Lady Anne Neville (Wife)
The First Marriage of Anne Neville
The Marriage of the Lancastrian Prince of Wales and Lady Anne Neville
by Marie Barnfield and Annette Carson
Although no date for this marriage is recorded in any contemporary source, 13th December 1470 has been given, with more or less confidence, by more than one modern writer.1 With a view to assessing the reliability of this date, the present writers have made a study of the evidence relating to the making of the marriage.
The union was a key ingredient of Louis XI’s plan for Anne’s father Richard, Earl of Warwick, to remove Edward IV from the throne of England in favour of the Prince of Wales’s father, the deposed Henry VI, and then return the favour by aiding Louis in a war against Duke Charles of Burgundy. But the marriage itself was much delayed, mainly by the groom’s mother, Queen Margaret of Anjou; the queen hated and distrusted Warwick, but had been persuaded by King Louis that reconciliation with the earl, cemented by the marriage of their offspring, was the only way to achieve the restoration of the house of Lancaster.
A papal dispensation was necessary before they could wed, to absolve the couple from the impediment of consanguinity in the fourth degrees (i.e. a third-cousin relationship): this was granted in August 1470. In this connection some incorrect assumptions have been made, one such being that three dispensations were obtained. This particular misunderstanding arises from Louis XI’s having made a series of three supplications for the dispensation in his eagerness to pave the way for the political alliance. On or before 24th July, whilst finalising his negotiations with Margaret and Warwick at the Angevin capital of Angers, Louis sent a supplication to Lyons (addressing the papal ambassadors there); then on 2nd August he sent two more supplications: one to Rheims (addressing archbishop of the same) and the other to Laon (addressing its bishop).2 Despite Louis’ importuning, such dispensations were not within the power of any of the recipients to grant. They therefore remitted the king’s representations to Rome, where a dispensation was duly granted by the office of the Papal Penitentiary on 17th August. This accommodated all three of Louis’ supplications, of which the actual wording employed by the king is reproduced in the Penitentiary’s register.3 Significantly, the three supplications were phrased differently from each other.
The first supplication, despatched no later than 24th July, merely sought absolution from the impediment that Anne and Edward were related in the fourth degree of consanguinity, with legitimation of any issue to be begotten. The second, dated 2nd August, described the couple as spouses (coniuges) and confessed that:
…at the time knowing themselves to be joined in the fourth degree of consanguinity, they publicly contracted a marriage between them by words of the present (tense), and consummated it; therefore they ask to be absolved from the sentence of excommunication that they shall thereby incur, and that, the said impediment notwithstanding, they may remain in their marriage thus contracted, with legitimation of their offspring begotten (if any may have been) and to be begotten.
The third supplication, also composed on 2nd August, was essentially the same as the second except that, like the first, it referred only to future issue.4
Clearly there had been developments between the issue of the two sets of supplications. The outline of that summer’s events can be traced through various letters and records. The earliest negotiations between Warwick and Queen Margaret had taken place at long range, with King Louis acting as broker. Then, when the terms were close to resolution, Warwick had travelled to Angers to meet King Louis and Margaret of Anjou, leaving Anne and her mother at Honfleur on the Normandy coast. On 24th July Louis authorised payment to one of his despatch riders:
…because he makes great diligence in a journey that he ordered him to make now to Lyon, to the ambassadors of our Holy Father the Pope and Messire Guillaume Cousinot, to bring them letters of our said lord (king) to have a dispensation for the marriage agreed not long ago between the Prince of Wales and the Earl of Warwick’s daughter.’5
