Authors: Lisa Hilton
Thou shalt, where thou livest, year by year
The most part of thy time spend
In making of a glorious legend
Of good women, maidens and wives,
That were true in loving all their lives.
It seems obvious to identify the God and Queen of Love with Richard and Anne — the god, like the King, has golden hair — but the comparison has been disputed. It has been suggested that Alcestis may have been intended as a compliment to Joan of Kent but, leaving aside the fact that the Fair Maid was dead when the poem was written, the inventory of the royal jewels in 1499 presents new evidence that Alcestis is a tribute to Anne of Bohemia. The inventory features a crown enamelled in red and blue with white enamel flowers, red and blue gems and pearls. Its origins are uncertain, and the workmanship may be French, but the crown was used as part of the dowry of Henry IV’s daughter Blanche of Lancaster on her marriage to Ludwig of Bavaria in 1401, and it has been associated with collars that were certainly Anne’s. The detail of the white flower is the key. Isabelle de Valois, Richard’s second wife, was presented with two crowns after her marriage in 1396, one of which was decorated with jewels, pearls and white daisies. During the negotiations for the marriage,
Isabelle was referred to as ‘our young marguerite, our precious stone, our beautiful white pearl’.
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Pearls and daisies were potent iconographic symbols beautiful white pearl of purity and innocence, highly appropriate for a young bride. Given the uncertainty as to when the crown was acquired and its provenance, it is possible to posit that it was made for Isabelle, but this would be to neglect its similarity to the crown in the poem. Alcestis is described as wearing
A fret of gold next her hair
And upon that a white crown she bear
With flowers small, and I shall not lie
For all the world, right as a daisy
Crowned is with white leaves light
So were the flowers of her crown white.
The image is extended so that the Queen of Love’s whole body appears as a daisy, in a green dress with ‘the white ‘wered crown’ on her head. The ‘F’ version of the prologue was written in Anne’s lifetime, and Chaucer, who spent a long period as a servant of the court, would have had the opportunity to see her wearing such a crown. The daisies in the crown suggest that he did, strengthening the case for Anne as the model for Alcestis (and potentially an involvement with the commissioning of the poem), and indicating that the crown given to Queen Isabelle was passed on from Anne’s possessions.
Anne imported more to England than shoes and jewels. Her literary activities place her within the tradition of culturally innovative queens. The extent and influences of Richard’s artistic patronage is still a matter of dispute, as has been noted, but there is no doubt that his reign encompassed one of the most important periods in English literature, a blossoming in which Anne played a small but significant part.
She is credited with introducing Bohemian craftsmanship in the field of manuscript illustration, specifically with regard to the
Liber Regalis
, the manual for royal coronations produced at Westminster m 1383 whose illuminations have been identified as Bohemian work. Bohemian influence has also been proposed in the Great Missal of Westminster (1384) and the Carmelite Missal made for the London Whitefriars in J 393. Anne’s badge, an ostrich crowned and chained (ironically, far more appropriate to her husband), appears in the margin, and the work of the second master of the Missal, one of three artists who worked on it, is very similar to that of the
Liber Regalis
illuminator. The extent of Bohemian influence on English art in general is, again, a matter of debate, but even if the
Liber Regalis
represents an exception, it is an extremely significant one.
Vernacular literature, especially religious literature, had been strongly linked with English queens since Matilda of Scotland commissioned the French version of’The Voyage of St Brendan’ for her ladies’ enjoyment. Anne’s father, the Emperor, had been an active patron of religious works in Czech and German. By the fourteenth century, queens’ traditional patronage of literature can be linked with another important dynamic of queenship, that of Marianism. Increasingly, the Virgin was depicted by artists as a keen reader, even leafing through a book on the back of the donkey as she flees with Joseph and Jesus to Egypt. The first such image appears in the eleventh century, and they were common by the fourteenth. Symbolically, the literacy of the mother of God celebrated her wisdom and her fitness to receive in her body the Word made flesh, and it is notable that a rise in the numbers of women book-owners through the period corresponds with the growth of portrayals of the Virgin reading, both a model for and a reflection of daily life. In a fourteenth-century annunciation painting, the Bohemian Master of Vissi Brod shows Mary seated at a table with two books before her.
Anne came from a part of Europe where the law specifically linked women with the transmission of culture, ‘especially lay religious culture’.
