by Thomas Penn
Elizabeth, all were agreed, had something about her. She seemed to breathe new life into the platitudes that, in the pages of chivalric romance, writers habitually reached for when describing queens: the beauty and wisdom that left otherwise impervious kings delirious with desire. It wasn’t just Elizabeth’s dark-blonde hair and almond eyes, but also the coolness that they enhanced, a quality that radiates from a contemporary portrait of her. Dressed with understated extravagance in a fitted, low-cut black gown and costly gold jewellery, hair drawn back in the fashion of the age under a cloth-of-gold cap over which a veil was suspended, her brown eyes gaze detachedly past the artist, high cheekbones tapering to a neat chin, the trace of some secret amusement in her cupid’s-bow mouth.4 Later, it was this poise and, predictably enough, her way with words that set Thomas More’s pulse racing as he wrote about her qualities. They seemed to have less effect on Edward’s chamberlain William Hastings who, sometime in early 1464, the twenty-eight-year-old Elizabeth approached to see if he would put in a word with the king on her behalf.
In the first years of the reign, a number of vulnerable widows in need of a little royal intercession had found their way into the king’s presence; if talk was to be believed, Edward had already bedded at least two of them.5 Hastings knew what kind of company Edward enjoyed. He also knew what his influence with the king was worth, and he drove a hard bargain. On 13 April 1464 Hastings and Elizabeth signed a contract stipulating that, should she regain her disputed lands, she would marry one of her sons to a female relative of Hastings’, or pay him 250 marks should the marriage not take place.6 It was a high price, and Elizabeth filed the episode away in the back of her mind. Nevertheless, it was about a fortnight after the contract was signed that things started to happen – or so the story went.
At the end of April, on his way north to suppress Somerset’s Lancastrian uprising, Edward had made one of his customary stopovers at the town of Stony Stratford, a communications and billeting hub in Northamptonshire. As dawn rose on May Day, he rode out with a few companions, ostensibly to go hunting. Instead, he made for the nearby Woodville home of Grafton where, in front of a huddle of witnesses that included Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta, he and Elizabeth were married by a dumbstruck priest from the nearby village of Paulerspury. Edward and Elizabeth then went to bed for ‘three or four hours’, following which the exhausted groom rode back to Stony Stratford, fell asleep and slept like a baby.7
If this romance-tinged story of their wedding seemed too perfect to be true, perhaps it was; after all, literary heroes almost invariably awoke on May Day morning to quest in search of their beloveds. But of all the accounts of Edward and Elizabeth’s betrothal – some of which had a besotted king wooing Elizabeth for years, pardoning her father and brother their Lancastrian allegiance, and dining with her regularly at Grafton as he led his armies to the north and back again – this was the one that stuck. Generally, especially for the nobility, love was placed fairly low down the list of prerequisites for marriage: it was nice if it blossomed, but hardly essential. In tales of courtly love, though, it was what mattered. When, in Thomas Malory’s retelling of the Morte d’Arthur, King Arthur asked Merlin for matrimonial advice, he was told that love was all he needed. One way of framing Edward’s moment of madness in a way that people understood was to couch it in the language of pure, virtuous love. Some, at least, got it: ‘Now take heed what love may do’, sighed one chronicler dreamily on recounting the secret marriage, ‘for love will not, nor may not, cast no fault nor peril in no thing.’8
If Edward was wild with desire for Elizabeth, he was also used to getting what he wanted. When his eye settled on somebody he was, it was said, happy to promise anything in order to get her into bed. It was all about the thrill of the hunt, for ‘having conquered them, he dismissed them’. After a successful seduction he would get bored, passing his victim on to his close circle of friends, his eyes locking onto his next target. But in Elizabeth, Edward met his match. When he had tried to force himself on her, so it was later said, she fought him off: opinion varied as to who was holding a dagger at the time. While this particular story owed much to the lurid fantasies of courtly romance, it contained a kernel of truth.9
At a time when women’s reputations were closely bound up with their chastity, false promises of marriage made by men to get women into bed were the subject of many cautionary tales. One man, Peter Idley, warned his eldest son Thomas how, all too often, a man ‘speaketh of wedlock but thinketh it not/ But he would his sin were wrought’. Idley, though, was as concerned with litigation as morality: this making of ‘blind bargains’ in ‘dark corners’, he said, could and did land people in court.10 Edward, who ‘overcame all with money and promises’, apparently made such ‘bargains’ on a regular basis. But then, Edward was the king of England rather than the impressionable young son of an Oxfordshire gentleman.
