by Lisa Hilton
Edward IV was crowned at Westminster on 28 June, three months after Towton. Marguerite, Henry and Prince Edward were now in Scotland, from where, in April, Marguerite had made good her promise of giving up Berwick, which did nothing for her popularity even among Englishmen who were sympathetic. In fact, one of Marguerite’s greatest disadvantages had been her inability to understand the consensual structure of English society, particularly the vital role of the gentry in the shires whose support was essential to the crown in times of need. It was these lesser men, rather than great magnates like Warwick or Somerset, who were embittered by the local unruliness and financial instability that had threatened them throughout the 1450s, and Marguerite had alienated them from the beginning by her aggressively partisan approach. The recent wars had not been expressly fought to get rid of Henry, but many people were glad to see the back of Marguerite. She had also gained a bloodthirsty reputation, however undeservedly, and her mishandling of her northern troops had terrified many potential loyalists into the Yorkist camp.
However, Marguerite is to some extent a victim of hindsight. Just as Suffolk had been made the scapegoat for the disastrous losses of the 1440s, so Marguerite was blamed for her husband’s shortcomings. If Henry were to be a saintly figure, pious, humble and unworldly, then it was necessary for someone to take the responsibility for the whole mess of his reign, and many writers chose the traditional option of chercher la femme. Marguerite may not have been possessed of brilliant understanding but she was ‘a great and intensely active woman, for she spares no pains to pursue her business towards an end and conclusion favourable to her power’.14 Moreover, unlike many of her contemporaries, such as her former chancellor Laurence Booth, who now became confessor to the new King, she had remained staunchly loyal to the cause of her husband and son. She had been dealt a dud hand with Henry, and perhaps, like Suffolk, should be ‘given credit for taking on an impossible job’.15 Undaunted, she continued to battle for her rights for the next decade.
CHAPTER 17
ELIZABETH WOODVILLE
‘Neither too wanton nor too humble’
In July 1461 the new King set off on progress, to show himself to the people and emphasise his regal authority. Pausing to hunt in the forest of Whittlewood near Grafton in Northamptonshire, Edward met a young widow, Lady Elizabeth Grey, née Woodville, whose husband had died fighting for the Lancastrians at St Albans. Lady Grey had apparently deliberately thrown herself in the King’s path to beg for the restoration of her husband’s lands to provide for their two small sons. Thomas More later imagined the meeting: ‘This poor lady made humble suit unto the King that she might be restored unto such small lands as her late husband had given her in jointure. Whom when the King beheld and heard her speak, as she was both fair and of a good favour, moderate of stature, well made and very wise, he not only pitied her, but also waxed enamoured on her. And taking her afterward secretly aside, began to enter in talking more familiarly.’1
Beauty is a difficult quality to draw out from the evidence of medieval chroniclers, who attributed it to most women of high birth and particularly to many queens. Elizabeth Woodville seems to have been possessed of the genuine article, a feature her contemporaries found unsettling and for which she was rewarded and punished in equal measure. Even allowing for the stilted artistic style of the period, her portrait at Queens’ College, Cambridge is captivating, the delicacy of the mouth and chin contrasting with the large, dark, sensuous eyes, her blonde hair gathered beneath an elaborate headdress.
Though the sylvan meeting of the King and the ravishing supplicant owes a good deal to local legend, there is no doubt that Edward was utterly smitten. Elizabeth was beautiful enough for him to defy his mother, the Duchess of York, his chief commander, Warwick, and his council in order to possess her.
Elizabeth’s marriage to Edward IV was that extraordinary thing, a love match. It initiated a series of problems within the already tangled skein of ambition and political loyalties that knotted into the Wars of the Roses. It also created an ambiguous perception of the Queen and her family which persists until the present day. Was Elizabeth a low-born adventuress who promoted the interests of the Woodville family at the expense of the nation, or a passionately loyal wife who showed exceptional fortitude and skill in surviving two political revolutions to ensure the final survival of the Yorkist dynasty? Elements of both interpretations are periodically valid; perhaps neither Elizabeth’s accusers nor her apologists have fully taken her measure as an individual in exceptional circumstances, in exceptional times.
