CHAPTER SEVEN

Past Her Sell-By Date

QUEEN ANNE’S FINAL SORROWS

Queen Anne had little opportunity to enjoy being queen. Her reign was exceptionally short. She may have been in ill-health at her succession. By January 1485 she was certainly a sick woman who, despite her relative youth, was past childbearing. The son, whom she loved, had died. Her husband played fast and loose with her inheritance, which no longer mattered to him. He appears also to have identified a younger princess as replacement and waited in eager anticipation for her death, which soon followed. At least Anne was spared the destruction of her husband and all he stood for. Whereas Richard is remembered as the most wicked of kings and uncles, Anne was another victim that he used, exhausted, and inevitably discarded. In this instance Shakespeare was right.

We have already seen how Edward of Middleham’s investiture as prince of Wales was made the centrepiece of Richard’s visit to York in 1483. The prince was left in the North as figurehead of Richard’s regional rule – the king’s hegemony was to be continued in his absence and Anne’s Neville connection maintained through the household and council of their son. In February 1484, whilst parliament was in session at Westminster, ‘almost all the lords spiritual and temporal and the leading knights and gentlemen of the king’s household’, assembled by royal command in a downstairs room on the corridor leading to Anne’s own apartments, were induced to swear a new oath of allegiance to the prince, ‘on whom’ – Crowland wisely observes ‘all hope of the royal succession rested’.¹Prince Edward fell ill, however, and died on 9 April 1484, one year to the day since the demise of Edward IV. It was a staggering blow, certainly politically, but also personally, to his parents, who were then together at Nottingham. Separation from their son did not indicate that they did not care for him. ‘You might have seen’, reported Crowland, who evidently had seen, ‘the father and mother … almost out of their minds for a long time when faced with the sudden grief’.² It is the clearest testimony that we possess (and the only one) that Anne and Richard enjoyed a genuinely companionate marriage, that they felt towards their son both the love that we expect today (and which is sometimes denied of past parents by modern historians), and that they were really distraught at their son’s death. Immediately afterwards Richard proceeded via York (1 May) to Middleham (5–6 May), Durham (15th), Scarborough (22nd) and back to York (27th), an itinerary most probably shared by Queen Anne. Both may have attended their son’s funeral, perhaps at Sheriff Hutton.

Prince Edward’s death was a personal grief, but it was much more than that. It left his parents childless, and this was in particular worrying for King Richard. We may readily believe that he ‘began to complain unto many noble men of his wife’s unfruitfulness, for that she brought him forth no children, and that chiefly did he lament with Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York’, who supposedly repeated the story with his own riders. Rotherham is an unexpected confidant, since he was the chancellor who allegedly surrendered the great seal to Edward IV’s widow and whom Gloucester therefore superseded. Since the archbishop died in 1500, several years before our source the historian Polydore Vergil came to England, this anecdote reached Vergil at best at second-hand from Rotherham’s audience.³ Politically the prince’s death was especially important because it left Richard bereft of an heir. He desperately needed one. The future of his dynasty required that retainers and subjects had the security that more than his own life stood between the regime, their careers and fortunes, and oblivion. That security was a male heir. Richard’s own future demanded that commitment. Without it, he could not hope to continue: ‘Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass’, Shakespeare made the king say.⁴First Richard seems to have turned to his nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of his brother Clarence, but he soon changed his mind. This may have been because he realised that Warwick’s hereditary claim was better than his own. The fact that Warwick was only nine years old and hence merely a figurehead may have been more significant. Instead Richard designated another nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, son of his sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, who at least was of age. A de la Pole pedigree of the time does identify Lincoln as Richard’s heir.⁵ Richard also foregrounded his bastard John of Pontefract:⁶ if he ever considered making him his heir, he surely decided – as his great-nephew Henry VIII was to do with his bastard Henry, Duke of Richmond – that this would be counter-productive. Probably John was also too young to be really useful.

Such measures, however, were merely stop gaps until Richard could produce another legitimate son of his own.⁷ He was still in the prime of life. Apparently he was still sleeping with Queen Anne.⁸ Reading between the lines, indeed, he may have made a final effort to impregnate his queen. Anne, however, was in ill health: she began, says Crowland, to ‘sicken most vehemently’.⁹ Perhaps she had tuberculosis. Her chances of conceiving may already have been recognised to be slim. She was breeding stock that had ceased to breed. Given that she was aged only twenty-eight, Richard might have had to wait many years and perhaps all his life to remarry and try again for a legitimate heir. His great-nephew Henry VIII was famously to dispense with four superfluous consorts by other than natural means, two by execution. Henry set a precedent where hitherto there was none. Such predecessors as Richard I, Richard II and Henry IV were less inventive and had to stick with barren queens.