Still, if as a woman you had enough strength and presence of mind to resist the king’s advances – a big if – such a situation might be turned to your advantage. Some five years older than Edward, a noble widow with children, Elizabeth knew her own value – or, if she didn’t, she had parents vastly experienced in the ways of the court who were able to make that value emphatically clear to the king. Either way, it was brought home to Edward that if he wanted to sleep with Elizabeth, he needed to marry her first. Edward was at the point where he would agree to anything.
In the eyes of the church, two types of informal marriage contracts were binding: verba de presenti, an exchange of promises between two people, in which they recognized that they were from that moment married; and verba de futuro, in which a mutual commitment to marry in the future was sealed by sexual intercourse. The events at Grafton covered both definitions. When, following Edward’s announcement to his shocked council that September, a group of councillors explored whether the marriage could be annulled, they quickly found that it couldn’t.11
It wasn’t just Edward’s flagrant disregard of one of the fundamental processes of kingship, his failure to seek advice, that caused such widespread consternation among his councillors; nor even that in marrying one of his own subjects, he had thrown away one of his greatest diplomatic cards. There was also the question of Elizabeth’s family.
Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta was not the problem. With a lineage stretching back to Charlemagne and close family ties to the glamorous dukes of Burgundy, her nobility was undeniable. As a teenager she had made a sensational marriage to Henry V’s powerful brother John duke of Bedford. But Bedford died soon after, leaving her, aged nineteen, a wealthy and highly desirable widow. Jacquetta’s next marriage, to her dead husband’s chamberlain, caused an uproar.
With a continent-wide reputation as a jouster, the Lancastrian knight Richard Woodville had all the seductive glamour of a great courtier-sportsman. But as the son of Northamptonshire gentry, even his subsequent ennoblement and membership of the Order of the Garter could not obscure the fact that he was, not to put too fine a point on it, common. Back in early 1460 Edward and Warwick, in their Calais bolt-hole, had taken turns to taunt the captured Woodville, now Lord Rivers, about his squalid lineage. He was, they had told him, a ‘knave’s son’ who had ‘himself made by marriage’ and had been ‘made lord’: a social climber, entirely reliant for his wealth and status on his wife and his ability to advance himself at court. After Towton, however, Edward had delightedly accepted Woodville’s pledge of loyalty, the insults apparently forgotten.
Indeed, for all the keen-eyed awareness of rank and precedence, there was rather less of a gulf between such ‘made’ lords and the ‘old’ nobility than the latter liked to pretend. New lords like Hastings and William Herbert wielded huge influence as part of Edward’s inner circle.12 Likewise, while the old nobility, rigidly conscious of their place in the social order, might have made a fuss about upwardly mobile marriages like Richard Woodville’s to Jacquetta – which had itself followed on from another secret marriage that caused even more of an uproar,
between Henry V’s widow Catherine of Valois and her chamber servant Owen Tudor, at a stroke making Tudor stepfather to Henry VI – ultimately, they accepted them.
Social mobility may have provoked headaches among England’s upper ranks, but it was rather more normal than most contemporary books of manners and courtesy let on: after all, these were books attempting to order society into a comprehensible ranking system. Occasionally, though, the messy reality of life defeated the authors of such tracts. One writer, attempting to tackle the question of commoners who married into the royal family, threw up his hands at the impossibility of it all. How should you rank poor noblemen or rich arrivistes; knights who had married ‘ladies of royal blood’; or ladies of ‘low blood and degree’ who had married ‘blood royal’? Confusion arose, the author said, for ‘many reasons’ and out of ‘ignorance’: people just didn’t know.
