Anne Neville (3 page)

Anne has no monument. Her tomb at Westminster Abbey is marked only by a modern brass and archaeology would be required to detect it.
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We do not know how King Richard intended to mark her resting place; nor indeed can we know whether Westminster was actually destined to remain her resting place, rather than – for instance – York Minster, where, it has been speculated, Richard hoped to be interred himself. After her death – or, at least, by five months after her death, when her husband was destroyed – there was nobody who cared enough about her memory to commission even a modest tomb. They may have been afraid of associating themselves too closely with the disgraced usurper. Henry VII himself, who did provide honourable interment after an interval for King Richard, failed to do the same for Queen Anne. Because Richard III left no heir to continue his memory, no cause to be continued, and attracted no historian in a position to speak out for him, so Anne, too, has been forgotten. Glimpses of her are provided by the Crowland Continuator and by the cantarist John Rows, but neither can be said to have known her in person – as opposed to her rank and pedigree – and what they have recorded for us can be counted in a few sentences.
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Yet there was much more than this to Anne and more, fortunately, can be recaptured and reconstituted.

We can never know Anne Neville the individual as well as, for instance, Margery Kempe or Margaret Paston, whose
autobiography and correspondence survive, or even Alice Bryene or Margaret Hungerford, whose household accounts or pious dispositions expose much about their everyday life or inner thoughts. Yet historians cannot confine themselves to the best documented individuals in the past. That would be elitist and sexist, would rule all but a tiny handful of unrepresentative individuals out of historical study, and would render history impoverished and limited indeed. Anne is capable of being studied. Moreover she is worth studying. And finally, because of who she was and especially because of who her husband was, many historians and many ordinary people today want to know about her – to know whatever there is to be known. That is the justification for this book.

WOMAN, LADY AND QUEEN

Anne, of course, was a woman. Historians used to suppose that there could be no history of women, especially medieval women, and certainly none that was worth the recounting. Initially, perhaps, this was because historians (especially male historians) had no wish to write about members of the other sex. They subscribed to the presumption that history was about politics, in which women have traditionally played little part. Women’s failure to participate in what really mattered in the past meant that women themselves were unhistorical and unworthy of the historian’s attention. It is certainly true that there is relatively little evidence relating to women in the conventional historical sources that deal with high politics. Women were, of course, everywhere in the past, as numerous if not more numerous than the men, sharing their upbringings, their adult lives, social and economic activities, their households and their beds, conceiving, bearing and bringing up each future generation. Women’s presence
en masse
cannot be denied. And new generations of historians, not necessarily
themselves women, have decided that these other aspects of the past and women themselves are as worthy of research as the most eminent of politicians. Moreover, they have demonstrated triumphantly that if one wishes to know about women, then the appropriate sources and techniques to do so can be found. There are now relative riches published in this field.
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Anne Neville played many roles in her short life and can be perceived in all these contexts.

Of course women do pose further problems to the historian that relate to their inferior status and restricted opportunities. In a patriarchal society which was becoming more patriarchal, according to Goldberg and as enjoined by St Paul, women were inferior and rightly subordinate to men.
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No matter how active and strong in character, first as spinsters and then as wives, they were obscured in the sources by their menfolk, who made the formal decisions for them, held their property, and represented them in politics. It was only as widows that women could create their own records and emerge into the light. We do know about many late medieval widows, aristocratic or burgher. Yet widows are hardly representative. Some widows admittedly were young, but most were not, and their study by definition cannot reveal them as spinsters, wives, nor during their reproductive years. Besides, it is only certain aspects of their lives, in particular their piety, that are usually illuminated. Even the best known widows are obscure. They suffer the disadvantages of all the subjects of medieval biography, that we lack the revealing sources of later eras, and that we cannot really grapple with their personalities. Yet women can be categorised as recognisable types, whose characteristics can be deduced rather than observed. Anne, as we shall see, passes through several such types.