Queen Anne died on 16 March 1485. She was promptly on cue. So convenient was her death that there was understandable speculation that King Richard had helped her on her way. The historian John Rows was not alone in reporting that Richard had poisoned her. The rumour was current on 30 March, only a fortnight after, when Richard denied it. The allegation occurs also in the Great Chronicle of London and Vergil’s English History.¹⁰ Vergil reports, at several removes, that Rotherham mused that Queen Anne would not live much longer ‘and foreshadowed the same to divers of his friends’:¹¹ presumably he expected Richard to help her on her way. The story duly passed into Tudor myth and was broadcast to later generations by Shakespeare. Taken together, Richard’s denial, repetitions by later chroniclers, and the prophetic speculations of the archbishop are grounds to believe the story. But none of our sources can have had access to reliable medical information – if the diagnoses of poisoning of fifteenth-century doctors is to be credited – and no better data is likely to emerge now. Besides, there was no need to kill her. Queen Anne had been ailing for some months before she died. It was on the doctors’ advice that Richard abstained from sexual intercourse.¹² A natural death is indicated. There is no reason to doubt the grief that Richard asserted, ‘that he was as sorry & in heart as heavy as man might be’,¹³ albeit sorrow not untinged with relief. Yet there are good grounds for crediting Shakespeare’s story, that Richard had in mind a consort as Anne’s successor. If Anne had passed her sell-by date, nevertheless King Richard required a consort to bear him an heir and to fulfil all the other functions required of queens. His first choice apparently was his own niece, Elizabeth of York, the daughter of his brother Edward IV, who had been bastardised by the precontract story and whom he is supposed to have designated even before Queen Anne was dead. This allegation requires more careful consideration than it has ever received to date.

THE ELIZABETH OF YORK STORY

The best contemporary evidence for these aspersions is that on 30 March 1485 King Richard held a news conference in the great hall of St John’s Priory at Clerkenwell, at which he made a statement to the mayor, aldermen, councillors, and livery companies of London, whom he had summoned to hear it.

Whereas a long saying and much simple communication among the people by evil disposed persons contrived and sown to very great displeasure of the king, showing how that the queen as by consent and will of the king was poisoned for and to the intent that he might marry and have to wife Lady Elizabeth, eldest daughter of his brother, late king of England deceased, whom God pardon etcetera. For the which and other the king… showed his grief and displeasure aforesaid and said it never came in his thought or mind to marry in such manner wise nor willing or glad of the death of his queen, but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be, with much more in the premises spoken. For the which he admonished and charged every person to cease of such untrue talking on peril of his indignation.¹⁴

As our source is a record made at the time and as it was the king himself who reported these aspersions against him, we cannot doubt that the allegations of poisoning, of remarriage, and of his selection of Princess Elizabeth were in circulation in the spring of 1485 immediately following Anne’s death, nor that Richard vehemently and publicly denied them. He cannot have wished to give currency to such damaging rumours. It was because they were already in circulation that a denial was needed and that he could afford to be explicit. A king’s word should normally have been conclusive and the story quelled.

Unfortunately, Richard’s public statement failed to do the trick. The poisoning reappears both as fact in Rows’ History and at least as a possibility to Polydore Vergil and the London chronicler c.1512, who all accept his rumoured remarriage.¹⁵ Moreover, we know that Richard made this public declaration because his councillors insisted that he did so, as Crowland reports in his chronicle.¹⁶ Note that the record of the Clerkenwell declaration confirms much of Crowland’s narrative. Crowland also reveals, at first hand, that in spite of Richard’s repeated denials, he himself believed that Richard did indeed intend to marry Elizabeth of York, and that he, Crowland, personally disbelieved that part of the king’s denial. At second hand, Crowland states that other royal councillors and especially the key figures of Sir Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby shared his own views. To Crowland’s mind, they knew.¹⁷ He did not mention the poisoning charge and presumably did not credit it. Although he can hardly have been unaware of the story, which was current at the time and mentioned by the king himself, Crowland presumably disbelieved it. He knew murder to be unnecessary, since he also knew that Anne had been ailing for several months and that her death was apparently expected several weeks in advance. What Crowland did relay was damaging enough.

