CHAPTER TWO

Who Was Anne Neville?

PRE-NATAL INFLUENCES

Anne Neville (1456–85) was the younger of the two daughters – and hence one of the two co-heiresses – of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and Salisbury (‘Warwick the Kingmaker’) and his consort Anne Beauchamp. Anne Neville was thus born into the highest nobility, the top rank of English society, and was assured from birth of a great future. The course that her life was to take owed much more to her lineage and family wealth, the circumstances of her family and her birth, the careers and renown of her ancestors and parents, than it did to her own efforts. Such factors determined who she was and ensured that she mattered. Rarely indeed can Anne be demonstrated to have done anything at all, yet her role was often crucial and her significance not in doubt. Before detailing her own life, therefore, it is necessary to establish her context.

Who Anne Neville was, what she was to become, and what factors shaped her development were pre-determined, at least to some extent, by her pedigree. Pre-natal influences, most notably lineage and inheritance, are the essential keys to understanding Anne’s context. What follows is therefore a commentary on Anne Neville’s pedigree.¹

Anne’s father, as we have seen, was Richard Neville junior, who made himself a household name as Warwick the Kingmaker in his own time and in all generations down to today. Richard was the son of another Richard Neville senior (d.1460) and Alice Montagu (d.1463). Richard Neville senior was the eldest of the children of Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland (d.1425) by his second wife Joan Beaufort. Earl Ralph was the most outstanding head of the great house of Neville – the culmination of many generations of Neville barons of Raby (Durham), Middleham and Sheriff Hutton (Yorks.) who had distinguished themselves repeatedly against the Scots ever since the Norman Conquest. Joan Beaufort, his second wife and his first countess, was the daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (d.1399) and third son of Edward III (1327–77), by his mistress and eventual third duchess Katherine Swynford. This royal marriage explains in part Ralph’s promotion as earl in 1397. He had the requisite qualifying income anyway and he had earned promotion by good service to the crown. However his elevation coincided with that of Joan’s brother John Beaufort as earl of Somerset. The Countess Joan was thus half-sister of the Lancastrian King Henry IV (1399–1413), aunt of Henry V (1413–22), great-aunt of Henry VI (1422–61), whole sister of Cardinal Beaufort (d.1447) and Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter (1425), both Lord Chancellors, and the aunt and great-aunt of the four Beaufort dukes of Somerset. Such a marriage made the Nevilles themselves royal. Earl Ralph, Henry IV’s brother-in-law, was frequently described in royal records, according to contemporary usage, as the king’s brother. His proximity to the king brought him high favour, a string of grants of office and of property that was settled in tail on the earl and his eldest son by his royal wife, Richard Neville, not the eldest son by his first marriage who was heir to the earldom of Westmorland. Doubtless persuaded by the Countess Joan, Earl Ralph also transferred many of his ancestral Neville estates to her children – to Richard senior and his heirs male – away from the main Westmorland line. Following Earl Ralph’s death, the Westmorland Nevilles objected violently, but were obliged to accept reality in 1443. They retained the Durham properties, but it was Richard Neville senior who secured the Middleham estates in Richmondshire and Sheriff Hutton, Penrith and other properties in Cumbria, and the royal wardenship of the West March that made him the military commander west of the Pennines against the Scots. It was this patrimony to which Anne’s father Richard Neville junior was born in 1428.² It was also this power-base that Anne Neville was to transfer to her second husband Richard, Duke of Gloucester in the 1470s. Gloucester used it to make himself dominant in the North and to usurp the throne in 1483.

Another fruit of the kinship of the Nevilles to the house of Lancaster was the most remarkable series of child marriages in medieval England. Earl Ralph fathered no less than twentytwo children, nine of them by his second wife Joan.³ The Nevilles were able to exploit the favour of the Lancastrians to secure grants of the marriages of the most desirable heirs and heiresses to marry their children, which Henry IV and V willingly conceded, especially when they were the offspring of former traitors whom they wanted safely married into loyal families. Neville spouses had become attractive to noblemen seeking husbands for their daughters. Hence Richard Neville senior was married to Alice Montagu, sole daughter and heiress of Thomas Montagu (d.1428), Earl of Salisbury, by Eleanor, one of the five heiresses of the Holland earls of Kent. Richard and Alice were Anne Neville’s grandparents. Quite apart from the title, which gave Richard Neville the earldom that his great estates demanded, and extensive lands mainly in southcentral England, his countess could trace herself through both lines back to Edward I. If not quite of the front rank – only the Stafford, York and Warwick inheritances were – Richard Neville’s combined estates placed him firmly in the second rank among the top half-dozen dynasties of the 1430s and 1440s. He was certainly the equal of his rival and brother-in-law Henry Percy, 2nd earl of Northumberland.⁴

Anne Neville’s grandparents the Earl and Countess of Salisbury started searching in the nobility for partners for their own dozen children well before they reached their teens and indeed before the younger ones were yet born. Richard Neville junior, the future kingmaker, was their eldest son, heir to the earldom of Salisbury and to all their Holland, Montagu and Neville possessions. He was a considerable matrimonial catch. Given how many marriages the Nevilles had already contracted amongst the nobility, there were in reality few partners of sufficient standing who were not already too closely related to them within the prohibited degrees of affinity and thus genuinely eligible. One of the most promising of these was undoubtedly Anne Beauchamp, the youngest daughter of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d.1439) by his second wife Isabel Despenser (d.1439). Born in 1426, Anne Beauchamp was not an heiress, for she had an elder brother Henry (d.1446), the future duke of Warwick, but only his single life stood between her entitlement to a share, with her four half-sisters, of the Beauchamp and Despenser heritage. In any case, even the greatest families could not confine themselves to heirs and heiresses unless they were prepared to intermarry with those of lesser rank, mere gentry rather than nobility.

