She had been married off as a child. Anne of Gloucester wanted her will in English, so that she could read and understand it. At the end of her life, she had instructions of her own.
She died on 16 October 1438, a granddaughter of Edward III who had outlived three husbands and spent much of her adult life holding together an inheritance enlarged by the deaths of people she had grown up with. The wealth was considerable. So was the work of keeping it.
Her father, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, was Edward III's youngest son. Her mother, Eleanor de Bohun, was one of two sisters who had inherited the great Bohun estates. The other sister, Mary, married Henry Bolingbroke, who would later take the throne. Anne grew up at Pleshey Castle in Essex, with royal blood on one side of the family and lands worth marrying for on the other. The Stafford family secured that marriage while she was still a little girl.
Her first husband was Thomas Stafford, Earl of Stafford. He died in 1392, before the marriage had been consummated. The arrangements had allowed for that possibility: if Thomas died, Anne was to marry one of his younger brothers. By 1398 she was married to Edmund Stafford. The bridegroom had changed. The connection between the families had been preserved.
By then her own family had begun to come apart.
In 1397 Richard II had her father arrested at Pleshey and taken across the Channel to Calais. Thomas had opposed the king, and being the king's uncle did not save him. He was murdered in custody. His widow had to wait for Richard to release his body before it could be brought home for burial. A family accustomed to royal grants and royal kinship had discovered how little either guaranteed.
Two years later Anne's brother Humphrey died, followed within weeks by their mother. Her sister Joan died in 1400. Another sister, Isabel, entered religious life. The family inheritance concentrated around Anne, but each change in her position had a person behind it. Her mother's lands and her father's claims were becoming hers while the household in which she had been a daughter and a sister was disappearing.
An inheritance could make a woman immensely wealthy on paper while someone else collected the income. Her father's fall had scattered property into other hands, and reversing his condemnation did not put every estate back where it had been. Anne's family could claim descent from a king. The people who possessed its lands could produce grants from one. Recovering an inheritance meant dealing with both.
Then Edmund died at the battle of Shrewsbury in July 1403, fighting for Henry IV. Their son Humphrey was eleven months old and now Earl of Stafford, with a title and an estate he could do nothing to manage. Anne was a widow for the second time, with a baby's inheritance to protect.
Her next marriage did not wait for the king's permission. She married Sir William Bourchier, a knight rather than an earl, and a royal pardon followed in 1405. The Crown's right to approve the marriage of a wealthy widow reached well beyond any interest in her happiness. A husband acquired influence over her property, and property was a matter on which kings liked to be consulted.
Anne and William had five children who survived to adulthood. Their marriage also brought a partner into the long business of recovering her estates. In 1414 they successfully claimed Oakham, which had belonged to her father before his fall. Seventeen years separated Thomas's murder from that recovery. The family's right had survived him; possession had taken rather longer.
William served Henry V in France and became Count of Eu. He died there in 1420, and Anne would live for a further eighteen years without marrying again. Within a year of his death she was dealing with the king himself. Henry V was Mary de Bohun's son, and so Anne's cousin, and in 1421 he imposed a new division of their grandfather's Bohun inheritance on terms that favoured the Crown.
Holderness, in Yorkshire, took longer still. Through Henry VI's minority the Crown disputed the lordship with her, and she finally secured it in 1437, the year before she died. Royal relatives could be remarkably persistent when there was land involved.
Anne appointed men to conduct that business. In London, on 15 July 1428, she issued a letter making John Harper her steward in Staffordshire. Its parchment survives, with part of her red seal still attached. One half of the shield carries the Stafford chevron. The other carries the arms of England and France with the Bohun lions, and above it all a swan rises with open wings, the badge of her mother's family.
This time, she was making the arrangements.
Her final testament is dated 16 October 1438, the day she died. It provided for burial at Llanthony Secunda, beside Gloucester, where she had already had her tomb made. It also directed her executors to make satisfaction for any wrongs or extortions committed by her that could be duly proved. This was a great landowner settling obligations, with the welfare of her soul bound up in the accounts.
The English she had requested was equally plain about her household. She asked that the women and men who had served her longest and most faithfully, and been little rewarded or not at all, should be helped according to their service and what her executors could afford. There were prayers to provide for and other creditors to satisfy. But among her debts, she had specified who must come first: her servants were to receive their fees and wages before anyone else.
