anne’s own grief would have been determined
by the extent of her feelings for her dead husband. Even if love had not
blossomed between them, they had been in each other’s company for the
past nine months and shared the mixed fortunes of exiles. Anne had thrown
in her lot with the Lancastrians, with the possibility of a future at Edward’s
side in Westminster: she had known and shared his aspirations – and
probably his fears and determination – before the battle. There is no
evidence that she welcomed his death, as some historical novels have
suggested; in fact, as his wife, she had every reason now to expect harsh
treatment from his enemies. As she rode with Margaret in captivity towards
Coventry, her emotions must have been turbulent, wondering just how
lenient the king was prepared to be. Her age and gender were on her side, as
was the past she had shared with both King Edward and Richard. How far
would that go towards saving her now?
On 11 May, Margaret and Anne appeared before King Edward at
Coventry. Given Margaret’s later humiliating return to London, driven
imprisoned in a chariot for the baying crowds to see, there was probably
little sympathy for the ex-queen. Alison Weir alleges that Margaret
screamed abuse and curses at Edward to the extent that he considered
ordering her execution. Having witnessed her grief, Anne may well have
felt compassion for her mother-in-law, although, as Warwick’s daughter, she
was aware that it was now a battle for individual survival. She could not
ally herself with Margaret now, as her future did not lie with her. It would
not have been clear exactly where that future did lie but if she was wise,
Anne would have tried to tread a careful political path and wait to see how
events would unfold. Once again, her youth and gender probably served her
well in this. It was likely that her arrival at Coventry as a prisoner also
marked her brief reunion with Richard of Gloucester, now cast in the role of
victor. A romantic interpretation of the meeting would stress the resurfacing
of old affections, as their eyes met across the room, full of assembled war-
weary lords. On a practical level, it was probably a painful and difficult
encounter, given the distance that the last two years had placed between the
childhood friends. In the aftermath of battle, Anne’s widowed status was
undeniable, making her available for remarriage, but if Richard conceived
any intention of making her his wife at this stage, it was purely theoretical.
The proceedings of that day were likely to have been formal and practical,
to determine arrangements for the prisoners. Richard may not even have
been present, or only briefly so, as he went south fairly soon after
Tewkesbury in order to deal with an uprising among Kentish rebels. The ex-
queen then began her journey south to the Tower on 14 May, where Henry
VI was still housed, while Anne was released into the custody of her sister
and Clarence. Vergil narrates a little anecdote in his 1513 history, whereby
Margaret had foreseen her husband’s death after the Battle of Barnet: ‘she
bewayled the unhappy end of King Henry, which now she accountyd
assurydly to be at hand’. She was quite correct that the loss of her son
removed the safeguard to her husband’s life. While Prince Edward had
lived, his father’s death would only have transferred his claim to a younger,
more competent man, but the extinction of the Lancastrian line sealed the
old king’s fate.
The same night that Margaret arrived at the Tower, her husband lost
his life. It is unlikely that they were reunited first. Popular legend has him
praying on bended knee at midnight in the Wakefield Tower when the
unknown assassin struck. Edward IV was re-crowned the following day and
Henry’s bleeding body was carried through the streets and lain on the
pavement outside St Paul’s Abbey, where it continued to ‘blede newe and
fresche’, according to Warkworth. While the Fleetwood Chronicle states
that ‘of pure displeasure and melancholy, he died’ and the Arrivall agrees
that his end was hastened by grief on hearing of the death of his son, others
lay the blame for the deed at the feet of the Yorkists. There were precedents
for such descriptions, euphemistically used for the demise of the usurped
Richard II in 1399. Writing about three weeks later in mid-June, Bettini
asserted ‘King Edward has had him put to death secretly … he has in short
chosen to crush the seed’.11 Rous’ second, post-Tudor version of events
takes relish in personally implicating Richard, who ‘as many believe,
[killed] with his own hand, that most sacred man King Henry VI’. This is
repeated as fact by Commines: ‘Immediately after this battle, the Duke of
Gloucester either killed with his own hand, or caused to be murdered in his
presence, in some spot apart, this good man King Henry,’ making the first
mention of the weapon, apparently a dagger, although how he was so
certain of these details is unknown, being at the time in France. Fabyan
echoed the idea of popular belief in helping to ascertain guilt. ‘Of the death
of this prince,’ he says, ‘diverse tales were told, but the most common fame
went that he was stykked with a dagger by the hands of the Duke of
Gloucester.’ Vergil confirms that common report attributed the crime to
Gloucester. ‘Henry VI,’ he says, ‘being not long before deprived of his
diadem, was put to death in the Tower of London,’ adding that the weapon
of choice was a sword, while More says of Richard, ‘he slew … with his
own hand, as men constantly say, King Henry VI, being prisoner in the
Tower’.
These accounts influenced the most famous depiction of the king’s
death, where Shakespeare has Richard brutally interrupt Henry’s long
speech:

King Henry: The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign;

The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howled, and hideous tempests shook down trees;
The raven rook’d her on the chimney’s top,
And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.
Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain,
And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope;
To wit, an indigest deformed lump,
Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree.
Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,
To signify thou cam’st to bite the world;
And, if the rest be true which I have heard,
Thou cam’st…
Gloucester: I’ll hear no more. Die, prophet, in thy speech. [Stabs him.]
There is no evidence that Richard was the murderer of Henry VI; equally,
there is no decisive evidence that he was not. Whoever wielded the sword
was certainly acting under instructions from King Edward and Richard’s
position as a Constable of England would have made the execution of such
duties his responsibility, either by his own hand or by delegation. It is
possible that Richard was present in the Tower that night but he was more
likely to have been at Westminster, celebrating his family’s success.
Thomas Rymer’s Foedera, published early in the eighteenth century, claims
that two esquires, Robert Ratcliffe and William Sayer, with no fewer than
ten or eleven other persons, were appointed to attend upon the unhappy
monarch. As a friend of Richard from Middleham days, Ratcliffe’s presence
could be interpreted as sinister but, on the other hand, it is to be expected
that the Yorkists would man the Tower with men they could trust. The
Warkworth Chronicle also places Richard at the scene when Henry was
‘putt to dethe’ between 9 and 10 o’clock at night, ‘beinge thenne at the
Toure the Duke of Gloucestre’, but then goes on to add that ‘many other’
were there too. Just as with later reports of the deaths of the Princes in the
Tower, common fame and later accounts continued to use Richard as a
convenient villain.
After the threats to the Yorkist regime in the period 1469–71, Henry VI
and his son were too dangerous to be allowed to live. Their removal was no
more remarkable than the deaths of Richard, Duke of York, the Earl of
Rutland, the Duke of Suffolk, both Dukes of Somerset and the Earls of
Warwick and Montagu, which were shocking in their own way, yet were
simply the realistic outcome of civil conflict. In each case, their killers,
where known, have escaped the sort of censure reserved for the death of the
Lancastrian king. The killing of Henry has captured the popular imagination
because of the passive, saintly nature of the victim and his helplessness in
the face of his supposedly ruthless enemies. If ever there was a pawn in the
course of these wars, it was him. Considering that his half-nephew, Henry
VII, later attempted to have him canonised, it is unsurprising that the
majority of accounts, which were written after the advent of the Tudors,
should seek to implicate the Yorkists. The Cousins’ Wars were marked by
acts of ferocity and brutality; increasingly it was a question of kill or be
killed. In all likelihood, the unfortunate Henry was put to death by royal
command, which is more significant than the identity of the servant who
carried out the order. When Henry’s tomb was opened in 1910 and the
contents examined at Cambridge University, his skull was found to be
broken and the remaining hair still matted with blood; there seems little
reason to disagree with the archaeologists’ findings that he suffered the
‘violent death’ that the majority of chroniclers describe.12 Richard may have
wielded the sword but ultimately, responsibility lies with Edward IV.
Henry’s body was put on display at St Paul’s, as Warwick’s had been,
in order for the public to view him and ascertain that he was, in fact, dead.
After this, he was buried in Chertsey Abbey, with his body being later
transferred to St George’s chapel, Windsor in 1484, on the order of Richard,
then king. These events would have been relayed to his one-time daughter-
in-law, Anne, as she remained under the watchful eyes of Isabel and
Clarence, probably at Coldharbour House. Into her mouth, Shakespeare
puts a description of his ‘murderer’:
O, gentlemen see, see! dead Henry’s wounds
Open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh.
Blush, blush thou lump of foul deformity;
For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells;
Thy deed, inhuman and unnatural,
Provokes this deluge most unnatural.
Anne probably did not attend the funeral procession or burial of Henry VI.
Her feelings towards her future husband, described here as an ‘unnatural’
‘lump of foul deformity’, were far more complex than the playwright
suggests.
Soon after the death of Henry VI, miracles were recorded in his name
in a volume at St George’s chapel, Winsdor. Typically they included curing
the sick, saving the unjustly condemned and raising the dead. Edward IV
attempted to quash these accounts but, interestingly, by the time of his
reign, Richard himself became an advocate of the late king’s sainthood. It
was Richard who ordered the removal of his body from Chertsey and the re-
interment at Windsor and who initiated the record which, by 1500,
contained 174 stories. His personal effects were also put on display as relics
and his velvet cap was recorded by Stowe as being able to cure headaches.
It is ironic, then, that his cult was developed by the Tudors in contrast to the
later perceived ‘villainy’ of Richard and, in tandem with reports of his role
in the king’s death, as a foil for their favourite Yorkist villain. Richard has
been ascribed various motives for this, from cynical manipulation through
to genuine piety: all are unsubstantiated. Henry’s canonisation was
advocated by his half-nephew, Henry VII, and by the 1520s, papal
representatives were seeking to verify the stories, although this was
abandoned with the Reformation.
Appearing as a ghost on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, Henry is
given the following words, by Shakespeare, with which he accuses Richard
III:
When I was mortal, my anointed body
By thee was punched full of deadly holes
Think on the Tower and me: despair, and die!
Harry the Sixth bids thee despair, and die!
Thus admonished by an apparent saint, Richard promptly complied.

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8

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A Strange Courtship
1471–1472
But if I sang your praises
it wasn’t out of love
but for the profit I might get from it
just as any joglar sings a lady’s fame1
Anne had lost her father and husband in battle. Her mother had remained in
sanctuary, beyond reach, while her sister was married to the enemy. She had
been taken into captivity along with her mother-in-law, who was still a
prisoner in the formidable Tower. Then her father-in-law, the king, had been
murdered. All this had happened within the space of a few months, yet it
was not the end for the teenager. Of course, she did not have the benefit of
foresight to reassure her, but she was lucky to have come through recent
events and now be in a position of safety, even optimism; as a survivor, and
following her father’s example, she was probably accustomed to seek out
whatever opportunities might present themselves, however unlikely. In fact,
far from being an end, it was a significant new beginning. A regime change
at the top could mark a swathe of new allies and potential connections,
particularly for a young, healthy and attractive woman. Anne has often been
sidelined as a pawn amid men’s more powerful games but there is no reason
why her gender should exclude ambition, cunning and drive. After all, she
had Margaret of Anjou as an example, albeit perhaps a negative one. Now,
she knew she must adapt to the status quo and start to map out a future for
herself.
Following the events of May 1471, Anne had been released into the
custody of her sister Isabel and brother-in-law, Clarence, who had now
inherited her father’s title of Earl of Warwick. It was a situation which
allowed for the widowed princess’s return to society, giving her access to
the court at Westminster and a degree of freedom suggestive of a hopeful
future as a Yorkist ally. She was lucky not to have been entrusted to her
mother, then still in sanctuary at Beaulieu Abbey, who, as the widow of a
traitor, was considered legally deceased. Perhaps Anne was extended an
element of choice in this. From this point forward, Anne de Beauchamp
would play no significant role in the lives of either of her daughters or their
husbands, who would fight over her inheritance. The sisters may have
considered their mother’s flight as an act of betrayal. Perhaps they had
never been close; it is not difficult to cast Warwick as the dominant parent,
also even the one who had inspired devotion, but this is speculation.
Equally it was in Clarence’s interests to keep his sister-in-law close, as he
was currently in possession of the majority of the Warwick legacy and did
not wish to divide that with whomever Anne should wed next. As she
turned fifteen, barely months after becoming a widow, the subject of Anne’s
remarriage was already a sensitive one.
The duke and duchess were then resident at Coldharbour House in
Thames Street, in the parish of All-Hallows-the-Less, or perhaps All-
Hallows-in-the-Hay, named after an adjoining hay wharf, near where the
London Brewery now stands. It was an ancient and important ‘right fair and
stately’ house, according to John Stowe, originally two fortified buildings
on the river-bank, which had been home to Henry IV in 1400 and to Henry
V during his tenure as Prince of Wales. Following the attainder of Anne of
York’s husband, Henry Holland, the property came into the possession of
the Crown and was used by various members of the York family. It is
mentioned in a mid-seventeenth-century play by Heywood and Rowley as
having twenty chimneys, was reputed to have a number of turrets built
around a courtyard and was generally believed to be impregnable. In the
1460s it had been owned by the Lancastrian Henry Holland, Duke of
Exeter, but was confiscated after his involvement in the Battle of Barnet. It
would have been there that Anne was taken, under escort from the Tower, to
be part of her sister’s household.
It is possible to reconstruct a fairly full picture of what life was like
under Clarence’s roof in 1471, due to the set of surviving guidelines
produced eighteen months before, for the running of his affairs during a
stay at Waltham. Royalty had long been visitors to Waltham monastery,
which was ideally located for hunting in the surrounding royal forest, now
Epping Forest. Henry II had founded an Augustine priory on the site, which
later became an abbey, one of the wealthiest of its order. Clarence’s
connection with the area was established in 1465, when Cheshunt Manor,
just over the border in Hertfordshire, had been granted to him after the
death of Elizabeth, Lady Say. Even as late as the eighteenth century,
descendants of Clarence’s daughter Margaret were listed as living at nearby
Much Waltham. The Stablishmentes and Ordinaunces made for the Rule
and Guydinge2 for the household of Clarence at the monastery of Waltham,
9 December 1469, just six months after his marriage, shows the extent and
expenditure of his home and the provisions made for his new duchess. It
seems to owe something to the similar routine followed by his mother
Cecily and that which Isabel herself had grown up under at Middleham, but
although the new duchess had jurisdiction over her servants, her husband
would have had the final say. The Waltham Ordinances clarify the standard
of living that Duchess Isabel would have experienced in London and Essex
and wherever Isabel went during the second half of 1471, Anne went too.
Embedded within the regulations is a paragraph reminding the
household of the Clarences’ then recent marriage:
Be it knowen and remembred that the Tewesdaye, the xii day of the
moneth of July in the castelle of Calais, the seid Duke tooke in
marriage Isabell, one of the daughters and heires of Richard the seid
erle of Warwik whiche that tyme was present there.3
Following this, the duchess’s household, described in The State, Rule and
Governaunce of the Excellent Princess in the Standing Householde,
includes her personal servants of a baroness and five gentlewomen, each
with their own staff and her own smaller version of the duke’s household,
with treasurer, chamberlain, almoner, chaplain, yeomen, servers, ushers,
waiters and kitchen hands. She had yeomen of the robes and beds, a groom
of the robes, clerk of the closet, pages of the chamber for water and other
necessaries, a clerk of the jewels and lavandrie, or washers, of her clothing.
The extensive stabling arrangements include carriages, chariots, palfreys,
chairs and litters for her travel; no doubt Anne would have been collected
from the Tower in one of her sister’s vehicles, perhaps covered over to
avoid attention. Isabel may well have made the arrangements herself, as she
clearly had a degree of control over her own servants: ‘All ladyes,
gentyelwomen and chamberers attending upon the seid duchesse, take such
fees, rewards and clothinge, as shall please the duchesse.’
The more general rules for the running of the Clarence household
would have dictated Anne’s daily routine. Typically for its time and status,
it was a household concerned with appearances, respect and service.
Individuals holding positions of importance, particularly those involved in
the organisation of finances, charity and catering, such as the chamberlain,
almoner, steward, treasurer, chancellor, controller of the household,
marshall, ushers and servers, were to be worshipful, virtuous and honest. A
range of fines, usually the suspension of a day’s wages, existed for any who
did not fulfil their duties, were disrespectful or wasteful. In summer, they
dined at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., while in winter, the hours shifted forwards to 9
a.m. and 4 p.m. Those in attendance must ensure the family were well and
honourably served, or else suffer financial penalty and the loss of their daily
meals. Livery must be worn by all employees to ‘give good example to the
court’, for identification and to demonstrate allegiance, which was
particularly important in an era of shifting loyalties. The Counting House
was responsible for assigning all the household servants with livery, which
in 1469 totalled 299 people, costing £188 13s 4d. Some servants were
permitted to exercise their own judgement within reasonable limits. The
almoner was to have 12d daily to distribute to the poor and, after each meal,
would take the leftovers ‘to be given to the most needy man or woman to
his discretion’, while the porter was to fetch wood, white lights and wax but
‘no more than was reasonable’.4
While staying at Coldharbour House, Anne would have been well
provided for. Having come from the royal court at Amboise, with Louis XI
in residence, in full expectation of assuming the role of the Princess of
Wales at Westminster, her life under Clarence’s regime was not materially
too far removed from that of Edward and his queen at Westminster. The
projected total annual expenditure for the duke and duchess in 1469 had
been a considerable £4,505 15s 10d. The ordinances list the different
kitchen departments of bakehouse, pantry, cellar, buttery and picher house,
spicery, larder, seething house, scalding house, scullery, saucer, hall, ewery,
chandry and butchery, as well as all those who worked in and around them
like the porters, servers and clerks. Bread was baked daily, with the small,
fine, white payne-manes and manchettes produced for the table as well as
loaves for the horses and hounds. The estimations for a year’s consumption
in 1469 included 650 quarters of wheat, 41 tons of wine and 365 tons of
ales, 2,700 sheep, 420 pigs, 2 barrels of honey and a long, luxurious list of
spices, including pepper, saffron, ginger, cloves, mace, cinnamon, nutmeg,
dates, licorice, sugar, raisins, currants, figs and rice, totalling over £72.
Over £30 was spent on sauces, £8 on white salt and £106 on wood and
coal.5
Although Coldharbour House was reputedly impregnable, comprising
what had been two fortified town houses, recent events had taught the
Clarences that even strongholds like the Tower could fall victim to the
attacks of marauding rebels. It is unsurprising, then, that the Ordinances
emphasise the need for security. In summer, the gates were open between 5
a.m. and 10 p.m., changing in winter to 7 a.m.–9 p.m., but they were
manned at all times. The porters were to wait at the gate and ensure no
household stuff, such as silver plates and pewter vessels, was ‘embezzled
out’ and no man was allowed to break doors, windows or locks on pain of
losing wages. The security measures may also have been in place to prevent
the Clarences’ charge from escaping or being snatched from under their
nose. Once it emerged that Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was interested in
becoming Anne’s second husband, his brother was keen to prevent the two
from meeting. The romantic legend that he banished her to the kitchens,
where she was dressed in the garb of a kitchen maid, may owe more to
historical fiction, although there is the fair possibility that he sent her out of
sight when his brother was visiting.
Shakespeare has Richard actively wooing Anne. An audience sees him
confess his guilt and declare his intention to wed her by way of a challenge
in spite of her ‘heart’s extremest hate, with curses in her mouth and tears in
her eyes’. He initiates the wooing in Act 1, Scene 2 and she reacts with
repulsion, before being won over by his false displays of affection. Yet there
is no way of knowing now just how the marriage came about. It is reductive
to Anne to assume the courtship had to be initiated by Richard, when she
had just as much to gain from the match as he. Anne may well have seen
Gloucester as an ally who would provide her with the status she needed for
independence and the necessary assistance to take control of her
inheritance. Clearly, she was the ideal wife for him, bringing with her the
lands, revenues and reputation of her father that would allow him to assume
the mantle of his old mentor. Anne was no fool; she knew her value and
what she had to offer. Perhaps she suggested the match to him herself. The
status of an independent widow would have been less attractive to a fifteen-
year-old than, perhaps, to a woman of more mature years. Anne had been
raised with marriage as her goal and there were few men equal to her in
rank. She would gain a protector and he would share her portion of the
Warwick estate; without his help, she could not even enjoy her inheritance
and, lacking that, there was little chance of her making a better match. She
was certainly capable of taking the initiative. From Clarence’s custody,
Anne wrote to Queen Elizabeth, her mother Jacquetta of Luxembourg and
her daughter, Princess Elizabeth, requesting the chance to claim her own
half of the Warwick estates in court.6 It was denied. Quite cynically, uniting
with Richard was a win-win situation and, ever the realist, Anne embraced
it.
It is not clear what role the Clarences played in the negotiations,
although Croyland’s story about Anne’s concealment, as well as the
subsequent disputes arising over the Warwick inheritance, would suggest
they were not overly keen for the marriage to go ahead. The legal settlement
that followed certainly provoked an unpleasant breach between the brothers
and consequently their wives. It would be romantically satisfying to believe
in the theory that this was a love match; that mutual affection had grown
between the young pair during their Middleham days, which survived the
intervening conflict that placed them on opposing sides, in order to later
reunite them purely for companionate love. Such a story provides the
premature ‘happy ending’ for Anne that, with hindsight, the historian and
novelist know she would not get. It is only human to wish to snatch a little
bit of romance out of the jaws of battle and premature death. But it would
also be as misleading to make this assumption as it would be to accept
Shakespeare’s version of events. There is no way of knowing whether one
pursued the other, or which of them first conceived of the idea and
somehow communicated it. Perhaps the idea was mooted by letter or in a
whispered discussion in the corner of the Erber; perhaps Richard or Anne
approached Clarence or Isabel, seeking their approval. Perhaps it was
denied. Of course, it cannot be entirely ruled out that Richard did ‘prove a
lover’ and swept his young childhood friend off her feet with the romantic
words and promises at which his brother Edward was adept. It would be to
underestimate Richard to assume he was not sincere or capable of this. The
details of exactly how Richard and Anne came together may never be
known.
What is more apparent is the rapid time-scale of the courtship. As
Michael Hicks has pointed out in his biography of Anne,7 Richard was
much occupied during the latter half of 1471. Immediately after the Battle
of Tewkesbury, rebels in Kent rose up in arms under the leadership of the
Bastard of Fauconberg, an illegitimate son of Sir William Neville, and
hence Warwick’s cousin. Richard was in Sandwich that May to subdue
them, then up in the North to quell other pockets of insurrection, where
Fauconberg was apprehended and beheaded that September. Gloucester was
also about his own business, issuing grants in the North on 30 August, 4 and
6 October, 20 November and 11 December, leaving little time for a lengthy
courtship. Lisa Hilton8 suggests the plan was hatched after Richard visited
the Clarences at Christmas, which may be the occasion of Croyland’s
kitchen maid story, when Anne was disguised or sent out of sight. Anthony
Cheetham9 claims Richard already had Edward’s permission for the
marriage as early as the summer and that Edward warned Clarence not to
interfere, hence the subterfuge. It would have been in the king’s interests to
allow the match to go ahead, in order to limit the degree of untrustworthy
Clarence’s inheritance. The more money his middle brother had, the more
potentially dangerous he could be. Whenever it happened, an agreement
was reached before 16 February 1472, when Richard ‘facilitated’ Anne’s
escape from Coldharbour House and her flight into sanctuary at the London
church of St Martin-le-Grand. Did she climb out of a window, as Perkin
Warbeck would do in 1499? Perhaps she lit a candle at midnight and
watched for his dark shadow appearing on the lawns below. Whatever
arrangements they made, Anne would have been waiting for him. Theories
suggesting she was ‘abducted’ have failed to recognise that the majority of
medieval cases involving heiresses use the term synonymously with
‘eloped’. Did she disguise herself and creep out of the gates at night? Did
Richard come for her while Clarence was at Westminster or while Isabel
slept?
Established by William the Conqueror, the precincts of St Martin-le-
Grand lay within the City’s walls, but were not subject to its jurisdiction,
allowing the inhabitants a degree of freedom. It had long been a
controversial place, with citizens complaining in 1402 of thieving
apprentices and servants who were living there on the profit of stolen goods
alongside murderers and robbers, although it was not until 1448 that a
sheriff visited and introduced some semblance of justice. By 1457, it was a
slightly safer place to stay, as anyone arriving to take refuge there would
first be stripped of all weapons and counterfeit goods, as well as being
registered with the dean. On the outbreak of war, Dean Stillington
supported the Yorkists, later being employed by Richard when he became
king and may even have been the Robert Stillington, Archbishop of Bath
and Wells, who was to play such a significant role in the fates of the Princes
in the Tower, or else a relative of his.10 There Anne remained until July,
whence she emerged to become Richard’s wife. Although the exact date of
the ceremony is uncertain, 12 July 1472 has been suggested, based on the
1474 provisions in the event of their divorce and estimations that place the
birth of their son in 1473. The twelfth was also the anniversary of Isabel
and Clarence’s wedding.
Anne has been accused of remarrying with indecent haste11 but the
interval of fourteen months was by no means atypical of an era when new
matches were often arranged with rapidity. Margaret Beaufort had been
widowed after Anne, in October 1471, when her third husband finally
succumbed to wounds he had sustained at the Battle of Barnet. Her fourth
wedding was conducted the following June, to a man who had previously
been her enemy, Thomas Stanley, Lord High Constable. This may well have
been a marriage of convenience, as some historians have suggested,
although it served Margaret and her son Henry Tudor well enough in 1485,
and even if it was, its speed demonstrates how quickly mutually beneficial
alliances could be forged across enemy lines. Equally, John Howard’s wife,
Margaret, had married him within a year of being widowed. The alliance of
man and woman could supersede previous dynastic ties. If Anne and
Richard recognised each other as their best possible match, then why wait
to secure the union and the inheritance? It is anachronistic to suggest
otherwise, especially as Anne’s first marriage had been one of convenience.
Michael Hicks writes that this unseemly ‘precipitate haste’ was not ‘what
was expected’ at the time, accusing Anne of ‘cynical and calculating
materialism’. Yet this is underpinned by modern romantic sentiments and
cannot be supported as indecent ‘even by fifteenth century standards’.
Rather, the proliferation of such connections, which Hicks acknowledges,
cannot be ignored and is, in fact, probably the rule rather than the
exception. Even Clarence would seek a Burgundian match for himself less
than a year after Isabel’s death. If Anne did act with ‘cynical and calculating
materialism’, she was only embracing the best means of advancement, by
which most of her contemporaries had survived.
Yet some historians, like Michael Hicks, have suggested that Richard
and Anne should never have married. In Anne Neville (2007), he identifies a
technical glitch which he claims should have prevented the ceremony from
going ahead. According to the standards of the day, certain matches were
forbidden because those involved were within degrees of affinity or
relation, either through birth, existing marriages or spiritual connection.
Hicks has rightly identified that the need for papal dispensations has been
‘downplayed’ by historians who regard the process as a ‘curious
technicality’, a ‘necessary mechanism to remove technical obstacles to what
ought to have been perfectly acceptable’. The twenty-first-century mind
may not find it strange to accept that the dispensation was required at the
time but, rather, that like indulgences, it seems strange that a piece of paper
can somehow wipe these ‘impediments’ clean away. With the English
aristocracy drawn from such a limited gene pool, many matches required
this action, including Anne’s first marriage with Edward of Westminster and
Isabel’s union with Clarence. Then, as now, to wed without the necessary
paperwork created problems. For the late medieval couple, an illegal and
immoral marriage would not only be invalid in the eyes of the law, but any
children born to them would be illegitimate, with all the repercussions for
inheritance. In addition, both parties risked the very real medieval fear of
eternal damnation. However, this did not have to prevent such a match and
there were precedents of marriage between pairs of siblings. The
impediment would only have applied if Anne had had relations with
Clarence or Richard with Isabel. At any rate, it did not stop the Gloucesters.
As a deeply religious man, Richard would not have countenanced making
an invalid marriage; even with the ongoing dispute for Anne’s inheritance;
if further dispensations had been required, and there is no reason why they
should not have been issued, the couple did not need to pre-empt them. As
members of the aristocracy, they were well aware of the importance of
legitimacy: neither would have risked the possibility of their future
children’s inheritances being called into question.
Marriages contracted without the relevant paperwork did sometimes
attract attention but it was usually when one of the parties had a vested
interest in doing so. Among the Vatican papers, a case exists from Ireland in
August 1473, when an Ellen Cantwell petitioned that Richard Boteller
contracted a union with her, ‘solemnized it with banns and consummated
it’. The pair had children and lived together for year until it emerged that he
had previously been married to a close relative of his, named Cathelina
Boteller, ‘without having obtained papal dispensation’. The ruling upheld
Ellen as his legal wife.12 Similarly, in March 1485, John Yve of Derby and
Emmota, widow or ‘relict, of Roger Lyversiche’, were given a dispensation
to ‘remain in the marriage’ they had contracted ‘in ignorance that the said
Roger had been godfather to a child of the said John and the late Joan his
wife’. If this was not enough, John had also been godfather to Emmota’s
child by Roger, but the union received the stamp of legitimacy
‘notwithstanding the impediment of spiritual relationship arising’.13 The
papal records are full of such cases, contemporary with the alliance of the
Gloucesters. The minimum paperwork they required was the dispensation to
provide for the case of affinity stemming from the sibling tie between
Richard’s mother, Cecily Neville, and Anne’s grandfather, Richard, Duke of
Salisbury. The couple shared mutual ancestors in the same way that Anne
had with Edward of Lancaster, so a similar dispensation would have been
required to that of her first match. The paperwork was issued on 22 April
1472. It probably arrived in England around June.
It seems plausible that Anne and Richard’s marriage was celebrated
that summer. If there had been a large celebration, or if the occasion had
been marked at Westminster, a record would have survived, which suggests
they became man and wife in a small, comparatively private way. Richard
was the sixth and final of Cecily of York’s children to get married: she had
disapproved of Elizabeth Wydeville as a daughter-in-law but may have been
more receptive to Clarence’s match with Isabel once that union had been
accepted by the king. Her relationship with Anne was to develop into a
close one, so perhaps she now proved a friend to the young couple. She
may have offered her London home of Baynard’s Castle as a venue for their
marriage, where Edward had proclaimed himself king in 1461 and where
Richard would do in 1483. Later, Richard would rent Crosby Hall, or Place,
an impressive building of 1466 in Bishopsgate, but this did not happen until
well after the marriage, when it was still in the hands of Anne Crosby,
widow of its constructor. Shakespeare refers to it anachronistically in Act 1,
Scene 2 of Richard III, when Richard, still as Gloucester, urges Anne to
repair there after the burial of Henry VI although, in fact, he was not
resident at the property until the late 1470s at the earliest. Alternatively, the
church of St-Martin-le-Grand may have provided them with a convenient
location for a quick ceremony, or they may have travelled north together to
one of the chapels or churches associated with a York or Warwick property.
As they were to spend most of their married life at Middleham, the nearby
church of St Mary and St Alkeda, which Richard designated as collegiate in
1478, may have witnessed the nuptials. The wedding night would have been
spent wherever was convenient after the ceremony and was likely to have
been successfully consummated, as suggested dates for the arrival of the
couple’s son could place his conception early in the marriage. By the time
she was due to give birth, Anne was settled as Richard’s wife, Duchess of
Gloucester, in her childhood home of Middleham.

