Pod Insights Gone Medieval Richard III's Queen Anne Neville About this episode Why do we know so little about Anne Neville, despite her significant role in history?
Anne Neville led a life shaped by power, tragedy, and shifting allegiances. Daughter of the formidable Warwick the Kingmaker, Anne was widowed at 15 before marrying Richard, Duke of Gloucester - later Richard III. Crowned alongside him in a dazzling coronation, Anne’s reign was brief and marred by heartbreak, especially after the death of her only son.
Matt Lewis reflects on Anne Neville's life of resilience and sorrow - and the political and social dynamics of Medieval women in power - with historian Joanna Laynesmith.
More
A Voice for Richard III
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0KhcblgXYqBTqfMAaAG18u
The Wars of the Roses: Origins
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3DHhrD90zRN0IppdA29QXk
Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
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Transcript 10,166 words · 8 speakers
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0:01 Matt Lewis? From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yarnagger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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2:24 Matt Lewis? Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.
3:03 Matt Lewis? I've been desperately thinking about how I could shoehorn in another Richard III episode. It's getting hard because most of my tricks get caught now. This one slipped by because it isn't really a trick. When we were filming our three-part documentary on Richard III, okay, okay, plug over, I had a chat with Joanna Laynesmith about Anne Neville, Richard's wife and eventually his queen. Anne is someone who fascinates me, but about whom very little is known, which is frustrating. I wanted to put her at the centre of an episode, though, to uncover as much as we possibly can and to think about why we know so little about some medieval women, particularly this one, who was a queen of England.
3:49 Matt Lewis? One of the key moments in Anne's life that we know frustratingly little about is around her marriage to Richard, Duke of Gloucester. We don't even know exactly what date the marriage took place, but there are some interesting complexities around why they got married and why the king permitted it. This is an extract from my biography of Anne's husband, Richard III: Loyalty binds me, which might offer a little food for thought on the topic.
4:19 Matt Lewis? Amongst this uncertainty, Richard pursued the idea of marriage to Anne Neville. When the thought first occurred to Richard is unknown, and it remains unclear who initiated the contact between the two. This ambiguity has provided room for unsubstantiated guesswork that tends predictably to try to portray Richard as either an acquisitive monster or a romantic hero. The likelihood is that the truth lies somewhere in between. The champions of the Black Legend see only a ruthless, greedy nobleman keen to get his hands on the most valuable inheritance in England, whilst those who favour the White Knight see him selflessly riding to the rescue of a damsel in distress.
5:03 Matt Lewis? Neither of those is correct. It may have been Anne who first opened communications on the matter. Her concerns would have been almost precisely in line with those of Edward. If she were to take another husband and hope to prize her rightful share of the Warwick inheritance from George and Isabel, her new husband would have to be able to match George in standing and authority. Only one bachelor in all England offered such an opportunity. Anne had been taken after Chelmsford with Queen Margaret and could have been able to make contact with Richard, a boy she had known even if only in passing from his time in her father's household. We can place them seated at the same table during George Neville's enthronement feast
5:48 Matt Lewis? in September 1465, and even if they had not been in each other's company beyond this, it was a moment Anne could cling to. Alternatively, Richard may have broached the subject with the king first. If he did so, it might have been with an eye to Anne's inheritance or to her personal safety. Perhaps he had his mind on both. Suggesting that he had been genuinely in love since his time at Middleham as a child is probably stretching this a little too far, though it can't be disproved. The most probable reality is that Richard knew Anne represented his best hope of a substantial block of lands and influence.
6:30 Matt Lewis? He knew that George might pose a threat to the peace of the realm and to the delicate, newly sown unity of the House of York if he was allowed to keep the entire Warwick inheritance. In this, he would surely have Edward's agreement.
6:48 Matt Lewis? None of this need negate a degree of personal feeling for Anne, whether that might be a fledgling form of love or even of responsibility. Despite Warwick's betrayal, he had been an important figure in Richard's life, and a feeling that he ought to take care of Warwick's daughter could have affected his thinking. The truth is most likely to have been a tangled amalgamation of all of these considerations. Anne was Richard's best route to the acquisition of lands that would set him up for life. A union with her would help his brother reduce the potential threat George might pose, a problem that might be increased by holding all of Warwick's former power. She was also a young girl he had known as a child,
7:33 Matt Lewis? and who he may have liked enough to feel he could build a happy future with her. Even if he had no personal affection for her, reading texts such as the copy of Vipomodan that he owned, and in which he had inscribed the personal motto «Tant le désirais», «I have longed for it so much», demonstrating awareness of chivalric expectations of the rescue and protection of a damsel in distress. A copy of the New Testament owned by Richard and now kept in the New York Public Library, bears the motto «Avou mille», «I am bound to you» in his own hand. It's undated, but it's interesting to wonder whether it derives from this period
8:16 Matt Lewis? when marriage was at the forefront of his mind, and he could satisfy chivalric requirements by positioning himself as Anne's protector, bound to her in some way that could conceivably have been love, at least of the courtly kind. The notion that Richard did in some way rescue Anne is given credence by the Croland Chronicle. It's another instance worthy of note because of the poor opinion the writer is believed to have held of Richard in later years. The chronicler, unable to help a dig at Richard for the craftiness he perceived, nevertheless reduces the protracted negotiations between all the parties to a story that has the spark of a romantic tale.