Moreover, in courtly circles the nature of nobility itself was a live issue. One book circulating around court was the Italian writer Buonaccorso da Montemagno’s Controversia de vera nobilitate. In it, an indigent, blue-blooded aristocrat and a virtuous low-born knight sought to trump each other’s nobility, the latter maintaining that to dedicate yourself to the service of the state showed an innate nobility that counted for rather more than inherited wealth. Nobility, in other words, wasn’t just something passed on down the generations; it could be earned, acquired.13
That, at least, was the theory. But while the urbanity and chivalric steel displayed by Elizabeth’s father, Lord Rivers, and her oldest brother Anthony Woodville, may have delighted Edward, in the eyes of many it hardly compensated for their lack of blood and land. As one foreign dispatch put it, the grumbling among the ‘lords and people’ that greeted Edward’s announcement was down to Elizabeth’s status. The daughter of a ‘simple knight’, her lack of landed wealth – not to mention her widowhood and her two sons from her previous marriage – made her an entirely unsuitable proposition as England’s queen. The way Edward had dithered before admitting his marriage suggested that he was quite aware what the reaction would be.14
Edward’s mother was said to have exploded in a ‘frenzy’ of maternal fury at the news. Cecily, who had spent the last years luxuriating in her title of king’s mother, had undoubtedly been bracing herself for the loss of status that would accompany her son’s marriage. Having to concede that status to a great foreign princess was one thing; having to defer to the widow of a Lancastrian knight was another. In the decision that mattered most of all, her oldest son had proved an exceptional disappointment to Cecily and – according to Thomas More, giving the encounter extra literary spice – she had let him know it: Edward had, she scolded, ‘defouled’ his kingship by marrying a woman who was neither noble nor a virgin.15
If Cecily, who had laboured under the misapprehension that she could somehow ‘rule’ her son, was alarmed by this demonstration of his independent-mindedness, so too was Warwick. Working openly for a high-profile French marriage for Edward, apparently with the king’s consent, the earl had been publicly blindsided. Almost immediately, in damage-limitation mode, Warwick had written to Louis XI saying how he and Edward had fallen out over the marriage, but that one of his secretaries would soon be in touch with some ‘pleasing news’. According to a Milanese diplomat who had spent ‘almost an hour’ listening to the French king go on about it, Louis extrapolated wildly from Warwick’s letter that the earl was about to overthrow Edward and make himself king of England – and, he added, he would give Warwick ‘as much help as he could’, as he counted Warwick one of his ‘best and truest friends in the world’.16
The ‘pleasing news’, however, was not forthcoming. Warwick soon calmed down, at least in public; so too did Cecily. Edward did some belated massaging of bruised egos. Rather than turf his mother out of the queen’s lodgings in Westminster Palace, he let her remain in possession. Still simmering, Cecily also reasserted her own queenly credentials, styling herself ‘late wife unto Richard in right king of England’.17 And on Michaelmas Day, 29 September, in an ostentatious display of family unity, Warwick and Edward’s brother Clarence, now fourteen years old, escorted Elizabeth Woodville into the church of Reading Abbey, where a congregation of Edward’s councillors honoured her as queen.
After the initial shock, people adjusted quickly to the new facts on the ground; whatever opinions they had, they kept to themselves. Nevertheless the Woodvilles, alert to the reception of their new status as royal family, kept their eyes and ears open. In response to an enquiry from Elizabeth’s brother Anthony Woodville, the Norfolk knight John Howard was reassuring: he had taken soundings across East Anglia and only one of those he talked to had made difficult noises about the marriage.