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9

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Richard’s Wife
1472–1483
With love founded on profit, pleasure and honesty
then shall true friendship reign among you.1
For the next decade, the rule of Edward IV went unchallenged. His queen,
Elizabeth Wydeville, bore five more children to add to the existing five and,
with the death of Henry VI and Queen Margaret effectively silenced, it
looked as if the Yorkist regime was finally secure. Richard and Anne
retreated to their estate at Middleham Castle, where they settled into the
roles of a great northern magnate and his wife. The seals from surviving
documents relating to Richard’s activities indicate that he spent most of his
time at the castle, which was their primary residence, although they also
owned Sheriff Hutton, which was useful for its proximity to York and a
number of other properties. Richard was to play an important role in
government during this time, ruling the Earl of Warwick’s old lands in the
name of his brother. He regularly attended Parliament, travelling south in
the autumn of 1472 for the first session since his marriage and leaving his
young wife behind, although they were probably reunited for their first
Christmas. Anne bore a son early in the marriage and established herself as
the head of the Ducal household, even deputising for her husband in his
absence. There was nothing to suggest the pair would not live out happy,
quiet lives, raising their child among the rolling hills of Anne’s childhood
home.
Today it is possible to get a sense of the majesty of the couple’s home,
even though the building stands in ruins. Middleham was entered across a
traditional defensive moat and drawbridge, either into the castle’s east
gatehouse or the gatehouse to the north. Both gave into a courtyard which
was flanked by the chapel and the massive keep, where a staircase led up to
the Great Hall. The chapel’s surviving masonry gives an idea of the extent
of the huge arches on third-story level and the little niches and pedestals
that would have contained statues and devotional items. The impressive
keep, with its reconstructed wooden steps, stood over the cellars, while the
inner chamber was warmed by the kitchens below. Wooden bridges linked
the upper levels to the garderobe or latrine block, the Lady’s Chamber and
Prince’s Tower, where Anne is rumoured to have given birth.
The arrival of Edward of Middleham has usually been placed around
1473 or 1474, although Charles Ross has put it as late as 1476. His case has
been based on the boy’s investiture as Prince of Wales in August 1483,
when he is described in one account as being around seven. Edward had
certainly arrived by April 1477, when a licence was granted to the manor
and church of Fulmere, Cambridge, for prayers to be said for ‘the king’s
brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester and Anne, his consort and Edward,
their son’.2 Then, in 1478, the boy was given Anne’s grandfather’s title of
Earl of Salisbury. Anne may well have conceived just days after her
wedding, as Isabel had, allowing for the first of the possible dates of
delivery in the late spring or summer of 1473, while The Peerage gives
December of that year as his birth month.
At seventeen, Anne was relatively young to become a mother, although
a number of her aristocratic contemporaries had already done so by that
age. When she was certain she was expecting, after the baby had quickened,
she would have prepared linen and furnished her chamber in the tower with
bed and cradle, making sure that draughts were excluded. Supplies would
have been ordered and it would have been scrubbed thoroughly clean,
perhaps even given a fresh coat of paint or plaster before her lying-in.
Possibly it was Anne’s pregnancy that prompted Richard to rescue his
mother-in-law from her confinement in Beaulieu Abbey that May, sending
Sir James Tyrell south to fetch her, even though Clarence was ‘not agreed’
to the arrangement. The Rous Roll stressed the countess’s proficiency in,
and fondness for, the birth chamber, so it is possible that she was present at
Middleham for the delivery itself. A midwife and local women would have
cared for Anne during those final months, as well as a physician, although
the period of confinement was exclusively female. As she was on her home
territory, there is a fair chance that some or all of them may have been part
of the household since her infancy, perhaps even the nurses and governess
of her own childhood. It is not impossible that Cecily Neville, Duchess of
York, travelled from London or the nearby Fotheringhay to attend her
daughter-in-law, with whom she was reputedly on good terms. As her time
approached, Anne took mass in the castle chapel and withdrew from the
household routine, sequestering herself in the tower to await her labour.
There was little to alleviate her pain beyond herbal remedies and the
panacea of devotional objects. The risks were high, gynaecological
understanding and standards of hygiene were poor, but Anne had youth on
her side. Her son arrived safely.
Baby Edward had his own household staff and routine within
Middleham Castle. The traditional association of one tower of the building
with him may well have a basis in fact, suggesting his location of birth and
the nursery that his parents established. A payment made in the Calendar
Rolls of 1484 sheds a little light on the identities of those who cared for
Edward, with an Isabel Burgh, wife of Henry, receiving from Richard ‘an
annuity of twenty marks’ for ‘good service’ to his family.3 The Burgh
family’s connection with Middleham went back even further. In 1471, an
indenture was made between Richard and Squire William Burgh, allotting
him an annual income from the nearby farm of Sleighholme in return for his
loyalty.4 Three years later, an Alice Burgh, described as Richard’s ‘beloved
gentlewoman’, was granted a £20 annuity for life from Middleham for
‘certain special causes and considerations’. Michael Hicks suggests the
Burghs were a local gentry family from Knaresborough, although the
connection may have been even closer. In fact, they may have been related
to the Yorks, if William’s family was a branch of the Irish de Burgh family,
from which Richard’s great-great-grandmother Elizabeth came. Hicks also
proposes that the ‘beloved gentlewoman’ with her ‘special causes’ was
Richard’s mistress.
The nursery was presided over by an Anne Idley, an Oxfordshire
woman who had been widowed around the time of Edward’s birth. When
she left her home, Drayton Manor, for Middleham, her stepson refused to
pay her the annuity they had agreed, leading Richard to intervene to ensure
the debt was settled. Ironically, Anne’s late husband Peter had written a
book of manners, or education, for the rearing of boys, called Instructions
to his Son. While Idley Junior may not have benefited from his advice,
Edward of Middleham did. The text advised a son to:
thy fadre and modre thow honoure
As thou wolde thy son shold to the…
And in rewarde it is geve vnto the
The blessyng of thy fadre and modre.5
It is tempting to consider the Instructions as a manual which the widow
Anne Idley and the duchess used with Edward. In it the boy was reminded
that his ‘fadre in age is, whiche now thy helpe is and favoure’, which
should serve as a reminder to negligent youth that ‘after warme youth
coometh age coolde’. Although many similar manuals existed, Edward’s
access to this text encourages speculation as to the lessons he was taught
and, by projection, the man and king he might have become. Idley
advocated discretion and consideration, keeping ‘within thi breste that may
be stille’ and not letting the tongue ‘clakke as a mille’. The avoidance of
unnecessary conflict and the giving of offence are considered important
facets of personal control:
A grete worde may cause affray
And causeth men ofte to be slain
Thus tonge is cause of moche pain.6
In fact, wariness and secrecy were a constant theme in the book: Idley
advocates a boy to ‘keep cloos all thing, as thombe in fiste’, and ‘lete
mekenes euer be thy Rayne’, as ‘many in this world wyde haue been cast
adoun for their grete pride’. Also, ‘while thy counceill is within thy breste,
it is sure as within a castell wall’, so a child should ‘keep thy tonge and
keep thy frende’. He should be lowly and honest to rich and poor, in both
word and deed, respectful of his masters and superiors. Idley warned that
games and japes were likely to backfire and that evil company could taint
and bring a boy into mischief. Friendship was the greatest treasure the
author could recommend, as more precious than silver or gold and that a
man without friends was a man without a soul. He should not be too hasty
in making promises to friends or foe, or too quick to take vengeance.
Equally, he should not ask for advice when he was angry as ‘it is harde than
the trouthe to feele’ nor accept it from those who were ‘greene’ or
inexperienced.7
Some of Richard III’s critics have accused him of being driven by
ambition and avarice, in the Shakespearean model. Idley’s manual contains
advice for the boy to ‘flee the counceill of a man covetous’, whose desire
for worldly goods could make a man ‘leese both lande and house’. Some of
the following lines sound almost like the Bard’s presentation of Edward’s
father:
He can shewe two facis in oon hode
Many a traitour is of his bloode
He causes other many theeves
A woman vicious in divers places
Men to be slayn in feldis and in greeves.8
Interestingly, as Edward’s father would find, Idley warns ‘a man may
somtyme wade so depe, it passeth his power to turn ageyn’. The young boy
at Middleham may have made a wise and cautious monarch, had he lived
long enough to put Idley’s advice into practice.9
If Edward arrived in the August of 1473, all three York brothers were
the fathers of children who were born that month. At Shrewsbury, the
queen, Elizabeth Wydeville, was delivered of Richard, Duke of York,
younger of the two Princes in the Tower, while Isabel, Duchess of Clarence,
had a daughter named Margaret, at Farleigh Hungerford Castle, in
Somerset. It is difficult to know to what extent the inheritance dispute
affected the relationship between the sisters; the battle had been fought
between Richard and Clarence but Anne and Isabel may never have been
fully reconciled. It is not even certain whether Anne visited London during
these years, perhaps keen to keep away from the Wydeville family, whom
her father had so disliked, and all the memories associated with his death.
Geography provided a neat divide too, with the marriage settlement
allotting land in the north to the Gloucesters while the Clarences were
favoured with property in London and in the South, including Warwick’s
town house, the Erber. When Isabel’s son Edward was born in February
1475, though, she was at Warwick, and less than a year later, she was
pregnant again, going into confinement at Tewkesbury, where she had
inherited the legacy of her maternal Despenser grandmother. She was
delivered of another boy on the sixth, whom she named Richard. The choice
may have been in memory of Warwick, although it might also indicate a
reconciliation with her sister and her husband. By extension, Gloucester
may even have been godfather.
Edward was to be Anne’s only child, although later miscarriages and
stillbirths cannot be ruled out. The documenter of her family, John Rous,
would not have been aware of them in his retreat at Guy’s Cliffe, near
Warwick, and such losses were not always recorded retrospectively. In this,
the Clare Roll that lists all Richard’s lost siblings is a rare and unusual
survival. No other record remains of the duchess experiencing any
unsuccessful pregnancies, or losing children at birth. As Lisa Hilton
suggests, Anne may have suffered from tuberculous endometritis, a
symptomless disease that causes infertility and possibly also affected her
mother and sister. Richard, however, was the acknowledged father of two
children, with rumours of a third. Their ages suggest they were the result of
liaisons conducted before his marriage, in the late 1460s or early 1470s. His
son, John of Pontefract, or Pomfret, may have been borne by the Alice
Burgh, who received a payment of 20 marks a year in 1474, according to
Michael Hicks. She was probably a local woman, related to Edward’s wet
nurse, Isabel Burgh, which may date their affair either to Richard’s late
teens or the early years of his marriage. However, it is more likely that
John’s conception probably occurred during Richard’s year-long residency
at Pomfret Castle, from April 1471, making the boy twelve when was
knighted at York in 1483. This would place his conception around the time
of Anne’s exile in France and marriage to Edward of Westminster, when
Richard himself was eighteen. His mother was likely to have been a woman
living in Pontefract, with whom the young duke sought solace. John was
possibly under the guardianship of Robert Brackenbury, who was with him
in 1484 when they stopped over in Canterbury, en route to Sandwich, and
dined on pike, leavened bread and wine. In March 1485, he was made
captain of Calais and there are indications that Richard would have
considered him his ‘spare heir’.
Richard also had a daughter, Katherine Plantagenet, who was married
between March and May 1484 to William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, son
of the Earl of Pembroke, Henry Tudor’s old guardian. Although matches
were made between aristocratic children, the illegitimate Katherine had
probably reached the minimum age of fourteen, dating her birth, also, to the
years preceding Richard’s marriage. As king, he financed her nuptials and
settled, on her and her heirs, lands worth 1,000 marks a year, although she
would die three years later, possibly in childbirth. A third potential son,
Richard Plantagenet, a stonemason of Eastwell, Kent, was reputed to have
been born in 1469 and died in 1550, although he is now widely believed not
to have been a son of York. The question of his identity was raised by the
local parish register and impressive altar tomb in the ruined Eastwell church
but if he was Richard’s son, the king never publicly acknowledged him.10
While the evidence suggests all Richard’s bastards were conceived before
the summer of 1472, it cannot be stated categorically that he was faithful to
Anne, nor would standards of the day necessarily have expected it. Most
famously, her sister-in-law, the beautiful Elizabeth Wydeville, had little
choice but to turn a blind eye while King Edward pursued a number of
other women.
It was not until after the birth of their son that Anne and Richard’s
marriage settlement was finalised, in 1474. Clarence had been loath to share
Isabel’s inheritance but the king ruled that Anne must receive her share of
her mother’s Beauchamp and Despenser legacy, so Parliament divided the
Countess of Warwick’s lands as if she were dead. Richard had liberated his
mother-in-law from her confinement at Beaulieu the previous year and the
forfeiture of her estates may have been her side of a mutually beneficial
bargain. In July 1484, he would allocate her a yearly pension of £80, but
ironically, she would go on to outlive both her daughters and sons-in-law.
The settlement allowed Richard to step into Warwick’s shoes and take over
the loyalty of his retainers even though Clarence was to keep the title.
Through his years under Warwick’s tutelage at Middleham, as well as his
birth at Fotheringhay, Richard was already known in the area. He took steps
to consolidate this by assuming the mantle of the old earl’s good lordship by
creating ties of patronage and clientage. On 13 May 1473, he was at
Nottingham to settle the long-running Percy–Neville feud, agreeing to be a
‘good and gracious lord’ to all those involved.11 The following July he was
at Alnwick Castle, where an indenture was drawn up between him and his
cousin, the newly reinstated 4th Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy. The
earl had previously been imprisoned and stripped of his title, which had
been granted to John Neville, following the death of his father, the third
Earl, at Towton. Now, Percy petitioned the king for his inheritance to be
returned, along with his estates. Richard oversaw this claim, making the
new earl promise to be his ‘faithfull servaunt … at all tymes’ and do him
‘lawfull and convenient’ service, as well as pledging his allegiance to
Edward IV and his heirs. In turn, Gloucester would be his ‘good and
faithful lorde’, to ‘sustain’ the earl in his rights and not challenge any grants
he may receive from the king or the activity or offices of his servants.12
From the early 1470s until his succession as king, Richard established
a network of obligations and endowments that made him the most powerful
magnate in the North. His birth and childhood at Fotheringhay Castle,
Northamptonshire, followed by an adolescence at Middleham, made him a
man shaped by and committed to his geographical area. He had this in
common with Anne and the pair would have travelled together in the
region, establishing order and being familiar faces at ceremonial occasions.
Sometimes Anne deputised for her husband, such as in 1475–76, when she
represented him at York during his absence in France. This may well have
involved arbitrating when it came to disputes and hearing minor court
cases; she certainly corresponded with the Mayor and Aldermen of York.
Once married, they made their permanent base at Middleham Castle and
Richard secured a licence from Edward so the town could hold fairs twice
yearly, as well as planning to endow a college there. Between them, they
also held a number of properties across the North. Sandal Castle in
Wakefield, West Yorkshire, had belonged to Richard’s father and witnessed
his death in 1460 but now Richard established it as another base of the
Council in the North. Situated overlooking the River Calder, his
improvements of the 1470s included a new tower, bakehouse and
brewhouse, although its associations with the death of his father and brother
cannot have been welcome.
In 1471, before marrying Anne, Richard had already claimed Penrith
Castle, south of Carlisle, newly built to be a defensive post against the
Scots, where he added a banqueting hall later that decade. The same year
saw him acquire the Norman Pontefract Castle, in Wakefield, which had
been his official residence for a year, as Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster.
With Warwick’s settlement of 1474 came the impressive Scarborough
Castle, overlooking the sea, which Richard and Anne visited in June 1484
and, in the following year, they gained Barnard Castle in County Durham.
Richmond Castle was also among their possessions, confiscated from the
Tudors, which the duke had been promised back in 1462, although it had
been granted instead to Clarence. The other main residence used by the
Gloucesters during this time was Sheriff Hutton, conveniently located about
10 miles to the north of York. A long-standing Neville property, it had
passed to Richard after the death of Richard Neville at the Battle of Barnet.
Anne was probably familiar with it from her childhood and, after her
marriage, was able to revisit it, along with the other Ducal properties.
Travelling between and overseeing the administration of all these estates
must have been almost a full-time occupation.
As Edward’s representative on the Council of the North, Richard was a
frequent visitor to York in the 1470s. The citizens presented him and his
councillors with bread, rabbits and wine at the session of 1475, although
this did not prevent the insurrection he returned to subdue in 1476, at the
head of 5,000 men. The citizens also sought his help to resolve conflict in
certain cases, such as the removal of salmon traps from the river, which was
proving a hazard for shipping, and a case of vandalism and theft at the Holy
Trinity Priory at Micklegate.13 He would not have been present when the
cathedral was reconsecrated after extensive repairs in July 1473 but both he
and Anne would have visited at some point in the following decade. It was
an important site of pilgrimage with its impressive Gothic transepts and
beautiful glazed Great East Window, fitted at the start of the fifteenth
century. Anne would have been accustomed to the bustling streets of
medieval York, with its markets, hospitals and religious orders. Together,
they may have joined the stream of pilgrims praying and making offerings
at the shrine of the city’s patron saint, William Fitzherbert. While visiting,
they would stay in the Augustinian priory, the smallest of the city’s religious
houses. Richard would create Friar William Berwyck ‘surveyour of our
works’ there in 1484; the friar would also be the recipient of boards left
over from the staging of pageants to welcome the new king and queen in
1483, which were used to build a closet.14
York was also an important centre for trade, where Anne would have
gone to make any special purchases, either in person or deputizing to a
servant. At that time, the city’s taxation records indicate the six main areas
of activity: wool, leather, metal, construction, victuals and specialist craft
workers. York was not what it had once been; the fifteenth century marked a
period of decline for it, as it did for many urban centres. However, it still
had the advantage of being a port, on the junction of the Rivers Ouse and
Foss, so foreign ships regularly brought supplies of luxury items such as the
rich spices that would have graced the dining table at Middleham. There
was also a high proportion of goldsmiths, producing ceremonial and
decorative items such as the Middleham jewel, an engraved, diamond-
shaped pendant of gold, set with a large sapphire, unearthed by a local
metal detectorist in 1985. Possibly a reliquary, an inscription on the border,
indicates it may have also been used as an amulet to protect against the
‘falling sickness’ or epilepsy. The jewel dates from Anne’s residency at the
castle but perhaps it is going too far to suggest that young Edward may
have suffered from this.
What constituted a good wife in the 1470s? One contemporary sermon
on wives and widows stated that love founded on profit, pleasure and
honesty would lead to true friendship and that ‘the spouse you have is the
spouse ordained for you by God’. There were practical jobs for a wife to
carry out, or oversee, as a woman in Anne’s position would have done.
These included the running of the kitchen, granary, storage and supply of
provisions, besides the usual sewing, knitting and spinning of domestic
clothing and linen. Marriage was advocated as a blessing for single men,
who were apparently incapable of keeping themselves clean and tidy,
sleeping ‘in a pit’, with the ‘sheets never changed until they are torn’.
Equally, the bachelor’s dinner hall floor was ‘littered with melon rinds,
bones and salad peelings’, his cloth was laid with little care and ‘dogs
lick[ed] his trenchers [bread plates] clean’.15 Luckily for Anne, a small
army of servants would have ensured she never had to bend down and pick
up the dropped bones!
Christine de Pisan also had advice for ‘young women living on
manors’ whose husbands might be absent on courtly or administrative
business. According to her 1405 Book of the City of Ladies, a routine was
essential; a lady should rise early and busy herself about the house, to set an
example to her employees. She should possess sufficient skills to be able to
cope with the household accounts, not being too polite to ask how much her
income is and how much revenue she gets from her lands. If her husband
was reluctant to disclose this, she must use ‘kind words and sensible
admonitions’ to encourage his confidence so that they could live within
their means. When it came to administration, a wife must be thoroughly
knowledgeable regarding land, law and rents, according to customs of the
region, to avoid falling victim to deception and so that she could best
represent her dependants. Good lordship was also, by extension, good
ladyship, otherwise, according to Pisan, ‘it would be a burden on the souls
of her and her husband until they make amends for it’. A good business
head must combine with empathy though, as the lady must be ‘more
compassionate than strict’ towards the poor. With Richard so often away for
sessions of the London Parliament and administering justice in the North,
Anne must have been trusted with the necessary information and managed
to run their home to his satisfaction.
Another source of wifely decorum, dating from the 1390s, the fictional
manual Le Ménagier de Paris, advised a wife to translate her obedience and
respect for her husband into practical care. She should keep him in clean
linen, for he will ‘go and come and journey hither and thither, in rain and
wind, in snow and hail, now drenched, now dry, now sweating, now
shivering, ill-fed, ill-lodged, ill-warmed and ill-bedded. And naught
harmeth him because he is upheld by the hope that he hath of the care that
his wife will take of him on his return.’ When he returned home, he should
‘be unshod before a good fire … have his feet washed and fresh shoes and
hose, to be given good food and drink’ before being ‘well bedded in white
sheets and night caps, well covered with good furs and assuaged with other
joys and desports, privities, loves and secrets of which I am silent’. There
should be no fleas in the bed, so the good wife would strew it with alder
leaves and bread soaked in glue and set a lighted candle in the middle to
draw them out. In the bedroom, she should hang up sprigs of fern to ward
off the flies or ‘tempteth them with a bowl of milk and hare’s gall’, failing
those, a raw onion and honey might just do the trick. According to the
narrator ‘husband’, such services make a man love and desire to return to
his home and see his goodwife. It was one of the strange anomalies of
Anne’s life that her position as a duchess could encompass the supervision
of pest removal and the dispensation of justice.
In June 1475, Edward launched a joint attack on France with the
Burgundians, with the intention of dividing the country between them.
Richard went with him, bringing 1,000 archers and over 100 men-at-arms,
mustered from his northern estates. However, the men were to see no
fighting. Terms were quickly reached with Louis XI, resulting in a large
pension for Edward and various gifts for Richard and Clarence, who dined
with the French king on 31 August. Far from being cowardly, as some later
writers have asserted, Edward had made sufficient gains without needing to
spill a drop of his men’s blood. Rather than being disappointed by this,
Gloucester would have been pleased to spare his men, who were Yorkshire
locals, known to him personally from the farms and estates surrounding his
own and probably indentured to him. Anne may have spent the intervening
time waiting in London, where the Gloucesters were reunited. She was
certainly there between 3 and 6 December, when payments to city
merchants were made in both their names. They could well have remained
in the capital to celebrate Christmas that year.
The couple were regular visitors to London, dictated by Richard’s seat
on the royal council. On 9 November 1477, he attended a feast hosted by
his nephew, Prince Edward, soon after his seventh birthday. On Clarence’s
demise, the following year, Richard and Anne came into possession again
of the Erber, Anne’s old childhood base in the capital. At some point
between 1475 and 1483, the Gloucesters leased Crosby Place, a house built
in 1466 in Bishopsgate. An extant floor plan shows how the building
encroached into the space occupied by the Priory of St Helen, comprising a
number of small chambers, rear garden, outer court, parlour and hall, which
had a carved ceiling and minstrels’ gallery. In disrepair by the twentieth
century, the house was demolished and rebuilt, brick by brick, in Chelsea in
1910. According to More, Richard held informal council meetings at
Crosby Place and it was there that his association with the Duke of
Buckingham developed. The Gloucesters would also have had access to the
London home of Richard’s mother, Cecily, at Baynard’s Castle and perhaps
Coldharbour House, which remained in the family after Clarence vacated it.
In July 1476, all three York brothers attended the re-interment of their
father Richard, Duke of York, and their brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, in
the mausoleum at the church of St Mary and All Saints, at their childhood
home of Fotheringhay. The family had come a long way since their deaths
at Wakefield over fifteen years earlier. The Chester Herald, Thomas
Whiting, described how Richard, dressed in mourning, followed the funeral
chariot, which was draped in black, up to the church door, where Edward
IV and Clarence were waiting. Their father’s body had been dressed in a
suitably regal ermine furred mantle and draped with cloth of gold. Anne
would have been waiting inside the church, alongside her mother-in-law
Cecily and sisters-in-law Elizabeth, the queen, and Isabel, then six months
pregnant. After masses were said, seven pieces of cloth of gold were laid to
make a cross upon his body before it was interred in the choir. His son,
Rutland, was buried in the Lady chapel. Around 5,000 local people came to
receive arms and the following banquet, held in the king’s pavilion, was
rumoured to have fed 20,000, for which the bill was in excess of £300. It
was probably the last time Anne and Isabel were together.
It was around Christmas 1476 when bad news arrived at Middleham.
Two and a half months after giving birth, Isabel, Duchess of Clarence, had
died at Tewkesbury, aged only twenty-five. The cause was probably
complications following childbirth; perhaps some sort of delayed post-
partum fever, an illness contracted during her period of recovery, or else
consumption. It is likely that her two surviving children, the 3½-year old
Margaret and Edward, not yet two, came into Anne’s care at some point
soon afterwards, perhaps at Sheriff Hutton, where Richard would establish a
‘household’ for them. If they did not arrive at once, they probably found
their way there soon after the bizarre events that overcame their father.
After his wife’s death, Clarence’s behaviour, always volatile and grandiose,
became increasingly strange. In April 1477, he ordered the arrest of
Ankarette Twynho, an elderly gentlewoman who had been in attendance on
his wife and whom he now claimed had poisoned her. Dragged from her
house, she was brought from Somerset to Warwick where, four days later,
she was tried and sentenced to death. The jury heard that she had
supposedly ‘given to the said Isabel a venomous drink of ale mixed with
poison, of which the latter sickened until the Sunday before Christmas’.
Considering that this draught had apparently been administered on 16
October, ten days after Isabel delivered her last child, it took a long time to
take effect. Regardless of this, the old woman was dead within three hours
of her conviction, being hanged from the city gallows.
After this incident, Clarence became convinced that none less than
King Edward himself was seeking to poison him ‘as a candle is consumed
by burning’. When three members of his household were arrested on the
charge of ‘imagining the king’s death’ and suffered the full fate of traitors at
Tyburn, Clarence disrupted a meeting of the Privy Council and tried to
petition them against his brother. For the king, who had forgiven his many
various acts of treachery, this was the final straw. That July, Edward
summoned him to Westminster, where he was charged with dangerous
conduct and sent to the Tower. He languished there until January, when a
Bill of Attainder accused him of plotting to usurp the throne and threatening
the lives of Edward’s family by spreading rumours that the king used
witchcraft and that he was illegitimate. On February 16, Clarence met his
end in the Tower. Richard was undeniably involved, as was every lord on
the council who heard the evidence and passed the Bill. As with the death of
Henry VI, the responsibility was ultimately Edward’s. The legend that
Clarence was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine was first mentioned by
Italian diplomat, Mancini, over a century before Shakespeare wrote his
version. Edward had been very forgiving when it came to Warwick and
Clarence’s treachery: now, the duke had simply pushed his luck too far.
The year of Clarence’s execution also saw Richard and Anne taking a
step closer to realising their religious plans. The role of a leading local
magnate and his wife had a crucial spiritual dimension, placing them at the
forefront of local worship and as important observers of holy days of the
Catholic calendar. The duke and duchess had a strong connection with their
local church, the twelfth-century St Mary and Alkelda at Middleham,
naming each of the stalls in turn after their favourite saints. Anne, no doubt,
played a part in this and their choices may reveal something further about
each of them, betraying a combination of military and domestic roles. As a
seasoned commander of the recent wars, Richard would have been drawn to
St George, England’s national saint and a prominent military figure who
was traditionally invoked before battle. Also, St Barbara, the patron saint of
artillerymen and explosives, along with St Catherine, was thought to protect
against sudden, unplanned death.
A more domestic note was struck by the inclusion of St Anthony,
patron of lost articles, and St Ninian, a fourth-century Scottish saint
associated with traditional healing miracles, including one where he healed
a deformed boy after appearing to his parents in a dream. Richard’s
connections with Durham may have led to the selection of St Cuthbert,
endowed with healing and insight, as well as for his charm and generosity
to the poor. In the early 1480s, the duke may have followed the long-
standing tradition of carrying the saint’s banner into battle against the Scots.
Also included was St Winifred, particularly associated with the
Beauchamps, which Anne F. Sutton suggests was at the personal devotion
and knowledge of Anne.16 During 1483–84, Caxton would publish a life of
St Winifred, possibly under Anne’s patronage.
The Gloucesters also chose St Catherine, a popular saint of the day; the
Cambridge college bearing her name was founded 1473. A princess, she had
a large female following and was considered an exemplar for intercession,
the mediatory role that was desirable in medieval wives, duchesses and
queens. Pisan and other contemporary writers held Catherine up as an
example of wifely virtue and a role model for young women. Like two
other women included in the Gloucester’s choices, she was esteemed for her
virginity. St Mary the Virgin was another traditional choice, with probably
the most powerful of all English saintly cults of the medieval period. She
was also a sympathetic figure to mothers although, interestingly, the
Gloucesters’ selection includes none of the other saints that were commonly
associated with conception and pregnancy. Anne can hardly have given up
hope of conceiving another child by 1478, at the age of only twenty-two.
The latest estimates for the arrival of Edward place his birth only a year
before this, so perhaps the spectre of infertility had not yet raised its head.
Richard planned to establish chantry colleges at Middleham and
Barnard Castle, where prayers would be said for the salvation of his kin and
kind. In 1478, he received a grant to elevate St Mary and Alkelda to the
status of college, with places for a dean and six secular priests. However,
his premature death curtailed the development of these. Through the period
of his marriage and into his reign, he was a regular visitor at Durham
Cathedral which, in 1474–76 and 1478–79, recorded various lengths of
cloth being required to furnish the table when he was fed. Anne would have
accompanied him at that time, or when he made offerings, as king, on 16
May, leaving behind a gift of a robe of blue velvet, embroidered with large
gold lions. In 1476, Anne became a lay sister of the eleventh-century
Durham Priory. The priory’s library had been considerably developed under
Prior John of Washington, who collected documents about the
establishment’s history and also extended and repaired the buildings. Both
the duke and duchess would also have been regulars at York Minster,
whenever they visited the city, attending mass and making donations.
Certainly Richard intended to be buried in York, for which purpose he
intended to found a chantry chapel, where, customarily, Anne would lie
beside him. When she predeceased him in 1485 though, those plans were
forgotten or abandoned.
Richard and Anne were staying at Sheriff Hutton in autumn 1480 when
they received news that the Scots were planning an invasion in retaliation
for a raiding party he had led across the border that summer. By November,
Parliament had made the decision to invade and preparations were begun
for a counter-attack, with Richard receiving £10,000 to provide wages for
his men. As the newly appointed Lieutenant of the North, it would have
fallen to Richard to lead the offensive but Edward toyed with the idea
himself, prolonging the actual invasion. In the meanwhile, a number of
small skirmishes continued along the borders, during one of which the
English unsuccessfully besieged the town of Berwick. Richard took an
active part in these conflicts, fighting alongside his childhood friends,
Richard Ratcliffe and Francis Lovell, whom he knighted for their loyal
services, near Berwick in 1482. When Edward finally relinquished the idea
of fronting the army, control fell to Richard. Here, the duke had another
opportunity to prove his military prowess as commander of a major
campaign. The brother and rival of King James III, the Duke of Albany, fled
to England in the spring of 1482 and signed a treaty at Fotheringhay that
June, supporting the invasion. In return, he would replace his brother as a
sympathetic Yorkist ruler. By mid-July, a force of 20,000 men, largely
gathered from the North, crossed the border under Richard’s leadership.
Berwick opened its gates, James III was taken prisoner and the English
force occupied Edinburgh. At the point of success, Albany showed
reluctance to assume the throne and Richard made him swear an oath of
loyalty. The armies then returned to the border and disbanded. It was hardly
an invasion that covered the duke in glory, even less successful than
Edward’s 1475 French offensive. Richard would have stopped over at
Middleham on the way back, before proceeding to Westminster, to give his
account of events to the Parliament that met that autumn. Anne must have
been relieved to see him home, safe and sound. Perhaps she travelled south
with him, to spend Christmas 1482 in the capital.
Some sources, like Croyland, claim the court was at Westminster for
the festive season, while others place it at the extensively rebuilt Eltham
Palace, where 2,000 people were fed daily by the new kitchens. According
to Croyland, the forty-year-old portly Edward was still cutting a fine figure,
‘frequently appearing clad in a great variety of most costly garments, of
quite a different cut to those which had been usually seen heitherto [sic] in
our kingdom’. Always interested in fashion, the ‘full and hanging’ robe
sleeves, ‘greatly resembling a monk’s frock’ and lined with fur, may have
been the latest Burgundian look. The chronicler was not present, but it
sounded as if he had spoken with someone who had been, who described
the outfit as giving the ‘elegant’ king ‘a new and distinguished air’. The
phrase ‘you might have seen, in those days’, reminds us this was written
retrospectively, after Edward’s decease; in places there is a wistful nostalgia
for the old regime, with ‘the royal court presenting no other appearance
than such as fully befits a most mighty kingdom, filled with riches and with
people of almost all nations’.
Richard was in London for the session of Edward’s last Parliament,
which commenced sitting on 20 January 1483, in order to discuss the wars
against Scotland and France. Taxes were granted for the protection of the
realm, making an invasion of some kind appear inevitable. Following the
Scottish campaign, the young duke could anticipate leading it, perhaps at
the head of the 4,000 archers that were offered to Brittany in defence
against France. Richard left London towards the end of February and
arrived at York on 6 March. Presumably he was back at Middleham with
Anne for Easter, which fell three weeks later. As events transpired, there
would be no offensive against the French or Scots. The conquest of the
English throne would be achieved from within.