An extant document known as ‘The Maner and Guydinge Bitwene the Quene Margarete and of hir Soone and therle of Warrewic’ records the clauses of the agreement at Angers, which reconciled the previously hostile parties and provided for the marriage of their children – although Queen Margaret had made it clear throughout the negotiations that she had strong reservations about the latter. A ceremony was held on 25th July in Angers Cathedral, at which King Louis an his brother Charles, Duke of Guienne, presided over the reconciliation of Warwick and Queen Margaret and oaths were sworn by all four. Warwick vowed to uphold the cause of King Henry and his family, and Louis and Guienne swore to hold him to this vow. For her part, Margaret swore to treat Warwick as ‘true and feythfull’ to King Henry, the prince and herself. Warwick’s promise to Louis, to send English forces to aid his enterprise against Duke Charles, was not openly acknowledged. ‘In treatinge of the forsaid mariage’, all that is recorded is that Anne was to join Queen Margaret’s household immediately, but that the marriage would not be ‘perfyted’ (completed) until Warwick had retaken England for King Henry.6
This final stipulation had been included at Queen Margaret’s insistence, but both Louis and Warwick remained keen for the wedding to take place before the earl set sail for England, and Louis therefore did his best to talk up the status of the marriage for public consumption. He wrote a letter on the same day stating: ‘Today we have made the marriage of the Queen of England and (Warwick), and tomorrow hope to have everything speeded for their departure.’7 The Milanese Ambassador Sforza de’ Bettini, writing from Angers on 28th July, reflected the optimistic version of events that Louis was promulgating:
The marriage of Warwick’s daughter to the Prince of Wales is settled and announced. His Majesty has sent for the lady (Anne) to Amboise, where the marriage will be consummated. In two days Warwick will leave with his fleet…’8
(Amboise, on the river Loire about 15 miles east of Tours, was one of Louis’ favourite castles and his queen had just given birth there to their son).
Edward IV’s biographer, Cora Scofield fairly understandably interpreted Louis’s words to mean that the couple had undergone a betrothal ceremony (i.e. a marriage ceremony in which the promises were exchanged in the future, rather than the present, tense) viz: ‘The betrothal of the Prince of Wales and Lady Anne Neville was solemnized on 25th July…’9 Paul Murray Kendall, in his biographies of Richard III, Warwick the Kingmaker and Louis XI, followed the same line a Scofield: Anne had been ‘betrothed’ to Edward on 25th July, their betrothal had been ‘solemnized in the cathedral of Angers’, and, taking matters a step further, acknowledging Anne’s absence from Angers he referred to ‘the betrothal of Anne Neville by proxy to Prince Edward’. Charles Ross continued in the same vein with an unattributed claim, again apparently derived from Scofield, that the couple on that day had been ‘solemnly betrothed in Angers Cathedral’.10 The same claim has recently been copied by Michael Hicks in his biography of Anne Neville11 and has achieved the status of tradition.
‘The Maner and Guydinge’, however, makes no reference either to a betrothal ceremony or to Prince Edward’s involvement in the proceedings in the cathedral, and even Louis claimed only that the marriage had been ‘made’ between the couple’s parents. A solemn betrothal between parties barred from marriage by an as-yet-undispensed impediment, as were Anne and Edward at this time, would have been illicit, and should the impediment later be removed and the betrothal recognised by the Church, it could only be negated by the marriage of one of the parties to another individual, and such a marriage would, although lawful, have been frowned on by the Church.12 In other words, not only is there no possibility that Margaret of Anjou would have considered it acceptable. It is also worth mentioning that a solemn betrothal would have obviated the need for further nuptials as it would become a full marriage upon consummation.
On 30th July the official documents recording the various agreements between the parties were finally signed and sealed.13 The written reconciliation left glaring loopholes, which the previously hostile parties continued to exploit even after the deal was agreed. Despite the fact that the dispensation had not yet arrived, Warwick now required the marriage to be solemnised before he left France, as indicated on 31st July in a despatch from Bettini: ‘The Queen of England and the Earl of Warwick left this morning together for Normandy to celebrate the nuptials of their children, as Warwick wishes to see them united before he proceeds to England…’14 But to proceed with the marriage without dispensation would place the parties in jeopardy of excommunication or even the annulment of the union. Either Warwick’s departure for England would have to be delayed or the supplication would need to be rephrased. This is the context in which the second and third supplications were drafted, on 2nd August, in which the couple anticipated their intentions by announcing their marriage and begging for dispensation from the impediment of relationship, legitimation of their offspring and absolution from the sentence of excommunication.
