Anne Neville by Michael Hicks Read Free Book Online Page A

longer thanthe thirteen years till his mother died. Instead he was able to become a great man at once, able to make a major impression on his age and indeed overshadow his own father Salisbury, without waiting to enter his parents’ shoes. It was not a hopeful heir, but the greatest of earls who begat Anne Neville.
    As yet, however, there was no heir: no offspring of either sex. By 1449 the new earl and countess had been married for thirteen years. The absence of heirs is surprising. Without pretending the union of Richard and Anne to have been a love match – how could it have been, given their youth and differences in ages? – the Nevilles at least must have intended children to result. Child grooms and brides did not live together or indeed consummate their marriages until they were considered old enough. Even by contemporary standards, 1436 – when Richard was aged seven and Anne ten – was too soon. Margaret Beaufort was twelve, and bore the future Henry VII when only fourteen. Girls came of age at fourteen, which Anne reached in 1440 when Richard, at eleven, was still too young. After the death of both her parents in 1439, if not earlier, Anne was surely living with her in-laws. We have no evidence when Richard and Anne first slept together, first lived together, or first had their own establishment, but it was surely by 1446, when Duke Henry died, Anne being at the relatively advanced age of twenty and Richard aged seventeen, still more so by 1449 when they became earl and countess of Warwick, she being twenty-three years old by then and he aged twenty. And yet it was only on 5 September 1451 that their daughter Isabel was born 22 – their eldest child so far as we can be aware. Presumably she was conceived at Christmas 1450 or New Year 1451. Given the committed interest in such events both of John Rows and the Tewkesbury Abbey chronicler, historians respectively of the Beauchamps and the Despensers, we should surely expect to know of any earlier daughter to be born and certainly of any son on whom the future of both housesdepended, if not necessarily of miscarriages and still-births. Richard and Anne must have been trying to beget children. Twenty-five was an advanced age for Anne to bear her first child. Perhaps the Countess Anne came to puberty very late. Perhaps she had miscarriages of which we are ignorant. That certainly is indicated by the papal dispensation she secured in 1453. Because ‘she is weakened by former illnesses and the birth of children’, she was allowed when pregnant to eat eggs and meat in Lent. 23 Did she also have difficulty in conceiving? The second daughter and future queen Anne Neville was born when Anne was thirty, which was an early age for a lady to cease child-bearing. Women who experience puberty late today have early menopauses. We can presume, once again, that Warwick himself was anxious to breed a son and was engaging in the requisite intercourse with his countess. Nothing more materialised. If infertility could have been his fault, his bastard daughter Margaret is evidence of a sex drive that the Countess Anne alone did not satisfy, for he was married throughout his fertile life. Anne Neville’s genealogical inheritance included a gene bank that, it appears, may well have included the gynae-cological problems which, perhaps, explain or contributed to her own disappointing record of procreation.
    Young though they were, Richard and Anne were programmed by class and family expectations to reproduce, all the more so once her inheritances had devolved on them. Heirs were needed to perpetuate their line. Additionally heirs were of signal value as they combated the rival claims of their rival cousins. We may be sure therefore that Anne Beauchamp’s first pregnancy was welcome, how eagerly her first confinement was anticipated, and how disappointing was the birth – when it came - of a daughter. There can be little doubt that Isabel Neville was given the name of her maternal