Anne of Bohemia was fifteen when she came to England to marry Richard II, and twenty-eight when she died. In between she was a queen who is remembered, mostly, for what her husband did after her death. He pulled down the house she died in. Then he spent a fortune on a tomb that, within five centuries, tourists had been quietly emptying of her bones.
The Horror
Anne was born in Prague on May 11, 1366, the sister of Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia. The marriage treaty was made in 1381 and the wedding took place at Westminster on January 20, 1382. Richard’s grief at her death, described below, suggests the marriage mattered to him.
She died on June 7, 1394, at Sheen, the riverside royal residence upriver from London that Richard had made his main home from 1383. She was 28. The cause is not certain. Wikipedia says her death was “believed to have been caused by plague”, and later “perhaps from plague”, and the medieval record does not let us say more than that.
What the sources do agree on is Richard’s reaction. Westminster Abbey’s own account says he was so grief-stricken that he had Sheen demolished. The chronicler Holinshed, writing in the sixteenth century and well after the event, says he “caused it to be thrown down and defaced”. That makes the demolition a reported fact rather than a documented one, and modern summaries repeat it without naming an earlier source. The palace then lay in ruins for almost twenty years. Henry V began rebuilding it in 1414.
The funeral came two months after the death. The Abbey says it was delayed, and one blog says the delay was to give Richard time to prepare. When it was held, on August 3, 1394, it was a spectacle. A wooden effigy of Anne was carried in the procession, apparently the first time this was done for a consort, and its oak head survives in the Abbey’s collection.
The Quarrel at the Funeral
There is also a story of violence at the funeral, and it should be read as such: a story. Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, was one of the lords who had humiliated Richard in the 1380s. He is said to have arrived late and then asked to leave early. Richard, in a rage, seized a wand, or in another version a cane from an attendant, and struck him in the face so that blood flowed inside the Abbey. The service is said to have halted for hours while the earl was treated, the two men were reconciled and the altar was cleansed and reconsecrated, and to have ended at nightfall.
Wikipedia’s article on Arundel gives the first part of this without a citation. The longer account comes from a blog that cites nothing and calls the incident something that “(shall we say) occurred”. No chronicle account has been traced, and the sources do not agree on the weapon. The Earl was executed in 1397, so it is a good story for a man who ended up on the scaffold, but little weight can be put on it.
The Modern Relic
Richard spent a very large sum on the tomb he intended to share with her: £933 6s 8d, according to the Abbey, which describes it as the first double royal tomb in England. It was made between 1396 and 1399 by the masons Henry Yevele and Stephen Lote, with gilt bronze effigies cast by Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest. Richard and Anne lay on it hand in hand. Anne’s effigy carries crowned initials and chained ostriches.
It is still there, in St Edward’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey, next to the tomb of Edward III. The hands are not. They have broken off, and the jewels, the buttons on her dress and the leopard and eagle at their feet have been lost. The statues of saints that stood in niches below have gone too.
Richard did not at first lie in it. He was deposed and died elsewhere, and only in 1413, according to the Abbey, was his body moved to Westminster to join Anne’s. Where he was first buried is unconfirmed.
The worst of it came later. The base of the tomb once held enamelled shields. When they fell away they left holes, and visitors found they could put their hands inside. When the tomb was opened in 1871, most of Anne’s skeleton was gone. The Abbey’s account says visitors had taken the bones through the hole in the side. Dean Stanley, who arranged what remained, put it back in order. Wikipedia says only that “many of her bones had been stolen”.
The version of this story that goes around says a Westminster schoolboy took part of Richard’s jawbone in 1776 and that it was returned by a descendant in 1906, and that scraps of Richard’s coffin were found in a cigarette box in the National Portrait Gallery. Neither detail is confirmed, and the Abbey’s page does not mention the jawbone, so both are offered here only as something that is told.
At Richmond the other half of her memorial is a lawn. The palace of Sheen stood roughly where the garden of Trumpeters’ House is now, between Richmond Green and the Thames. Henry VII’s later palace replaced it, and its Gate House, Wardrobe and Trumpeters’ House are the parts of the Tudor complex that survive. The medieval house that Richard destroyed for love of her has no walls left to stand in front of. The tomb has the hole.
