Elizabeth had wed Grey when she was most likely in her mid to late teens, and bore him two sons, Thomas and Richard. Grey was killed at the Second Battle of St. Albans in 1461, fighting on the Lancastrian side.
On April 30, 1464, Edward IV stopped at Stony Stratford en route to Grafton. There, by the great oak tree (or not), he encountered Elizabeth Woodville, and the following day they secretly wed in the presence of Elizabeth’s mother, a priest (the Dominican Master Thomas Eborall), possibly two other unnamed witnesses, and “a young man who helped the priest sing.” Although many historians believe their marriage probably didn’t take place until August of 1464, May Day is traditionally ascribed to lovers, and the May 1 wedding date has long been part of the story’s lore. Whatever the date, the velocity of the whirlwind romance stunned even the bride. Elizabeth Woodville was now the first English-born queen consort since the eleventh century.
Edward’s union with Elizabeth Woodville was the ultimate mixed marriage. Elizabeth hadn’t merely married a man from a different social caste, she’d wed the sovereign—and not only was she a commoner, but the Woodvilles were stalwart Lancastrians, while the king, the eldest surviving son of the late Duke of York, had deposed the reigning Lancastrian monarch, Henry VI.
It’s said that Jacquetta initially kept the royal marriage a secret from her husband, Baron Rivers. No doubt she had her reasons, but even the bridegroom didn’t feel obligated to mention it to anyone until his Privy Council met in Reading that September to discuss his wedding plans to Bona of Savoy, the sister-in-law to the French monarch—a dynastic alliance that was being brokered by the Earl of Warwick. The earl’s martial prowess and political savvy had helped Edward win his crown (thereby gaining himself the moniker of “kingmaker”). And he was none too thrilled to end up with diplomatic egg on his face after the sovereign’s admission that—oops, sorry!—he was now a newlywed, so it would be in everyone’s best interests to put the kibosh on the Bona situation.
Once his union with Elizabeth Woodville was made known, criticism of Edward’s lopsided marriage was swift and widespread. A Venetian merchant reported that “the greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied at this, and for the sake of finding means to annul it, all the peers are holding great consultations in the town of Reading.”
The peers’ or Privy Council’s reaction to the king’s admission that he couldn’t marry Bona because he was already wed to Elizabeth Woodville is best summarized by the Burgundian chronicler Jean de Waurin: “They answered that she was not his match, however good and however fair she might be, and he must know well that she was no wife for a prince such as himself; for she was not the daughter of a duke or earl, but her mother, the Duchess of Bedford, had married a simple knight, so that she was the child of a duchess and the niece of the count of St. Pol, still she was no wife for him.” Additionally, the council argued that their union served no foreign or domestic diplomatic purpose, and might anger or alienate the King of France.
Furthermore, Elizabeth was a widow with two young sons who would expect preferment commensurate with their new station. The royal marriage would be an expensive one, too, the councilors insisted. The new queen consort had eleven siblings (ten of whom survived to adulthood). They would become the crown’s beneficiaries as well, their social standing elevated to a level appropriate for a king’s in-laws. Brilliant marriages would have to be found for Elizabeth’s sisters and positions at court secured for her brothers.
The Church had a problem with the sovereign’s surprise marriage as well. It tended to be reluctant to bless a second union—even if one party was the king—on the grounds that such marriages were motivated by lust, which in the groom’s case was particularly true. It was a popular theory at the time that death didn’t automatically end a marriage because the spouses would eventually be reunited in heaven. The more pragmatic reason for the Church’s view was that England was a land-based society and property was inherited upon the death of a spouse, so a remarriage threatened the inheritance of any issue from the previous union.
And speaking of children from a prior marriage, Edward’s Privy Councilors also feared that when Elizabeth’s two sons, Thomas and Richard Grey, matured, they might form a rival faction to her heirs by Edward.
Is it any wonder, therefore, that, in the words of the Tudors’ historian Polydore Vergil, the union between Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville was described as an “impolitic and unprecedented” marriage, motivated by “blind affection and not by rule of reason”?