No objection could be found to Anne’s pedigree. The earls of Warwick traced themselves to the legendary Guy of Warwick. Earl Richard Beauchamp was the sixth Beauchamp earl, a soldier and indeed hero of chivalric renown, the ‘father of courtesy’, the tutor to King Henry VI himself and about to become king’s lieutenant in France.⁵ The Countess Isabel had been daughter and sole heiress of Thomas Despenser (d.1400), briefly Earl of Gloucester, who traced his descent from Edward I, and Constance of York (d.1416), another granddaughter of Edward III. Her daughter Anne Beauchamp was indeed the ‘noble lady of the blood royal’ that John Rows alleged.⁶ The combined Beauchamp and Despenser estates, principally in the West Midlands around Warwick, Hanley Castle (Worcs.) and Tewkesbury (Gloucs.) and in south Wales (but including Barnard Castle in County Durham), placed them decisively in the front rank, one level above the Nevilles. Evidently it was Salisbury who really wanted a matrimonial alliance, most probably to unite his daughter Cecily Neville with Warwick’s son Henry, heir to the only magnate family to which the Nevilles were not yet closely connected. Earl Richard Beauchamp, we may deduce, was not so enthusiastic to dispose of the hand of his heir in this way. Henry was, after all, the greatest heir of any contemporary noble house, who ought really to have been advancing himself by marriage to a royal princess or to a well-endowed heiress, neither of which Cecily Neville was. Salisbury, however, made him an offer even Earl Richard Beauchamp could hardly refuse. Not only did he offer him a dowry with Cecily of 4,700 marks (£3,233 13s 4d), one of the largest marriage portions recorded in medieval England and very welcome given the great earl’s financial embarrassments, but Salisbury also threw in as makeweight the hand of his son Richard for Anne Beauchamp, which would make her a countess. This was decidedly better than the mere baronies that were all that Warwick had secured for his three elder daughters by his first wife. The double marriage, Henry Beauchamp to Cecily Neville and Richard Neville to Anne Beauchamp, was celebrated at Abergavenny in Wales on or about 4 May 1436.⁷

In the short run, as we shall see, these splendid matches produced the intended results. Following the deaths of the earl and countess of Warwick, their son Henry succeeded as earl and Cecily Neville as countess. Henry was elevated in quick succession to be premier earl and then duke, but died in 1446. His infant daughter followed in 1449 and Cecily, now Duchess of Warwick, in 1450. What was unexpected was that in 1449 Anne Beauchamp scooped the pool. Richard Neville junior became earl of Warwick and acquired the whole of the vast Beauchamp and Despenser inheritance, to the chagrin, violent protest and ineffective resistance of his sisters-in-law. It was as earl of Warwick that he made his reputation – he was not Salisbury the Kingmaker, but Warwick the Kingmaker – and his parental inheritances did not fall in for another decade. This was why Anne Neville was born at Warwick, why her childhood homes were on the Beauchamp and Despenser estates, and why John Rows of Warwick was her family chronicler.⁸

Queen Anne Neville, as we have seen, was a product of this union. Her parents were destined to careers as great landowners in Yorkshire and the North-West and also in the central South. During the 1450s they periodically visited London for parliaments and great council, and regularly interacted with all the other great houses whom they numbered as their kin and with the royal family. Every generation that passed, of course, moved the Nevilles further from the throne, repeatedly creating more intimate royal families, so that by the 1450s the Nevilles were among the more remote of the 200 or so individuals who regarded themselves as royal.⁹ They ceased to benefit from extraordinary royal favour during the 1440s: the Kingmaker’s younger brothers, Anne Neville’s uncles, and his younger sisters, her aunts, had to wait until they were adults to marry, and even then matched themselves to mere barons and the heiresses of wealthy gentry. Even if no longer ranked with the royal by those who were undoubtedly royal, nevertheless Richard Neville and Anne Beauchamp – and hence their daughter Anne Neville herself – could pride themselves on descent from Edward III and earlier monarchs through five distinct lines. Her pedigree is a case study in endogamy, the tendency of the nobility to marry within a limited circle of existing kin. Royal descent linked her inevitably with other royal lines: Valois, Wittelsbach, Bruce and Luxemberg, rulers of the Empire, France, the Spanish kingdoms and Scotland, back to Charlemagne and into the mythical mists of time. Genealogical rolls traced them back to Woden, Adam and Noah. The Warwick historian John Rows was right therefore to address Anne Neville as ‘the most noble lady and princess born of the royal blood of divers realms lineally descending from princes, kings, emperors, and many glorious saints’.¹⁰ Perhaps he was thinking of St Louis (Louis IX of France) and St Margaret of Scotland? Understandably Anne and her family took pride in its lineage, burnishing their buildings, glass, plate and vestments with the coats of arms and badges that they had inherited. Most probably it was Anne Neville who was to commission the Pageant of Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick – a celebration of her distinguished grandfather – and an updated edition of the Salisbury Roll: John Rows’Roll of the Earls of Warwick was a worthy gift.¹¹

Yet inheritance was not merely a matter of accumulation – of castles, lordships, wealth, honours, titles and progeny. There was a genetic inheritance too. No doubt, as always, there were family likenesses. Anne’s genetic inheritance may perhaps have been a negative one. It makes sense to argue that inheritances accrued because families ran out, that heiresses then occurred only when their families failed to produce or successfully to bring up sons, and that families that repeatedly married their sons to heiresses rendered themselves more liable to inherit infertility, sterility or susceptibility to disease, and hence to produce no heirs themselves. Such an argument must be mere speculation uninformed by the medical lore or genetic know-how that we can bring to the subject today, but some of the circumstances are suggestive. Alarmingly fertile though the Nevilles had been, several of the branches were to terminate only in daughters. Salisbury’s brother William Lord Fauconberg left three daughters. Salisbury’s three married sons produced numerous daughters, but not a single son that they raised to maturity.¹² Whereas Anne Beauchamp, as we shall see, bore only two daughters, these daughters had only five children between them, three of whom died young. Anne Neville herself produced only a single son who died before the age of ten. Gynaecological misfortune, perhaps a genetic inheritance, shaped Anne Neville’s whole life and came ultimately (and tragically) to overshadow it.

The marriage of Anne’s parents, in the meantime, took years to become a reality. Richard, after all, was only seven years old, his bride Anne Beauchamp being already ten. Whilst they grew up, Warwick’s three brothers reached maturity – the youngest, George, becoming a bishop – and his sisters were married off to the earl of Arundel, Lord Stanley and Lord FitzHugh. Anne’s four sisters had peers for husbands. Moreover, the older generation survived – in the 1450s Salisbury had four brothers and five brothers-in-law in the House of Lords.¹³ Almost everyone who was anyone was related to the Nevilles. Anne Neville had a host of uncles, aunts, even great-uncles and great-aunts. The Wars of the Roses, when they happened, were genuinely a family affair. Kinship, which often entails disputed inheritances, can divide as well as unite. Different branches of this vast family network developed contradictory interests and antagonisms. It was to slay two brothers-in-law that the Neville earls were to fight at St Albans in 1455;¹⁴ other kin followed at the battles of Northampton in 1460 and Towton in 1461.

