The marriage of Anne and Richard

The Marriage of Lady Anne Neville and Richard, Duke of Gloucester

by Annette Carson and Marie Barnfield

For no discernible reason the date of this marriage has been cited by some writers as 12th July 1472, but the source for this is obscure (volume 4 of The Complete Peerage, published in 1916, may have been the first reference work to give this date; Victorian fiction has been suggested as the ultimate source).

A major clue to identifying the correct date was provided a few years ago by research carried out in the archives of the Papal Penitentiary by Peter Clarke and published in 2005, which revealed that – contrary to the common allegation that the couple married without dispensation – the office of the Papal Penitentiary granted them a dispensation for third-and-fourth-degree affinity on 22nd April 1472.¹ Clearly the couple married at some point after this: but before we can proceed to discuss the circumstances and probable date it will be necessary to deal with various questions about impediments to their union.

The incest fallacy

Almost immediately after Professor Clarke’s discovery, its implications were seized upon by Professor Michael Hicks in his biography of Anne Neville. Arguing an absence of absolution for other, pre-existing relationships between the couple, Hicks propounded charges against Gloucester including that of incest. ² Despite publishing refutations, his incest accusation has appeared repeatedly in print over the past ten years³ and has now surfaced again in his most recent book, about Richard III’s family. The necessity therefore arises to devote space here to a further, and hopefully conclusive, correction. This article’s co-author, Marie Barnfield, published an article in 2007 in The Ricardian which addressed in detail the complexities of marriage impediments and dispensations.⁴ The Church’s rules in the case of Anne and Richard required them to seek dispensation from impediments of consanguinity that arose from their kinship at birth, and from an impediment of affinity that had recently arisen as a result of Anne’s marriage to Edward, the late Lancastrian Prince of Wales; the latter was the impediment absolved in the dispensation of April 1472. Under canon law the impediment of consanguinity ‘had the effect of forbidding couples  descended from the same great-great-grandfather…from marrying’ whilst that ‘of affinity barred marriages between couples similarly related by marriage…’⁵ (the two partners were held to have become one flesh). Hence when Anne as a widow married Richard, she brought with her an acquired relationship (affinity) with her previous husband’s family members. Since Richard and Edward of Lancaster shared a blood relationship which fell within the prohibited degrees a dispensation for his marriage to Anne was required and granted.⁶

Hicks, however, has wrongly claimed that a further impediment of affinity existed, and an insuperable one at that: he argues that when Richard’s brother the Duke of Clarence married Anne’s sister Isabel Neville, the Church deemed that Richard and Anne acquired through that marriage, a relationship that made them siblings under canon law: ‘Following Clarence’s marriage to Isabel, Gloucester and Anne were additionally brother and sister in law twice over – already brother and sister in contemporary parlance and by affinity – and probably beyond a valid dispensation.’⁷ He adds another assertion: ‘Both Richard III’s first marriage to Anne Neville and his proposed remarriage to Elizabeth (of York?) were too close to be dispensed. He was a serial incestor.’⁸

In claiming that Richard and Anne were barred from marrying by the prior marriage of Richard’s brother to Anne’s sister, Professor Hicks appears to have been drawing on a suggestion made in 1898 by James Gairdner. This related to the dispute Clarence had initiated (as we shall see) in objecting to Anne’s partaking of the Warwick inheritance to which she and his wife Isabel were co-heiresses. Gairdner was attempting to explain why contingencies for a possible future annulment of Richard and Anne’s marriage were included within the 1474 parliamentary settlement of that dispute. He tentatively suggested that Clarence ‘may…perhaps, have raised a canonical objection to the marriage, as he himself only married the elder daughter by virtue of a papal dispensation; and now there was a still greater affinity between the families.’⁹ It is clear enough from his wording that Gairdner did not actually understand the marital impediments in force at this period: but he was sufficiently insightful to realise that these provisions for the possible dissolution of the couple’s marriage were likely to have resulted from an attempt by Clarence to have it declared void.

