The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family

by Higginbotham, Susan

  With ‘great pomp and splendour and in no small exaltation of mood’, York arrived in October at Westminster Palace, where Parliament had assembled. As one observer wrote:

  [H]e made directly for the king’s throne, where he laid his hand on the drape or cushion, as if about to take possession of what was his by right, and held his hand there for a brief time. At last, withdrawing it, he turned towards the people and, standing quietly under the cloth of state, looked eagerly at the assembly awaiting their acclamation. Whilst he stood there, turning his face to the people and awaiting their applause, Thomas Bourchier Archbishop of Canterbury arose and, after a suitable greeting, enquired whether he wished to come and see the king. The duke, who seemed irritated by this request, replied curtly, ‘I do not recall that I know anyone in the kingdom whom it would not befit to come to me and see my person, rather than I should go and visit him.’ When the archbishop heard this reply, he quickly withdrew and told the king of the duke’s response. After the bishop had left, the duke also withdrew, went to the principal chamber of the palace (the king being in the queen’s apartments), smashed the locks and threw open the doors, in a regal rather than a ducal manner, and remained there for some time.82

  Despite the lack of enthusiasm engendered by his bid for the throne, York would not give up so easily, and even began planning his coronation. Dissuaded, he instead submitted his claim to Parliament, which by 31 October had hammered out an arrangement under which York would replace Henry’s own son, the 8-year-old Edward of Lancaster, as heir to the throne. York would receive castle, manors, and lands worth 10,000 marks per annum, part of which would be shared with his first and second sons, Edward, Earl of March, and Edmund, Earl of Rutland. Nothing was reserved for Henry’s own son, although it may have been intended that he be allowed to succeed to the duchy of Lancaster upon his father’s death. The Act of Accord, as it was called, required York, who was older than the king, to swear that he would do nothing to cut short Henry’s natural life, but did provide for the eventuality that Henry might abdicate.83

  The Act of Accord also authorised York to suppress ‘rebellions, murders, riots, looting, extortion and oppression’ – the unnamed source of such troubles being Henry’s own queen. Hearing of her husband’s capture at Northampton, Margaret had fled with Prince Edward into Wales, from where she contacted Somerset and her other allies. With every reason to fear for her son’s safety if he fell into Yorkist hands, she resisted Yorkist attempts to lure her to London.84

  As King Henry adjusted to this new state of affairs, Margaret’s forces assembled minus Margaret herself, who had travelled to Scotland to seek aid. York went out with his own forces to oppose them. On 30 December 1460, his dreams of the throne ended at Wakefield, where he was killed in battle by forces led by Somerset. The Lancastrians (as it is now most convenient to call them) ordered that the dead duke be decapitated and that his head be placed at Micklegate Bar in York. As a finishing touch, York’s severed head was decked with a paper crown.

  There had been a notable absence at Wakefield: York’s 18-year-old heir, Edward, who had been engaged elsewhere, probably in the Welsh march. He now took up his father’s cause. In early February, he defeated Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, Henry VI’s younger half-brother, at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross. This Yorkist victory was quickly followed by a Lancastrian triumph at St Albans. King Henry, who had been dragged along to the battle by the Earl of Warwick, was reunited with his wife and young son. The most significant Lancastrian casualty at St Albans was Sir John Grey, who had been married to Richard and Jacquetta’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth. The death of this luckless knight would have undreamed-of consequences three years later.

  Yorkist propaganda had painted a lurid picture of Margaret’s army as a horde of barely civilised northerners set on wholesale destruction of the civilian population.85 With Margaret encamped at St Albans, the nervous Londoners were taking no chances. They appointed Jacquetta, the Duchess of Buckingham, and Lady Scales to join a delegation sent to Margaret to beg for mercy for the city – a service which would be remembered with gratitude some years later.86

  What Jacquetta and the other ladies said to the queen is unrecorded, but Margaret promised to leave the city unharmed. Tragically, from her point of view, she chose not to enter it at all, save for a token force. Instead she returned to the north, leaving London to throw its gates open to the charismatic Earl of March. On 4 March 1461, the earl, just a month short of his 19th birthday, took his seat in Westminster as King Edward IV.

