And Afterwards …
For those who have read The Queen and the Countess and wish to know what happens next …
Queen Margaret’s story came to its sad end before the final pages of The Queen and the Countess. Margaret lived in France for seven years as a poor relation of the King where she died impoverished in his castle of Dampierre-sur-Loire, near Anjou on 25 August 1482 at the age of 52. She was entombed next to her parents in Angers Cathedral but her remains were removed and scattered by revolutionaries who ransacked the cathedral during the French Revolution, leaving no remains.
Her husband King Henry VI was already dead in dubious circumstances and her son and only child, Edward of Lancaster, was dead after the battle of Tewkesbury.
Margaret left no direct family. The claims to the English throne passed into the hands of Lady Margaret Beaufort and eventually her son Henry VII as the first Tudor king after the Battle of Bosworth.
Not so for Anne Beauchamp, the Countess of Warwick, in the immediate years when she was living in semi-confinement in Middleham Castle under the close jurisdiction of her daughter Anne Neville and her husband Richard the Duke of Gloucester.
In April of 1483, when King Edward IV suddenly died, Richard became Lord Protector of Edward’s son, declared king as Edward V, but in June Richard declared Edward IV’s children illegitimate, and made himself king as Richard III. Anne Neville and Richard III were crowned in July, and their small son Edward made Prince of Wales.
There is no record that the Countess participated in any of these events to any degree, so she probably was not part of them although she was now mother to the Queen of England. Her history fades into the shadows.
The newly-declared Prince of Wales, Edward of Middleham, died in 1484, leaving Richard III without any direct heirs. Anne Neville, by some accounts always sickly, died in 1485. Richard of course died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1458.
This left Anne Beauchamp with no children and only two grandchildren surviving: Isabel Neville’s son Edward and his older sister Margaret. She was still dispossessed of all her land and income. She continued to petition for their restoration.
Anne Beauchamp’s fortunes changed again when in 1487, King Henry VII partially restored to Anne her lands and a pension, and rescinded the 1474 Act of Parliament that took away her lands and treated her as if she were dead. As a condition of her restoration, she signed over the lands to revert to the crown at her death.
Anne lived until 1492 and was buried at Bisham Abbey where the Earl of Warwick had also been buried with the rest of his family. After the Reformation and the Dissolution of the monasteries, these Neville tombs no longer exist.
Anne’s grandson, Edward Plantagenet, son of George Plantagenet and Isabel Neville, inherited the title of 17th Earl of Warwick, though he was kept prisoner in the Tower of London as a potential threat to the Tudor king. In 1499, he was accused of plotting with the pretender Perkin Warbeck, tried, and beheaded for treason. He too was buried at Bisham Abbey.
Anne Beachamp’s granddaughter Margaret, Countess of Salisbury in her own right, was married in 1487 to a cousin of Henry VII, Reginald Pole. She was a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon, mother of five, including Reginald Pole, the last Roman Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, an opponent of Henry VIII’s separation of the Church of England from the Church of Rome. Margaret was executed in 1541 by Henry VIII.
Thus the Neville-Beauchamp line through the Earl and Countess of Warwick came to an end.
