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Historical person

Anne Neville

1456–1485

Anne Neville was the younger daughter of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the powerful magnate remembered as the “Kingmaker”, and Anne Beauchamp. Her childhood was inseparable from the dynastic struggles of the Wars of the Roses. In 1470, when Warwick temporarily allied with the Lancastrians against Edward IV, Anne married Edward of Westminster, the only son of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou. She was widowed after Edward was killed following the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.

Anne later married Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Edward IV’s brother, and lived with him chiefly in northern England. Their only surviving child, Edward of Middleham, died in 1484. When Richard seized the throne as Richard III in 1483, Anne was crowned queen beside him at Westminster Abbey. Her own political agency is difficult to reconstruct because the evidence is sparse and filtered through later dynastic narratives. She died at Westminster in March 1485, only months before Richard was defeated and killed at Bosworth.

Sarah Gristwood’s Blood Sisters and Alison Weir’s Queens at War place Anne Neville among the women whose marriages, inheritances and family loyalties shaped the Wars of the Roses. Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour follows Anne from the Kingmaker’s household into marriage with Richard of Gloucester and queenship beside Richard III. Philippa Gregory’s The Kingmaker’s Daughter tells the conflict more directly through Anne and her sister Isabel, while Jean Plaidy’s The Reluctant Queen focuses on Anne’s movement from political pawn to consort during the final Yorkist crisis.

Periods

Periods linked to Anne Neville

Wars of the Roses1455–1487 CE

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Anne Neville (3 series)

The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels in Order

by Philippa Gregory 16 books 4.4(140,052)

The Plantagenet and Tudor novels form a chronological sequence of connected but independently readable stories about women near the English throne. They move from the Lancastrian court and the Wars of the Roses through the rise of the Tudors, Henry VIII’s marriages, the mid-Tudor religious crisis and the…

All books in this series

A Queens of England Novel in Order

by Jean Plaidy 11 books 3.9(21,484)

The Queens of England novels dramatise the lives of royal women from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Queen Victoria. Each volume concentrates on a queen, consort or claimant whose marriages, loyalties and private ambitions were inseparable from dynastic politics, religious conflict and the exercise of monarchy.

All books in this series

York Family Novels in Order

by Anne Easter Smith 6 books 4.1(16,252)

The York Family Novels are six overlapping biographical novels about the House of York during the Wars of the Roses and the opening of Tudor rule. Each book centres on a different historical or lightly documented figure—Kate Haute, Margaret of York, Grace Plantagenet, Cecily Neville, Jane Shore and…

All books in this series

Standalone books

Standalone books featuring Anne Neville (3 books)

Non Fiction

Non Fiction featuring Anne Neville (2 books)

Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.