CHAPTER 17
‘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 boys’3 seems rather optimistically romantic. It is possible that 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. Luchino 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 10s 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 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.
Warwick’s anger at the Woodville marriages was compounded by the prominent role the family now played in facilitating the union of Edward IV’s sister Margaret to Charles, Duke of Burgundy, an alliance expressly contradictory to Warwick’s own policy, which was a dynastic marriage with France (perhaps to compensate for the one Edward denied him in his own case). In 1467, the Queen’s brother Anthony was the King’s champion at a magnificent five-day tournament at Smithfield against the Comte de la Roche, known as ‘The Bastard of Burgundy’. The tournament was followed by a supper offered by the Mercers’ Company, and an invitation from the Comte to the Queen ‘and especially her sisters’, which included Margaret of York. Warwick was permitted to leave for France to open talks for a French marriage with Louis IX, but Anthony Woodville led a similar embassy to Burgundy, and that match was confirmed at Kingston-upon-Thames in October 1467.
Warwick had certainly been outraged when Edward married Elizabeth Woodville, but The Croyland Chronicle emphasises that it was the Burgundian marriage that proved the last straw. ‘Indeed it is the fact that the Earl continued to show favour to all the Queen’s kindred until he found that her relatives and connections, contrary to his wishes, were using their utmost endeavours to promote the other marriage.’ Now, on his return from France, he sulked at his northern seat of Middleham for several months and did not return to court until January. Ever the courtier, he concealed his animosity and led Margaret’s wedding procession in June. The bride spent a night with her brother and sister-in-law at Stratford Abbey before travelling to Canterbury and embarking for Burgundy with an entourage dominated by the Queen’s family. Both Anthony and John Woodville sailed in the same vessel, and John was awarded the honour of Prince of the Tournament at the nine-day jousts held to mark one of the most splendid royal weddings of the century.
As early as the preceding spring, a messenger apprehended en route to Harlech Castle, which still defiantly held out for the Lancastrians, had claimed that Warwick was in contact with Marguerite of Anjou. Whether or not he had begun to plan a rebellion at this stage, Warwick’s attitude to Edward now showed itself explicitly disobedient. Warwick had proposed a marriage between Edward’s brother the Duke of Clarence and his own elder daughter Isabel, a suggestion the King refused to countenance. Persisting in spite of the royal veto, Warwick pursued a papal dispensation (the couple were within the prohibited degrees), which was granted in March 1469. In June that year, Edward made a progress to the shrine at Walsingham while Queen Elizabeth, who had recently given birth to her third child, Cecily, met her husband at Fotheringhay Castle towards the end of the month, after which Edward departed to deal with yet another Lancastrian uprising in the north and Elizabeth set off for Norwich.
The Queen’s visit to Norwich provides a touching glimpse of the excitement generated among ordinary people by the glamour of royalty. The mayor of the town declared that ‘because this should be her first coming hither . . . she will desire to be received and attended as worshipfully as ever was Queen afore her’.9 A committee was organised to repair the church tower and Robert Horgoner was sent out to supervise the Queen’s route into Norwich, while John Sadler instructed her servants to enter by the Westwick Gate. Parnell’s company were hired for twelve days to provide pageants on a stage decorated with red and green worsted. Elizabeth was met by the mayor and corporation as well as two wooden giants stuffed with hay, and heard a speech of salutation performed by Mr Gilbert Spirling. Other entertainments included the angel Gabriel and sixteen virgins in hooded cloaks. The ‘great chair’ of St Luke’s Guild was brought from the cathedral to the abbey of the Friars Preachers for the Queen to sit on, and Mr Farckes’s choir of boys sang. In typically English fashion, the whole event was rather spoiled by heavy summer rain.
While Elizabeth was at Norwich and Edward at Nottingham, Isabel Neville was married to the Duke of Clarence at Calais by Warwick’s brother the archbishop of York, attended by her younger sister Anne Neville. The wedding celebrations lasted five days, but the Earl himself left almost immediately to raise an army in Kent. Maintaining the pose of a loyal subject, Warwick released a letter in which he denounced the Woodvilles as the ‘evil counsellors’ so often invoked by potential traitors:
The deceivable covetous rule and guiding of certain seditious persons, that is to say the Lord Rivers, the Duchess of Bedford his wife, Sir William Herbert Earl of Pembroke, Humphrey Stafford Earl of Devonshire, the Lords Scales and Audley; Sir John Woodville and his brothers . . . and others of their mischievous rule, opinion and assent, which have caused our said Sovereign Lord and his said realm to fall into great poverty of misery, disturbing the ministrations of the laws, only intending to their own promotion and enriching.
As the Yorkists had done during the crisis of 1450, Warwick emphasised the interdependence of the King and his great magnates, focusing on the ultimate criterion of medieval hierarchy: blood.
First, where the said Kings estranged the great lords of their blood from their secret counsel, and not advised by them; and taking about them others not of their blood and inclining only to their counsel, rule and advice, the which persons take not respect nor consideration to the weal of the said princes, nor to the commonweal of this land, but only to their singular lucre and enriching of themselves . . . by which the said princes were so impoverished that they had not sufficient of livelihood or of goods, whereby they might keep and maintain their honourable estates and ordinary charges within this realm.