Historians seem to have accepted as fact Gairdner’s suggestion that the couple wed without a dispensation,¹⁰ but in general wisely ignored his speculation that affinity created by George and Isabel’s marriage may have had anything to do with it. It was only Professor Hicks who, on the publication of Peter Clarke’s research, revived Gairdner’s original proposal. Regrettably, the basis for this charge of brother-sister incest is a misunderstanding of the relevant canon law. At no time did any person become the affine of another except by their own sexual activity. Two virgins, in other words, could not be each other’s affines. Hence, when St Augustine asked of Pope Gregory: ‘Is it permissible for two brothers to marry two sisters, provided there be no blood ties between the families?’ the great pontiff had replied: ‘This is quite permissible’.¹¹ The rules had been further simplified by the Fourth Council of Lateran (1215 AD), which had decreased the scope of the impediments of consanguinity and affinity, and had abolished that impediment of affinity which had previously applied to the blood relatives of a person’s first and subsequent spouses, the latter reform being summed up by the axiom affinitas non parit affinitatem (‘affinity does not beget affinity’).¹²

In summary, the brother (Richard) of the married man (Clarence) did become related by affinity to the wife (Isabel), but not to her relatives. This interpretation has been confirmed by the ecclesiastical historian Henry A Kelly, viz: ‘Marie Barnfield is absolutely right that there was no prohibition against double marriages, two brothers marrying two sisters (namely, in our case, Clarence and Gloucester marrying the two Neville sisters). The notion that there was such an impediment is a common mistake, one committed by Georges Duby in his Medieval Marriage (1978) and later writings. The law of affinity only prohibited one brother from successively marrying two sisters or two cousins.’¹³ Not only were multiple marriages of siblings permissible, but they were extremely common as a means for families to cement their alliances. Indeed, the marriage of Isabel and Anne’s parents, Richard Neville and Anne Beauchamp, fell into this very same category, Richard Neville’s sister Cecily Neville marrying Anne Beauchamp’s brother Henry Beauchamp, Duke of Warwick. It remains only to add that, even if such an impediment had existed, it would not have been beyond dispensation as only those relationships barred by the Old Testament Book of Leviticus were beyond the power of the Pope to dispense.

The real grounds for dispensation

Having disposed of this red herring, we can move on to  consider more pertinent aspects of the couple’s matrimonial affairs. Richard and Anne knew very well, as did their family and the entire nobility of England, that they were related by blood within the prohibited degrees.¹⁴ A dispensation from the effect of these kinships would have been required, and it is illogical to suppose that they would have approached the Vatican purely on the matter of affinity unless the matter of consanguinity had already been safely resolved. Marie Barnfield’s above-mentioned article addresses the question of why no record has been found of such a dispensation.¹⁵ As usual, the most plausible explanation is the simplest. The ambitious Earl of Warwick, father of Isabel and Anne, had flouted the king’s objections and effected a marriage between Isabel and the Duke of Clarence in 1469. In view of the king’s entirely different plans for Clarence, their dispensation (a copy of which has survived in a seventeenth-century transcript) was probably obtained clandestinely. Both the Milanese ambassador in England and the Burgundian chronicler Jehan de Wavrin believed that Warwick was scheming for Clarence and his brother Gloucester as husbands for his two daughters,¹⁶ and although these claims cannot be authenticated common sense suggests that, since he had two daughters to marry, Warwick would not have overlooked the king’s younger brother, whom he had in his own household between early 1465 and late 1468. It would, after all, have been as easy for Warwick to despatch two secret supplications as one. It need not unduly concern us that no Vatican record has come to light of such a dispensation being granted in respect of Gloucester, for neither has any such record been found in respect of Clarence.¹⁷ In 1472, therefore, this would have left only Richard and Anne’s newly acquired relationship of affinity to be absolved. Issued in late April, this new dispensation could have been received in England at any point between say, late May and late October 1472.¹⁸

One slight clue that this 1472 supplication may indeed have been drafted to tie in with an earlier dispensation lies in the fact that it describes Anne as ‘of the diocese of York’. The diocese ascribed to supplicants might be that of either their birth or their current residence or, in the case of the nobility, the region from which they drew their title. In the early spring of 1472 Anne could not claim to belong to the diocese of York on any of these grounds, but in the late 1460s Warwick and his family appear to have been resident in Yorkshire for much of the time, and during this period the earl and countess both described themselves in their applications to Rome as belonging to the diocese of York.¹⁹

