Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  18

  “ANNE MY WIFE”

  The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham’s bosom,

  And Anne my wife hath bid this world good night.

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 4.3

  On January 6, 1485, the English court celebrated the festival of the Epiphany with special splendor. There would have been the seasonal rituals—the licensed revelry of the fools and the edgier clowning of whichever young courtier had been appointed Lord of Misrule for the day and allowed to give his own fantastical orders as to the conduct of the party. The oak log burned, to draw heat back to the earth, and the toasting of the fruit trees in a wassail cup—that they might bring forth good crop.

  Epiphany—the celebration of the revelation of Christ to the Magi, or wise men, and the end of the Christmas season—was an important event in the medieval calendar, and the king made a point of appearing “with his crown.” But it is easy to guess that Richard was not naturally lively that day. Crowland wrote that “while [Richard] was keeping this festival with remarkable splendour in the great hall . . . news was brought to him on that very day, from his spies beyond sea, that, notwithstanding the potency and splendour of his royal state, his adversaries would, without question, invade the kingdom during the following summer.”

  This must have been everything the king had feared, yet—on the outside, at least—Richard didn’t seem perturbed. Richard’s reaction to having definite news—after months of suspicions—was to declare that “there was nothing that could befall him more desirable, in as much as he imagined that it would put an end to all his doubts and troubles.” But among the other courtiers, the news must have sent a ripple of unease throughout the party.

  Perhaps the women of the royal household were trying to keep things merry. Not that Richard’s queen, Anne Neville, could have found it any easier than he. Anne had been in poor health for months, and in the hotbed of rumor that was a palace, she could hardly fail to have known that courtiers and ambassador alike were speculating on what would happen if (as looked increasingly likely) she were to die. She had the company of her elder nieces: Elizabeth of York and at least her older sisters had spent the festive season at court. Buck says that Anne Neville “entertained also the young ladies with all her courtesies and gracious caresses, and especially the Lady Elizabeth, whom she used with so much famil[iarity] and kindness as if she had been her own sister.” They were, after all, hardly a decade apart in age. “But the queen had small joy and little pleasure in the festi[val and] pompous time, because she was sick and was much in languor and [sorrow] for the death of the prince, her dear and only son, and the which grieved her sorely.”

  Indeed, the company of Elizabeth must have been a very mixed pleasure for Anne. At the festivities (where, as the author of the Crowland chronicles disapprovingly relates, “far too much attention was given to dancing and gaiety”), there were “vain exchanges of clothing” between Anne and Elizabeth, “being of similar colour and shape; a thing that caused the people to murmur and the nobles and prelates greatly to wonder thereat.” Crowland seems to suggest some point was being made by those exchanges of garments—clothing was an important signifier of rank. Despite that official declaration of bastardy, many still regarded Edward IV’s children as the natural inheritors of the country. And for Anne Neville, the competition from Elizabeth of York would have hit even closer to home.

  It was already being whispered that if anything were to happen to Anne, then a marriage between Richard and Elizabeth would square the circle of inheritance nicely. To be sure, she was his niece, but was there anything a papal dispensation could not legitimize? Anne and Richard’s marriage had also needed a papal dispensation, which, modern research suggests, might not have arrived when they went through their wedding ceremony. That might provide grounds for an annulment, and Richard may have already been considering this as an option. Rumors were rife that “the king was bent, either on the anticipated death of the queen taking place, or else, by means of a divorce, for which he supposed he had quite sufficient grounds, on contracting a marriage with the said Elizabeth.” Vergil described it as a plan “the most wicked to be spoken of, and the foulest to be committed that ever was heard of.”

  At that Epiphany party, no one surely spoke openly of the possibility of such a relation between Richard and his niece. But the rumors were there already, and the reasons for the union would have been clear. Such a marriage would be a severe blow to Henry Tudor. And Richard might have had other incentives, as Anne must miserably have realized. Elizabeth was a buxom eighteen-year-old. Later in her life, the Portuguese ambassador noticed her “large breasts”; a Venetian one called her “very handsome.”