Pro-Woodville writers have chosen to oppose Warwick’s obsession with ‘blood’ with the more ‘meritocratic’ tendencies of the Woodville family, figuring Warwick as the harrumphing reactionary and the Woodvilles as proto-modern, achieving distinction by service rather than birth. This simplistic opposition overlooks the fact that we know nothing of how much or how little the Woodvilles, or indeed Warwick himself, truly believed in the ineffable qualities of breeding. Nor had the Woodvilles proved averse to allying themselves with some of the most prestigious families of the nobility. Warwick was not alone in considering them a pack of parvenus and upstarts, but equally, he and the Woodvilles were playing the same game, and when it appeared that they might best him, it was logical that he should employ a conventional form of outrage against them, whether or not he himself cared for the principle. ‘Blood’ was a concept to which fifteenth-century society paid a great deal of attention but, as became evident in the reign of Edward IV’s son-in-law, Henry Tudor, it was a flexible commodity, a very little of which could be made to go a very long way.
By 20 July, Warwick and his troops had left Canterbury for London. Edward remained at Nottingham, awaiting support from the Earl of Pembroke, but Pembroke’s army was attacked and defeated by a pro-Warwick force of northerners at Edgecote, and on Warwick’s orders their commander and his brother were executed. Queen Elizabeth was still at Norwich when she heard the appalling, incredible news that the King himself had been taken prisoner and was being held at Warwick Castle. Edward had barely advanced out of Nottingham when he received word of the Edgecote defeat, and had submitted himself to George Neville’s keeping on 29 July. Following a short spell at Warwick he was taken to the Nevilles’ northern power base of Middleham. After a two-week wait at Norwich, Elizabeth had to endure even more terrifying tidings. Her father, Earl Rivers, and her brother John had been beheaded at Coventry, again on Warwick’s orders. Elizabeth was in an extremely vulnerable position. She could not have known what Warwick’s intentions were, but she knew that if the ‘kingmaker’ were to depose her husband as he had done Henry VI, the next in line to the throne was Warwick’s new son-in-law, Clarence and, after the treatment of her father and brother, that her family could expect no mercy from either. Nevertheless, she set off for London.
Perhaps Warwick’s intentions were not entirely clear even to the Earl himself. He had claimed to be fighting for the reformation of the government, not the deposition of the King, yet he had acted entirely illegally in the executions of the Pembrokes, Earl Rivers and John Woodville, who served the man he still acknowledged as his master. Warwick’s supporters had no wish to dethrone Edward, and Warwick himself did not intend the restoration of Henry VI, who was by this time languishing in the Tower. It was rumoured that he had been thinking of having Edward declared illegitimate and was conspiring to replace him with Clarence, but now that he was on the way to creating his puppet king he appeared at a loss to know what to do next. In this light, Edward’s seemingly inexplicable passivity might be seen as a stroke of political genius. Had he attempted to flee and raise another army, the whole grisly process of battling towards the crown would have started up again. As it was, he played the role of the polite prisoner until his captors were embarrassed into releasing him. By 10 September, Edward was back in London, and everybody acted as though nothing much had happened.
Outwardly, all was peace and concord. Edward even went so far as to betrothe his three-year-old daughter Elizabeth to Warwick’s nephew, creating him Duke of Bedford to mark the occasion. The Queen and her family suppressed their outrage at Warwick’s unjustifiable savagery, and for some months Edward and Warwick held councils together, but both the King and the Earl were planning their next moves. In March, Edward travelled north to put down a rebellion in Lincolnshire, while Warwick was supposedly mustering troops in the Midlands to come to assist him. When Edward confronted the Lincolnshire men, their war cry ‘For Clarence! For Warwick!’ told him all he needed to know about the Earl’s latest conspiracy. The King continued northwards, and while Clarence and Warwick maintained appearances of loyalty in their letters, they refused to join the King as promised. On 24 March Edward issued a proclamation against them, announcing that if they came within four days to York they could be reconciled with him, but if they failed to do so they were to be considered traitors. Needless to say, they did not appear. The rebel list later compiled in Salisbury shows that at this point support for the rebels was weak – only four lords, fewer than twenty knights and twenty esquires were arraigned - and Warwick realised that it was time to flee. Edward’s army was now pursuing him to the west country, but Warwick, his wife, Clarence, Isabel and the second Warwick daughter, Anne, succeeded in taking ship at Dartmouth. The Earl attempted to supplement his fleet with a raid on Portsmouth, but was repelled by a force led by Anthony Woodville, now Earl Rivers.
Warwick headed for his old stamping ground of Calais, but found the guns of the garrison, which had appealed to Edward’s brother-in-law the Duke of Burgundy for support, turned against him. Nineteen-year-old Isabel was heavily pregnant, and went into labour on board ship, but though Warwick was able to obtain some wine for her, the birth was difficult and her baby died. The Earl now put to sea again, encountering and taking a large Burgundian convoy, and on 1 May he arrived in Normandy. Officially, Louis IX was unable to offer him any help. He did extend an offer of hospitality to the Countess and her daughters, but the family chose to stay together at Vulognes, near Barfleur, where Warwick came to the conclusion that his only remaining hope lay with his old enemy, Marguerite of Anjou.