The Clarence intervention

Quite aside from the need to satisfy Church restrictions, Richard and Anne found that strenuous objections were raised to their marriage by George, Duke of Clarence, who as the husband of Anne’s elder sister had the younger girl in his keeping. For Anne’s whereabouts we have only the testimony of the Second Continuation of the Crowland Chronicle.²⁰ This recounts that Clarence opposed Richard’s matrimonial intentions because they threatened a division of his wife’s vast inheritance; hence he sequestered Anne from sight. Richard, however, discovered her disguised as a cookmaid and removed her to St Martin’s Sanctuary, whereupon a bitter dispute arose between the brothers.  Unfortunately the author of this account has confused the first two years of King Edward’s second reign so that it is impossible to be certain when the events he describes actually occurred. The Continuator may have been under the impression that Edward IV’s above-mentioned 1472 Parliament really did open in the Michaelmas term (ie the autumn) of 1471. The relevant passage starts with an approximate resume of events at the start of Edward’s second reign, concluding with Lord Hastings’s appointment as Lieutenant-General of Calais, which is correctly identified as occurring in the summer of 1471. It continues:

When it came to the Michaelmas term many were attainted by statute of Parliament and many other things were done which do not need describing in detail. This Parliament lasted almost two years. I should like to bring in here the quarrel which had arisen in this Michaelmas term between the king’s two brothers and which proved difficult to settle.

To establish the correct chronology the opening words ought to have read, ‘When it came to the Michaelmas term of 1472 many were attainted by statute of Parliament…’ etc. The account that follows then makes perfect sense. But the omission of this explicit date means that when the Continuator tells us of the quarrel that arose between the king’s brothers ‘in this Michaelmas term’, we may be reading about either autumn 1471 or autumn 1472.²¹ It is relevant, however, to note that the words ‘Michaelmas term’ were (and still are) specific to the dating of the legal/judicial year and are here used to identify a parliamentary term to which these events are linked, i.e. the quarrel occurred in the twice-mentioned October term at the beginning of that lengthy Parliament of which the chronicle goes on to supply further details. Hence the question is essentially (a) did the Continuator mistakenly conflate the Parliament of 1472 with an earlier quarrel which flared up in 1471; or (b) did he actually know that the incident occurred in the Michaelmas term/opening of Parliament in 1472, and simply omitted (or his scribe omitted) to identify the year in writing?

To take the Crowland Chronicler’s muddled dates literally would suggest that Anne might have been installed in St Martin’s Sanctuary before Christmas 1471, and remained there until her marriage, perhaps even being brought north by Gloucester for the wedding in the summer of 1472 after the dispensation arrived. Such a scenario would at least make some sense of Clarence’s later objection that Richard had taken Anne to wife by force (see postscript below). Clarence may, however, have felt no need at all to hide Anne until the summer or autumn of 1472, when the arrival of that important final dispensation from Rome would have brought the prospect of the marriage into sharp focus.

If we take it that the chronicle merely omitted a clarifying date of 1472, this would fit well with the prevailing circumstances, primarily because consideration of Anne as a marriage prospect in 1471 was very questionable. Widowed at the battle of Tewkesbury in May, she would have been expected to remain in mourning for the next 12 months. Added to this, she was linked with the Lancastrian treason and might well be carrying a Lancastrian heir; hence the close control of her in Clarence’s household. A marriage proposal leading to a public squabble that autumn would have been highly improper. It would also have been logistically difficult, since Richard appears to have left the capital by the end of July and spent the entire autumn and early winter in the North.²² It is also noteworthy that, in a letter dated 30th April 1472, Sir John Paston referred to the Countess of Oxford’s continued sojourn at St Martin’s without making mention of any presence there of her niece, Warwick’s daughter.