And Edward’s press hadn’t been all that good to begin with. In 1461 he had taken the throne by force from the fanatically religious and half-mad Henry VI, defeating him in a skirmish at Mortimer’s Cross, near Ludlow. While Henry and his warrior-queen, Margaret of Anjou, were campaigning in the north, Edward marched down to London, taking control of the capital and declaring himself king. That same year his Yorkist army wiped out the rest of the Lancastrian forces at the Battle of Towton, and the victorious Edward ascended the throne. By the time he met, wooed, and wed Elizabeth Woodville in 1464, Edward IV had worn the crown for only three years, and in the eyes of many Britons, remained a usurper.
Despite all arguments against the king’s marriage, the fact remained that it was a fait accompli. By virtue of their little wedding ceremony in the woods, Elizabeth Woodville was Queen of England whether the Privy Council, the Earl of Warwick, or any number of scribbling monks who called themselves chroniclers of history liked it or not.
Elizabeth’s coronation took place on Ascension Day, May 26, 1465. The lavishness of the extravaganza made up for the quickie wedding. Allegorical pageants greeted her state entry into the capital as she traversed London Bridge, which had been specially fumigated for the occasion. Edward created thirty-nine new Knights of the Bath in her honor; these men escorted her to Westminster from the Tower, where English queens traditionally spent the night before their coronations. Elizabeth was “clothed in a mantyll of purpull & a coronall upon hir hede.” (Spelling was phonetic at the time and would not be standardized for centuries, which also accounts for alternative spellings of Elizabeth’s maiden name as Wydeville and Widvile.)
At the north door of the monastery Elizabeth was met by the Archbishop of Canterbury. She shed her shoes, entering the abbey barefoot. Once the coronation began, she was given the scepter of the realm to hold in her left hand, and in her right, the scepter of St. Edward. About her was a carmine sea of humanity, with the duchesses and countesses clad in red velvet, and the baronesses attired in scarlet and miniver. After the ceremony, three thousand guests attended the coronation banquet.
At the time—and the bad press filtered down through the centuries—Elizabeth was soundly criticized for promoting the interests of her large family. Her father was made Treasurer on March 4, 1466; that May he was made an earl and the Constable of England for life. Her brothers were ennobled and received lucrative governmental appointments, and her sisters were wed into the highest echelons of the aristocracy. But none of this patronage was out of the ordinary. And the loyalty and competence of Elizabeth’s relations was never called into question. The promotions elevated her family to a status more appropriately befitting a king’s bride, but more important, they bound a number of aristocratic families to the throne. As a newbie who had not inherited the crown through primogeniture, Edward needed all the backing he could get.
Elizabeth spent the better part of the next fifteen years pregnant, bearing ten children—seven girls and three boys—seven of whom survived their father. The gaps in their birth years came when Edward was on the battlefield defending his crown, or on the run from those who sought to snatch it from him.
And such occasions were many. Not long after marrying Elizabeth, the man largely responsible for his attaining the throne grew disillusioned with Edward. The “kingmaker,” Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick, was a relative of Edward’s on his mother’s side. In 1469 he joined forces with Edward’s brother, the
Duke of Clarence, to dethrone him, fomenting uprisings in Yorkshire that spring. Warwick captured Edward with the intention of ruling in his name, but was ill prepared for the minutiae of governing; and holding the king hostage proved to be spectacularly unpopular with the nobles. So Warwick released Edward and the two of them, plus Clarence, reconciled and joined forces to defeat the Lancastrians.
But Elizabeth’s family suffered greatly during the dispute. On August 12, 1469, Elizabeth’s father, Earl Rivers, and Sir John Woodville, one of her brothers, were captured by Warwick’s men and executed outside Coventry. Elizabeth’s mother was accused in absentia of using sorcery to make the king fall in love with her daughter, a charge that never stuck (but would surface again several years later). In any event, by the time Jacquetta Woodville was tried for witchcraft in January 1470, the political landscape had changed and Edward IV had regained his freedom.