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10

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Crisis
Summer 1483
We largely shewed our trewe entente and mynde in al such thinges1
Three months in the spring and early summer of 1483 were to propel Anne
from her quiet Middleham estate back into the centre of national politics.
While the events following the death of Edward IV and accession of his
son, the twelve-year-old Edward V, have been well documented and
analysed, Anne’s role in them is less clear. Historians are divided over her
husband’s intentions and motivation but Anne’s understanding of the
process which made her queen is just as mystifying. Perhaps, at the time,
she was not required to understand. However, it remains that Anne did
accept the throne, whether or not the exercise of personal choice lay within
in her control. Some may see her as complicit in all that Richard did, while
others may judge that she was carried along on the wave of his changes.
Did she, for example, know what happened to the Princes in the Tower?
Did she wonder about the death of William Hastings? How did she resolve
such questions in her mind, or in discussion with Richard? Should she share
any of the ‘guilt’ that tradition has ascribed to her husband?
Anne was not in London for the months of April and May. She
remained in Yorkshire after Richard had left and did not arrive until three
weeks before he was proclaimed king and she, by extension, queen. Much
had changed during that time, possibly including her husband’s goals. How
did he explain to her that her position was about to alter so drastically? It is
impossible to determine how she viewed his actions, without ascertaining
exactly what those actions were. Many interpretations of that summer’s
events assume that the steps Richard took were ‘wrong’, and that his
acquisition of the throne was an act of ‘usurpation’. This cannot simply be
accepted without further exploration. To state the obvious, while Richard’s
behaviour may be analysed, his motivation can only be cause for
speculation. His potential subterfuge makes it difficult to pinpoint the
turning points of his ambition, yet secrecy had been expedient to the
kingmaking activities of his mentor Warwick and those of both Richard’s
elder brothers. Anointed monarchs and teenage princes had lost their lives
in the dynastic struggle: enemies were executed without legal trial and
brother turned against brother. Richard’s coup must be considered in the
context of their struggles for control of the country: were any of his
‘crimes’ significantly worse than theirs?
Ultimately, one question comes to dominate all others: was Richard
motivated by personal ambition or a sense of genuine entitlement? Was he a
ruthless opportunist who employed violence and exploited the weak in
order to seize the throne? Or, with an unblemished record of loyalty to his
brother, did his belief in his nephew’s illegitimacy dictate the changing
course of his duty? His actions in 1483 appear to be out of character, unless
he genuinely believed he was in danger from a Wydeville plot. Was he
driven by the need to remove his enemies and prevent a return to the
instability of civil war, or he had previously concealed his true nature? Even
then, we cannot know how far the husband confided in his wife; how much
was explicitly stated and how much was understood? Only one person knew
the extent to which Richard shared his motives with Anne; that was Richard
himself.
For Anne, it all started on 16 April 1483. The spring flowers were
already starting to brighten the surrounding fields and buds on the trees
were bursting into bloom when a letter arrived at Middleham Castle. King
Edward was dead. In fact, he had been dead for a week, soon to be buried in
the splendid chapel he had left unfinished at Windsor. It was only Lord
Hastings, veteran of so many battles at Richard’s side, who had chosen to
write to him and break the news. Official word had still to come from
Westminster, although arrangements were being discussed for the
succession of Richard’s nephew, the twelve-year-old Edward. It has been
suggested that the Gloucesters were surprised to learn that the king had died
on 9 April, a week ago, yet word had not reached his son in Ludlow until 14
April. Considering that the distance from Ludlow to the capital is around
150 miles, in comparison with the 240 miles from Westminster to
Middleham, the extra two days delay, for even the fastest of horseback
riders, appears reasonable. There may have been no intention to exclude
Richard. More unexpectedly, it transpired that, on his deathbed, Edward had
named his brother as Protector. As the son of Elizabeth Wydeville, raised in
Ludlow Castle by her brother Anthony, the young prince would
automatically have come under the control of his Wydeville relations. In the
days leading up to his death, knowing that his end was imminent, the king
had attempted to bring about a reconciliation between his unpopular
Wydeville in-laws and other members of his household, including his close
friend Hastings. For Edward to have entrusted his son to Richard spoke
volumes about his concerns regarding the influence of the queen’s family.
As the final surviving son of that Yorkist generation, Richard would have at
once risen to the challenge of defending the inheritance.
The death of Edward IV had been unexpected. At forty-one, he was no
longer the youthful, athletic figure who had dominated the battlefield and
years of indulgence had significantly increased his girth. At some point in
late March or early April, according to Mancini, the king had been fishing
on the Thames, after which he had caught a cold. This was unremarkable in
itself, as the river was the main thoroughfare of London and frequently used
for travel by the royal family. When he returned home, though, the illness
worsened and he took to his bed. A number of suggestions have been made
regarding the causes of his decline and death. The French chronicler
Thomas Basin stated that the king had upset his digestive system by eating
a surfeit of fruits and vegetables. Commines believed it was due to
Edward’s disappointment regarding the breakup of the intended marriage
between his daughter Elizabeth and the Dauphin, but this had happened the
previous year. Virgil described the illness as an ‘unknown disease’ and Dr
John Rae, in 1913, suggested pneumonia because contemporaries say that
Edward lay on his left side. Commines also said that Edward had a stroke.
Whatever claimed his life, it set in motion a chain of extraordinary events.
It is interesting that a false report of Edward’s death had already
reached York on 6 April, ‘in so authentic a form that no doubt was
entertained of its truth’.2 At this point, there were three days still to go
before Edward actually died. According to the municipal records, the mayor
received a message from the dean on a Sunday, inviting him and the
aldermen to attend a dirge on Monday in the minster and a requiem service
on Tuesday. However, a mistake in the dates or the translation must have
occurred, as 9 April fell on a Monday that year, so if the message was
dispatched on a Sunday, it must have been on Sunday 8 April. This is
probably not as sinister as has been suggested and may have been an
exaggerated report of his illness or else a result of the fifteenth century’s
imperfect communication networks. On 10 April, Edward’s body was
carried to the chapel of St Stephen for eight days of obsequies, after which
it was taken to St George’s at Windsor and buried on 19 April. It was not
until after this that Richard ordered a funeral mass to be performed in York
Minster, on 21 April. The eighteenth-century Ricardian and Prime Minister,
Horace Walpole, wondered whether Richard would have ‘loitered in York’
if he intended to seize the throne; in fact, Gloucester was already on his way
south.
Richard had only ‘loitered’ a little in the North, awaiting official
instructions and planning his next move. Hastings’ letter probably informed
him that Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, had been instructed to bring the
young Edward V to London by 1 May. Although it was essential to secure
the safety of the new king, for Richard, this may have confirmed Edward’s
last-minute concerns of Wydeville domination. The Coronation of Edward
V was being treated as a matter of urgency, perhaps in order to minimise
Gloucester’s power, which was commensurate only with the period of
preparation. Once the crown had been placed on his nephew’s head,
Richard would be marginalised, then no one would be able to challenge the
Wydeville hegemony. Surely it is not unreasonable to speculate that, at this
point, he and Anne discussed the matter and she had given her opinions on
the clan which her father had so loathed. The Wydevilles had been one of
the key reasons for the rift that had opened between Warwick and Edward
IV, so Anne had little reason to love them. Still waiting at Middleham,
Richard wrote letters of condolence to the London Council, to the queen
and to her brother, Earl Rivers, who had been the boy’s guardian at Ludlow
Castle. Then it was a matter of waiting for the reply. Hastings had urged
him to travel south and ‘secure the person’ of the new king but no official
word had come from Westminster. The Gloucesters were both still in
Yorkshire while the old king’s funeral went ahead, which is perhaps what
prompted Richard to arrange a service in York, for 21 April, as a comment
on his exclusion. Then another letter arrived, from the Duke of
Buckingham, who also bore ill will to the Wydevilles, having been forced
into a child marriage with the queen’s sister. Buckingham offered his troops
and services, so Richard agreed to meet him on the march south to join with
the king’s procession from Ludlow to London.
First, though, Richard went to York for the ceremony. As his duchess,
and Edward’s sister-in-law, Anne must have gone with him to pay her
respects. Only ill health would have excused her from missing such an
event. On 20 April they rode out from Middleham, accompanied by 300
men, and the following day Richard led the nobility of the region in
swearing an oath of loyalty to Edward V. Anne would also have pledged her
loyalty. Two days later, Richard left York for Nottingham, where he planned
to meet Buckingham and travel south. Anne probably returned to
Middleham, to pack up her household in advance of her journey to London.
What exactly had Richard confided in her at this point? What exactly was
there to confide? Based on his behaviour, purely on external appearances,
she would have anticipated attending the imminent Coronation of her
nephew, Edward V, not that of her husband and herself. Richard’s private
intentions can only be a matter of speculation at this point. If he had already
conceived any doubts concerning the future rule of Edward V, one
indication of this may have been the size of the army he raised. Elizabeth
Wydeville had agreed to the council’s suggestion that her son be
accompanied to London by a minimal number of troops; by planning to
intercept them with more men, Richard must have either considered this to
be inadequate provision or already intended to overrule them. At
Middleham, packing up the necessaries for her journey, how long did Anne
anticipate remaining in London? By the time she arrived in the capital, on 5
June, her husband’s motives had already been called into question.
When Anne arrived in London, she and Richard retired to Crosby
Place. No doubt she was soon apprised of recent events – if he had not
already communicated with her by letter – and must have quickly grasped
what the implications were for her future. Richard explained how he had
met with Buckingham on the way to London. There, something passed
between them that either changed or confirmed his attitudes towards the
Wydevilles. Perhaps he became convinced they were attempting to prevent
him from accepting his role as Protector or else minimise his influence.
Perhaps their vision for Edward V’s reign did not contain him. After
spending what appeared to be a routine evening with Anthony Wydeville,
Earl Rivers, Richard had ordered his arrest the following morning. He had
then intercepted and assumed charge of the royal procession, which he
conducted to the Bishop of London’s Palace, summoning key citizens to
swear loyalty to his nephew. Elizabeth Wydeville had fled into sanctuary
with her children, which publicly demonstrated the depths of her mistrust of
her brother-in-law. There is little indication, though, that any bad blood had
existed between the queen’s family and Gloucester prior to this. In fact, it
was with Anne’s family that they had, historically, been at odds. As the wife
of the Protector, the Wydevilles may have feared she would seek to restrict
their control of the boy king, as vengeance for her father’s death, or even to
seek to punish those she blamed.
Soon after arriving in London, Richard had met with the council,
which had voted to move Edward V to the Tower of London and had
confirmed his sovereign power, ‘just like another king’. The peers of the
realm had been summoned to the capital for 18 June, in plenty of time for
the Coronation, which was scheduled for four days later. It was then that
Richard had begun to meet with various councillors at Crosby Place, where
he was now imparting this news to Anne, while the others lords continued
to meet at Westminster. Did Richard take this step because he distrusted
some of the members, or was he trying to cause a division among them? It
was probably both, and, unsurprisingly, when the secret meetings became
public knowledge, they aroused suspicion. Paul Kendall described how
‘unease, restlessness, and doubt’ gathered ‘like mist at Westminster and the
Tower. It is a thing of dark corners and the rustle of whispers, insubstantial
but pervasive.’ To discover Richard’s intentions, Edward IV’s old friend,
Lord Hastings, had employed his lawyer, William Catesby, to attend his
Crosby Place meetings and report the content to him. Some had even begun
to suspect Gloucester of conspiring against the king and doubted his
trustworthiness. A surviving fragment from the commonplace book of a
London merchant indicated that ‘divers imagined the death of the Duke of
Gloucester’, and Hastings’ name was rumoured to be among them. In turn,
Richard had used Buckingham to test Hastings’ loyalty and, according to
More, had discovered that the lord would accept Richard as Protector, but
not as king, responding ‘with terrible words’. This time-scale implies that
Richard had already made his decision to seize the throne before Anne
arrived in London. The explanation her husband gave her on the night of 5
June 1483 was determined by the nature of their marriage. If it was a strong
partnership, equal as far as the times permitted, Richard would have been
open with her as far as he could. If not, it may be going too far even to
suggest he confided in her at all. Her presence and silent complicity may
have simply been all that he required. But, if he actually told her, at this
point, that he intended to become king, what impression did that make on
her? Did she question his right? Or did she, at once, set her mind to helping
overcome certain obstacles? Unfortunately, it is impossible now to know.
Anne was at Crosby House during the dramatic events of June 1483.
About a week after her arrival, Lord Hastings paid the price of his loyalty to
Edward V. As late as 20 May, he had been confirmed in his role of
Chancellor and Richard, as Protector, had promoted him to Master of the
Mint. There is no doubt that Richard was very good at ‘keeping his powder
dry’, thus it was a surprise to Hastings when, summoned to the council
meeting of 13 June, he found himself accompanied by an armed knight. The
meeting was most famously portrayed by More and Shakespeare but the
truth behind that morning’s strange events is still baffling. At 9 o’clock, a
smiling Richard entered the Tower, where his councillors were assembled.
In conversation, he remarked that he would like some strawberries from
Bishop Morton’s Holborn garden, which were sent for. He soon left, but
returned at about 10.30 a.m., his manner completely changed, claiming that
witchcraft had been used against him and ordering the arrest of Hastings,
Morton and Rotherham, Bishop of York. All sources agree that Hastings
was executed within minutes; the Great Chronicle stated that it was carried
out ‘without any process of law or lawful examination’, while Croyland
said that innocent blood had been shed, ‘and in this way, without justice or
judgement, the three strongest supporters of the new king were removed’.
Explanations for these events vary. On one side, Richard is accused of
inventing a plot against himself in order to remove a man who would block
his route to the throne. Hastings had employed spies against Richard and
would not support his claim over that of Edward V. Therefore, Hastings had
to go.
However, Richard may well have genuinely believed that witchcraft
was being used against him. During the course of the morning, he began to
feel its effects. It is possible that the dish of strawberries, brought from
Morton’s garden, produced a genuine allergic reaction which caused
Richard’s arm to wither and other physical symptoms to develop. Bizarre as
this may sound, allergic reactions caused by the proteins in strawberries can
produce tingling limbs, breathing difficulties and red, puffy, itchy skin.
These symptoms usually occur within two hours of eating the fruit,
beginning with swelling of the lips and tingling in the mouth. More’s
account has Richard fretting, frowning and ‘knawing at his lips’. Food
allergies can emerge even after an individual has eaten a particular dish for
years. When the body’s tolerance level is reached, the symptoms are
triggered. Strawberries would have been seasonal, and therefore a rare treat.
It is quite possible that Richard had a latent allergy to the fruit which
emerged that June, causing the sudden physical responses in his body which
he could only explain as witchcraft. Fifteenth-century people of all classes
were deeply superstitious and believed that magic could be used to good
and evil ends. Elizabeth Wydeville and her mother had both been accused
and cleared of sorcery in 1469–70. More recently, Clarence had claimed
that his brother Edward was conspiring against him through the medium of
magic. It cannot be ruled out that, anticipating attacks from the Wydeville
clan, Richard believed himself to have fallen victim to poison or
enchantment. He stated that witchcraft had ‘wasted his body’. Perhaps he
genuinely believed it had. The usual targets for such accusations were
female. Richard had pointed the finger at Morton, Hastings and his
mistress, Jane Shore, the one-time love of Edward IV. However, only
Hastings lost his life.
The intended day of Edward V’s Coronation came and went. Soon
afterwards, Dr Ralph Shaa, brother of the Mayor of London, delivered the
sermon ‘Bastard Slips Should Not Take Deep Root’ at St Paul’s Cross. As
relayed by Mancini, the word spread across London that the ‘progeny of
King Edward should be instantly eradicated, for neither had he been a
legitimate king, nor could his issue be so’. Anne may have accompanied her
husband and Buckingham to St Paul’s Cross to hear the sermon and her
mother-in-law, Cecily Neville, may even have been with them, having come
to London to attend her grandson’s Coronation. How did she react, when
forced to choose between her son and her grandson? Were the women
surprised at what they heard or was this a secret from the family closet? It
was certainly in Richard’s interests that Edward V should be removed; the
boy would have reached his majority within a few years and may have
sought revenge on Richard for the death of his guardian Earl Rivers and
other uncle, John Grey. One person with whom Richard had been
consulting in his private meetings at Crosby Place was Richard Stillington,
Bishop of Bath and Wells. Some time that May or June, the bishop had
‘unburdened his conscience’ to Richard, stating that in the early 1460s,
Edward IV had been pre-contracted, if not actually already married, to
Dame Eleanor Butler, née Talbot, who was now conveniently dead. The
result was the legal confirmation that Edward’s children could not inherit
the throne: ‘All the issue and children of the said king … be bastards and
unable … to claim anything by inheritance.’ This made Richard the next
direct Yorkist heir.
Most subsequent evaluations of Richard’s character have rested on the
integrity of Bishop Stillington. The credibility of his word determines
whether Richard is seen as a dutiful son of York or a manipulative and
murdering usurper. The report of Edward’s pre-contract was in keeping with
what was known of his character; after all, he had married Elizabeth
Wydeville in secret and bedded many other women on the basis of
unsubstantiated promises. If Stillington had held on to this information for
twenty years, what prompted him to publicise it now? There was another
possible source though, dating from a more recent scandal. The bishop had
been closely associated with the Duke of Clarence, even spending time with
him in prison in 1478. During this time, the duke may have passed on this
information, either as a genuine family secret, or part of his unstable
accusations against his brother. Ironically, then, Richard’s replacement of
Edward’s heirs was perpetrated by Clarence from beyond the grave. On the
other hand, the whole story may have been concocted one night at Crosby
House. Richard and Stillington had hit upon the single weapon that would
bring the late king’s family down, by exploiting the vices in which Edward
was known to have indulged. The story had credibility. Did Anne play any
part in it? Was she tucked up in bed asleep or sitting at the fireside, listening
as they plotted? Did she contribute any fine details? If the story was an
invention, then it was on the bishop’s shoulders that the unlawful reign of
Richard and Anne would rest.
After Dr Shaa’s sermon, events moved quickly. Buckingham spoke for
an hour and a half to the Mayor and Aldermen of London at the Guildhall,
explaining the pre-contract and stating that kingship was ‘no child’s office’.
When the council was recalled to Westminster, Mancini relates that it was
still in the expectation of Edward V’s imminent Coronation. Instead they
met Buckingham, armed with three reasons for the invalidity of Edward’s
marriage to Elizabeth Wydeville. Firstly, it had been made without the
consent of the lords and through witchcraft; secondly, it was conducted in
private without the edition of banns and, finally, it was bigamous, since
Edward had already made a pre-contract with another woman. There were
also rumours, once employed by Warwick, that Edward IV himself had
been the result of an affair his mother had conducted with a Norman archer.
The dates provided to support such a view are not conclusive, given the
variation in individual terms of pregnancy and there seems little reason to
suspect that a woman of Cecily’s breeding and stature would jeopardise her
family bloodline.
Now Richard moved against the Wydevilles. At Pontefract, Richard
Ratcliffe, his friend from Middleham days, had assembled Elizabeth
Wydeville’s brother, Earl Rivers, her son Thomas Grey and Thomas
Vaughan, loyal to Edward V. On 24 June, they were condemned to death,
without trial, for plotting against Richard. None were allowed to speak in
their defence and they were executed the following day, to the universal
condemnation of all contemporary writers. The Croyland chronicler
observes that ‘innocent blood … was shed on the occasion of this sudden
change’. According to Rous, they were ‘unjustly and cruelly put to death,
being lamented by everyone, and innocent of the deed for which they were
charged’. Thomas More states that their only fault was in being ‘good men,
too true to the king’, while Polydore Vergil says that their only offence was
to stand in the way of Richard’s ambitions. This act remains hard to defend.
Richard may have believed in a plot against him, or else, by this point, the
rapid removal of his enemies was expedient under any charge.
Anne was probably at Richard’s side in Barnard Castle, the home of
her mother-in-law, when Parliament came to petition him to accept the
throne. Once again, queenship was within her reach, closer than it had ever
been. Was she excited by this? Back in 1471, she had played a critical role
in her father’s royal ambitions. Her marriage to Edward of Westminster had
made her Princess of Wales and could have resulted in her rule at
Westminster. Did she now scheme along with her husband in order to
achieve the same goal? She had no love for the Wydevilles, whose father
had been her deadly enemy, and may have viewed them as the justifiable
casualties of a three-decade-long war. Did she see that moment in June
1483 as the culmination of everything her father had worked for? Was she
even impatient with her husband? Richard did not accept the throne at once.
When the lords returned the next day, he ‘reluctantly’ agreed to become
king. Did Anne ‘reluctantly’ celebrate becoming queen? In reality, was she
closer to a Lady Macbeth figure than the pathetic pawn some novels have
portrayed her as?
The version of events presented by later chroniclers upholds the
villainous, murderous Richard who is familiar from Shakespeare’s play.
Like the Bard, the majority of writers date his ambition from the decease of
Edward and attribute it to the classic character flaws of tragedy. Vergil
wrote that, as soon as the news reached Middleham, he ‘began to be
kyndlyd with an ardent desyre of soveraigntie’ and ‘determynyd to assay his
purposyd spytefull practyse by subtyltie and sleight’. Maybe as early as the
middle of April, Richard and Anne were already plotting their route to the
throne, considering whom they might trust and who needed to be removed.
According to true dramatic convention, Vergil’s Richard’s ‘owne frawd,
wicked and mischievous intent, his owne desperate boldenes, maketh him
frantyke and mad’. Perhaps Anne was also consumed by this driving
ambition, seeing a final chance to achieve what her father had aimed at for
so long. The Croyland chronicler was in no doubt regarding the identity of
‘the sole mover at London of such seditious and disgraceful proceedings’,
but had these moves already been carefully rehearsed at Middleham?
Fabyan emphasised Richard’s duplicity, as he was able to behave ‘so
covertly in al his matters, that fewe understode his wicked purpose’,
although who else but Anne would have numbered among those ‘few’? This
view of Richard is well known and hardly needs repeating. As an
interpretation of his wife, Lady Macbeth-like, it is fairly unsubstantiated,
although motivation and behaviour are hard to substantiate when sources do
not survive or never existed. As his wife, Anne’s duty was to support
Richard in all his endeavours, even if they ran contrary to legal or moral
codes. Still the question remains of whether these ‘crimes’ should be
considered as such. If Richard initially acted in good faith and was loyal to
his nephews before receiving news of their illegitimacy, then he committed
no crime. If he responded to a perceived threat from the Wydevilles, again,
no law was broken. It would have been reprehensible if he had invented the
witchcraft and pre-contract stories in order to bring about his enemies’ swift
defeat. Fabricating these pieces of ‘evidence’ to condemn others for his own
personal advancement would be criminal indeed. If Vergil is correct
regarding his ambition, then his actions in the summer of 1483 did
constitute a usurpation. Yet if Edward’s marriage had been invalid, perhaps
a usurpation was exactly what was needed.
This was nothing new. Usurpation had been a vital skill in the
Kingmaker’s repertoire. The most recent precedent had been in 1399, when
Henry of Bolingbroke usurped and probably murdered his cousin, Richard
II, giving rise to decades of conflict. In Gloucester’s lifetime, his own
brother and Warwick had deposed Henry VI, before the earl tipped Edward
off the throne and reinstated the Lancastrian, followed by the Yorkist
restoration and Henry VI’s death. If Richard had usurped a fully grown
man, he would not have been the target of such contemporary and
subsequent opprobrium. However, the two obstacles that blocked his path to
the throne were children. His nephews, Edward and Richard, were aged
twelve and nine in June 1483 when they disappeared in the Tower. What did
Anne feel about this? A twenty-first-century response may begin with
Anne’s motherhood: surely, as a mother she could not condone the
incarceration and murder of her nephews, barely older than her own boy?
Yet this is to transpose modern values onto past events, to apply culturally
constructed stereotypes, such as the ‘mother’, to an ambitiously driven
aristocracy, with a unique standard of conduct. It does not follow that a
royal mother of the fifteenth century would behave in the same way as a
twenty-first-century ‘mum’: the acquiescence of Elizabeth Wydeville to
Richard III demonstrates that. Perhaps Richard told Anne some acceptable
lie regarding the boys; perhaps she chose to believe it. Maybe she guessed
at their fate, or was even fully aware of it. Just as Margaret of Anjou fought
like a lioness for the rights of her son, Anne may have recognised that
certain obstacles had to be removed if her own boy was to become king.
This possibility may be difficult to accept, yet it would make Anne a typical
queen of her day. She cannot be retrospectively assigned the scruples of a
modern woman in order to please modern sensibilities.
Rumours of the boys’ death began to spread almost at once. While
gossip is notoriously unreliable, it can give an indication of popular beliefs
and opinions about the king and whether people believed him capable of the
act. Mancini, author of The Occupation of the Throne by Richard III, may
have got some of his information from a fellow Italian, Dr Argentine, who
was in attendance on Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower. According
to his account, the elder boy ‘like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought
remission of his sins daily, in confession and penance because he believed
that death was facing him’. This was also believed by Fabyan, who wrote
that ‘King Richard … put to death the two children of King Edward, for
which cause he lost the hearts of the people’, and was repeated in
Weinreich’s Danzig chronicle of 1483 and the speech of Guillaume de
Rochefort at Tours in January 1484. Later, Croyland would write that ‘the
people of the south and … west … began to murmur greatly, to form
assemblies … many were in secret, some quite open’ about the princes’ fate.
More described people weeping in the streets when they thought of Edward
V and his brother. One easy way to dispel these reports would have been for
Richard to produce the princes and prove his innocence. Alternatively, he
could have claimed they had died that summer or autumn from some illness
or accident, which would at least have made their deaths palatable, even if it
had been a lie. Given the extent of Richard’s intelligence and abilities, it is
surprising that he failed to address this directly. However, he cannot have
known the sympathy that the boys would evince and may have assumed
that a general acceptance of their illegitimacy would quash public interest in
their fates. In this he was mistaken.
No modern court of law would convict Richard of killing the Princes
in the Tower. The jury in a televised mock trial of 1984, examining the
evidence presented by expert witnesses, returned a verdict of not guilty. As
there is no conclusive source to ascertain his guilt or innocence, the balance
of probabilities suggests they met their end soon after their last sighting, in
the late summer. It seems most likely that they were put to death in the
Tower during Richard’s absence in the North; perhaps he deliberately
removed himself from the capital for that purpose. It is also possible that he
did not issue a direct order but that a servant of his understood that the boys
needed to be dispatched and acted independently, presenting the king on his
return with a fait accompli. Richard’s servant, Sir James Tyrell, was at the
Royal Wardrobe at the start of September, to collect clothing for Edward’s
investiture and, according to More, made a confession in 1501, perhaps
under torture, that he was responsible for their deaths.
The investiture of his son Edward as Prince of Wales on 8 September
was certainly seen by Elizabeth Wydeville as incontrovertible proof that her
sons had been killed. More describes her grief when the news was broken to
her in his usual melodramatic terms, yet the elevation of Richard’s son was
fairly decisive. There is no doubt that the innocent boys’ murders were
tragic. It would be wonderful to believe in one of the romantic tales of their
escape and for decisive evidence to prove they lived long, fulfilled lives in
some remote European court. Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, the
pretenders to the throne who emerged under the reign of Henry Tudor, were
not of the royal blood. They both made verifiable confessions of their own
humble origins and the circumstances that propelled them into the public
eye. Those contemporary heads of state who welcomed and ‘recognised’
them did so out of political expediency and personal inclination. No
convincing report of the princes’ survival has ever been found so it would
seem most likely that they died. The box of bones uncovered under the
staircase of the White Tower in 1674 probably represents their hasty burial.
The blame lies with Richard. Whatever his role in their demise, he was their
king, uncle and protector, but he failed to protect them. As king, having
given the orders for their incarceration, he had ultimate responsibility for
their welfare, whether he gave the orders personally or not. If he ordered
their deaths, Anne probably knew it.