After the battle of Towton, Marguerite had stayed in Scotland until 1462. She received some support from Mary of Guelders, acting as regent for her son James III, who was the same age as Prince Edward, and it was Mary who paid for Marguerite’s passage to France. Marguerite’s uncle Charles VII had died the previous July, and she now persuaded her cousin, the new French King Louis XI, to supply her with money and troops in return for the promise of Calais. Louis lost interest after the Duke of Burgundy refused French forces access to the port across his lands, and in the end Marguerite had returned to Scotland with just 800 men. She was able to advance as far as Bamburgh which, along with the other important Marcher castles of Alnwick and Dunstanburgh, had reverted to the Lancastrians, but when she heard the news that both Edward and Warwick were heading north, she retreated, suffering the misery of a shipwreck on the way. Marguerite herself arrived safely at Berwick, but many of her little force were marooned on Holy Island, where they had nothing to do but wait for the Yorkist army. Still, she soldiered on.
Over the winter of 1462—3, the three castles changed hands again, first to York and then back to Lancaster, so by March it seemed plausible that Henry VI’s supporters could attempt a more ambitious attack. Marguerite had worked hard to retain the support of the Scottish regency council, this time wildly promising them seven English counties if they should succeed, and in July 1463 the young James III led an attack on the castle of Norham, accompanied by his mother, King Henry and Marguerite. The expedition ended hopelessly, with the invaders fleeing Norham for their lives and Warwick harrying the undefended Scottish marches. The Scots had now had enough, and in August Marguerite embarked once more for France with Prince Edward.
Everyone felt very sorry for her, and did all they could to avoid her. France had supported Henry VI in the conflict, but it now seemed clear to Louis XI that there was nothing to be gained from maintaining such an alliance any longer. He was keen to come to an accommodation with the Duke of Burgundy, who had supported the Yorkists, concerning lands in the Somme, and both rulers were ready to make terms with Edward, the new English King. Marguerite pleaded in person with the Duke, but came away with no more than a sum of money and a few courteous commonplaces. Neither Burgundy nor France were overly concerned about a dethroned queen or her dispossessed son.
What remained of Marguerite’s hopes was signed away at Hesdin in October 1463. In exchange for the cession of the Somme towns by Burgundy, the King of France renounced all help to the Lancastrians, along with the traditional French protection of Scotland. Edward IV had been funding a conspiracy by the ‘Black Douglases’, whom James II of Scotland had stripped of their power, to foment civil war, and the Scottish regency council, isolated and abandoned by the French, was prepared to come to terms with England if Edward ended his assistance to the rebels. The Lancastrians were still pushing hard in the north, and there was a brief resurgence of optimism when the Duke of Somerset, who had been pardoned by Edward, turned his coat again and joined Henry VI, who was now imprisoned at Bamburgh. Despite an attack led by Somerset, Scottish envoys reached York in April 1464, and once an agreement was reached with Edward, Scotland would no longer offer a refuge. Somerset brought Henry to Bywell Castle, close to where the royal army, commanded by Warwick’s brother John Neville, was camped, but any hope that his presence would garner enough support to overwhelm the Yorkists was disappointed by a swift, sudden defeat at Hexham on 15 May. Somerset was executed immediately, but by the time soldiers arrived at Bywell, Henry had vanished, leaving behind his coroneted helmet. It had never been much use to him. For a year, the former King of England wandered the north country until he was finally taken the following July at Ribblesdale and shut up in the Tower of London, but not before Warwick and Edward had paraded him with tasteless cruelty through the city streets, denounced as a usurper.
Marguerite now had little choice but to return to the protection of her own family. René of Anjou eventually provided her with the castle of Koeur near Verdun and a pension of 2,000 livres. By 1470, Marguerite and Prince Edward had been in France for seven years. Time did not reconcile her to her position. Henry lived, her son was the rightful heir to the throne and there were still many loyal to her cause. (Perhaps it is permissible to imagine Marguerite heaving a sigh of relief every time was delivered of a girl.) But the Lancastrians were poor. They had no means to attempt another invasion, and meanwhile politics was moving on. Harlech, the last castle in Lancastrian hands, fell in 1468, Edward was establishing his family and a new court party and cementing his European alliances. If it was difficult to imagine that the situation would ever change, certainly no one could have foreseen what actually happened.
The Lancastrian cause was revived by the most wonderful and improbable of marriages: that between Edward, Prince of Wales and Anne Neville, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the kingmaker.
Marguerite and Warwick had little cause for mutual trust, but perhaps they had one thing in common: their shared hatred of Elizabeth Woodville. Certainly, they were both determined to depose Edward IV, and to achieve this they had to depend not only on one another but on King Louis of France. Louis was careful to portray himself as a reluctant mediator, rather than the instigator of this extraordinary alliance, but he was nevertheless instrumental in bringing it about. He was determined to bolster his power against Charles of Burgundy, who still retained control of the disputed Somme territories, and he was prepared to gamble on Charles’s reaction to his support for Warwick in the confidence that the marriage could bring about the restoration of a Lancastrian king and a subsequent pact against Burgundy.