However, the renewed partnership between king and kingmaker was short-lived. Clarence and Warwick began to plot anew. Edward and a handful of supporters fled to Burgundy, where they lived in exile. Back in London, a pregnant Elizabeth took sanctuary at Westminster Abbey with their three young daughters, where, on November 2, 1470, she gave birth to her first son, Edward.
Edward IV’s predecessor, Henry VI, was released from the Tower and reclaimed his throne in a period that was known as the Readeption. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was described as “the Queen that was.” But not for long. In the spring of 1471 Edward regained the crown. After the famous Battle of Tewkesbury in which Henry VI’s son, Edward of Lancaster, was slain, Edward IV emerged victorious and triumphantly entered London on May 21.
He acted quickly to secure his position. The very night of his victory, he had Henry VI quietly killed in the Tower. On June 26, 1471, Elizabeth and Edward’s infant son was created Prince of Wales. Twenty months later the boy was given his own household at Ludlow in Shropshire; his affairs were to be managed by a subcommittee empowered to make decisions “with the advice and express consent of the Queen.”
In 1475, when Edward departed England to engage in a new phase of the Hundred Years War, he appointed the four-and-a-half-year-old Prince of Wales as Keeper of the Realm; but the king wrote a will in which he named his “derrest and moost entierly beloved wiff Elizabeth the Quene” as his primary executor, and stipulated that she should keep the worldly goods he had not otherwise bequeathed to holy orders. Edward IV might have been a serial philanderer, but he did take excellent care of his wife and seemed to be very proud of her. Throughout their marriage, Elizabeth and Edward were very close and he evidently sought, and listened to, her counsel.
The fifteenth-century chronicler Dominic Mancini wrote that the king had fallen in love with her because of her “beauty of person and charm of manner.” Edward respected Elizabeth tremendously and probably loved her deeply, but she was far from the only woman in his life. The chronicler Gregory remarked that even before his clandestine marriage to Elizabeth, “men marveled that [he] was so long without any wife, and were ever afraid that he had been not chaste of his living.”
By all accounts Elizabeth always behaved with queenly dignity during her husband’s frequent infidelities. It was a wise move. We can guess that there were few fusses and recriminations, because they surely would have been documented if people had been privy to them. Elizabeth’s tolerance endeared her all the more to Edward, and in this way until his death she was able to maintain her hold over him where it counted. Evidently, her charms continued to attract him, since she gave birth to their tenth child in 1480 at the age of forty-three.
On April 9, 1483, after a brief unidentified illness, Edward IV died in his bed at Westminster at the age of forty. During the last years of his reign, he had grown monstrously obese and was a slave to every kind of gluttony and excess, or “fleshy wantonness,” as his contemporaries graphically phrased it. They attributed his downfall as a monarch to his amorous temper—from his insistence on the marriage to Elizabeth Woodville to his bevy of mistresses, some of whom also bore him children. At the time of his demise the “goodly personage . . . princely to behold, of visage lovely, of body mighty, strongly and cleanly made,” resembled Jabba the Hut.
His funeral was conducted at Westminster Abbey on April 17 and he was interred in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor three days later.
Genial, but never gullible, Edward had gained political mileage from delegating authority to those he could trust regardless of rank, yet was swift to yank it away when it was abused. To some, he did the unthinkable by ordering the judicial murder of his brother, the Duke of Clarence, in 1478—but Clarence had twice raised an army against Edward and continued to plot against him with the intention of snatching the crown for himself.
Upon Edward’s death, his oldest son, not yet thirteen years old, became Edward V; and by the terms of the late king’s will, his younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, once his ally and seneschal in the north, was named Protector. While ostentatiously assuring everyone of his fealty to the boy king, Richard immediately and ruthlessly began to eliminate anyone that stood between himself and the throne, creating phony treason plots and arresting the alleged perpetrators—among them, Elizabeth’s brother, now Earl Rivers, and her younger son by her first marriage, Lord Richard Grey.
