by Lisa Hilton
Anne Neville had waited a long time for her crown. She had suffered a good deal, but it would be fascinating to have an insight into the state of her conscience. She knew that she had no right to be queen this time round, in the first place because her marriage was illegitimate in the eyes of the Church. And did she really believe the precontract story? Richard had provided an official justification for his usurpation, but it was intellectually barren. What information can be gleaned of Anne’s spiritual life shows that she was a conventionally pious woman. In 1476 she became a member of the sisterhood of Durham Cathedral Priory (the cathedral had strong associations with the Neville family), and the next year she and her husband were admitted to the Guild of Corpus Christi at York, and founded a chantry at the Queens’ College, Cambridge. They also established two colleges, at Barnard Castle, Durham and Middleham, but these activities were as much an appropriate means of enhancing family prestige as reflective of any profound spiritual commitment. As Queen, Anne formed a close relationship with her motherin-law, Cecily, Duchess of York, who was a national example of piety. Cecily forgave Richard for branding her an adulteress and was a frequent visitor at court, where she and Anne discussed religious books such as Ghostly Grace, by the thirteenth-century German mystic Mechtild of Hackeborn, of which they both owned a copy. Such interests aside, Anne left no record of notable acts of more personal dedication and her religious patronage was negligible. If she did entertain private doubts about her new position, she did not feel the need to make public amends.
Anne’s most significant cultural association is with the Beauchamp Pageant, a magnificent illustrated life of her grandfather Richard Beauchamp. The identity of the Pageant’s patron is uncertain, but it is widely believed to have been commissioned by Anne’s mother, either as an attempt to curry favour with Henry VII or as a ‘mirror’ (in the manner of the Life of St Margaret of Scotland) for Edward of Middleham. Given the meagre resources of the Countess of Warwick, it has also been proposed that Richard and Anne commissioned the work. Though this seems less likely, the fact that Anne and her mother could both have been involved in this monument to the greatness of the Queen’s maternal family allows the possibility that their relationship was collaborative, if not cordial, even after the Countess had been dispossessed by her son-in-law.
While the anointed Queen of England lingered in sanctuary, Richard and Anne made rapid preparations for their coronation. Many of the arrangements were already in place in anticipation of Edward’s crowning, including his small robes, but now there was a great rush to ensure that Richard and Anne’s ceremony would be a faultless display of their legitimacy to rule. It was essential that all the rituals be performed correctly, and a special book, The Little Device, was drawn up for their coronation, which also followed the provisions set down in the Royal Book or Liber Regalis. On 3 July, the couple exchanged gifts of over fifty yards of purple velevet and cloth-of -gold, worked with garters and roses, and on the next day they made the traditional journey to the Tower, possibly by water. Anne Neville entered Westminster Abbey on 6 July with a magnificent crimson train, her fair hair loose under a gold circlet, evoking the virginity that had become part of the coronation symbolism (though of course she, like Elizabeth Woodville, was both a widow and a mother) and walked in her stockinged feet up the aisle as a display of humility, before prostrating herself at the altar. She and Richard were crowned by Archbishop Bourchier, who did not, however, attend the banquet for 3,000 that followed the ceremony.
Anne’s short, hurried journey to the Tower gave no scope for the personally tailored pageants that had represented the hopes of the country for the queenships of her predecessors Marguerite of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville. Given that this was a moment to show queens as ‘individuals with particular contributions to make to kingship at different times’, 6 absence of such pageantry negated Anne’s own character and her significant pedigree and family history, suggesting that in the public mind she was little more than ‘the female body that bore the king’s heirs and sat beside him in public’.7 And unlike Marguerite, who had forty, and Elizabeth who had thirty-eight, Anne was accompanied to Westminster by only seventeen newly dubbed knights of the Bath, though forty-nine men had been summoned to enter the order for Edward V. Had the remainder discreetly made themselves scarce rather than be so closely associated with the new regime?