When Warwick’s battered, miserable family arrived at Honfleur in May 1470, Louis sent an invitation to Marguerite to come to court. By June, the betrothal between Anne and Edward had been proposed. Marguerite had little choice but to favour the match, even though she risked Warwick’s treachery if he planned to worm his way back into Edward IV’s favour by delivering up the Lancastrian’s principal bargaining tool in the person of the Prince. She also had her dignity to think of. Warwick took care of that by grovelling on his knees for a full fifteen minutes at Angers Cathedral on 22 July, and on the twenty-fifth both parties swore themselves to the proposal over sacred fragments of the True Cross.
What Edward and Anne thought of their marriage is unknown, though both seem to have accepted it dutifully. Warwick was clearly prepared to forget that he had accused the Prince of being illegitimate when he was born, manipulating rumours of Marguerite’s adultery and Henry’s inability to recognise the baby to support his campaign to bring Edward to the throne. To be married to the daughter of the man who had deposed his father, forced his mother into humiliating exile and called him a bastard might have been a very bitter pill for a sixteen-year-old boy to swallow, but ‘the very little we perceive of Edward of Lancaster . . . is of a boy who had been brought up to think of himself as a prince and who was keen to have his opponent’s heads off’.10 Edward, like Marguerite, was clearly prepared to accept whatever distasteful necessities fate presented in the quest for the restoration of his rights. Nor was Anne necessarily a demeaning bride. She was a great heiress, five of her ancestral lines gave her a share of royal blood, she also had connections with European dynasties and (inevitably) Charlemagne, and was described as ‘the most noble Lady and Princess of the royal blood of diverse realms lineally descending from princes, kings, emperors and many glorious saints’.11
Anne had been four years old when Edward IV was crowned. She had been born at Warwick in 1456, but had spent the first few years of her life in Calais, when her father was captain there. Unusually for medieval children of high rank, she and her sister Isabel had remained with their parents until their teens. There had been no queen’s household for them to enter until Edward’s marriage in 1464, and there is no evidence that Anne or Isabel waited on Elizabeth Woodville, though they were mentioned as being present, along with the King’s younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, at the consecration of Anne’s uncle, George Neville, as archbishop of York in 1465. Anne spoke French, and possibly Flemish – the former language may have eased her introduction to her formidable future mother-in-law - but little else is known of her education. What Anne was aware of were the vicissitudes of fortune so beloved of medieval moralists. She had seen her father as almost a ruler in his own right in Calais, then as the greatest man at Edward’s court, then as an exile, and according to the aggrieved Burgundians, a pirate. She had watched her sister, in theory one of the highest-ranking women in England, endure a miserable childbirth at sea, with her father reduced to begging for supplies. Now Anne was to displace her sister in Warwick’s putative succession, and Isabel’s was not a happy precedent. Though the Duke of Clarence was tactfully kept away from the betrothal proceedings, his newly bereaved Duchess was not. Anne saw her mighty father creeping on his knees to his former enemy, and yet he planned to make her Queen of England. It could only have been bewildering. The events of the following months were to prove even more dramatic.
At the same time as Anne’s betrothal was taking place, Queen Elizabeth, once again pregnant, moved into the safety of the Tower of London with Henry VI. King Edward had left for the north, to put down yet another rising, this time led by the Earl of Warwick’s brother-in-law, Lord Fitzhugh. The King’s fleet was patrolling the Channel, and Elizabeth’s removal to the Tower with her three daughters was one more indication that invasion was inevitable. Through the lucky chance of a huge storm which scattered Edward’s fleet, Warwick and Clarence were able to land at Dartmouth in mid-September. When she heard the news, Elizabeth began preparing for a siege.
Like King Harold in 1066, Edward now had to swing his army round and head south to face Warwick who had mustered 30,000 men at Coventry. His own troops were gathering at Nottingham, and John Neville was rallying a northern contingent. Edward was dining with his brother Gloucester and brother-in-law Lord Rivers at Doncaster when he received word that Neville had betrayed him and marshalled the northern levy in favour of Henry VI. Edward was caught between two advancing hostile armies and there was no time to think of fighting. The King and his immediate entourage rode for the coast and on 2 October set sail in three borrowed ships. Somehow a message was carried to the Queen in the Tower, and on the night before Edward’s escape, Elizabeth, Jacquetta and the princesses were rowed up the Thames to Westminster, where they took sanctuary. The atmosphere in London was terrifying. With the King gone so suddenly, the authorities had no idea how to keep order. Debtors and criminals scuttled out of sanctuary and swarmed over the city. It was an opportunity for general anarchy, with prisons broken open and mobs of looters declaring they were supporters of Warwick. The Earl himself, accompanied by the Duke of Clarence, appeared on 6 October. Poor Henry VI, confused and shuffling, was fetched from prison and set once more upon his throne.
It is curious that at this juncture Marguerite did not rush over to Westminster to join her husband. Initially this was due to a delay in the marriage between Anne Neville and Prince Edward. The ceremony eventually took place at Amboise on 13 December, held up by bureaucratic tanglings and the last-minute discovery of a need for the dreaded papal dispensation (Anne and Edward shared a great-great-grandfather in John of Gaunt). In the meantime Anne, Isabel of Clarence and the Countess of Warwick remained with Marguerite, leaving for Paris after the wedding. Louis XI was finally prepared to open his purse now that Marguerite was useful to him once more, and provided over 6,000 livres for ‘the furnishing of their silver ware’ and their ‘pleasures’, but even a return to luxurious living could not have been much of a temptation to Marguerite to linger, given that what she had fought and schemed and yearned for had finally been achieved.