Margaret, however, was still determined to delay progressing the union for as long as she could, and it is of course possible that, when the royal party reached Honfleur, Warwick may have found his wife and daughter also unwilling to proceed without the dispensation. By 7th August, therefore, Bettini was reporting that Warwick had departed and was about to take ship: ‘He did not wish to lose time in waiting for his daughter’s marriage. The ceremony will take place at Amboise, according to what they say.’15
Cora Scofield believed that ‘no real marriage’ ever took place at all, because of Queen Margaret’s determination that Warwick must first recover England.16 In a footnote she quoted James Gairdner who agreed that ‘It does not appear that she was married to him,’ citing the Crowland Chronicle’s description of Anne, even after the Prince of Wales’s death, as desponsata (betrothed) and puella (girl, maiden).17 Speculation about whether the marriage took place was perhaps natural among British historians, since little was known about it until 1930 when Calmette and Perinelle, in their seminal work Louis XI et l’Angleterre, published documents from French archives which yielded hitherto unknown sources of information.18 Such suspicions have remained tenacious though, and once again have acquired a certain traditional status. The underlying assumption is that, by permitting a marriage ceremony but forbidding consummation, Margaret would have reserved in hand, should matters not resolve to her liking, the possibility of an annulment and a more palatable future bride for her son. This idea is not tenable, however. At this period the mere exchange of a promise in the present tense made a marriage complete and indissoluble; sexual relations were thereafter a mutual obligation and the only circumstance in which annulment could be granted for non-consummation was where one of the parties – normally the husband – proved to be incapable of full sexual relations. Further confirmation of the complete nature of Anne and Edward’s marriage can be found in several sources. The dispensation granted to Anne in 1472 for marriage to her second husband Richard, Duke of Gloucester, absolved them from the impediment of affinity that had arisen from her union with Edward of Lancaster, by now deceased; at this period affinity was contracted not by marriage vows but by sexual relations.19 The Warwick family’s own contemporary biographers also state that Anne and Edward had been married; John Rous records that Anne was ‘wyfe furst to prynce Edward son and Eyre to kynge Harre the syxt’,20 whilst the anonymous author of the Beauchamp Pageant includes a family tree in which Anne is shown crowned between her two husbands, with a caption saying that she was ‘first wedded to Prince Edward, son to Kyng Henry…’21
Warwick’s expeditionary force made landfall in England on 13th September and Louis soon began receiving good news from his protege. By the beginning of October Edward IV had been forced to seek refuge in the Burgundian Low Countries, and on the 6th of that month Henry VI was reinstated as king. On 19th October Louis confidently issued a proclamation ordering thanksgiving ‘throughout all the cities, cathedral churches and good towns of our realm.’22
Although the dispensation is likely to have arrived from Rome sometime in September, plans for the marriage still remained dormant (Margaret’s mistrust of Warwick was such that she did not bring her son into England until the following April). Louis’s patience was sorely tried at her persistent delaying, especially since for several months he had been financing the sojourn in France of the Neville entourage and the court in waiting of Queen Margaret and Prince Edward. Contemporary correspondence is unhelpful to our quest: although allusions occur to the king’s (repeatedly disappointed) anticipation of their departure, there is no report of the wedding itself.