Even in the fifteenth century, convention demanded a decent interval for mourning between the death of one wife and the wedding of another. The planning of a second marriage before the ending of the first was not approved. Many forthcoming widowers must have foreseen such an eventuality, especially when there were young children to care for and households to run. Post-Reformation parish registers frequently reveal rapid remarriages. Kings, furthermore, were always a special case. Reasons of state undoubtedly demanded on occasions both a precipitation and a calculation in matrimony to be eschewed by ordinary mortals. Once single, Richard was free to marry again. It was not so much his intention to marry that aroused criticism – that was to be expected and was actually his public duty – but his supposed choice of bride. Because of the supposed precontract between her father Edward IV and another lady, Princess Elizabeth had been bastardised just as much as her younger brothers the Princes in the Tower, who had disappeared, who were believed to be dead, and whom Elizabeth surely thought had suffered at Richard’s hands. Of all the noble young ladies who could bear him sons, it was her claim to the crown, Elizabeth must have realised, that singled her out. Elizabeth of York was also closely associated with her mother Elizabeth Wydeville, who was no longer categorised as a queen at all, her uncle Anthony, Earl Rivers and half-brother Lord Richard Grey, both of whom Richard had had executed, on whose behalf, so Crowland reports, Richard’s supporters feared her vengeance.¹⁸ If Shakespeare was seeking a paradox, a marriage between those whom past events should have made incompatible opposites, surely it should have been Elizabeth of York and Richard III in 1485 rather than Anne Neville and Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Furthermore, Elizabeth was Richard’s niece: a blood tie so close to the king that Crowland (and, on his evidence, many others) considered any such joining into one flesh to be incest.¹⁹ So did the ReformationParliament, which legislated against such matches. It was for this latter reason, not mere decorum, that Richard had publicly to deny any such plan.

From Richard’s angle, Elizabeth’s disqualification was a pity. A match with her had obvious political advantages. She could only strengthen Richard’s title. For any Yorkists sceptical of the bastardy of Edward IV and his children, Elizabeth was their preferred claimant. At the very least, such a match would disarm their opposition to Richard. At the best, Richard could enlist their support. Besides, the king’s rival Henry Tudor had pledged himself at Christmas 1483 to marry Elizabeth in order to secure the support of Yorkist fugitives from Buckingham’s Rebellion and their adherents within England for his candidacy as king. Tudor even secured a papal dispensation for his marriage to Elizabeth on 27 March 1484, albeit an insufficient one and obtained without her consent.²⁰If Richard did marry Elizabeth, Tudor could not do so himself: where was he to find so advantageous a replacement? Such a union was surely the necessary incentive for recalcitrant Yorkists to swallow their hostility, to relinquish their plans to dethrone the king, and to seek instead his forgiveness and the restoration of their forfeited properties, which Richard was prepared to concede. Elizabeth, moreover, had other advantages. Now eighteen, she was nubile, physically healthy, and no doubt attractive. Apparently she so resembled her aunt the queen physically in height, build, colouring etc. that they could wear the same clothes.²¹ Queen Anne, after all, was less than ten years her senior. Perhaps Elizabeth reminded Richard of what had first attracted him to Anne Neville. Elizabeth could be expected to provide the desired heir speedily. Her Wydeville kin were as prolific as the Nevilles: Elizabeth was the eldest of ten children. Elizabeth, in short, could quickly supply the defects in title and expectations that Richard in 1485 so obviously lacked. She was more than an adequate substitute for Queen Anne: to a beleaguered and desperate usurper, she was ideal.

Three contemporary sources report that Richard was considering his match with Elizabeth ahead of Anne’s death: the Clerkenwell declaration, Crowland’s chronicle, and the report of a letter in her own hand from Elizabeth herself to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk.

The original of Elizabeth’s letter is lost. Perhaps it never existed and was forged by our source, the pro-Ricardian Jacobean historian Sir George Buck. Yet Buck himself reported its existence (and provided a paraphrase) in 1619 ‘among precious jewels and rare monuments’ in the ‘rich and magnificent cabinet’ of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, heir of the recipient, to whom it had descended.²² Arundel was interested in his family’s history and was a noted connoisseur and collector. It was in his cabinet that the scholarly earl displayed all his particular treasures. A royal letter (autograph?) of a princess and a future queen to an ancestor was just such a treasure. Buck wrote for publication: surely he expected his reference to be pursued? Moreover, it seems to have been overlooked that Buck not only acknowledged the earl’s permission to consult the letter, but also dedicated his book to him. Had it ever been published, Arundel would have received a presentation copy, which – as a scholar himself – he could be expected to read. Obviously the earl knew whether such a prized letter was actually in his cabinet. By seventeenthcentury standards, this was as good a provenance and as precise a citation to a publicly accessible location where the original was to be found as could be imagined at the time. For all these reasons forgery is unlikely. Partly because the original, four centuries further on, is now lost and partly because Buck’s manuscript history was damaged by fire in 1731, modern historians anxious to rebut the story as discreditable to Richard have questioned exactly how the original text read.²³ Buck rendered into the third person what must originally have been in the first person, but the version published in 1647 by Buck’s nephew certainly confirms the meaning that his uncle had intended if not his actual words.²⁴ After an appropriately respectful introduction,