It was crucial that Anne Neville was born not to rank and wealth, but to ancient lineage, ancient contacts and ancient loyalties. The Beauchamps, Despensers, Montagus and Nevilles had held their titles and their estates by right for so long that they had come to be seen as natural, permanent and enduring. Such long-established families were stable, capable of surmounting temporary minorities and forfeitures, and were extremely difficult to uproot.‘New men’ raised from the dust by royal grants found that it took time to make more of their estates than the chance and temporary agglomeration of properties. They needed strength of character, attractive personalities and material inducements to secure the service they desired and which ancient families could take for granted, to construct the connections that were required in politics, and to ensure that these held firm at the first shock. That took decades, even generations. Long-standing inheritances, which had endured over time, conferred all these advantages on each successive tenant for life. Nobody doubted their right to exist and their natural associates – the tenants on their estates, retainers and officers – expected them not only to remain, but their heirs to continue after them. Such dependants had an interest in the inheritance, in the family and in its traditions. All the components of the Warwick inheritance were ancient, by medieval standards, and possessed this character. They had traditions remembered by lords and servants alike, whose memory was cherished and perpetuated by such custodians as the monks of Tewkesbury Abbey, canons of Coverham Abbey and the Warwick chantry priest John Rows, and as imparted to successive lords and their offspring, certainly to Anne Neville. The interest of the lords was to foster and ideally develop these traditions, which indeed Duke Richard and Anne Neville did. Anne Neville inevitably was imbued with these traditions, if not always at first hand.

Anne Neville was born at Warwick, the principal seat of the earls of Warwick, where there remains today one of the most imposing seigniorial castles to survive and which was still inhabited by its lord until very recently. Apart from its castle, the modest Midlands town was dominated by the religious foundations of successive earls, who had also enhanced it with privileges, walls, parks and other improvements. The earls of Warwick proudly traced themselves back beyond the Norman Beaumonts to the legendary past. The first earl, it was believed, had been a giant, Guy of Warwick, a hero of medieval romances, whose cave at Guyscliff to the north of Warwick still survived. The Beauchamps’ respect for the legend was displayed by nomenclature – there was one Earl Guy of Warwick (d.1315) and a grandson was scheduled to be a second – and there was a huge Guy’s Tower at Warwick Castle. Guy’s supposed arms were quartered with their own and were to be quartered indeed with those of Anne, her sister, their husbands and Anne’s sons. It was in the Warwick tradition that Anne Neville’s maternal grandfather Earl Richard Beauchamp was credited with an ambitious, extremely expensive and perhaps technologically impractical plan to transform Warwick economically by making the River Avon navigable from Tewkesbury up to Warwick. In 1423, when he had feared that the inheritance would terminate with his daughters and he yearned for heirs male to continue his line, the Beauchamp name and title, Earl Richard Beauchamp had remarried to the much younger Isabel Despenser. He had also rebuilt Guyscliff Chapel, with its giant statue of Guy hewn from the rock, and had endowed a two-priest chantry to serve it. The chapel was only finished in 1454. Anne Neville’s father, the kingmaker, supposedly planned to augment it with an almshouse of noble poverty for retired retainers like that which he had despoiled at St Cross, Winchester.¹⁵ So attests John Rows, the graduate who was cantarist there for almost sixty years until his death in 1491. Rows made himself into the historian both of Warwick and its earls so successfully that he superseded whatever it was that had previously reminded the family of their heritage and which, regrettably, has been lost. Earl Richard Beauchamp bound his son Henry, if promoted, to retain the Warwick title, which indeed he did when created in 1446 duke of Warwick. Moreover, through another line, the Thonys, the Beauchamps were heirs of the legendary Swan Knight, another hero of medieval romance, whose golden cup was kept at Warwick Castle and shown to visitors. From the fourteenth century, the Beauchamps made the ancient college of St Mary Warwick into their mausoleum. It was there that Earl Thomas I (d.1369), Earl Thomas II (d.1401) and Earl Richard (d.1439) were buried. They rebuilt the choir. In his will Earl Richard Beauchamp commissioned for himself the Beauchamp Chapel, one of the finest – if not the finest – chantry chapels of medieval England, which was under construction throughout Anne Neville’s childhood and was consecrated only in 1472. From 1459, when Earl Richard Beauchamp’s monument was completed,¹⁶ Anne could identify her parents by their coats of arms amongst the weepers ranged alongside the effigy of her grandfather. Doubtless she did.

En route from Warwick to Cardiff lay Tewkesbury Abbey, the mausoleum of Anne’s De Clare and Despenser forebears, where her grandmother Isabel Despenser lay buried and where Anne’s own sister still rests. The Benedictine monks of this greatest religious house still in lay patronage regarded themselves as repositories of their founders’ ancestral renown. The eastern apse had been refashioned by her Despenser ancestors, who were all depicted in its early-fourteenth-century glass, and a semi-circle of chantries commemorated the founders from the legendary origins down to Anne’s own grandmother the Countess Isabel (d.1439). Most of them, including Anne’s father, are depicted in miniature in the Founder’s Chronicle.¹⁷ Presumably the same role was performed by the Augustinian canons of Bisham Priory, the mausoleum of the Montagus, in the earlier versions of the Salisbury Roll.¹⁸ A younger lineage, undoubtedly, the Montagus nevertheless had their hero – William Montagu, the 1st Earl of Salisbury (d.1344) – and a century of distinction, to which Anne’s maternal grandmother the Countess Alice was the last heir.

Although he was not to inherit until 1460, the kingmaker was acutely conscious of his own lineage, the Nevilles, who, as we have seen, traced themselves back to the Norman Conquest and indeed beyond. Their family genealogy, originating at the abbey of St Mary at York and continued at Coverham, as revised for Earl Ralph and updated c.1443, celebrated their roots in Richmondshire, where Middleham lay, and their military renown.¹⁹ Some versions stressed the direct line and others all the siblings, male, female and prematurely deceased, in each generation. Surviving in multiple copies and perhaps hung up on the wall, the genealogy indicated to members of the family, such as Anne Neville, exactly where they fitted and everything to which they were heirs. The Nevilles were everywhere in the North. As Anne Neville was to find, Neville’s Cross marked a notable victory over the Scots in 1346, in Durham Cathedral there was both a Neville chantry and a Neville screen, and at York her father and uncle were to found St William’s College. Not only was she to feel at home in the North, but northerners regarded Anne Neville – in turn the Lady Anne, the Duchess Anne and Queen Anne – as very much their own.²⁰

BIRTH 1456

A daughter like Anne Neville benefited from her complex pedigree and luxuriant traditions, but she was decidedly not their intended culmination. A daughter who was an heiress, still more a daughter who was a co-heiress, threatened to bring everything to the end – the family name, its titles, its honours, its traditions, its patronage and its connections. The future would be shaped by a husband who knew of none of these, perhaps cared little for them, and had his own counterparts to each to protect.