9:08 Matt Lewis? When it comes to late medieval queenship, Joanna Lane Smith is the expert. So I asked her to come back and discuss Anne Neville with us. Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Joanna. It's fantastic to have you back with us.
9:19 Speaker 04 It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
9:21 Matt Lewis? I mean, I couldn't think of anyone better to talk to about medieval queenship. You're the expert, but I really wanted to try and get at Anne Neville. So you and I last spoke when we were doing a bit of filming for a Richard III documentary and talking about Anne Neville and the role of medieval women. I guess we ought to start with full disclosure that Anne is a really hard person to get to, but we're going to do our best to get as close to her as we possibly can. But she's one of those frustratingly elusive people, isn't she?
9:48 Speaker 04 She must be the most elusive medieval queen I think there is, apart from maybe John's first wife.
9:54 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it's amazing. When you think of who she is and the rank to which she rose and the part that she played in a really crucial part of history, it is amazing that we don't know much about her. But let's get started then with who Anne Neville is. Who are her parents and when is she born?
10:11 Speaker 04 So Anne was the younger daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who was a descendant of Joan Beaufort, so he had royal connections that way, and his wife Anne Beecham. And it was Anne Beecham, whose father was the Duke of Warwick and brought this title into the family. So Anne was the younger of the two daughters, that she had an eldest sister called Isabel. But there were no sons in the family, which was of course quite an issue for a great landholder like the Earl of Warwick. His father had been the Earl of Salisbury. He too had married a great heiress. And so there's this huge set of estates that need to be inherited. And in fact, some of them have been entailed, so they can't go to daughters.
10:52 Speaker 04 But nonetheless, Isabel and Anne are, due to divide between them, a very large inheritance. So she grows up knowing that she's going to make a splendid marriage.
11:02 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And how significant are the Neville family by this point? Because you mentioned Warwick's father has married the heiress of Salisbury, he's married the heiress of Warwick. They're managing to sort of mop up these really good matches around the country. But how significant are the Neville family?
11:18 Speaker 04 So Anne's born in 1456, by which time her father is quite a powerful figure at court, but he's still slightly in the shadow of his father. But the Nevilles have married into so many of the nobility by this time. They've got connections everywhere.
11:35 Matt Lewis? And the other side of Anne's heritage is that Beecham lineage of her mother. How significant were the Beecham family? Because I think when you get to the Wars of the Roses, it's not really a name that crops up too much or means too much. But how significant was that Beecham pedigree?
11:51 Speaker 04 Oh, that is hugely important for them because the line had died out with Beecham's brother. It gets forgotten, but she herself was really proud of it. And she commissioned, we think it was her, anyway, commissioned this wonderful The Beecham Pageant, a manuscript we've still got, full of images of her father's life, celebrating how important he was. And he was seen as quite sort of the epitome of chivalry and the great lord. He was tutor to Henry VI because he was seen to be the kind of person who would be able to inculcate the future. Well, he was a king already because he was a child, but you know, the future ruler with all the virtues and values that were necessary to ideal kingship at that period. That was very important, just sort of from an ideological point of view.
12:34 Speaker 04 Also, of course, he was very wealthy. The estates that mattered. And of course, there's the splendid Beecham Chapel where he's buried, which is a real celebration, which people can still go and look at now and see this amazing celebration of his life.
12:47 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And I think, I mean, the Beechams, by the time the Nevilles marry into the Beecham family, the Beecham is kind of one of the oldest noble families in England, aren't they? And something similar with the Salisbury family, you know, they're marrying into these really long established, ancient families. And is that a way for the Nevilles to be able to sort of root themselves to make that? I mean, they're fairly recently risen to the ranks of earldom. So Ralph Neville becomes Earl of Westmoreland at the start of the 15th century. Are they kind of trying to establish themselves as almost like older nobility than they actually were?
13:21 Speaker 04 I think that's definitely what they're doing, yes. Ralph Neville and his wife Joan Beaufort must have been the most ambitious marriage makers of that period. It's astonishing the way they mop up all these orphans whose parents had been involved in the whole conflict over Henry IV's succession. And they particularly seem to specialise in picking those whose parents actually had been on the wrong side, been on Richard II's side, or at least opposing the Lancastrians later on as well. And they buy up their wardships and then marry them to their own children. And I think there's a stereotype of medieval marriages in the nobility being about children being married. That's actually not that common. But for the Nevilles it is. There's a lot of very young marriages.
14:03 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And how much do we know about Anne Neville's childhood? Do we know where she's born? Do we know where she's brought up?
