Anne Mowbray was born with a fortune and married to a king’s son before she could read properly. She died at eight. Five centuries later a digging machine broke into her grave in the East End, and the first people to see her coffin were building workers who rang the newspapers.
The Horror
Anne was born on December 10, 1472, at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk, the only surviving child of John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. Her father died in January 1476, when she was three. That made her the heiress to one of the largest estates in England, and the crown took charge of her lands.
Edward IV had a younger son, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. On January 15, 1478, in St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster, Anne, aged five, married Richard, aged four. The marriage needed a papal dispensation. Popular retellings say this was partly because the pair were distant cousins, which is unconfirmed. The point of the match was plain enough. A bride who was a wife could not be given to anyone else, and her inheritance stayed in the royal family. Historians generally describe it as a political arrangement, and the sources do not say otherwise.
It did not last. Anne died at Greenwich on November 19, 1481, a few weeks short of her ninth birthday. No source records the cause. When her coffin was opened centuries later, the skeleton showed no sign of disease, which tells us nothing about a fever or a childhood infection that leaves no mark on bone. She was buried in Westminster Abbey in the chapel of St Erasmus, which her mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, had recently built.
The marriage had one more consequence. After her death an Act of Parliament in January 1483 gave her estates to Richard. A few months later he and his brother, the boy king Edward V, were in the Tower of London. They were not seen again. The child bride was gone before the child groom disappeared, and the Abbey did not keep her for long.
The Legend
Popular retellings of this story often end by suggesting that Anne’s remains could one day help identify the bones of the Princes. This is unconfirmed. She was Richard’s wife, not his blood relative, and no source says her remains hold any genetic key to his. What can be said is narrower. Two juvenile skeletons found in the Tower in 1674 are often assumed to be the Princes, but this has never been proved. The 1933 examination of them was unsatisfactory by modern standards, and any fresh identification would need modern analysis, which requires the sovereign’s permission. Treat the DNA link as the story’s most appealing tradition, not as established fact.
The Modern Relic
Around 1502 Henry VII had St Erasmus’s chapel demolished to make way for his new Lady Chapel. Anne’s coffin was moved to a vault beneath the church of the Minoresses of St Clare, a convent near Aldgate. The Abbey’s own page says Stepney, while Wikipedia says the abbey was ‘without Aldgate’. Whatever the exact address, the convent was dissolved and built over, and the coffin was forgotten.
On December 11, 1964, workmen clearing the site broke into a brick vault about eleven feet down. The Abbey says her name was on a coffin plate. The LAMAS article adds that a Latin inscription was wrapped around the top half of the lead coffin, which was about 1.43 metres long. The workmen telephoned the press and posed for photographs with it. The police, suspecting it was old, took it to Leman Street station. From there Dr Francis Celoria of the London Museum took it away in his Land Rover.
Popular accounts describe her as remarkably preserved. The sources are more cautious. There was no body tissue, and organic preservation was very poor except for the hair. The skull was nearly complete, and the hair was red. LAMAS notes that the coffin had probably been punctured centuries earlier, possibly during the move in 1502, and that Celoria’s wider programme of study was cut short by legal difficulties. Examination took place at Guy’s Hospital Medical School.
On May 31, 1965, she went back to the Abbey. The Dean of Westminster allowed her reburial in the north-east apsidal chapel of the Lady Chapel, “as near as could be found to the original site of her burial”. One source describes the same place as the Duke of Buckingham’s Chapel at the east end of Henry VII’s chapel. These are probably the same chapel, though this is unconfirmed. A popular retelling adds that she lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber on the way, but nothing reliable supports it.
You can still find her. A new stone records her dates and lineage, though it is often covered by a portable organ. Within a few feet are the bones in the marble monument that are believed, though never proved, to be the Princes. The Abbey notes this itself. The girl who was married into the family and the boys who were lost from it now lie close together.