Joy at Anne Neville’s birth (and her mother’s survival) was thus accompanied by apprehension for the future. For Anne Neville herself, of course, her birth was her beginning. What that meant – how she was greeted and how her significance evolved – is also deserving of attention.

Formally married in 1436, Richard Neville junior and Anne Beauchamp needed time to grow up. Even allowing for that, however, their marriage was slow to bear its intended fruits: inheritance, children and heirs. Richard Neville senior (henceforth Salisbury) lived to be sixty: still vigorous and effective, his life ended violently. His countess Alice Montagu, our heroine’s grandmother, survived another two years. Anne Neville’s maternal grandparents died sooner, both in 1439. Her only maternal uncle Duke Henry died in 1446, his spouse Duchess Cecily in 1451, and their only baby daughter in 1449, all before Anne Neville was born. The duke’s infant left five aunts to divide her Beauchamp and Despenser inheritances. Had her father Duke Henry not come of age, they would have done, but because the duke had achieved his majority his only whole sister Anne Beauchamp took precedence over his four half-sisters: there was a common-law rule that favoured the whole blood over the half blood. As we have seen, the unforeseen beneficiaries were Duke Henry’s youngest sister and his daughter’s youngest aunt Anne Beauchamp and her husband Richard Neville, who became earl and countess of Warwick and secured the whole of both inheritances rather than merely the quarter and half shares that were all that could have been predicted. Anne Beauchamp’s half-sisters and nephew objected and resisted, ultimately without avail.²¹ For the heir of Richard and Alice, always heir presumptive to the Neville and Montagu lands and the earldom of Salisbury, an even greater future beckoned. Moreover, it began at once. In 1449, at the age of twenty, the younger Richard Neville became earl of Warwick. But for the Wars of the Roses and Salisbury’s violent death in 1460, Richard Neville junior might have remained an heir in waiting, overshadowed by his father, for much longer than the thirteen years till his mother died. Instead he was able to become a great man at once, able to make a major impression on his age and indeed overshadow his own father Salisbury, without waiting to enter his parents’ shoes. It was not a hopeful heir, but the greatest of earls who begat Anne Neville.

As yet, however, there was no heir: no offspring of either sex. By 1449 the new earl and countess had been married for thirteen years. The absence of heirs is surprising. Without pretending the union of Richard and Anne to have been a love match – how could it have been, given their youth and differences in ages? – the Nevilles at least must have intended children to result. Child grooms and brides did not live together or indeed consummate their marriages until they were considered old enough. Even by contemporary standards, 1436 – when Richard was aged seven and Anne ten – was too soon. Margaret Beaufort was twelve, and bore the future Henry VII when only fourteen. Girls came of age at fourteen, which Anne reached in 1440 when Richard, at eleven, was still too young. After the death of both her parents in 1439, if not earlier, Anne was surely living with her in-laws. We have no evidence when Richard and Anne first slept together, first lived together, or first had their own establishment, but it was surely by 1446, when Duke Henry died, Anne being at the relatively advanced age of twenty and Richard aged seventeen, still more so by 1449 when they became earl and countess of Warwick, she being twenty-three years old by then and he aged twenty. And yet it was only on 5 September 1451 that their daughter Isabel was born²² – their eldest child so far as we can be aware. Presumably she was conceived at Christmas 1450 or New Year 1451. Given the committed interest in such events both of John Rows and the Tewkesbury Abbey chronicler, historians respectively of the Beauchamps and the Despensers, we should surely expect to know of any earlier daughter to be born and certainly of any son on whom the future of both houses depended, if not necessarily of miscarriages and still-births. Richard and Anne must have been trying to beget children. Twenty-five was an advanced age for Anne to bear her first child. Perhaps the Countess Anne came to puberty very late. Perhaps she had miscarriages of which we are ignorant. That certainly is indicated by the papal dispensation she secured in 1453. Because ‘she is weakened by former illnesses and the birth of children’, she was allowed when pregnant to eat eggs and meat in Lent.²³ Did she also have difficulty in conceiving? The second daughter and future queen Anne Neville was born when Anne was thirty, which was an early age for a lady to cease child-bearing. Women who experience puberty late today have early menopauses. We can presume, once again, that Warwick himself was anxious to breed a son and was engaging in the requisite intercourse with his countess. Nothing more materialised. If infertility could have been his fault, his bastard daughter Margaret is evidence of a sex drive that the Countess Anne alone did not satisfy, for he was married throughout his fertile life. Anne Neville’s genealogical inheritance included a gene bank that, it appears, may well have included the gynae-cological problems which, perhaps, explain or contributed to her own disappointing record of procreation.

Young though they were, Richard and Anne were programmed by class and family expectations to reproduce, all the more so once her inheritances had devolved on them. Heirs were needed to perpetuate their line. Additionally heirs were of signal value as they combated the rival claims of their rival cousins. We may be sure therefore that Anne Beauchamp’s first pregnancy was welcome, how eagerly her first confinement was anticipated, and how disappointing was the birth – when it came - of a daughter. There can be little doubt that Isabel Neville was given the name of her maternal grandmother, the countess’s mother Isabel Despenser. Even daughters had their dynastic and political uses, however, and Isabel’s birth was moreover an earnest of better things to come. Yet four years passed before the next childbirth, when events repeated themselves. It was in recognition that the countess’s pregnancies were few – and that the hoped-for son might materialise – that a special christening was prepared. Undoubtedly Anne Neville was wanted – but how much more disappointing must have been her sex. Anne was given her mother’s name. And so, in the absence of evidence, sexual intercourse persisted and the waiting continued. How soon it was that the Warwicks realised that there would be no more pregnancies or childbirths we cannot tell. Certainly by 1464, when the countess was forty, Warwick appears to have made his will and invested his hopes in heirs that did not include a son. The countess herself, of course, will have known when her periods ceased. Not to have a son that they both wanted so much was surely one of the sharpest disappointments of their married lives and perhaps their personal tragedy.

Earl Richard and Countess Anne thus produced only two daughters, Isabel and Anne Neville. Probably conceived at Warwick Castle, their principal seat and the countess’ home, it was there that Isabel was born on 5 September 1451.²⁴ Most probably Warwick himself was present in the castle, although the labour was an all-female preserve. Nothing is recorded about her christening. Anne Neville also was born at Warwick on 11 June 1456 and ‘in our lady church there with great solemnity was she christened’²⁵ at St Mary’s, Warwick College, the Beauchamp mausoleum where Earl Richard Beauchamp and his father were interred. Since Warwick missed the poorly attended great council that met at Westminster from 7 June, almost certainly he was at Warwick for the birth and for the christening, although the son that he so desired failed to materialise. Regrettably the Warwick cantarist John Rows, who reported the occasion, has not transmitted to us details even of who Anne’s godparents were. Presumably it was for the intended son that the ceremonial (and noble godparents) were prepared: the most public statement possible to the Warwick connection that the Neville line was to endure.