In our search for documentary evidence we found no reliably dated source referring to any marriage negotiations until mid-February 1472, when the three royal brothers were together at Sheen, and Clarence grudgingly gave his consent for Richard and Anne to marry provided that the whole inheritance remained with himself and Isabel.²³ A month later, however, he granted Gloucester ‘a parcel’ of the Warwick lands on the written assurance that no more lands granted him by the king would ever be taken from him, ‘neither by authority of Parliament nor in any other way.’²⁴ It must have been at about the time of this grant agreement that Richard sent to Rome for that final marriage dispensation. To observe the proprieties, Anne would probably still have been in Clarence’s custody. For the rest of the year we cannot positively identify any times at which Richard and Anne were both in the same area. Gloucester’s movements during the summer of 1472 are particularly poorly recorded; he may have been in the North throughout. On 30th April that year Sir John Paston wrote from London that it was believed Richard intended to set off for the North the following day,²⁵ and it is certainly true that he failed to attend the important commission of oyer and terminer that sat at Barnet and South Mimms on 11th and 12th May and to which he had been appointed.²⁶

The trail then goes cold until the first week of October, when Richard was in Yorkshire. On the 6th of that month, the day that parliament opened, the duke was at Bedale (between Middleham and Northallerton) presiding over a session of the commission of the peace for the North Riding,²⁷ We next glimpse him 50 miles farther south at Pontefract, where he ordered the arrest of a freshly acquired retainer, Thomas Farnall, having discovered him to be the father and abettor of a gang who had committed a particularly gruesome murder scarcely more than a week earlier.²⁸ Richard then continued on to Westminster, apparently arriving on 14th October.²⁹ The duke seems to have remained in or near London throughout the parliamentary recess of 1st December 1472 to 7th February 1473. A servant of his was murdered in a tavern brawl not far from the Tower on Christmas evening;³⁰ at the end of December he had the dowager Countess of Oxford brought to his lodgings in Stepney for examination, and some time before the middle of January escorted her into the city.³¹

The marriage timeline

By this reasoning, Anne’s disappearance, discovery and removal to sanctuary occurred in the Michaelmas term of 1472, when Richard came south for Parliament and Clarence made a last-ditch attempt to prevent the marriage by sequestering her. A logical chronology has now fallen into place: Richard, after fulfilling his military duties in 1471 (and leaving a decent interval), indicates to Clarence his wish to marry Anne; Clarence objects and an opportunity is found to place the matter before Edward IV. By mid-February 1472 Clarence has been coerced to agree to the marriage but refuses to share the inheritance; Edward brokers an agreement involving the transfer in March of certain estates to Richard, who then applies for a dispensation. The dispensation arrives, probably after he has returned to the North. By the middle of October he is back in London looking to arrange the wedding, only to discover that Clarence has gone back on his word and hidden Anne from him;³² Richard discovers her, places her in sanctuary, and Clarence is, for the time, bested.

We are therefore left with the task of estimating the date when the marriage itself might have happened. Fortunately, we have some evidence: before Parliament rose on 8th April 1473, an Act referred to Anne as Duchess of Gloucester. This reference appears in the first roll for the 1472-3 parliament, which covers the first two sessions only, i.e. 6th October – 30th November 1472 and 8th February – 8th April 1473.³³ During one of these sessions Edward IV passed a petition by Ralph, Lord Neville, with the addition of a special proviso: ‘Provided also that this act shall not…be prejudicial or harmful to…Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Anne, Duchess of Gloucester, his wife’. King Edward’s agreement, in May 1473, to allowing Anne’s mother to leave sanctuary to join Gloucester’s household at Middleham³⁴ may be viewed as corroborative evidence that he and Anne were now man and wife.

Two time-frames at the end of this period – Advent and Lent – can be ruled out immediately on the grounds that they were times when the Church forbade marriages to take place. Advent in 1472 ran from Sunday 29th November until Christmas, while the following Lent began on 3rd March ending at Easter Sunday, which in 1473 fell on 18th April.³⁵ It seems unlikely that a royal wedding would have been hastily arranged to take place before Advent, especially if the atmosphere between the brothers remained tense; and we know that Richard had matters in hand to negotiate with the Countess of Oxford which continued into early January. Therefore Richard’s marriage to Anne most likely took place in the second half of January or in February of 1473.

It may be useful to note here that in the autumn of 1472 King Edward had announced to Parliament his intention to lead an army into France the following spring, and that the hope of a 1473 campaign seems not to have been finally set aside until March.³⁶ To Clarence this plan may have appeared to offer an opportunity to prevent the marriage for the foreseeable future, since if the campaign had gone ahead he would have had to keep Richard and Anne apart only until Advent at the end of November, and then again between Christmas and the beginning of March. Lent and the French war would have done the rest From Richard’s point of view, an impending departure for a continental campaign would have given him increased incentive to seal his marriage to Anne that winter.