‘Being now desirous, with all speed, to show in the north … his high and kingly station’,8 Richard and his Queen now set off on progress, to display themselves to their new subjects. Anne took a more leisurely route than Richard, travelling from Greenwich to Windsor, where she stayed for two weeks before moving on to join the King at Warwick. There they received an important mark of international acknowledgement of their rule: a delegation from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain proposing a betrothal between their son Edward and an infanta of Spain. In mid-August they set off for the north, arriving at Pontefract on the twenty-eighth and the next day at York, where Edward joined them. There, on 8 September, he was created Prince of Wales. The ceremony was followed by a four-hour crown-wearing and accompanied by ‘gorgeous and sumptuous feasts and banquets for the purpose of gaining the affections of the people’.9 In breaking the convention of investiture at Westminster, Richard was offering a gesture of prestige to the northern affinity he had consolidated with his marriage and ensuring its loyalty to his family for the future.
According to Polydore Vergil, when Queen Elizabeth heard the news that Anne’s son was created Prince of Wales, she ‘fell in a swoon and lay lifeless a good while; after coming to herself she wept, she cried out loud and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring. She struck her breast, tore and cut her hair and … prayed for her own death … condemning herself as a madwoman for that (being deceived by false promises), she had delivered her younger son out of sanctuary to be murdered by his enemy.’
The mystery of the princes in the Tower has generated a literature of its own, its ambiguities providing tantalising space for the insertion of all manner of conspiracy theories. Depending on which account is believed, twelve-year-old Edward and ten-year-old Richard were stabbed, poisoned, drowned in wine, walled up alive, thrown into the Thames, buried alive in a chest or smothered. Other rumours, exploited by later pretenders, held that they had escaped and been spirited away in secrecy, still others that they lived to adulthood under assumed identities. What is certain is that they disappeared, and the balance of evidence suggests that they were murdered some time after the coronation — at which point The Croyland Chronicle, supported by other accounts, asserts that they were alive — and Edward of Middleham’s investiture as Prince of Wales on 8 September. Elizabeth Woodville, for all that Vergil’s account is dramatised, believed her sons were dead. She knew that her husband had had Henry VI killed, and may have been personally involved in the death of his son. She was all too well acquainted with the exigencies of civil war. It made no sense for Richard III to allow the boys to live, for as long as they did his throne would always be in jeopardy. Elizabeth had now lost her father, her first husband, two of her brothers and three of her sons in the battles for the English throne. Her subsequent actions can therefore be seen as a fight to preserve her own life and those of her daughters, whatever the cost.
In 1483, the only living Plantagenet heirs male were Richard III himself, his son Edward, his weak-minded nephew the Earl of Warwick, who was living in the household of Queen Anne, the Duke of Buckingham and Henry, the son of Edmund Tudor. Of them all, Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne was the slightest. He had inherited a tincture of English royal blood through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, the great-great-granddaughter of Edward III, and his grandmother Catherine de Valois gave him descent from Charles VI of France. Since 1471 he and his uncle Jasper had been living at the court of Francois II of Brittany. Their status in the duchy was precarious, varying from that of minor diplomatic pawns to ‘honourable prisoners’,10 and Henry had narrowly avoided being sent back to England by
faking an illness when Edward IV tempted Francois in 1476 with a marriage proposal for Henry, once again offering the hand of his eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. That such a marriage was proposed so early is borne out by the fact that Margaret Beaufort and Edward IV held talks about potential problems of consanguinity. Lady Margaret had been determined for years to restore her son to the earldom of Richmond, his father’s title. She had discussed the possibility with Richard before his coronation, raising the suggestion of a marriage between Henry and Elizabeth once again afterwards with the ‘King’s favour’11 and she had shown her loyalty to the new Queen by carrying her train at her coronation. Despite their Lancastrian connections, Lady Margaret and her husband Lord Stanley were officially in favour — Stanley, a supporter of Hastings, was appointed steward of the royal household — but Richard did not entirely trust them. Stanley’s heir, Lord Strange, had married a niece of Queen Elizabeth, and it was as much out of caution as a need for his services that Stanley was commanded to accompany the King on his northern progess.
