Queens Consort (61 page)

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 Elizabeth Woodville served Queen Marguerite, but there is as yet no direct proof that she did so and, given the calumnies heaped on her for her lack of royal connections, it seems odd that her contemporary supporters do not mention it.
⁴

From the first, Elizabeth’s relationship with Edward was controversial. If their meeting is correctly placed in 1461, then the idea of Edward’s marriage as ‘impulsive’
⁵
must be dismissed, as it did not take place until May 1464. Edward already had a reputation as a ladies’ man. He was gloriously attractive, with the Plantagenet height, strawberry-blond hair and an impressively honed physique. With his good looks, his position and his appetites, he was already something of a connoisseur of beautiful women, and he was not accustomed to rejection. As Thomas More tells the story, he tried to seduce Elizabeth, but when she presented him with a dagger and begged him to kill her rather than despoil her honour, his desire was even more inflamed. Reports of this version of the incident were spread as far as Milan, but even if Elizabeth had defended her virtue so passionately, it seems unlikely that she would have had the energy to do so for three years. Her detractors also seized on the story, claiming she played at virtue to push Edward into marriage (a tactic that later worked most effectively for Anne Boleyn, the mother of Elizabeth’s great-granddaughter). Edward himself acknowledged this controversy by keeping his marriage secret for four months, not announcing it until a council meeting at Reading in September. The ceremony had been witnessed only by Jacquetta, Elizabeth’s mother, the priest and a clerk to sing the office. It was altogether an embarrassing, rather sordid affair, but Edward put the best face he could on his defiance. Again, Thomas More puts words into Edward’s mouth, suggesting that his choice of Elizabeth was a patriotic one: ‘He reckoned the amity of no earthly nation so necessary for him as the friendship of his own. Which he thought likely to bear him so much the more hearty favour in that he disdained not to marry with one of his own land.’
⁶

However respectable Elizabeth’s connections might have been, notwithstanding Jacquetta having disparaged herself with her second marriage and the fact that Richard’s barony was a recent creation, she was irrefutably not royal. Luchmo Dallaghiexa, an Italian diplomat in London, described her as ‘a widow of this island of quite low birth’, while Jean de Waurin observed that Edward ‘must know well that she was no wife for such a high prince as himself. Warwick had been planning a dynastic marriage for Edward with a French princess and, since in his own eyes it was he
who had placed Edward on the throne, it was disturbing that the King should simply have ignored him. Moreover, Warwick already had a reason to dislike Elizabeth, for it was her father who had refused him entry to Calais back in 1455. When Queen Marguerite tried to have Warwick arraigned for piracy, Lord Rivers was among the commissioners and Warwick, one of England’s greatest aristocrats, was disgusted that he should be obliged to defend himself before a ‘mere baron’. (Warwick has been accused of hypocrisy here in that he held the Warwick earldom merely in right of his wife, but his critics neglect to mention that he was also heir to the Salisbury title in the male line, a far grander inheritance than anything the Woodvilles could boast.)

To counter the nasty rumours that he had demeaned himself in his choice of bride, Edward was determined Elizabeth’s coronation should be as splendid as their marriage had been simple. First, on 30 September 1464, she was formally presented as queen by a grudging Warwick and Edward’s brother the Duke of Clarence. Edward then sent to the Duke of Burgundy requesting a suitable delegation of guests, including Elizabeth’s uncle, Jacques de Luxembourg. The sum of 400 pounds was advanced to the treasurer of the household to cover coronation expenses, including £27 IOS for silkwork on Elizabeth’s chairs, saddle and pillion, 108 pounds for a gold cup and basin, 280 for two cloths of gold and twenty to Sir John Howard, who provided the plate. Elizabeth rode into London on 24 May 1465, where she was greeted by the mayor, aldermen and representatives of the city’s guilds, who had spent 200 marks on decorations. A pageant on London Bridge featured the boys from the choir of St Magnus church dressed up as angels in blond wigs.

