Elizabeth Woodville: The Knight’s Widow

Abstract

Edward IV’s queen is distinctive for being an English gentlewoman and for a family whose influence in her husband’s reign has been a key feature in discussions of the Wars of the Roses. This chapter argues that for the most part Elizabeth’s queenship was exemplary: she was fertile, pious, cultured, and beautiful, a successful intercessor, and an able administrator, who tried hard to present herself within the acceptable ideal for English queens. Nonetheless, in the exceptional circumstances of a civil conflict she was a natural target for abuse because contemporary perceptions of social status meant that her husband’s critics could use her family connections to undermine his credibility. Similar prejudices among later generations of historians have continued to obscure the positive elements of her queenship. Her most politically significant role was as mother of the future king, Edward V, but this was ultimately compromised by her devotion to the children of her first marriage.

In September 1464, plague had driven Edward IV and his councillors out of London into the Thameside village of Reading where they gathered in its majestic Benedictine abbey.¹ When discussion turned to the King’s ongoing marriage negotiations with France, Edward astonished his councillors by announcing that he had chosen a wife of his own, without their advice, and had already married her in secret. Moreover, this wife was no foreign princess but an English gentlewoman with two sons from a previous marriage. She was the widow of a knight who had died fighting for Henry VI at St Albans in 1461. Lady Elizabeth Grey, née Woodville, was a queen whose origins broke all established conventions for English queenship. Later allegations of her family’s malign influence and a perception that she was “no wife” for a king would make this marriage “one of the defining factors” of Edward IV’s reign and would play a critical part in the tragic endgame of the Plantagenet dynasty.²

Elizabeth’s is a remarkable story: she lost her status as queen and regained it, not once but twice. Most of her very closest kinsmen died violently and the disappearance of her youngest sons has been a matter of public fascination ever since. Yet, unlike five of the queens in this volume, the modern royal family are her descendants. The terrible losses that Elizabeth endured evoked sympathy in some early reporters of her story, but elsewhere jealousy and the political needs of her family’s opponents created a more powerful narrative of ambition, greed, murder, witchcraft, and betrayal that has proved popular among more recent writers. A.J. Pollard identified these traditions as the mater dolorosa and the femme fatale: common stereotypes that marginalise women in a male-dominated discourse, but only rarely co-exist as they have for Elizabeth.³ In 1995, Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs convincingly refuted traditions that included Elizabeth’s supposed responsibility for the deaths of the Earl of Desmond and the Duke of Clarence, as well as her alleged greed in pursuing her rights to queen’s gold, yet the slanders continue to be repeated in more recent books.⁴

A Northamptonshire Gentlewoman

Few details of Elizabeth Woodville’s early life have survived. Her mother was Jacquetta of Luxembourg, daughter of Pierre, Count of St Pol, and of Margeurite des Baux, a Neapolitan noblewoman.⁵ Jacquetta’s first husband was Henry VI’s uncle, John, Duke of Bedford. Shortly after Bedford’s death in 1435, Jacquetta secretly married one of the knights in her household, Sir Richard Woodville, whose family had been Northamptonshire gentry since the thirteenth century.⁶ Despite this mésalliance, Jacquetta retained her status as the highest ranking noblewoman in England, only eventually surpassed by Henry VI’s queen, Margaret of Anjou.

It is commonly assumed that Elizabeth was born very shortly after her parents’ marriage became public knowledge in 1437. However, it is equally possible that she was slightly younger than her brother Anthony, perhaps born in 1441, and was consequently much closer in age to Edward IV than most historians allow.⁷ Elizabeth is likely to have received a better education than many women: one of the Stonor letters noted that on occasion she would write letters “with her awn hand,”⁸ and Jacquetta retained some of the French royal library that her first husband had purchased, including Isabeau of Bavaria’s sumptuous presentation copy of Christine de Pisan’s works.⁹ Elizabeth’s eldest brother, Anthony, was to become one of William Caxton’s most important patrons and collaborators, and Elizabeth herself owned a copy of Caxton’s first English book. The full extent of the siblings’ engagement with Caxton is a matter of continuing debate.¹⁰ Elizabeth’s only surviving household accounts mention that she had arranged for the chancellor of the University of Cambridge, William Wulflete, to purchase a book for her at the cost of £10 (the sum then considered necessary to support a gentleman for a year).¹¹ This predates all of Edward IV’s known book purchases. Jacquetta surely arranged for her children to grow up in the same cultural milieu as herself, despite their smaller income.