UPBRINGING

The young married couple who unexpectedly became earl and countess of Warwick in 1449 fought off rivals for the Beauchamp, Despenser and Abergavenny elements of Anne’s inheritance. The earldom of Salisbury fell in following the deaths of Warwick’s father in 1460 and his mother in 1463. Substantial additions to his estates were added from the forfeited property of Lancastrian families such as the Percys, Cliffords and Rooses. Warwick now was the richest nobleman in England by a large margin – richer even, almost certainly, than Richard, Duke of York and than any other subject since John of Gaunt (d.1399). He had moreover accrued a host of offices – captain of Calais, chief forester of the North and chief steward of the northern estates of the duchy of Lancaster, great chamberlain of England, keeper of the seas, warden of the West March, constable and steward of a host of castles and lordships, even briefly king’s lieutenant of the North and steward of England. He conquered the North for Edward IV, not once but repeatedly, was the king’s principal ambassador, presided over the queen’s churching and, to foreigners at least, he appeared greater than King Edward himself. He dominated his brothers, whose personal success, John as earl of Northumberland and warden of the East March, and George as archbishop of York and chancellor of England, enhanced his own.²⁶

Warwick’s success happened very quickly, but not all at once. The first years of his first daughter, Isabel, were surely spent with her mother the Countess Anne principally at Warwick. That was where Anne was born. But her father’s career took off first as keeper of the seas and then as captain of Calais, the principal military commands of the English crown in the aftermath of military defeat. Never had Calais and its captain been more important. Remarkably Warwick chose to take up residence in Calais. That was in May 1457.²⁷ Earlier captains, such as Earl Richard Beauchamp and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had been absentees who acted through deputies. It was a formal decision by Warwick, not a chance visit that was somehow extended. Even more remarkably, Warwick took his countess with him. Perhaps he did not wish to be parted indefinitely from his lifelong partner and soul mate; more cynically, he could not pass by several years of opportunity to father a son. Probably, therefore, both his daughters were at Calais too. It could hardly have been intended to separate them from their mother for the space of years. Probably Anne Neville moved to Calais before her first birthday. Probably she, her mother and her sister Isabel resided at Calais for three years.

Restless and apparently tireless, Warwick himself was frequently away, often on activities that carried a high degree of risk. Obviously his countess and daughters did not join him for his naval depredations against foreign shipping nor for negotiations with foreign neighbours in Calais’ hinterlands. The chroniclers do not record either whether his family joined him for his visits every so often to England for great councils, notably the three-month peace conference that culminated in the Loveday of St Paul’s in the winter of 1458–9, and which allowed him at least to make lightning visits to Warwick and other properties. These were political fraught occasions not without their own dangers: the first blows of the Wars of the Roses had been struck and there was an assassination attempt on Warwick in Westminster Hall in November 1458. Most probably, therefore, his countess and daughters remained at Calais.

Certainly the Countess Anne was again at Calais, perhaps with her daughters, when Warwick arrived there on 2 November 1459 in flight from the debacle at Ludford. He was accompanied by his father – his daughters’ paternal grandfather Richard, Earl of Salisbury – and by Edward, Earl of March, son of Richard, Duke of York and the future King Edward IV. All the Yorkist peers were attainted as traitors at the Parliament of Devils. When Warwick consulted York in Ireland, many chronicles report what was evidently a celebrated feat, and he returned to Calais with his mother (and Anne’s grandmother), the now aged Countess Alice.²⁸ Left behind during the successful invasion of the Yorkist earls in 1460, the two countesses (and presumably also Isabel and Anne) received the victorious Warwick in triumph at Calais on 7 August and were transported back via Sandwich to England, catching up with King Henry VI at Greenwich on 19th and proceeding with him to London.²⁹ At that point Anne had just embarked on her fifth year.

Young though she was, Anne’s earliest years in Calais ought to have been a formative experience. She was not in England in her early childhood. Physically she did not live in England, although she must have been told often enough, nostalgically, that it was her real and permanent home. The great household that she inhabited was little different from what it was in England, but her apparently static existence in Calais Castle was very different from the peripatetic nature of noble life in England. The beleaguered frontier town of Calais, a garrison town and an English colony in a foreign hinterland, was quite unlike anywhere else in England, except possibly the northern marcher fortresses of Carlisle and Berwick-upon-Tweed, and was certainly dissimilar from the provincial seats where her parents resided when in England. She may not have known Warwick, Hanley Castle (Worcs.), Tewkesbury, Cardiff or her mother’s other residences in Wales and the West Midlands as well as her sister Isabel, particularly as the earl’s northern heritage seems to have taken precedence after 1460; perhaps Rows knew her less well also. For six months in 1459–60 she lived in close proximity to her grandparents. Moreover at Calais Anne was exposed to francophone culture. If English was the principal language of her parents, their entourage, and indeed the people of Calais, French and Flemish were frequently spoken by native Frenchmen and Burgundians in her parents’ household and everywhere outside, doubtless sometimes to Anne, whom, one might surmise, quickly learnt to understand and also to speak French herself – a language that was both useful and a polite accomplishment. Surely she encountered Flemish too. If Anne grew up bilingual, it could have smoothed relations with her first mother-in-law Margaret of Anjou. Unfortunately, like so much else about Anne, there is nothing to confirm what was the impact in later life of her sojourn in Calais.

Little more than a toddler and at a distance in Calais, Anne was insulated against the first of the Wars of the Roses of 1459–61, though her father’s absences – and some sense of the risks, the reliefs, and the victories – surely permeated down even to his youngest daughter. After the Greenwich reception in August, the earl and countess and presumably both daughters too went next to Warwick, before the earl met up with Richard, Duke of York at Shrewsbury, and preceded him to London,³⁰ where the duke bid for the crown. The decisive battles ensued. Where the countess and daughters were in the meantime we cannot know. Warwick survived. He also won. The right side, the Yorkists, prevailed decisively at the battle of Towton on 29 March 1461. The Yorkist King Edward IV, whom his cousin Anne knew from his nine-month sojourn at Calais, supplanted the Lancastrian King Henry VI.

