Elizabeth Woodville (also spelt Wydville, Wydeville, or Widvile; Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived, p. xviii, Perseus Books, 1995. – 8 June 1492), known as Dame Elizabeth Grey during her first marriage, was Queen of England from 29 September 1464 until 3 October 1470 and from 11 April 1471 until 9 April 1483 as the wife of King Edward IV. She was a key figure in the Wars of the Roses, a dynastic civil war between the Lancastrian and the Yorkist factions between 1455 and 1487.
At the time of her birth, Elizabeth's family was of middle rank in the English social hierarchy. Her mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, had previously been an aunt-by-marriage to King Henry VI, and was the daughter of Peter I, Count of Saint-Pol. Elizabeth's first marriage was to a minor supporter of the House of Lancaster, John Grey of Groby. He died at the Second Battle of St Albans in 1461, leaving Elizabeth a widowed mother of two young sons.
Elizabeth's second marriage, in 1464, to Edward IV became a cause célèbre. Elizabeth was known for her beauty but came from minor nobility with no great estates, and the marriage took place in secret. Edward was the first king of England since the Norman Conquest to marry one of his subjects,A Complete History of England with the Lives of all the Kings and Queens thereof; London, 1706. p. 486 and Elizabeth was the first such consort to be crowned queen. The couple had ten children together. The marriage greatly enriched Elizabeth's siblings and children, but their advancement incurred the hostility of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, "The Kingmaker", and his various alliances with the most senior figures in the increasingly divided royal family. This hostility turned into open discord between King Edward and Warwick, leading to a battle of wills that finally resulted in Warwick's switching allegiance to the Lancastrian cause, and to the execution of Elizabeth's father, Richard Woodville, 1st Earl Rivers, and her brother, John, by Warwick in 1469.
After the death of her husband in 1483, Elizabeth remained politically influential even after her son, briefly proclaimed King Edward V, was deposed by her brother-in-law, Richard III. Edward and his younger brother Richard both disappeared soon afterwards. The Tudor court and Sir Thomas More accused Richard of their murders, although no direct evidence exists tying him to the crime. Elizabeth subsequently played an important role in securing the accession of Henry VII in 1485.
Henry married Elizabeth's eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, which ended the Wars of the Roses and established the Tudor dynasty. Through her daughter, Elizabeth Woodville was the maternal grandmother of the future Henry VIII, and an ancestor to every English and British monarch that followed. She was forced to yield pre-eminence to Henry VII's mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort; her influence on events in these years, and her eventual departure from court into retirement, remain obscure.
Early life and first marriage Elizabeth Woodville was born in about 1437 (no record of her birth survives), at Grafton Regis, Northamptonshire. She was the firstborn child of a socially unequal marriage between Richard Woodville and Jacquetta of Luxembourg, which briefly scandalised the English court. The Woodvilles, though an old and respectable family, were gentry rather than noble, a landed and wealthy family that had previously produced commissioners of the peace, sheriffs, and MPs, rather than peers of the realm. Elizabeth's mother, in contrast, was the eldest daughter of Peter I of Luxembourg, Count of Saint-Pol, Conversano and Brienne, and as the widow of John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, uncle of King Henry VI of England, was before her second marriage one of the highest ranking women in England. As Jacquetta had pledged, upon the death of her first husband, that she would not remarry without first obtaining royal permission, and as royal permission to marry Woodville was out of the question, the pair married secretly. When the marriage became public knowledge, the couple was heavily fined, but was pardoned on 24 October 1437: it has been conjectured that the pardon coincided with the birth of Elizabeth, the couple's firstborn child.
Around 1452, Elizabeth Woodville married John Grey of Groby, the heir to the Barony Ferrers of Groby. He was killed at the Second Battle of St Albans in 1461, fighting for the Lancastrian cause. This would become a source of irony, since Elizabeth's future husband Edward IV was the Yorkist claimant to the throne. Elizabeth Woodville's two sons from this first marriage were Thomas Grey (later Marquess of Dorset) and Richard Grey.
Elizabeth Woodville was called "the most beautiful woman in the Island of Britain" with "heavy-lidded eyes like those of a dragon".Jane Bingham, The Cotswolds: A Cultural History, (Oxford University Press, 2009), 66
Queen consort
Edward IV had many mistresses, the best known of them being Jane Shore, and he did not have a reputation for fidelity. His marriage to the widowed Elizabeth Woodville took place secretly and, though there is no documentary evidence of the date, it is traditionally said to have taken place at her family home in Northamptonshire on 1 May 1464.Robert Fabian, The New Chronicles of England and France, ed. Henry Ellis (London: Rivington, 1811), 654; "Hearne’s Fragment of an Old Chronicle, from 1460–1470," The Chronicles of the White Rose of York. (London: James Bohn, 1845), 15–16. Only the bride's mother and two ladies were in attendance. Edward married her just over three years after he had assumed the English throne in the wake of his overwhelming victory over the Lancastrians, at the Battle of Towton, which resulted in the displacement of King Henry VI. Edward introduced Elizabeth Woodville as his queen to the royal court at Reading Abbey on Michaelmas Day (29 September 1464).