In March 1471, Marguerite’s party were once more at Harfleur, but were kept ashore for seventeen days more by adverse winds. This dithering was highly prejudicial to the Readeption, as the restoration of Henry VI is known. Warwick had difficulty in creating any coherent sense of government, and without the presence of Marguerite and, more importantly, Prince Edward, there was no prospect of stability in England. Henry’s inadequacies were common knowledge, and returning Lancastrians were resentful at the ascent of one who had so recently been their enemy, when they, not he, had suffered for their King’s cause. So why did Marguerite wait? She may have been reckless in speech but, as she had shown in retreating from London in 1461, she had a tendency to hesitate at crucial moments. She had to delay until her son’s marriage had taken place to give herself some security, but she still had no guarantee that Warwick might not decide Clarence was a more malleable successor to Henry. Either way, he would still have a daughter on the throne.
Marguerite’s indecisiveness once again allowed events to get the better of her. In November, Queen Elizabeth had given birth to a son, Edward, in Westminster sanctuary. A greater contrast to the hushed ceremonial of her previous lyings-in could hardly be imagined. Henry VI had behaved considerately, providing a salary of ten pounds for Elizabeth, Lady Scrope to wait on her, and permitting a butcher named William Gould to send in a half of beef and two muttons every week for her household. There was even a fishmonger to provide for Fridays and fast days. But the sanctuary quarters in Westminster Close were disgustingly crowded and insanitary, with the many debtors, thieves and beggars sharing space with fifty monks and the hundred servants who waited on them, as well as shopkeepers and cookshops. The public latrine, situated to the west of the abbey, filled the whole area with its stink and there was little space for outdoor exercise. Anyone who has spent a rainy day indoors with small children might pity Elizabeth, who was confined here for six months with a newborn to nurse. For her labour, Elizabeth had been allowed the company of Marjory Cobbe, the midwife who had attended her at Cecily’s birth, and a physician, Dominic de Sergio. The Prince was christened in the abbey with Abbot Millyng and the prior of Westminster as godfathers and Lady Scrope as godmother. It was an inauspicious, indeed ominous beginning, but still a joyful one. The new baby was the heir to the house of York and now Elizabeth, like Marguerite, had a son to fight for.
If Warwick was disadvantaged by Marguerite’s hesitancy, Edward IV was saved by Louis XI’s impatience. On 3 December, the French King declared war on Burgundy. Until this point, Charles of Burgundy had refused to see his exiled brother-in-law, who was living under the protection of the governor of Holland, Lord Gruuthuyse. Charles’s main concern was that he should have an ally against Louis in the English, and now that Edward had been deposed it was more sensible of him to seek an accommodation with the new government. However, as Warwick was pro-French, Louis’s aggressive stance now meant Charles had an interest in helping Edward, and the Duke had nothing to lose by acknowledging him openly. He provided Edward with 20,000 pounds to finance an invasion, and Edward and his brother Gloucester also had an interview with their sister, Duchess Margaret, who raised further money and ships from bankers and merchants and 6,000 florins from five Dutch towns. In March, Edward set sail with thirty-six ships, landing at Ravenspur on the fourteenth. Arriving at York, Edward, like Henry IV before him, declared that he had not come to claim the crown, but only the duchy that had belonged to his father. He swore an oath on the high altar at York Minster that he would never again make an attempt on the throne of England, then promptly set about raising an army. At this stage, though, he looked unlikely to succeed. He had brought about 2,000 troops from Burgundy, but Warwick had reputedly gathered 7,000 at Coventry. The crucial intervention came from the Duke of Clarence.
Clarence was not tremendously intelligent, but he finally realised that Warwick had used him and that he had little to gain by Henry’s restoration. In a dramatic scene on the Banbury road, the two brothers, each with their army behind them, came forward and embraced. Thus Clarence, and more importantly 4,000 men, were firmly engaged on Edward’s side. By 9 April, Edward was able to send a reassuring message to his supporters in London and Queen Elizabeth in sanctuary, and two days later he entered the city. After a quick pause at St Paul’s to thank God and St Edward and feel the crown once more on his head, Edward went to Westminster to retrieve his wife and daughters and see his son for the first time. The Historie of the Arrivall pictures Edward comforting Elizabeth, and praises her fortitude in ‘right great trouble, sorrow and heaviness, which she sustained with all manner of patience that belonged to any creature, and as constantly as has been seen at any time any of so high estate to endure’, and describes his joy as he was presented with the baby prince.12 Henry VI was once more stowed away in the Tower. He had been produced by Warwick’s brother George Neville to march in a propaganda procession in a last attempt to hold the city, but had made a poor showing in a scruffy blue velvet gown, and he was apparently quite relieved to see Edward again, shaking his hand and expressing gratitude to his ‘cousin of York’, whom he trusted to spare his life.
The next day was Good Friday, and Edward and Elizabeth, who had spent the night with Edward’s mother, the Duchess of York, heard Mass together. Elizabeth, Jacquetta and the children then returned to the Tower while Edward prepared for the final showdown with Warwick. The King and the kingmaker met at Barnet on the morning of Easter Sunday, 14 April 1471. The battle began at dawn, and once again Edward fought at the centre of his men, his tall figure rearing out of the mist, ‘turning first one way and then another he so beat and bore down that nothing might stand in the sight of him’.13 After three hours of close fighting, Warwick was dead and the field was Edward’s. A few hours later Marguerite, with her son Edward and his Neville bride, landed at Weymouth.