The earliest mention of Elizabeth’s first marriage, to Sir John Grey, occurs in 1455 in letters patent of Richard, Duke of York (under whom her father had served in France).¹² Sir John Grey’s father was a younger son of Reynold, Baron Grey of Ruthin, and the family’s wealth came primarily from John’s mother, Elizabeth, Lady Ferrers of Groby. John and Elizabeth’s sons, Thomas and Richard, were probably born in 1456 and 1460, respectively. After only five years of marriage, Sir John Grey was killed at the Second Battle of St Albans. Weeks later Edward IV was triumphant at the Battle of Towton. Elizabeth’s father, now Lord Rivers, and her brother Anthony (Lord Scales) were locked in the Tower.¹³

The newly widowed Elizabeth was exceptionally vulnerable. Several of the trustees responsible for her jointure refused to hand over the manors that were meant to sustain her in her widowhood.¹⁴ Moreover, her brother-in-law, Edward Grey, had seized estates that her son Thomas should have inherited from his paternal grandfather, while her mother-in-law’s new young husband, Sir John Bourchier, had prevailed on Lady Ferrers to settle her principal properties on them jointly for life, ensuring that Thomas would have to wait far longer for this inheritance too. Rivers and Scales were pardoned in July 1461 and swiftly moved into the Yorkist establishment, which perhaps explains the success of the chancery suits Elizabeth launched to regain her jointure.¹⁵ Her son’s inheritance proved harder to recover. By 1463, Rivers was often in the King’s company and on his council, but Elizabeth needed someone with much stronger influence over the King.¹⁶ She turned to a distant kinsman, William, Lord Hastings, the King’s chamberlain. Hastings drove a very hard bargain for his aid but it was probably amid these negotiations that the King’s desire for Elizabeth was kindled.¹⁷ Whether they had only just met or had been distantly aware of each other for their entire lives is impossible to know.

The Secret Marriage

Almost every account of their secret wedding includes details that seem to be contradicted elsewhere. The dates of Elizabeth’s arrangements with Hastings suggest that the marriage may have occurred only a few days or weeks before it was announced. Most reports assumed that Edward had tried to persuade her to be his concubine and she had impressed him with her virtuous refusal and her beauty. The earliest copies of her portrait depict a woman with honey-blonde hair, plucked to create a fashionably high forehead, dark grey-blue eyes, and an elegantly long neck.¹⁸ Within four years of her marriage, Elizabeth had become an exemplar of chastity in Antonio Cornazzano’s De mulieribus admirandis, which depicted her threatening suicide if forced to become the King’s concubine.¹⁹ Virtue was of course a standard queenly attribute, but one that it was especially important to emphasise for a queen of debatable social status. This depiction played into fifteenth-century literary arguments about the relative merits of noble behaviour and noble blood.²⁰ Elizabeth herself fostered her reputation for virtue by choosing a deep red clove pink or “gillyflower” as her device which stood for “virtuous love and marriage and was also a devout reminder of the Virgin Mary’s own chastity and motherhood.”²¹ For some, the idea that Elizabeth’s personal qualities merited her status was clearly persuasive: decades later, a servant of the Howard family who had been at court later in the 1460s wrote that Edward had “attemptid the stabilite and constant modesty of dyvers ladies and jentilwomen” and could find none “of such constant wommanhode, wisedome and beaute as was dame Elizabeth.”²²

For Elizabeth, the King’s proposal must have seemed a glorious opportunity to triumph over avaricious in-laws, protect her children’s future, and assume the role of queen that her own mother had come so close to. For twenty-two-year-old Edward their romance was clearly more enticing than the prospect of marrying the sister of Louis XI’s famously unattractive queen. It was perhaps also an impetuous demonstration of his independence as king. He must have been well aware that European courts imagined his cousin, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, was the real ruler of England. Edward of Woodstock’s secret marriage to Joan of Kent in 1361 very likely provided an influential precedent, but Joan was a countess in her own right and a descendant of Edward I. Edward IV’s announcement of his love match was a revolutionary moment in English queenship.

In October 1464, Venetian merchants who had just left London and John, Lord Wenlock, who was in Reading at the time the marriage was announced, both left records of the “great displeasure” that the King had aroused by acting without his council’s advice.²³ The news in Danzig was that English custom required a king to marry “a maiden … not a widow, yet the king took this one against the wish of all his lords.”²⁴ Edgar, Cnut, Harold Godwinson, and, more recently, Edward of Woodstock and Henry IV had all married widows (Henry II even married a divorcee), yet this complaint about Elizabeth’s marital status proved so persistent that Thomas More imagined the King’s mother, Cecily, Duchess of York, arguing that it was “a very blemish, and highe disparagement to the sacre magesty of a prince … to be defouled with bigamy in his first marriage.”²⁵ It was perhaps the combination of widowhood with her father’s social status that rendered widowhood more objectionable in Elizabeth’s case than it had been previously.