First she thanked him for his many courtesies and friendly offices and then she prayed him as before to be a mediator for her in the cause of the marriage to the king, who as she wrote, was her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was his in heart and in thoughts, in body, and in all. And then she intimated that the better half of February was past, and that she feared the queen would never die.²⁵

If genuine, Elizabeth’s letter indicates that the marriage was indeed projected and that Elizabeth herself had consented to it – indeed, in highly enthusiastic terms! She fancied her uncle as well as wanting a crown. This was in February 1485, more than a fortnight before Queen Anne died. If not quite explicit about Richard’s intentions, it indicates that there was opposition to the match. It was to win over Norfolk and to secure his support in persuading Richard to proceed that Elizabeth’s letter purports to have been written.²⁶This conforms to Crowland’s statement that there were those who knew about it despite Richard’s denials that such a project was afoot.²⁷ Since Buck had also read Crowland’s account, however, consistency between it and any letter that he might have forged is to be expected and the two sources cannot safely be considered to substantiate one another. Furthermore, Crowland, it could be argued, may not only have been wrong to disbelieve the solemn denials of a king he disliked, but he may also have read the rumours of the proposed marriage that were current in the spring of 1485 back to Christmas 1484. He may have found it difficult to separate what happened before Queen Anne’s death from what ensued afterwards. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Later developments can make better sense of what happened earlier.

On 1 March 1484 Richard had made a deal with Elizabeth Wydeville that enabled Edward IV’s erstwhile queen and her daughters to emerge from sanctuary and to live under his protection, evidently at court.²⁸ The deal was definitely not struck with the marriage between King Richard and Princess Elizabeth in mind, as Vergil says,²⁹ for Prince Edward was still living and the oaths of allegiance to him had just been administered. The prince still took priority. The contract survives. It contains nothing about such aspirations,³⁰for which it is at least nine months too early. As the eldest and most adult daughter, Elizabeth of York was present at Richard’s court at Westminster Palace for the Christmas celebrations of 1484. She attracted much attention. In Crowland’s case, it was highly disapproving. Elizabeth’s conduct that Christmas was amongst the ‘things unbefitting’ and ‘evil examples’ with which ‘the minds of the faithless’ should not sullied. ‘There are many other things besides, which are not written in this book and of which it is grievous to speak’, wrote Crowland.

Nevertheless it should not be left unsaid that during this Christmas feast too much attention was paid to singing and dancing and to vain exchanges of clothing between Queen Anne and Lady Elizabeth, eldest daughter of the dead king, who were alike in complexion and figure. The people spoke against this and the magnates and prelates were greatly astonished; and it was said by many that the king was applying his mind in every way to contracting a marriage with Elizabeth either after the death of the queen, or by means of a divorce for which he believed he had sufficient grounds. He saw no other way of confirming his crown and dispelling the hopes of his rival.³¹

People were acutely conscious of differences in status. The 1483 sumptuary law set monarchs apart from royalty and royalty from mere nobility. Whether a princess or a bastard, Elizabeth was not Queen Anne’s equal in rank. For them to wear similar outfits – and even exchange them – struck the wrong note immediately and excited the suspicions that Crowland relates. We would be wrong to underrate the importance of what he reports. We may, however, reasonably wonder whether Crowland was attaching undue significance to these celebrations in the light of later rumours and whether he perhaps also read public disapproval back a few weeks in time, although this chronicler was usually scrupulous in guarding against such dangers. One circumstance, however, demonstrates that this is not a correct interpretation, and that at this point Crowland’s recollections were strictly contemporary.

When dispensing with his consorts, Richard III’s greatnephew Henry VIII resorted to divorce on two occasions. Divorce did not involve sundering a valid knot as it does today. Adultery, cruelty or mere incompatibility were not yet grounds for divorce, still less the brief period of separation that enables so many millions of valid marriages contracted ‘till death us do part’ today to be terminated prematurely and routinely. There were two categories of divorce in this period. The first, the divorce a mensa et thoro, was not a divorce at all by our standards but a legal separation, which neither terminated the marriage nor permitted either party to marry whilst the other was still living. The second type that applies here, the divortium a vinculo, did release both parties from the marriage, but was possible only because the marriage had never really occurred, because forbidden or because never consummated, and was thus null from the outset. Henry VIII could divorce Katherine of Aragon because she was his dead brother’s wife: they were therefore, at canon law, tantamount to brother and sister and thus related within the degrees within which marriage was forbidden. So closely were they related, moreover, so Henry alleged, that the Pope could not dispense the impediments away. Under 1485, Crowland also reports that Richard was contemplating ‘a divorce for which he believed he had sufficient grounds’.³² Crowland did not state what these grounds were, almost certainly because he did not know – indeed, had no idea and had not thought further about it. On his own admittance, he was not a doctor of theology; if a canon lawyer, he had not practised for many years. Had he known what Richard’s grounds were, as we shall see, he would surely have made much of it both here and earlier in his chronicle.³³ A divorce, of course, presupposes a living wife. This report must therefore antedate Anne’s death and when it was first expected, which Elizabeth’s letter locates some time before late February. Crowland demonstrates that Richard’s intent to remarry preceded Anne’s death. Divorce could serve no purpose thereafter. It seems that Richard first considered divorce, but then Anne’s ill health and death rendered it unnecessary. At the latest that was in the last days of February 1485. Any idea of divorce must therefore be earlier.