The news of Warwick’s death reached Marguerite the next day at Cerne Abbey in Dorset. There is something magnificent in her refusal to surrender, her clear belief that there was still a chance of victory. From Cerne she moved to Exeter, where the troops of Devon and Cornwall were called out for Henry VI. Marguerite was supported by the third Duke of Somerset to fight for the Lancastrian cause (Edmund, the younger brother of Henry, who had been executed after Hexham in 1464), and the earls of Wiltshire and Dorset, while Jasper Tudor was gathering a Lancastrian army in Wales. Now began a cat-and-mouse hunt that lasted almost three weeks, with Marguerite moving cautiously north via Wells, Bath and Bristol and Edward leaving London to the west then turning north, marching in parallel with the Lancastrians, as Marguerite sent out small parties of troops in different directions to confuse Edward’s spies. Conditions were hard for both armies, with hot sun and scant supplies of water for the heavily laden men and gasping horses. On 3 May as Edward’s troops approached faster and faster to the rear, the Lancastrians camped at Tewkesbury while Marguerite and Anne took shelter in the abbey house.
On Saturday 4 May, Edward’s trumpets blared out the attack and his guns and archers started to pound the Lancastrian defence. Somerset managed to lead a contingent round the side of the central Yorkist division and attack downhill. As usual, Edward hadplaced himself in the centre and now he and his soldiers shifted to face the oncoming Lancastrians, trying to force them, hand to hand, back up the slope. Meanwhile, the Yorkist vanguard, under the command of Richard of Gloucester, had been liberated by Somerset’s feint and now bore down on the Lancastrians. Edward had stationed 200 men-at-arms on his flank and they rushed forward so that Somerset’s men were boxed in, with no option but to try to flee. Few succeeded. The second Lancastrian division, led by the inexperienced Prince Edward, was coming up, and the King wheeled his troops again to face them head on. The Yorkists knew they were winning and the remaining Lancastrians had little spirit for the fight. Many of them ran away, pursued enthusiastically by Edward’s troops, who had been given permission to chase, kill and rob them. Most disastrously of all for Marguerite, Prince Edward was killed.
Until recently, it has been accepted that Prince Edward died in the field while attempting to escape to the town, as confirmed by the Arrivall, The Tewkesbury Abbey Chronicle and The Warkworth Chronicle. Another story of his death exists in Hall’s Chroniclewhich, since it was written under the Tudors, was dismissed for some time as propaganda. In this version, Prince Edward was captured and brought face to face with Edward IV before being executed by Gloucester and Clarence some days after the battle. However, an illustrated version of the Arrivall from 1471 suggests that Hall’s version may indeed be correct. Clarence had been in the field with Edward, but where was Isabel? The Countess of Warwick had taken refuge at Beaulieu Abbey, but there is no mention of Isabel having joined her. Did this mean that Anne Neville had to wait with her sister while her brother-in-law murdered her husband?
The aftermath of Tewkesbury brought very different consequences for the once, present and future queens of England. Both Anne and Marguerite were formally pardoned at Tewkesbury as Edward passed through on 7 May, having sought refuge in a convent on the Worcester road. Anne was given into the custody of the Duke of Clarence. Marguerite was treated more severely. When Edward made his triumphal entry into London, she was exhibited as a penitent captive in the rear of his train, then sent straight to the Tower. She was not permitted to see her husband. Henry VI died that night. The highly partisan account in the Arrivall has him expiring of ‘ire and indignation’, unlikely indeed for such a passive character, and the consensus is that he was murdered, though how or by whom is a matter for speculation. However, ‘no matter who carried it out, the responsibility of the deed was Edward’s’.14 Edward’s decision was harsh and treacherous, but the upheavals of the last years had taught him that the violence could not end as long as Henry or his heirs were living. (Anne Neville, it must be assumed, was not considered to be pregnant with Henry’s grandchild.) To confirm the refoundation of his dynasty, Edward created his baby son Prince of Wales that July, in the presence of two archbishops, eight bishops and as many magnates as could be assembled, all swearing their allegiance to a Yorkist future.
Marguerite remained in prison for the next four years. Agnes Strickland speaks with determined optimism of the amelioration of her ‘rigorous’ confinement brought about by the ‘compassionate influence’ of Elizabeth Woodville, but as with so many of Strickland’s accounts, this is agreeable fantasising. There is no record that Queen Elizabeth visited or saw Marguerite during her imprisonment, nor do her expenses show any personal favours. Marguerite had worked for years to destroy Elizabeth’s husband and family, and though she was no longer a political risk, Elizabeth, understandably, left no documented trace of compassion towards her. Strickland’s embroidering has been accepted by at least one of Elizabeth’s biographers, who has suggested that she was motivated by ‘a grateful remembrance of the benefits she had received from her royal mistress’,15 but the evidence of Elizabeth having served Marguerite is very flimsy, and her true feelings seem more apparent in the fact that in 1475 she had Marguerite’s arms removed from Queens’ College, Cambridge, and replaced with her own and those of England.