By contrast, John, Lord Howard, drafted a letter not long after the marriage noting that the people of East Anglia were “despossed in the beste wysse and glade ther of.”²⁶ As with more recent royal marriages, it seems that responses varied. The regime acted swiftly to try to limit the potential damage. On 30 September 1464, Elizabeth was escorted into the quire of Reading Abbey by the King’s eldest brother, George, Duke of Clarence, and his cousin, the Earl of Warwick. Here she was “openly honoured as queen by the lords and all the people.”²⁷ This was a make-shift ritual to provide public affirmation of her status and of the King’s right to marry her. It was later reported that their secret marriage had happened a full five months earlier, on Mayday, the quintessential occasion for romance in the medieval calendar. Edward IV’s itinerary indicates that this was not impossible. Yet it is surely significant that such a date wove the marriage into the King’s wider public image, propagated in songs and illuminated genealogies, as a hero of romance, and King Arthur’s heir.²⁸

The following spring, Elizabeth and her ladies reinforced this image by engaging in public theatre at the palace of Shene, challenging her brother Anthony, Lord Scales, to arrange a tournament for the “augmentacion of knyghthode & recomendacion of nobless.”²⁹ Scales and his father already had an international reputation for their jousting so this was an obvious means of enhancing public perception of the queen’s family. Scales’s challenge was delivered to the Duke of Burgundy’s bastard son, Antoine, Count de la Roche, and it was probably no coincidence that his reply “to Lorde Scales my brothir” was formally presented to the King at Greenwich on the eve of Elizabeth’s entry into London for her coronation, weaving this noble enterprise firmly into the festivities for her anointing.³⁰

Elizabeth had a legendary bloodline of her own. The house of Luxembourg claimed descent from the heroic Antoine, fourth son of the half-fairy Melusine who founded the house of Lusignan. Both Melusine and her mother, Presine, were encountered by their royal mortal husbands at the edge of forests when they were out hunting, a common romance trope that would find its way into stories of Elizabeth’s meeting with Edward too.³¹ The Lusignan lion was included in Elizabeth’s new coat of arms, along with those of St Pol and Luxembourg, and both of her maternal grandparents (Baux and Orsini). There was barely room for her father’s Woodville fess and canton.³² We do not know what Elizabeth’s motto was but if, as seems likely, she was the Queen who once owned Life of our Lady (Beinecke MS 281), it was perhaps “aymer et a tandyr” (to love and to wait)—the perfect motto for a romance heroine.³³

Becoming Queen

Within days of the announcement of their marriage, Edward had issued a safe conduct for Elizabeth’s maternal uncle, Jacques de Luxembourg, to visit England with a company of one hundred persons (of any degree but not French).³⁴ Jacques was fully aware of Edward’s need for distinguished foreign in-laws and arrived for Elizabeth’s coronation in May 1465 with an impressive entourage. Meanwhile, the King and his council had been liaising with the civic authorities in London to choreograph an occasion of particular splendour that began by celebrating some of Elizabeth’s unique characteristics, but gradually reconfigured her in a template of traditional queenship.³⁵ At London Bridge she was greeted by angels in flaxen wigs dyed with saffron, their wings fashioned from 900 peacock feathers, and actors representing St Elizabeth and Mary Cleophas.³⁶ These biblical mothers provided implicit parallels with Elizabeth’s own proven fertility, her most obvious virtue in the circumstances. St Elizabeth was of course also the Queen’s name saint while Mary Cleophas was believed to have been twice married and thus affirmed the Queen’s own unconventional marital status.

The following day, newly created Knights of the Bath escorted Elizabeth to the Palace of Westminster. Implicitly this was as much a celebration of new-found peace as the coronations of many of her predecessors had been, for chief among the new knights were the young sons of prominent Lancastrian families. These were led by nine-year-old Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and his brother Humphrey, whose grandfather had been slain at the battle of Northampton in 1460. Buckingham had recently married the Queen’s younger sister Katherine, and the brothers had joined Elizabeth’s own sons in her household. The Staffords were followed by the twenty-two-year-old John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whose father and elder brother had both been executed for treason only three years earlier.³⁷ On Sunday 26 May the Queen walked to Westminster Abbey dressed in a purple mantle, her train carried by the elder Duchess of Buckingham who was both a Lancastrian widow and the King’s own aunt. Elizabeth’s anointing and crowning in the abbey were followed by a similarly ritualised banquet with fifty-one dishes in the great hall of Westminster Palace.³⁸