14:11 Speaker 04 Thankfully, we do know where she was born. Yes, so she was born at Warwick Castle. And we know that because of the Rouse Roll, which is another beautiful illuminated document, which is digitised online. You can go and have a look at it. I should say the Beecham Pageant's digitised online as well. If it's available, it's on the British Library website. And of course, that's all a bit off kilter at the moment. But when that's up and running, it's there. So we know that she was she was born at Warwick Castle and that she was christened in there by St. Mary's Church. What happens next is really difficult to be certain of. She probably spent quite a bit of time at Warwick, but we know she was also up with her father in Yorkshire, at least at the time that her uncle George Neville became Archbishop of Canterbury, because there's a great splendid feast to celebrate that. And she's mentioned
14:55 Speaker 04 as one of the guests at that time. But other than that, it's really difficult to know exactly where she was.
15:02 Matt Lewis? And do we have any real sense of what a young girl of her rank might have been learning as she's growing up? What are the things that she's going to need to know to serve her in later life?
15:11 Speaker 04 So her education would be very much focused on good Christian upbringing. The very first thing she'd be learning was actually how to pray. She'd probably learn how to read and she would do that using a prayer book. We've got lots of records of specific prayer books called primers being bought for young ladies to read.
15:30 Speaker 04 It explicitly says that. And certainly her great grandmother, Joan Beaufort, and a number of the other noblewomen in her family were very into books. We've got lots of records of that. So she probably came from a family who were quite keen on that kind of thing. And so she would have, as well as the religious books and saints' lives particularly, she'd also eventually moved on to being able to read romances, but also histories, especially in a family that was so proud of its heritage in that way.
15:58 Speaker 04 She would also have had to learn how to run a great household because that's what she was expected to go on and do, that she would be able to manage large numbers of servants. And especially during the period of the Hundred Years' War, it was recognised that husbands were away a lot. And although some women travelled abroad with their husbands, a lot of them stayed back at home. So she had to be prepared to be able to run the great household in his absence for months at a time if necessary. And even if, you know, he's just down in London in Parliament or whatever, she needs to be able to run that without him.
16:29 Matt Lewis? Which I think feels quite strikingly at odds with the image that we quite often have of medieval women, that they're in the corner doing their sewing, or they're some form of damsel in distress. But we're talking about women who understood administration and politics and had a role to play in all of that. They weren't just an ornament who sat in the window sewing until they needed to do something, probably give birth to another child.
16:53 Speaker 04 Absolutely not, no. Now, quite often you see, you know, the women will have signed the bottom of the account books when they've been going, you know, checking over them. So we know they were taking an active role in that. And of course, there would be sort of the, her lords' councillors who would give advice about what should be done. She would meet with the council in his absence to know what to do. So very much administrators, but they would embroider as well. So, yeah.
17:19 Matt Lewis? Multitasking. And we see the daughters of Warwick will sort of explode onto the political scene towards the end of the 1460s as their father's relationship with his cousin, Edward IV, begins to fall apart and the wheels begin to come off that. And I guess the first sign that we have that they're moving into this politically active sphere is when the elder daughter, Isabel, so Anne's older sister, is married to Edward IV's brother, George, Duke of Clarence.
17:49 Matt Lewis? What does that marriage tell us about the direction of travel for Anne and her family compared to the Yorkish crown or in relationship to the Yorkish crown?
17:57 Speaker 04 So it's quite possible that her father had always hoped that George and his brother Richard would end up being husbands to the daughters, to the sisters, because they were the premier heiresses of the day and George and Richard were the premier heirs kind of thing.
18:14 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I always imagine Warwick is such an ambitious man, where else is he going to set his target than the King's Brothers? You know, there is nobody better to marry his two daughters to, no better way to promote his family. It almost feels like that was always going to be what Warwick wanted, but there's a sense that Edward doesn't want to let him have it.
18:34 Speaker 04 No, that's the thing. So Edward clearly doesn't want to let him have it. And after things start getting fractious between Edward and Warwick, particularly around the marriage that Edward arranges for his sister Margaret to the Duke of Burgundy, you really see the Earl of Warwick sort of chafing against Edward being powerful. And so the decision for George to marry Isabel is very much not what Edward IV wants. It's the moment when the relationship completely fractures, I suppose, because they've broken faith with what Edward IV wanted for his brothers. I mean, he probably wanted to make foreign marriages for them, move them out of the country and then they, to compensate for the fact that his own marriage had been so inappropriate.
19:16 Matt Lewis? And I guess that Warwick's plan initially at least is to depose Edward, make George king, which will in effect make Isabel queen. So again, we're seeing there are almost no limits to Warwick's ambition and his daughters are sort of vessels for delivering that.
19:32 Speaker 04 Yes, it's the beginning of the rebellion is very much, you know, we just need to get rid of the King's evil councillors. And so certainly it appears to move on to, yes, he wants to make George king. It's possible that when Isabel first married him, she wasn't expecting that. This was still about getting rid of the Woodvilles, putting the Nevels in their place and that kind of position of power. But yes. Certainly by the Second Rebellion, that seems to have been what intention was. So they were very much at odds with Edward the Fourth.