Richard conveyed Edward V to the Tower, ostensibly to await his coronation, and promised Elizabeth he would personally guarantee the safety of the boy’s younger brother, ten-year-old Richard, Duke of York, if she would send the child to him. Elizabeth didn’t trust Richard as far as she could spit, but she decided it was safer to acquiesce than to rebel.
Richard imprisoned both boys in the Tower. Then he executed Rivers and Grey. But in order to legitimately claim the crown, he had to delegitimize others. So he sought to have Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth declared invalid on the grounds that before the late king met Elizabeth, he had entered into a precontract with a young widow named Lady Eleanor Butler. A precontract was considered as binding as an actual marriage, rendering any subsequent union bigamous unless the precontract was sundered. It was said that Lady Eleanor Butler had done the same thing as Elizabeth Woodville; that is, she held out for marriage before agreeing to sleep with Edward. Although Lady Eleanor Butler had died in 1478, Richard dredged up the cleric who had been present at the precontract and had him testify to its existence. Richard also renewed the charges of witchcraft against Jacquetta Woodville, who had died in 1472, claiming that she had used sorcery to enchant the late king into marrying her daughter.
The matter of the precontract with Lady Eleanor Butler was the only issue that was awarded any serious credence. Yet, during Edward’s lifetime no one had ever questioned the validity of his marriage to Elizabeth or the legitimacy of their children, or doubted that their firstborn son was the true Prince of Wales. However, if the royal children were retroactively declared bastards, there would be only one Yorkist claimant to the throne still standing, and that was—surprise!—Richard, Duke of Gloucester.
On June 25, 1483, in a formal document issued by Parliament known as the Titulus Regius, Elizabeth’s marriage to Edward IV was declared null and void—which meant that all of their children were illegitimate, and therefore barred from inheriting the throne. Elizabeth was deprived of the title of Queen Mother, to be known thereafter simply as Dame Elizabeth Grey.
Elizabeth had little choice but to pretend to back Richard. By now he had custody of her two sons, who were languishing in the Tower. Her efforts to covertly raise troops against him were unsuccessful. For a time she lived in sanctuary with her daughters, but Richard convinced her to return to court, assuring her that no harm would come to any of them and vowing to arrange for good marriages for the girls—provided everyone behaved themselves—which meant turning a blind eye to anything he chose to do.
On June 26, 1483, the Duke of Gloucester usurped the throne, proclaiming himself Richard III. Edward V and his younger brother Richard were “progressively removed from men’s sight,” accordi
ng to Dominic Mancini, and by the autumn of 1483 they were never seen or heard from again.
For two years Richard managed to withstand all rebellions against him propagated by Lancastrian forces, but on August 22, 1485, he was defeated in the Battle of Bosworth, struck down by the Welsh-born Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who claimed the throne as Henry VII. Henry had been a lifelong supporter of the Lancastrian claim to the throne. His subsequent marriage to Elizabeth and Edward’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York—whom he relegitimized, along with her siblings—united the feuding houses of York and Lancaster and, with the denouement of the Battle of Bosworth, finally ended the Wars of the Roses.
Elizabeth Woodville spent the last five years of her life at Bermondsey Abbey, dying on July 8, 1492, at the age of fifty-four or fifty-five. On June 10, her body was conveyed by boat to Windsor, and her modest wooden coffin was interred on top of Edward’s lead-encased one in St. George’s Chapel.
She may not be a household name, but Elizabeth Woodville’s fame is far-reaching—scant degrees of separation from some of the most famous royals in Britain’s history. Not only was Elizabeth the first commoner in centuries to become Queen of England, she was the mother of the two princes in the Tower, whose purported remains now repose in Westminster Abbey; the sister-in-law of Richard III; the grandmother of Henry VIII (and his older brother, Arthur, to whom she stood as godmother); the great-grandmother of Mary I and Elizabeth I; and the great-great-grandmother to two beheaded queens, Mary, Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Grey. As grandmother to Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret, who wed the King of Scotland, Elizabeth Woodville’s blood infused the Stuart line, and eventually wended its way through the Hanovers down to the current ruling family of England, the Windsors.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 4