Even before her coronation, Elizabeth’s family were inevitably the source of considerable attention. Spectacular marriages were arranged for her five sisters, her eldest son, and youngest brother. Much has been made of this act of social climbing, although it would be hard to argue that they were any more impressive than the matches Joan of Kent had arranged for her Holland offspring or indeed the grand alliances masterminded by Joan Beaufort for her Neville children on the strength of her kinship to Henry IV. The greatest beneficiary of Elizabeth’s second marriage was her father, Lord Rivers, who was created Earl Rivers in May 1466. Nonetheless, the income he required for this position came not from grants of lands but from offices that required a considerable commitment of service. He was made Treasurer of England in 1466 and Constable of England in 1467.

Edward’s lavish generosity early in his reign to secure his throne had left him with few estates to dispense at this point. It swiftly emerged that properties granted to Elizabeth for her maintenance before her coronation were so burdened with expenses that they could not provide a satisfactory income. A new settlement was made in July 1465, replaced by another in January 1466.³⁹ The total receipts that reached her household the following year, including those from queen’s gold, amounted to £4540 18 s 11½ d.⁴⁰ As Katia Wright notes in her chapter on queen’s dower, this was significantly less than the 10,000 marks that had been promised to Margaret of Anjou as her annual income, yet it was probably very similar to Margaret’s actual receipts.⁴¹ Elizabeth received various additional grants throughout Edward’s reigns and Rosemary Horrox has argued that by 1475 her interest in East Anglia may have been regarded as “the main instrument of royal authority there.”⁴²

The Business of Queenship

Elizabeth was clearly actively engaged in managing these estates and finances herself. In a letter to Sir William Stonor, rebuking him for “uncourteisly” hunting deer on her land, she disputed Stonor’s claim that the King had granted permission for this and required him to show his evidence “if any suche ye have” either to her council or to her directly.⁴³ Similarly, marginal notes in her household accounts indicate that several payments her receiver general had expected to pay out had been “disallowed by order of the lady the queen.”⁴⁴ A letter she sent to William Harleton, her steward in Norfolk, showed how her decisions were made: evidence had been presented to her council on behalf of a tenant who was asking for exemption from a fine and “we be credibly enformed” of the “uttyr distrucion” the tenant faced “withoute our grace especiall to hym schewyd” so, “be thavise of the same our counsell,” he was to be permitted to remain in his property at Thetford paying no more than his previous rent.⁴⁵

The business side of queenship was of course not limited to managing her own estates but was very often about patronage and for Elizabeth even her withdrawal from court for childbirth was not allowed to distract from these responsibilities. In June 1467, she had written to the Earl of Oxford to support the claims of one Simon Blyant to a manor that Sir John Paston also claimed. That August, Oxford asked George Neville, Archbishop of York, to discuss the matter directly with the Queen but her confinement made this impossible. Consequently, the Archbishop delivered his message with “a rynge for a tokyn” to the Queen’s father who presumably passed it on via his wife.⁴⁶ The Queen’s involvement in this dispute seems to have been at the request of Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk, who was trying to reclaim this manor, which her husband had sold to Sir John Fastolf decades earlier.⁴⁷ Helen Maurer has drawn attention to Margaret of Anjou’s practice of working through other women to support both her own and her husband’s interests and Elizabeth Woodville seems to have operated in similar female networks.⁴⁸ In 1469, Sir John Paston became engaged to her kinswoman Anne Haute, prompting the Queen to support his ongoing struggles to make good his claims to Fastolf’s possessions. While the King put pressure on the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk to achieve a resolution, Elizabeth wrote to Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, and Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, asking them to “commune with” their respective dukes to the same end.⁴⁹

It appears from the Stonor letters that Elizabeth could also be exceptionally persuasive: a letter that is probably from Joan Stonor mentions that she had ordered her daughter to serve in a household at the Queen’s desire (in response to a request from the lord or lady of that household), even though this would not have been the Stonors’ own choice. When Joan had initially tried to refuse, the Queen was “ryght gretly displisyd” since it thwarted Elizabeth’s attempts to please the host family.⁵⁰ The incident highlights not just the strength of the Queen’s personality, but also the careful balances that had to be made in the negotiations of patronage.