20:01 Matt Lewis? And then it moves on and it all gets a very tangled kind of mess, particularly for Warwick, who ends up altering his plans. So he's no longer going to make George king. He's looking then to restore the deposed Henry VI. So the man that he had helped to depose, to put Edward the Fourth on the throne, he decides he's going to put Henry back. And as part of this arrangement, we see Anne emerge onto the political stage because she is betrothed to Henry VI's son, the Prince of Wales. What is Warwick doing here? I mean, he just seems to be playing every which side. Is this him building his plans or is this him lurching around as things go wrong for him?
20:39 Speaker 04 I think it's key to realise that Warwick was only ever really interested in him, his family, his power. He didn't put Edward the Fourth on the throne or support Richard of York because he felt they had some ideologically superior claim. And so once it was no longer serving his purpose, he was looking elsewhere. So in as much as his trajectory is to be as powerful as possible, he was just still doing that. But yes, obviously, the plan to put George on the throne had failed. He still made Henry VI promise that George would be his heir if Edward of Lancaster died. So he was sort of still hedging his bets on that front as well.
21:20 Matt Lewis? So whichever way it goes, his intention is to have a daughter who will one day sit on the throne. And presumably what he really wants then is a grandson who is going to be king.
21:27 Speaker 04 Absolutely. That is the plan. Yes.
21:30 Matt Lewis? And do we get any sense at all of how Anne might have felt about this arrangement? You know, presumably she's just been pushed into it. You know, she's going to be married as part of this political alliance. Do we have any sense of how she felt or how she reacted at that moment?
21:46 Speaker 04 We don't, it is so frustrating, the, the lack of information. I mean, it must, the whole event adventure kind of thing must have been really scary because there's that point when they're stuck out at sea, they can't land at Calais. Her sister gives birth to a baby who dies and it's, you know, it's a horrible situation. And then they finally make landfall and they sort of have to do as the, as the French king wants. Obviously, she knew she was never going to get to choose who she would marry. I think it's interesting going back to the Beecham pageant, which has this beautiful genealogy at the back of it, which does, you know, it depicts both her marriages. Edward of Lancaster was a marriage that still mattered and was still worth mentioning and celebrating, even though her, her story ended in the House of York.
22:32 Matt Lewis? Yeah. I mean, even the Rouse Roll has her pictured as sort of having two crowns, doesn't it? Even the Rouse Roll will make reference to her previous marriage to a Prince of Wales as well as to her second husband. I don't know if there's any spoilers into who the second husband is at this stage, but.
22:46 Speaker 04 I think people all know.
22:48 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And so this period of Henry VI being restored is called the re-adoption. That will fall apart. What happens to Anne when the re-adoption collapses? Henry VI is removed again. How does Anne fare in the aftermath of this?
23:03 Speaker 04 So Anne's really unfortunate in that, I don't know if she just stayed in France with Edward of Lancaster whilst Warwick was sorting things out. Things might have turned out very differently, but unfortunately her mother-in-law, Margaret of Anjou, brought them over just at the moment when Warwick was killed at the Battle of Barnet. So she arrives in the country to the collapsing of all their plans already. But Margaret of Anjou doesn't turn tail and protect her son. She decides it's, you know, it's now or never. So Anne has no option but to stick with Margaret of Anjou at this point and head up near where the Battle of Tewksbury takes place. At this point, Anne's mother has taken sanctuary at Buly Abbey. She's getting right out of it and just trying to keep herself safe. So I feel Anne must have felt desperately alone at that point. Of
23:48 Speaker 04 course, the Lancastrians are defeated at the Battle of Tewksbury and Anne and Margaret are found at a small religious house, quite possibly Malvern Priory, and. Taken back to London. Anne is fortunate that by this point in time, George Duke of Clarence has made his peace with Edward the Fourth, because that means that actually her sister is attached to the winning side and she is taken into their household as a sort of protective custody. Of course, if it turned out that she was pregnant, that would have made life really complicated because then she would have been the mother of the Lancasterian heir. So it's not surprising that she just kind of disappears from the scene for him a little bit whilst they're making sure she's not pregnant. But then she's in a position where she's in George Duke of Clarence's custody and
24:32 Speaker 04 it becomes quickly apparent that George is hoping to get his hands on the entirety of her father's fortune. And Edward the Fourth really doesn't want this because George has proved himself such an unreliable brother anyway, you know, he needs to change the situation. So Anne is suddenly in the middle of this really complex political situation, which threatens more civil war eventually.
24:55 Matt Lewis? Yeah. How unusual is it for an heiress like Anne to find themselves almost kept in custody? There are suggestions in some of the sources that she's almost George and Isabel's prisoner because they don't want her to remarry so they don't have to share her inheritance. Is Anne unique in that situation or does this happen fairly often?
25:14 Speaker 04 She's not unique at all, no. And she's very high status for this to happen, but she's not the only high status in the noble one town. But there are lots of sort of a little bit further down the social scale, you find it really quite often that heiresses get captured by men who want to marry them usually rather than to stop them marrying. But it's a particular feature that is noted particularly in Henry VI reign, actually, that they're failing to protect heiresses in this way.