Divorce between the king and queen was feasible because the marriage between the duke and duchess of Gloucester – brother- and sister-in-law – had never been properly validated by a papal dispensation. In this event, the act of 1474 resettling the Warwick inheritance had anticipated a divorce – that their marriage might be declared null. Because the 1472 dispensation had not covered the key issues, the 1474 parliament ‘ordained that if the said Richard Duke of Gloucester and Anne, be hereafter divorced and after lawfully married’ – that if the Church applied the letter of the law to nullify their union and subsequently allowed them to remarry – that then the parliamentary settlement of the Warwick inheritance would be ‘as good and valid’ as if there had been no divorce and as if Anne and Richard had been married throughout. However, if they were divorced and not allowed to remarry, and if Richard did his utmost to remain married and did not marry anyone else during Anne’s life – only possible with a divorce a vinculo – then he could retain her lands during her life and for his life after her death.³⁴ In 1474, of course, it had been so important to Richard to retain Anne’s lands that he was prepared to forego any other marriage. Companionship and sex was available without. Up until 1484, of course, it had been in the interests of Anne and Richard to affirm the validity of their union and to conceal this crucial flaw. That they were married was just another lie that they successfully concealed. Nobody questioned the royal marriage at the time, Laynesmith reminds us.³⁵ Richard had wanted Anne’s estates by inheritance, both to secure his title and to transmit it to his own descendants. Anne had no incentive to undermine her own position. Once monarchs, neither King Richard nor Queen Anne wanted to cast doubt on the legitimacy of their son Prince Edward, the hope of their dynasty, nor indeed the moral probity which they denied in Edward IV. Even though children remained legitimate if born to unions within the prohibited degrees in which the partners were ignorant of affinity, this did not apply if they were aware of the impediments at the time of Edward’s conception, as Richard and most probably Anne emphatically were.³⁶

Now that Prince Edward was dead, however, and Anne appeared incapable of supplying a replacement, the situation was radically changed. With access to the resources of the crown, possession of Anne’s estates was no longer essential for her husband. King Richard now had good reason to seek release from his marriage. All that was necessary was to reveal the absence of a dispensation and the Church would decree that the original marriage was null and that it had indeed never been valid. No doubt Richard could purport to discover the impediment just as he had with his brother’s precontract. The king could then marry again. That was why, around Christmas 1484 and in the New Year of 1485, Richard may have considered himself eligible for a divorce. That he did indeed think thus is indicated by Crowland’s report with its reference to his case for a divorce – a case that Crowland did not understand. To report what he did not understand is the surest evidence of veracity: Crowland had no ulterior motive. Had he understood, the truth would certainly have shocked him. To live openly as man and wife when related in the second, fourth, fourth, and fourth degrees of consanguinity, knowingly without a valid dispensation, was prohibited, incestuous and sinful, though matters might have been righted in arrears by a dispensation if appropriately penitent. To do so openly with one’s brother-or sister-in-law, a relationship in the first degree of affinity, was yet more grave and perhaps beyond what could be dispensed. To combine all five impediments was obviously worse. It had not occurred to Crowland that the original match between Anne and Richard might not be dispensable, nor that the impediments had not been dispensed. Had Crowland appreciated that no dispensation had been obtained, not only must he have understood why Richard thought a divorce to be feasible, but this stern critic would surely have referred to it both at this point and in the passages relating to Richard’s first marriage, about which Crowland’s narrative was anyway sharply disapproving.³⁷

We may be sure of this because of Crowland’s horror at Richard’s proposal to marry his niece incestuously. Evidently he was ignorant that Richard’s first marriage was also incestuous. Uncle and niece constituted another blood relationship that was normally regarded as incestuous in the fifteenth century and is still so considered today. Princess Elizabeth herself was also, of course, closely related to Anne and to Richard through other lines also. The number of impediments is impressive. Crowland was horrified. He was certainly not unusual in his reaction. Just as horrified, he indicates, were the nobility, the bishops and even the general public.³⁸ Richard’s ‘unlawful desire’, so the two historians Polydore Vergil and Edward Hall declared, ‘provoked the ire of God and the sword of vengeance against him, whereby his final ruin and fatal fall shortly after ensued’…³⁹ It was public opinion that Richard sought to still in his declaration at Clerkenwell.

