Anne Neville, Queen of England, daughter of the Kingmaker, widow of the forgotten prince, tends to get reduced to a footnote as Richard III’s wife, but her story is far more complicated than that.
She was the younger daughter of Richard Neville, the so-called “Kingmaker”, and grew up right in the middle of the chaos of the Wars of the Roses. By the time she was still very young, she had already seen her father switch allegiances, watched fortunes rise and collapse, married the Lancastrian heir, lost him after a brutal battle, and found herself at the centre of a scramble over her inheritance.
In this episode of Dead People Talking, we trace Anne’s path from her father’s powerful household to the English throne. Along the way, we’ll look at the shifting alliances of the period, the Wars of the Roses, the circumstances around her marriage to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and what the surviving evidence actually tells us about her life.
Women in history are often forced behind a foggy pane of glass in which the sharper details of their lives become blurry and ill defined in the aftermath of male written records. Anne experienced some of the most momentous and tragic events in English history yet she is almost totally forgotten. Lets correct that today. Let’s take a closer look at the records, the rumours, and the gaps in between to get a better sense of who Anne Neville really was.
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