Nobody, though, was more sensitive to Elizabeth’s astonishing transformation than the new queen herself. Where her husband brushed aside the rigid ceremonial of court, she stood on it, sharply conscious of her new status and of the interrogatory gaze of the Yorkist establishment. Sensitive to her anomalous background, she reached for symbolism that would enfold it in the language of religious allegory: her new device, a deep red gillyflower, betokened the Virgin Mary’s purity and motherhood, and carried associations of true love and matrimony.18
For although there was plenty about Elizabeth to explain away, as her gillyflower emphasized, there was every likelihood that she would be able to fulfil the crucial role of queen – bearing royal children. After all, she already had two of her own, while Edward had amply demonstrated his own potency: even as the pair wed, one of the king’s mistresses was bearing his second illegitimate child.19 As he put it breezily to his irate mother, ‘neither of us is like to be barren’. Moreover, unlike Margaret of Anjou, it could at least be said of Elizabeth that she wasn’t French.
Given that no amount of genealogical barrel-scraping could add lustre to her father’s line, Elizabeth was quick to play up her mother’s illustrious forebears. Of the six ‘quarterings’ in her new royal coat of arms, five referred to Jacquetta’s Burgundian ancestry.20 Which proved timely as far as Edward was concerned.
Early in July 1464, as Lord Wenlock was wining and dining with Louis XI and Philip of Burgundy, Edward was beginning to involve himself in another, off-the-record conversation, with Philip’s estranged son and heir Charles of Charolais. It was a discussion that ran directly counter to the peace talks at Hesdin. Charles and Louis loathed each other: one of Louis’ party pieces was a ‘maniacal’ impression, complete with hand gestures, of Burgundy’s ‘short-tempered, somewhat bestial’ heir. For his part, Charles meant business. He was plotting with a group of disaffected French magnates to bring down the French king, and he was prepared to swallow his visceral Lancastrianism in order to include Edward in his plans. Edward, for his part, jumped at the chance of tearing Charles’s sympathies away from Margaret of Anjou and the house of Lancaster.
That summer, unaware of the secret marriage that had taken place, Louis had written Edward a letter emphasizing his ‘great desire’ for a peace with Yorkist England, which, among other things, would leave him free ‘to exterminate the duke of Burgundy and the count of Charolais’. Edward promptly forwarded the correspondence to Philip of Burgundy, who suddenly woke up to what his son had been trying to tell him for years: that in playing honest broker to an Anglo-French peace, he had been unwittingly preparing the ground for the destruction of his own state.21
As Edward and Charles searched for common ground meantime, messengers moving clandestinely between London and Bruges, they seized on Edward’s new in-laws – who were only too happy to oblige. On 8 October, barely a week after Elizabeth Woodville had been presented to the assembled nobles in Reading Abbey, Edward authorized safe conducts for a Burgundian visit to England. The leader of this full-blown embassy was Jacques of Luxembourg, a military veteran from an ancient Burgundian family. The embodiment of Anglo-Burgundian détente, Luxembourg had been carefully chosen. Not only was he exceptionally close to Charles, he was maternal uncle to Elizabeth Woodville, the
new queen of England.22
In London, merchants followed developments with mixed emotions. Anything that brought closer links with England’s biggest trading partner was, of course, good news. But seen another way, Edward’s cosying up to the bellicose Burgundian heir – a move which, in the minds of some, had been triggered by the king’s new Woodville in-laws – could only serve to destabilize the delicate international equilibrium, and drag England into another ruinous war with France. London’s mayor, Ralph Josselyn, was reported to have opined gloomily that Elizabeth’s coronation ‘would cost the lives of ten thousand men’. That autumn, though, the country’s merchants had a more immediate problem on their hands. Just as Edward’s relations with Charles of Charolais were softening, Philip of Burgundy, previously supportive of the house of York, suddenly snapped.
The protectionist laws that Edward had waved through Parliament the previous year had not gone down well in the Low Countries. Over the years, Philip had become wearily familiar with aggressive English mercantilism and had responded in kind, slapping embargoes on English cloth imports into his dominions. This time, perhaps hopeful of negotiating the laws’ repeal, he had not immediately responded. But Edward’s recoinage that summer, which further drained away scarce bullion from the mints of the Low Countries, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.23