Elizabeth was one of fifteen children born to Jacquetta, the dowager Duchess of Bedford, and her second husband, Sir Richard Woodville. The status of her family was one of the principal sources of objection to her marriage to Edward in the ‘lethally competitive’2 world of the fifteenth-century aristocracy. Traditionally the Woodvilles have been depicted as minor country gentry, living unostentatiously on their estates at Grafton in Northamptonshire, but a minimally attentive look at Elizabeth’s ancestors proves that this was far from being the case. Her mother, Jacquetta, was the daughter of Pierre, Count of St Pol, Conversano and Brienne, and Marguerite, daughter of Francesco de Balzo, Duke of Andrea in Apulia, who claimed descent from Charlemagne. Admittedly, her paternal lineage was of no particular distinction among the European aristocracy of the time, but the Counts of St Pol, on her mother’s side, were one of the most prestigious houses in Europe, as evinced by the magnificent marriage Pierre arranged for Jacquetta who, in 1433, married Henry V’s brother John, Duke of Bedford. Thus for two years, until Bedford’s death, Jacquetta was England’s second lady after her sister-in-law, Queen Catherine, and she was permitted to use her royal title until the end of her own life.
If Sir Richard’s ancestors were not quite so illustrious, they could hardly be termed obscure. They had held their land in Northamptonshire since the twelfth century and Richard’s father had served Henry V as an esquire of the body and Henry VI as seneschal of Normandy He was knighted on Palm Sunday 1426 in the same ceremony as Edward IV’s father, the Duke of York. Another post, the one that brought him into Jacquetta’s orbit, was chamberlain to the Duke of Bedford during his captaincy of Calais. When Jacquetta was widowed, she was granted her dowry in February 1436 on condition that she did not marry again without Henry VI’s permission. Nevertheless she and Richard married in a clandestine ceremony the same year and the couple were forced to ask for a royal pardon, which they received in October 1437, the year of Elizabeth’s birth, subject to a huge fine of 1,000 pounds, which Jacquetta raised by selling property in the west country to Cardinal Beaufort. The circumstances of her parents’ marriage are interesting when compared with Elizabeth’s own story. Jacquetta and Richard were prepared to defy royal authority to marry, and did so in hurried secrecy. That they were pardoned so quickly suggests the King held them in high regard, and the fact that the dower agreement, marriage and the granting of the pardon took place in such a short space of time indicates that Richard and Jacquetta truly loved each other, that they took a serious gamble, and that they won.
The Woodvilles continued to be closely associated with the court. Isabel, Jacquetta’s sister, was aunt by marriage to Marguerite of Anjou and in 1444 Richard and Jacquetta had formed part of the new Queen’s escort to England. In 1448 Richard was created Baron Rivers, and in 1450 made a knight of the Garter. Jacquetta and Queen Marguerite exchanged those politically charged New Year gifts, with Jacquetta receiving jewellery from Marguerite to welcome her in 1452. It has been strongly mooted that Jacquetta’s eldest daughter also held a position among the Queen’s ladies, and that Edward IV, then Earl of March, first saw her at the Reading Parliament of 1454. The interpretations of the subsequent conduct of both queens differs if they are believed to have known one another well, but the evidence that Elizabeth had a role at court is not definitive.
Both Thomas More and Hall’s Chronicle concur that Elizabeth waited on Marguerite which, given their access to eyewitness
accounts and Jacquetta’s position, seems highly probable, but it is not absolutely certain. At the age of about seven, Elizabeth had been betrothed to John Grey, son of Sir Edward Grey of Groby and his wife, Lady Ferrers, and, as was customary, went to live with her groom’s family at their home in Leicestershire. In 1452—3 there are references to ‘Isabelle Domine Grey’ and ‘Domine Elizabeth Grey’ as holding the post of lady-in-waiting and receiving gifts of jewellery. Elizabeth was fifteen at the time and not yet married, so it seems odd (though not unheard of) that she should be described by her future husband’s name. Moreover, the references might well relate either to John Grey’s mother, another Elizabeth, or to Elizabeth the widow of Ralph Grey, who appears as an attendant in 1445. The opinion of a recent biographer of Elizabeth (the italics are this author’s) that ‘the adolescent Edward … surely observed more than political ceremony at the various court affairs. Among the Queen’s attendants, the sophisticated Elizabeth … must have ignited Edward with all the passion typical of adolescent boys3 seems rather optimistically romantic. It is possible that Elizabeth Woodville served Queen Marguerite, but there is as yet no direct proof that she did so and, given the calumnies heaped on her for her lack of royal connections, it seems odd that her contemporary supporters do not mention it.4
