Richard Armitage / Richard III rumble, Week 10!

Wrong month, but beautiful Armitage / Richard III fan art courtesy of Русскоязычный Cайт Pичардa Армитиджa.

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I admit I’ve been so focused on Richard Armitage this week that I haven’t thought much about Richard III. As a tidbit, however, Sharon Kay Penman reminds us that December 6th was the birthday of Henry VI.

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You can also generate a commission donation to Richard Armitage’s JustGiving charities by buying some neato Richard III swag (or indeed, anything) at zazzle.

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Since the Gloucesters celebrate Christmas this week, here’s some atmosphere:

This is the English carol, “Ther is No Ros of Swych Vertu,” composed around 1420. It is a song that Richard and Anne almost certainly would have known.

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And now, to the group read. As always, links to FB and Twitter discussions are found at the end of the post.

Last Week: TSIS, Book II, ch. 9-13 recounted the recovery of Anne’s person. Anne escaped the Herber and hid in October 1471 (ch. 9); Richard rescued Anne (ch. 10), and proposed and placed her in sanctuary. In November 1471 (ch.11), Richard and Edward IV discussed politics in the wake of Edward’s reaccession and plans for Richard’s marriage to Anne. Richard and Anne (ch. 12) awaited papal dispensation to marry and fought over how to pursue her inheritance; and finally, in February 1472 (ch. 13), Edward forced George, Anne’s guardian and the major obstacle in the way, to consent to the marriage.

[Left: Beaulieu Abbey, where Anne of Warwick claimed sanctuary. It became private property after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. North & South fans might be interested to learn that it’s in the New Forest; Margaret Hale might have visited the village.]

This Week: TSIS, Book II, ch. 14 and Book III, ch. 1-4. We find ourselves first at the wedding of Anne and Richard (ch. 14), which Penman puts in April 1472. Richard shows himself a considerate lover, first by banning the traditional pre-consummation ribaldry from the bedside and then by initiating intercourse gently and then spooning with her afterwards, although Anne is still not able to overcome the bad memories of her previous marital relations. After the wedding, Anne and Richard move to Middleham. Book III, titled “Lord of the North,” inaugurates the phase of Richard’s career in which he is building loyalties and governing the North of England successfully — the phase of his life that suggested he would be a good governor and king. In September, 1472, Richard meets the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Kate (Book III, ch. 1), while visiting the girl. His daughter’s mother still loves him but recognizes that he now loves Anne. The Gloucesters keep Christmas that year at Middleham (ch. 2), where Anne is pregnant. In June 1473, Anne’s mother, the Countess of Warwick, now dispossessed, is released from sanctuary at Beaulieu (ch. 3) to go to her daughter at Middleham. There, Anne is newly delivered of a son, Edward; has taken in Richard’s illegitimate son, John; and has apparently learned to enjoy marital relations. Finally, in November 1473 (ch. 4), readers are introduced more fully to two crucial players in the later drama of Richard’s accession to the throne — Will Hastings, who we met before, and his twenty-two-year-old mistress, Jane / Elizabeth Shore, are in bed when Edward IV happens in upon them — after which a starstruck Jane becomes Edward’s lover, frustrating Will.

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At right, the results of the poll from last week. Intriguingly, readers who prefer a “love” approach to Anne’s dilemma (of whatever sort) are almost equally balanced with those who prefer a stance that emphasizes Anne’s awareness of her power and social balance. Scriptwriters, take note. Is there a way to balance both of these elements in a portrayal of Anne?

Because I have to get on the road and can’t geek out over what I’d like to write this week (perhaps there’ll be an opportunity for a retrospective), let me note some things that historians would observe about this chapter.

First, I’d draw reader attention to what seems from our perspective like the rather large indeterminacy of a number of these dates.

One of these is the date of Richard and Anne’s marriage. Richard moved Anne to sanctuary on February 16, 1472; the first document that gives unequivocal evidence that they were married is dated June 6, 1474. No surviving document says anything about the date or nature of their wedding. Penman responds to this problem by suggesting that Richard and Anne sought a low-key wedding for personal reasons; she also gives it the earliest possible historical date (since the Church prohibited weddings during Lent).

Of course, Anne and Richard would also have had social reasons for wanting to keep any celebration of nuptials limited. Contemporaries would have seen the way of Anne and Richard’s marriage as quite scandalous. In medieval canon law, the consent to marry between partners — so-called “contract marriage” — constituted a valid union (a matter that would become a huge bone of contention during the Reformation, incidentally). This is an important thing to to know about medieval England, because the outcomes of this practice are going to hit us over the head again in only a few more chapters. Because of this state of affairs, it was common for betrothed partners to consider themselves married and thus commence sexual relations ahead of the formal ceremony that played the legal role of securing property relations and inheritance. But Richard and Anne could not simply marry by plighting troth, because their union was highly incestuous. Nor would a clandestine marriage (in secret, without announcement of the intent to marry, outside of the canonical hours of 8-12 a.m.) have served their purposes, although it would also have been legally binding. It was well known that the prospective partners were related in the first, second, third, and fourth degrees. Although we would not recognize all of them today (for instance, we would not say that George’s marriage to Isobel made Richard into Anne’s brother, which canon law did), the forbidden degrees were known and significant to contemporaries. Children of a known incestuous union were illegitimate and could not inherit; the church was required to separate incestuous partners.