Even as Richard III triumphantly celebrated his accession in the north, he was aware that conspiracies against him were simmering. His supporter the Duke of Buckingham had already been rewarded with significant offices in Wales and the marches, and on 13 July 1483 he had received a grant for a share of the Bohun inheritance (to which he was entitled through his great-grandmother Eleanor, wife of Thomas of Woodstock and sister to Mary de Bohun, Henry 1 V’s first wife and mother of Henry V), a longstanding source of grievance to the Duke, as some of the Bohun lands had been given to Elizabeth Woodville. Buckingham had every reason to be satisfied with the fruits of his loyalty. But as the ‘rumour was spread that the sons of King Edward had died a violent death’, Buckingham ‘repented of his former conduct’.12 He may have been motivated by moral repugnance, or by the possibility that if Richard were deposed he himself would have a chance at the crown. Whatever the reason, he now, extraordinarily, became involved in a plan for an uprising led by Lionel Woodville and Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset. The Marquis had been in hiding after making a dramatic escape from Westminster sanctuary pursued by soldiers and hunting dogs, but the rumours of the Princes’ death galvanised him into attempting to organise the disparate groups of Richard’s opponents into a coherent force for rebellion.
Someone else who had grasped the significance of the murder of the direct heirs was Margaret Beaufort. She perceived that her son Henry could now aspire to much more than the restoration of his earldom. The Duke of Buckingham had last seen Richard at Warwick on 2 August, from where he had travelled to Brecon to take custody of John Morton, bishop of Ely, who had been arrested with Hastings. Many later chroniclers attribute Buckingham’s change of heart to Morton’s influence. Lady Margaret sent her servant Reginald Bray to Brecon to parley with the Duke. She had also found a means of communicating with Elizabeth Woodville in the heavily guarded sanctuary. The two women used the same physician, Lewis Caerleon, who was still permitted to visit the Dowager Queen. Together, Margaret and Elizabeth formulated a plan based on Henry’s marriage, a concerted rising by the English rebels and an invasion by Henry himself. Margaret, however, was playing a double game with Buckingham, leading him to believe that it was his claim she was supporting. Why else would Buckingham have been prepared to take the suicidal risk of rebelling in favour of a man who was virtually unknown? Furthermore, if Henry became king, the Woodvilles would have been assured of a return to power. According to Michael Jones and Malcolm Underwood, ‘serious consideration must be given to the possibility that Margaret duped Buckingham, encouraging him to claim the throne himself’.13 This suggestion is given weight by the fact that when Buckingham declared himself by writing to Henry Tudor on 24 September, it was to invite him to join the rebellion without any reference to accepting Henry as king or to his future marriage.
In the event, the rebellion was a failure. The men of Kent rose on 10 October 1483, followed by groups in Newbury, Salisbury and Exeter. Richard was informed on the eleventh and ordered a muster at Leicester for 21 October. He offered free pardons to any rebels who were prepared to surrender and set rewards for the capture of Buckingham, Dorset and Lionel Woodville. Buckingham began an advance along the Wye Valley towards Hereford, but violent floods and Richard’s blandishments kept many hoped-for supporters away, and he was reduced to escaping in disguise. Betrayed by one of his own supporters, he was taken into the custody of the sheriff of Shropshire. With news of the Duke’s capture, the rebellion collapsed and Richard marched via Salisbury, where Buckingham was beheaded, to Exeter, arriving by 8 November, without meeting any resistance. Meanwhile Henry Tudor had sailed from Brittany and reached Plymouth, but on hearing of the disaster he had prudently turned back.
Margaret Beaufort was now in great danger, but she and her husband, Lord Stanley, had worked out a brilliant insurance policy While Margaret had sided with the rebels, Lord Stanley had retained his allegiance to the King and, along with the Percys and their northern supporters, had marched in pursuit of the rebels with Richard. It was in recognition of Stanley’s service that the Parliament of 1484 spared Margaret from attainder, and though Richard’s proceedings against her were punitive, including the loss of her right to inherit her mother’s lands, they were softened by many of her forfeited properties being regranted to Stanley. Moreover, Margaret remained in contact with Henry. After the failure of the rebellion, he had been joined in Brittany by many fleeing rebels, including the Marquis of Dorset and his son Thomas Grey and Lionel Woodville, who died soon afterwards. Edward Woodville had been part of Henry’s circle since escaping Richard’s routing of the fleet with his two ships the Trinity, and the Falcon. Other members of Henry’s growing court were Sir John Cheyne, a former knight of the chamber to Edward IV, Peter Courtenay, a former royal secretary and now bishop of Exeter, and Sir William Berkeley, William Brandon and Sir Giles Daubeney, who had also served in Edward’s household. It was before these men that Henry swore to marry Elizabeth of York in the cathedral of Rennes on Christmas Day. He also received the sworn homage of his supporters.