In early November Louis held a parlement in Tours and set about opening formal hostilities with Burgundy. On 13th November the briefing commenced of a high level embassy to England whose task was to ensure that Warwick held fast to his promise of military support. We may also assume that during this fervid period Louis was receiving a constant stream of intelligence. That his political ambitions flourished is indicative that the news from England continued favourable, and indeed we know that a parliament was due to be opened on 26th November by an unopposed Henry VI. It seems that Louis was placing renewed pressure on Margaret of Anjou to allow her son to proceed with his marriage to Warwick’s daughter and set forth to complete the Franco-Lancastrian victory in arms. On 17th November he visited Queen Margaret at her lodgings in Tours; around 21st November, having bidden farewell to the etats generaux, he returned to his chateau of Amboise taking his English guests with him; and finally, on 26th and 28th November, he enticed from Prince Edward a written promise to make war on the Duke of Burgundy and his English guest, the exiled ‘Edward of March, calling himself Edward IV’.23 Ambassador Bettini, in a despatch written on 5th December (see below), expressed his belief that Louis had signalled the departure of King Henry’s family, but it was just one more in a series of false starts. Bettini wrote as follows:
The Queen of England and the Countess of Warwick, with their children, are still here, as although his Majesty took leave of them some days ago for them to return to England, yet he has changed his mind, and it is thought that he will detain them until a reply has come from his ambassadors who have gone to England, who left about twelve days ago. It is thought that they will leave immediately the reply arrives.24
Although our interest lies in tracking the date of Anne’s marriage to Prince Edward, Bettini’s main concern was purely political, i.e. that the Lancastrian royal family’s return to resume power in England, scheduled for ‘some days ago’, had again been postponed. His description of the young couple as merely ‘their children’ suggests that they had not yet married. Louis, by speaking of having himself decided to ‘detain them’, was signalling to the Milanese ambassador that he had control of events – a control that might otherwise have appeared to be in Margaret’s hands. He had, in any case, made significant progress in wringing from the prevaricating queen a commitment to comply with her part of the bargain as soon as Louis’ embassy sent back sufficient assurances. The wedding now hinged on what his only envoys reported, which Margaret could no longer gainsay.
By this time, however, a fresh obstacle had interposed itself. On 2nd December, the fourth Sunday before Christmas, the season of Advent had begun, and with it a solemn tempus clausum or ‘closed time’ which would last until 13th January and during which wedding ceremonial was forbidden and marriages per se – although not actually invalid if entered into – were not clearly allowed (a question not resolved until the following century). Very possibly Margaret’s procrastination had been partly with this in mind, as the tempus clausum would allow her to continue to postpone the marriage for some time after the return of Louis’ ambassadors.25
Very occasionally at this period, an urgent wedding did proceed during a tempus clausum with the aid of high level ecclesiastical sanction or guidance, One such marriage of which the details survive took place on 13th December 1487. The unexpected death of the young Edward Stradling the previous month had left his sister Anne as heiress to the entire family fortune. Since the wardship of the Stradling children had been violently contested, Anne’s guardian Henry Danvers now secured her inheritance by having her married to his own son and heir as quickly as could possibly be arranged. The wedding seems to have eschewed all ceremonial the couple simply exchanging their vows in the presence of a select group of witnesses, with no celebrating priest so far as can be ascertained from the record; and yet it was not a clandestine marriage, since it took place in a chapel of St Martin’s sanctuary and was witnessed by a ‘clerk of the diocese of Norwich, public notary by the apostolic and imperial authority and proctor general of the court of Canterbury’, who drew up a public instrument formally recording the details.26
It was almost certainly on account of the tempus clausum that Louis now sent a messenger galloping towards the Normandy coast in order to request from Louis d’Harcourt, Patriarch of Jerusalem and Bishop of Bayeux, the head of the embassy that Louis had recently dispatched towards England, requesting him to appoint a vicar general (deputy), since the patriarch himself could not return, ‘for a dispensation to marry the said Prince of Wales to the said Earl of Warwick’s daughter’.27