That Richard knew the value of sexual morality and immorality for propaganda purposes emerges in his successive denunciations of Edward IV’s precontract and bastardy, the sexual adventures of the Wydevilles and Greys, and Henry Tudor’s bastardy on both sides. Opposition to his proposed second marriage worried Richard. Perhaps it caused him to waver, as Elizabeth’s letter implies, if not to drop the project, which he appears extremely reluctant to abandon. It was opposition that provoked his qualms, not the message itself that what he projected was incestuous and damnable. That evidently did not trouble the king. After all, he had done it before. A man who could marry his sister [in-law] in defiance of convention and indeed religious law – an incestuous union by the standard of the time – was unlikely to be deterred by another such union, in this case marriage to his niece. Of incest Richard was a serial practitioner. To coin a phrase, he was a ‘serial incestor’. Maybe another marriage was to be celebrated and consummated ahead of the arrival of (or request for) a dispensation. Could he afford to wait on negotiations at the papal curia that were bound to be protracted if they were to achieve their objective? The instant, automatic negative that was to be expected would be difficult to overcome. Too much depended politically on the match to enable him to wait on prior papal approval.

Besides, the Lady Elizabeth was willing enough. Presumably her mother was too. How imperfect once again appear the moral standards of the house of York! Did its members regard the prohibited degrees and papal dispensations as mere technicalities that could be squared rather than the moral issues and dictates of God that Crowland and public opinion so respected? Richard could do it and therefore he would do it.

Certainly the king did appreciate that the projected match was bound to arouse hostility. Hence it was politic to keep it secret and to deny any such plans in public, but not at once to abandon it. If Crowland is to be believed, he floated his project with key advisers – perhaps including the Duke of Norfolk, recipient of Princess Elizabeth’s supposed letter. They were averse. After Anne’s death, his councillors invoked a special session of council – maybe even a great council – for this issue alone. It met in late March, between 17th and 30th, and it sounds as though opposition was unanimous. Richard denied having any such match in mind or ever having intended it, which, apparently, was not regarded by those who knew him best as evidence that he would be deflected from his purpose. ‘Some at that council’, states Crowland, ‘knew well enough that the contrary was true’. When the king denied it, therefore, Sir Richard Ratcliffe and the esquire William Catesby, key advisers and agents, retorted

That if he did not deny any such purpose… the northerners, in whom he placed the greatest trust, would all rise against him, charging him with causing the death of the queen, the daughter and one of the heirs of the earl of Warwick and through whom he had obtained his first honour, in order to complete his incestuous association with his near kinswoman, to the offence of God.

They also produced more than a dozen doctors of theology who stated that the Pope could not dispense so close a degree of consanguinity.⁴⁰

Perhaps the doctors were right, although the opinion of canon lawyers was more relevant on such a topic than those of theologians, and canonists are likely to have been divided. Although Leviticus chapter 18 verses 12–13 banned the marriage of a man to his aunt, it did not explicitly proscribe the marriage of a man to his niece, although the nature and proximity of the relationship was the same. Taking the literal meaning rather than the spirit of God’s law, what Richard proposed was not explicitly forbidden. Perhaps, therefore, the marriage of the king and the princess was not in breach of divine law, which was absolute, but human law, which could be dispensed. Precedents could be found both for such marriages being allowed and disallowed.⁴¹ All dispensations to set aside canon law required serious grounds, popes usually placing the desires of kings into that category. The curia found it hard to rebuff kings and princes. In practice royalty secured dispensations covering the greatest impediments, which mere nobility and gentry could not, whilst ordinary mortals could not obtain them at all. Hence, perhaps, clerics and gentry deplored a union that Richard and Elizabeth of York thought acceptable. Their senses of Christian morality differed.

The Great Chronicle suggests that ‘a licence purchased’ would permit this union⁴² – a dispensation by another name – and Professor Kelly considers that such a dispensation was not altogether impossible.⁴³ Kelly reviewed what a range of canonical authorities had to say and examined several case studies, all of which Richard’s advisers may have known. One aunt-nephew marriage in direct contravention of Levitical decrees was when Henry IV’s son Thomas, Duke of Clarence was allowed to remain married to his auntby marriage, Margaret, widow of John, Earl of Somerset (d.1410). Despite this precedent, Cardinal Torquemada and some other notable canonists considered that popes could not dispense for marriages between uncles and nieces. Perhaps that represented the balance of canonical opinion, but from the next decade a whole series of matches involving royalty and contradicting the Levitical decrees were indeed dispensed. Thus Pope Alexander VI allowed King Ferrante of Naples to marry his Aunt Joanna and a series of marriages to siblings-in-law involving offspring of Ferdinand and Isabella were permitted.⁴⁴ That was in the future and cannot have been known to Richard, who also could not have waited on lengthy deliberations at the curia. Moreover, Kelly considered the case in isolation, without considering all the other degrees in which Richard and Elizabeth were related. What of his first wife, aunt to his proposed second wife, and her cousin several times over? Even if her marriage was invalidated, the carnal relationship remained, and of course Richard had not secured (or even sought) the necessary dispensation.

