Anne de La Tour d'Auvergne

Anne de la Tour d'Auvergne
Countess of Auvergne
A contemporary portrait of Anne de la Tour d’Auvergne
Spouse(s)	John Stewart, Duke of Albany
Noble family	La Tour d'Auvergne
Father	John III, Count of Auvergne
Mother	Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme
Born	1496
Died	1524 (aged 28)

Anne de La Tour d'Auvergne (1496–1524) was sovereign Countess of Auvergne from 1501 until 1524, and Duchess of Albany by marriage to John Stewart, Duke of Albany. In her marriage contract, she was called 'Anne de Boulogne fille de Jehan Comte de Boulogne et Auvergne.'

She was the eldest of two daughters born to Jean III of la Tour d'Auvergne and Jeanne of Bourbon. Her younger sister was Madeleine de La Tour d'Auvergne, who would marry Lorenzo II de' Medici and become the mother of Catherine de' Medici. As the elder daughter, Anne was her father's heiress.

Her father's sister was Jeanne de la Tour d'Auvergne, d.1510, wife of Aymar de Poitiers. Aymar de Poitiers and Jeanne de la Tour d'Auvergne were the grandparents of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henry II, King of France.

On 13 July 1505, she married her first cousin John Stewart, Duke of Albany, the intermittent heir presumptive to the Kingdom of Scotland and its sometime-regent, who lived in France as a sort of exile.

Anne died in 1524 at her castle of Saint-Saturnin, leaving her inheritance (the feudal county of Auvergne) to her infant niece, Catherine de' Medici (born 1519), daughter of her late younger sister Madeleine and Lorenzo II, Duke of Urbino.

A manuscript detailing Anne's inheritance, with pictures of her castles in Auvergne, and her descent from the legendary Belle Moree, daughter of a Pharaoh, survives in the Royal Library of the Hague. The Bibliothèque nationale de France has another manuscript version of this fabulous genealogy, and a similar inventory of Auvergne castles made for Catherine de' Medici. Anne and the Duke of Albany were painted in a stained-glass window at Vic-le-Comte.