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27:27 Speaker 02 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer.
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29:19 Matt Lewis? Yeah, interesting. And one of the things I've always been fascinated by is this really romantic story that we get in the Kroland Chronicle, which it's not a particularly friendly source to Richard III in many, many ways, but it does credit him with this really chivalric, romantic idea that he wades in and rescues Anne and saves her and gets her out from George's custody. How much credit or credence do you think we should give to a story like that from Kroland?
29:51 Speaker 04 So I suppose the romantic element to it is the notion that he found her dressed as a kitchen maid, and that that's how George was trying to hide her, which does seem a little implausible, but some kind of disguise, I suppose, is possible. And then it got slightly exaggerated as to how lowly the disguise was. But certainly in terms of Richard being the man who's able to rescue her, that is what happens. It may not be quite so romantic as it looks. You know, I can very much envisage Edward IV saying, "You're going to have to marry Anne because I can't let your brother have all the estates and no one else would be able to stand up to George. Only his brother, Richard, was in a position to be able to do that." So it was kind of essential for Edward IV for this would happen. It's also possible that Anne herself...
30:34 Speaker 04 Made the same calculation. How else am I going to get what I'm entitled to? Richard's the only one who can give it to me. And we don't know who the prime mover was in this case. Or, and of course, it could have been Richard himself.
30:44 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I'm intrigued by the idea that Anne could have had some degree of agency here because we quite often think of, you know, Cronin says she's put into sanctuary at St Martin's Legrand, which means that she surely has a degree of space and a bit of freedom. And I'm intrigued by the notion that she is the one. We, a couple of centuries earlier, we famously get Eleanor of Aquitaine writing to Henry the Second, saying, come and marry me, because he's the only one that can help her protect Aquitaine from the King of France. Is Anne doing something similar? And also, aside from the fact that Richard would protect her, her marrying Richard is almost the completion of her father's original aim. If he'd always wanted his daughters married to the king's brothers,
31:26 Matt Lewis? she's now able to achieve that and to do it in a way that is beneficial to Edward all of a sudden. So although Warwick is now dead, he's actually getting what he wanted.
31:36 Speaker 04 Yes, it must have felt ironic that Edward was finally having to do what Warwick wanted all along in that respect. So putting her into sanctuary is a smart move. It's a sensible thing because if Richard had taken her into his own home, no matter how shiverously he was behaving, there would have been accusations of forced marriage. And you could later on dissolve a marriage on the grounds that had been forced. A lot of women seem to have been in that position and never managed to get out of it. You still generally needed some powerful male relatives who would help you get out of it. But it was a way of getting out of it. And in fact, one, despite Richard's taking care in this way and putting her into sanctuary, there was one ambassador who still thought he'd taken her by force.
32:19 Speaker 04 So it was quite a tricky position to be in at that point. But yes, once she was in sanctuary, she should have had a certain amount of freedom to sort of discuss this. And yeah, ironically, do what her father wanted all along.
32:33 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and it's another one of those incredibly frustrating gaps in our knowledge about Anne that we don't even know exactly when she gets married to Richard, do we? How much can we guess about when that must have happened?
32:45 Speaker 04 Well, I think the key thing is that it's June 1473 when her mother moves up to join them at Middlesbrough and that wouldn't be happening, I don't think, if they weren't already married by then. So it's probably early in 1473, after there'd been a lot of discussion in Parliament about how they were going to divide up the lands, how they're going to deal with the complex issue of some of the estates should be inherited by men and some of the estates actually belonged to her mother and so forth. So yeah, I think early 1473 or maybe early summer 1473 at the latest.
33:18 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it's so frustrating, isn't it? Because you've got some of the most important people in England at this time. We just don't know anything about how they've got married, why they've got married, even when they've got married. It's so frustrating. What do we know then about Anne's time as Duchess of Gloucester? So they move back up to the north, which is her family's seat, her family's home, kind of where she might have considered herself to be from. What do we know about her time, her activities as Duchess of Gloucester?
33:46 Speaker 04 Again, not a great deal. I think one of the interesting things is actually how often she's not there down south when Richard is, or at least she's not mentioned. And it looks like he's leaving her in charge of the estates whilst he's doing his political business down south, which points to her being quite an important influential lady. It's so frustrating that we don't have any of those kinds of letter collections that we have, say that show us how important the de la Pole and the Duchess of Norfolk were as well. We just don't have that kind of source to know. We do know that she kind of built up quite a good relationship with the Bishop of Durham, the Prior of Durham, where she was a member of their fraternity. And there's a few letters where she's asking
34:26 Speaker 04 to be able to put men in her service into clerical posts, which she gets to do. So we're just fortunate that the Durham Cathedral archive is a particularly wonderful archive that survived really well and others haven't. So we don't know much about her other business. But that's pretty much the sum of what we know that's going on at that point. Of course, also, she needs to have an heir to inherit all these estates. And eventually she does have at least one son, probably only one son. There's another of these beautiful heraldic books, the Chelmsford Abbey Record of its Donors. I think that's the one that accidentally refers to her son, George, but that's probably just an accident rather than anything else. So the son they have, Edward of Midland, was born at some point in the mid 1470s.