Perhaps Anne Neville at four and certainly her sister Isabel at nine were old enough to understand the high dramas of 1460–1, when the Yorkists secured control of the government, their grandfather was slain at Wakefield, their father was routed at St Albans and the Lancastrian army menaced London where, most probably, they were at the time. Given the prominence of their parents, they were probably observers both of the formalities of King Edward’s accession on 4 March and his coronation in 1461. Their father set off northwards for the decisive battle of Towton and returned as victor. If never visible in our sources, Isabel and Anne cannot have been ignorant either of the stakes and risks nor other than grateful at consequences that surely answered their prayers.

Warwick was certainly head of his household and a model of the male authority to which daughters like Anne were taught to defer. To an extent even greater than as head of his great household in his provincial seats, the Earl of Warwick was in charge in Calais, where he actually ruled and where, when in rebellion, he actually was the final authority. He operated martial law and exercised power of life and death, notoriously despatching Osbert Mountford, King Henry’s naval commander, when he fell into his hands.³¹Warwick’s power was the reality of Anne’s earliest years. Return to England did not radically change that situation. As early as Anne Neville became conscious of such things, her father was a great man. When she was four he was second only to the king or – so some said – greater than the king himself. Laden with honours and responsibilities, ‘he had all England at his leading and was dreaded and feared [doubted] through many lands’, and was ‘a famous knight and excellent greatly spoken of through the most part of all Christendom’, whose ‘knightly acts had been so excellent that his noble and famous name could never be put out of laudable memory’. That was the public face of what was to her ‘the most famous and dread and beloved lord’.³² How close that relationship was, how domestic was the comital household, how well Anne knew her father and what he meant to her in practice we cannot tell.

Of Anne’s mother we know a little more. The earl and countess resided principally at Warwick up to 1456, when Anne was born, and then in Calais until 1460. Thereafter during the 1460s Warwick was constantly away on military or diplomatic business, most commonly in the North, at Westminster, and on continental embassies, on which his family can rarely have accompanied him. Clearly the earl and countess were less often together. Quite frequently recorded at Middleham and at Carlisle, the earl was rarely at Warwick after 1461 and does not occur again in Wales. Did the countess also base herself in the North? For the whole of 1464–5, the only year for which accounts survive, the Countess Anne was not at Middleham. Or did she reside more usually on her own estates in the West Midlands whence she came? She must certainly have possessed a household capable of operating apart from the earl and of moving about. After the earl’s exile in 1470, his countess lived in turn abroad, at Beaulieu and in the North, and returned to Warwick, if ever, only after John Rows had finished writing. Although this Warwick cantarist knew his countess well, and knew all about her subsequent sufferings and her reactions to them, yet he encountered her principally in 1449–57 rather than later. What he saw her daughters witnessed also. As a clergyman, Rows reports with approval that the countess ‘was ever a full devout lady in God’s service’ – that she attended religious services assiduously and fervently: he had more that was positive and distinctive to say about her elder siblings and would have liked, we may presume, to have something more concrete to praise about her piety. Rows also perceived in her ‘a noble lady of the blood royal’ and ‘by true inheritance countess of Warwick’, neither of which Anne can have overlooked. Anne’s mother was also an excellent example of feminine conduct for her daughters, even through masculine eyes. ‘She was also gladly ever companionable and liberal’, Rows wrote, ‘and in her own person, seemly and beauteous, and to all that drew to her ladyship, as the deed shewed, full good and gracious’. Translated into modern English, Rows tells us that the countess was pleasing to the eye and acted with decorum. She was affable, courteous to all comers, and generous. She addressed all members of her household whatever their rank ‘according to her and their degrees’. A strict sense of hierarchy and etiquette and condescension to inferiors, which contemporaries thought proper and we call snobbery, is implied. Although apparently only twice in childbirth herself, Rows reports that the countess was ‘glad to be at and with women that travailed of child, full comfortable and plenteous of all things that should be helping to them’.³³ Presumably these mothers-to-be were the gentlewomen of her household and the wives of her retainers and officers. It sounds as though they were her friends as well as her employees. Pregnancy, childbirth and babies were entirely familiar. Here surely Rows provides some insight into the feminine ambience within which Anne Neville was raised up to her early teens. Thereafter, as we shall see, she leapt into married life.

Whilst obviously coming together much more frequently than we can know, for procreation, on important feasts and perhaps on many other occasions, it was normal for lords and ladies to have separate and self-sufficient households, and for them often to be apart. Warwick’s busy life often kept him and his family separate. In the absence of direct evidence, the households of the earl and countess were surely like many others that we do know about. Most members worked in the service departments that handled the food, drink, transport, laundry and washing up: the lower household that sustained the upper household, where the lord and lady lived and entertained. Warwick’s household came to be exceptionally large and the scale of his open-handed hospitality quite outstanding.³⁴ When the Neville daughters were there, they found roasted meats prominent on the menu. Bar the laundress, the earl’s household was entirely male, but in the smaller replica that was the countess’s establishment there were females, both gentlewomen (damsels) and domestic servants. Based on other parallels, there were probably both married women, the wives of his officers, and spinsters, although actually only one widow – the earl’s flighty cousin Dame Margaret Lucy³⁵ – is known by name. It was a female world that aristocratic girls like the Neville sisters inhabited. Men there were in plenty, both in the service departments, in office upstairs, in business transactions with their mother, and in polite society, but such maidens were always chaperoned and insulated against potential male predators except under the most strictly controlled circumstances.

Whilst little, the earl’s daughters lived with their mother. Mothers took general responsibility for the upbringing of their children.³⁶ The image of St Anne teaching her daughter the Blessed Virgin Mary to read become popular in the fourteenth century. At this stage in history ladies did not suckle their babies or undertake themselves the physical care of their offspring. That was the work of a wet-nurse, from whom girls progressed to a governess – in a great household a gentle-woman – and boys to a master. The Warwicks, of course, had no sons, but at least two other boys, their ward Francis Lord Lovell and also the royal prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, were brought up in their household;³⁶ female wards and other girls may also have been. Whatever their sex, all the children learnt at least to read and write in English, perhaps in Latin also, to say the Lord’s Prayer (Paternoster) and Hail Mary (Ave), and were taught about religious observance: there were religious services everyday, usually several times a day. They also learnt who they were: their family, its genealogy, its traditions, legends and renown. It was here, surely, that Anne Neville learnt about Guy of Warwick and her remarkable grandfather Earl Richard Beauchamp, about her Despenser, Montagu and Neville forebears. They must all have learnt to ride. Thereafter the routes for boys and girls separated. Boys were taught to a higher academic standard and also about the martial arts appropriate to future warriors. The upbringing of girls was designed to fit them for their role in life as gentlewomen, mothers, managers of households and members of polite society. They needed to attract good husbands and to make the most of their married lives. For the latter role, they needed to learn housewifery. Sewing and the working of textiles feature prominently in all the books of instruction. They learnt how to handle servants. Girls also needed to learn courtesy, proper deportment, the etiquette, procedures and good manners expected of polite society. The Neville girls must have been taught to eat as daintily as Chaucer’s Prioress.