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11

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Queen
July–December 1483
Kingdoms are but cares,
State is devoid of stay,
Riches are ready snares,
And hasten to decay.
Pleasure is a privy prick
Which vice doth still provoke;
Pomp, imprompt; and fame, a flame;
Power, a smoldering smoke,
Who meaneth to remove the rock
Out of the slimy mud,
Shall mire himself, and hardly ’scape
The swelling of the flood.1
Less than a month after her arrival in London, Anne was anticipating her
Coronation. Events had moved very quickly and, for many, unexpectedly.
Thomas More’s stinging comment, over twenty years later, was that she and
Richard were wearing borrowed robes; ‘that solemnitie was furnished for
the most part, with the self same prouision that was appointed for the
Coronacioun of his nephew’.2 More’s criticism has both metaphorical and
literal resonances, in a vein rather similar to the funeral ‘baked meats’ that
Hamlet observes to re-emerge at his mother’s wedding. Even if the existing
arrangements that had been made for Edward V’s ceremony were adapted,
the seamstresses at least must have worked in considerable haste, sewing
flat out to produce the royal robes, after Peter Courteys, Keeper of the Great
Wardrobe, received their orders on 27 June. This allowed nine days for their
commission before the Coronation day arrived, although it was not until 3
July that Richard and Anne exchanged gifts of 20 yards of purple cloth of
gold decorated with garters and roses.3 Alice Claver, an experienced silk
worker and mantle weaver from London, was paid handsomely for her
work on various Coronation pieces; she was paid 63s and 2d for making
laces of Venetian gold and purple silk, with tassels and buttons, for the
king’s and queen’s robes and a further 60s and 7d for the white silk and
gold lace on Anne’s mantle.4 On 4 July, Richard and Anne travelled by
barge from Westminster to the Tower, where they settled into the royal
apartments. Security was tight, with Londoners forbidden from carrying
arms and a curfew imposed of 10 p.m. This would have meant that Richard
and Anne were present in the Tower at the same time as their nephews, the
princes, who, if they were still alive at that point, may have been aware of
the sudden flurry of activity.
The following day, 5 July, Anne and Richard rode out through the
London streets to Westminster, followed by what Holinshed describes as a
huge procession of earls, knights and dukes, although the chronicler was
wrong when he stated that their son Edward rode with them. Anne’s ushers,
William Joseph and John Vavasour, preceded her, guiding the way for her
litter, borne by two palfreys draped in white damask. The litter itself was
also of the same material, with white cloth of gold garnished with ribbon
and hung with bells. Inside, Anne sat with her hair loose, her head crowned
in a gold circlet set with pearls and other precious stones. She wore white
cloth of gold, with a cloak and train furred with ermine and trimmed with
lace and tassels. After her ‘henxmen’ came four carriages carrying her
waiting women: twelve great ladies and seven ladies of the queen’s
chamber. Anne was no stranger to bravery. In the midst of the exiled
Lancastrians in France, and later at Tewkesbury, she had proved her mettle,
but she had never before been on such public display. Now, as she watched
the upturned faces that lined her route, she knew she would never again be
able to escape the responsibility, scrutiny and dangers that her new role
brought. She may have been reassured to see the loyal Northern soldiers
stationed at key points throughout the length of their journey. Outside St
Paul’s, the procession paused while she was presented with a gift of 500
marks from the city, before continuing to Westminster, where she joined
Richard to partake of wine and spices in the Great Chamber. This was
probably the King’s Chamber, later known as the Painted Chamber, lined
with impressive Biblical wall paintings and with a state bed headed by a
gilded panel depicting the Coronation of St Edward the Confessor. The
image of the eleventh-century king looked out over the scene as Richard
and Anne prepared to emulate the ritual.
That night, Anne slept alone. Richard was to carry out the traditional
pre-Coronation ceremony of dubbing Knights of the Bath; the arrangements
for Edward’s Coronation had included forty-nine knights but the surviving
documents for Richard’s day mention only seventeen. When these details
were drawn up in advance, the officer who committed them to paper was
unclear about the final arrangements, including the king’s intended
whereabouts at the time. There may have been some doubt about the time-
scale or how long he would stay at Barnard Castle5 but, in the end, protocol
was observed by Richard and Anne staying in the Tower, before proceeding
to Westminster. This is again indicative of the haste of the occasion, even
the uncertainty over whether it would go ahead. First, these knights served
dinner to the royal couple, which was fish as it was a Friday. The menu
consisted of two courses, comprising nine and twelve dishes each. The first
contained salt and seawater fish dishes while the second was more
ceremonial, with freshwater fish and set pieces in ‘foil’, decorated in silver
and gold leaf. Many were served in sauces coloured red and yellow by
saffron and other spices. That evening, Richard ‘took a ceremonial bath’,
which was lined and draped with 22½ ells of linen, in order to prepare
spiritually, along with vigils and prayers.6
The morning of 6 July 1483 dawned warmly down the Thames. As
Anne woke in her chamber overlooking the river, she must have felt a thrill
of excitement, tinged with surprise at the rapidity of the recent changes that
had brought her to the capital in her husband’s wake. Perhaps her mood was
also coloured by uncertainty. Did she have questions of her own about how
she had been catapulted from her quiet Middleham existence onto the centre
stage of English politics, or the role her husband had played and the
implications for the lives of her nieces and nephews? After she rose and
dressed, she was a few short hours away from the ceremony that was to
mark the pinnacle of her achievement and her father’s long-cherished aim.
What were her thoughts that morning, and in the hours before she was due
to be crowned as England’s queen? Her son, Edward, was too ill to be with
them; did she know that on that special day, the Mayor and Aldermen of
York rode out to Middleham to present the boy with food and wine? By 7
o’clock, the Coronation party assembled in Westminster Hall. Anne wore a
royal surcoat and mantle, made from 56 yards of rich purple velvet, adorned
with rings and tassels of gold, and a second gown in crimson, furred with
ermine. As a duchess, she would previously have been entitled to wear a
mantle of only 13 yards. She was barefoot and her hair hung long and loose.
Richard was keen to involve as many of his kinsmen and extended
family in the day’s proceedings as he could. As she processed with her
husband along the special carpet of ray cloth, their Coronation robes
matching, Anne would have recognised many familiar faces. Richard’s
transition from protector to king had been so swift and unexpected that it
was wise to surround themselves with allies, fulfilling the ceremonial roles
of the day and enjoying the feasting and celebrations that would follow. At
the head of the procession trumpets sounded the way, followed by the
heralds of arms wearing colourful tabards that depicted the Yorkist arms.
Following them, the Bishop of Rochester, Edmund Audley, carried the
cross, himself a grandson of Constance of York, who was Anne’s maternal
great-grandmother.7 Next came Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland,
bareheaded and carrying the pointless sword naked in his hands, which
signified mercy. Percy had been married to Maud Herbert, intended as a
wife for the young Henry Tudor during his time as her father’s ward. Percy
was related to both his new rulers: his maternal aunt was Richard’s mother,
Cecily Neville, who was sister to Anne’s grandfather, the Earl of Salisbury.
After Percy came William Herbert, the Earl of Huntingdon and Pembroke,
Maud’s brother, who would marry Richard’s illegitimate daughter Catherine
in 1484. He was also brother-in-law to Richard through his first marriage to
Mary Wydeville, sister of Elizabeth, Edward IV’s wife and queen. He bore
the gilt spurs signifying knighthood.
Following Huntingdon came the Earl of Bedford, carrying the holy
relic of St Edward’s staff. This title had previously been held by George
Neville, the young nephew of Warwick, who had received the title on his
engagement to Princess Elizabeth of York in 1470, although he was
deprived of the title in 1478 and had died two months earlier. Next came
Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby. Having survived the council meeting of 13
June where Hastings had lost his life, he was now bearing the mace of
constableship. Originally married to Warwick’s sister, Eleanor Neville, he
had been steward of Edward IV’s household before marrying the
Lancastrian Margaret Beaufort. Three ceremonial swords were carried out
next. The first was in the hands of Edmund Grey, 1st Earl of Kent, who had
married one of his sons to Elizabeth Wydeville’s sister Anne, and another to
Joan or Eleanor Wydeville, making him Richard’s brother-in-law twice
over. The second was borne by Richard’s childhood friend from
Middleham, Francis, Lord Lovell, with the third carried by Thomas
Howard, Earl of Surrey. In the mid-1460s Howard was a ‘henxman’ under
Edward IV, possibly training with George, Duke of Clarence, not at
Middleham with Richard. Following them was the Duke of Suffolk,
Richard’s brother-in-law by his marriage to his sister Elizabeth, holding the
sceptre of peace, and then his son, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, with the
ball and cross of monarchy. Finally, came the Duke of Norfolk, John
Howard, who carried the crown in his hands.8 For all this impressive array
of family, the conflicts of their youth had made Richard and Anne very
aware that blood ties did not equate to loyalty. After all, the surviving
aristocracy of England were already assembled in the capital in expectation
of a very different Coronation.
After his kinsmen came Richard, wearing his robes of purple velvet,
with a canopy carried over his head, flanked by bishops and barons.
Buckingham followed, carrying the king’s train and a white staff for the
office of Lord High Steward. Anne followed her husband, also under a
canopy, dressed ‘like to the king’, and ‘on hir head a rich coronet set with
stones and pearle’.9 She had her own train of earls, viscounts and dukes
carrying the ceremonial sceptre and rod with the dove. Anne’s crown was
carried by the thirteen-year-old Earl of Wiltshire, Edward Stafford, whose
mother was another Anne Neville, Richard’s great-aunt and Anne’s great-
great-aunt. After him came ‘manie fair gentlewomen’: Margaret Beaufort,
Countess of Richmond was the first, bearing the train, then the Duchesses
of Norfolk and Suffolk, as well as Anne’s aunt Alice FitzHugh, Warwick’s
sister and her daughter, Elizabeth Parr. There was also Lovell’s wife, Anne;
Katherine Neville, the queen’s great aunt; Elizabeth Talbot, mother of Anne
de Mowbray; Elizabeth de la Pole, the Duchess of Suffolk, who was
Richard’s sister; Lady Scrope of Masham and Upsall and Lora, Lady
Mountjoy. The Coronation records also list ladies from aristocratic northern
families including Anne’s illegitimate half-sister Margaret Huddleston, who
was, perhaps, around her own age or a little older. All had changed the blue
gowns they had worn during the procession for the crimson velvet required
by the ceremony.
The procession passed through the palace and into the abbey at the
West End, while ‘divers solemn songs’ were sung as they headed to the
altar. Many of those assembled to witness the day had taken part in the
recent decades of conflict, many fighting on the opposing side, and had
travelled to London in anticipation of seeing the twelve-year-old Edward V
making the same journey. The rapidly made robes that had been created
especially for him were hanging in a wardrobe somewhere in one of the
palaces, never to be worn. Did any of those assembled wonder where he
was or question his right? If they did, no one spoke up and interrupted
proceedings. At the altar, Richard and Anne were ‘shifted of their robes’ and
anointed. Then as king and queen they changed into cloth of gold, with
Anne’s train furred with ermine and miniver, comprising 56 yards of
material. A stage had been erected, covered with red worsted, where two
empty thrones sat waiting. Richard’s was central but Anne’s was to the left
and slightly lower: it was the first time in centuries that a king had
succeeded to the throne who was already married. Together, they took their
seats alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier, in whose
household Richard had spent time as a youth. Anne was given sceptre in her
right hand and the rod with a dove in her left, while a ring was placed on
the fourth finger of her right hand. They knelt to hear the mass sung and
share one consecrated host, which was divided between them before
making offerings at the shrine of St Edward.10
The formal proceedings over, Richard and Anne were officially king
and queen. He exchanged Edward the Confessor’s crown, Fabyan’s ‘regal
diadem’, for one of his own before they processed outside and entered their
new chambers in Westminster Palace. Here, for a moment, the pair had a
rare moment of privacy. What passed between them? Were they excited at
this, the high point of their lives? Were they relieved that the proceedings
had passed off without a hitch, that they were now the anointed monarchs of
the realm? Perhaps it would be straying into the territory of the romantic
novelist to suggest they embraced and called each other ‘king’ and ‘queen’.
Quite possibly, they had little time to celebrate: there was much to be done
and Richard was a man of action. No doubt, as a pragmatist and realist,
Anne was busy at his side straight away, as they prepared for the next stage
of the day. They may have changed their clothes or taken refreshment, even
rested for what would be a long night ahead.
However they used that brief window of time, Anne was now officially
Queen of England. It was a position she had once thought to attain by her
first marriage to Prince Edward but had then believed lost to her forever.
Now she had come to it by accident, through circumstances of fate and the
choices made by her husband. As Warwick’s daughter, no doubt she had
ambition and pride. As wife and consort to Richard, she would have been
more than equal to the moment, standing at his side. She had already been
Princess of Wales and the sister-in-law to a queen. She may not have
actively sought the crown but it would be naïve to think that Warwick’s
daughter would not have welcomed it, even if she had any private
reservations about what it may entail. Only hindsight warns us of rebellion,
her impending death and that of her son and husband. Too many accounts of
her life had taken a ‘doom-laden’ approach, suggesting her weakness and ill
health. In reality though, she may not have been experiencing any
symptoms of the illness that would claim her life, as many of the
contemporary chroniclers agree it was of a short duration. Because of the
way her husband succeeded, she may have anticipated challenges but the
potential opponents were few: the Lancastrian line had been effectively
wiped out, with their best candidate, Henry Tudor, still in exile in France.
The news of Richard’s coup would be as much of a surprise to him as the
fact that his mother, Margaret Beaufort, had borne Anne’s train. The other
Yorkist claimants, sons of Edward IV and Clarence, were still children. In
July 1483, at the age of twenty-seven, Anne could look forward to potential
decades on the throne, with her son continuing the Yorkist dynasty.
The ceremonies continued when the Duke of Norfolk entered the Great
Hall at Westminster. In his office as High Marshall, he entered on
horseback, draped to the ground with cloth of gold, and tapped his rod on
the floor to empty the hall. About four in the afternoon, the king and queen
entered for the feast. Richard took his place at the middle of the marble
table with Anne seated to his left. A countess waited behind her on each
side, holding up a cloth when she wished to drink and all the other ladies
were seated together in the middle of the Hall. The dishes were carried up
from the kitchens and handed over to the aristocratic servers who were
taking over the role for the occasion. In order to underline differences in
status and promote deference, those accustomed to be waited on were
responsible for the smooth running of the feast. The Dukes of Norfolk and
Surrey, Stanley, treasurer Sir William Hopton and King’s Controller
Thomas Percy all served the king with dishes of gold and silver, and Anne
with dishes of gilt. The Bishop of Durham was served on silver, with Lord
Audley as carver and Lord Scrope as cupbearer.11
It has been estimated that around 3,000 people were fed at the
Coronation banquet, sharing 1,200 messes or portions. Various reports
stated that it lasted for five and a half hours. In the kitchens extra cooks
were hired, new brooms bought and special ‘hutches’ to lock away the
spices.12 The menu was comparatively simple, including roast capons, royal
custards, veal, pike, roast quail, egret, little chickens, fresh sturgeon with
fennel, ‘crabbes of the sea’ and other plain dishes besides the usual dressed
peacock.13 The 1465 enthronement feast of George Neville, Archbishop of
York, had already set the standard for an age, which Edward IV had
equalled with a lavish feast at the Garter ceremonies of 1472. In
comparison, Richard’s cooks would have needed to produce luxurious and
inventive dishes in order to supersede it in the memories of the king’s
contemporaries but they did not appear to try and rival it. Perhaps this was
due to the lack of time or the king’s personal taste. Another feast menu,
served up in 1455 by the Count of Anjou, suggests the inventive
extravagance of the era, by combining the business of eating with the
theatricality of the medieval monarch. First, a huge centrepiece was set up
in the middle of the table, comprising a hollow silver fortress which
contained small birds with gilded feet and ‘tufts’, sitting on a lawn of grass
surrounded with branches, sweet-scented flowers and peacock feathers. At
the lawn’s corners sat huge pies topped with further smaller pies like
crowns, their crusts silvered and gilded, filled with many different types of
meats. Later delicacies included red and white jellies decorated with the
heraldic crests of the diners and plums stewed in rosewater. After the first
course of the Coronation banquet, Richard’s champion, Sir Richard
Dimmocke, threw down the gauntlet to challenge any who disputed the
king’s honour. No one spoke up. Perhaps, as Fabyan suggests, ‘the people
[were] rather not repyning for feare than allowing therof’. After dinner, the
Mayor of London, Edmund Shaa, served Richard and Anne with sweet
wine; John Lamplew was paid £7 19s for 53 gallons of hippocras, and the
royal kitchens £4 10s for red wine. By the time they had finished, ‘all was
doone, it was darke night’.14 No doubt the drinking and entertainment
continued but, after all the guests had gone, Richard and Anne remained at
Westminster, as king and queen.
Two weeks after the Coronation, Richard and Anne left the capital to
go on progress, initially heading west through the Thames Valley. Elaborate
pageantry marked each stage of their journey. The route was carefully
planned to impress and engage the affection of his subjects, whose financial
gifts he declined along the way, stating he would prefer to have their love
instead. Richard’s subjects turned out in great numbers to see him and,
according to Vergil, ‘the day of generall procession was at hand, wherin ther
was great confluence of people, for desire of beholding the new king’. Anne
travelled with him from Greenwich to Windsor, where the newly interred
body of Edward IV was lying among the incomplete renovations he had
been making to St George’s chapel. The pair probably visited his tomb and
offered prayers there, although they may have been less likely to do so at
the chapel of St Stephen, where Hastings had recently been interred. Anne
then stayed at Windsor Castle while Richard continued on through Oxford,
Tewkesbury, Gloucester, Worcester and Warwick. The reasons for this are
unclear; perhaps she needed to recuperate after the last few weeks, although
the couple’s separation need not imply any weakness on her part. It was
usual for a king to go about official business independently of his queen. It
was a century since Edward III’s renovations had transformed Windsor
using the proceeds of the Hundred Years’ War. A number of luxurious
rooms were at her disposal, from the Rose Tower to the Upper Ward. In
1472, the chamber used by Elizabeth, Edward IV’s queen, was the largest in
the castle, while the beds in the guest rooms had coverlets of cloth of gold
furred with ermine and curtains of white sarcanet. There were also
extensive hunting grounds, a little park, a garden and ‘vineyard of
pleasour’. A herald’s account of 1506 describes one room as being hung
with rich cloth of gold bordered with crimson velvet, another as the king’s
dining or ‘secret chamber’ and an ‘inner chamber’ opening from it, which
was used by the ladies. The private closets, where mass could be heard, may
have appealed to Anne more than the indoor tennis court, although she may
have watched games from its gallery. Here Anne may have enjoyed a brief
retreat, being treated – literally – as a queen, before travelling north to join
her husband at Warwick.
Richard arrived at Warwick on 8 August; Anne probably joined him
soon after, along with her ladies. They stayed for a week at the castle,
Anne’s birthplace, where they were joined by her nephew, Isabel’s son,
Edward, who currently held the Warwick title. While there, they visited the
family chronicler, the septuagenarian John Rous, at Guy’s Cliff about a mile
out of town, where he presented Anne with the first version of his Roll of
the Earls of Warwick, with its sixty-four illustrations and descriptions of her
ancestors. The images of Anne and Richard shed little light on them as
individuals, being generic enough, along with their coats of arms and the
heraldic bear and boar. Anne holds the sceptre and orb, while descending
hands from the heavens offer her the two crowns that represent her
marriages. Facing her, Richard wears full armour, with orb and sword in
either hand, his crown lined with ermine. The illustration of their son,
Edward, is identical to that of his father, only smaller. Faced with his
portrait, Anne was aware that she would see him again soon. It was while
his parents were in Warwick that the Spanish Ambassador proposed a
marriage between Edward and one of the daughters of Ferdinand of Aragon
and Isabella of Castile. This may have been the thirteen-year-old Isabella or
the four-year-old Joanna; the couple’s final and most famous daughter,
Catherine of Aragon, would not be born until the end of 1485, after
Richard, Anne and Edward were all dead.
They left Warwick on 15 August, travelling through Coventry,
Leicester and Nottingham before staying in Pontefract Castle, which is
possibly where Richard’s illegitimate son, John of Pontefract, or Pomfret,
joined them, along with Edward of Middleham. From there they proceeded
to York, arriving on 29 August. To mark the occasion, 13,000 badges of
Richard’s white boar badge were commissioned. The family were met
outside the city and watched a series of pageants on their approach, which
Hicks has implied may have featured the story of John the Baptist, whose
feast day it was. Then they attended a service and retired to the
Archbishop’s Palace. This had been the see of Anne’s uncle, George
Neville, whose enthronement the couple had attended as teenagers; he had
died in 1476 and the present incumbent was Thomas Rotherham, Edward
IV’s Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Great Seal, who celebrated the
king’s funeral mass at Windsor. His loyalties, though, had remained with
Edward’s offspring and the Wydevilles. After he surrendered the seal to
Queen Elizabeth, he had been deprived of his office and had been arrested
on the same day that Hastings met his death. Rotherham, though, had been
more fortunate, being released after a short spell in the Tower. Weeks later,
he was playing host to Richard’s family in his capacity, of five years’
standing, as Archbishop of York. In past visits, Richard was accustomed to
stay in the Augustinian Priory but, on this occasion, the guests may have
been housed in Bishopthorpe Palace, or even Cawood Castle, which would
have been familiar to Richard and Anne from her uncle’s inauguration of
1465. It was during these days in late summer 1484, in the epicentre of
support for the new king, that Richard and Anne would experience the
pinnacle of their popularity and power.
At York, though, Edward was to take centre stage. On 19 July, he had
been appointed as Lieutenant of Ireland for three years but, on 24 August,
the boy was invested as Prince of Wales. Fabyan states that Richard
repeated his Coronation and elevated his son to this status ‘with a wreath
upon his head and the insignia of the gold wand as after shall appear’.
Vergil’s account is more detailed, having Richard ‘adornyd with a notable
riche dyademe and accompanyd with a great number of noble men’. Anne
followed ‘also with a crowne upon hir head’, leading her son by the hand
‘crownyd also with so great honour, joy and congratulation of
thinhabytants’ and Edward is described as being about nine. Lisa Hilton
states, though, that Edward was already so ill at this time that he had to be
carried into the cathedral on a litter. The ceremony in the chapter house was
followed by the ‘most gorgeous and sumptuous feasts and banquets, for the
purpose of gaining the affections of the people’,15 who responded by
rejoicing. Edward’s cousin and namesake, the young Earl of Warwick, was
also knighted at the occasion. After mass at the cathedral, Richard made a
gift to the city of twelve gilt figures of the apostles, before the family
attended a banquet in their honour. Richard, Anne and Edward sat in state,
possibly on some of the 13,000 cushions embroidered with boars, wearing
their crowns for four hours, which led Croyland to call the occasion another
Coronation. While the rites of anointment were not performed again, the
performance of such ritual outside the capital was unprecedented and
speaks volumes about the loyalty felt for the new king on his home ground.
Around mid-September, Anne travelled back to Middleham with Edward,
while Richard continued his progress through Pontefract and Lincoln.
Richard’s choice to process north was an interesting one. After years
spent living at Middleham, along with his other local connections and the
Scottish campaign, he was already known and well respected there. Even
the initial leg of the journey, through the Thames Valley, played to his
existing strengths, as it was an area associated with his friend since
childhood, Francis Lovell. The West Midlands, where he would venture
next, had long been loyal to Warwick and his family. If Richard needed to
secure his popularity, it was in the South and the capital, where rumours of
dissent indicated that rebellion was already brewing. It may appear that the
new king was prioritising his existing power base, to display his new status
and reward his loyal subjects. In that sense, the purpose of the visit would
have been to consolidate an existing stronghold, but there was more to his
decision. Richard was undoubtedly an intelligent and talented leader, having
proved himself in battle and service to the throne. It was not his people in
the North he needed to impress; rather, he needed their loyalty to
demonstrate the extent of his power before the southern lords and bishops
in his company. Royal secretary John Kendall wrote ahead to the City of
York that ‘there come many southern lords and men of worship … which
will mark greatly your receiving their graces’. It was in this city that
Richard’s popularity was at its height. Vergil recorded how the people
showed the new king ‘great honor, joy, and congratulation’ and that ‘in
shew of rejoysing they extollyd king Richard above the skyes’.16 This
progress was designed to display the full extent of his support outside the
capital, as a deterrent for any potentially rebellious Southern lords. When
the threat did come, it was from closer to home.
In Lincoln, unexpected news reached the king. Less than three months
into the new regime, rebellion had broken out across the South of England.
Behind it lay none other than Lady Margaret Beaufort, who had recently
carried Anne’s train in Westminster Abbey, and the Lancastrian Bishop of
Ely, John Morton, with whom Anne and Margaret of Anjou had sheltered
with before the Battle of Tewkesbury. In another remarkable alliance
spawned by civil conflict, Margaret Beaufort, like her royal namesake, had
realised an opportunity to promote the interests of her son by getting into
bed with the enemy. Now she sent her physician to Edward’s queen,
Elizabeth Wydeville, in sanctuary at Westminster, to discuss a marriage
between her son, Henry Tudor, and Edward IV’s eldest child, Elizabeth of
York. Dissatisfied individuals also began to murmur in favour of Henry and
a plan was soon afoot to replace Richard with the exile, now aged twenty-
six. Croyland expresses the extent of the threat, involving ‘people in the
vicinity of the City of London, throughout the counties of Kent, Essex,
Sussex, Hampshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, Somersetshire, Wiltshire, and
Berkshire’ who were determined ‘to avenge their grievances’ and spoke
widely of the young Tudor. Two embryonic plots had been discovered and
thwarted back in June, to release the Princes in the Tower and send the
Yorkist princesses abroad for their safety. There were still a few voices
raised in favour of the princes as late as September, but the fact that the
main emphasis had shifted away from the restoration of Edward V in favour
of Tudor was an indication that the general public believed the princes were
no longer alive. Several chroniclers claim this was what prompted the
involvement of Richard’s close ally, the Duke of Buckingham.
Having been instrumental in placing Richard on the throne,
Buckingham now quickly shifted his allegiance. He had been in
communication with Henry and Jasper Tudor, as well as Margaret and
Bishop Morton, but his motives remain unclear. It was too early in the reign
for him to feel aggrieved at any sense of being unrewarded by Richard,
whom he had proclaimed in public at St Paul’s Cross at the end of June. It
has long been speculated by historians that Buckingham was privy to some
information that prompted his change of heart. Croyland says it was in
reaction to news that the Princes in the Tower had been killed, which
Richard may have confided in him during his progress. Others have laid the
charge for their deaths at Buckingham’s feet, who now saw himself as
something like a latter-day Kingmaker. Perhaps, with Edward’s heirs out of
the way, he wanted to assert his own claim to the throne, with Tudor’s help.
Buckingham had not been present at York; he had left the progress at
Gloucester to go to his Welsh estates, where he had made the decision to
join the rebels and was raising an army in Brecon. Now, news reached
Richard that his former friend’s treachery was no longer in doubt.
Just how far did this come as a surprise to Richard and Anne? They
must have been anticipating some sort of response to the sudden events of
the summer, especially after the plots uncovered that June. Croyland claims
the plot was ‘perfectly well known’ to Richard by a network of spies, who,
with the ‘greatest activity and vigilance’, contrived that ‘armed men should
be set in readiness around the said duke, as soon as ever he had set a foot
from his home, to pounce upon all his property’ and ‘in every way to
obstruct his progress’. If this was true, Richard’s spy network was extensive
and had been very quickly established. It also meant he was taking a risk by
remaining in the North while his enemies, including a potential Tudor
invasion force, could seize control of the South. As late as 15 July,
Buckingham had been granted the positions of constable and steward in
Salop and Hereford, which suggests that Richard was not suspicious of his
loyalty. It seems more likely that the news came as a surprise, judging by
the severity and swiftness of the king’s response.
Richard turned to his pen before his sword. Immediately he called for
the royal seal to be brought to him in Lincoln. A letter composed there on
13 October, warning the Mayor and Aldermen of Southampton of the threat
and desiring them to raise troops in his support, must have been typical of a
number of appeals issued on or about that date. The king informed his
‘trewe subgiettes’ that ‘the Duc of Buckingham is traterously turned upon
us contrary to the deutie of his liegeaunce and entendith thutter distruccion
of us … whose traiterus entent we with goddes grace entend briefly to resist
and subdue’. The loyal armies he requested were to converge on Coventry
on 22 October ‘withouten faile in any wise as ye tendre our honnour and
your owne wele’.17 As the disorganised Kentish rebels were dispersed by
John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Richard sent Francis Lovell to the South
Coast to repel Tudor and marched to Salisbury to confront Buckingham.
Circumstances had already conspired against the duke, though, to make his
attempted coup a failure even before Richard arrived. He had met with little
success in raising troops and a spate of bad weather prevented him from
crossing the River Severn and joining with other rebels, who were now
heading west. Those men who had joined him, unpaid and hungry, were
already beginning to desert. When he heard of Richard’s approach, he
deserted and fled into hiding with Morton at Weobley, the home of Lord
Ferrers. The king then put a price on his former friend’s head. Fabyan
describes the proclamation he issued, ‘that who so euer that might take the
said duke, should haue for a reward, a thousande pounde of money, and the
value of an hundred pounde in lande by yere, to hym and to his heires for
euermore’. In response, Buckingham ‘changed his dress, and then secretly
left his people; but was at last discovered in the cottage of a poor man’. He
was taken before Richard at Salisbury and beheaded in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, Henry Tudor had set sail with an invasion force, unaware of
Buckingham’s fate. Richard marched west, arriving at Exeter on 8
November and, according to Fabyan, arrived in Plymouth ‘in order to
ascertain the real state of affairs’. When he had done so, ‘he at once hoisted
sail, and again put to sea’. By the time Anne arrived back in London, the
threat had been effectively destroyed.