  The new king promptly led an army northward to confront the queen’s forces. With them by now were Lord Rivers and his son Anthony, who at some unknown point had either escaped or been freed from Calais. On 30 March 1461, in blinding snow, the armies met at Towton. According to the Burgundian chronicler, Waurin:

  Edward had scarcely time to regain his position under his banner when Lord Rivers and his son with six or seven thousand Welshmen led by Andrew Trollope, and the Duke of Somerset with seven thousand men more, charged the Earl of March’s cavalry, put them to flight and chased them for eleven miles, so that it appeared to them that they had won great booty, because they thought that the Earl of Northumberland had charged at the same time on the other flank, but he failed to attack soon enough, which was a misfortune for him as he died that day. In this chase died a great number of men of worth to the Earl of March who, witnessing the fate of his cavalry was much saddened and angered: at which moment he saw the Earl of Northumberland’s battle advancing, carrying King Henry’s banner; so he rode the length of his battle to where his principal supporters were gathered and remonstrated with them.87

  Snow blowing into the faces of Lancastrian troops, good generalship by Edward, and the timely arrival of fresh troops led by the Duke of Norfolk resulted in a Yorkist victory, but at a terrible cost to both sides. By the time the battle and the ensuing rout ended, anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 men lay dead, some on the snow-covered fields, others in the waters of the River Wharfe. Towton would be the bloodiest battle fought on English soil.

  The Lancastrian royal family, Somerset, and a few others, fled to Scotland, while the triumphant Edward IV took the time to send a letter to his mother. William Paston II, who was allowed to read the letter when it reached the Duchess of York, reported that Anthony, Lord Scales – that is, Anthony Woodville – was among the dead.88 Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury, also reported that Anthony had fallen in battle, while Prospero di Camulio, Milanese Ambassador to the Court of France, claimed that Lord Rivers had escaped to Scotland with Henry and Margaret.89 In fact, Anthony was very much alive, and if Lord Rivers ever made it to Scotland, he did not stay there. On 31 July, Giovanni Pietro Cagnola reported, ‘I have no news from here except that the Earl of Warwick has taken Monsig. de Ruvera and his son and sent them to the king who had them imprisoned in the Tower’. This seems unlikely, because before this letter was written, Lord Rivers and Anthony had already made a decision that many other followers of Henry and Margaret made after the slaughter at Towton: they offered their allegiance to the new king. Lord Rivers received his pardon on 12 July 1461, while Anthony’s came on 23 July. A third pardon was issued on 8 February 1462 to Anthony’s younger brother Richard.90 On 30 August 1461, Count Ludovico Dallugo, a recent visitor to England, wrote to Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan:

  The lords adherent to King Henry are all quitting him, and come to tender obedience to this king, and at this present one of the chief of them has come, by name Lord de Rivers, with one of his sons, men of very great valour. I held several conversations with this Lord de Rivers about King Henry’s cause, and what he thought of it, and he answered me that the cause was lost irretrievably.91

  The Woodvilles, once loyal Lancastrians, were now loyal Yorkists. In December 1462, Anthony was among Edward IV’s forces besieging Alnwick Castle, held by the Lancastrians.92

  With the Lancastrian army reduced to a handful of impoverished exiles, Edward set about consolidating his regi
me. He had another concern as well. For it is a truth universally acknowledged, that an unattached young king must be in search of a wife.

  The King and the Widow

  In September 1464, King Edward IV, one of the most eligible bachelors in Europe, informed his council at Reading that he had married. As the councillors waited, no doubt expecting to hear that the king had at last contracted himself with a foreign princess, the king told them that he had married an Englishwoman. The councillors’ jaws dropped, and the king in turn dropped his final bombshell: his new bride was no duke or earl’s daughter but Dame Elizabeth Grey, the widowed daughter of Lord Rivers and Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford.