Postscript: the final settlement

It remains only to acknowledge that Richard and Anne’s marriage did not put an immediate end to the quarrel over the Warwick inheritance. This is where Crowland picks up the story again:

As a result, so much disputation arose between the brothers and so many keen arguments were put forward on either side with the greatest acuteness in the presence of the king, sitting in judgement in the council-chamber, that all who stood around, even those learned in the law, marvelled at the profusion of the arguments which the princes produced for their own cases.³⁷

This statement following directly from the description of Richard’s discovery of Anne in the Michaelmas term of 1472, has led many historians, and the Chronicle’s published translators, to assume that it refers to arbitration prior to the marriage, but in fact it seems that the account has yet again jumped from one Michaelmas term to the next. There exists no independent evidence of any public quarrel or arbitration prior to the autumn of 1473; the settlement to this dispute that the Chronicle describes is the final accord of 1474.

What is known is that, when Richard came south again for the parliamentary session beginning 6th October 1473, the squabble between the two brothers flared up anew – perhaps as a result of Richard’s acquisition of the Countess of Warwick, which was suspected of heralding the restitution of her property for Gloucester’s benefit, and which Clarence is reported to have opposed.³⁸ Again, Richard seems to have reached the capital late, perhaps not arriving until the last days of October.³⁹ On 6th November Sir John Paston reported from London:

the worlde semyth qwesye heer, ffor the most part that be abowt the Kyng have sende hiddre ffor ther harneys, and it (is) seyd ffor serteyn, that the Duke off Clarance makyth hym bygge in that he kan, schewying as he wolde but dele with the Duke of Glowcester; but the King ententyth, in eschyewyng all inconvenyents, to be as bygge as they bothe, and to be a styffieler (stifler) atweyn them.⁴⁰

In order to bring Clarence to the table the king found himself forced to renege on his promise not to confiscate any more of his lands, and denied Clarence (though not Gloucester) a proviso from the Act of Resumption passed to take effect before Christmas.⁴¹ By 22nd November Sir John Paston was hoping ‘thatt the ij dukes of Clarans and Glowcester shall be sette att one by the adward of the Kyng,’⁴² but the differences between the two brothers took some while to sort out, As the Crowland Chronicle records, the dispute was subject to the arbitration of the royal council; Richard paid one of the auditors of his southern estates to come to London to participate in discussions on the subject with the lords,⁴³ and no doubt Clarence did the same.

Clarence’s justification for his behaviour appears to have included a claim that Richard’s marriage to Anne was null and void/  Unfortunately, James Gairdner was writing 14 years before the publication of A B Hinds’s calendar of the entries relating to England in the Milanese archives, or he might have notice the significance of a piece of gossip picked up by the Milanese ambassador at the French court in early February 1474, namely that ‘the Duke of Lancaster (recte Gloucester), who by force had taken to wife the daughter of the late Earl of Warwick who had been married to the Prince of Wales, was constantly preparing for war with the Duke of Clarence.⁴⁴ If Clarence was really claiming that Richard had taken Anne by force, then this is highly significant as forced marriages were invalid. The strength of this particular claim of force is, it should be said, doubtful: it was most probably Clarence’s rather hopeful interpretation of Richard’s removal of Anne from his own custody. Possibly Clarence had also come up with other objections to the legality of the marriage, but if so they are not recorded. Of one thing we can be sure, however, and that is that he would not have even tried to argue that his own marriage had posed any bar to theirs or he would have been impugning his own wife’s legitimacy. Finally, as the Crowland Chronicle relates:

…in order that the discord of such princes should not pose an impediment to his royal plans with regard to France, their most loving brother King Edward intervened. The whole dispute was settled in such a way that, so long as the Duke of Gloucester’s marriage with the abovesaid Anne should stand, he should have all the lands agreed between them by the mediation of arbitrators, all the rest remaining in the possession of the same Duke of Clarence; which left little or nothing at the disposal of the true lady and heir, the Countess of Warwick, to whom all that most noble inheritance of Warwick and Despenser was due whilst she lived.⁴⁵