We no longer have precise dates for the ensuing events, which must be estimated from random items set against the known historical background. Catching d’Harcourt at Honfleur before his departure, Louis’ messenger was successful in his mission: a vicar was indeed appointed by the Bishop and brought back to Amboise where he not only issued the patriarchal dispensation but also officiated at the marriage. Unfortunately there are some misleading dates assumed by Calmette and Perinelle. They state that this new dispensation was provided by d’Harcourt ‘on the eve of his departure for England, on 28th November 1470,28 but this date applies neither to the eve of the Patriarch’s departure from Tours (which took place around 23rd November, as indicated in Bettini’s last letter) nor to the eve of his sailing (the embassy seems to have set sail around 6th December).29 The wedding, according to Calmette and Perinelle, took place vers le 13 decembre, ‘about’ 13 December, but their piece justificative no 39 in support of this date is merely a note of reimbursement by King Louis dated ‘December 1470’ for various expenditures, among which are the vicar’s expenses and the cost of sending to Honfleur for his services.30 31
It may be, however, that Calmette and Perinelle actually opted for 13th December for a different reason. On this date, in the course of a letter to Antoine de Chabannes, Louis XI included information about the departure of various luminaries from Amboise, among whom ‘…the Queen of England and my Lady of Warwick shall go tomorrow’.32 But it contains no mention of the wedding of the Prince of Wales, and the odds are against this having happened as the crucial despatches from England could not yet have been received. Perhaps the recent arrival of d’Harcourt’s vicar may be the key to Louis’s optimism that the queen’s party would soon depart, as he may have assumed that Margaret would have hesitated to raise further objections to the marriage to the vicar who had come to seal it. Those hopes must surely have been dashed quite soon, as Queen Margaret appears to have reverted to her fall-back position of waiting for the official despatches.33 We know that the Countess of Warwick (at least) was still at the French court on 17th December, on which date a surviving document shows that Louis gave 13 livres 15 sols to his esquire Jeannot de Cadebiere ‘to leave with my Lady of Warwick’.34 This was not a reimbursement of past expenses but payment for a commission to accompany the countess when she left, so the group was clearly still in residence.
This date of 17th December, indicating plans for departure, should be viewed alongside the next report penned by Bettini on 19th December, when he wrote from Tours as follows:
His Majesty has received a reply from his ambassadors who went to England. Words fail them to express the honourable and noble way in which they have been received and welcomed, so they state in their letters to the king…The Queen of England and the Countess of Warwick, with the prince and princess their children, have left and returned to England, to the unspeakable satisfaction and content of his said Majesty.35
With the arrival of this irreproachable assurance Margaret could no longer prevaricate; Prince Edward of Lancaster had now made Anne Neville his princess. From Bettini’s phrasing, the marriage probably did not occur on the 19th itself, and his presence at Tours may indicate that Louis had also returned there temporarily with his English guests in order to expedite his reception of messages from England.36 There is just time, if the embassy had taken ship around the 6th and both sea crossings were uneventful, for the return messages to have reached Honfleur around 15th December. This means news could just have reached Louis on the 17th and encouraged him to start planning departures.
A wedding on the same day might seem inordinately hurried, but a marriage undertaken during the tempus clausum would, as we have seen, have been a low-key affair. We already have many clues that Louis was exerting pressure, and Margaret’s party could scarcely be unaware that the French king was almost as keen for their departure as he was to cement the marriage. Hence they must have been prepared for matters to be conducted briskly.
The escort commissioned by Louis for the Countess of Warwick now comes back into focus. It tells us that the wedding party was making its departure arrangements on the 17th. Based on our current state of knowledge, therefore it appears that in all probability they left the French court on 18th or 19th December after a private wedding, at either Amboise or Tours, on 17th or 18th December 1470.
Notes and References
1. Charles Ross stated that the couple were ‘probably’ married on 13th December (Edward IV, London, 1974, p 147, n 1); more recently, in his biography of Anne Neville, Michael Hicks stated that ‘On Thursday 13th December 1470 Anne Neville and Edward of Lancaster were at last married at Amboise’ (Anne Neville: Queen to Richard III, Stroud, 2006, p 88), although in his entry for Anne Neville in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography this has been modified to ‘about 13th December’.
2. M L Cimber et al, Archives Curieuses de l’Histoire de France, Series 1, Vol 1 (Paris, 1834), p 95.
3. P D Clarke, ‘English Royal Marriages and the Papal Penitentiary’, English Historical Review, Vol 120, No 488 (September 2005), pp 1021-2; and P D Clarke and P N R Zutshi, Supplications from England and Wales in the Registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary, 1410-1503, Vol 2 (Canterbury & York Society, 2014), p 23. The Cardinal Penitentiary, or his regent on his behalf, was by virtue of his office authorised to grant dispensations from relationships in the third and fourth degrees (Clarke & Zutshi, op cit, Vol 1, 2012, p xxviii).