  For most people in medieval England, years of birth, much less days of birth, were not recorded, and Elizabeth Woodville was no exception. We have only one source for her birth year: a portrait labelled ‘Elizabeth Woodville’, supposedly dating from 1463 and giving its sitter’s age as 26. This would put Elizabeth’s year of birth in 1437, the same year her parents were fined for their marriage. The 1437 date is plausible, then, but John Shaw’s suggestion that the painting was made in 1463 by the king’s own painter, John Stratford, is highly unlikely.1 First, as Frederick Hepburn has pointed out, this and other extant paintings of Elizabeth appear to be derived from a lost original, so we cannot know what any original label, if there was one, said.2 Had Elizabeth been on such terms with King Edward in 1463 that he was having her portrait done, she would have hardly needed to ask his friend Lord Hastings for help in 1464, as we shall see later. The possibility that Elizabeth or her parents commissioned the portrait is even more unlikely, given Elizabeth’s straitened circumstances in 1463 and the fact that portraiture in England was very much in its infancy. It seems far more likely that someone labelling the portrait years later (with the modern spelling of ‘Woodville’) simply was mistaken in his recollection of when Elizabeth became Edward’s queen. Thus, while a birth date of 1437 certainly cannot be ruled out, the portrait is not a reliable source, and it is just as likely that Elizabeth was born somewhat later. As for her traditional birthplace of Grafton, given the uncertainty of her year of birth and her father’s responsibilities abroad, it is possible that she was born on another one of her family’s properties or even in France.

  Beyond her first marriage, little is known of Elizabeth’s youth. Both Edmund Hall and Sir Thomas More, writing in the sixteenth century, claimed that Elizabeth had served Margaret of Anjou as one of her ladies.3 At first glance, this appears to be confirmed by the records. An Isabel, Lady Grey, was among the English ladies sent in 1445 to escort Margaret to England,4 and an Elizabeth Grey, in her capacity as one of the queen’s ladies, received jewels from the queen in 1445–46, 1446–47, 1448–49, 1451–52, and 1452–53.5 ‘Isabel’ and ‘Elizabeth’ were often used interchangeably during this period, and it is possible that young Elizabeth Woodville had married her first husband, John Grey, as a child and thus was already known as Elizabeth or Isabella Grey. It is unlikely, however, that the lady named in Queen Margaret’s records was the Lancastrian queen’s successor. Little Elizabeth would have been a mere child in 1445–46, and therefore rather young to serve in the queen’s escort or to receive jewels from the queen. It is far more likely that the person referred to in Queen Margaret’s records is Elizabeth, ‘late the wife of Ralph Gray, knight, daily attendant on the queen’s person’, who received a protection on 27 June 1445. Alternatively, Elizabeth Grey could be Elizabeth Woodville’s own mother-in-law.6 It is still possible that Elizabeth did indeed serve Margaret, of course, given the favour her parents enjoyed with the queen, but it is more likely that she did so in the late 1450s, a period for which Margaret’s household records do not survive.

  A story associated with Elizabeth’s youth but now largely discredited is that at some point, she was solicited by both Richard, Duke of York, and Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, to marry a Hugh John, who was in favour with the two noblemen. As George Smith has pointed out, however, the letters appear more likely to have been directed to a prosperous widow, Elizabeth Wodehille, than to the similarly named Elizabeth Woodville. Moreover, as David Baldwin notes, had Elizabeth Woodville been the prospective bride, the matchmaking duke and earl would have approached her father, not young Elizabeth herself.7

  Like the date of her birth, the date of Elizabeth’s first marriage is unknown. Her spouse was John Grey, the son of Edward Grey, Lord Ferrers of Groby, and his wife, Elizabeth. Sir John Grey was aged 25 or more at the time of his father’s death in 1457, putting his birth year at around 1432 and making him a few years older than his bride.8 According to John Grey’s 1464 inquisition post-mortem, Thomas Grey, John Grey’s eldest son by Elizabeth Woodville, was 13 or more in 1464, which would put his birth date at 1451, but a 1492 inquisition post-mortem, that of his uncle Richard Woodville, names him as being 37 and more, putting his birth date at around 1455. The latter date seems more probable, in light of this document dated 8 January 1455:

  Letters patent from Richard, Duke of York, Earl of Ulster, Lord of Wigmore and Clare that Richard Castleford, cousin and heir of Richard Castleford, clerk has sworn in his presence that release made of manor of ‘Mew & Gyngjoyberdlaundry [Buttsbury]’, Essex to Edward Gray, Lord Ferrers, for the settling of a jointure on the son of Lord Ferrers and the daughter of Lord Rivers, is to be disavowed if found to be to the prejudice of Edward Ferrers of Tamworth.9

  As jointure arrangements were being made for Elizabeth in January 1455, it is probable that she had recently married John Grey or was about to marry him, which would coincide neatly with a 1455 birth date for their first son. This boy was duly followed by another, Richard, whose birth year is unknown.