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In the early thirteenth century, a collection of Saxon customary laws was produced with reference to the ‘Sachsenspiegel, an area of land stretching from Magdeburg, the first capital of the Holy Roman Empire, into modern Russia. ‘The Way of the Saxons’ sets out which objects are to be inherited by women, including geese, linens, kitchen utensils — and books, particularly those concerned with religious practices. As Anne had been educated in a place where women’s role in trans-generational religious inheritance was official and vernacular religious texts had the support of the highest lay authority, Charles IV, and at a time when women’s reading was increasingly associated with the Virgin, a powerful symbol for queens, it is unsurprising to find that she brought with her to England the New Testament in Latin, Czech and German, and that translations of the Gospels were made for her in English, perhaps as an aid to her education in the language. Her commitment to pious reading was celebrated at her funeral, as was her desire to overcome her foreignness ‘so great a lady and also an alien would so lowlily study in virtuous books’, praised Archbishop Arundel.
Yet Anne’s English gospels also involved herin a theological controversy that contained some of the seeds of the Protestant Reformation. John Wycliffe, the Oxford theologian, promoted and translated the Bible in the
vernacular, and his project is connected (though not to be conflated) with Lollardism, the movement that called for reform of the Church and emphasised the authority of faith rather than the worldly hierarchies of Rome. Accessible translations of the Bible were considered heretical by many, but not by Anne. When Wycliffe petitioned in favour of his translation in 1383, he observed: ‘It is lawful for the noble Queen of England the sister of the Emperor to have the Gospel written in three languages … and it would savour of the pride of Lucifer to call her a heretic for such a reason as this! And since the Germans wish in this matter reasonably to defend their own tongue, so ought the English to defend theirs ‘
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The Lollards seized on Archbishop Arundel’s commendation of Anne’s possession of the English texts in a tract published in 1407. It is not absurd to claim that this royal example endorsed a movement which was to come to its revolutionary fruition in the time of the next Queen Anne.
The connection between piety and literature also had a deeply personal significance for Anne of Bohemia. Soon after her arrival in 1382, she sought papal permission for greater solemnity in the celebration of the feast day of her namesake St Anne, the mother of the Virgin. In the early fifth century, St Jerome had highlighted the important role of mothers in teaching their daughters to read. ‘Have a set of letters made for her … and tell her their names … let her every day repeat to you a portion of the Scriptures as her fixed task.’ Reading the scriptures, Jerome explained, was the best way to prevent girls from wasting their time in idle pursuits, or succumbing to the vanities of the flesh. Alongside the growing tendency to portray the Virgin reading, the fourteenth century popularised depictions of St Anne teaching her daughter. Anne of Bohemia’s veneration of the saint could be associated with her own longing to bear a child, as St Anne and her husband Joachim had waited twenty years before being so blessed. Anne’s petition to the Pope at the time of her marriage could possibly suggest that she felt an affinity with St Anne, believing she would wait a long time for a child because her marriage was not consummated.
This is speculation. There is absolutely no evidence that Richard and Anne did not enjoy a normal sex life and only some reason to suspect the opposite. In his lifetime, Richard was accused of homosexuality. He identified with his great-grandfather Edward II, and the same analogy was made politically at the end of his reign when Adam Usk’s chronicle accuses him of’perjuries,
sacrileges, sodomitical acts
, the reduction of his people to servitude, lack of reason and incapacity to rule’ (the italics are this author’s), though, as in the case of Edward, this does not necessarily mean he
committed homosexual acts — sodomy was a politicised perversity, used as grounds for unfitness. Richard liked the company of women, in fact the cost of the retinues of his female courtiers was a source of complaint, but he also enjoyed passionate friendships with men, particularly Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Such friendships, again, do not necessarily indicate homosexuality (indeed, De Vere proved himself inconveniently straight). However, a persistent accusation levelled against Richard was that he was childlike. Obviously, he had come to the throne as a child, but such observations dogged him to the end of his reign, and he may have encouraged them in cultivating infantile appearance. If it is dabbling in psycho-history to theorise that Richard preferred loving, romanticised friendship to mature sex, it is notable that in his second wife, a six-year-old girl, he consciously chose a bride with whom he could not hope to have sexual relations for some years. Given that his relationship with Anne was childless, the need for an heir by 1396 was imperative, yet he chose to ignore it. Possibly Richard was infertile, which might account for the fact that, as far as is known, he had no illegitimate children, but there is some evidence that he was committed to chastity. In the hauntingly exquisite Wilton Diptych, the double-panelled painting that is one of the artistic glories of his reign, Richard’s arms are impaled with those of Edward the Confessor, suggesting that, like the saint, he had rejected sex for a spiritual marriage with his country. This, and the marriage with Isabelle de Valois, may have been connected with his grief for Anne, as the diptych was made in 1395, a year after her death, but it is certainly possible that his first marriage was also electively chaste.