4. Clarke, ‘English Royal Marriages’, p 1021, n 33, trans M Barnfield.
5. Cimber et al, Archives Curieuses, p 95 (this and all other quotations from French sources trans, M Barnfield).
6. ‘The Maner and Guydinge Bitwene the Quene Margarete and of hir Soone and therle of Warrewic’, in The Politics of Fifteenth Century England: John Vales Book, ed M Kekewich et al, 1995, pp 215-18.
7. J Vaesen and E Charavay, Lettres des Louis XI, Roi de France, Vol 4 (Parism 1890) pp 130-1: ‘Aujourd’uy avons fait le mariage de la royne d’Angleterre et de lui…Escript…le xxve jour de juillet’.
8. A B Hinds (ed), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts in the Archives and Collections of Milan 1385-1618 (CMP) (London, 1912), item 192 (British History Online website).
9. C Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth, Vol 1 (London and New York, 1923), p 530, referencing Lettres de Louis XI, vol 4, p 131.
10. Ross, Edward IV, p 147, where Edward’s age is given as 18 (recte 16) and Anne’s as 17 (recte 14).
11. Hicks, Anne Neville, p 85.
12. ‘Betrothal’, Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent website).
13. The document signed by Louis’s brother Charles of Guienne is still extant and bears this date: Kekewich, Politics of Fifteenth Century England, p 218.
14. CMP, item 193.
15. CMP, item 194.
16. Op cit, p 531 and n 2.
17. J Gairdner, History of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third (Cambridge, 1898), p 19 and n 4: N Pronay and J Cox (eds), The Crowland Continuations 1459-1486 (London, 1986), p 132.
18. J Calmette et G Perinelle, Louis XI et l’Angleterre (1461-1483) (Paris, 1930).
19. Clarke, ‘English Royal Marriages’, p 1023, n 42; Clarke and Zutshi, op cit Vol 2, pp 107-8.
20. J Rous, The Rous Roll (Gloucester, 1980), item 62.
21. Alexandra Sinclair (ed), The Beauchamp Pageant (London, 2003), pp 160, 161.
22. Lettres de Louis XI, Vol 4, p 154.
23. L Visser-Fuchs, ‘Edward IV’s Memoir on Paper to Charles, Duke of Burgundy: the so-called ‘Short Version of the Arrivall’, Nottingham Medieval Studies (1992), pp 174-5.
24. CMP, No 198.
25. F L Cross and E A Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford, 2005), pp 1598.
26. F N Macnamara, Memorials of the Danvers Family (London, 1895), pp 265-6.
27. Calmette et Perinelle, op cit, pp 319-320, piece justificative no 39, (compte original, Bibliotheque nationale f, fr 6759, fol 144 vo).
28. Calmette et Perinelle, op cit, p 133: no source for this date is given.
29. Calmette et Perinelle, op cit, p 127 and p 128, n 3, citing BN nouv acq fr 1483, no 10.
30. Calmette et Perinelle, op cit, p 133, fn 5, and pp 319-320 (piece justificative no 39 – of the four repayments itemised, none is dated). Both Ross and Hicks give Calmette and Perinelle as their reference.
31. Calmette et Perinelle, op cit, pp 319-320 (piece justificative No 39 – of the four repayments itemised, none is dated).
32. ‘…la royne d’Angleterre et madame de Warvic s’en yront demain’: Lettres de Louis XI vol 4, p 171.
33. Louis had sent his rider, Antoine de Mons, to Honfleur in the first week of December carrying new letters for the attention of his ambassadors, which may have been intended to ensure a speedy return despatch from England: Calmette et Perinelle, op cit, pp 127-8, n 3, citing BN f fr 6759, folio 70v.
34. ‘…pour s’en aller avec Madame de Warwick’: Calmette and Perinelle, op cit, p 134, n 1 (their destination is given as Paris).
35. CMP, No 199.
36. The present authors have found no direct evidence of Louis’ whereabouts between 16th and 24th December, on both of which dates he was at Amboise (Lettres de Louis XI, Vol 4, pp 173 and 177).
This article first appeared in The Ricardian Bulletin, December 2017.