  This quiet competition from her friend and niece seems to have pushed Anne Neville over the brink. Soon after the Christmas festivities, Crowland wrote, “the queen fell extremely sick, and her illness was supposed to have increased still more and more, because the king entirely shunned her bed, declaring that it was by the advice of his physicians that he did so. Why enlarge?” the chronicler asks, maddeningly. But perhaps he trusted readers to understand that—while Anne’s illness may simply have been infectious—Richard may have had other reasons for leaving her alone.

  The feelings of Elizabeth herself—apart, that is, from the normal eighteen-year-old’s pleasure in a party—are even harder to discern. But a few weeks ahead—perhaps in mid-February—there would come an extraordinary clue. It was recorded by Buck, who in 1619, in his History of King Richard the Third, set down a précis of a letter in which, he said, Elizabeth of York expressed her own passionate longing to marry her uncle. Elizabeth, said Buck, was toward the end of February writing to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, an influential magnate and once her father’s friend:

  First she thanked him for his many courtesies and friendly offices, and then she prayed him as before to be a mediator for her in the cause of the marriage to the king, who, as she writes, was her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was his in heart and in thoughts, in body, and in all. And then she intimated that the better half of February was past, and that she feared the queen would never die. And all these be her own words, written with her own hand, and this is the sum of her letter, whereof I have seen the autograph or original draft under her own hand.

  Well! If real, Elizabeth of York’s letter would not only be surprising but also damning in several different ways, including the callousness of the fear that Anne would never die and the possible sexual implications of the assurance that “she was his . . . in body, and in all.” There have long been doubts, however, over Buck’s rendition of the letter. Some suggest that Buck could simply (especially when blinded by his prejudices) have misinterpreted a letter that he did indeed see or that it was not written by Elizabeth—or not written at this juncture and in relation to this match. Indeed, as shall be seen, there was another, far less controversial, marriage proposed for Elizabeth very soon after this time, and the words could be made to fit. At the most extreme, it has even been suggested that Buck invented the letter in its entirety.

  But it does not seem wholly impossible that Elizabeth of York should have wanted to marry Richard. The question of consanguinity could be left to a higher, papal, authority; there was enough uncertainty in the air for her to have been able to convince herself that he was not responsible for her brothers’ deaths. Power is an aphrodisiac, and this was the destiny for which she had been reared—not to mention a chance to come back from the wilderness. Possible further evidence that Elizabeth of York had an affection for Richard can be found in the inscription she wrote on a copy of Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, most likely at this time: “Loyalte mellye” (Loyalty binds me). It was Richard’s favorite motto. She also wrote, on a copy of the French prose Tristan, “sans re[mo]vyr” (without changing) above her signature, “elyzabeth.”* She wrote on the page with the mark that showed it was Richard’s property—but is that enough to show the unchanging loyalty she was expressing was loyalty
to Richard? Not really.

  And of course Polydore Vergil, the Tudor historian, sees it differently. In his telling, Elizabeth of York is an unhappy pawn—a martyr, even—in Richard’s twisted game. “Richard had kept [Elizabeth] unharmed with a view to marriage,” Vergil writes. “To such a marriage the girl had a singular aversion. Weighed down for this reason by her great grief she would repeatedly exclaim, saying, ‘I will not thus be married, but, unhappy creature that I am, will rather suffer all the torments which St. Catherine is said to have endured for the love of Christ than be united with a man who is the enemy of my family.’”

  But Vergil would say that. He was writing a quarter of a century later, when Richard had become the antagonist in the creation story of the Tudor dynasty. And “the enemy of my family” might have applied to Henry—a representative of the Lancastrian family that had so long opposed the house of York—as easily as to Richard; Richard also kept Elizabeth’s sisters “unharmed,” even those who were nearing maturity. What is more, if Richard wished to keep Elizabeth of York away from Henry Tudor, all he had to do was marry her to somebody else—not necessarily to himself.