From the first, Elizabeth’s relationship with Edward was controversial. If their meeting is correctly placed in 1461, then the idea of Edward’s marriage as ‘impulsive’5 must be dismissed, as it did not take place until May 1464. Edward already had a reputation as a ladies’ man. He was gloriously attractive, with the Plantagenet height, strawberry-blond hair and an impressively honed physique. With his good looks, his position and his appetites, he was already something of a connoisseur of beautiful women, and he was not accustomed to rejection. As Thomas More tells the story, he tried to seduce Elizabeth, but when she presented him with a dagger and begged him to kill her rather than despoil her honour, his desire was even more inflamed. Reports of this version of the incident were spread as far as Milan, but even if Elizabeth had defended her virtue so passionately, it seems unlikely that she would have had the energy to do so for three years. Her detractors also seized on the story, claiming she played at virtue to push Edward into marriage (a tactic that later worked most effectively for Anne Boleyn, the mother of Elizabeth’s great-granddaughter). Edward himself acknowledged this controversy by keeping his marriage secret for four months, not announcing it until a council meeting at Reading in September. The ceremony had been witnessed only by Jacquetta, Elizabeth’s mother, the priest and a clerk to sing the office. It was altogether an embarrassing, rather sordid affair, but Edward put the best face he could on his defiance. Again, Thomas More puts words into Edward’s mouth, suggesting that his choice of Elizabeth was a patriotic one: ‘He reckoned the amity of no earthly nation so necessary for him as the friendship of his own. Which he thought likely to bear him so much the more hearty favour in that he disdained not to marry with one of his own land.’6
However respectable Elizabeth’s connections might have been, notwithstanding Jacquetta having disparaged herself with her second marriage and the fact that Richard’s barony was a recent creation, she was irrefutably not royal. Luchmo Dallaghiexa, an Italian diplomat in London, described her as ‘a widow of this island of quite low birth’, while Jean de Waurin observed that Edward ‘must know well that she was no wife for such a high prince as himself. Warwick had been planning a dynastic marriage for Edward with a French princess and, since in his own eyes it was he who had placed Edward on the throne, it was disturbing that the King should simply have ignored him. Moreover, Warwick already had a reason to dislike Elizabeth, for it was her father who had refused him entry to Calais back in 1455. When Queen Marguerite tried to have Warwick arraigned for piracy, Lord Rivers was among the commissioners and Warwick, one of England’s greatest aristocrats, was disgusted that he should be obliged to defend himself before a ‘mere baron’. (Warwick has been accused of hypocrisy here in that he held the Warwick earldom merely in right of his wife, but his critics neglect to mention that he was also heir to the Salisbury title in the male line, a far grander inheritance than anything the Woodvilles could boast.)
To counter the nasty rumours that he had demeaned himself in his choice of bride, Edward was determined Elizabeth’s coronation should be as splendid as their marriage had been simple. First, on 30 September 1464, she was formally presented as queen by a grudging Warwick and Edward’s brother the Duke of Clarence. Edward then sent to the Duke of Burgundy requesting a suitable delegation of guests, including Elizabeth’s uncle, Jacques de Luxembourg. The sum of 400 pounds was advanced to the treasurer of the household to cover coronation expenses, including £27 IOS for silkwork on Elizabeth’s chairs, saddle and pillion, 108 pounds for a gold cup and basin, 280 for two cloths of gold and twenty to Sir John Howard, who provided the plate. Elizabeth rode into London on 24 May 1465, where she was greeted by the mayor, aldermen and representatives of the city’s guilds, who had spent 200 marks on decorations. A pageant on London Bridge featured the boys from the choir of St Magnus church dressed up as angels in blond wigs.
