Anne Woodville

Anne Woodville, Viscountess Bourchier (c. 1438 – 30 July 1489) was an English noblewoman. She was a younger sister of Queen consort Elizabeth Woodville to whom she served as a lady-in-waiting. Anne was married twice; first to William Bourchier, Viscount Bourchier, and secondly to George Grey, 2nd Earl of Kent. Anne was the grandmother of the disinherited adulteress Anne Bourchier, 7th Baroness Bourchier, and an ancestress of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex.

Anne was born in about 1439 at Grafton Regis, Northamptonshire, the second eldest daughter, and one of the fourteen children of Richard Woodville, 1st Earl Rivers and Jacquetta of Luxembourg. Her elder sister was Elizabeth Woodville who would become Queen consort of King Edward IV of England.

Anne's paternal grandparents were Sir Richard Wydeville and Joan Bedlisgate, and her maternal grandparents were Peter I of Luxembourg, Count of Saint-Pol, Conversano and Brienne, and Margaret de Baux.

In 1466, two years after her sister Elizabeth's secret marriage to King Edward, and one year after her coronation, Anne became one of Queen Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting, receiving forty pounds a year for her services.

Sometime before 15 August 1467, Anne married William Bourchier, Viscount Bourchier, the son and heir of Henry Bourchier, 1st Earl of Essex, and Isabel of York.

Anne's was just one of the many advantageous marriages Queen Elizabeth shrewdly arranged for her numerous siblings with eligible scions of the most aristocratic families in the realm; a scheme which was done with the purpose of augmenting her family's power, prestige, and wealth. This blatantly ambitious, self-seeking policy of the Queen consort deeply antagonised the old nobility and House of Commons against the entire Woodville family. One of the most formidable enemies of the Woodvilles was Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, a former Yorkist supporter who switched his allegiance to the Lancastrians following King Edward's marriage to Elizabeth. In 1469, Warwick ordered the execution of Anne's father, Earl Rivers and her brother, John. They had both been taken prisoner when the King's army was defeated by Warwick's forces at the Battle of Edgecote Moor.