  John Grey’s death at the second Battle of St Albans in 146110 left his young widow in difficult straits. Her mother-in-law, Lady Ferrers of Groby, had married Sir John Bourchier and was balking at the prospect of allowing Elizabeth to enjoy her jointure of 100 marks, consisting of the manors of Woodham Ferrers in Essex and Brington, and New Bottle in Northampton. Elizabeth and her father were obliged to go to chancery to recover her jointure, and apparently succeeded.11

  Elizabeth also had the inheritance of her oldest son, Thomas, to safeguard, and this proved a more difficult task, so much so that Elizabeth needed assistance. Although her father had been made a member of Edward’s council in 1463,12 the erstwhile Lancastrian must not have been sufficiently influential to be of much help. Elizabeth, therefore, chose a much more powerful ally: William, Lord Hastings, Edward IV’s long-time companion and close friend. On 13 April 1464, Hastings and Elizabeth agreed that her eldest son, or his younger brother in the event of Thomas Grey’s death, would marry one of Hastings’s as-yet-unborn daughters or nieces. If any lands formerly belonging to Sir William Asteley, Sir John Grey’s late great-grandfather, or any of the inheritance of Lady Ferrers of Groby was recovered for Thomas or Richard Grey, half of the rents and profits while Thomas or Richard was under the age of 12 was to belong to Lord Hastings, half to Elizabeth. Lord Hastings was to pay Elizabeth 500 marks for the marriage, but if both of Elizabeth’s sons died or there was no female issue on Hastings’s side, Elizabeth was to pay Hastings 250 marks.13 J.R. Lander described the arrangement as a ‘very hard bargain’ from Elizabeth’s point of view.14

  The arrangement never came to fruition, however, because soon Elizabeth had an even more important ally: Edward IV himself. When Edward and Elizabeth had first met is unknown. It is possible, but purely speculative, that they might have encountered each other on social occasions at court, one possible occasion being the Loveday festivities, when Elizabeth’s brother Anthony jousted before Henry and Margaret. The Burgundian chronicler, Waurin, claimed that it was Edward’s infatuation with Elizabeth which led to her father’s and brother Anthony’s pardon in 1461, while Caspar Weinrich, writing from Danzig, claimed that Edward fell in love with Elizabeth ‘when he dined with her frequently’.15 Thomas More, writing years after the fact, claimed that Elizabeth met Edward when she petitione
d him to have her jointure returned to her.16 The traditional, and virtually unshakeable, story has it that Elizabeth, knowing that Edward was hunting nearby, took her two sons and waited under an oak tree in the forest of Whittlebury. When the king came across this affecting tableau of the widow and her little boys, Elizabeth knelt at his feet and begged for the restoration of her children’s inheritance, winning the king’s heart in the process.17

  Wherever and however the couple met, both the king and Elizabeth would have liked what they saw. Dominic Mancini describes Edward as captivated by Elizabeth’s ‘beauty of person and charm of manner’, while the author of Hearne’s Fragment wrote of her ‘constant womanhood, wisdom and beauty’.18 Her portraits, even if all copies of an original, amply bear out contemporary descriptions of her good looks, although no more than broad generalisations about her appearance were recorded by her contemporaries. Even her hair colour is uncertain. The chronicler, Hall, writing years after her death, refers in passing to her ‘fair hair’, which is difficult to confirm from the sliver of hair visible in Elizabeth’s portraits.19 Manuscript illustrations invariably show Elizabeth as a golden blonde, but as J.L. Laynesmith has noted, queens were generally depicted in this manner.20 What can be dismissed is the famed description of Elizabeth’s ‘silver-gilt’ hair: this appears to be the invention of the novelist Josephine Tey, whose fanciful description was picked up by subsequent novelists and even by popular historians.21