There is another reason to suspect that Richard had little hope of a child from his marriage to Anne. By 1385, the Scots were causing trouble again. Their allies, the French, were menacing English ships in the Channel and the northern marches were subject to yet more raids. That summer, at York, Richard called out the final feudal force ever to be summoned in England. It was one of the greatest armies ever seen in the country, and the last to include fighting priests. Edinburgh was taken, but little else was achieved beyond the siege of Stirling Castle and the destruction of a few religious houses. The campaign did quell unrest on the border for three years but, despite Froissart’s sycophantic assurances that Richard had achieved more than the Black Prince or Edward III, it was neither an answer to Edward II’s dismal rout at Bannockburn nor a challenge to Edward I’s conquests in the north. In a gesture that attracted comparisons with Edward II’s promotion of Piers Gaveston, Richard elevated Robert de Vere to Marquess of Dublin on his return, but more significantly, in
terms of his marriage and the future of England, he named eleven-year-old Roger Mortimer as his heir.
Queen Anne was nineteen in 1385. She and Richard had been married just three years. Why would Richard make such a pessimistic statement so publicly? The rumours of John of Gaunt’s ambitions for the throne had not abated in the decade since Richard’s coronation. As Edward III lay dying at Havering, he had naturally been troubled by the question of the succession. If his grandson were to die, which branch of the royal family would have the better claim? Should the English crown pass through the heirs general, in which case the succession would belong to Philippa, the daughter of Edward Ill’s second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, or through the heirs male, in which case it would go to Gaunt as the third son? Philippa Plantagenet had married Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March and, in 1385, Richard declared his support for the heirs general argument by naming Philippa’s son Roger. The transmission of a claim via a woman was one Edward himself had endorsed; it had been the foundation for his bid for the French crown through his mother Isabella, and a reversion to the Salic law of heirs male as practised in France would effectively undermine the English position in the Hundred Years War. However, at the end of 1376, Edward attested a letter patent entailing the crown in the male line, with only a remainder to the heirs general. According to this document, the house of Lancaster, not Mortimer, stood to inherit if Richard had no children.
Richard’s statement naming Mortimer may have been a stalling tactic. As well as promoting his friend De Vere, Richard raised his two other royal uncles, Edmund of Langley and Thomas of Woodstock, to the dukedoms of York and Gloucester, a move that diluted the preeminence of Gaunt as the only royal duke. Gaunt was still unpopular, and Richard needed to curb his aspirations. This may also have been the motivation for his support of Gaunt’s attempt on the throne of Castile. Walsingham asserted that John had petitioned Parliament for a confirmation of the entail to heirs male, but this did not prevent him from claiming the throne of Castile in right of his second wife, Constance. Richard acknowledged this claim on his return from Scotland and in March 1386 placed him at his own right hand and declared he should be addressed as King. Gaunt departed to fight for his Spanish kingdom that July, remaining abroad three years. Richard had therefore done what he could to neutralise a potential Lancastrian threat, and in this context his naming of Mortimer can be seen as part of a tactical pattern. Yet why was he seemingly so certain he would not have children himself? In January 1394, when Anne
was still living, Richard permitted his close friend Thomas Mowbray to use the crest of a crowned leopard, a badge traditionally reserved for the eldest son of the king. The use in the grant of the pluperfect tense
‘st quern procreassemus
‘if we had begotten the same’
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has been highlighted as evidence that Richard accepted his childless condition. Officially, the subject was taboo — ‘Who is it that dares to suggest that the King will have no issue?’ asked Parliament the same year — but it is possible that Richard himself knew that he would not. By 1394, it could of course have become apparent that Anne was unable to bear a child, but no such diagnosis could have been conclusive in 1385. So it is plausible that Richard and Anne did not consummate their marriage, and that Anne, like her namesake saint, continued to hope for a miracle.