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12

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Disquiet
1484
But now all thes tryumphes are passed and set on syde
For all worldly joys they wull not long endure
They are sonne passed and away doth glyde1
For Anne and Richard, Buckingham’s rebellion had shattered the
triumphant mood established at the ‘second Coronation’ in York. Back in
the capital, increasingly aware of the threat posed by dissidents within the
kingdom as well as that of the exiled Henry Tudor, they set about rewarding
their loyal friends and subjects. While Tudor had been sent back into exile
with his tail between his legs, Richard knew from the experiences of his
brother that medieval kingship was a constant battle against those who
wished to challenge the existing regime. As a Yorkist, he would always be a
target for Lancastrian sympathisers but, at the end of 1483, there was little
reason to suppose that Richard, as a skilled commander, administrator and
politician, would not be able to deal effectively with these attacks. At thirty-
one, he might anticipate reigning for two decades or more, and it was
important that he now established a household to demonstrate continuity
with the rule of Edward IV. Those who had previously proved themselves
faithful to Richard’s family were provided for over the coming months.
According to the surviving Parliamentary Rolls, that December, John
Lewes was granted 12d daily for his good service to the previous king,
while a grant for life was awarded to Joan Malpas ‘for her good service to
the king in his youth and to his mother the Duchess of York’. The twice-
widowed Joan was likely to have been in the Yorks’ household at
Fotheringhay and familiar to Richard since childhood. The following
February John Smyth, one of the former sergeants at arms of Edward IV,
received 12d daily and 10 marks went to Nicholas Harpisfield for good
service to Richard’s father, the Duke of York and Edward in Ireland and
during the 1470–71 exile in Holland. Robert Radclyff, perhaps the father of
the Richard who had been a teenager at Middleham, received 60 marks for
serving the family ‘in foreign parts and elsewhere’ and David Keting was
granted the manor of Eskir, and its watermill in County Dublin, for loyalty
to the king’s father Richard, Duke of York, and afterwards to Edward IV.
Also, the town of Waterford in Ireland was compensated for expenses
arising from the last visit there of Richard’s father, the Duke of York, in the
1450s. More recent servants from Middleham, Henry and Isabel Burgh,
received ‘an annuity of 20 marks’ for their ‘good service’ to the king’s
family, in particular to their son, Edward.2 Many of Edward IV’s household
remained in their posts but, as Richard and Anne settled into their new role,
they transported their existing Northern allegiances and extended family
network into the country’s capital.
While the Palace of Westminster remained the royal family’s main
official residence, Anne established herself on a semi-permanent basis
further out at Greenwich. Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Wydeville had
made it their home during the previous regimes, living in ‘Bella Court’,
which had been built in the 1420s by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and
later called ‘Pleasaunce’ or ‘Placentia’. The original palace, pulled down in
the seventeenth century to make way for the neoclassical ‘Queen’s House’,
stretched 200 yards from the water’s edge to the foot of the hill in
Greenwich Park. In 1443, Gloucester had received a grant from Henry VI to
‘embattle and build [it] with stone’ around at least one courtyard and ‘to
enclose and make a tower and ditch within the same, and a certain tower
within the park’. Edward IV had enlarged the park and filled it with deer,
making certain improvements for the joust held to celebrate the marriage of
his young son in 1478. Around 1480, a Grey Friars convent had been built
adjoining the palace, comprising ‘a chauntrie, with a little chapel of the
Holy Cross’.3 Anne was following in the tradition of queens by basing
herself in Greenwich and the records of payments and arrangements for
Richard’s journeys there show that he was a frequent visitor.
While they preserved Greenwich as a peaceful retreat, the new king
and queen kept Christmas 1483 at Westminster. The hostile Croyland called
it their ‘pompous celebration of the feast of the nativity’ but Commines,
who was not even in the country, described the ‘greater splendour and
authority than any King of England’. Croyland was closer to the mark.
Richard was short of ready cash, forcing him to sell some items from the
royal household and treasury to the merchants of London and use others to
raise loans. He used the money to present the city with a gift of a gold cup
encrusted with gems, while members of his court received presents totalling
£1,200. Christmas day itself was predominantly a solemn occasion, with the
focus on devotion rather than celebration. Anne and Richard would have
attended services in the abbey and perhaps given thanks, having come
through the challenges of their first six months on the throne. Festivities
gradually built over the twelve days following, culminating in the gift-
giving of Epiphany and the masques and pageants that followed. The
kitchens would have been kept busy preparing the traditional boar’s head,
although, given his personal device, Richard may have opted instead for
gilded peacock! It was washed down with ‘lambswool’, which was beer
mulled with apples.4 The only note of sorrow was that their son, Edward of
Middleham, remained in Yorkshire, still suffering from the illness that had
incapacitated him during August and September.
Two days after the festival of Epiphany, Richard was on the road
again. He progressed briefly into Kent, which had been a stronghold of
Warwick’s rebels, following the close connection that trade and travel had
established between Calais and Sandwich. He reached the port in mid-
January, stopping over at Canterbury, where he was presented with a gift of
a purse containing £33 6s 8d in gold, contributed by the mayor, councillors
and ‘the better sort of persons of the city’, although he did not accept it. The
mayoral accounts indicate how the king was catered for through payments
made to a local supplier: John Burton received £4 for ‘four great fattened
beefs’ and 66s 8d for ‘twenty fattened rams’. Payments were also made for
carpentry work and for the carriage of furniture and hangings to the royal
lodgings.5 Traditionally, visiting monarchs would reside in the well-
appointed, central Archbishop’s Palace or at St Augustine’s Abbey.
However, a reference in the city accounts to Blene Le Hale, outside the
walls, suggests Richard stayed outside the walls, possibly at Hall Place,
which from 1484 was owned by a Thomas Lovell. Alternatively Tim
Tatton-Brown places him in ‘large temporary buildings around a great tent
called le Hale’6 on the edge of Blean forest, elsewhere called the Pavilion
on the Blean.7 As he states, Henry VI and Edward IV were frequent visitors
to Canterbury, along with their queens, so perhaps Anne was present on this
occasion too.
There may also have been a religious dimension to the king’s visit.
Richard would have been based near St Nicholas’ Hospital on the hill,
overlooking the cathedral at Upper Harbledown, which overlaps with the
village of Blean. Founded for the treatment of lepers by Archbishop
Lanfranc, with its easily cleaned, sloping floor, the hall housed pilgrims on
the route to Becket’s shrine in the cathedral.8 From ‘hobble down’, shoes
may have been removed to allow them to process the final mile barefoot
and penitent, as visitors did at the Norfolk shrine of Walsingham. In
Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century work, The Canterbury Tales, the village
was also known as ‘Bobbe-up-and-down’, due to the poor condition of its
roads. In 1484, payments were listed for repairs to the road in advance of
Richard’s visit, which may well have been timed to coincide with the 400th
anniversary of Lanfranc’s establishment of the hospital in 1084. If the king
undertook the barefoot walk to make offerings at the shrine, he would have
been walking in the footsteps of another monarch. Henry II had taken this
route 300 years earlier as penance for his role in the death of Thomas
Becket. Did Richard make an offering at the sainted archbishop’s tomb?
Did he, like Henry, have a burden on his conscience that he sought to
alleviate?
Where was Anne during Richard’s brief progress into Kent? If she
accompanied him, did she also stay outside the city and make the arduous
walk downhill to the cathedral? Alternatively, she may have remained in
London, possibly repairing to Greenwich Palace in his absence. Richard
was back at Westminster in time for the meeting of his one and only
Parliament, which convened for the first time on 22 January. Joining him
there, Anne received news that the Act of Titulus Regius had confirmed her
husband’s succession to the throne and her own queenship. Croyland relates
how they met at Westminster, ‘near the passage which leads to the queen’s
apartments’, and swore an oath of allegiance and ‘adherence to Edward, the
king’s only son, as their supreme lord, in case anything should happen to his
father’. Did this prompt Anne to think of another Edward, who had also
been Prince of Wales, to whom men had also sworn their loyalty?
Having bases in Greenwich and Westminster helped Anne maintain a
division between her public and private roles. She had already fulfilled the
first function of a queen by delivering a son and heir, although at least one
spare was always desirable in the eventuality of illness and accident. Since
his arrival, though, Anne had not produced another child. Stillbirths and
miscarriages cannot be ruled out, although the Prince of Wales featured in
national prayers as Richard’s ‘first-born son’. No doubt, like Anne’s
parents, they continued to hope for another pregnancy and, according to
Croyland, continued to sleep together until early in 1485. Edward’s
existence added to Anne’s prestige, as it was more socially acceptable for
her to take an active public role for the sake of her son than as the king’s
wife. There was little differentiation in role between a queen and an
aristocratic wife besides the rise in status. As Richard’s consort, her role
was paradoxically ceremonial and informal. She was required to head her
own establishment and appear at his side during important rituals and court
occasions, yet her influence had to be informal. The recent example of
Margaret of Anjou’s active and ‘warlike’ queenship was considered the
antithesis of what a benign, modest and gentle woman should be. Equally,
Elizabeth Wydeville had been criticised for her family’s ambition and her
‘haughtiness’. Anne had to forge her own style of queenship along different
lines, acting as a patron of the arts, an intermediary between supplicants and
the king and subtly influencing him with her ‘feminine wiles’. While this
may sound, to the twenty-first-century reader, like a reductive cliché, the
‘advice’ of fifteenth-century manuals on female roles conform to this
notion, particularly that written by a woman, Christine de Pisan. Her 1405
Book of the City of Ladies advocated that a ‘Good Princess’ speak softly, be
kind, patient and humble, in the knowledge that she had ‘no strength, power
or authority unless it is conferred on you by someone else’. She should ‘live
in peace’ with her husband and be humble and welcoming, putting up with
bad behaviour and ‘dissimulate wisely’.9 However, Anne and Richard
already had an established marriage dating back a decade. There was little
need to readjust to each other, and redefine the way they interacted in
private. Perhaps publicly both of them were more guarded, but they
assumed the mantle of leadership as a team. It was a team that had been
working successfully, even harmoniously, for years.
Anne’s household followed Richard’s in recruiting from among
women who were her Northern relations. At over fifty, Alice FitzHugh, née
Neville, had married into a prominent Yorkshire family based at
Ravensworth Castle, which stood about 16 miles from Middleham. A
formidable matriarch, Alice had outlived her brother Warwick, and her
husband, and was now a vocal supporter of the new regime. She recruited a
number of her children, the cousins Anne would have known in childhood,
to her cause. Now, some of them joined her at the new queen’s court as
ladies-in-waiting and received gifts of cloth in order to make new dresses.
Alice’s daughter, Elizabeth Parr, had been married at the age of twelve and
bore her first child at sixteen. By 1483 she was twenty-three and widowed
with four small children, one of whom was the future father of Henry VIII’s
final queen, Catherine Parr. Two more of Alice’s daughters were Agnes, or
Anne, who had been married for seventeen years to Francis Lovell, and
Margery, wife of Sir Marmaduke Constable, who served Edward IV on his
French campaign of 1475 and helped crush the Buckingham rebellion. One
of Alice’s sons, George, was elevated to Dean of Lincoln in 1483. Anne’s
illegitimate half-sister Margaret Huddleston was among her waiting women
listed in the Coronation records, along with Elizabeth Bapthorpe, Elizabeth
Mauleverer, Grace Pullan, Joyce Percy, Katherine Scrope, Alice Skelton
and Anne Tempest.10 Other women in Anne’s company may have been the
Duchesses of Norfolk and Suffolk, who had been prominent at her
Coronation, and perhaps Frideswide Norris, née Lovell, Francis’ sister, who
had just become the mother of Henry Norris, a victim of the Anne Boleyn
scandal. In 1485, Frideswide would be given a yearly salary of 100 marks
and a Thomas Norris, perhaps her brother-in-law, received grants drawn
from the Middleham estates, suggesting he was employed there. Possibly
Agnes, Lady Scrope, wife of Richard Ratcliffe, and her half-sister Margaret,
married to William Catesby, were also among the number. Shakespeare
assigns her two women called Tressel and Berkeley.
Likewise, Richard promoted those he could trust to key positions.
Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell, known to history as the ‘cat’, the ‘rat’ and the
‘dog’ of Shakespeare’s play, were to feature prominently in the new regime.
All were Richard’s contemporaries, their loyalty unquestioned. William
Catesby had been a Warwick retainer in the service of Hastings and then
briefly on the council of Edward V before being appointed as Chancellor of
the Exchequer on 30 June and, later, Speaker of the House of Commons.
Ratcliffe and Lovell had progressed from being teenage henxmen at
Middleham to soldiers fighting alongside Richard in Scotland in 1480. Now
both were made Knights of the Garter. Lovell, who came to be known as
‘the king’s spaniel’, hence, the ‘dog’, became Lord Chamberlain and Chief
Butler of England, which had been ‘voided by the death of Anthony, late
Earl Ryvers’,11 while Ratcliffe received grants of the lands confiscated from
traitors. John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, now aged around sixty, already had
a long and distinguished career in the service of the House of York. He had
been knighted by Edward IV on the battlefield at Towton in 1461, and had
been among the party accompanying his sister Margaret to her wedding in
Burgundy seven years later. Richard had awarded him his dukedom in June
immediately after his succession, as well as the offices of Marshall of
England and Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine.12 Another
appointee was Robert Brackenbury, who had served as Richard’s treasurer
during his time as Duke of Gloucester. A grant of 17 July 1483 made him
Master and Worker of the King’s Money and Keeper of the Exchange as
well as Constable of the Tower of London. The following March, he was
rewarded with land and annuities for his good services against the rebels
and was given custody of the lions and leopards in the Tower, receiving 12d
daily for wages and 6d to feed the animals. Other kinsmen Richard
promoted were William Berkeley, Earl of Nottingham, whose second wife
was Joan Strangeways, niece of Cecily of York, and Humphrey Dacre, Lord
Dacre, son of Philippa, another Neville sibling.
In spring 1484, Anne received another group of girls into her
household. Edward’s queen, Elizabeth Wydeville, had remained in
sanctuary throughout the second half of 1483, with her surviving children,
five girls. All had been disinherited by the Act Titulus Regius, which
proclaimed them illegitimate as their parents’ marriage was supposedly
invalid due to a pre-contract Edward had entered into with an Eleanor
Butler, née Talbot. Their mother had come under increasing pressure to
leave her Westminster confines, but, after the loss of her two sons, Edward
V and Richard, was reluctant to do so. A plot had been uncovered and
quashed soon after the Coronation, by which the girls were to be spirited
away to safety overseas and, as Edward’s heirs, they retained a strong claim
to the throne as well as popularity with the people. Given Elizabeth’s
backing of the failed Tudor invasion, Richard was keen to keep the
bastardised princesses within his reach and thus prevent any further
suspicious alliances from being made. Early in the New Year, he conceded
to Elizabeth’s request to swear a public oath to defend and protect her five
remaining daughters, his nieces, and to become their protector, responsible
for arranging suitable marriages for them all. Out of sanctuary came the five
girls, Croyland’s ‘most sweet and beautiful children’. Named after her
mother, Elizabeth of York had been her father’s favourite and was the eldest
at seventeen, with her long, blonde hair and the good looks she inherited
from both parents. Next came Cecily, almost fourteen and reputed to be the
most beautiful of them all, followed by Anne, Catherine and Bridget, who
were all under the age of ten. With their mother still in custody, they entered
the queen’s household, based at Greenwich, where they had spent much of
their childhoods already. What exactly was Anne’s role in their care? As
their aunt, she oversaw the arrangements for their board and provisions but,
given the girls’ desirability as potential figureheads of Lancastrian
rebellions and alliances, she may also have been charged to be their
guardian, even their keeper. Richard would have been aware that Henry
Tudor swore an oath in Rennes Cathedral, on Christmas Day 1483, to marry
Elizabeth of York. In private, he may have specifically asked his wife to
keep a watch on the eldest princess’s correspondence and visitors, as well as
her comings and goings.
Anne was also involved in the provisions made for the care of her
sister Isabel’s two surviving children, the eight-year-old Edward, Earl of
Warwick, and his elder sister Margaret, now ten. Elizabeth Wydeville’s
elder son from her first marriage, Sir John Grey, had been the boy’s
guardian until his execution in the summer of 1483. The children now
entered Anne’s household at Greenwich, possibly joining the routine
already arranged for Edward IV’s younger daughters. Edward, though,
would have required a different form of training and education if he was to
fill his grandfather’s shoes and was later given his own establishment at
Sheriff Hutton. In March 1484, Parliament ruled that John Fortescu(e), ‘the
king’s servant’, was to receive an additional 10 marks annually during the
minority of the king’s nephew and, on the same day, Robert Chambre and
his wife Marion had their long-term annuity of 10 marks confirmed by
Richard. This would have been originally given to them by Edward or
Clarence himself, as they had been in the family’s employ as far back as
1477. This suggests they may have been family servants, perhaps in the
household of the two children, whom, the grant’s renewal implies, they
were continuing to care for. In the boy’s minority, provision was made for
the maintenance of his lands, which were awarded to Richard’s allies in
safekeeping until Edward attained his majority. A Roger Holdern was
granted the manor of Sutton in February 1484, ‘to yield 2d daily during the
minority of Edward, son of Isabel and Clarence’, and Robert Russell was to
benefit from the £5 annuity from Elmeley Castle in Worcestershire. The
actual castle of Warwick, where the king and his family had stayed during
the northern progress, was bestowed on 15 November 1484 upon John
Higgeford and Humphrey Beaufo or Beowfo, to be constable and steward at
salaries of 10 marks yearly.13 Anne appears to have seen less of her own
son, whose illness kept him at Middleham for much of the year. Included in
the arrangements of July 1484 for the King’s Household in the North were
provisions for ‘the children’ at Sheriff Hutton. Perhaps Edward had his
cousins for company in his parents’ absence, or else this referred to
expenses incurred by Richard’s illegitimate children, John and Katherine.
A picture of the royal household emerges from the appointments
Richard made over the following months. John Kendall became the king’s
secretary and Stephen Fryon was Master of the Signet and secretary in the
Gallic tongue, while the royal physician was one William Hobbes, who was
granted £40 a year on 12 December 1483. More grants were confirmed by
Richard’s first and only Parliament, which met in the January of 1484. In
spite of Margaret Beaufort’s recent treachery, her husband, Thomas Stanley,
was made a king’s counsellor in February 1484 and awarded a grant for
£100 in his role as Constable of England. A London goldsmith, Hugh Brice,
and his son James, were appointed as clerks of the king’s mint, money and
exchange within the Tower of London in March 1484, while Henry
Wedehoke was made yeoman and Keeper of the King’s Armour within the
Tower of London, receiving 6d daily for wages, and William Daubeney
became Clerk of the King’s Jewels. One Ralph Bygot was named as Master
of the King’s Ordinance, or keeper of his firearms, and John Crochard was
appointed chief smith within the Tower of London at a fee of 8d a day. A
Thomas Hunte became Clerk of the Works at Westminster, Windsor, Tower
of London and all the king’s manors, with commission to control workmen,
materials and to sell branches, bark and residue of the trees within the royal
parklands. Thomas Wyntersell was made sergeant of the king’s
‘herthoundes’ and John Piers was made Master of the King’s Vine at
Windsor in February 1484, while Simon Dowsing was made Keeper of the
King’s Garden at the Tower of London the following month. In April, John
Hudde and Walter Mathyn, yeomen purveyors of the office of the poultry of
the household, were granted the right to acquire fowls, lambs and other
dairy products for daily provision. William Poche became Keeper of the
Beds within the Tower of London, ‘alias the office off the little wardrobe
within the tower’ at a salary of 6d daily and 3d provision for two grooms
under him, while the Windsor Castle beds were given into the keeping of
Thomas Cresey. Parliament’s final grants and rulings for the provision of
Edward IV’s daughters were concluded towards the end of March, 1484.14
As spring began to spread across the country, Richard and Anne
headed out of the capital on a second progress. Perhaps it was the lure of
the North that summoned him, or Anne’s desire to see her son, or the
imperative to maintain order with his presence. Their first stop was
Cambridge, where they stayed for a week and made gifts to King’s and
Queen’s Colleges. By 20 March, they had arrived at Nottingham Castle.
When antiquarian John Leland visited the place, in the sixteenth century, it
was already partly in ruins but a stately bridge crossed the drawbridge,
‘with pillars bearing beasts and giants’. Inside was ‘a fair green court fit for
any princely exercise’ with stone staircases leading through the rock to the
river and an underground ‘vault, [with] rooms cut and made out of the very
stone, in the walls whereof the story of Christ’s passion and other things are
engraven, by David, King of Scotland, [as they say] who was kept prisoner
there’. Later records mention the extensive meadows, the dovecote and the
cony gate, where rabbits were caught. There had once been a chapel dug out
of the rock under the castle, as well as three others on the site, and a college
of secular priests.15 It was while they were staying there, on 20 April, that
terrible news reached Richard and Anne. In their absence, their son had died
at Middleham.
Surrounded by his long-term household, Anne Idley, the Burghs and
his treasurer, John Dawney, Edward of Middleham had slipped away on 9
April 1484. He was probably aged between seven and ten but the cause of
death is unclear. The records are full of medieval children of all classes
falling victim to various illnesses, accidents and diseases and the usual
attribution of tuberculosis may well apply in Edward’s case. He had been
too ill to go with his parents to London for their official Coronation and had
needed to be carried into York on a litter for his investiture as Prince of
Wales that August. Either he was suffering from a long-term debilitating
illness, of which his parents were aware, or else he experienced a series of
different complaints as Croyland implies, when he states that the boy was
‘seized with an illness of but short duration’. Rous called it an ‘unhappy
death’ and one twentieth-century historian suggested appendicitis. There is
no doubt, though, about his report of his parents’ reaction: ‘You might have
seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness, by
reason of their sudden grief.’ The irony was not lost on the chronicler, who
stated a popularly held belief that this loss was somehow a punishment for
the fate of the Princes in the Tower, Richard’s nephews. Croyland expresses
a typically medieval satisfaction in the turning wheel of fortune, stating ‘it
was fully seen how vain are the thoughts of a man who desires to establish
his interests without the aid of God’, juxtaposed with a reminder that this
was almost exactly a year since the death of Edward IV.
The blow for Anne and Richard must have been appalling. Even if they
had known the extent of his illness, their absence during the boy’s last hours
intensified their pain; perhaps it had even been Edward’s inability to travel
that underpinned their own northern itineraries. They left Nottingham at
once and arrived in Middleham on 5 May, probably in time to arrange his
funeral, although this was already almost a month after his death. The
battered tomb in the church at Sheriff Hutton, topped with its alabaster
effigy, which has usually been claimed for Edward, does not contain his
bones. The window contains Yorkist imagery but the vault is empty and the
body lies elsewhere. Edward of Middleham’s final resting place remains
unknown to this day. His death had a significance beyond the personal; now
Richard had no direct heir, the next in line being Clarence’s son, the young
Earl of Warwick. It made the king vulnerable, as Henry VI had been, and
made the prospect of his overthrow all the more attractive to his enemies.
Some went so far as to suggest this was a divine punishment for various
crimes attributed to Richard, such as the deaths of Henry VI and the
Princes, as Rous had recorded. This must have been in the king’s mind as
the couple made their way back to York at the end of May. Archbishop
Rotherham repeated an ungracious tale that Richard had complained ‘unto
many noble men of his wife’s unfruitfulness, for that she brought him forth
no children’.16 Richard may have regretted his lack of legitimate heirs but
Rotherham was a strange choice of confidant, as he still had to prove
himself a friend to the new regime.
Edward’s death marked the turning point in Anne’s life; sadly, she
would never be as happy, secure or healthy again. Nor would she enjoy as
close a relationship as she had had with her husband during the Middleham
years. She was not old, her twenty-seventh birthday was only weeks away,
but the loss of her only child must have proved a heavy burden. It was
equally momentous for Richard, raising the question of divine disapproval
and the reality of a disputed inheritance. From this point onwards, there
appears to have been a shift in the marriage, as if Edward had been a bond
which broke them with his death. Perhaps Richard did direct some of his
grief and anger at the wife who had not been able to provide him with the
dynasty he required. Perhaps he felt the irony of her current situation,
surrounded by her profusion of nieces, when she had only been able to
produce one child. It may have seemed unjust that Edward IV had almost
had too many children when his one legitimate son was taken. From this
point onward, Richard and Anne’s marriage was torn apart by rumours and
resentment, grief and illness.
For much of 1484, the threat of a Scottish invasion and the
establishment of a council at York kept Richard busy. In May he was in
Durham, in June naval matters occupied him at Scarborough and July was
spent launching the quarterly Council for the North. Where exactly was
Anne during this activity? Records seem to confirm that she was with him
at Scarborough, staying in the ‘square’ or ‘queen’s tower’ as he supervised a
fleet for the repulsion of Henry Tudor. She may well have also been with
him in York that summer but changes made to Sheriff Hutton, now the
official home of Edward, Earl of Warwick, suggest she might have been
there. That July, the property was designated the king’s ‘Household in the
North’ under the rule of his nephew and heir, John de la Pole. Elizabeth of
York and her sisters are likely to have been present there too, included in
provisions which were made for ‘the children’ that also covered Richard’s
illegitimate offspring. Sheriff Hutton, an old Neville property which had
been granted to Richard after the Battle of Barnet in 1471, was close
enough to York to allow the pair to see each other during the inauguration
of the council. Commanding an impressive view over the Vale of York, it
had four towers of reddish stone and long ranges lit on the first floor by
large square windows and heated by 6-foot-wide fireplaces.
Anne and Richard were back in London that August when the bones of
Henry VI were transferred from Chertsey Abbey to St George’s chapel,
Windsor. How did Anne feel, standing over the tomb of her father-in-law,
recalling the events of over a decade ago? The re-interment had been made
at Richard’s request, and perhaps she appreciated this small, retrospective
gesture of respect. It may be that the king decided it was time to give his
fellow monarch a more suitable resting place, or maybe he was responding
to the many reports of miracles carried out in Henry’s name, which had
already begun to develop into a minor cult. The bones were laid to rest to
the south-west of the altar, incurring £5 10s and 2d in expenses. Richard
had also commissioned the original tomb which was a flat alabaster slab,
featuring a recumbent Henry, bearded and in armour, with a leopard and
antelope at his feet and an angel bearing his shield of arms on the side. It no
longer stands, having been dismantled around 1600; Henry VI is
commemorated today by a slab set into the floor.17
Whatever reunion the pair might have had was short-lived as, by the
following month, Richard had left London again, to return to Nottingham
Castle. From this point, according to Paul Kendall, he referred to the place
as his ‘Castle of Care’; a continual reminder of the news he had received
there. Now, it was a venue for the visit of a delegation of Scottish
ambassadors, who proposed a three-year truce and marriage between
Richard’s niece, Anne de la Pole, and James III’s son and heir. Richard
remained there all through October before returning to London on 11
November. He was welcomed back into his capital, being met by the mayor
and alderman, dressed in their brightly coloured ceremonial robes. The
scarlet and violet velvet must have been vivid on the autumnal day of St
Martin, traditionally the occasion when animals were slaughtered for the
winter. Anne was probably already waiting for him, having spent the
intervening time at Greenwich, now moving back into Westminster. Settling
back into their royal apartments overlooking the Thames, a winter of
discontent certainly lay ahead for Richard and Anne. And for both of them,
it would be their last.
That December saw the trial of William Collingbourne, whose
apparently light-hearted efforts to mock the new regime belied the serious
nature of his treasonable activities. Once employed in the household of
Cecily Neville, and therefore probably known to Richard in his youth,
Collingbourne is best known as the author of the lampoon, ‘The Catte, the
Ratte and Lovell our dogge rulyth all Englande under a hogge.’ These
heraldic references to Richard, Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell (the king’s
spaniel whose badge featured a wolf) were demeaning when pinned on the
door of St Paul’s Cathedral that summer. However, it proved to be just one
example of the ‘various bills and writings in rhyme’ that proclaimed the
author’s Lancastrian sympathies.18 Collingbourne was the probable author
of a longer version of the couplet and its explanatory key, which first
appeared in Fabyan’s chronicle in 1516 and then in the 1559 cautionary
poetry collection, Mirror for Magistrates. This was more explicitly critical
of Richard and the circumstances of his succession, although the references
to his ‘crooke-back’ may suggest a post-Tudor authorship:
The Cat, the Rat and Lovell Our Dog
Doe rule all England under a Hog.
The crooke-backt Boar the way hath found
To root our Roses from our ground.
Both flower and bud he will confound
Till King of Beasts the swine be crown’d.
And then, the Dog, the Cat and Rat
Shall in his trough feed and be fat.19
The author’s ‘key’ described Catesby as ‘a craftee lawyer catching all he
could’, while Ratcliffe was ‘a cruel beast’ who ‘gnawed on whom he
should’. Lovell, in turn, ‘barked and bit whom Richard would’ but such an
explanation would hardly be required by an audience of 1483.20 All three of
Richard’s close friends had helped in suppressing the Buckingham rebellion
and received lands and grants as rewards.
After Collingbourne’s arrest, it was proved that he had been in contact
with Henry Tudor and other exiles, encouraging his invasion plans. It has
been suggested that he was a disgruntled ex-employee who had lost his
place after being implicated in Buckingham’s revolt or that he wrote in
revenge for the loss of lands and offices he had been promised: he had
served as a commissioner for the peace in Wiltshire, in July 1483, but did
not feature in the records by December of that year. On trial at the
Guildhall, a commission of dukes and earls convicted him of high treason.
He was then taken to Tower Hill and suffered the horrific hanging, drawing
and quartering reserved for traitors. More fortunate that season was John
Morton, Bishop of Ely, who received a general pardon on 11 December for
his role in Buckingham’s rebellion.
It was not the first time that year that Richard had been forced to deal
with slander and libel. One source of annoyance was the preferment of his
Northern magnates in roles that had previously been held by Southerners.
Croyland was exaggerating when he commented that Richard had ‘planted’
them ‘in every spot throughout his dominions … to the disgrace and lasting
and loudly expressed sorrow of all the people in the South’, but the
appointments had caused some annoyance. Although he did try to bind his
critics to him with grants, alliances and titles, those with Lancastrian
leanings, who had escaped punishment for the 1483 rebellion, began to
resurface in hopes of a Tudor invasion. A surviving letter written by Richard
on 5 April 1484 to the Mayor of Southampton shows the nature of the
problem and his response. It had come to the king’s attention that ‘diverses
sedicious and evil disposed persounes’ in London and elsewhere had begun
‘to sowe sede of noyse … ayenst our persoune and ayenst many of the
lordes and estates of our lands’. Their purpose was to ‘averte’ the minds of
loyal subjects to ‘theire mischevous entent and pourpos’ by setting up bills
and messages and ‘sending furth of fals and abhominable languages and
lyes’. Richard had called together a meeting of the London mayor and
aldermen to ‘represse al such fals and continued invencions’ by
apprehending all those attempting to ‘stir commontions’, raise ‘unlawful
assembles, or any strif and debate aryse betwix lord and lord’. Such
malcontents were to be ‘punisshed according to [their] defautes’.21
Fabyan’s chronicle is more specific regarding the rumours that surfaced
around Easter. His marginal headings, ‘Innocents’ and ‘Death of the
Innocents’, indicate the subjects of the accusations, which included such
wild stories as smothering, poisoning and drowning. Fabyan even proposed
that either Sir James Tyrell, High Sheriff of Cornwall, or an unnamed
‘servant of the king’ had murdered Edward IV’s sons in the Tower. He also
says these rumours lost Richard ‘the hearts of the people’.
Richard knew how damaging seditious speech could be and seems to
have spent considerable time in the final year of his reign countering
various rumours and challenges to his reputation. Of course, he had his
advocates too. In a private letter to William Selling, prior of Christchurch,
Canterbury, in the summer of 1483, Thomas Langton wrote that Richard
‘contents the people where he goes best that did prince … I liked never the
conditions of any prince so well as his; God has sent him to us for the weal
of us all.’22 The clerk of York later recalled Richard as a ‘most famous
prince of blessed memory’ and Rous’ first version of his history was full of
glowing praise. Archibald Whitelaw, a Scottish ambassador visiting
England in 1484, wrote, ‘Never has so much spirit or virtue reigned in such
a small body.’23 By the end of that year, though, new threats were to emerge
to his person and his name. Around Christmas, he received information that
the planned Tudor invasion force would be launched the following summer.
Before that, it was the state of his marriage that became the talk of
Westminster.