35:12 Matt Lewis? Yeah, so I guess we're left frustratingly thinking about all of those lessons that she must have learnt as a girl about how to run the administration of a household and all of those kinds of things. And think about her husband being frequently absent from Midland and the fact that it must have been Anne who was doing a lot of the day to day work of running the estates of her husband while he wasn't there. Just, you know, we can't see proof that she was doing that, but we can imagine she must have been.
35:39 Speaker 04 She must have been, yes. I mean, obviously she would have had stewards and, you know, other chamberlains, other officials to help her in this role. But that is what she must have been doing. If she'd not been active, she probably would have been at his side at the events that get described by heralds down in London.
35:56 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And I guess there's a, there's always a danger of trying to talk about love and Richard III and Anne Neville's relationship is one that people seem quite often to talk about in terms of, you know, it was a loving relationship or something. We see Richard reacting to Anne's death in particular ways. I mean, it's impossible to talk about love in medieval relationships like this, isn't it? But I always think about characterising their relationship in terms of its success. They seem to have had a successful working relationship, whether you can call that love or not. Does that seem fair?
36:28 Speaker 04 Yes, definitely. A successful working relationship, which I think is made particularly obvious in some of the images that we still have of Anne, the images that have survived in the Razz role that you've already mentioned, in the Salisbury Roll of Arms, in the little sketch we've got that shows how she looked in Skipton Church. She's always in cloaks of her heraldry, all her family connections, which is a real reminder of how important all these family connections were to Richard's own position. And so she's a woman who comes with so much powerful connection in the North of England, which was really useful and was worth celebrating in that way. I suppose the only way in which you might say it was less successful is that there's only one child who survives infancy. And so that's always a worry when you've only got one heir.
37:13 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And do you think from that, that use of heraldry, do you think that Anne has picked up her father's pride in that long heritage that he was tapping into? I mean, sometimes he did it through his Beecham wife to make it look like he was, you know, a Beecham with a heritage that went back that far. But he was clearly keen to make all of those connections and establish his own worth. Do you think Anne is trying to do that? Or is she simply trying to build up her husband's position by feeding all of those connections to him?
37:44 Speaker 04 I think it's both. And I, I think it's, you know, fair that obviously, so her mother stays with her a long time. And the one of, what I love about the Beecham pageant is the way the genealogy at the end misrepresents Anne and her sister's positions in the family. Anne is depicted as the elder sister. And so there's this, you know, positioning her as the superior heir to all that Beecham heraldry as well, which we think, I mean, obviously the fact that she's the one who gets to be queen is impacted on how her mother's seeing her and so forth. But I think this does speak to family. She's actually, not just that she's celebrating it because her father did, but actually because her mother did and it mattered to her mother. And I think that's really important.
38:25 Speaker 04 It's often more obvious when the men are doing it, but actually, once you start digging, women are very often the sort of the carriers of family memory in all sorts of ways.
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40:09 Matt Lewis? You nicely segued us into Anne becoming queen there. And I guess you and I can enjoy the pleasure of skipping over all of the controversy of 1483 and not worrying too much about all of that today. But it must have been a significant shift for Anne to go from being Duchess of Gloucester, an incredibly powerful and privileged position. But that must be very different to being a queen.
40:32 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yes. Not least because she has to move down south at this point and become part of the whole London political set instead of being where she was comfortable, where she'd grown up, where she knew all the players. And suddenly, these are people who have, some of them, you know, been on the opposite side from her family at certain points in time. The whole thing is much...
40:56 Speaker 04 Much more complicated, I suppose, much scarier probably.
41:00 Speaker 04 And being queen, she's obviously in a much more public position.
41:05 Speaker 04 She's also got less freedom because she's no longer running things on her own terms in that way that she was able to when especially when Richard was down south and she was up north. Eventually, queens were given a lot more control over their lands than most married women were, in fact, in a sort of a legal sense. But in practical terms, Anne doesn't actually ever seem to have got round to receiving her estates. One of the things that normally happens when a king is marrying a queen from abroad or whatever, they sort of put together an arrangement as to what her estates are going to be and it's all kind of set up. But because Richard was already married and that meant he had control over all her lands legally. It was a different situation and he never got round to making an arrangement where she had an independent set of estates that she should
41:51 Speaker 04 rule. And that's not to suggest that he was trying to control her or anything like that. It's just they often took a couple of years to properly resolve that and and she just died before it was all sorted out, I think.
42:01 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I guess it's frustrating to think about whether they just, as you say, ran out of time to arrange that, or was it not something that they particularly dealt with? Because they'd been successfully married for more than a decade, you know, doing business together. Was there a necessity to put that dowel aside? But I guess that dowel would have been to protect Anne in the event that Richard died before her.
42:21 Speaker 04 Yes, so I think he would have needed to have done that for, he would have expected that he ought to do that to protect her, yes. So I think it would have happened eventually.