Misled, as indicated above, by the Chronicle’s condensed chronology, both its original translator Henry Riley and its more recent translators Pronay and Cox were forced into the position of interpreting its constante matrimonio ducis Gloucesteriae cum Anna supradicta as a reference to marriage in the future.⁴⁶ Constante matrimonio is, however, merely a conventional legal phrase meaning ‘during marriage’ or ‘whilst in a state of marriage’; it often appears in discussion of the property rights of married women or contrasted with soluto matrimonio referring to the situation after annulment or divorce.⁴⁷

Quite when the arbitration process was concluded is not known, but it seems to have been still under way when Parliament reconvened on 20th January 1474, since the two dukes remained at court after the next prorogation on 1st February. On 26th February they attended a Garter Chapel at Windsor,⁴⁸ and it is not until April that we have firm evidence of Richard’s presence in the North;⁴⁹ the best that can be said, therefore, is that it was probably during March that the final arbitration award was made. Parliament reconvened as scheduled on 9th May and an Act was passed, ‘by the advice and assent of the lords spiritual and temporal and the commons of the same lord King’s realm of England being in that parliament, by authority of the same parliament, for diverse considerations moving the same lord king,’ which divided the Countess of Warwick’s properties between her daughters and their husbands as though the countess were ‘naturally dead’.⁵⁰ It concluded with the well known clause providing, in the event of a divorce, for Richard to retain his interest in Anne’s share of the estates until their marriage could be repeated; it is surely this provision to which the Crowland Chronicler was referring when he stated that Richard was to keep his share constante matrimonio…cum Anna.

Contrary to Michael Hicks’s contention that Richard was the driving force behind the solution decreed by King Edward,⁵¹ there is some evidence that this Act may have been pushed through at the king’s insistence before his brothers and their wives had properly come to terms with its provisions. It was not until 20th July 1474,⁵² after two more parliamentary prorogations, that the two couples concluded their own joint accord acknowledging the provisions of the Act and clarifying the Countess of Warwick’s position.⁵³ Interestingly, this indenture explicitly states that the Act in question had been passed on 9th May as soon as Parliament reconvened, but on 7th May Richard was still at Pontefract;⁵⁴ so, if the indenture can be taken at face value, he must have been absent from Parliament when the Act was passed. Certainly it was not until 6th June that Richard obtained an exemplification, or official copy, of the Act.⁵⁵

By the time that Richard and Clarence made their indenture in July it would seem that Clarence had either reconciled himself to Richard and Anne’s marriage or the Church had ruled it to be valid, because in this document there is no further mention of a possible divorce. Richard and Anne were now finally able to settle down to married life.

References

1. Clarke, P D, ‘English Royal Marriages and the Papal Penitentiary in the Fifteenth Century’, EHR Vol 120, No 488,September 2005, p 1023, fn 42.

2. Hicks, M A (2006) Anne Neville, Queen to Richard III, The History Press, 2006, pp 194-210.

3. Ricardian Bulletin, Autumn 2006; BBC History Magazine, 2006, 2015, 2016.

4. Barnfield, M, ‘Diriment Impediments, Dispensations and Divorce: Richard III and matrimony’, The Ricardian, 2007, pp 84-98.

5. Helmholz, R, and Barker, J H, The Oxford History of the Laws of England: the canon law and ecclesiastical jurisdiction from 597 to the 1640s, OUP, 2003, p 541.

6. Edward of Lancaster was Richard’s second cousin once removed, Richard being three generations (‘degrees’ in canon law parlance) removed from John of Gaunt, and Edward, four. So, just as Richard and Edward of Lancaster had been related by consanguinity in the third and fourth degrees, so were Richard and Edward’s widow related by affinity.

7. Hicks, M A, The Family of Richard III, Amberley, 2015, pp 99-100.

8. Hicks (2015), p 26.

9. Gairdner, J, History of the Life and Reign of Richard III, Cambridge, 1898, pp 22-3.

10. Gairdner (1898), p 24.

11. O’Regan, M, ‘Marriage Dispensations According to St Augustine’, Ricardian Bulletin, September 2008, pp 34-5.

12. Ferraris, L and Migne, J-P, Prompta Bibliotheca Canonica, Juridiva, Moralis, Theologica: Nec non Ascetica, Polemica, Rubricistica, Historica, Vol 1, Amboise, 1858, p 332.