An important arena for patronage was of course the Queen’s own household. As Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs demonstrate in the following chapter, it was expected that a noblewoman’s household would provide employment for men and women with family connections. In practice, because the Woodvilles had themselves been royal servants since Edward III’s reign, it was inevitable that the household of Edward IV’s queen would include their relations and in most cases it is hard to determine how significant their personal connections to the Woodvilles actually were in achieving their positions. Even her Venetian physician Dominic de Serego could have entered her service either through his connections in Northamptonshire, her home county, or through the patronage of the long-time Yorkist John, Lord Dynham.⁵¹ Only one of her sisters, Anne, attended her and their brother John became the Queen’s master of horse.⁵² Clearly a small number of her family did benefit from this new opportunity for employment, but, contrary to the popular image, these were a slender element in a large administration dominated by career administrators who had long-standing connections with Edward IV or with the Duchy of Lancaster.⁵³

The Queen’s new subjects were swift to offer opportunities for her to engage in the traditional queenly role of intercessor with the king. Even before her coronation she had established herself as a patron of what was then called “the Queen’s College,” which Margaret of Anjou had helped to found in Cambridge.⁵⁴ A decade later she issued its first statutes so that subsequent records considered Elizabeth herself “fundaresse of the said college.”⁵⁵ On other occasions she supported planned religious foundations in London, interceded to reduce debts owed by the Merchant Adventurers’ company to the King, made generous gifts to Eton College, and petitioned the pope to extend the circumstances in which indulgences could be acquired by observing the feast of the Visitation.⁵⁶ Her piety as queen seems to have been broadly conventional for a fifteenth-century royal, encompassing pilgrimages, membership of various fraternities, a particular devotion to her name saint, notable generosity to the Carthusians, and the foundation of a chantry at Westminster after her son was born there (Fig. 13.1).⁵⁷ One possible indicator of a more personal, and more sophisticated, thread in her piety is a book of Hours of the Guardian Angel which Sutton and Visser-Fuchs have argued was commissioned for her, very possibly at her request.⁵⁸

Fig. 13.1

The court of Edward IV at the foundation of the Luton Guild of the Holy Trinity. Elizabeth Woodville on right with Cecily, Duchess of York, behind her. (Courtesy of the Culture Trust Luton)

Elizabeth’s first royal child was born on 11 February 1466, a daughter who shared her name. The occasion was an opportunity to reassure the Earl of Warwick of his pre-eminent position by inviting him to be the baby’s godfather. The Queen’s subsequent churching and banquet were witnessed by Bohemian visitors who were concealed in an alcove to watch the women-only silent feast. It was one of a number of occasions on which Edward used privileged access to Elizabeth’s presence in spaces that were constructed as private in order to impress or honour his guests.⁵⁹ Elizabeth bore her second daughter, Mary, in August 1467 and a third, Cecily, on 20 March 1469. As Luchino Dallaghiexia told the Duke of Milan, this last “rejoiced the king and all the nobles exceedingly, though they would have preferred a son.”⁶⁰

That summer, as King Edward travelled north to quell what appeared to be a local rebellion in Yorkshire, Elizabeth journeyed to East Anglia, accompanied by her elder daughters. The authorities in Norwich were advised that “she woll desire to ben resseyved as wurshepfully as evir was Quene a fore hir.”⁶¹ Any sovereign expected as much worship as their predecessors, but, as a gentlewoman who had married a usurper, Elizabeth’s concern to present a convincing spectacle as queen was understandable.

A Fragile Throne, 1469–1471

Elizabeth’s anxieties proved well founded. While she was being fêted in Norwich, Warwick and Clarence dispatched a letter from Calais supporting the northern rebels and naming the Queen’s parents and brothers among evil counsellors to the King. Comparison was made with earlier kings who had only taken advice from those “not of thaire blood” and lost their thrones as a consequence.⁶² The King’s disappointing rule was being blamed squarely on the low birth of his Queen’s kin and a small number of others which made them unfit to guide government. Dallaghiexia now reported that,

the king here took to wife a widow of this island of quite low birth. Since her coronation she has always exerted herself to aggrandise her relations … and had brought things to such a pass that they had the entire government of this realm, to such an extent that the rest of the lords about the government were one, the Earl of Warwick.⁶³

He was clearly parroting Warwick, who he considered “as astute as Ulysses.”⁶⁴ The claim of Woodville domination was demonstrably wildly exaggerated and it is surely here, in Warwick’s propaganda, that Elizabeth’s reputation as a femme fatale originated. Contemporaries were divided on the reasons for Warwick’s rebellion. In 1486, one of Edward’s former councillors wrote a continuation to the Crowland Chronicle in which he argued that “the real cause of dissension” had been Edward’s preference for an alliance with Burgundy instead of France.⁶⁵ The Howard family servant was adamant that the “first motiffe and originall cause” was Warwick’s own ambition: “his insaciable mynde could noȝt be content.”⁶⁶ Whatever the reasons, the social status of the Queen’s family made them easy scapegoats in a familiar narrative of righteous rebellion.