In this instance, legal arguments took second place to political ones. Accordingly, as his councillors insisted, Richard declared publicly at St John’s Hall Clerkenwell that he had never intended any such thing. ‘Many people’, including Crowland, did not believe him.⁴⁵ But his project to marry Elizabeth was dropped – as far as we know.

Of course the marriage did not happen. Because Anne died, divorce was unnecessary. So was murder. The poisoning of his queen nevertheless became a highly effective piece of Tudor propaganda against Richard, which was silenced neither by his denial or by improbability. So was Richard’s incest with his niece.⁴⁶ The London chroniclers knew the whole story. About 1512, the Great Chronicle states:

But after Easter much whispering among the people that the king had put the children of King Edward to death, and also that he had poisoned the queen his wife, and intended with a licence purchased to have married the elder daughter of King Edward. Which rumours and sayings with other things have caused him to fall in much hatred of his subjects as well as men of [good be]haviour as of others. But how so[ever] the queen were dealt with, were it by his means or the visitation of God, she died shortly after… which was a woman of gracious fame, upon whose soul & all Christian [soul]s, Jesus have mercy. Amen.⁴⁷

Whether the charges were true or false, including those relating to the queen’s death, Anne was exonerated, but public opinion blamed her husband, so the chronicler testifies.⁴⁸ Yet how much more effective would such propaganda have been had it related to the fact of an incestuous marriage rather than merely an incestuous intent, and had it been revealed that Richard’s twelve-year-long first marriage had also been illicit, incestuous, sinful and surely damnable. He was a serial incestor. Because Anne died, it never became expedient for Richard to reveal his first marriage as invalid. Richard was induced to repudiate Elizabeth of York. Approaches were made to appropriate princesses of Spain and Portugal. King Richard perished at Bosworth, still single, on 22 August 1485. Whether he would have revived his matrimonial project had he been victorious we cannot tell. That he contemplated the match – and did so whilst Anne was still living – we cannot doubt any more. Strangely his apparently willing partner appears to have escaped unsullied: within the year, Elizabeth of York had married his successor and was crowned and was on course to be ancestress of the Tudor, Stuart and all subsequent dynasties. It is remarkable that in 1485 such a potentially anti-Tudor story was written of the fiancée of the current Tudor king.⁴⁹

LAST DAYS

Following the distressing death of her son, therefore, and perhaps the king’s last desperate attempt to father another, Anne’s last days were clouded indeed.‘Unhappy’(infelix), as Rows said, may her marriage have become.⁵⁰ The king spurned her bed:⁵¹ he considered repudiating her as his spouse and potentially as his queen. The death of her son had removed the cement to their relationship: shared sorrow did not keep them together, but threatened a decisive parting of the ways. Whether or not illegitimacy really disqualified a king who had been publicly recognised and acclaimed, as historians have questioned, the slur certainly sufficed to strip Edward V of his crown and kingdom, and would have done so also in Anne’s case. Richard wished to marry another lady, henceforth his queen, and could do so, because Anne had never been married to him. Crowned and anointed or not, she could not have continued as queen – a proper ecclesiastical court could not have adjudicated her marriage valid – and would certainly have lost her dower as queen to her supplanter, and perhaps also, one wonders, the Warwick inheritance that the 1474–5 acts had assured to Richard himself for life. There was not as yet the comfortable single life after marriage of Katherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves as divorced queens to serve as a precedent. What was to become of Anne? Although no divorce in the modern sense was necessary, Anne was no longer useful to her husband King Richard and was, in modern parlance, past her sell-by date. Vergil has another unattractive story how Richard had her death rumoured whilst she was still living, which came to her ears and which she raised with him and which he denied in reassuring terms.⁵² Since there is no confirmation of this – which, indeed, is incompatible with Crowland’s circumstantial analysis – it can be rejected, yet talk of divorce or remarriage could still have been rather a nasty psychological tactic designed to hasten her end (and more likely, surely, to loosen her wits than to kill her) as Hanham suggests?⁵³Sorrow, rather than poisoning, was Vergil’s preferred cause of death.⁵⁴ Queen Anne was aware, of course, of the grounds for divorce. Did she perceive in Elizabeth her potential successor? Were her last days clouded by the apprehension that she would be set aside, disgraced, and/or suffer from qualms of conscience arising from her illicit marriage, for which the death of her son was punishment? Did she see all her misfortunes as punishment for her sin and fear for her soul? We cannot tell: she has not left us her will. That in itself is surprising, since her death was anticipated by others if not herself: surely Anne wished to compose herself and to settle her earthly accounts before she died? Whilst married women, even queens, possessed no property of their own, it was by no means unusual – and surely normal in her circumstances – for her husband to allow her some testamentary dispositions. Moreover, she was unwell, languishing, and died, unattended and indeed unregretted by her husband. If heavy at heart over her death, nevertheless it served Richard’s purpose and appeared to offer him a way forward. If Richard’s treatment of Anne was ruthless and cruel, his assessment purely material and utilitarian, we must recognise also that his action was the desperation of a rat in a trap as Shakespeare indeed so clearly perceived and need not preclude a genuine affection for her.