42:30 Matt Lewis? During the short period in which Anne is queen, I mean, her husband's rule doesn't go brilliantly, but then her personal life begins to fall apart as well. They lose their only son. And then six or eight months later, you know, she falls terribly ill. What do we know about Anne's death? Because there will be this story that grows up that Richard poisoned her to make way for a new wife because he needed a new son, which seems to be at odds with that idea of a at least successful. Married couple, if not a happily married couple.
43:04 Speaker 04 I mean, I think it's worth, you know, bearing in mind what happens in Henry VIII's reign, that actually Catherine of Aragon was a very successful queen for a long time, but not having a son was what kind of soured and destroyed the whole relationship and made Henry decide he needed another wife. So I think it would have been really difficult at the point when they no longer had a child and she obviously wasn't going to have any more children. And I can't help thinking that that probably did impact on her health because she would have been aware that it was a really fragile position that her husband was now in, that he couldn't look to have another heir. So he was having to potentially look to one of his sister's sons, but then there's this awkward, awkward situation that his brother George, George Clarence's son was also in the running.
43:49 Speaker 04 But some people might think he had a greater claim than Richard, so he couldn't, he couldn't sort of call him his heir. So it was, it must have been desperately stressful. So it's really not surprising that she fell ill, to be honest.
44:02 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And do we have any sense of what the illness that killed Anne was, or are we just guessing in the dark again?
44:08 Speaker 04 I think we're just guessing in the dark, to be honest. I mean, there's all sorts of things that can make you kind of waste away for her to a certain amount over a couple of months. Yeah, I'm not happy about pinning my colours to any particular illness.
44:20 Matt Lewis? Yeah, fair enough. So I guess the most common one that you hear is maybe tuberculosis, which is what her sister had reportedly died of too. But then you get these other stories that suggest that Richard is slowly poisoning her to clear the way for a remarriage. So it gets to the point where it's impossible to tell what is the truth and what is a myth amidst all of that, doesn't it?
44:39 Speaker 04 Absolutely. I mean, I know the whole issue of the legitimacy of their marriage is one of those controversial questions. But the Crolin chronicler thought that Richard could find a way out of the marriage. And it's amazing how many people did manage to find little connections that had been missed when they did the dispensations earlier on. No matter how thoroughly people thought they tied up the marriage and they still managed to pull themselves out of it. So I think it's more, you know, Richard, Richard probably could have divorced her if he'd really wanted to. And the fact that he managed, that he didn't kind of points to a couple who are, who desperately don't want to end it. But actually fate takes its, its course instead.
45:20 Matt Lewis? Yeah. Why do you think that we know so little about Anne? We've spent a long time desperately trying to get a bit closer to her, but at every turn, sort of finding ourselves hitting dead ends a little bit. Given who she was, the fact that she rises to become a queen of England, why do we know so little about her, even in comparison to other medieval noble women around her?
45:42 Speaker 04 I think it's important to realise that most of the noble women that we know about were widows. So they had to do things in their own, in their own name. They had that legal independence, whereas it's really difficult to know when Anne might have been influencing Richard, all those kinds of things, because things are just done in the husband's name. That's how it's done. It's partly fewer sources of the sort of letter collections kind that I mentioned earlier for the area that she was living in. Also, it's often those who kind of play the game properly and do things right, that, you know, they don't cause upset. There are no lawsuits as a consequence. There's nobody writing letters of complaint and therefore they're not leaving records in the same way. I suppose it's disappointing that we haven't
46:24 Speaker 04 got a bit more in terms of book collections that we can connect with her, that sort of thing. But I think it's probably because she was just getting on with the job and not being controversial.
46:34 Matt Lewis? Yeah, I think that's a really good idea or way of looking at it, that we maybe don't know much about Anne Neville because she was just too good at her job. Are there ways in which, you study medieval queenship in particular and medieval women, are there ways in which we can try to get closer to some of these women who are more elusive? Can we hope that things turn up in the future? Do we ever find ourselves getting closer to people like Anne who are quite elusive?
46:59 Speaker 04 Oh, yes, we do. Absolutely. So if you think about her mother-in-law, Richard's mother, Cecily, her collection of saints' lives that was written perhaps for her and her husband initially, but was eventually hers, just turned up in Walter Scott's library in the 1990s, I think it was. And it's this unique book and it's just, obviously, we don't know how much Cecily had a hand in actually commissioning it or how much time she read. But it's still, it was a really fascinating, huge, beautiful document, which we've just suddenly discovered. Things still keep cropping up. And there are, you know, the National Archives has all these documents which are stashed away in a Cheshire salt mine that still haven't been worked through properly and so forth. So now, who knows
47:42 Speaker 04 what might yet come to light that would help tell us more about her.
47:46 Matt Lewis? Yeah, so I guess for anyone who maybe finds it as frustrating as we do that you can't get too close to Anne Neville, we can end on the idea that there is always a little bit of hope that something, something might crop up one day that allows us to understand Anne a little bit better.
