Richard and Anne were cousins, and companions from childhood. Their union had been a happy one in their hospitable Yorkshire home. In all the important events of his life Richard had always had the companionship of his wife. They had been together in sorrow and in joy. Anne's illness was a lingering decline, during which she was assiduously watched and cared for by her physicians, and by her sorrowing husband, who deeply mourned her loss. She was buried, as a Queen, in Westminster Abbey. It is true that no writer has done more than insinuate this calumny. But most of the Tudor slanders take the form of insinuations. 'It is a charge,' wrote Sir Harris Nicolas, 'which is deserving of attention for no other reason than as it affords a remarkable example of the manner in which ignorance and prejudice sometimes render what is called history more contemptible than a romance.' The same may be said of most of the Tudor stories about Richard III. [Sidenote: Elizabeth of York] The rumour that King Richard had an intention of marrying his illegitimate niece Elizabeth is {229} unsustained by any evidence,[30] and is contrary to all probability. Such a project would have stultified the Act of Parliament on which his title to the crown was based. The King was a politician and was not entirely deprived of his senses. He could not have entertained an idea so absurd. But there is evidence that the scheme was favoured by the girl herself and her mother, and this fully accounts for the existence of the rumour. Their ages were suitable, the King being thirty-two and his niece in her twenty-first year; and in a letter to the Duke of Norfolk Elizabeth expressed a strong wish to become the wife of her uncle.[31] The {230} Church of Rome granted, and still grants, dispensations for such marriages. But, be this how it may, Richard himself can never have contemplated a marriage with his niece. 'The whole tale,' says Sir Harris Nicolas, 'was invented with the view of blackening Richard's character, to gratify the monarch in whose reign all the contemporary writers who relate it flourished.' As soon as the rumour came to Richard's ears he publicly and emphatically denied its truth. [Sidenote: Intrigues of Lady Stanley]