Anne Mortimer, Countess of Cambridge

Anne de Mortimer (27 December 1388 – c. 22 September 1411) was a medieval English noblewoman who became an ancestor to the royal House of York, one of the parties in the fifteenth-century dynastic Wars of the Roses. It was her line of descent which gave the Yorkist dynasty its claim to the throne. Anne was the mother of Richard, Duke of York, and thus grandmother of kings Edward IV and Richard III, and great-grandmother of Edward V and Elizabeth of York.

Early life

Born 27 December 1388, Anne de Mortimer was the eldest of the four children of Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March (1374–1398), and Eleanor Holland (1370–1405). She had two brothers, Edmund, 5th Earl of March (1391–1425), and Roger (1393–1413?), as well as a sister, Eleanor.

Her father was a grandson of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, second surviving son of King Edward III of England, an ancestry which made Mortimer a potential heir to the throne during the reign of the childless King Richard II. Upon Roger Mortimer's death in 1398, this claim passed to his son and heir, Anne's brother Edmund, Earl of March. In 1399, Richard II was deposed by Henry IV, of the House of Lancaster, making Edmund Mortimer a dynastic threat to the new king, who in turn placed both Edmund and his brother Roger under royal custody.

Anne and her sister Eleanor remained in the care of their mother, Countess Eleanor, who, not long after her first husband's death, married Lord Edward Charleton of Powys. Following their mother's death in 1405, the sisters fared less well than their brothers and were described as "destitute", needing £100 per annum for themselves and their servants.