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

The virgin martyrs were maidens, what we call adolescents, suspended between childhood and adulthood. ‘Sufficiently physically developed to engage in procreation, and sufficiently intellectually and morally developed to understand the nature of the bond’ of marriage, maidens had reached the perfect age of the ‘youthful, sexually mature yet virginal young woman’. The late medieval ideal was that female ‘beauty was associated with the slenderness of youth and virginity’.³⁷ By the mid-1460s, Isabel and Anne Neville too were maidens shaped by their upbringings and were still being shaped to an ideal devised by men to make them attractive to male suitors and good wives and mothers thereafter. Anne was blonde and conventionally described as ‘beauteous’ by John Rows.³⁸Heiresses did not have to be beautiful, with even the insane finding husbands, but as they attracted royal dukes perhaps the Neville sisters were.

Damsels like Isabel and Anne were commonly placed in other gentle households, where perhaps they were more easily disciplined in their adolescent years. We have no evidence of this for the Neville sisters. There was no queen’s household in which to place them until 1464, when Isabel was twelve and Anne eight. Perhaps Warwick did not want to place them with Edward’s Wydeville queen, about whom he had decided qualms, and whose kinsfolk competed vigorously for such places. We should imagine Isabel, Anne and other girls living in an upper household dominated by mature and married gentlewomen with their mother and accompanying her wherever she moved, albeit less frequently than their restless father. With both parents they are recorded making offerings with the king at St Mary’s Warwick, probably in January 1464.³⁹ Most likely they were also with their parents at York in September 1465 in company with young Duke Richard, their two uncles by marriage Lords FitzHugh and Hastings and hence probably their aunts, Warwick’s sisters Alice and Katherine. That, regrettably, is all.

Probably Warwick’s two little girls moved increasingly into society during the 1460s. From historical records, of course, it was only on occasions – and very special occasions – that they did emerge from obscurity and into our vision. Always they were in their best clothes and on their best behaviour. It was only their presence that was reported. Although unrecorded by the heralds, almost certainly both were present with almost all their kindred at Bisham Priory on 14 February 1463, where their grandfather Richard, Earl of Salisbury and their uncle Thomas Neville, both slain at Wakefield in 1460, were ceremonially reburied, and their recently deceased grandmother the Countess Alice was first interred. The king’s own father and brother, both also killed at Wakefield, were not to receive their similar reburial until 1476. The heir of the throne, the king’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, was among Warwick’s distinguished array of guests at Bisham. So splendid was the occasion that the heraldic record became the model for the funeral of an earl. There is no record of the wedding of their youngest aunt Margaret c.1462 to John, Earl of Oxford. Just as remarkable as Bisham in September 1465 at Cawood Palace near York were the celebrations of the enthronement of their uncle George Neville as archbishop of York. Two thousand guests were feasted on the most lavish scale at thirteen tables in the great hall, in the chief, second and great chambers, the lower hall and in the gallery. Almost all their relations were there. Their father Warwick himself was engaged as steward, his countess was seated with other adults in the second chamber, and ‘two of the Lord of Warwick’s daughters’ were placed in the great chamber: testimony, perhaps, that their society manners at twelve (Isabel) and nine (Anne) could be trusted. Also at their table was another child, the earl’s ward, the thirteen-year-old Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, ‘the king’s brother’, and three adult ladies to keep order. The ladies were Duke Richard’s grown-up sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, a cousin of the Neville girls, their distant in-law the countess of Westmorland, and their aunt by marriage (and Warwick’s sister-in-law) Isabel, Countess of Northumberland. It was both a family get-together and the nursery table.⁴⁰ The heraldic records of the other major ceremonies of the 1460s, which the countess and her daughters may well have attended, such as the marriage of Queen Elizabeth (1464), her coronation (1465) and churching (1466), over which Warwick presided, and the Smithfield tournament of the Bastard of Burgundy with Lord Scales in 1467, prioritised male participants and made no mention of either Isabel or Anne. Presumably they were absent from the marriage of the Princess Margaret in Burgundy in 1468 since the earl himself was elsewhere.

Neither Isabel Neville at seventeen nor Anne Neville at fourteen were particularly young by contemporary standards when they were married. They were the products of the sort of upbringing that has been described. How successfully they internalised its messages we cannot tell. Anne’s moral code, as we shall see, may have been imperfect. It was at fourteen that she left her parents’ hearth. She may never have returned to Warwick again until she was queen. Hence John Rows knew her less well than her mother or her sister and therefore has little that is personal to tell us. If he could, he would have recorded distinctive details, especially of her piety, but was instead reduced to the most general of platitudes. Her manner was decorous and amiable, he records, her conduct commendable and virtuous, and she was ‘full gracious’. The Great Chronicle also records her reputation as gracious.⁴¹ At least, therefore, she had been brought up to her rank.

MARRIAGE

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

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

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

The vast estate that the earl and countess had collected could remain united only for their lives. Sadly they could not transmit it intact to the next generation. For that, a son was needed. Their son. There was no divorce as such in the fifteenth century and with two daughters Warwick could hardly plead non-consummation. Even if the Countess Anne had died and the earl had remarried, any son by a second bride could have succeeded only to his Neville and Salisbury lands. The countess did not expire until 1492, when Warwick, had he survived, would have been sixty-four years old: not too ancient to procreate, but old by fifteenth-century standards. The Countess Anne had twenty years to remarry, but her menopause had surely come and reproduction of a son of her own was no longer a possibility. Even a single daughter, had either Isabel or Anne died, could not have kept everything together, because the estates were not all held by the same title. Inherited through different lines, they were subject to different entails. Whereas the Beauchamp, Despenser, Holland and Montagu lands were heritable by children of the earl and countess of whatever sex, the Neville lands were entailed in the male line (tail male). If Warwick had no son, the right of inheritance would devolve first on his brother John (d.1471) and his male descendants, and thereafter on the male lines of Salisbury’s brothers George Lord Latimer (d.1469) and Edward Lord Abergavenny (d.1476) in succession. Warwick’s two daughters, Isabel and Anne, could divide the rest. By 1464, it therefore appears, the earl and countess were reconciled to the division into three of their great accumulation of property. The Neville lands in tail male, comprising a couple of manors in Essex and the three great northern lordships of Middleham, Sheriff Hutton (Yorks.) and Penrith (Cumbria), were destined to pass to Warwick’s brother John and his son George Neville. All the rest, from Barnard Castle in County Durham, the Welsh marcher lordships, the Warwick and Despenser lands in the West Midlands, to properties in twenty other counties, would be divided between Isabel and Anne as co-heiresses.⁴² Even in three unequal parts, the divided estate was sufficient to make George, Isabel and Anne amongst the greatest heirs (and matrimonial catches) of their time.