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13

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Elizabeth of York
1484–1485
Her hands together can shee wringe,
and with teares shee wipes her eye;
‘welladay, BESSYE!’ can shee sing.1
Now the long winter nights began to draw in at the palace. As Anne looked
out of the windows of the royal apartment, looking over the long, snaking
line of the Thames, the sky was white and full of massing clouds. In her
chamber, fires were built up in their wide hearths, cracking and blazing
bright, yet the chill still managed to enter her bones. If she ventured out into
the formal gardens, laid out to the north of the complex, the walkways and
plants were often tinged with frost and, when she crossed the yard to pray in
the abbey, her breath formed clouds in front of her eyes. As the nights grew
darker, she would sit waiting in the light of the flickering candles, playing
cards or dice with her ladies, reading, singing or watching while the young
princesses danced to a tune played on a lute. Perhaps Richard would come
and warm her bed that night. She waited for the soft knock on the door that
announced his arrival, but it did not come. Where was he?
Since March 1484, Anne’s household had contained the ‘sweet and
beautiful’ Elizabeth of York. She and her four younger sisters probably
travelled with them to the North that spring and had been present when the
bad news arrived from Middleham. As the eldest child of Edward IV, the
blonde eighteen-year-old had spent the majority of her life at Greenwich
and Westminster, having been raised in the full expectation of marriage to a
king or prince. It had been no secret that the rosy-cheeked little girl had
been the favourite of her father, with her even temper and gentle ways. She
was equally beloved of the people of London, who had turned out to cheer
her whenever she made a public appearance. For a number of years she had
been referred to as the Dauphine, following her betrothal to Charles, son of
Louis XI, but that match had been abandoned by the time her father died.
The death of her brothers should have made her the direct Yorkist heir, had
Titulus Regius not declared her illegitimate as the result of reputed
discrepancies in the marriages of her parents and grandparents. One
condition of her release from sanctuary, by her mother, had been Richard’s
promise to suitably bestow her. She was now well past what was considered
the necessary year of consent and had reached the age at which both Anne
and Elizabeth Wydeville herself had contracted their first matches. As her
uncle and guardian, it was Richard’s responsibility to find her a husband,
but, as her king, he needed to make a very careful choice. Since the
Wydeville–Beaufort plot of 1483, Elizabeth’s significance in Henry Tudor’s
invasion plan had become clearer, culminating in the oath he had sworn to
marry her on Christmas Day 1483. The ‘Ballad of Lady Bessye’, probably
written by Humphrey Brereton during the reign of Henry VII, describes her
in the usual literary conventions as ‘white as any milke’ and ‘faire on mold’.
One later ambassador called her ‘very handsome’, while another
commented on her large breasts and comely figure which promised health
and fertility. The epitome of a princess, Elizabeth was beautiful, eligible and
available, yet twelve months after Tudor’s pledge, she remained unwed.
What did her king have in mind for her?
Elizabeth Wydeville’s agreement to release her daughters from
sanctuary into the care of their uncle has raised speculation for centuries.
The disappearance of her sons, Edward and Richard, in the Tower, in the
summer of 1483, has never been satisfactorily explained and probably never
will be. Some have taken Elizabeth’s ‘surrender’ as evidence that she did
not believe Richard capable of having murdered them, although this
simplifies the situation she found herself in and her need to provide for her
surviving daughters. The king did have a motive for procuring the deaths of
the boys, although this does not imply guilt, but he could hardly have
derived any benefit from removing Princess Elizabeth and her sisters. As
women, unable to directly inherit, they were far more useful to him alive, as
marriageable commodities. By swearing the oath, Richard bound himself
‘in surety of their lives’ and would suffer no hurt done to them ‘by way of
ravishment or defiling contrary their wills’. He would put them ‘in honest
places of good name and fame … to have all things requisite and
necessary’, to marry them suitably as his kinswomen. He did this publicly,
in front of an assembly of the nobility, clergymen and leading Londoners.
To break his word would have incurred serious consequences.
In fact, the wording of the oath suggests the dowager queen did believe
in Richard’s guilt but was faced with little choice, given her confinement at
Westminster and the continual, increasing pressure he put on her to leave it.
It may seem hard for a modern reader to accept that she would trust her
daughters to the care of their brothers’ murderer but the situation was
complex and necessity dictated her actions. Her sons were beyond her
reach. She could act now only for the benefit of her children still living. Her
posthumous reputation has contributed to the misunderstanding of her
motives and needs to be unravelled. The late sixteenth-century Holinshed
accused her of being won over by Richard with ‘glorious promises and
flattering words’, which made her ‘blot out the old committed injurie and
late executed tyrannie’, as she was but a ‘weake woman of timorous spirit’.
In contrast, More presents a powerful image of her distress: ‘the quene sat
alone on the rushes all desolate and dismayed’. More has her call Richard
‘he that goeth about to destroy me and my blood’. According to Vergil, she
‘fell into a swoon and lay lifeless a good while … she wept, she cried out
loud and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring. She struck her
breast, tore and cut her hair … prayed also her own death … condemning
herself for a madwoman … for [sending her younger son] to be murdered
by their enemy.’ It seems unlikely, as the Victorian Gairdner asserted, that
the ‘queen dowager had been completely won over by Richard’. Elizabeth
Wydeville has been accused of ambition and arrogance but there is nothing
to suggest that she was unintelligent. There seems little reason to doubt the
sincerity of the bereaved mother’s grief or the lack of choices that now
forced her into a corner. It would have been wise for the ex-queen to
concede to Richard’s wishes in early 1484, as she was not blessed with
foresight and could not have predicted the success of Henry Tudor’s
invasion the following year. As far as she knew, Richard may retain the
throne for decades and the fortunes and lives of herself and her daughters
depended on his favour; as such, she can hardly be blamed for making a
‘deal with the devil’. Her two eldest daughters were of marriageable age
and could not be kept indefinitely in sanctuary. Elizabeth made her decision
in 1484 as a mother. She could no longer do anything to help her sons, so
she wisely did the best she could for her girls, who were now included in
Anne’s household. Perhaps she was counting on the influence of the new
queen to keep them safe.
The loss of their son may not have brought Richard and Anne closer.
In fact, it may have had the opposite effect, as their movements in the
second half of 1484 are suggestive of physical and emotional distance. Her
exact location during this time is unclear but his busy schedule could well
have excluded his wife, even if she was staying relatively close at Sheriff
Hutton. Given that she only had months left to live, Anne may have already
been suffering for poor health or exhaustion, choosing to remain in one of
their residences, perhaps at home in Middleham, while he was on official
business. She may have consulted her physician, who would have bled her
and suggested changes in her diet. Perhaps his diagnosis was one of
melancholia, the intense grief caused by her loss and the sense of failure at
her low fertility. However tempting it is to speculate, records of her illness
do not emerge until the winter. It is possible that, during those summer
months, she had not yet experienced any symptoms that caused concerns
regarding her health or, at least, they were not too severe.
If Lisa Hilton is correct in her diagnosis of tuberculous endometritis,
which affects the fallopian tubes, Anne’s illness would have produced few
external signs. She may have experienced some abdominal pain, irregular
or heavy bleeding and perhaps mucus discharges, which contemporary
medicine would have seen as an imbalance of the humours. The damage
would have been internal, with scarring, calcification and deformation of
the uterus. Very rare in the modern era, it more commonly occurs in older,
post-menopausal women, often secondary to other forms of tuberculosis. It
can, though, be the result of a bacterial infection or, even, of sexually
transmitted disease.2 To suggest that Anne had contracted some sort of
venereal disease is a step too far, though. Records of the spread of such
conditions are infrequent if they exist at all; the first recorded case of
syphilis was in 1494, when it swept across Europe, claiming up to 6 million
victims. Diseases of this kind were poorly understood and proved
untreatable. Anne only had two sexual partners. While the extent of Prince
Edward’s experience is unknown, although probably very limited, Richard
had certainly been sexually active before his marriage. As far as can be
ascertained, he experienced good health and did not display any symptoms
of infection, although his early death meant they may not have had a chance
to develop. Throughout his reign, his punishing schedule and wide travel
about the kingdom do not suggest he was at all unwell. If Anne was
experiencing any symptoms during the summer of 1484, as a result of
tuberculosis in any form, she may have seen them within the context of her
general health. Those months may have passed peacefully in retreat in the
countryside, awaiting her reunion with Richard.
However, Edward’s death had brought her health more into focus,
especially if Richard’s complaints about Anne’s infertility, as reported by
Archbishop Rotherham, are to be believed. His criticism of her, in the
aftermath of Edward’s death, may have been unguarded comments made in
the extremes of grief. Equally, it may have tapped into an existing source of
grievance which he had previously voiced in private. Low fertility and
infertility were largely considered, at the time, to be the fault of the female,
and the existence of Richard’s illegitimate children may have seemed, to
him, to validate this. The inability to produce a surviving male heir could
tear apart what would, under other circumstances, have been a happy
marriage, as Catherine of Aragon was to discover with Henry VIII in the
1520s and 30s. According to Alison Weir, Richard’s intention to put his wife
aside and remarry in order to father an heir was already widely spoken of.
Holinshed relates that Richard complained to ‘diuerse noble men of the
realme, of the infortunate sterilitie and barennesse of his wife, bicause she
brought foorth no fruit and generation of hir bodie’ and shunned her
company. In Yorkshire, Anne may have been sheltered from such gossip but
when the king returned to London in November, Anne may have travelled
south with him. Alternatively, she may have gone on ahead of him to
Greenwich, as her activities in the summer of 1483 proved that she had an
independent household and had previously made the journey to the capital
independently of him. Anne settled back into her Westminster apartments
for the Christmas season, which provided many opportunities to surround
herself with her nieces and nephews during the devotions, feasting and
festivities. At some point, she became aware of rumours that were
circulating the court regarding her own health. Worse still, people were also
hinting at a possible liaison between her husband and Elizabeth of York.
Perhaps a trusted lady-in-waiting passed on what was being whispered in
the corners of the hall. Did Anne give them any credence?
The truth of Anne’s relationship with Elizabeth is hard to ascertain. As
the girl’s aunt, only ten years her senior, Anne would have known the girl
during her childhood, seeing her at court on the occasions when she visited
with Richard. During the 1470s and early 80s, the position between them
would have been reversed, with Elizabeth’s rank as royal princess placing
her higher in status than her aunt, a duchess. The girl’s mother, Elizabeth
Wydeville, had been very conscious of the protocol surrounding such
gradations of privilege and would have raised her daughter in the full
understanding of the deference due to her. This is not to suggest any
arrogance or vanity on the part of either Elizabeth; it is simply how the
strictly hierarchical court operated, at all levels, from the king down to the
scullion. Edward’s family had suffered a number of falls from their high
position, plunging the princesses first into sanctuary and now supposed
illegitimacy. At the court of 1484, Elizabeth was required to defer to her
aunt, previously her inferior, yet she may still have held out hopes of
gaining a crown for herself. Even though Henry Tudor had declared his
intention to marry her and invade England, those events lay in the future
and could not be predicted, no matter what ‘The Ballad of Lady Bessye’
says. Brereton wrote of Elizabeth’s prophetic abilities in 1486, once she was
married to the Tudor conqueror. As far as Elizabeth knew, Richard was to
be her king for years to come. She had to carve out the best future path for
herself in his reign. Anne, though, may have been another matter.
As Elizabeth’s elder by a decade, the queen may well have seen herself
as fulfilling the role of substitute mother, sister or guardian. The nature of
their bond would depend on Elizabeth’s feelings towards her uncle and her
understanding of the queen’s role in the events of 1483. Did the princess
believe her uncle responsible for the murder of her brothers? If so, did she
believe that Anne knew the truth, or had colluded with his plans? On Anne’s
side, her guardianship of the princess may have been affected by the need to
keep her under observation as the target of Tudor’s intentions. One
possibility is that the two women may have been wary of each other,
distrustful and distant; by another, they may have become close friends and
confidants. Weir asserts that the princess ‘was ranked familiarly in the
queen’s favour, who treated her as a sister’. As an older woman,
experiencing the trials of queenship that Elizabeth had been raised to
expect, she may have been something of a role model. Alternatively, it may
have been difficult for the princess to forget the comparison between the
new queen and her mother, who had remained in sanctuary in order to buy
her daughters’ freedom. Elizabeth Wydeville would still have been
influencing her daughter’s behaviour, directly or indirectly. The oath she
had imposed on Richard that May implies that she did not trust him and
believed that her sons had been killed in the Tower on his orders. Still, she
recognised the need to come to terms with him for the future of her
surviving children. It is impossible, now, to ascertain the feelings of aunt
and niece that would provide the essential context in which the events of
Christmas 1484 need to be interpreted.
The celebrations began along traditional lines. Fabyan described how
the ‘feast of the Nativity was kept with due solemnity at the Palace of
Westminster’, after which, the more lively Epiphany was held ‘with
remarkable splendour’. Reminiscent of his London Coronation, Richard
appeared in the Great Hall wearing his crown, in his royal state of ‘potency
and splendour’. The doors would have been decked with ivy or holly, box
and broom, which was also wrapped around frames and suspended from the
ceiling. A multitude of candles would have been lit to ward off the gloom,
games played and carols sung. Richard may have appointed his own Lord
of Misrule to entertain the court with jokes and jests; besides this, there
would be the inevitable disguisings and plays that followed dinner and
ended with dancing. Presents were exchanged, but the fact that the king
gave Elizabeth his copy of The Romance of Tristan as a gift can hardly be
construed as evidence of an affair. A later poem of 1580 describes the type
of fare that would have been provided that season, which had not
significantly changed in a century and still sounds familiar today:
Good bread and good drinke, a good fier in the hall
brawne, pudding and souse, and good mustard withal.
Beefe, mutton and pork, shred pies of the best,
pig, veal, goose and capon, and turkey well drest;
Cheese, apples and nuts, joly carols to heare,
as then in the countrie is counter good cheare.3
Not everyone had much appetite for the revelry. The hostile Croyland,
writing in 1486, described himself as ‘grieved to speak’ that ‘far too much
attention was given to dancing and gaiety’ but he adds that Elizabeth was
sent, with her four sisters, ‘to attend the queen at court’. Over the twelve
days of Christmas, Elizabeth apparently attracted her uncle’s attention in a
way that ‘caused the people to murmur and the nobles and prelates greatly
to wonder thereat’. Perhaps he had always found her appealing but the loss
of Edward turned his mind to the need to father a new legitimate heir. The
occasion that prompted speculation was the fact that Anne and her niece
wore similar clothing. The potential threat to the queen lies more in the
interpretation of this line than the description. Their ‘vain changes of
apparal’ were not uncommon in a period of festivity, nor was the co-
ordination of clothing between family members on ceremonial occasions.
Croyland was not present in Westminster that season, yet he records that
‘many’ said the king was ‘bent … on the anticipated death of the queen …
or else … divorce’ in order to marry Elizabeth. ‘Many’ may have believed
this. How ‘many’? The apparent identical appearance of the women, ‘being
of similar colour and shape’, has been taken to imply the substitution of one
for the other, yet this must have been suspected within the context of other
interactions between the king and his niece. Croyland does hint at other
‘things so distasteful, so numerous that they can hardly be reckoned’ which
were ‘pernicious and perfidious’ and were ‘shameful to speak of’. The
‘anticipated death’ of Anne is also sinister, giving rise to the allegations of
murder that find fruition in Shakespeare’s play. Frustratingly, the chronicler
goes no further, leaving the modern reader wondering exactly what
happened between Richard and Elizabeth at Christmas that year.
The most significant piece of evidence used to argue for Richard’s
relationship with Elizabeth has been a seventeenth-century copy of a letter,
known as Buck’s letter. Buck was an historian, born around 1560, who
found a copy of Titulus Regius folded within the Croyland manuscript and
produced his own history of Richard III’s life and reign. Buck claimed to
have seen Elizabeth’s letter in 1619, then in the keeping of the Howard
family, who were patrons of his work. Apparently written by Elizabeth of
York herself in February 1485, to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Buck
stated that the letter asked for the duke’s assistance in her intended marriage
to the king and expressed impatience that the queen, her aunt, was not yet
dead. Assuming for a moment this letter’s authenticity, it would mean that
Elizabeth and Richard had come to some sort of understanding and that the
whole court, including Anne, was aware that her illness was terminal. Either
that, or that her death was imminent.
However, the letter is not a reliable source. For starters, it is an edited
version of a lost original, published by Buck’s great-nephew in the 1640s.
The original version (BL MS. Cotton Tiberius E. x. f. 238v) is fire-damaged
and has been reconstructed to an extent that suggests liberal degrees of
‘interpretation’ by Buck junior.4 The first version’s assertion that Elizabeth
‘feared the queene would nev…’ has become ‘feared the queen would never
die’. To play devil’s advocate, this could even have related to concerns for
Anne’s health and good wishes for her recovery. The second version says
Elizabeth belonged to Richard ‘in heart and in thoughts, in body and in all’,
although the suggestive word ‘body’ is absent from the letter of 1619,
turning a conventional phrase into a potential physical affair. However, as
his niece, whom he had sworn to protect and suitably marry, Elizabeth was
his to dispose of bodily. The earlier letter asks Howard to be ‘a mediator for
her to the K … [space] … ge …’, which Buck junior interpreted as a
mediator for her in her marriage to the king himself. It is possible, though,
that this letter must be viewed in the context of Richard’s attempts to
provide his niece with a marriage, as he had promised. Tudor’s oath and
impending invasion made that all the more urgent. He had married
Elizabeth’s sister, the fifteen-year-old Cecily, to Lord Scrope and may now
have been planning a joint match for himself and Elizabeth. Suitably for a
king and princess, his attention turned abroad. A powerful foreign alliance
could add prestige to his reign and furnish him with allies in the event of
Lancastrian reprisals. Richard may now have been planning a double
Portuguese marriage. The proposal had been suggested by Sir Edward
Brampton, by which Richard was to marry the teenage Joana of Castile,
while Elizabeth would wed Manuel, Duke of Beja, later Manuel I of
Portugal, who had been born in 1469. The planned union was referred to by
Alvaro Lopez de Chaves, as the Portuguese hoped for English support
against Castilian rebels, and may well have been the match Elizabeth was
referring to early in 1485. Although this interpretation absolves Elizabeth
from callously anticipating her aunt’s death in order to satisfy an
‘incestuous passion’, it follows that Richard was already thinking of
remarriage in the spring of 1485, while Anne was still alive.
Perhaps his intentions pre-dated that. Vergil states that it was news of
Richard’s impending match with Elizabeth that prompted Henry Tudor to
act, which assumes the rumours reached him before his declaration
regarding the summer. However, he may also have believed the marriage
would go ahead, as he did briefly entertain the idea of defeat and returned to
the possibility of taking Maude Herbert as his wife. Jean Molinet, French
chronicler and translator of the Roman de la Rose, believed that Elizabeth
had borne Richard a child in secret but this can be dismissed as the time-
scale hardly allows it. Any child conceived on or around that Christmas
would have arrived, if it had been full-term, in the late summer of 1485,
around the time of Bosworth. Richard did send Elizabeth away to Sheriff
Hutton in the spring, where a pregnancy could have been concealed,
although with his desire for a legitimate heir, he would surely have married
her after Anne’s death, despite the disapproval of his council. The five
months or so that Elizabeth spent in Yorkshire allow for such speculation;
even, following romantic lines, a secret marriage or miscarriage. Yet no
other source mentions a child. Molinet probably did not visit England
during that period; he was the librarian of Margaret of Austria, step-
granddaughter of Richard’s sister, Margaret of Burgundy, and, as such,
hostile to Elizabeth and Henry Tudor. It is highly unlikely that Henry Tudor
would have made the Yorkist princess his queen if he had any suspicions
regarding her virtue. The further five-month time-lapse between Henry’s
succession and marriage has also been interpreted as his deliberate delay, in
order to ascertain whether or not Elizabeth was pregnant by Richard. These
individuals were no strangers to controversy or gossip, though. This single
report that Elizabeth had conceived a child by Richard must be dismissed as
one of the worst examples of contemporary slander.
Had Richard been drawn into a relationship with his niece? Rumours
at court do not translate into incontrovertible fact, no matter how many
people repeat them. And they were repeated frequently in later years,
usually to blacken Richard in the eyes of Elizabeth’s Tudor descendants.
‘The Ballad of Lady Bessye’ states unequivocally the princess’s distaste of
her uncle as well as her belief that Richard intended his wife’s death in
order to satisfy his lust.
He wolde have put away his Queene
for to haue lyen by my bodye.
She would not be drawn into marriage with her uncle no matter what
punishment she might suffer as a result: the union was clearly damnable in
her eyes.
I care not whether I hange or drowne
so that my soule saued may bee.
The 1614 poem ‘The Ghost of Richard III’ demonstrates the king’s
awareness of the inappropriateness of the match.
Yet to establish and secure my state
I sought with wilfull lust and powerfull awe
To crosse the banes [banns] and over-rule the law5
An anti-Ricardian tragedy, the Roode en Witte Roos, by Lambert van den
Bos, published in Amsterdam in 1651, may have been based on a now lost
English play, rather than that of Shakespeare. Richard’s wooing of
Elizabeth is gentler than in the Bard’s version, conducted at court, in the
presence of her mother. The king appears to be a man in love, calling the
young woman ‘lovely creature’ and ‘beautiful child in which the world
takes pride’. He politely asks her, ‘if it please’ her, to ‘grant him your right
hand in marriage’ as a way to possess her father’s throne. Elizabeth, in
response, expresses ‘real terror at your vile deed’. While her mother urges
her to ‘dissemble, dissemble’, she calls Richard mad and states she cannot
forget his ‘evil deeds’, threatening to ‘pierce [his] cursed entrails’.6
Then there is the question of Elizabeth’s private feelings. What would
her motives have been for involvement with her uncle and how would her
mother, Elizabeth Wydeville, have viewed this? With Buck’s letter
discounted, the simple answer is that we do not know for certain how
Elizabeth felt. Traditionally, she has been portrayed as passive and reactive,
along with the glorification of her beauty and gentle qualities, creating a
degree of ambiguity about her character. Perhaps there is a good reason for
it. As the mother of the Tudor monarchs, later accounts have been coloured
by the dynasty’s dependence on her lineage and the vilification of Richard
III. Any relationship she willingly entered with Richard would have been a
source of deep embarrassment to subsequent generations. Yet again, the
question of hindsight is central to understanding her actions at Christmas
1484; even as late as the following summer, there were no guarantees that
Henry Tudor’s bid for the throne would be successful. Richard was the
reigning king and, at the age of thirty-one, might anticipate at least another
decade in power. Evidence to suggest that he contemplated marriage with
his niece has recently been explored seriously by historians, where it has
previously been dismissed as impossible. Some have concluded that
Elizabeth was urged into the match by her mother, who coveted the crown
for her. The princess had been raised in the expectation of queenship and
the recent decades proved that fortunes could quickly turn and opportunities
had to be capitalised on. With the Wydeville power on the decline, it may be
that Elizabeth and her mother saw this as a last chance to seize some sort of
security for themselves. The imperatives of survival and propagation could
not be overlooked in a world where illness and death, accident and conflict
played such a prominent role. Nor can it be ruled out that Elizabeth was
released from confinement in order to seduce her uncle.
To the modern mind, there is an obvious impediment to such a
relationship. Richard was, of course, Elizabeth’s uncle by blood, not just
through marriage. While his marriage to Anne had, in theory, required
several dispensations, his affinity to Elizabeth was closer but was still not
considered prohibitive according to the standards of the medieval Catholic
Church. It was within the power of the Pope to grant a dispensation for
alliances of this nature, so although it would not contravene religious codes,
it was still rare. Richard had already understood the need to provide the
correct papal documents for his marriage to Anne: some still argue they
were incomplete, although their union went unchallenged at the time.
Marriages between those connected in the first degree went against the
grain of popular sentiment. Pairs of brothers and sisters did marry but
Henry VIII’s marital trials illustrate just how problematic they could prove.
The rumours appear to have provoked disgust in Richard’s contemporaries,
with his council uniting against the idea and close advisers, Catesby and
Ratcliffe, warning him of a possible public backlash. In the event, Richard
appears to have listened to them, issuing strongly worded public denials
that he had ever considered Elizabeth as a wife.
In January 1485, though, any affair was at its height. Whether fuelled
by mutual passion, ambition or the imperative for an heir, if Richard and
Elizabeth had become entangled, they were committing adultery. As Hall
stated, one thing ‘withstood’ Richard’s desires. Anne, his queen, was still
alive. It cannot have been a happy time for her. In the last weeks of her life,
she cannot have been unaware of the extent of the rumours, which perhaps
contributed to her rapid decline soon after Epiphany. Croyland reported that
her sorrow was exacerbated by Richard’s cruelty: she was ‘extremely sick
… [and] still more and more because the king entirely shunned her bed’, on
the advice of his physicians. This has the ring of truth. If Anne was in the
final stages of a terminal illness, that is exactly the recommendation they
would have made, for her benefit and his. The chronicler added that the
queen understood that she had become a burden to her husband, so ‘soon
became a burden to herself and wasted away’, while Hall would later report
that daily quarrels took place between the couple. If the success of their
relationship had hinged upon the existence of Edward, his death was the
catalyst for its rapid disintegration. This does suggest that the marriage had
been one of expediency, on Richard’s side, at least. It was Anne’s tragedy if
this possible ill feeling and estrangement coincided with the deterioration of
her health.
Yet the case for the couple’s estrangement is based in gossip. The
rumours originated with Croyland and were repeated by Vergil and Hall,
thus entering popular legend. To quote Richard Marius, the king was
‘crucified by hearsay’. The second half of 1484 had already demonstrated
that Tudor agents were actively spreading rumours ahead of the intended
invasion, and the reports of his liaison with his niece must also be
considered in the light of this and other, later, defamations. A 1614 poem,
‘The Ghost of Richard III’, states that although Anne’s presence ‘did deny’
his match with his ‘fayre niece’, he had some genuine feeling for her,
especially as she weakened. The two approaches are not necessarily
incompatible, as Richard’s position as king may have come into conflict
with his private relationship with his wife. On one hand, he may have
genuinely loved her and grieved at her worsening illness, while being
unable to avoid the dynastic ramifications of her death. As a king under
threat, survival was uppermost in his mind that Christmas; to deny that life
would go on after Anne’s tragic and untimely death would have been to fail
in his duty. The poem goes further; the queen
fell sodaine sicke with griefe or jealousie;
and all my love would not preserve her breathe.
Worse still, this sensational version affirms that Anne’s low fertility had
been a bone of contention between them, for which she was taking some
sort of remedy. The results of this, according to the author, were startling
and give another interpretation of Richard’s presence in, or absence from,
her bed:
I gave her medicines for sterilitie
And she grew fruitfull in the bed of death
Her issue crawling worms.
The derivation for this bizarre image is unknown, as is the precise use of the
term ‘issue’. If, as the poem implies, Anne was pregnant on her deathbed,
then it follows that some stillbirth or miscarriage is intended. His medical
advisers would have certainly counselled the king not to sleep with Anne if
there was any suspicion of pregnancy, advice which was commonly given
to couples of all walks of life. The meaning of ‘fruitfull’ did not necessarily
imply pregnancy then, though, as its alternative uses were simply to do with
creation and production in other forms. The poet may be implying,
ironically, that in her illness the medicines only brought forth worms, which
‘issued’ from her body, thus mocking his hopes for a pregnancy. If there
was an original English source for this poem, it is now lost and no other
source suggests that Anne had conceived shortly before her death. Most
other accounts agree that it was the lack of a child that lay at the root of the
couple’s problems.
From what actual evidence survives, it is not possible to conclude that
Richard and Elizabeth had an affair, or that he intended to marry her, or she
him. Buck’s letter is too full of holes to be useful and its provenance may
have been doubtful, to say the least. What can be asserted is that, along with
Anne, the pair were at Westminster that Christmas, where rumours
circulated about their relationship, which the king later refuted. Some
people clearly believed them. Croyland paraphrased how, that spring,
Richard was obliged to call a council meeting at Clerkenwell to address his
‘intention of contracting a marriage with his niece Elizabeth’ which had
‘never once entered his mind’. The chronicler states that some present ‘very
well knew the contrary’ and had told Richard ‘to his face’ that the people of
the North would ‘rise in rebellion against’ his desire to ‘gratify an
incestuous passion for his said niece’, summoning twelve Doctors of
Divinity to support their case. Croyland roots this objection in self-
preservation. It was feared, by men like Ratcliffe and Catesby, that if
Elizabeth of York became queen, she would seek to ‘avenge upon them’ the
deaths of her relatives. Also there were indications that the North would rise
in rebellion to prevent the match. Just before before Easter, ‘in [the]
presence of the mayor and citizens of London, in the great hall of the
Hospital of Saint John’, the king made ‘the said denial in a loud and distinct
voice’. The nature of his private feelings can only be a matter for
speculation.
The Elizabeth of York episode presents a further challenge when it
comes to the interpretation of Richard’s marriage. Looking at Anne’s
relationship with him as a whole, from their childhood years at Middleham,
through the separation caused by Warwick’s Lancastrian fling, into their
marriage and glorious Coronations at Westminster and York, the events of
late 1484 and early 1485 make for uncomfortable reading. They appear to
represent a sudden change in character by the king, a decisive rejection of
his wife of a decade. This, in turn, forces a reassessment of their motives in
entering the union and their priorities at different stages of their life-cycles.
Of course, much had changed since the couple spoke their vows as
teenagers in the spring of 1472. Richard and Anne were undoubtedly close
from the mid-1460s, when they sat together at the table for the Cawood
Castle feast, and Richard was a member of Warwick’s household. A match
may have been Anne’s father’s ultimate intention, although this was
superseded by that of Isabel and Clarence and became redundant when his
loyalties changed. There is not enough evidence to suggest the couple
formed a romantic attachment during their youth, yet this does not mean it
did not happen. When they did marry, the question of love and affection
may not even have arisen. For royalty and the aristocracy, issues of
pedigree and inheritance were far more important than companionship,
which could be found elsewhere. Through the next decade, the pair’s
mutual goals allowed them to fulfil the contemporary roles of Lord and
Lady of the Manor, continuing their line and upholding the peace. Even
after the events of 1483, when Richard’s new status forced a change in their
priorities, the initial months appear to have been harmonious. Until this
point, it is possible to speculate that the Gloucesters had a happy, successful
marriage. At least, there is little to imply otherwise.
What continues to bind a couple together for over a decade? Then, as
now, love and attraction are the primary factors, overriding the fluctuations
of ‘better and worse’. In a less romantic sense, habit, compatibility, children
and shared mores establish an exclusive connection that remains successful
as long as it is satisfying to both partners. Nor does this remain static; it
must evolve as those concerned change and age. Yet, in the fifteenth
century, for individuals like Richard and Anne, this was not enough. The
primary function of a marriage was religious and dynastic. It was intended
to safeguard against various sexual ‘sins’ and to legitimise any children
born in order to facilitate inheritance. The Gloucesters had been able to
produce only one surviving heir. With Edward’s death, their marital
equilibrium began to unravel. Additionally, the balance of priorities had
shifted massively for Richard. His initial reluctance to accept the throne in
the summer of 1483 has been portrayed by Shakespeare, and accepted by
many, as disingenuous, but an alternative reading might highlight a tension
between Richard’s ambition and the enormity of the transformation such a
role would bring. As Duke of Gloucester, he had been no stranger to
responsibility but, as king, his private self was, of necessity, moderated by
the good of the ‘common weal’. His kingdom was about to be invaded and
he had no son to secure his succession. This made him vulnerable.
The thorny question remains. Did Richard love Anne? If so, why do
the rumours suggest that he treated her cruelly in her last months of life?
Setting aside the scurrilous stream of gossip that dogged Richard during and
after his life, what happened between husband and wife during what must
have been, for Anne, a ‘winter of discontent’? If she loved him, the
disintegration of their family unit and her health must have been the tragic
cost of the crown she now wore. While fifteenth-century definitions of
marriage render these responses anachronistic, a modern analysis of his
behaviour of 1484–85 cannot avoid such a question. If Richard had loved
her, at any point, was this overridden by political imperatives and the need
to protect himself and the fragile dynasty from increasing attack? Had his
affection been gradually eroded over the course of their years together? Had
he married her purely for her inheritance? It would be wrong to assess
Richard through a romantic filter when it comes to his marriage; kings did
tire of wives they had once loved and seek to replace them with younger
models in order to father sons. Elizabeth of York’s own son, Henry VIII,
provides enough evidence for this. There is no doubt that he was
romantically in love with Catherine of Aragon as a young man, yet their
failure to produce a living son undermined his emotion. The desire to
qualify the Gloucesters’ relationship as a love match is strong, but there is
little evidence to support or disprove such a theory. It is also natural to seek
positive interpretations, in the interests of balance, when rejecting the
centuries of defamation that had done so much damage to assessments of
Richard as a man and a king. It may have been Anne’s tragedy that their
previously harmonious marriage did not fit the requirements of a royal
match. Richard may have loved her as a wife, but considered that she failed
in her primary function as a queen. If any turning point can be identified,
the loss of Edward must be it. If they had remained as duke and duchess,
the boy’s death would have had predominantly personal ramifications. As
king and queen, it opened the kingdom to invasion and conflict. Sadly for
them as individuals, the Gloucesters’ marriage was undone by their lack of
fecundity. If Anne was Richard’s tragic queen, he was, no less, her tragic
husband.
The ‘what-ifs’ of history can become fascinating but dangerous dead
ends. However, so long as they are considered in a similar vein to the best
examples of historical fiction, they can add to the understanding and
interpretation of enigmatic individuals. We cannot know what direction
English history would have taken if Richard had not been killed at
Bosworth. We can only speculate about what sort of king he would have
proved to be and whether he would have remarried, and to whom. No doubt
he wanted an heir. Would he have got his way? At what cost? Forty years
before the marital trials of his great-nephew Henry VIII, would Richard’s
quest for a son have proved as tortuous as he sought increasingly young
wives in the interests of Yorkist propagation?

