Richard, Anne and Sex
Mary Purnell
For how much they are said to have loved each other, it’s curious that Richard and Anne never had a child. Of course, infertility is a possibility; but after only three years of marriage, Richard named Roger Mortimer his heir. Three years is a rather short period for a couple to confirm that they cannot conceive. What’s more is that during this time, rumors abounded that Richard was homosexual. While there’s certainly no evidence to prove the idea, neither is there any to disprove it. What we do know is that, after Anne’s death, Richard “consciously chose a bride with whom he could not hope to have sexual relations for some years” in Isabella of Valois (Hilton, 283), who was six at the time.
There’s little mention of the king’s sexuality in Richard II, which comes as no surprise. But one line has had scholars speculating for years:
There’s little mention of the king’s sexuality in Richard II, which comes as no surprise. But one line has had scholars speculating for years:
(Bolingbroke to Bushy and Green)
You have in manner with your sinful hours
Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him,
Broke the possession of a royal bed,
And stained the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeks
With tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs.
(III.i.11-15)
What could Bolingbroke mean by a divorce, and one that is specifically localized to Richard and the Queen’s bed? Who other than a competitor for her husband’s heart could possess the power to “break” Anne’s marriage, as this passage suggests? Perhaps most perplexing are the phrases, “your sinful hours” and “your foul wrongs.” Deliberately vague, their meanings are made even murkier with the nondescript possessive pronoun, “your.” Does Bolingbroke just mean Bushy’s and Green’s sinful hours and foul wrongs? Or is he including Richard’s character in that “your,” as well?
It’s all speculative – everything from the real Richard’s sexual preferences to this one’s. But if we indulge ourselves in the act of speculation, and assume that, perhaps, the real Richard did have male lovers, what would that say about his reportedly loving marriage with his wife? If they were as happy as they were and did not in fact engage in sexual activity, then actually, they are the poster children for a pure, unadulterated Platonic love.
However, motherhood was very important to the real Anne of Bohemia, and she devoted much of herself to helping expectant mothers. Furthermore, Lisa Hilton posits that she identified closely with her namesake saint. Soon after marrying Richard, she petitioned to the pope that extra attention be paid to the celebration of Saint Anne’s Feast (282). Saint Anne was popular in the Middle Ages among childless women. She and her husband were barren, and she prayed every day until an angel came and told her that she was to have a child. When she told her husband the happy news, as the fourteenth and fifteenth century priest John Mirk puts it, she exclaimed, "I was baren and now I schal have a chyld; I was in woo and wepyng, and now I schal ben in joye and lykyng" (Sermon of the Conception of the Virgin Mary, 43-44).
This division between joy and woe, defined by the presence or absence of a child, may well describe how Queen Anne felt about her own childless state. This, while nothing more than hypothesis, would suggest either that it had become immediately clear that the couple was infertile (which is improbable), or that something else was getting in the way of consummating the marriage.
Whichever it was, it did not go unnoticed by Shakespeare. In the play, some of the Queen’s lines carry strong images of childbirth and fertility. As she tries to articulate a melancholy she cannot put her finger on, Green bursts into the room with bad news: the rebellion is beginning. To this Anne replies, “So, Green, thou art midwife to my woe” (II.ii.65). This isn’t the first time that her character has referred to her sorrow as a child, describing it earlier in this scene as “some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune’s womb” (10). Here, she has carried the image of her "child" from the womb, through birth, and then later, into the phase of new motherhood: “And I, a gasping new-delivered mother, / Have woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow joined” (68-69). Childless, the Queen’s sorrow becomes her child, just as the real Anne’s childlessness was her source of sorrow.
It’s all speculative – everything from the real Richard’s sexual preferences to this one’s. But if we indulge ourselves in the act of speculation, and assume that, perhaps, the real Richard did have male lovers, what would that say about his reportedly loving marriage with his wife? If they were as happy as they were and did not in fact engage in sexual activity, then actually, they are the poster children for a pure, unadulterated Platonic love.
However, motherhood was very important to the real Anne of Bohemia, and she devoted much of herself to helping expectant mothers. Furthermore, Lisa Hilton posits that she identified closely with her namesake saint. Soon after marrying Richard, she petitioned to the pope that extra attention be paid to the celebration of Saint Anne’s Feast (282). Saint Anne was popular in the Middle Ages among childless women. She and her husband were barren, and she prayed every day until an angel came and told her that she was to have a child. When she told her husband the happy news, as the fourteenth and fifteenth century priest John Mirk puts it, she exclaimed, "I was baren and now I schal have a chyld; I was in woo and wepyng, and now I schal ben in joye and lykyng" (Sermon of the Conception of the Virgin Mary, 43-44).
This division between joy and woe, defined by the presence or absence of a child, may well describe how Queen Anne felt about her own childless state. This, while nothing more than hypothesis, would suggest either that it had become immediately clear that the couple was infertile (which is improbable), or that something else was getting in the way of consummating the marriage.
Whichever it was, it did not go unnoticed by Shakespeare. In the play, some of the Queen’s lines carry strong images of childbirth and fertility. As she tries to articulate a melancholy she cannot put her finger on, Green bursts into the room with bad news: the rebellion is beginning. To this Anne replies, “So, Green, thou art midwife to my woe” (II.ii.65). This isn’t the first time that her character has referred to her sorrow as a child, describing it earlier in this scene as “some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune’s womb” (10). Here, she has carried the image of her "child" from the womb, through birth, and then later, into the phase of new motherhood: “And I, a gasping new-delivered mother, / Have woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow joined” (68-69). Childless, the Queen’s sorrow becomes her child, just as the real Anne’s childlessness was her source of sorrow.