  Whatever the truth about Richard’s plans, there were certainly rumors of the possible marriage, if not necessarily of Elizabeth’s complicity. Henry across the Channel heard them and feared loss of Yorkist support if the two York factions could thus be reunited. Vergil wrote that the stories “pinched Henry by the very stomach,” so much so that he began to seek an alternative match—a daughter of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the loyally Yorkist supporter of Edward IV who had cared for Henry when he was a child. But the message he sent suggesting the match, says Vergil, never reached its destination, and soon he must have heard that a marriage between Richard and his niece was no longer a possibility—unless, that is, the rumors of the marriage—rumors so discreditable to Richard—were being spread by Henry Tudor’s own party, which is another possibility impossible to discount.

  Whatever the sources of the rumors, they seem to have had one immediate effect: Anne almost certainly heard them. Over the next few weeks, Anne’s condition worsened, and the suggestion is that Richard hoped it would do so—and perhaps even helped the process along. Richard, said Hall, “complained to divers noble men of the realm, of the unfortunate sterility and barreness of his wife”; he was especially vocal in his complaints to the Archbishop of York, upon whom he relied to spread the word to Anne, “trusting the sequel hereof to take his effect, that she hearing this grudge of her husband, and taking therefore an inward thought, would not long live in this world.” Vergil even has a story that Anne, hearing rumors of her own death, went to her husband “very pensive and sad, and with many tears demanded of him what cause there was why he should determine her death. Hereunto the king, lest that he might seem hard hearted if he should show unto his wife no sign of love, kissing her, made answer lovingly, and comforting her, bade her be of good cheer.”

  The reassurance did Anne little good. On March 16, 1485, during a great eclipse of the sun, she died. Since her illness was lingering—and possibly, if the doctors really warned Richard to avoid her, infectious—the best modern guess is tuberculosis. But then and now, there would be other rumors, and her death would be linked to that of the princes, whether in fact or in the art of black public relations (as current in the fifteenth century as in the twenty-first). Vergil wrote that she died “whether she was despatched by sorrowfulness or poison,” Rous that “Lady Anne, [Richard’s] queen, he poisoned.” Commynes wrote that “some say he had her killed,” and Hall: “Some think she went her own pace to the grave, while others suspect a grain was given her to quicken her in her journey to her long home.”

  Anne was buried on the ninth day after her death—March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation. She was interred, says Crowland, “at Westminster, with no less honours than befitted the interment of a queen.” Pro-Ricardian stories of his weeping copious tears at her funeral prove to have no original source, but the signs of Richard’s lack of grief are deceptive, too. The fact that there is no tomb for Anne at Westminster conveys, now, an impression of lack of care or lack of ceremony, but it is probably erroneous, for Richard’s own reign would end before he had time to commission one.

  It is difficult not to feel some relief at the end of Anne Neville’s long suffering. The Doge of Venice, some six weeks later, after the news had reached him, assured Richard that “your consort led so religious and catholic a life and was so adorned with goodness, prudence, and excellent morality, as to leave a name immortal.” But Anne’s life seems to have been a hard one, even by the harsh standards of the fifteenth century.

  Richard seems by now to have abandoned any plans he might have harbored for himself and his niece. On March 29, only four days after Anne’s death, an emissary, Sir Edward Brampton, was sent to Portugal, to negotiate a marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king’s sister, the Infanta Joana. The infanta was not only determinedly religious and averse to marriage, but also thirty-three and old for childbearing by the standards of the day. It is likely, therefore, that her appeal was her descent from John of Gaunt—a descent that made her the senior representative of the legitimate Lancastrian line, and in some ways, therefore, a better candidate than Henry Tudor.