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14

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Eclipse
1485
Strange shadows from the midst of death
Are round our being strangely cast:
Thus the great city, tower’d and steepled,
Is doubly peopled,
Haunted by ghosts of the remembered past.1
Early in 1485, Richard was thinking about his successor. After the death of
Edward, he had initially nominated Clarence’s son as his heir but,
considering the boy’s perceived feeble-mindedness and youth, then declared
in favour of another of his nephews, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. John
was the son of his sister Elizabeth, who had married the second Duke of
Suffolk. By 1485, her eldest son was already twenty-two, a far more viable
successor than the ten-year-old boy. Richard appointed him President of the
Council in the North and King’s Lieutenant in Ireland. He also made
provision for his illegitimate son, John of Pontefract, who was assigned the
captaincy of Calais on 11 March 1485. In the grant, the ‘well-beloved’
youth is described as having a ‘disposition and natural vigour, agility of
body and inclination to all good customs’, which promised ‘great and
certain hope of future service’.2 Given his loss of Prince Edward, it is not
impossible that Richard was lining up his bastard as his spare heir. He was
certain now that he would never have another child by the queen, whose
condition was weakening every day.
One grey morning, Anne was dressing in her chamber when one of her
ladies-in-waiting made a startling admission. The rumours regarding
Richard and Elizabeth had not abated; now, in fact, they were joined by
another, stating that Anne herself was already dead. Perhaps she had
appeared less and less in society since the New Year, taking meals in private
and resting in the company of her women. She may well have had a spell in
bed, her absence giving rise to speculation. Croyland and Vergil report that
she was distressed by the news and went straight to her husband, in tears,
her hair loose, asking why he should ‘determine her death’. Richard, in
turn, reassured her, ‘kissing hir [and] made awnswer loovingly comfortyng
hir, bad hir be of good chere’. Holinshed stated that the slanders had
originated with the king, as a ruse to scare the queen to death; ‘to the intent
that she taking some conceit of this strange fame … in … sorowfull agonie’
and puts Richard’s faith in the rumours to cover up his dastardly intention,
if Anne ‘should fortune by that or anie other waies to lease her life’. As may
be expected, Shakespeare developed this idea of a whispering campaign,
designed to tip an already terminally ill woman prematurely into her grave.
In Act 4, Scene 2 of Richard III, he instructs Catesby to ‘rumour it abroad,
that Anne, my wife, is sick and like to die’. His motive? ‘I must be married
to my brother’s daughter, or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass.’ A
scene later, the audience learns the queen had ‘bid the world goodnight’, not
even meriting a death on stage. She returns as a ghost for a brief riposte on
the eve of Bosworth, directing her prayers in Tudor’s favour against the
man with whom she ‘never slept a quiet hour’. Anne Neville was dead and
the audience believed Richard had killed her.
In 1699, the fashion for ‘improving’ Shakespeare saw poet laureate
Colley Cibber produce his own version of Richard III. In a scene invented
for the play, he portrays Richard and Anne at the point in which their
marriage breaks down. His Anne cannot help but compare her second
husband with her first, considering matrimony to be a ‘blessing to the
virtuous’ rather than the ‘scourge of our offences’ it has now become. Now
her life ‘yields only sorrow’, with Richard the ‘constant disturber’ of her
rest, as she, ‘night after night, with cares lie waking’. She asks him, ‘Have I
deserved this usage?’ To which he replies, ‘Out-liv’d my liking,’ now that
he ‘lov’d another’. Anne then invites him to kill her, which he declines, as
‘the meddling world will call it murder’. She wishes she could ‘with deadly
venome be anointed’ but is done away with by Richard’s ‘physician’. The
1995 McKellen screenplay portrayed Richard encouraging the queen’s
developing depression and drug addiction, to the point at which she
overdoses, either by her own hand or the administration of another. In the
original version, Shakespeare’s Anne also wishes for her own death,
through the symbolic medium of Coronation:
I would to God that the inclusive verge
Of golden metal that must round my brow
Were red-hot steel to sear me to the brain.
In March 1485, Anne’s actual death was to prove hardly less dramatic or
mysterious. In fact, all that can be stated for certain is that she died, in the
Palace of Westminster, on the 16th of that month. Lisa Hilton states that,
given the rumours, Anne’s ‘death was all too convenient’ but her illness
may well have triggered the gossip, rather than been their intended result.
Subsequent sources recorded that she passed away during an eclipse of the
sun. The symbolism of this, as an indicator of the demise of the Yorkist
dynasty, with its motif of the sun in splendour, would not have been lost on
her contemporaries. Fabyan related that it was bad rumours arising from the
death of the queen that caused Richard ‘to fall in much hatred of his
subjects’, although Vergil gave a non-committal account of her end: ‘The
quene, whether she wer dispatchyd with sorowfulness, or poyson, dyed
within few days after, and was buryed at Westmynster.’
So how exactly did Anne die? Tuberculosis (TB) and cancer have been
suggested as the most likely causes, which could fit with theories regarding
her low fertility. Richard’s detractors favoured the poison theory and some
of his contemporaries believed that enough to repeat it. In an essay of 1980,
The Death of Queen Anne Neville, Anne F. Sutton explores how the
circumstances of Anne’s final illness are consistent with the diagnosis of
TB. Firstly, there is the suddenness of her death. According to the Croyland
Chronicle, she showed no signs of illness through 1484, but fell ill soon
after Christmas, which allows for a rapid decline over a period of twelve
weeks. Although there are many different kinds of tuberculosis, the most
common, pulmonary TB, is an infectious bacteria spread through coughs
and sneezes. It is not inherited but can easily thrive in shared living
quarters, suggesting that Isabel Neville’s premature death at twenty-five
may not just have been a result of childbirth. The symptoms of pulmonary
tuberculosis can include fever, breathlessness, night sweats, coughing up
blood, weakness, weight loss and anorexia. Perhaps this may explain the
physical similarity between the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth of York and
Anne, a woman a decade her elder, who had borne a child. Secondly, a
severe shock, such as the death of her son, could also trigger a latent
infection to become a full-scale disease. Physicians of the medieval period
did not understand the illness. Twelfth-century Hungarians asserted that it
was caused when a dog-shaped demon ‘occupied’ the body and began to
consume the lungs. She may have been prescribed garlic and the poisons
mercury and arsenic. Perhaps these accelerated her demise. Thirdly, her
symptoms would have been considered contagious and caused sufficient
alarm for Richard’s doctors to advise him to keep his distance. Anne’s
death, amid the prophetic eclipse, can never be completely resolved.
Tuberculosis may fit the known facts but those facts are limited. There may
have been a number of other causes. Equally, the rapid time-scale, rumours,
symptoms and possible ‘cures’ could indicate poisoning by person or
persons unknown. Did someone take advantage of the temporary darkness
and smother her? Did she sink into a Lady Macbeth-style derangement,
prompted by guilt, just weeks before her husband’s own violent death? In
the twenty-first century, it is not possible to know for sure.
Few tributes to Queen Anne remain. Her reign was one of the shortest
in English history, lasting only twenty-two months. According to Fabyan,
she was a woman of ‘gracious fame, upon whose soul … Jesus have
mercy’. Agostino Barbarigo, future Doge of Venice, wrote to Richard III,
regretting the loss of his ‘beloved’ consort and exhorting him, ‘endowed
with consummate equanimity and marvellous virtues, of your wisdom and
grandeur of mind to bear the disaster calmly and resign yourself to the
divine will’. According to the Italian, who had never met Anne, she lived a
‘religious and catholic life, and was so adorned with goodness, prudence,
and excellent morality, as to leave a name immortal’.3 In the intervening
centuries, though, it was Anne’s mortal name that was often overlooked.
Her life has been overshadowed by the controversies of Richard’s reign and
his death in battle. Today the site of her burial is disputed; perhaps Richard
intended to erect a tomb in her honour but he ran out of time. In 1960, the
Richard III Society established a memorial plaque on the wall of
Westminster Abbey, close to where her remains are thought to lie, inscribed:
Anne Nevill[e] 1456–85, Queen of England, younger daughter of
Richard, Earl of Warwick, called the Kingmaker, wife to the last
Plantagenet King, Richard III. In person she was seemly, amiable and
beauteous … And according to the interpretation of her name Anne full
gracious. Requiescat in pace.
What, exactly, was Anne’s contribution to her times? While Richard III has
inspired his own cult following, Anne has received far less critical attention.
However, the nature of her relationship with her husband can help provide
answers to some of the key questions of his accession and reign. More
significantly, though, Anne must be allowed to stand alone as a late
medieval woman, wife, mother and queen. She deserves to be studied as
more than just a foil for the men in her life and as a far more complex
individual than a mere pawn of their schemes. Her tenure as queen was so
brief and poorly recorded as to make analysis of her achievements difficult.
Difficult, but not impossible.
Firstly, as a wife and queen, Anne’s role was to validate her husband in
his position. Of course, Richard was king in his own right. As the only
surviving son of Richard, Duke of York, following the declared illegitimacy
of Edward IV and the invalidity of his marriage, he did not need Anne in
order to claim the throne. However, the events of summer 1483 left him
vulnerable to gossip, criticism and attack. His regime needed every symbol
of validity to demonstrate its pre-eminence and durability, so Richard
sought to embed himself at the heart of Westminster by establishing
networks of ties by blood, marriage and loyalty. This began as early as his
Coronation. The presence of a devoted wife, and queen of long standing,
added a further level of respectability. Anne was no insignificant individual
in her own right; embodied in her was the memory of Warwick’s status and
‘kingmaking’ activities. If, by implication, she stood beside Richard, so
should others who may have doubted his claim and role in the
disappearance of the princes. Even today, the question of Richard’s
involvement elicits comments that Anne would not have remained loyal to
him, had she believed in his guilt, yet this is a modern perspective. Anne
had known her husband since they were children and continued to back him
once he became king, whatever she may or may not have known. No doubt
her own considerable ambition contributed to this, but, more importantly,
they presented a powerful union.
Equally, a queen was seen as an indispensable facet of medieval
monarchy, tempering her husband’s warlike majesty with charity, mercy
and gentleness. As the figurehead of a network of female and juvenile
dependants, the queen represented an interface between a divine regime and
its subjects. There had not been a double Coronation since that of Edward II
and Isabel of France in February 1308. From her role as Duchess of
Gloucester, Anne was already known as a sponsor of various religious
establishments and the cults of saints, as well as having represented Richard
at the York courts. Her political function was as an intermediary, patron of
the arts and example of piety. As the embodiment of these, her visible
presence at Richard’s side, on occasions such as the Coronations at
Westminster and York, the royal progress and Christmases at Westminster,
completed what her contemporaries would have sought as the desirable
model of a royal family. Thus, her function was a confirmatory one, for
Richard the individual and as king.
Secondly, the role of a medieval queen had to encompass motherhood.
Anne had already provided Richard with one son, the minimum
requirement for the continuation of the dynasty, but the absence of any
other surviving children was clearly an issue, as it made Richard’s
inheritance as tenuous as the young boy’s life. Yet Anne’s low fertility
cannot be assumed. Modern medical studies have ascertained that the
responsibility for a lack of fertility in couples can lie with either partner or
be an unfortunate consequence of their specific pairing. Richard had
fathered at least two illegitimate children but there is no way of knowing
what Anne’s levels of fecundity would have been if she were with a
different partner. To her husband and his contemporaries, though, the lack
of children in a marriage was always attributable to the woman. Through
fifteenth-century eyes, Anne had failed in this aspect of her duties as a wife
and queen.
The brevity of Anne’s reign makes it difficult to state decisively what
model of queenship she provided. During her lifetime, she witnessed the
reigns of two other women, both of whom she was related to through
marriage. Her mother-in-law, Margaret of Anjou, presented herself as a
warrior queen, equal to the task of kingship, which she assumed during the
periods of her husband’s illness. The unpopularity of her favourites, coupled
with the unruly nature of the armies under their command, made her into a
figure of fear for many of her contemporaries. Margaret can hardly be
blamed for actively defending her husband and son, and her contemporary
warlike queen, Isabella of Castile, attracted epithets such as powerful,
forceful and brave when she met rebels in person. One difference was that
Isabel was part of a functioning couple, supported by her formidable
husband, Ferdinand of Aragon; in England, Margaret was despised for
blurring the lines between kingship and queenship. For most of Anne’s life,
her sister-in-law Elizabeth Wydeville had worn the crown and made her
influence felt through the sphere of family and household. Her undeniable
sexual hold over Edward led to accusations of ‘pillow-talk’ and resentment
was caused by the advancement of her large and ambitious family. The
greatest cause of dislike was her supposedly humble roots and rapid
ascendancy to power, which meant her marriage had been conducted in
secret. Neither modelled a type of queenship that would have appealed to
Anne, as far as her character can be understood. As half of a married couple
of ten years’ duration, her position was unusual, as her reign was an
extension of an established partnership. Unlike her contemporaries, she had
not chosen Richard in expectation of a crown and did not have to undergo
the process of integration and acceptance as queen. Nor did she need to
define herself as a wife in the public eye, as Margaret and Elizabeth had
done. As a result, she and Richard are likely to have approached their rule
from a position of mutual understanding and shared ambition. Under
different circumstances, Anne Neville could have proved to be a very
successful queen.

[Link]
3. Edward III. King of England from 1327 to 1377, and common ancestor of the warring houses of
Lancaster and York. Richard III’s family were descended from his second son, Lionel of Antwerp,
through the female line, while Henry VI derived his claim from the third son, John of Gaunt. Anne
was his great-great-granddaughter and Richard was his great-grandson. (Author’s collection)
4. Anne de Beauchamp. According to Pevsner, this fifteenth-century corbel in the nave of St
Andrew’s church, Chedworth, Gloucestershire, depicts Anne’s mother, Anne de Beauchamp,
Countess of Warwick. She was born in 1426 and bore Anne, her last child, at the comparatively
advanced age of thirty. (Guy Thornton)
5. Warwick Castle. Anne was born here on 11 June 1456. One of the most wealthy and impressive in
the country, there had been a castle on this bend of the River Avon since the eleventh century.
Warwick inherited it and the title through his wife, after the death of the last Beauchamp earls in the
1440s. (Matthew Wells)

6. St Mary’s church, Warwick. Anne was baptised here in June 1456, within days of her birth.
Medieval babies were usually christened as soon as possible, to ensure their salvation, as cases of
infant mortality were high. Anne’s ceremony would have been arranged by her godparents, as her
mother would not have yet emerged from her confinement. (Colin Sabin)
7. St Mary’s church, Calais. L’église Notre-Dame, one of the few remaining landmarks in Calais that
Anne would recognise from her childhood. Begun in the thirteenth century, building work continued
throughout the English occupation of the Hundred Years’ War, with its tower completed around 1500.
(Matthew Reames)

8. Inner Court, Warwick Castle. The interior of Warwick, showing the extent of the inner courtyard.
In Anne’s day, this would have been bustling with activity. The crenelated wing, which overlooks the
river, was designed by the Beauchamps as a symbol of strength and status. Retaining its original
defensive features, steps had been made to make the living quarters more comfortable by the time of
the earl’s residence. (Matthew Wells)

9. Falcon and fetterlock. The House of York is best known for its device of the sun in splendour but
the falcon and fetterlock was also among its early heraldic devices, featured here on a tower at
Fotheringhay Castle. It may have come from the Mortimer family, of which Richard, Duke of York’s
mother had been a member. (Simon Leach)
10. St Albans. ‘French Row’, in St Albans, Hertfordshire; a narrow street just off the medieval
marketplace and cross. With its origins in the thirteenth century, this, and other narrow lanes in the
town, must have seen the worst of the hand-to-hand fighting in the battles of 1455 and 1461. (Steve
Cadman)

11. St Albans Abbey, now Cathedral. From here, Abbot Whethamstede witnessed the battle of 1455,
amid fears that the abbey would be sacked. After the death of Somerset, some of the Lancastrian
lords sought refuge from Warwick’s victorious troops, hiding their armour and disguising themselves
as monks. (Steve Cadman)
12. Sandwich. The gateway from the town to the dock. One of the original Cinque Ports, the Kentish
town was used as the main foothold into the kingdom by Warwick. Earl Rivers had amassed a fleet
here with the intention of raiding Calais, but a pre-emptive strike in 1460 resulted in his humiliating
capture and that of his parents as they lay in bed in the town. Now the port is silted up and only a
narrow river flows past this gate. (Jane Ring)
13. Micklegate Bar, York. After Richard, Duke of York and his second son, Edmund, Earl of Rutland,
were killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460, their heads were displayed on the gate
for all to see. York’s was dressed in a paper crown, as an allusion to the claim he had made to the
throne that autumn. His youngest son, named after him, was eight at the time. (Mark Smith)
14. Angers Cathedral. It was here, in July 1470, that Anne Neville and Edward of Westminster were
formally betrothed, in the presence of her parents and his mother, Margaret of Anjou. Their oaths
were reputedly sworn upon a fragment of the true cross but the marriage wasn’t solemnised until six
months later. (Tjeerd Huisman)
15. Chateau d’Amboise. The imposing and beautiful chateau, favourite of the French monarchy, set
on a bend of the River Loire. Anne and her mother arrived in July, along with Edward and her
mother-in-law Margaret of Anjou, as guests of Louis XI. Together they awaited news of Warwick’s
attempt to restore Henry VI to the English throne. (Tjeerd Huisman)

16. View, Chateau d’Amboise. During the summer of 1470, Anne and her fiancé Edward passed the
days at Amboise by walking in the surrounding gardens and watching the road for messengers. Here,
the two young people got to know each other. With its breathtaking view across the river, the chateau
must have seemed an idyllic place to start their lives together. (Tjeerd Huisman)

17. Margaret of Anjou and Prince Edward. Statue in the Jardin de Luxembourg, Paris, of Margaret of
Anjou and her son, Edward of Westminster. The inscription on the base reads, translated, ‘If you do
not respect a proscribed queen, respect an unhappy mother.’ Margaret and Edward appear to have
been close and united in their ambitions; his loss was a devastating blow to her. (Deborah Esrick)
18. Tewkesbury Abbey. The armies of Lancaster and York met outside the abbey at Tewkesbury in
Gloucestershire on 4 May 1471. As Anne and Margaret waited, the battle turned decisively against
them. It was the first campaign of both Anne’s husbands, Richard of Gloucester and Edward of
Westminster. The young Prince of Wales was killed, either during the fighting or shortly afterwards.
Some of the Lancastrian lords sheltering inside the cathedral were later extracted and beheaded,
forcing the building to be reconsecrated. It is also the final resting place of Isabel Neville. (Simon
Jenkins)
19. Cerne Abbey. It was to the beautiful abbey at Cerne, in Dorset, that Margaret of Anjou fled with
Anne and Edward in April 1471. They had arrived in England expecting to be welcomed as its newly
reinstated royal family, only to receive news of Warwick’s death. Inside the peaceful walls of Cerne,
they planned their next move. (Danny McL @ Flickr)

20. The Wakefield Tower. Built by Henry III, this part of the Tower of London was used to imprison
Yorkists after the 1460 Battle of Wakefield, possibly giving rise to its name. The hapless Henry VI
was incarcerated here and met his mysterious death within its walls, reputedly while at prayer.
(Christopher Hall)
21. Warwick the Kingmaker. (David Baldwin)
22. Anne Neville (centre), her first husband Prince Edward of Lancaster (left), and her second
husband Richard III (right). (Jonathan Reeve JR1731b90fp109C 14001500)

23. Richard III and Anne Neville. (Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and the Lady Anne by Edwin Austin
Abbey. Yale University Art Gallery, Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Collection)
24. Arms of Anne and Richard. A cigarette card dating from 1906, featuring the arms of Anne Neville
surmounting those of Richard with its tusked boars. (Keith)
25. Middleham Castle. Exterior of the castle that was home to the Warwick family on their return
from Calais in 1461. The thirteen-year-old Richard came to join them here in around 1465 to be
trained as a ‘henxman’ in the martial and noble arts essential to his future role. Anne and Richard’s
friendship may have developed from this time. (Mark Wheaver, [Link])
26. The Great Hall, Middleham Castle. The Great Hall at Middleham, which was built over the
cellars, for which the central pillars remain. This would have been the centre of castle life, where
feasting and entertaining took place, business was conducted and the duke presided over a local
court. After their marriage in 1472, Richard and Anne made it their home. (Mark Wheaver,
[Link])
27. Inner Chambers, Middleham Castle. A statue of Richard III now stands on the ground floor where
the kitchen was once located. Above it, on the second storey, were the Gloucesters’ private rooms, the
Great Chamber and Inner Chamber. (Mark Wheaver, [Link])

28. South Wing, Middleham Castle. The horse mill, centre, and oven, left, were installed in the
sixteenth century. Before that, the first floor of the range contained four rooms known as the ‘privy’
(private), or lady, chamber. (Mark Wheaver, [Link])

29. St Mary’s and Alkelda’s church, Middleham. This was the local parish church for the
Gloucesters, where Richard intended to found a collegiate college. He obtained the necessary grant
from Parliament in 1478 but the plans were ended with his death. The stalls were named after the
couple’s favoured saints. (Karen Beal)
30. The Shambles, York. Anne would have been familiar with the winding medieval streets of York,
where she could have purchased luxury items, which arrived in the markets from ships on the River
Ouse. The central Shambles would have been at the heart of the city’s trade since its first incarnation
in the Domesday Book. Historically a street of butchers, the present fifteenth-century buildings
recently earned it the title of ‘most picturesque street in England’. (Steve Cadman)
31. York Minster. Anne and Richard’s arrival at Middleham in the summer of 1472 came soon after
the building had finally been completed. Dedicated to St Peter, it was the seat of Anne’s uncle,
George Neville, who had been enthroned as archbishop in 1465. The role it would later play in their
reigns indicates the affection in which they held it. (Neil Melville-Kenney)
32. The white rose. A modern carving in the City of York evokes the long association of the city with
Richard’s family. The white rose was used by Edward IV, along with the sunburst image, as his
personal devices. His daughter, Elizabeth, would have them embroidered on her clothing. This forms
part of the design of a bridge spanning the River Ouse. (Mark Smith)

33. Sheriff Hutton. The remains of Sheriff Hutton Castle, Yorkshire, which Richard received in 1471,
following Warwick’s death. It was here that he based his ‘King’s Household in the North’ and where
his council regularly met. The castle was home to his nephews, Edward of Warwick and John de la
Pole, from 1484 and it was here that he sent his niece Elizabeth of York, in the wake of rumours of
his amorous intentions towards her in 1485. (Tom Blackwell, [Link])
34. Fotheringhay Castle ruins. Ruins are all that now remain of the northern stronghold of the York
family, birthplace of Richard III in 1452. Thirty years later, he would be present when a treaty was
signed with the Duke of Albany for an invasion of Scotland. Anne would have been familiar with the
castle as a guest of her mother-in-law and great-aunt, Cecily Neville. (Amanda Miller @ Amanda’s
Arcadia)

35. St Mary and All Saints church, Fotheringhay. Close to the York family seat of Fotheringhay
Castle is this early fifteenth-century church. In 1476, Edward IV ordered the reinterment of his father
and brother, Richard, Duke of York and Edmund, Earl of Rutland, following their deaths at
Wakefield. Cecily Neville was also buried there on her death in 1495. (Amanda Miller @ Amanda’s
Arcadia)
36. Richmond Castle. The seat of the Tudors in Yorkshire, this twelfth-century castle made from the
local honeystone had been confiscated and bestowed on George, Duke of Clarence. On his death in
1478, it was given to Richard and Anne. (Alan Taylor)
37. Window, Fotheringhay church. A modern memorial window at Fotheringhay, featuring the royal
arms of York, including the falcon and fetterlock, sunburst and boar. (Simon Leach)
38. Penrith Castle. Once in the hands of the Neville family and set in a prestigious location near the
Scottish border, Richard obtained it in 1471 and added a banqueting hall to its layout. (Stephen
Woodcock)

39. Crosby Hall. By 1483, Richard had acquired this Bishopsgate town house from the original
owner’s widow; it was here that Anne stayed with him during the turbulent events of June 1483.
Shakespeare mentions it at the time of Henry VI’s funeral but it was not in Gloucester’s possession at
that time. In 1910, it was removed, brick by brick, to its present site in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. (Jos)
40. Ludlow Castle. Edward, Prince of Wales, had been raised in his own household at Ludlow, on the
Welsh borders, under the tutelage of his uncle, Earl Rivers. News of his father’s death reached here
on 14 April 1483. (Les D.)