After a period in the Tower, Marguerite was moved to Windsor, then Wallingford and eventually to Ewelm in Oxfordshire, the seat of Lady Suffolk, who received a weekly sum of eight marks for the maintenance of the royal prisoner. Now that Henry was dead, the King of France had no purpose for Marguerite, while her father, René, seemed content to let her linger in captivity. It was a cruel reminder that despite all her struggles and suffering, she remained merely a woman, only as valuable as her alliances, and they were no more. Finally, in 1475, when Louis XI and Edward met at Picquigny to ratify an Anglo-French truce (one of the provisions of which was a second betrothal for Edward’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, this time to the Dauphin), Louis agreed to ransom Marguerite. She had to renounce all claims to her jointure and any English inheritance, and Louis handed over 50,000 crowns for her freedom. In January 1476 she landed at Dieppe and travelled to Rouen, where she was received by the King’s representative, Jean d’Haguet, the receiver general of Normandy. The motivation behind Louis’s magnanimity soon became apparent: he invaded Anjou the next year. Since Marguerite’s brother John of Calabria had died in 1470, she was rightfully an heiress, but on 29 January 1476 she was obliged to sign away her rights in Lorraine, Barrois, Anjou and Provence, describing herself in the document as ‘I Marguerite, formerly married in the Kingdom of England’.
Marguerite’s father gave her the use of a castle and a small pension, but in 1480, he died. Bourdigne’s Chronicle mourned: ‘No prince ever loved his subjects as he loved his, nor was in like manner better loved and well-wished than he was by them,’ but René’s ‘love’ does not seem to have extended to his widowed, bereaved and dispossessed daughter. He had ceded his own inheritance to his nephew Charles of Maine, who had sold it on to King Louis, so now that he was gone, there was no one to pay Marguerite’s pension. She was forced to beg, writing plaintively to one of Louis’s ministers that ‘it may please him to take my poor case in the matter of what can and should belong to me, into his hands to do with it according to his good will and pleasure and still keep me in his good grace and love’.16 Louis obliged her by insisting she confirmed the 1476 donation and then permitting her to go to law with her living sibling, Yolande, for the resignation of her rights to the Barrois. By this time, Marguerite was living in penury and, having manipulated her for his own territorial gain, Louis simply abandoned her. She was compelled to leave her castle of Reculée as she could no longer maintain her household, and it was only the charity of François Vignolles, Lord of Morains and one of her father’s former vassals, that protected her. He provided her with a home in his castle of Dampierre, about three miles from Saumur on the River Loire. The final indignity came when Charles of Maine died and Marguerite was pressured to sign a will in Louis’s favour. It included a request that he provide funds for her funeral and burial with her parents at St Maurice d’Angers. Marguerite had her wish and was interred with her father who, despite his careless treatment, she seems to have loved to the end.
Marguerite died aged fifty-two in August 1482. The last decade of her life had been one long fall from grace. There were some who still considered her a champion of the Lancastrian cause, and she had received a party of exiled Lancastrian lords in 1479,but the year of her death saw Edward IV’s dynasty apparently firmly established on the throne. At her coronation she had been hailed as a bringer of peace and plenty; she died an isolated exile, an impoverished symbol of war. King Louis demanded her hunting dogs be given to him as, pathetically, they were the only thing of value that she owned. No record exists of her funeral. It is possible that no one troubled to write one.
The decade after Edward IV’s ultimate recovery of his kingdom had been peaceful and productive, both for the country as a whole and for Elizabeth Woodville. She gave Edward three more daughters, Anne, Katherine and Bridget, and a second son, Richard, Duke of York. Two other children, Margaret and George, died as infants. Her public activities reflected both pious and scholarly interests whose pattern had been disturbed by the upheavals of the Lancastrian insurrection. In 1466, she had received a grant from the city of London for a tract of land adjacent to Tower Hill, on which to build a chapel or college, and though no more is heard of this project, by 1479 Elizabeth had founded a chapel to St Erasmus at Westminster Abbey. She made grants to Holy Trinity, Syon Abbey and to the Carthusians at Sheen and went on pilgrimage to Canterbury with her husband and eldest daughter. The Pope saw fit to make particular mention of her devotion to the Virgin and St Elizabeth, and granted exceptional indulgences to worshippers who recited the Hail Mary three times a day at the encouragement of the Queen. Elizabeth adopted Marguerite of Anjou’s foundation of Queens’ College, Cambridge and, along with her brother Lord Rivers, was a benefactress of Henry VI’s college at Eton.
Two accounts of Elizabeth’s participation in public rituals give a sense of her conduct and, again, of how the way her background influenced perceptions of that conduct. One is the description of her churching banquet after the birth of her first child as queen. It was held in ‘an unbelievably costly apartment’, where she sat on a golden chair. Jacquetta and Edward’s sister Margaret stood apart and knelt when she spoke to them. They were not permitted a seat until the first dish had been placed on the table, while the other sixty ladies at the women-only event remained on their knees in silence until the Queen had dined. Elizabeth’s silence and the formal protocol of the event have been attributed to her ‘haughtiness’ and ‘arrogance’ (characteristics that may well have been seen as appropriate had she been a royal princess), but this strange, soundless ballet was part of a sacred ritual, and in no way expressed her own preferences.