Elizabeth was back in London when she heard the devastating news that her father and her twenty-four-year-old brother John had been summarily executed at Northampton after the royalist defeat at Edgcote; that the King was the Earl of Warwick’s prisoner; and that her mother was being charged with witchcraft, having apparently used lead figures of the King and Queen.⁶⁷ Charges of witchcraft had of course been made against the Dowager Queen Joan of Navarre in 1419, as Elena Woodacre discusses above. Even more pertinently, in 1441 Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, another gentlewoman who had married into the royal family, had had her marriage annulled after she was found guilty of bewitching her husband into their union. It is most likely that Warwick hoped to annul Elizabeth’s marriage in similar fashion. “The queen keeps very scant state,” Dallaghiexia reported with brutal brevity.⁶⁸ She had every reason to be terrified of what the future held. In the midst of this nightmare, the London Mayor and Aldermen voted to send the Queen a gift of wine, perhaps a token of their continuing loyalty.⁶⁹ At the French court Sforza de Bettini, the Milanese ambassador, heard that in London “the Earl [of Warwick] is hated.”⁷⁰ Ironically, it was a rebellion on Henry VI’s behalf by one of Warwick’s own kinsmen that forced the Earl to release the King because he could not muster sufficient forces to restore peace.

The following September, Warwick launched his final bid at kingmaking, this time in alliance with Margaret of Anjou to restore Henry VI. He and Clarence landed in Devon while the King was in Yorkshire. Elizabeth’s initial reaction was to prepare for a siege in the Tower of London where she had already retired in expectation of the imminent birth of another child. But on 1 October news reached the capital that the King was preparing to set sail from Bishop’s Lynn, abandoning his kingdom. With no hope of imminent rescue, Elizabeth moved swiftly into the Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey with her mother and her daughters. She sent Abbot Thomas Millyng to advise the Mayor and Aldermen that she was surrendering the Tower, and consequently Henry VI, into their custody. The council’s journal recorded that the Queen feared that the approaching army would “despoil and kill the said queen.”⁷¹ After the traumas of the previous summer, she could scarcely be blamed for such anxiety, although to kill a queen would have been unprecedented: was this a measure of her insecurity or dramatic overstatement? The terms of surrender included safe conduct for all within “with their goods” to the sanctuaries at Westminster or St Martin’s.⁷² Even so, after the Readeption was over, Elizabeth had to bring a court case against John Marlburgh, gentleman of London, and others for a debt of £100, explaining that the paperwork proving her claim had been left in the Tower “in the tyme of the last rebellion” and “was take a way” by persons unknown.⁷³

The new Lancastrian regime chose to pretend they did not see Elizabeth as a threat, perhaps because they feared the repercussions from Londoners if they moved against her. Instead, Henry VI’s new council contented themselves with sending the widowed Lady Elizabeth Scrope to “attend,” or spy, on “Elizabeth late calling hir Quiene.”⁷⁴ At the beginning of November, Elizabeth at last bore a royal son, Edward. The Abbot and Prior of Westminster were his godfathers. The Duchess of Bedford would have been the most obvious candidate for godmother, but the Queen instead chose Lady Scrope.⁷⁵ This was probably a gesture of reconciliation with the new regime and was all that she could do to protect her infant son. The Crowland Continuator recalled that “those faithful to King Edward drew some consolation and hope” from the news of the prince’s birth.⁷⁶ The literature that celebrated Edward IV’s return to the throne the following year made much of the “great trowble, sorow, and hevines” that the Queen had endured, sharing the “vexacioun” experienced by all Londoners.⁷⁷

Mother of the Heir

Elizabeth continued to bear children regularly through Edward’s second reign: Margaret (19 April 1472) who died a few months later; Richard (17 August 1473); Anne (2 November 1475); George (1477) who was only two when he died; Katherine (1479) and Bridget (10 November 1480).⁷⁸ Elizabeth’s new position as mother of a male heir swiftly brought additional responsibilities. On 3 July 1471, Edward was created Prince of Wales and five days later the Queen was among those appointed to be administrators of his principality.⁷⁹ When the Prince moved to Ludlow in February 1473, the Queen travelled with him as a senior member of his council and may have remained in the Marches for much of that year.⁸⁰ On 10 November her brother Anthony, now Earl Rivers, was appointed “governor and ruler of the king’s first begotten son … that he may be virtuously, cunningly and knightly brought up.”⁸¹ It was an eloquent rejection of Warwick’s narrative of the Woodvilles’ unworthiness.