Elizabeth Woodville came to London for her coronation. Her Royal Entry was marked by a pageant at London Bridge featured angels wearing wigs dyed with saffron and the texts of six ballads were painted and set up on the bridge. She was crowned queen at Westminster Abbey on 26 May 1465, a few days after Ascension Day.Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1 (Routledge, 1980) pp. 99–100, 324–332.Sarah Carpenter and Meg Twycross, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Ashgate, 2002), p. 315.
In the early years of his reign, Edward IV's governance of England was dependent upon a small circle of supporters, most notably his cousin, Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick. At around the time of Edward IV's secret marriage, Warwick was negotiating an alliance with France in an effort to thwart a similar arrangement being made by his sworn enemy Margaret of Anjou, wife of the deposed Henry VI. The plan was that Edward IV should marry a French princess. When his marriage to Elizabeth, who was both a commoner and from a family of Lancastrian supporters, became public Warwick was both embarrassed and offended. His relationship with Edward IV was ruined. The match was also badly received by the privy council, who according to Jean de Waurin told Edward with great frankness that "he must know that she was no wife for a prince such as himself".
With the arrival on the scene of the new queen came many relatives, some of whom married into the most notable families in England.Ralph A. Griffiths, "The Court during the Wars of the Roses". In Princes Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, cc. 1450–1650. Edited by Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. . 59–61. Three of her sisters married the sons of the earls of Kent, Essex and Pembroke. Another sister, Catherine Woodville, married the queen's 11-year-old ward Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, who later joined Edward IV's brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in opposition to the Woodvilles after the death of Edward IV. Elizabeth's 20-year-old brother John married Katherine, Duchess of Norfolk, Edward IV and Warwick's aunt. The Duchess had been widowed three times and was in her sixties, so the marriage created a scandal at court. Elizabeth's son, Thomas Grey, married firstly Anne Holland, a niece of Edward, and later Cecily Bonville, 7th Baroness Harington.
Elizabeth's status as a commoner before her sudden, secret marriage to Edward was primarily the reason for the backlash against her queenship. She was often seen as arrogant and disrespectful for actions that would be seen as normal by a lady of higher rank, such as her predecessor Margaret of Anjou. Such was Elizabeth's unpopularity that George, Duke of Clarence, rebellious brother of her husband, later even accused her of witchcraft in order to murder his wife Isabel Neville. Most historians now believe that Isabel died of either consumption or childbed fever.
When Elizabeth Woodville's relatives, especially her brother Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, began to challenge Warwick's pre-eminence in English political society, Warwick conspired with his son-in-law George, Duke of Clarence, the king's younger brother. One of his followers accused Elizabeth Woodville's mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, of practising witchcraft. She was acquitted the following year.Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1467–77, pg. 190.
Warwick and Clarence twice rose in revolt and then fled to France. Warwick formed an uneasy alliance with the Lancastrian Queen Margaret of Anjou, executed Elizabeth's father and brother after the Yorkist defeat at the Battle of Edgcote, and restored Margaret's husband Henry VI to the throne in 1470. But the following year, Edward IV returned from exile and defeated Warwick at the Battle of Barnet, and the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury. Henry VI was killed soon afterwards.
Following her husband's temporary fall from power, Elizabeth Woodville sought sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, where she gave birth to a son, Edward (later King Edward V of England). Her marriage to Edward IV produced a total of ten children, including another son, Richard, Duke of York, who would later join his brother as one of the Princes in the Tower. Five daughters also lived to adulthood.
Elizabeth Woodville engaged in acts of Christian piety in keeping with conventional expectations of a medieval queen consort. She also became a patroness of Queens' College, Cambridge. Her acts included making pilgrimages, obtaining a papal indulgence for those who knelt and said the Angelus three times per day, and founding the chapel of St. Erasmus in Westminster Abbey.Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, "A 'Most Benevolent Queen;'"Laynesmith, pp. 111, 118–19.
Queen dowager Following Edward IV's sudden death in April 1483, possibly from pneumonia or being worn out from "high living", Elizabeth became queen dowager. Her young son, Edward V, became king, with his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, acting as Lord Protector. In response to the Woodvilles' attempt to monopolise power, Gloucester quickly moved to take control of the young king and had the king's uncle Earl Rivers and half-brother Richard Grey, son to Elizabeth, arrested. The young king was transferred to the Tower of London to await the coronation. With her younger son and daughters, Elizabeth again sought sanctuary. Lord Hastings, the late king's leading supporter in London, initially endorsed Gloucester's actions, but Gloucester then accused him of conspiring with Elizabeth Woodville against him. Hastings was summarily executed. Whether any such conspiracy really occurred is not known.C. T. Wood, "Richard III, William, Lord Hastings and Friday the Thirteenth", in R. A. Griffiths and J. Sherborne (eds.), Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages, New York, 1986, 156–61. Richard accused Elizabeth of plotting to "murder and utterly destroy" him.Charles Ross, Richard III, University of California Press, 1981 p81.