A warmer image is provided by Elizabeth’s role as hostess to Lord Gruuthuyse in 1472. Gruuthuyse had been Edward’s host during his Flemish exile, a sojourn that provided the King with an opportunity to experience the magnificence of the Burgundian court lifestyle and which was to be highly influential on his own tastes and cultural ambitions. Edward was keen to reward Gruuthuyse, and invited him to England, where he created him Earl of Winchester at Windsor. After supper, Edward conducted his guest to Elizabeth’s rooms, where she was playing at bowls with her ladies, a sight Gruuthuyse found charming. Following the bowls there was dancing and next day Elizabeth had a banquet prepared in her apartments. She had created three ‘chambers of pleasance’ hung with silks and floral tapestries, which featured a tented bath and a fine down bed for Gruuthuyse, complete with a cloth-of-gold and ermine counterpane, gold canopy, white curtains and sheets and pillows ‘of the queen’s own ordinance’. Elizabeth’s gilt-and-ivory beauty would have been set off to full advantage by such a backdrop, and here she appears as the perfect picture of graciousness and condescension, regal and courteous, yet simple enough to concern herself with cushions. Nothing in either of these accounts suggests that she was anything less than fully capable of fulfilling her royal role in public.
Privately, Elizabeth’s situation was less satisfactory, as she was learning that even great beauty is not enough to hold a philandering man. Her sexual relationship with the King certainly continued until 1480, since she gave birth to Bridget, her last child, in November that year. But Thomas More noted that Edward was ‘greatly given to fleshly wantonness’, and few women could resist the attentions of a handsome king. Dominic Mancini, an Italian cleric in the service of one of Louis XI’s ministers, added that Edward generously passed on his mistresses to his friends when he tired of them. The King had a bastard son, Arthur, by his lover Elizabeth Lucy, and two daughters, the tactlessly named Elizabeth and Grace (with whom Elizabeth Woodville obviously had some sort of relationship, as Grace attended her funeral). Anti-Woodville writers have made a vice even of Elizabeth’s dignified silence in the face of her husband’s many infidelities, citing it as evidence of her ‘cold’ and ‘designing’ character.17 A similar twisting occurs in the case of Edward’s best-known mistress Jane Shore, a source of misconceptions about Elizabeth’s relationship with the chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, which would affect the interpretation of her role in the events surrounding her son’s thwarted succession. Many commentators have accepted that Elizabeth hated Hastings, with whom she had a long history of disputes dating back to the 1460s, though there is some evidence that they collaborated with one another in the 1470s. The reason for this ‘hatred’ was supposedly the pleasure Hastings shared with Edward in ‘wanton company’, a tendency which, according to Mancini, spilled over into a quarrel with Elizabeth’s son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset. Dorset planned to take over from his stepfather in Jane Shore’s affections, but Mistress Shore wasted no time in throwing herself on the protection of the chamberlain. Thomas More bulks out Mancini’s gossip with a political motivation for the ill will between Hastings and the Woodvilles with the suggestion that Edward preferred Hastings for the governorship of Calais over the Queen’s candidate, her brother Lord Rivers, in 1482. The enmity between Hastings and the Queen’s family has been seen as a crucial stalling point in Edward V’s accession, though Elizabeth’s personal responsibility for it is ‘the most uncertain factor of all’.18
Malicious rumour also placed ElizabethWoodville at the centre of another controversy of the 1470s: the execution of the Duke of Clarence. Isabel Neville died in January 1477, yet the King was reluctant to allow his untrustworthy brother to marry again. Matches were proposed with Mary, the heiress to the Duke of Burgundy, and Margaret, the King of Scotland’s sister, but the former would have prejudiced Edward’s concord with Louis of France and the latter given Clarence a power base disturbingly proximate to England. A truculent Clarence began to display his contempt for Edward’s authority and in May 1477 expressly defied the King with his support of one Thomas Burdet, who was hanged for treason, sorcery and the spread of sedition that month. There were whispers of another rebellion plot, which the Duke compounded by claiming that he and his heirs had the true right to Henry VI’s crown and encouraging some of his men to swear fealty to him. Clarence was becoming dangerous, and by June Edward felt he had no choice but to arrest him. The Queen was reported to be using her influence to destroy the Duke, for fear that her son would never reign while his uncle was alive, but the decision to execute Clarence in February 1478 was Edward’s and Edward’s alone. Elizabeth may never have forgiven Clarence for conspiring with Warwick, so it is possible that she did perceive him as a threat and welcomed his demise, but her purported responsibility in the matter proves nothing more than the readiness of her critics to attribute her husband’s unpleasant political actions to the powers of persuasion of his wife, a trope with which English queens had had to contend since Eleanor of Provence’s day.
Despite the shadows of Edward’s infidelity and the bitterness of Clarence’s death, it appeared that by 1482 the royal couple had finally overcome the horrors and sufferings of years of war. The Croyland Chronicle presents an idyllic picture of the family atChristmas that year: ‘You might have seen, in those days, the royal court presenting no other appearance than such as fully befits a most mighty kingdom, filled with riches, boasting of the sweet and beautiful children, the issue of [Edward’s] marriage with Queen Elizabeth.’ As ever for Elizabeth, though, peace and security proved to be short-lived.