By 1464, if not earlier, it appears that Warwick had resigned himself to never fathering a son. It was in this year, perhaps not for the first time, that he was resettling his estates and most probably writing his will. Thirty-five was not unusually young to be planning for eternity. Actually it was only the year before that he had secured a royal licence to settle £1,000-worth of lands in trust for the payment of his debts and the performance of his will.⁴³ Early in 1465 he had lands settled on him, not in tail male as on previous occasions, but on his heirs, executors and assigns, clear evidence not only that he was thinking of his soul, but also that he was resigned to lacking a son and was providing for the eventuality that it was daughters whom he wished to inherit.⁴⁴ Moreover, in 1466 he compromised with his Beauchamp sisters-in-law.⁴⁵ Whilst he was alive, he could continue to frustrate their claims on his estates, but how would his daughters cope should he die? A handful of manors to each sister-in-law and an entail that promised them the succession should his countess die childless were prices worth paying to ensure that his daughters’ tenure of the Beauchamp estates and the earldom of Warwick would not be challenged when he himself was gone. His sisters-in-law did not however give up their claims on their father’s trust: Elizabeth Lady Latimer (d.1480), the youngest sister-in-law, regarded the trust and the Beauchamp Chapel as their family assets.⁴⁶ Presumably Warwick felt no need to compensate the powerless St Cross Hospital, Winchester, which he had already wronged, and could not persuade the Nevilles of Abergavenny to abandon their claim to a halfshare of the Despenser inheritance. Warwick had recognised reproductive reality. He was investing in his heirs and ensuring their future security.

If Warwick could not himself become a king or indeed a duke as he more feasibly aspired, his heirs could be ducal or royal and could satisfy those ambitions that he yet had to fulfil. That he possessed such exalted ambitions is shown by his decision to marry Francis Lord Lovell, the heir to a decidedly wealthy barony, not to one of his daughters but to his niece, when he was granted the boy’s wardship and marriage in 1465.⁴⁷ Anne Neville was the younger, of course. When we think of these two young ladies, Isabel – the eldest – must always have taken precedence and been more important. She would have the pick of their inheritance. Inevitably it was Isabel who embarked first on the marriage market. Nor should we overlook George Neville. Although only a baby, born on 22 February 1465,⁴⁸ he and his father were the heirs presumptive and future heads of Warwick’s house of Neville. Warwick was as concerned for the future of the main line, the male line, as for his own daughters.

Actually it was as early as 1464 that the Burgundian chronicler Waurin located Warwick’s plan to marry his two daughters to their cousins and royal dukes, the king’s brothers George, Duke of Clarence and Richard, Duke of Gloucester.⁴⁹ At that point Anne was at most eight years old. Undoubtedly Warwick did plan to wed Isabel to Clarence, whom she did indeed marry in 1469, but any proposal to wed Richard to Anne during the 1460s is unsubstantiated and appears unlikely. Certainly 1464 is too early. What seems more likely is that Warwick intended the young Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham for one of them, since the earl’s ‘secret displeasure’ was recorded by the chronicler pseudo-Worcester at the duke’s marriage to Katherine Wydeville, sister of Edward IV’s new queen, in February 1466.⁵⁰ It is telling that no such anger is attributed to the marriages of the less well-endowed heirs of the newly created earls of Essex, Kent and Pembroke, down to whom Warwick was apparently unwilling to stoop for either Isabel or Anne. Certainly Warwick did support the proposal for the marriage of his brother John’s baby son George Neville to Anne, the heiress of the Duke of Exeter. It was a match that should have made young George into a duke and certainly made him royal, for the mother of the infant bride was Edward IV’s eldest sister and the father, though exiled, was also of Lancastrian royal descent. We know of Warwick’s attitude because of his anger – ‘his great secret displeasure’ – when Anne of Exeter was poached instead for 4,000 marks (£2,666 13s 4d) by Edward’s new Wydeville queen for her own son Thomas Grey in October 1466.⁵¹ Queen Elizabeth had readier access – pillow talk – to royal favour, and the nobility were anxious to exploit (or guard against) this new avenue of patronage. The young king attached inflated worth to his new in-laws and provided for each of them on an unprecedented scale. Warwick moreover was disadvantaged by his family’s previous success: in each case, Buckingham, Clarence, Exeter and Gloucester were already related to his heirs within the prohibited degrees and a papal dispensation was required, so weddings could not be concluded quickly.

Individually and collectively all these matches would have provided for Warwick’s heirs, advanced them in rank and wealth, strengthened his own position at court and extended his hold yet more firmly in diverse localities. We have seen that the Buckingham and Exeter marriages were frustrated. So, too, was the union of Isabel and Clarence, which King Edward, for reasons unknown, vetoed. Pseudo-Worcester locates this around October 1467.⁵² Probably Edward wanted to make use in his diplomacy of Clarence’s hand and did indeed proffer it.⁵³ Hence Warwick suddenly found his influence eclipsed in one of his areas of principal concern – the future of his dynasty and his daughters. It has been identified as an important contributory factor in his quarrel with the king and its subsequent escalation into renewed civil war. What Warwick had in mind next for his daughters when the dukes were taken is unclear, because actually he refused to take no for an answer and married Isabel to Clarence nevertheless.

Certainly the teenaged Isabel Neville was old enough to appreciate that a suitable bridegroom had been found for her and denied to her by the king. Whether the eight-or nine-year-old Anne knew of any of the very preliminary manoeuvres on her behalf appears unlikely. There was no need for haste. That Warwick could secure none of these matches and was opposed at every juncture by the king and queen was a factor – perhaps merely contributory, but significant nevertheless – in the deterioration of their relations that ended in the renewal of civil war in 1469 with the earl and king on opposite sides. If the Countess Anne, Isabel and almost certainly Anne Neville engaged themselves with the matrimonial issues, neither daughter can have been consulted on the bigger political issues and the countess’s input, if any, was not decisive.