Daughter of the emperor Charles IV and first wife of Richard II: a peacemaking queen whose early death in 1394 broke her husband, and whose Bohemian connections linked England to Prague in the age of Wycliffe and Hus.
Anne of Bohemia was queen of England from 1382 to 1394 as the first wife of Richard II. The daughter of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Bohemia, and sister of the emperor Wenceslaus and of Sigismund of Luxembourg, she was chosen to seal an alliance against France during the Great Western Schism, and she came without a dowry: Richard's council instead lent her brother money.
The marriage turned out to be close, and her reputation as a merciful intercessor for rebels, Londoners and condemned men made her popular. Her death at Sheen in 1394, childless at twenty-eight, is often seen as the point after which Richard's rule grew erratic and vindictive.
Anne was born in Prague on 11 May 1366, the eldest daughter of Charles IV and his fourth wife, Elizabeth of Pomerania, and grew up in the cosmopolitan court of Charles's rebuilt Prague, with its new university and cathedral. Her marriage was negotiated in 1380–1381 by English envoys looking for allies for Pope Urban VI against the antipope supported by France. She landed at Dover in December 1381 and married Richard at Westminster Abbey on 20 January 1382, when both were fifteen.
English chroniclers were at first cool towards a foreign bride who brought no dowry; the Westminster chronicler, weighing what she had cost, called her a tiny scrap of humanity. They came to praise her piety and gentleness, and the most consistent theme in their accounts is intercession: she begged pardons for rebels of the Peasants' Revolt at her coronation, and her pleas for the citizens during Richard's quarrel with London in 1392 were staged as public ceremonies of reconciliation.
Her religious interests were those of the Luxembourg court, and she is said to have owned the Gospels in several languages, a point later cited by Wycliffite writers as proof that a queen could read scripture in her own tongue. Contacts between her household and Prague helped carry John Wycliffe's writings to Bohemia, where students who had studied at Oxford brought them home and Jan Hus read them.
Anne was crowned two days after her wedding and became part of Richard's inner circle. She travelled with him constantly, and unlike some earlier queens she did not bring a large foreign household that stirred resentment, though later writers blamed the Bohemian ladies in her train for new fashions at court. During the crisis of the Lords Appellant in 1388 she reportedly knelt for three hours before the earl of Arundel to beg for the life of Richard's former tutor, Sir Simon Burley, and failed.
Anne died suddenly at Sheen Palace on 7 June 1394, probably of plague. Richard was so stricken that he ordered the manor at Sheen demolished, and at her funeral in Westminster Abbey he struck the earl of Arundel with a staff for arriving late and asking to leave early. He commissioned a double tomb with gilt-bronze effigies of king and queen by the London coppersmiths Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest, whose hands were originally joined.
Anne's death removed a moderating influence from Richard's court, and many historians trace to it the king's turn towards the arbitrary rule of his last years, which ended with his deposition in 1399. Her Bohemian marriage left a longer trail: the movement of Wycliffe's ideas to Prague, where they fed the reform movement that became the Hussite revolution.