Of all these types, queens were pre-eminent. Each queen was particularly prominent, in history as in life. It is not surprising that, as the most eminent of females in their own age and the leaders
of female society, all English queens achieve the salute of a life in the new
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, some admittedly fuller and more elaborate than others. None is shorter or more vestigial than that by the present author of Anne Neville.
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Of course, her husband Richard III had one of the shortest reigns of any post-conquest English king, a mere twenty-six months, and she predeceased him. Anne therefore had little time to make an impression. None of her own records survive. Almost no independent actions can be identified. That does not make Anne into a personal nonentity nor indeed render her insignificant, but it does make her quite exceptionally inaccessible, which is all the more regrettable given the fame, notoriety, and modern fascination with her husband Richard III. How much we would like to know the inner secrets of his family life! What did his wife think? We cannot know.

Before she became queen, Anne Neville was a noble lady, a spinster, princess of Wales, a widow, and duchess of Gloucester. She illustrates a whole series of the ‘life-cycle stages’ that are now perceived as ‘modifiers’ of ‘medieval women’s gendered identity’.
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In each case, regrettably, there are no special sources. Anne was amongst the most obscure instances of her type. If Anne had not become a queen – and queen, moreover, to Richard III – nobody would have selected her for study. Yet each of these categories is a type that historians have studied and illuminated. Much is known about young medieval women, medieval widows, medieval ladies and medieval queens, and whole books have been written recently on each.
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In the last five years there has been a relative epidemic of studies of the last medieval queens.
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These provide templates against which Anne can be measured and contexts into which she can be set. Anne symbolises a series of stereotypes. She was successively a stage on her family tree, her father’s daughter, the consort of two husbands, and the queen of a reigning king. She was also a bride, widow, a bride again, a mother, moreover a bereaved
mother, and almost, anachronistically, a divorcee. But Anne does much more than pose for these established tableaux. Merely to reveal that she conforms to norms is hardly worth the undertaking. But actually Anne Neville did not conform to type. What little we know about her reveals her life to be remarkable, not merely for its eminence, and well worth investigating. Close analysis casts more light on Anne herself and also – and perhaps more intriguingly – on the extraordinary men who shared her life. Poor Anne. She died so young and suffered such a sequence of tragedies in her short life. Much more than an object of the activities of others and a victim, it is nevertheless as a victim that Shakespeare has commemorated her. Most historians have followed.

Shakespeare’s view of Richard III no longer prevails. Most people today suppose Richard to be not as bad as Shakespeare presented him. Many think him the victim of Tudor propaganda. That is the achievement of many individuals – perhaps most influentially Josephine Tey and Paul Murray Kendall – and of the Richard III Society, which allows no opportunity to pass to correct critical comments in books, paper, television and other media. If Richard was a good man and a good king, then perhaps he was also a good husband and Queen Anne was happy with her lot. Perhaps theirs was a love match, their marriage companionate, and we should imagine them like any happily married couple of today. At times, certainly, it has seemed essential to the new Ricardian myth to cast a romantic aura over their relationship. If so, the loss of Anne’s son and her own childlessness – Anne’s failure to fulfil this essential function – looks more tragic yet.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Anne Neville did matter. She was a queen. She did bear Richard his only legitimate son, the tragically short-lived
Prince Edward of Middleham. She brought him the resources in her Neville inheritance that enabled Richard to dominate the North and the means to usurp the throne. She shared his coronation and other regal ceremonies of his reign. And she survived too long, apparently to be spurned by a husband to whom she was a political burden, an obstacle to the reconstruction of his power, and supposedly, indeed, his victim. She packed into her short life incident enough for many adventurous careers, but always, apparently, as a passive instrument of a succession of others. This book seeks to research her career properly, to bring out its implications, and to explore in depth the remarkable shifts and turns of her fraught and ultimately unrewarding career.

