On This Day In History: Mysterious Death Of White Queen Anne Neville – On Mar 16, 1485

AncientPages.com - On March 16, 1485, Anne Neville, the daughter of Richard Neville, 16th  Earl of Warwick, and Anne Beauchamp, died mysteriously at the age of twenty-eight.

Did tuberculosis cause her death, or was she poisoned?

Anne Neville spent most of her time at Middleham Castle in North Yorkshire with her elder sister Isabel. The young Richard of Gloucester, the youngest brother of King Edward IV, came to Middleham to learn all the social and political skills required by a royal prince. Credits: leestuartsherriff - CC BY-SA 4.0

On June 11^, 1456, Anne Neville was born at Warwick Castle, the younger daughter of Richard Neville, the 16^th Earl of Warwick, and Anne Beauchamp. As a young girl, she spent most of her life at Middleham Castle in North Yorkshire with her elder sister Isabel and Richard of Gloucester, the youngest brother of King Edward IV. He came to Middleham to learn all the social and political skills required by a royal prince. There, he met Anne, but no records of their reaction to each other.

In 1461, Warwick secured the throne for Edward IV and deposed Henry VI (a monarch who became king of England at nine months old, king of France at ten months old, and lost the French throne once and the English throne twice). He married Anne to Henry's young son Edward, but her marriage did not last long. By 1470, he had begun to find Edward intolerable and decided to restore Henry VI to the throne.

Warwick and Prince Edward were killed in the Battle of Tewksbury, one of the decisive battles of the Wars of the Roses. (1471) against Edward IV's army, and thus, Anne lost her father and her husband in one day.

Richard III and Queen Anne Neville – Stained glass window at Cardiff Castle. Credit: VeteranMP - CC BY-SA 3.0

Anne now became a political prisoner. She was taken to the house of Edward IV's brother, George, Duke of Clarence, and his wife, her sister Isabel. George decided that Anne must marry again and so wedded her to his younger brother, Richard, in 1472.

In 1483, Edward IV died, leaving the throne to his young son Edward V, with Anne's husband, Richard, named Lord Protector. Anne was fifteen, Richard eighteen, at the time of their marriage. Richard soon found a way to have his nephew declared illegitimate, took the throne himself as Richard III (a controversial king who plotted and killed to get it), and Anne was crowned with him in Westminster Abbey.

They had a child, Edward, who died suddenly in April 1484, and soon after, Anne died of tuberculosis, aged 28, on March 16, 1485. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, and her grave was unmarked until a bronze tablet was erected in 1960 by the Richard III Society.

According to some rumors, Richard wanted to get rid of Anne and marry his cousin Elizabeth of York, so he was suspected of murder.

In Shakespeare's Richard III, Anne appears as a ghost, tormenting Richard on the eve of the decisive Battle of Bosworth, in which he lost his life.

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Updated on March 7, 2026