47:59 Speaker 04 What I should also have said is there was also things that people didn't bother to hold on to because they were hers, probably because of her husband's reputation. We've got household accounts for Elizabeth Woodville and for Margaret of Anjou, which were, and also for George, Duke of Clarence and Cecily, which were being copied and preserved by later royal households and used as models. It's not surprising, given his, you know, the stories that were later told about him, that they chose not to save Richard and Anne. So that is another reason, I think, why we've, we've not got as much information.
48:31 Matt Lewis? Yeah, fascinating. Well, I'm going to sit here and hold out that someone will, somewhere will find something that, that gives us a little bit of a window into Anne's personality and the kind of person that she was behind the Queen and behind the Duchess of Gloucester. But thank you so much for joining us, Joanna, and trying to get us a little bit closer to this fascinating figure from the Wars of the Roses. It's been great to talk to you again.
48:52 Speaker 04 Thanks very much. Been good.
48:54 Matt Lewis? If you want to hear more about this fascinating period of the Wars of the Roses, Richard III, the House of York and the rise of the Tudors, there are tons of fantastic episodes in our archive. Most notably, our episode on the incredible work done to recreate the voice of Richard III. In that episode, I spoke to the wonderful Professor David Crystal about how Richard and Anne would have spoken, what accent they would have had and how their English may have sounded different to ours. Here's what he said when I asked him, if I was to land in Richard III's England in 1483, would I understand what people were saying to me? Or would it be like a foreign language?
49:39 Speaker 06 No, it wouldn't be foreign, not in fourteen eighty-three. In Chaucer's time, that would be a bit tricky.
49:45 Matt Lewis? It isn't all that much earlier, really, is it?
49:47 Speaker 06 Which isn't, but you know, that fifty years, sixty years or so, um, was critical because of something that happened in the history of English. It's called the Great Vowel Shift. And what it means is that the long vowels in English, and nobody knows quite why, suddenly shifted in a direction which makes Chaucer's English sound very different from the English of fifty or a hundred years later. So when we go back to the beginning of Chaucer, for instance, when that April with his sweet showers. When that April with his surest sochter, the drog of March hath perced to the roater, and bathed every vine in sweet liquor of which varcú engendred is the flor.
50:31 Speaker 06 Then you do need a bit of commentary, a bit of explanation. But by the time you get to Richard's period, and certainly by the time you get to Shakespeare, you don't need that kind of commentary anymore. Think Shakespeare now for a moment. Uh, two households both alike in dignity in fair Verona where we lay our scene. Two households both alike in dignity in fair Verona where we lay our scene. From ancient grudge break to new mutiny where civil blood makes civil lands unclean. Well, you know, everybody can understand that. It sounds a bit odd. Um, it has echoes of different modern accents in those words. Uh, but you don't need a gloss for it really. And Richard is right bang in the middle.
51:16 Speaker 06 And so on the whole, as people will hear when they hear Richard speaking in the voice that had been reconstructed for him, they'll understand him for the most part. Occasional words, they'll say, what was that? But just occasionally, and they won't have any real difficulty.
51:33 Speaker 07 Yeah, brilliant. And just as we move closer and closer to people hearing this voice, how close do you think you are to what Richard would have sounded like in real life?
51:44 Speaker 06 Oh, as with all original pronunciation, you get to about 90% confidence and that remaining 10% is, oh, it's a bit of guesswork, really. I mean, nobody will ever know exactly what his voice quality was. And voice quality is such an important thing. We all, we all know that people speak differently. We recognise people's voices. We know that he speaks, oh, that is, from the voice. We can never reconstruct that. What you reconstruct is the sound system underlying the speech. Now, you and I are speaking today both in modern English, but your voice is different from mine. Your accent is slightly different from mine, but we're both basically using the same system.
52:28 Speaker 06 We're both speaking modern English. And it was the same then. People spoke in late, middle or early modern English with the same basic system. But they would have spoken in slightly different ways, depending upon where they came from and who they bumped into and all that sort of thing. So you reconstruct that basic system. You make sure that Richard has all his Rs pronounced, for instance, even though at the time, some people might have said the R in a slightly different way from other people and so on. One of the most noticeable features is that the medieval ION endings, as in, you know, conversation and vacation and musician and all of those,
53:11 Speaker 06 they were spelt out like in French, you know, conversational in Shakespeare's time, vocalization, musician and passion and all of those. Richard would do that. And so you'll notice that diminution. And there will be certain features like that which jump out at you.
53:37 Matt Lewis? You can hear more from the endlessly fascinating Professor David Crystal in our Gone Medieval episode, A Voice for Richard III. The link is in the show notes.
53:49 Matt Lewis? If you've enjoyed this episode, you can listen to Joanna's previous appearance on Medieval Queenship in our back catalogue. And I reckon you might find an episode or two on Anne's husband, Richard III, and maybe even the Wars of the Roses lurking in there, too. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back next time to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries, including
54:29 Matt Lewis? a three-part special on Richard III, when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. As a special gift, you can also get 50% off your first three months when you use the code MEDIEVAL at checkout. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.
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