Anne died on 16 March 1485 at Westminster, ‘on the day when the great eclipse of the sun took place’:⁵⁵ an omen that Crowland cannot have been alone in recognising. She was buried not at any of her family mausolea – not at Bisham with her father Earl Richard Neville, not at Warwick with her grandfather Earl Richard Beauchamp, not at Tewkesbury with her grandmother or her sister Isabel, Duchess of Clarence, not at her colleges of Barnard Castle, Middleham or York, where she and Richard may formerly have intended to be interred, but with previous monarchs at Westminster Abbey. No heraldic account survives for her funeral, unlike those for other members of the house of York, yet Crowland tells us that she was buried ‘with honours no less than befitted the burial of a queen’.⁵⁶ Presumably King Richard was present. She was interred in the presbytery in front of the high altar, reported Rows, but the Great Chronicler, after all a Londoner, locates her ‘by the south door that leads into St Edward’s Chapel’.⁵⁷ No monument was ever erected over her tomb. Perhaps none was intended. Far more probably, however, her husband’s reign ended before any such project could be undertaken. Her sepulchre, however, was nobler than those of either husband, Edward of Lancaster at Tewkesbury Abbey or Richard III in his unmarked grave at Leicester.

Besides a monument to Anne, Laynesmith speculates that Richard intended ‘perhaps even a double one to share her privileged position in the sanctuary’ of Westminster Abbey.⁵⁸ Of course the couple’s earlier plans for colleges implied their interment together. Once Richard was thinking of a second queen, perhaps even of repudiating Anne both as his spouse and queen, this was surely far from his thoughts. He had other things on his mind. Both his queen at Westminster and his son at Sheriff Hutton were allowed to rest where they fell. Longer term planning was left to the longer term – which never arrived. But if Richard had indeed remarried, Anne and Edward were less likely to feature in any re-interments or grandiose monuments.

Ratcliffe and Catesby touched a vital nerve when they drew attention to Anne’s Warwick inheritance and especially the Warwick connection of which they were a part.⁵⁹ However egotistical he was and however much his own man, Richard had founded his power on Anne’s inheritance. Even though the Neville lands had been in tail male, Anne was regarded as Warwick’s, Salisbury’s and Westmoreland’s heiress. Much more than a miscellany of properties or indeed an assembly of employees incentivised by pay and spoils of office, Anne brought Richard a devoted following united by family tradition focused on herself that caused them to hazard their lives on her behalf and that endured beyond the grave.⁶⁰ However little control he allowed her of her own affairs as duchess and queen, they remained hers. The Neville retainers were the core of the northern army that had watched over Richard’s usurpation and that had enabled him to rule the insurgent South. Richard could not count on adherents of the house of York or the Yorkist establishment of his brother Edward, many of whom indeed had become his foes, nor had he much opportunity to build up much committed support from his own subjects. If Anne’s death enabled Richard to look for another consort capable of extending his support, it also threatened to deprive him of his original power base. Deploying his son and residual heirs in the North may have reinforced traditional ties. Whether Anne’s death actually did weaken his connection is unclear. Richard had legal tenure for life. Certainly Ratcliffe and Catesby did not fail him: both were at Bosworth, Ratcliffe falling in battle and Catesby being executed thereafter. The division of his army that Northumberland failed to engage in battle most probably included Anne Neville’s northern retainers. Whether they were lukewarm to their erstwhile lord – absent inadvertently or by design – we cannot tell. King Henry, however, was anxious to ensure that the connection never operated effectively again. At first in the North, then everywhere, he destroyed it. The Warwick inheritance and Neville connection hardly outlived Anne Neville.