Ahead of his expedition to France in 1475, the King summoned Prince Edward back to London to take up the position of “keeper of the realm” and Elizabeth was granted £2200 for the additional costs of his presence in her household, but actual decision-making power rested in a Great Council led by John Alcock, Archbishop of Canterbury.⁸² Elizabeth’s eldest son, Thomas, now Marquess of Dorset, accompanied the King to France. Elizabeth had recently arranged a lucrative marriage for him with William Lord Hasting’s step-daughter, the heiress Cecily Bonville. In January 1478 Dorset and Rivers took leading roles in the flamboyant celebrations that attended the wedding of Elizabeth’s youngest son, Richard Duke of York, to five-year-old Anne Mowbray.⁸³ Only one member of the royal family was conspicuously absent: George, Duke of Clarence, who was in the Tower of London awaiting trial for treason. Like the King’s remaining brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Dorset eventually benefited significantly from the wealth available after Clarence’s death.⁸⁴ Dorset’s consequent increasing authority provided a challenge to his step-father-in-law which contributed to tensions between the families, tensions that erupted in April 1483 on Edward IV’s sudden death.

The Crisis of 1483

The Crowland Continuator, who was concerned about the undue influence of the Woodville men, nonetheless saw Elizabeth as a neutral figure at this point: he explained that “the most benevolent queen, desirous of extinguishing every spark of murmuring and unrest,” endeavoured to mediate between the opposing parties on the king’s council.⁸⁵ The motives and details of the events that followed may be the most fiercely debated in English medieval history. On 1 May 1483, news reached London that the Duke of Gloucester and the Duke of Buckingham had arrested several of the young King Edward V’s household. These included Elizabeth’s brother, Anthony, Earl Rivers, and her son, Richard Grey. It was reported that these men had been plotting to kill Gloucester so that they could dominate the new regime.⁸⁶ Elizabeth was apparently blindsided by events. All her previous relations with Gloucester seem to have been cordial.⁸⁷ Her decision then to return to the Westminster Sanctuary with Dorset was very likely primarily out of fear for Dorset’s safety rather than her own. There was a real risk that the Dukes would break sanctuary to arrest Dorset but far less so if the Queen and her other children were present with him.

In entering sanctuary for the sake of the children of her first marriage, Elizabeth effectively ceded the political neutrality that queenship should have afforded her. The Crowland Continuator recalled supporters gathering outside the Abbey in the Queen’s name while Hastings’ adherents assembled at the Tower.⁸⁸ Her actions also implied that she believed Gloucester posed a threat to much of the royal family, a message that could weaken his authority and so made her a threat to him. Following his arrival in London, Gloucester was declared Protector and assumed leadership of the Great Council meeting at Westminster Palace, while the young King Edward V was lodged in the Tower. Immediately contemporary reports are scarce but anxious letters from Simon Stallworth, a canon in the service of the newly appointed Chancellor, commented on 8 June that the Queen had been excluded from discussion about the forthcoming coronation and then, on 21 June, he wrote, “with huse is much trouble and every manne dowtes other”: Lord Hastings had been beheaded and men in armour had removed the young Duke of York from sanctuary.⁸⁹ Meanwhile, Gloucester was writing to the Corporation of the City of York asking for their assistance in “correcting and punisshing the quene” and her adherents who meant to murder him and others “of the olde royal blode of this realm” having “by many subtill and damnable ways forecasted the same.”⁹⁰ Here was a familiar medieval rhetoric of the threat posed to traditional authority by those of low birth made more disturbing with implications of sorcery. It is perfectly possible that Gloucester genuinely believed what he was writing.

Elizabeth’s silent enclosure in sanctuary in 1470–1471 had served to locate her in a template of ideal womanhood. This time, it was undercut by the association between secrecy and sorcery (a charge subsequently levelled at her publicly in Parliament, too), as well as the implication of deceit in events that were hidden, specifically her clandestine marriage to the King which was about to be declared a sham: it was announced that before their wedding Edward had already been legally bound to another woman so that “their entire offspring was unworthy of the kingship.”⁹¹ Common Law had evolved to protect the rights of children as far as possible so that in such a case as this the courts would usually still have considered the children legitimate, except when the second union had been clandestine too.⁹² The secret ceremony Edward had used to force his councillors into accepting his unconventional choice of wife could now provide justification for disinheriting their children. Whether these legal intricacies were actually examined at the time is not recorded. On 26 June 1483, Richard was acknowledged as King in Westminster Hall and Elizabeth was once more “dam[e] Elizabeth Gray.”⁹³ Her brother, Earl Rivers, and her son, Richard Grey, had been executed the day before.