13. Kelly, H A, ‘Incest and Richard III, Bigamy and Edward IV’, Ricardian Bulletin, March 2007,p 28, Professor Kelly’s position has since been confirmed by another specialist in the history of canon law, Professor Richard Helmholz in an email to Annette Carson.

14. In the second and third degrees (through their common descent from Ralph, Earl of Westmorland), in the third and fourth degrees (through their common descent from Edmund of Langley, Duke of York), and in the fourth and fourth degrees (through their common descent from Thomas Holland, 2nd Earl of Kent). Appreciation to John Ashdown-Hill for drawing attention to the last of these, which is omitted in the extant copy of Clarence’s dispensation made by Dugdale in the seventeenth century; given that it is the least onerous of the impediments there is no reason to suppose that its omission is due to anything more than a copying error.

15. Barnfield (2007), pp 89-90.

16. Hinds, A B (ed), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts in the Archives and Collections of Milan (hereafter CMP), London, 1912, Item 173; Jehan de Wavrin, Recueil des Croniques et Anchiennes Istoires de la Grant Bretaigne, Vol 5, London, 1891, pp 158-9.

17. The issuance of a dispensation did not necessarily indicate that a marriage had been agreed by both sides. There is an interesting parallel in the original dispensation for the marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York, which was granted on 27th March 1484, almost four weeks after Elizabeth Woodville had delivered the proposed bride into Richard III’s care (Clarke, 2005, pp 1024-5).

18. Estimating travel times over such distances is always difficult. Communications from Rome very often reached England in about six weeks, and urgent ones sometimes more quickly, but on other occasions the journey took much longer. For instance, the dispensation granted in Rome for the marriage of Richard Lumley and Anne Conyers at the end of January 1489 was not entered into the register of the Archbishop of York until 1st September that year (Barnfield, M and Lark, S, ‘The Paternity of Lady Lumley’, The Ricardian, Vol 26, 2016, p 114).

19. Bliss, W H, Calendar of Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland (hereafter CPR), Vol 12, London, 1933, pp 64, 593.

20. Pronay, N, and Cox, J. (eds), The Crowland Chronicle Continuations, 1459-1486 (hereafter CCC), London, 1986, pp 130-3.

21. CCC, pp 132-3.

22. Sir John Howard’s letter of 22nd July announcing that Richard had arrived in Colchester the previous day probably belongs to 1471: Crawford, A (ed) Howard Household Books, Stroud, Vol 1, 1992, Introduction, pp 580-1. In mid to late August Richard visited Norwich: Norfolk Record Office, City of Norwich Chamberlain’s Account Book 1470-1490 (NCR Case 18a), f 24b. And from at least the end of September to mid December he seems to have been in and around Middleham, making further grants of land in that lordship on 12th and 13th January 1472: Middleham Accounts for Michaelmas 1473 to Michaelmas 1474 (TNA DL 29/648/10485), mm 5r, 10r & 12r (the authors gratefully acknowledge the use of transcription by Moira Habberjam and Livia Visser-Fuchs).

23. 16th February 1472 ‘…the Kyng, the Qween, my Lordes of Claraunce and Glowcester, wente to Scheen to pardon; men sey, nott all in cheryte…The Kynge entretyth my Lord of Clarance for my Lord of Glowcester; and, as itt is seyde, he answerythe that he may weell have my Ladye hys suster-in-lawe, butt they schall parte no lydelode, as he seythe…’ (Gairdner, J (ed), The Paston Letters, London, 1904, Vol 5, pp 135-6′.

24. CPR, 1467-77, p 330. There is, however, no evidence that ‘The matter went in March 1472 before the royal council at Sheen’ as claimed by Professor Hicks (2015, p 98). All claims of arbitration by council prior to the autumn of 1473 are based on a misreading of Crowland (see postscript).