With Buckingham dead, Henry Tudor still exiled and Margaret Beaufort confined to her husband’s household on the King’s instructions, Queen Elizabeth remained in sanctuary, reduced to living on charity and with her paltry resources stretched even further by the arrival of Buckingham’s widow, her sister Katherine. In January 1484, Parliament confirmed Richard’s rule and (to the disgust of the Croyland commentator), the illegitimacy of the marriage between Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. Richard took care to distribute the attaindered lands of the rebels between his northern supporters, further shoring up his now apparently unassailable power.
Elizabeth decided the time had come to accept the new order. The only leverage left to her was the embarrassment her continuance in sanctuary caused Richard, and before she was prepared to quit the abbey, the new King was obliged to swear an oath to the mayor and aldermen of London, in the presence of numerous magnates. On 1 March 1484, he announced that if ‘the daughters of the said Dame Elizabeth Grey, lately calling herself Queen of England, will come out of the sanctuary at Westminster … then I shall see that they shall be in surety of their lives and also not suffer any manner hurt by any manner person or persons … nor any of them imprison within the Tower of London or any other prison’. Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, Katherine and Bridget were now officially bastards, and Elizabeth herself was forced to relinquish her rightful rank as Queen Dowager. Richard cancelled her dower and arranged that she would receive 700 marks annually, in quarterly payments, through the offices of John Nesfield, diminishing her to the status of a royal pensioner. Elizabeth’s critics had always remarked on her excessive pride, yet now she was forced to humble herself and disparage her daughters before the man who had murdered her sons and her brother. But her remaining children were free, and they would live. That month, before her first year of mourning for her husband was over, Elizabeth and her daughters joined Richard’s court.
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p; In April 1484, the court was at Nottingham when the news arrived that Edward of Middleham, the newly created Prince of Wales, had died. He had always been delicate, and had been so ill at his investiture at York that he had had to be carried on a litter. Richard had deliberately left him behind in the north as a symbol to his most loyal adherents of the new regime to which they owed allegiance, but it was likely that he was also too ill to travel. He may have been suffering from tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his aunt Isabel of Clarence and would also claim his mother’s life. Richard and Anne were described as being in a state ‘almost bordering on madness, by reason of their sudden grief’.14 To contemporaries, young Edward’s death was seen as proof of the ungodliness of his father’s rule. Did it give Elizabeth Woodville a certain bitter satisfaction?
From the available evidence, it appears that however much their marriage had been a calculation on both sides, Anne and Richard were united in being loving and interested parents. Edward had been wetnursed by Isabel Burgh, then lived in the nursery at Middleham in the care of Anne Idley. Her story suggests that Anne Neville may have been concerned with modern theories of education. She was the widow of Peter Idley, an Oxfordshire esquire who had died around the time of Edward’s birth. She had agreed to leave her marital home, Drayton Manor, in favour of her stepson William in return for an annuity of five marks, which William then refused to pay. When Anne became mistress of the nursery at Middleham, Richard himself wrote to the commission of the peace for Oxfordshire, ordering them to summon ‘William Idley and Elizabeth his sister and demand them the cause why they contest and pay not to our right well beloved servant Anne Idley … her annuity of five marks and advise them, as they would avoid our grievous displeasure, to see that she is as well thereof yearly contented as of that she is behind unpaid of the same’.15 The letter shows an unexpected human side of one of history’s most celebrated tyrants, the great northern magnate who was concerned enough about his son’s governess to interfere in a few marks-worth of arrears. The Gloucesters may have particularly valued Anne because she had moved in educated circles. Her husband Peter had written a book, Instructions to His Son, a collection of verses with adaptations from the English writer Lydgate as well as Latin poets which gave tips on cleanliness, modest dress and manners and the importance of keeping respectable company. Little Edward could have been frightened into good behaviour with tales such as ‘The Witch and her Cow-Sucking Bug’.