The Marquess of Dorset had fled shortly after Hastings’ death and, after the new King left the capital, Elizabeth was presumably involved in the plans to help her daughters escape too. On discovering these, Richard arranged for so many guards around the Abbey that, in the Crowland Continuator’s view, “the whole neighbourhood took on the appearance of a castle.”⁹⁴ According to the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil, a physician, Lewis Caerleon, was nonetheless able to enter the Abbey without arousing suspicion and consequently enlisted Elizabeth’s involvement in the rising that became known as Buckingham’s Rebellion.⁹⁵ The rising failed and the following January Richard’s only Parliament declared Elizabeth’s marriage to Edward IV an adulterous union. In March she finally accepted terms by which her daughters would leave sanctuary with promises of protection and of marriages appropriate to their new status. Vergil indicates that many who were in exile after Buckingham’s rebellion resented her “light-mindedness” in making her peace with Richard.⁹⁶ Yet prioritising her children’s interests regardless of politics had always been her modus operandi. The agreement did not specify that Elizabeth herself was required to leave with her daughters, but it promised her an annual income of 700 marks.⁹⁷ It may be that she remained at Westminster for the next eighteen months until Richard’s death at Bosworth and the arrival of Henry VII.

Queen Dowager (again)

Restored to the status of Queen Dowager and now the mother of Henry’s queen, Elizabeth is nonetheless difficult to trace through these final years. This has led to speculation of complicity in rebellion and a rift with the King.⁹⁸ She was present at Winchester and Westminster for the births of her grandchildren Arthur (1487) and Margaret (1489). A proposal in November 1487 that she enter a third marriage, with James III of Scotland, was forestalled by rebellion and that King’s violent death the following year. Early in 1487, Henry VII had resumed her dower lands in order to fund her daughter’s dower and he granted “oure dere moder Quene Elizabeth” an annuity of 400 marks, later raised to £400 (about £268,000 in today’s money).⁹⁹ She seems now to have cultivated a lifestyle of comparative simplicity. On 10 July 1486 she had taken out a forty-year lease on the mansion of Cheynegates in Westminster Abbey (for the sum of £10 a year), but by 1492 she was a resident at Bermondsey Abbey as Katherine of Valois had been before her.¹⁰⁰

Elizabeth made her will on 10 April 1492 “seyng the worlde so transitorie, and no creature certayne whanne they shall departe frome hence.”¹⁰¹ It was nine years and one day since Edward IV’s death. She claimed to have “no wordely goodes” with which to reward her children as she wished, but nonetheless requested that “suche smale stufe and goodes that I have” be dispersed in paying off any debts, “for the helth of my sowle,” and among “any of my bloode” who might want specific items. The surrender of her estates should not have meant the loss of her jewels, books, or clothes so it may be that she had chosen to part with many of the trappings of her glittering days at the heart of a court that had proved as transitory as Camelot. Her will made no reference either to Richard Grey or to her youngest sons, who were widely assumed to be dead.

When she died two months later her executors honoured her request that she be buried with Edward IV at Windsor “without pompes entreing or costlie expensis donne there abought.”¹⁰² A herald who described the five days of ritual repeatedly drew attention to the lack of expense, although whether this was a critique or to emphasise that her pious wishes had been observed is impossible to determine.¹⁰³ Her grandson Henry VIII, who was not yet a year old at the time, seems later to have believed that she had died of plague.¹⁰⁴ There are no other recorded cases of plague in London that summer so this may have drawn on a confused recollection of comments about the simplicity of her funeral. However, her body first arrived at the college “prevely” at 11 at night and was buried immediately rather than lying on the hearse throughout the following ceremonies, which would seem to suggest there was indeed a fear of contagion.¹⁰⁵ The pinewood coffin was laid on top of her husband’s lead sarcophagus in the vault beneath his tomb and chantry.¹⁰⁶

Elizabeth’s social and marital status were threads in the web of circumstances in which the Plantaganet dynasty crumbled, and this larger story will always overshadow her queenship. Yet a focus on her everyday practice indicates much that was exemplary: she was fertile, pious, cultured, and beautiful, a successful intercessor, and an able administrator. She participated time and again in public theatre of an idealised court and tolerated her husband’s infidelities to the extent that one of her final attendants was his bastard daughter, Grace. Perhaps her most remarkable quality was one not recognised as a virtue in her own day: she had the courage to reject a discourse shaped by class-consciousness and misogyny and so assert herself as a worthy consort for England’s King.