41. Arms of Edward V. The arms of the twelve-year-old Edward V, who reigned from 9 April to 26
June 1483. (Keith)
42. Princes in the Tower. The young Edward V was conducted to the Tower of London to await his
Coronation, and soon his brother, Richard of York, joined him. They were seen for the last time
playing in the grounds in June 1483. This cigarette card dates from around 1924. (Keith)
43. The White Boar. A modern version of Richard’s motif located at Bosworth Field, surrounded by
his motto ‘loyaultie me lie’ or ‘loyalty binds me’. Thousands of boar badges were made and
distributed in York to coincide with the investiture of Edward as Prince of Wales of September 1483.
(Mike Cox)

44. Staircase, White Tower. The flight of steps leading to the chapel in the White Tower, Tower of
London. Renovations in 1674 unearthed a box of bones which had been buried deep in the well under
the steps, which were placed within an urn now in Westminster Abbey. The discovery of Richard III’s
remains has reopened debate about whether the bones in the urn will now be subject to forensic
study. (Ann Longmore-Etheridge)
45. Lincoln. Richard was visiting the city in October 1483 when news reached him that Buckingham
had joined the rebellion sweeping the South. It may have come as a surprise to Richard, as only four
months earlier Buckingham had helped put him on the throne and given every appearance of loyalty.
(Snapper)

46. Richard, Duke of York (d.1460), Richard III’s father. Drawing of a statue formerly on the Welsh
bridge at Shrewsbury. (Jonathan Reeve JR1577b4p548 14501500)
47. A hunchbacked portrayal of Richard III. (Jonathan Reeve JR1559folio5 14501500)

48. Nottingham Castle. It was while staying here that Richard and Anne received the terrible news
about their son’s death, in April 1484. They left at once for Middleham. It is rumoured that Richard
referred to it afterwards as his ‘castle of care’. (Tom Bastin)
49. Statue of Richard III. Richard is commemorated in a modern statue in Leicester Park. He stayed
at the Blue Boar Inn on the night before the battle and rode out from the city to Bosworth Field on 22
August 1485. (James Nicholls)
50. Westminster Abbey. Anne died on 16 March 1485 amid an eclipse of the sun. She was buried in
an unmarked grave in Westminster Abbey; if Richard had intended to erect a tomb to her, his own
demise prevented it. In 1960, the Richard III Society put up a bronze plaque in her honour. (Steve
Cadman)
51. St Margaret’s church, Stoke Golding. Local legend suggests that the grooves made in this
window-sill were caused by soldiers sharpening their swords before the Battle of Bosworth, fought
nearby in 1485. (Lee Hutchinson)
52. Bosworth Field. On the night of 21 August 1485, Richard was supposedly plagued by bad dreams
in which, according to Shakespeare, Anne appeared to accuse him of her murder. In the morning,
though, he rallied his troops on the high ground, believing that God would vindicate his rule through
a decisive victory. (Lee Hutchinson)

53. Bosworth Field Memorial. A modern-day memorial to those who fell in battle at Bosworth, or
Ambion Hill, on 22 August 1485. (Mike Cox)
54. Bow Bridge, Leicester. This memorial plaque relates that a soothsayer predicted Richard’s demise
where his ‘spur struck’. Tradition has it that he did just this, on the ride over the bridge out to battle
on 22 August, and that as his corpse was carried back, his head also struck the bridge. (Snapper)
55. Henry VI. The king depicted on a screen in Ludham church in Norfolk. (Jonathan Reeve
JR1721f14 14001500)
56. Margaret Beaufort, Christ’s College, Cambridge. Henry Tudor was her only son, whom she bore
at the age of thirteen. (Elizabeth Norton)
57. Henry VII by Holbein. (Elizabeth Norton)

58. Tudor-era stained glass depiction of Elizabeth of York. (Author’s collection)

59. Corner of a Leicestershire car park. One unkempt corner of the Leicester car park before the
university dig began in late August 2012. The exact location of the Greyfriars church was unknown,
but the discovery of stones under the tarmac soon established its perimeters. (Snapper)

60. Medieval tile. This tile, with its heraldic motif, was found at the Leicester dig site in 2012, still
located in the well-preserved floor of the Greyfriars church. (Snapper)
61. Greyfriars church, Leicester. In this section of the dig, the diamond-shaped indentations of the
floor tiles are still visible within the church choir. (Snapper)
62. Greyfriars trench. The public were allowed in to view the long, thin trench in September 2012,
which shows just how little space the archaeologists had to work with when seeking to locate the
grave. (Snapper)

63. Burial site of Richard III. The location within the Greyfriars choir from which the bones of
Richard III were exhumed in September 2012. (Jim Crowdell)

64. Skeleton of Richard III. The skeleton, minus feet, of Richard III, unveiled at the press conference
of 4 February 2013. (University of Leicester)
65. Skull of Richard III. Image released before the press conference on 4 February 2013. (University
of Leicester)
66. Spine of Richard III. Richard’s spine, excavated in September 2012, shows signs of idiopathic
adolescent onset scoliosis, forming the distinctive ‘S’ shape, which would have caused some
discomfort. (University of Leicester)

[Link]
Epilogue
Lord Jesus Christ, deign to free me, your servant King Richard, from
every tribulation, sorrow and trouble in which I am placed … hear me,
in the name of all your goodness, for which I give thanks, and for all
the gifts granted to me, because you made me from nothing and
redeemed me out of your bounteous love and pity from eternal
damnation to promising eternal life.1
On 1 August 1485, Henry Tudor set sail from Harfleur and landed at
Milford Haven six days later, with an army of exiles and French
mercenaries. According to Fabyan, he knelt down ‘and with meke
countenaunce and pure deuotion’, recited a psalm ‘and kissed the ground
mekely, and reuerently made the signe of the crosse upon him’, then ‘he
commaunded soche as wer about him, boldly in the name of God and S.
George to set forwarde’. Nearby was Sir William Herbert, of Raglan Castle.
Herbert was the son of Henry’s old guardian, Earl of Pembroke, on whose
estates the boy had grown up. William was six years his elder and must
have known the young Tudor since their teenage years, when he had been
intended as a husband for William’s sister, Maude. Henry may have hoped
to find support from his guardian’s son. However, the previous year,
Herbert had married Richard’s illegitimate daughter Katherine, for which he
received an annual payment that nearly doubled his income. Charles Ross
has suggested that it was probably an agent of Herbert who brought news of
Tudor’s landing to the king.
Croyland claimed that Richard had been uncertain ‘at what port
[Tudor] intended to effect a landing’, so ‘betook himself to the North’,
leaving Francis Lovell in the vicinity of Southampton. The chronicler dates
this to shortly before the feast of Pentecost, which fell that year on 22 May.
The Court Rolls can provide some answers which disprove Croyland’s
time-scale. Richard was at Westminster as late as 1 August, after which he
proceeded to Nottingham. The news reached him at the castle there, ten
days later. At once he sent out messengers to summon his lords to
rendezvous, with their armies, at Leicester, although he did not arrive there
himself until 20 August. Fabyan says Richard ‘gathered his power in all
haste’, while Croyland believed him to have been complacent, rejoicing as
the ‘long wished-for day had arrived, for him to triumph with ease over so
contemptible a faction’, resulting in ‘uninterrupted tranquillity’ for the
kingdom. Both chroniclers wrote with the benefit of hindsight. In 1485, the
king prepared himself as best he knew how, as a seasoned commander, with
experience from battles such as Edgecote and Tewkesbury. In Leicester, he
was reputed to have stayed at the old Blue Boar, or White Boar Inn, also
known as King Richard’s House, which was the city’s ‘principal hostelry’.
Legend has it that the populace tore down the sign after the battle that
August and the whole building was pulled down in 1836.2 From Leicester,
he led the royal forces west, where they camped upon Ambion Hill, near
Bosworth Field, and lay down to rest for the night.
Shakespeare’s depiction of Richard’s terrible nightmares before the
battle is well known. Describing herself as ‘wretched’, the ghost of Anne
appears in order to curse her husband, with whom she ‘never slept a quiet
hour’. The spectral presence of supposed victims, speaking their allegations
and curses, was a common literary device, which the Bard also used in
Julius Caesar, written in the same year as Richard III, and later in Macbeth
and Hamlet. Medieval Catholicism explained the existence of ghosts as
souls trapped in purgatory, who could manifest in order to ensure that
justice was done. The Protestant view, though, relevant for the context in
which Shakespeare wrote, was that purgatory and, therefore, ghosts, did not
exist; instead, these would be seen as devils, sent to taunt and alarm the
living. These two interpretations, polarised along religious lines, correspond
with the most dichotomic views of Richard’s life and reign. According to
one, he is the murderer troubled by his crimes; on the other side, he is a
pious, responsible ruler on the eve of a critical battle, struggling against
forces of evil.
Where exactly did the story of the nightmares originate? More’s
history does not cover the battle and neither the London chronicler, Fabyan,
nor the Ballad of Bosworth Field poem mention them. The account appears
first in the Croyland Chronicle, written in April 1486. According to this
source, Richard declared he had ‘seen dreadful visions’ and imagined
himself ‘surrounded by a multitude of daemons’. Apparently, this made his
usually ‘attenuated’ face ‘more livid and ghastly than usual’. Recording
these events only months after the marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth
of York, Croyland is keen to state the godlessness and general disorder of
the losing side, which lacked any chaplain ‘to perform divine service’ or
anyone to prepare breakfast ‘to refresh the flagging spirits of the king’.
Similar stories are repeated by Polydore Vergil, who had completed a draft
of his history by 1513, although it was not published for twenty years.
Vergil adds that Richard was mindful of his troops, ‘refresshy[ng] his
soldiers that night from ther travale, and with many woords exhortyd them
to the fyght to coome’. His ‘horryble ymages as yt wer of evell spyrytes’
replicates Croyland’s in description, although he adds that they bred in the
king a fatal and ‘suddane feare’ so that he ‘dyd not buckle himself to the
conflict with such lyvelyness of corage and countenance as before’. Vergil
also attributes this to ‘a conscyence guiltie of haynous [heinous] offences’.
In 1587, Shakespeare’s source, Raphael Holinshed, reputed these details to
‘fame’, implying that, in the intervening century, the story of the nightmare
had become widespread. In terms reminiscent of the fate of Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus,3 Richard saw ‘diuerse images like terrible diuels, which
pulled and haled him, not suffering him to take anie quiet or rest’, after
which ‘his heart being almost damped’. According to legend, he had seen a
soothsayer (fortune-teller or seer) in Leicester, the night before the battle,
who predicted ‘where your spur should strike on the ride into battle, your
head shall be broken on the return’. Apparently, his spur struck the bridge
stone of the city’s Bow Bridge as he left it in the morning. Independently of
the battle, he had already planned to be buried in York, in a chantry chapel
of the cathedral, where a hundred chaplains would pray for his soul.
Perhaps there is something in the accounts of the nightmare. After all,
on paper, Henry Tudor should not really have won the Battle of Bosworth
that August day. He had no experience of combat and had fewer troops, as
well as challenging an anointed king who was a veteran of such campaigns
and had the higher ground. He also firmly believed God was on his side,
parading the cross before his troops and hoping for a swift and decisive
validation of his reign. Estimates have placed Richard’s army at around
8,000, with Henry’s a little over half that. The flower of English aristocracy
lined up behind their king, who had taken steps to ensure the loyalty of
those who had previously been his enemies, through alliances, grants and
titles. The Ballad of Bosworth Field, thought to have been composed by an
eye-witness, possibly based in Stanley’s camp, lists those who turned out to
fight at his side: the Duke of Norfolk, ‘Earls of Lincoln, Northumberland
and Westmorland, Lords Zouche, Maltravers, Welles, Grey of Codnor,
Bowes, Audley, Berkeley, Ferrers, Lovell, Fitzhugh, Scrope of Masham,
Scrope of Bolton, Dacre, Ogle, Lumley, and Greystoke’, as well as a
multitude of knights including Henry Percy, John Grey, Robert
Brackenbury, Marmaduke Constable, Richard Radcliffe and John Neville.
Richard is described as having dignity and suffering ‘great misfortune’ and
was the ‘causer of his owne death’, brought down by ‘wicked counsel’. The
account of Richard charging single-handedly at Tudor, as he stood
surrounded by his troops, may have been an act of bravery or desperation. It
cost him the battle. Many of his expected 15,000 troops had failed to
commit themselves during the conflict, with Sir William Stanley, husband
of Margaret Beaufort, reputedly launching a personal attack on the king in
order to save Tudor. Richard died with the words, ‘Treason, treason,’ on his
lips. His close associates, John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, William Catesby
and Richard Ratcliffe fell at his side, while Lovell escaped to an uncertain
fate.
Richard’s end has attracted controversy since he fell at Bosworth on 22
August 1485. Further legends arose surrounding the desperate search for a
horse and Tudor’s discovery of the crown in a hawthorn bush, which
Stanley then used to crown him. ‘The Ghost of Richard III’ gives a graphic
account of Richard’s end and the removal of his body:
My braine they dasht, which flew on ev’ry side,
As they would shew me my tracts of policie:
My yeares with stabs, my days they multiplide
In drops of blood, t’ expresse my crueltie:
They pierst my hart, evaporating pride,
And mangled me like an anatomie,
And then with horses drag’d me to my tombe.
Thus finish’t I my fate by heaven’s just doome.
Fabyan describes how Richard’s body, ‘spoiled and naked’, was carried
‘unreverently ouertwharte the horse back … untl ye friers at Leiceter’,
where he was ‘with little reverence buried’. Holinshed adds that he had
‘nothing left about him, not so much as a clout to couer his priuie members’
and contrasts this with the way the king had ‘gorgeouslie [the day before]
with pompe and pride departed’ from the same city. It is Holinshed who
presents the disturbing image of the dead king ‘trussed … like a hog or
calfe, his head and armes hanging on the one side of the horsse, and his legs
on the other side, and all besprinkled with mire and bloud’, in which
condition ‘he was brought to the graie friers church within the towne, and
there laie like a miserable spectacle’. This was probably at the church of the
Annunciation of Our Lady, before he was buried in the church of the small
monastic community at Greyfriars. In 1495, Henry Tudor, then Henry VII,
paid for a marble and alabaster monument to be erected over his tomb, at a
cost of £50. The church was demolished following its dissolution in 1536
and the bones were reputed to have been thrown into the nearby River Soar.
Few voices were raised in lamentation. One of the only surviving
tributes came from the one place where he had perhaps been most at home,
from whence he derived his family name. The Mayor of York’s sergeant
recorded that ‘King Richard, late mercifully reigning over us, was through
great treason … piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this
city’. Yet, within the year, allegiances had changed. Such were the times. In
1486, Henry VII paid his first visit to the city so closely associated with
Richard and Anne, where they had sat enthroned for four hours with their
son, at the height of summer 1484. The mayor and aldermen rode out to
meet him, dressed in their official robes of scarlet and violet, mulberry and
red. At Micklebar Gate, which had been graced in 1460 by the head of
Richard’s father, the Duke of York, children lauded the new king. A huge
red-and-white rose was displayed to symbolise the union of Henry and
Elizabeth of York, and crowds sprinkled the party with rose water and
sweetmeats. It seemed that while Anne had been forgotten, Richard would
continue to be vilified forever. That is, until 527 years later.
*
In late August 2012, a team of archaeologists from the University of
Leicester began to excavate a city-centre car park, believed to be the site of
the old Grey Friars church. Unsure of exactly how the layout of the church
mapped out over the modern site, they dug three long trenches and hit at
once upon some bones, which they set aside for further explanation: surely
they could not be so lucky as to have discovered the king on their first
attempt? By 5 September, they had uncovered glazed floor tiles and
fragments of stained glass, consistent with expectations of such a building.
Now they knew for certain that they were actually inside the church, even
within the location suggested by John Rous, for Richard’s burial. This made
them return to the original bones, uncovered on that first day, and begin to
scrape away the soil around them. The skeleton of an adult male emerged,
located in the most prestigious burial location of the church, the choir. The
skull showed evidence of fatal injuries caused by a bladed weapon, as well
a number of other blows. It appeared that the individual had met a violent
end, probably in battle. More controversially, the bones indicated the
presence of scoliosis, a condition that can result, to varying degrees, in
curvature of the spine. Even in situ, the skeleton’s spine formed a
distinctive ‘S’ shape. The circumstantial evidence for its identity as the lost
Yorkist king looked strong.
A sample of mitochondrial DNA was extracted from the teeth and
compared to a sample taken from Michael Ibsen, a British Canadian who
had been identified by genealogist Dr John Ashdown-Hill as a direct
descendant of Richard’s sister, Anne of York. While forensic pathologists
worked to establish the exact cause of death, specialists in medieval
weaponry were summoned to give advice on the types of instrument that
might have inflicted the injuries to the skull. The bones were thoroughly
cleaned and closely examined to establish the individual’s age, height and
state of health, before being radiocarbon dated and given a CT scan, to
allow for a three-dimensional reconstruction to take place. Soil samples
were also collected and analysed, as were mineralised dental plaque
deposits, to help ascertain details about diet and living conditions. The
world waited to hear the results.
On 4 February 2013, the archaeologists’ findings were presented in a
press conference, organised by the university. Having subjected the remains
to ‘rigorous archaeological investigation’, some ‘truly astonishing’
conclusions had been reached. The body had lain only 680 millimetres
below the surface of the car park and had almost been destroyed by
nineteenth-century building works, which were probably responsible for its
lack of feet. No evidence was found of a coffin, shroud or any other funeral
formalities; likewise it appeared not to have been buried with any clothing,
adornment or personal objects. The torso was twisted, with its head propped
up and jaw open. The hands were crossed, right over left, across the pelvis,
suggesting they had been tied. Detailed skeletal analysis confirmed that it
was the remains of an adult male, aged from his late twenties to late thirties,
consistent with Richard’s age at death of thirty-two. The evidence also
showed he had enjoyed a diet rich in protein during his life, particularly
meat and fish, indicative of high-status living. Ten separate wounds were
found on the body, two of which, to the skull, would have proved fatal and
could only have been caused if Richard had lost his protective helmet
during the final melee. They were made by a range of weapons, including at
least one dagger and possibly a halberd, while others appeared to have been
inflicted after death as further acts of humiliation. Radiocarbon dating
placed his year of death somewhere between 1450 and 1540. Two lines of
DNA descent were established, from Richard’s sister, Anne of York, which
provided the final confirmation that the bones did, in fact, belong to him.4
That night, a Channel Four documentary, The King in the Car Park,
revealed the reconstructed head of the king for the first time, similar to the
portraits of the 1520s with his strong nose and jaw. With a half-smile
playing on his lips, unexpectedly charismatic, a face stared back at the
camera that had not been seen for 527 years.
According to archaeological practice, the bones will be laid to rest at
the nearest location to their discovery, at Leicester Cathedral. There are no
plans to reunite him in death with his wife Anne, whose exact resting place
in Westminster Abbey is still uncertain.

[Link]
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to the team at Amberley; Jonathan for suggesting this book and
Nicola and the publicity department for their continuing support and
promotion. I would also like to thank the many wonderful people I have
met online whilst writing, who have offered me their expertise and
enthusiasm, asked and answered questions and kindly shared their images,
resources and ideas. They are too numerous to mention, all around the
world, but they have made a significant contribution to this book. Thanks
also to all my family, in particular to Tom for his love and support; also the
Hunts, for Sue’s generosity and John’s local knowledge and continual
supply of interesting and unusual books. Most of all, thanks to my mother
for her invaluable proof-reading skills and my father for his enthusiasm.
This is the result of the books they read me, the museums they took me to
as a child and the love and imagination with which they encouraged me.

[Link]
Notes
Introduction
1. Ian McKellen official website.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
1 Battles and Births, 1453–1456
1. Complaint made by Cade’s rebels; Seward.
2. Ditchfield, P. H. and W. Page, ‘Windsor Castle: History’, A History of the
County of Berkshire: Volume 3 (1923).
3. Furnivall, F. J. (ed.) and Andrew Boorde, Fyrst Boke of the Introduction
of Knowledge (Early English Text Society, 1870).
4. Brunschwig, Hieronymous, Buch der Cirurgia (1497).
5. Seward, Desmond, A Brief History of the Wars of the Roses (Constable &
Co. Ltd, 1995).
6. Kendall, P., Richard III (Norton & Co., 2002).
7. Hall, Edward, Chronicle; containing the History of England, during the
reign of Henry the fourth and the succeeding monarchs, to the end of the
reign of Henry VIII, in which are particularly described the manners and
customs of those periods (Collated with the editions of 1548 and 1550)
(London: J. Johnson, 1809).
8. Seward.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. SLP Henry VI July 1455.
12. Ibid.
13. SLP Milan 1455.
14. Licence, A., In Bed with the Tudors (Amberley, 2012).
2 Castle Life, 1456–1458
1. Hanawalt, Barbara, Growing up in Medieval London (Oxford University
Press, 1993).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Orme, Nicholas, Childhood in Medieval England 500–1500
(Unpublished paper).
5. Calendar of Close Rolls for Edward IV, 1483.
6. Hanawalt.
7. A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Governance of the
Royal Household, made in divers reigns from King Edward III to King
William and Queen Mary (London: Society of Antiquities, 1790).
8. Nichols, John Gough (ed.), The Chronicle of Calais (Camden Society,
1846).
9. Phillips, Kim M., Medieval Maidens (Manchester University Press,
2003).
10. Orme.
11. Rickert, E. (ed.), The Babees’ Book: Medieval Manners for the Young,
Done into Modern English from Dr Furnival’s Texts (Chatto & Windus,
1908).
12. Strutt, Joseph, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England
(Methuen & Co., 1908).
13. Rickert.
3 Warring Cousins, 1458–1460
1. Pepys 1, 64–5. A most sorrowfull Song, setting forth the miserable end of
Banister, who betraied the Duke of Buckingham, his Lord and Master.
EBBA ID 20265.
2. [Link].
3. Connors, Michael, John Hawley, Merchant, Mayor and Privateer
(Richard Webb, 2008).
4. Chaucer, G., The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387).
5. SLP Henry VI May 1458.
6. Ibid.
7. Ingham, Patricia, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the
Making of Britain (University of Pennsylvania, 2001).
8. Weir, Alison, Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses (Vintage, 2009).
9. Gairdner, James (ed.), Gregory’s Chronicle 1461–9 (London, 1876).
10. Ibid.
11. Weir, Lancaster (2009).
12. SLP Venice July 1460.
13. Edward IV: November 1461, Parliament Rolls of Medieval England.
14. Henry VI: October 1460, Parliament Rolls of Medieval England.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Hall.
4 Boy and Girl, 1461–1465
1. Shakespeare, William, Henry VI, Part 3.
2. Nichols, John Gough, Inventories of the wardrobes, plate, chapel stuff,
etc. of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and of the wardrobe stuff at
Baynard’s Castle of Katharine, Princess Dowager (Camden Society, 1855).
3. [Link]
for-teachers/.
4. Amt, Emilie (ed.), Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe, A Sourcebook
(Routledge, 1993).
5. A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Governance of the
Royal Household, made in divers reigns from King Edward III to King
William and Queen Mary (London: Society of Antiquities, 1790).
6. Ibid.
7. Wilkinson, Josephine, Richard, the Young King to Be (Amberley, 2009).
8. Weightman, Christine, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, 1446–
1503 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989).
9. Hicks, Michael, Warwick the Kingmaker (Blackwell, 1998).
10. Ibid.
11. Calendar of Close Rolls for Edward IV, Nov 1461.
12. Rhodes, Hugh, The Boke of Nurture.
13. Ibid.
5 Romance and Chivalry, 1465–1469
1. John Rous on Anne Neville.
2. Sutton, Anne F. and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘“Richard Liveth Yet”: An Old
Myth’, Ricardian, 9 (June 1992).
3. Payne Collier, J. (ed.), ‘The Ghost of Richard III’ (First pub. 1614;
London: Shakespeare Society, 1884).
4. Laynesmith, J. L., The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445–
1503 (Oxford University Press, 2004).
5. Weightman.
6. Gravett, Christopher, Knight: Noble Warrior of England, 1200–1600
(Osprey, 2008).
7. Clephan, R. Coltman, The Medieval Tournament (Dover, 1995).
8. King René’s Tournament Book (1406; trans. E. Bennett, 1997).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Clephan.
6 Queens in Waiting, 1469–1470
1. Anonymous, ‘How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter’ (1430).
2. State Letters and Papers, Milan 1470.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Abbot, Jacob, Margaret of Anjou (Harper and Brothers, 1904).
8. SLP Milan Oct 1458.
9. Abbott.
10. SLP Milan 1470.
11. Ibid.
12. Abbot.
13. SLP Milan 1470.
7 Lancastrian Princess, 1471
1. Pepys 3.235 A Courtly New Ballad of the Princely Wooing of the fair
maid of London, by King Edward. EBBA 21249.
2. Bruce, J. (ed.), Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England and
Finall Recouerye of his Kingdomes from Henry VI (Camden Society, 1838).
3. Ibid.
4. Commines.
5. Jesse, John Heneage, Memoirs of King Richard III and Some of his
Contemporaries (London: Richard Bentley, 1862).
6. Bruce, Arrivall.
7. SLP Milan 1471.
8. Ibid.
9. Weir, Alison, Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses (Vintage, 1995).
10. SLP Venice June 1471.
11. Ibid.
12. Wilkinson.
8 A Strange Courtship, 1471–1472
1. Bogin, M. quoted in Shahar, Shulamith, The Fourth Estate: A History of
Women in the Middle Ages (Methuen, 1983).
2. A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Governance of the
Royal Household, made in divers reigns from King Edward III to King
William and Queen Mary (London: Society of Antiquities, 1790).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Hilton, Lisa, Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (Phoenix,
2009).
7. Hicks.
8. Hilton.
9. Cheetham, Anthony, The Life and Times of Richard III (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1972).
10. Page, W. (ed.), A History of the County of London: Volume 1: London
within the Bars, Westminster and Southwark (1909).
11. Hicks.
12. Twemlow, J. A. (ed.), Calendar of Papal Registers relating to Great
Britain and Ireland, August 1473.
13. Ibid., March 1485.
9 Richard’s Wife, 1472–1483
1. Bernardino of Siena, ‘Sermon on Wives and Widows’ (1472).
2. Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office of the
Reigns of Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III, April 1477.
3. CPR Richard III June 1484.
4. Jones, M. and S. Walker (eds), ‘Private Indentures for Life Service in
Peace and War’, Camden Miscellany, XXXII (Royal Historical Society,
1994).
5. Idley, Peter, Instructions to his Son (Greifswald, Druck von J. Abel,
1903).
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Hammond, Peter W., ‘The Illegitimate Children of Richard III’, in Petre,
J. (ed.), Richard III: Crown and People, A Selection of Articles from The
Ricardian Journal of the Richard III Society, March 1975 to December
1981 (Alan Sutton, 1985).
11. Kendall.
12. Camden Miscellany, XXXII.
13. Mitchell, Dorothy, ‘York and Richard III’ (Silver Boar, 1984).
14. Ibid.
15. Bernardino of Siena.
16. Sutton, Anne F., ‘Caxton the Cult of St Winifred and Shrewsbury’ in
Clark, Linda (ed.), Of Mice and Men; Image, Belief and Regulation in Late
Medieval England (Boydell Press, 2005).
10 Crisis, Summer 1483
1. Richard III, Letter to the Mayor of Southampton, 1484. ‘The corporation
of Southampton: Letters and loose memoranda’, The Manuscripts of the
Corporations of Southampton and Kings Lynn, Eleventh report, Appendix;
part III (1887), pp. 97–134.
2. Davies, Robert, Extracts from the Municipal Records of the City of York
During the Reigns of Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III (London: J. B.
Nichols, 1843).
11 Queen, July–December 1483
1. Reputed to have been written by Henry VI when a prisoner in the Tower.
2. More.
3. Hicks.
4. Ibid.
5. Anne F. Sutton and P. W. Hammond (eds), The Coronation of Richard III:
The Extant Documents (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983).
6. Ibid.
7. CPR Richard July 1483.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Croyland.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Pollard.
17. ‘The Corporation of Southampton’ (1887).
12 Disquiet, 1484
1. K. Dockray, ‘Sir Marmaduke Constable of Flamborough’ in Petre, J.
(ed.), Richard III (1985).
2. CPR Richard III 1483–5.
3. Walford, E., ‘Greenwich’, Old and New London: Volume 6 (1878), pp.
164–76.
4. Ibid.
5. Sutton, Anne F. and R. C. Hairsine, ‘Richard III at Canterbury’ in Petre,
J. (ed.), Richard III (1985).
6. Tatton-Brown, T., Canterbury: History and Guide (Alan Sutton, 1994).
7. ‘Addenda to Volume 12: Minutes of the Records and Accounts of the
Chamber’, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent:
Volume 12 (1801), pp. 612–662.
8. Thanks to John D. Hunt for local information on this.
9. Pisan, Christine de, The Treasure of the City of Ladies or the Book of the
Three Virtues (trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant: Penguin, 1999).
10. Hicks.
11. CPR Richard III 1483.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. ‘Section II: Nottingham Castle’, Thoroton’s History of Nottinghamshire:
Volume 2, Republished with large additions by John Throsby (1790).
16. Hicks.
17. Mortimer, R. and T. Tatton-Brown (eds), Westminster Abbey: The Lady
Chapel of Henry VII (Boydell Press, 2003).
18. Fabyan.
19. Hillier, K., P. Normark and P. Hammond, ‘Colyngbourne’s Rhyme’ in
Petre, J. (ed.), Richard III (1985), pp. 107–8.
20. Ibid.
21. ‘The Corporation of Southampton’ (1887).
22. Baldwin.
23. Buck in Kincaid, A. N. (ed.), The History of King Richard III (1979).
13 Elizabeth of York, 1484–1485
1. Brereton, Humphrey, ‘The Ballad of Lady Bessye’.
2. [Link].
3. Peachey, Stuart, ‘Festivals and Feasts of the Common Man 1550–1660’
(Stuart Press, 1995).
4. Okerlund, Arlene Naylor, Elizabeth of York (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
5. Brereton.
6. van den Bos, Lambert, The Position of the Roode en Witte Roos
(Amsterdam, 1651).
14 Eclipse, 1485
1. Thornbury, W., ‘Westminster: Introduction’, Old and New London:
Volume 3 (1878).
2. Cunningham, Sean, Richard III, a Royal Enigma (Kew: National
Archives, 2003).
3.‘Venice: 1481–1485’, Calendar of State Papers Relating to English
Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 1: 1202–1509 (1864), pp. 141–59.
Epilogue
1. Taken from Richard III’s prayer book, held in Lambeth Palace.
2. Goddard, ‘Richard III’s House in Leicester’, Journal of the British
Archaeological Association, 9 (1863).
3. Extant by 1594, although composed before, as Marlowe died in 1593.
4. From my notes, taken whilst watching the live conference on the BBC
website.

[Link]
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[Link]
Table of Contents
Genealogical Trees
Introduction
Anne and Warwick
1 - Battles and Births, 1453–1456
2 - Castle Life, 1456–1458
3 - Warring Cousins, 1458–1460
4 - Boy and Girl, 1461–1465
5 - Romance and Chivalry, 1465–1469
6 - Queens in Waiting, 1469–1470
7 - Lancastrian Princess, 1471
Anne and Gloucester
8 - A Strange Courtship, 1471–1472
9 - Richard’s Wife, 1472–1483
10 - Crisis, Summer 1483
11 - Queen, July–December 1483
12 - Disquiet, 1484
13 - Elizabeth of York, 1484–1485
14 - Eclipse, 1485
Picture Section
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography

[Link]
Table of Contents
Genealogical Trees
Introduction
Anne and Warwick
1 - Battles and Births, 1453–1456
2 - Castle Life, 1456–1458
3 - Warring Cousins, 1458–1460
4 - Boy and Girl, 1461–1465
5 - Romance and Chivalry, 1465–1469
6 - Queens in Waiting, 1469–1470
7 - Lancastrian Princess, 1471
Anne and Gloucester
8 - A Strange Courtship, 1471–1472
9 - Richard’s Wife, 1472–1483
10 - Crisis, Summer 1483
11 - Queen, July–December 1483
12 - Disquiet, 1484
13 - Elizabeth of York, 1484–1485
14 - Eclipse, 1485
Picture Section
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography

[Link]
Table of Contents
Genealogical Trees
Introduction
Anne and Warwick
1 - Battles and Births, 1453–1456
2 - Castle Life, 1456–1458
3 - Warring Cousins, 1458–1460
4 - Boy and Girl, 1461–1465
5 - Romance and Chivalry, 1465–1469
6 - Queens in Waiting, 1469–1470
7 - Lancastrian Princess, 1471
Anne and Gloucester
8 - A Strange Courtship, 1471–1472
9 - Richard’s Wife, 1472–1483
10 - Crisis, Summer 1483
11 - Queen, July–December 1483
12 - Disquiet, 1484
13 - Elizabeth of York, 1484–1485
14 - Eclipse, 1485
Picture Section
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography

[Link]