STONES, BONES & KINGS: THE WORLDS OF AUTHOR J.P. REEDMAN

 Today in history, Anne Mowbray was born to John Mowbray Duke of Norfolk and his wife Elizabeth Talbot, sister to the infamous Eleanor who may have been the secret wife of Edward IV. She was the only child of the couple so a great heiress and after her father died in 1476, King Edward decided to marry her to his younger son, Richard of Shrewsbury. The small children were wed in St Stephen’s chapel at Westminster, accompanied by Richard, Duke of Gloucester ( future Richard III) and Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham (future headless traitor) and Anne joined the Queen’s household. Unfortunately Anne died in November 1481, which meant all the inheritance went to her young widower as per the rather unusual terms of the marriage contract. (Edward’s dealings with Elizabeth Talbot, were, well, rather complicated.)

Anne’s story should have ended there…but it did not. She was buried in Westminster in the new chapel of St Erasmus, built by Elizabeth Woodville. But some years later, when Henry Tudor became king, he decided to make a massive chantry for his own burial, and destroyed St Erasmus’ chapel and Anne’s tomb. There was no provision for a reburial, so her mother Elizabeth, now a resident in the convent of the Minories, had to come a claim her little lead coffin. She took it to the nuns, who reinterred the little princess in a stone vault in the abbey.And there her coffin became lost during the destruction of the Reformation and subsequent generations of building and rebuilding.

Then in 1964, men working on clearance of a bombsite discovered an underground vault, and inside it Anne’s lead coffin. They didn’t know what to do at first, and hauled it out using the digger. From there it was taken to a police station, where contact was made with the coroner who said the coffin had to be reburied in a mass pit if unclaimed in several days. One policeman was suspicious that this was not just a medieval nun’s coffin and called the museum, who came to collect the artefact shortly after.

I have written a short novel, set in both 1964 and in late medieval and Tudor times about Anne, her mother, Edward IV, and Anne’s burial, disinterment, reburial, finding and analysis on her remains…followed by reinterment in her first burial site in Westminster Abbey.

PRINCESS IN THE POLICE STATION, a dual timeline novel by J.P. Reedman about Elizabeth Talbot & daughter Anne Mowbray, child-bride of one of the Princes in the Tower, whose coffin was found in an underground crypt in London in 1964. #kindleunlimited #historicalfiction. 

https://mybook.to/annemowbray