As in Marguerite’s case, the ceremonies around the coronation were shaped to be appropriate to an individual woman, and to highlight the qualities that could be hoped of her as queen. For Elizabeth Woodville, the emphasis was placed on her impeccable foreign connections and her already proven fertility. Elizabeth was met by ‘St Paul’, in reference to her mother’s St Pol descent, and surrounded by the Burgundian delegation, which presented her in the context of her noble Continental family. Two saints, St Elizabeth, mother of St John the Baptist, and St Mary Cleophas, half-sister to the Virgin Mary and mother to four of the disciples, were also featured. Since these three saintly relatives were often depicted together in psalters and books of hours, ‘when Elizabeth Woodville arrived beside them, very probably with her blonde hair loose beneath a jeweled coronet … she would immediately have reminded onlookers of the Virgin Mary’.
⁷

While Elizabeth’s obvious fertility favoured her in one sense, it was also proof of her ‘blemished’ sexual status. More claimed that Edward’s mother had berated him for ‘befouling’ himself with a ‘bigamous’ marriage, while at least two other commentators noted that English custom demanded the King marry a virgin (they had obviously forgotten about Joan of Navarre). By going ‘in her hair’ to Westminster and very probably wearing a white dress similar to that of Marguerite of Anjou, in which she is shown in the royal window of Canterbury Cathedral, Elizabeth was asserting a spiritual purity which in her new role as queen transcended her physical reality.

At her coronation banquet, the newly dubbed knights of the Bath, who included Elizabeth’s brothers, Richard and John, brought in the dishes and the Duke of Clarence accompanied each course to the table on horseback. At the tournament next day in the sanctuary of Westminster, Edward specially requested that some of the Burgundian knights took part, though Elizabeth handed the winner’s prize of a ruby ring to Lord Stanley.

Elizabeth was now an anointed queen, and the next year she cemented her success with the birth of her first child by Edward, Elizabeth, in February, quickly followed by Mary in 1467 and Cecily in 1469. Yet there were still many who refused to accept her, portraying her as a devious interloper concerned only with the interests of her own family According to Luchino Dallaghiexa: ‘Since her coronation she has always asserted herself to aggrandise her relations, to wit her father, mother, brothers and sisters. She had five brothers and as many sisters and had brought things to such a pass that they had the entire government of this realm.’
⁸

There was nothing unusual about a queen’s family receving advantages from her marriage, and nothing unusual about it provoking resentment, as had been the case with Eleanor of Provence and the Savoyards. The particular difficulty with the Woodvilles was that there were simply so many of them. Two of Elizabeth’s siblings had died in infancy, but that still left John, Anthony, Lionel, Edward, Richard, Jacquetta, Martha, Margaret, Katherine, Mary, Anne and Joan. Anthony had established himself independently, acquiring the title of Lord Scales in right of his wife, Lionel entered the church, aided by a grant of the issues of the archdeaconry of Norwich, and Richard remained unmarried, while Edward’s circumstances are unknown. The other Woodville siblings did tremendously well out of their royal sister’s influence. Margaret married Lord Maltravers, the heir to the Earl of Arundel; Katherine married Henry, Duke of Buckingham; Mary, the Earl of Pembroke; Anne, Lord Bourchier, heir to the Earl of Essex; Jacquetta, Lord Strange of Knocklyn;
Joan, Lord Grey of Ruthin and Martha, less dazzlingly, Sir John Bromley. Perhaps the most talked-about match was that of John with Catherine Neville, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, Edward IV’s aunt. John was twenty and the Duchess a spring chicken of anywhere between sixty and eighty, depending on the bitchiness of the chronicler. Elizabeth’s father also benefited from his daughter’s new dignity, obtaining the post of treasurer of England in 1466 and being created Earl Rivers in May that year, with the title to revert to his son Anthony. So prominent did the Woodvilles become that it became a court joke: Edward’s fool appeared one day in boots, carrying a walking staff, and when the King inquired about this costume answered: ‘Upon my faith, sir, I have passed through many countries of your realm, and in places that I have passed, the Rivers have been so high that I could barely scape through them!’

Not everyone found such laboured humour terribly funny. The Earl of Warwick was infuriated that the Woodvilles seemed to be infiltrating the network of Neville power he had worked so hard to build up. He had two daughters of his own, Isabel and Anne, to marry off, yet between 1464 and 1470 every English earl with an available heir selected a Woodville bride. He was particularly incensed by the wedding of Henry Stafford to Katherine Woodville and that of Anne, heiress to the Duke of Exeter, to Thomas Grey, Queen Elizabeth’s son by her first marriage, in 1466. It has been suggested that Edward was using the availability of Woodville spouses to create a new centre of loyalty at court, associated primarily with himself and not the Neville connections that had been so instrumental in bringing him to power. If so, it was a sensible enough strategy, but there is no doubt his treatment of Warwick at this time was ill judged, and Warwick’s alienation began to make him feel he had been cheated of the right to rule which had appeared implicit when Edward first claimed the crown.

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.