As in Marguerite’s case, the ceremonies around the coronation were shaped to be appropriate to an individual woman, and to highlight the qualities that could be hoped of her as queen. For Elizabeth Woodville, the emphasis was placed on her impeccable foreign connections and her already proven fertility. Elizabeth was met by ‘St Paul’, in reference to her mother’s St Pol descent, and surrounded by the Burgundian delegation, which presented her in the context of her noble Continental family. Two saints, St Elizabeth, mother of St John the Baptist, and St Mary Cleophas, half-sister to the Virgin Mary and mother to four of the disciples, were also featured. Since these three saintly relatives were often depicted together in psalters and books of hours, ‘when Elizabeth Woodville arrived beside them, very probably with her blonde hair loose beneath a jeweled coronet … she would immediately have reminded onlookers of the Virgin Mary’.7
While Elizabeth’s obvious fertility favoured her in one sense, it was also proof of her ‘blemished’ sexual status. More claimed that Edward’s mother had berated him for ‘befouling’ himself with a ‘bigamous’ marriage, while at least two other commentators noted that English custom demanded the King marry a virgin (they had obviously forgotten about Joan of Navarre). By going ‘in her hair’ to Westminster and very probably wearing a white dress similar to that of Marguerite of Anjou, in which she is shown in the royal window of Canterbury Cathedral, Elizabeth was asserting a spiritual purity which in her new role as queen transcended her physical reality.
At her coronation banquet, the newly dubbed knights of the Bath, who included Elizabeth’s brothers, Richard and John, brought in the dishes and the Duke of Clarence accompanied each course to the table on horseback. At the tournament next day in the sanctuary of Westminster, Edward specially requested that some of the Burgundian knights took part, though Elizabeth handed the winner’s prize of a ruby ring to Lord Stanley.
Elizabeth was now an anointed queen, and the next year she cemented her success with the birth of her first child by Edward, Elizabeth, in February, quickly followed by Mary in 1467 and Cecily in 1469. Yet there were still many who refused to accept her, portraying her as a devious interloper concerned only with the interests of her own family According to Luchino Dallaghiexa: ‘Since her coronation she has always asserted herself to aggrandise her relations, to wit her father, mother, brothers and sisters. She had five brothers and as many sisters and had brought things to such a pass that they had the entire government of this realm.’8
There was nothing unusual about a queen’s family receving advantages from her marriage, and nothing unusual about it provoking resentment, as had been the case with Eleanor of Provence and the Savoyards. The particular difficulty with the Woodvilles was that there were simply so many of them. Two of Elizabeth’s siblings had died in infancy, but that still left John, Anthony, Lionel, Edward, Richard,
Jacquetta, Martha, Margaret, Katherine, Mary, Anne and Joan. Anthony had established himself independently, acquiring the title of Lord Scales in right of his wife, Lionel entered the church, aided by a grant of the issues of the archdeaconry of Norwich, and Richard remained unmarried, while Edward’s circumstances are unknown. The other Woodville siblings did tremendously well out of their royal sister’s influence. Margaret married Lord Maltravers, the heir to the Earl of Arundel; Katherine married Henry, Duke of Buckingham; Mary, the Earl of Pembroke; Anne, Lord Bourchier, heir to the Earl of Essex; Jacquetta, Lord Strange of Knocklyn; Joan, Lord Grey of Ruthin and Martha, less dazzlingly, Sir John Bromley. Perhaps the most talked-about match was that of John with Catherine Neville, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, Edward IV’s aunt. John was twenty and the Duchess a spring chicken of anywhere between sixty and eighty, depending on the bitchiness of the chronicler. Elizabeth’s father also benefited from his daughter’s new dignity, obtaining the post of treasurer of England in 1466 and being created Earl Rivers in May that year, with the title to revert to his son Anthony. So prominent did the Woodvilles become that it became a court joke: Edward’s fool appeared one day in boots, carrying a walking staff, and when the King inquired about this costume answered: ‘Upon my faith, sir, I have passed through many countries of your realm, and in places that I have passed, the Rivers have been so high that I could barely scape through them!’
Not everyone found such laboured humour terribly funny. The Earl of Warwick was infuriated that the Woodvilles seemed to be infiltrating the network of Neville power he had worked so hard to build up. He had two daughters of his own, Isabel and Anne, to marry off, yet between 1464 and 1470 every English earl with an available heir selected a Woodville bride. He was particularly incensed by the wedding of Henry Stafford to Katherine Woodville and that of Anne, heiress to the Duke of Exeter, to Thomas Grey, Queen Elizabeth’s son by her first marriage, in 1466. It has been suggested that Edward was using the availability of Woodville spouses to create a new centre of loyalty at court, associated primarily with himself and not the Neville connections that had been so instrumental in bringing him to power. If so, it was a sensible enough strategy, but there is no doubt his treatment of Warwick at this time was ill judged, and Warwick’s alienation began to make him feel he had been cheated of the right to rule which had appeared implicit when Edward first claimed the crown.