25. Paston Letters, Vol 5, p 137.

26. TNA KB 9/72.

27. TNA KB 9/330, m 23.

28. TNA KB 29/102, m 40v.

29. He missed the St Edward’s Day feast held by the king at Westminster on 13th October (Kingsford, C L, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century, Oxford, 1913, p 383), but arrived in time to submit a parliamentary petition on behalf of the widow of the Farnalls’ victim; the deadline for the submission of petitions was 15th October: Given-Wilson, C (gen ed), Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (hereafter PROME), Woodbridge, 2005, www.british-history.ac.uk; ‘Edward IV: October 1472’, ed Horrox, R E Rol 1, Item 39.

30. TNA KB 9/335, m 40.

31. Hicks, M A ‘The Last Days of Elizabeth Countess of Oxford’, EHR, January 1988.

32. A hint that Clarence may have been causing trouble that autumn comes from the Milanese observer Pietro Aliprando, who wrote on 25th November that before leaving for France King Edward would ‘decide about the regents and lieutenants to govern, so that he may not be overthrown by his brother the Duke of Clarence, who has Warwick’s daughter to wife…’ (CMP, Item 240).

33. PROME, ‘Edward IV: October 1472’, Roll 1, Item 24. The Introduction to this Parliament states ‘The last membrane of roll 1 is damaged, but it does not look as if there are any stitch marks there, suggesting that it always was the final membrane in this particular roll. It covers the first two sessions of the parliament, beginning on 6th October 1472 and 8th February 1473, but includes no common petitions.’

34. Paston Letters, Vol 5, pp 188-9.

35. A Medieval English Calendar, www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/cal/medcal.shtml.

36. PROME, ‘Edward IV: October 1472’. Introduction; Scofield, C L, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth, London, Vol 2, 1923, pp 34-5, 49.

37. CCC, p 133.

38. Paston Letters, Vol 5, p 188-9; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eleventh Report, Appendix, Part 7 (London, 1888), p 95.

39. Et in expensis Johannis Hertilpoe unius auditoris domini in partibus australibus pro expensis suis apud London (xj s x d ob) pro participatione dominirum inter ducem Clarencie et Ducem Glouc (TNA DL 29/648/10485, m 12).

40. Paston Letters, Vol 5, p 195.

41. PROME, ‘Edward IV: October 1472′, Roll 2, Items 6-15.

42. Paston Letters, Vol 5, p 199.

43. Paston Letters, This payment belongs to the accounting year beginning 29th September 1473.

44. CMP Item 255, the present authors’ italics.

45. Translated M Barnfield. The original Latin, which is difficult to reproduce exactly in English, reads: Interveniente tamdem utriusque amantissimo fratre Rege Edwardo et ne tanrorum principum discordia rebus Gallicis suo regali proposito impedimentum afferret, lis omnis ita sopita est ut, constante matrimonio ducis Gloucestriae cum Anna supradicta, haberet ille tot et tales terras de quibus per medium arbitorum inter eos conventum est omni residuo in possessione ipsius ducis Clarentiae remanente quod parum and nihil verae dominae et haeredi comitissae Warwici, cui in vita tota ipsa Warwickensium et Dispensatorum nobilissima haereditas debebatur ad suam dispositionem relicum fuit. (CCC, p 132).

46. Riley has ‘the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Anne before-named was to take place’ (Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland with the Continuations, London 1454, Part VI) Pronay and Cox have kept more closely to the Latin wording, giving ‘The duke of Gloucester, once married to Anne…’ (CCC, p 133). Riley also refers to the arbitrated settlement in the future tense.

47. An example of the contrast between constante matrimonio and soluto matrimonio may be found in the correspondence concerning Henry VIII’s bid to divorce Catherine of Aragon: Brewer, J S (ed), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Vol 4, HMSO, 1825, www.british-history.ac.uk, Item 3422.

48. Anstis, J, The Register of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Vol 2, London 1724 pp 187-8.

49. Durham Cathedral Muniments Register IV, f 214r; TNA DL 29/648/10485, m 12r.

50. PROME, ‘Edward IV: October 1472’, Roll 2, Items 20-25.

51. Hicks, M A, Richard III, Tempus, 2000, p 81; Hicks (2006) pp 137-8.

52. Not 1473 as stated by Hicks (2015), p. 98.

53. BL Cotton MS Julius BXII, ff 139v-140v.

54. TNA DL 29/648/10485, m 12r.

55. Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1467-77, London, 1900, pp 455-6.

 

This article was first published in The Ricardian Bulletin, December 2016.