  By marrying the foremost Lancastrian then living, Richard was setting himself up to reunify the splintered Plantagenet family, thereby shoring up the foundation of his regime in a way that even his Yorkist opponents would find hard to undo. The Portuguese council urged Joana that it was her duty to agree “for the concord in the same kingdom of England that will follow from her marriage and union with the king’s party, greatly serving God and bringing honour to herself by uniting as one the party of Lancaster, and York”—and urging, moreover, the danger that if she refused, Richard might look instead to the next most senior marriageable representative of the Lancastrian line, the Spanish Infanta Isabel, another great-great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt.

  The idea must have maddened Margaret Beaufort if she heard of it, for such a marriage would neatly cut out her (and her son’s) Lancastrian claim. Both Joana and Isabel were descended from John of Gaunt’s earlier, uncontroversial, marriages to foreign princesses, while the Beaufort line came from his liaison with Katherine Swynford, only later regularized by marriage. To make matters worse, Richard’s emissary to Portugal, Sir Edward, was to negotiate a double marriage—an alliance also between a daughter of Edward IV (presumably Elizabeth) and the king’s cousin the Duke of Beja. This, it is suggested, may have been the marriage Elizabeth herself was discussing in the Buck letter. (The speed with which the embassy set out shows that in a pragmatic age, the matter must surely have been under discussion before Anne’s death.) Since the marriage proposed for Elizabeth was dependent on the one proposed for Richard, this would explain if not excuse any fear that Queen Anne would never die.

  The prospect of a royal foreign marriage for Elizabeth of York may (like the pardons granted to various Woodvilles) have been part of the general sweetening that, eventually, had persuaded Elizabeth Woodville to write, summoning her son Dorset home. Dorset that spring tried to escape from the exiled Tudor “court” and was making for Flanders and the coast when Henry’s representatives (with French connivance) caught up with him and persuaded him to return. Perhaps Elizabeth Woodville had been rattled by Henry’s declaring himself king before he had married her daughter; on the other hand, of course, she may have been coerced by Richard. Shakespeare has Elizabeth, asked by Richard how he should woo her daughter, sarcastically advising him to send her a token “by the man that slew her brothers.” In a long recitation, she counters each promise he makes for the future with some wrong from the past. But, in the course of some 150 lines, she also changes her mind and agrees to put his proposal to her daughter—“Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!” as Richard apostrophizes her. Historians have not always felt able to disagree, with those writing near Elizabeth’s own day making much play on women’s mutabil
ity.

  But in deciding to marry his niece off abroad rather than marry her himself, Richard may have been succumbing to popular pressure. Indeed, whoever else may have been complicit in his reputed plan to wed Elizabeth of York, it was Richard who attracted the most opprobrium for it. The king’s closest advisers felt forced to warn him of the unpopularity of such a union. Crowland writes that “by these persons the king was told to his face that if he did not abandon his intended purpose, and that, too, before the mayor and commons of the City of London . . . all the people of the north, in whom he placed the greatest reliance, would rise in rebellion against him.” The northerners might even, so the advisers said, be tempted to blame him for the death of Anne—one of their own—“through whom he had first gained his present high position.”

  The union between Richard and Elizabeth was opposed on other grounds, as well. Certain of Richard’s advisers, Crowland added, also wheeled in a dozen or so doctors of divinity “who asserted that the Pope could grant no dispensation in the case of such a degree of consanguinity.” (Other such marriages had been known, abroad, but the legality of thus defying or evading Leviticus is still discussed today.)

  Richard’s advisers may even have been afraid that the girl whom later commentators have always taken to be a placid and gentle woman would have sought retribution for the suffering that Richard had caused her family, or so Crowland suspected. “It was supposed by many, that these men, together with others like them, threw so many impediments in the way, for fear lest, if the said Elizabeth should attain the rank of queen, it might at some time be in her power to avenge upon them the death of her uncle, Earl Anthony, and her brother Richard [her half brother Richard Grey].”