The life of Anne Neville illustrates much that makes medieval England different from today. Clearly Anne is an example of a medieval lady, whose life illustrates both the normal experiences of medieval ladies and contemporary attitudes towards them. Her life illustrates repeatedly the making of the medieval marriage. However we might wish it were not so, Anne may never have married for love, but was rather the object – and the financial beneficiary – of two materially prudent marriages. In her life the key role played by inheritance – its sanctity, both theoretical and practical – has to be constantly reiterated.

Anne Neville was born to be a wife and mother. So far as we know, the only respectable alternative – life in a nunnery

– was never considered. From early childhood, her parents were seeking an appropriate spouse – to arrange a marriage, certainly for her benefit, but with many ulterior motives in mind. The arranged marriage was the norm. People of her station did not marry merely to please themselves and those who did, like Edward IV and Margery Paston, offended contemporary standards and were strongly condemned. The love match, which we take for granted, was deplored. Anne’s first marriage was the handiwork of her parents. When it was terminated by
Prince Edward of Lancaster’s death, a further marriage was the only palatable option: another, less acceptable, may have been broached. Although apparently the work of the two parties, Anne’s union to Duke Richard was unexceptionable and unobjectionable – what her parents would have approved and may indeed once have sought – and was furthermore approved by the king. If the partiality of Anne for Richard went beyond the businesslike – even to Shakespeare’s stormy wooing – it fell within the parameters of eligibility and mutual advantage.

Yet Anne and Richard were not as free in their choice of partner as we presume today, because there was a much longer list of people, scores or perhaps hundreds strong, that each was forbidden to marry. This was because they were related within the prohibited degrees. More significantly, perhaps, this book is a commentary on the prohibited degrees. The rules on eligibility that applied – a framework both legal and moral – recognised as kin much more distant relatives than we do today and forbade marriage amongst relations whom we would scarcely acknowledge today. Canon law was here rooted in the laws of Moses set down in the Old Testament in the book of
Leviticus
chapter 18: ‘None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness’. Kinship was either consanguineous, where blood relatives shared a common ancestor, or affinal, the result of marriage or at least sexual intercourse, that had made the two participants one flesh and their in-laws into relatives. Consanguinity (blood relationships) and affinity (relationships created by marriage) were expressed as degrees; there were also spiritual ties created by acting as godparents at baptism. Unions between partners within four degrees of kinship whether consanguineous or affinal were incestuous and were therefore banned.
Leviticus
had actually forbidden only a few close relationships, which were regarded as examples for others equally close, but the Church had extended the ban, originally to the seventh
degree, which prohibited marriage amongst those sharing a great-great-great-great-great grandparent living two centuries or more ago, of whom most descendants may have been quite unaware. From 1215 the prohibition applied only to relationships in the fourth degree: to those descended from a common great-grandparent or whose blood relations had sexual intercourse with their prospective in-laws in the last four generations. Any man was barred from marrying the third cousin of any woman with whom he had ‘carnal dealings’. These rules constituted a moral code that was strictly enforced by the Church, sometimes by debarring couples from marriage, if necessary by abrogating marriages after the event and bastardising any resultant children. The code was internalised as the moral expectations of the general public. We certainly must not suppose, writes Helmholz, that ‘the rules about consanguinity were trifles’. For most people they were absolute barriers and there was no way out. For royalty and aristocracy, however, the situation was different. They were closed elites who frequently intermarried with their kin. For such notables a bull from the Pope dispensing any prohibitions that arose not from divine law as set out in
Leviticus
but from human law, the extensions made by the Church, was not only possible but commonplace. The busy clerks of the papal penitentiary routinely dispensed away literally thousands of these impediments. Penitentiaries and notables may indeed have viewed the impediments less as moral precepts than as the dispensable technicalities that we tend to suppose nowadays. Princes and nobles often did not wait for a dispensation, but married in the expectation of one; even if set asunder by the Church, they might well be allowed to marry again. Not always, however.
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