So Anne and Richard needed a dispensation. When we left them, last week, they were cuddling in bed in St Martin-le-Grand, waiting for it. The first dispensation they received is preserved only in a section of the Vatican Archives long barred to secular researchers. Until recently, historians thus assumed that the two had married without any dispensation. The registers of the papal penitentiary only became accessible in the twentieth century and confirmed that an initial letter of dispensation was issued on April 22, 1472. It was a pro forma document that this particular wing of the Vatican bureaucracy issued regularly to nobles who could afford it, which dispensed the couple from all disabilities to their relationship in the third and fourth degrees. It was apparently sufficient to squelch the qualms of a clergyman, so that no one in fifteenth-century England thought Anne and Richard unmarried. But it was clearly inadequate as a solution to their problems. No record survives anywhere that Richard and Anne were ever dispensed from impediments in the first and second degrees, or that they even asked to be. It is uncertain that they could have been (canon lawyers spent a lot of this period precisely debating whether even the pope could dispense a couple from biblical impediments like those stated in Leviticus) and it certainly would not have happened without intensive lobbying at the Holy See. Perhaps the two thought it was hopeless. Indeed, the 1474 parliamentary property settlement of the Beauchamp, Despenser and Montagu estates I discussed last week was cognizant of this problem. It provided that the property settled on Richard would remain in his hands, even were his marriage to be found void — thus neatly robbing Anne of her jointure. Given the tendency of nobles to play fast and loose with canon law, Anne and Richard likely assumed that they’d be secure in enough in their positions to ensure their heirs could inherit, and thus not to be vulnerable to challenges on this score. There’s a particular pattern in England of “marry first, get dispensed later.” But that didn’t mean observers weren’t troubled by it, or that marriages or sexual relations of questionable legality couldn’t come back to haunt couples, as we’ll see in a few chapters.

[Left: A monument at the parish church in Sheriff Hutton, thought to be a cenotaph for Edward of Middleham. Source.]

Another point on dates: Edward of Middleham’s exact birthdate is recorded in no contemporary source and thus counts as uncertain. Penman gives it the earliest possible date — perhaps subconsciously relying on argument in some secondary literature that Anne and Richard married without full dispensation because she was already pregnant. Various dates between 1474 and 1477 have been proposed for his birth based on ex negativo and deductive arguments. The first document that refers to his existence is the record of a chantry endowment of July 1, 1477, listing him among those to be prayed for. His name points to the possibility that Edward IV was his godfather, but no record of the baptism survives, nor of Anne’s obligatory churching after the birth. Account books reveal that Edward was wet-nursed by Isabel Burgh and later raised by Anne Idley.

Secondly, on the wedding night, this theme deserves an entire separate discussion, but I need to note that the possibility that a bride would engage in first coitus with her husband before the eyes of witnesses has been widely magnified in modern popular literature. (And, just to add a pedagogical tidbit on the same theme — the jus primae noctis or droit du seigneur is also a myth, as is the chastity belt.) Medieval couples were indeed brought to bed by guests at their weddings, and rituals of disrobing and robing and drinking and ribaldry and lewd jokes and gestures certainly accompanied that process — our “throwing the garter” in the West may possibly be a remnant of these practices — but I am unaware of a historical basis for more. Noble weddings by proxy did involve customs that would have required the bride to disrobe partially in front of witnesses. This was especially the case when partners were betrothed by proxy (per verba de praesenti) and a marriage had to be legally consummated before a wedding could be planned. Katharine of Aragon was married in this way in 1502. Upon her arrival in England, she disrobed partially and lay in bed, whereupon a representative of the crown came to her and touched his naked thigh to hers, which constituted a valid marriage. Anne and Richard can hardly have been married by proxy, however.

Finally, regarding Richard’s other issue: Richard had two children apart from his marriage with Anne, and possibly a third. It is not entirely clear that all were born before their marriage, and Penman’s book effectively suppresses the strong likelihood that Richard continued sexual relations outside of his marriage for his entire life. We know that Richard made financial provision for his children, as well as for people who look suspiciously like they might have their mothers. This index points to Richard’s relative generosity, for the illegitimate offspring of the nobility — and their mothers — were rarely treated as well as he did his. He betrothed his daughter, usually called Katherine Plantagenet, to the Earl of Huntingdon in 1484; she married and died in 1487. His son, John (variously of Gloucester; of Pontefract) also had an uncertain birthdate, which could have fallen either before or after Richard’s exile (Penman puts it shortly before). After Anne’s death, John was made Captain of Calais. John lost this job and was pensioned off when Richard was killed at Bosworth and Henry VII came to the throne; John is said by a single historical source to have been imprisoned or executed during the rebellion of Pekin Warbeck. He is thus thought to have died by 1499. Penman’s position that Anne was unusually kind to her child’s half-brother is entirely hypothetical, and to some extent suggestively countered by the datum that John’s elevation in rank came only after her death.

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No silly quiz this week because I have to get on the road.  See you next week for TSIS, Book III, ch. 5-9.

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The Sunne in Splendour Group Read continues on Sunday night at 9 p.m., U.S. East Coast time, and continuing Sunday nights through February.

Directions for veterans of #ArmitageWatch are found here.

Participate via the Institute of Armitage Studies facebook page, here. You can sign up there for a reminder to come and chat on facebook, too.

If you want to sign up for Twitter in order to participate in the chat, but haven’t yet, an explanation of procedures is found at the bottom of this post. The tweetchat “room” for this event will be here.

The chat is free form — come to tweet your impressions, or even a favorite quote from the first five chapters of the book.

~ by Servetus on December 9, 2012.