The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (6 page)

Other accounts simply have Edward falling in love, without first hazarding Elizabeth’s virtue. Gregory’s Chronicle put the matter most succinctly: ‘Now take heed what love may do, for love will not nor may not cast no fault nor peril in nothing’.
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(An alternative view, that Jacquetta promoted her daughter’s marriage through witchcraft, shall be dealt with in Chapter 5.) It has even been suggested that Edward married Elizabeth because she had fallen pregnant, leading Edward to ‘seize the opportunity for a son and heir’,
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but it is difficult to imagine that the Woodvilles’ later enemies would have missed the opportunity to charge Elizabeth with unchaste living had there been the slightest hint that she had indulged in premarital sex with Edward.

Those chronicles that give a date for Edward and Elizabeth’s marriage each specify the same one: 1 May. This date is compatible with the known movements of Edward, who was at Stony Stratford the night of 30 April 1464 and could have made an excursion to and from Grafton that morning, as claimed by Fabyan in the sixteenth century:

    [I]n most secret manner, upon the first day of May, King Edward spoused Elizabeth […] which spousals were solemnised early in the morning at a town called Grafton, near Stony Stratford; at which marriage were no persons present but the spouse, the spousess, the Duchess of Bedford her mother, the priest, two gentlewomen, and a young man to help the priest sing. After which spousals ended, he went to bed, and so tarried there three or four hours, and after departed and rode again to Stony Stratford, and came as though he had been hunting, and there went to bed again. And within a day or two after, he sent to Grafton to the Lord Rivers, father unto his wife, showing to him he would come and lodge with him a certain season, where he was received with all honour, and so tarried there by the space of four days. In which season, she nightly to his bed was brought, in so secret manner, that almost none but her mother was of counsel.
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Several historians, however, have questioned the May Day date. As David Baldwin notes, ‘The idea of a young, handsome king marrying for love on Mayday may have been borrowed from romantic tradition’.
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J.L. Laynesmith agreed that ‘1 May is a suspiciously apt day for a young king to marry for love. May had long been the month associated with love, possibly originating in pre-Christian celebrations of fertility and certainly celebrated in the poetry of the troubadours’.
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Moreover, there are documentary reasons to be wary of the May Day date. On 10 August 1464, Edward signed a document giving Hastings the wardship of Thomas Grey. Wardships were lucrative commodities; if Elizabeth was already married to the king, it seems likely, as Michael Hicks has pointed out, that she would have asked to keep the wardship for herself. Furthermore, on 30 August 1464, Edward granted the county of Chester to his brother George, Duke of Clarence, apparently in his capacity as heir apparent. Such a grant would seem unnecessary if Edward had just married a lady who could be expected to provide him with an heir of his own body.
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Whether the couple were married on May Day or later, the scant record does bear out Hall’s claim that a priest was present at the wedding. A Master John Eborall, whose church of Paulspury was close to Grafton and Stony Stratford, is said to have offered in 1471 to intercede in a land dispute involving the queen ‘supposing that he might have done good in the matter, forasmuch as he was then in favour because he married King Edward and Queen Elizabeth together’.
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A chronicle known as Hearne’s Fragment adds that the priest who married the couple was buried at the high altar of the Minories in London, but leaves a blank space for the man’s name.
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Whoever performed the ceremony kept it quiet until September 1464, when Edward IV himself announced the marriage to his council at Reading. There is no doubt that the reaction was one of pure shock. English kings had traditionally chosen high-born, foreign virgins for their queens: Elizabeth was an English commoner and a widow with two children. Although Edward III’s son Edward, known as the Black Prince, had shocked his family in the last century by choosing an English widow with a tangled marital history, Joan of Kent, for his bride, Joan at least was a granddaughter of Edward I. In any case, the Black Prince had predeceased his father, preventing Joan from becoming a queen consort.

According to Gregory’s Chronicle, the king announced his marriage only when his council urged him to find a foreign bride. We can only speculate on Edward’s reasons for keeping the marriage secret, although if the couple married after August instead of in May, the delay of weeks rather than of months in announcing the marriage is less problematic. It has been suggested, in light of later allegations of a prior marriage (see Chapter 11),
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that Edward entered the marriage with the thought of disavowing it once he had accomplished the feat of bedding Elizabeth, but other than a hint in Fabyan (‘how after he would have refused her’)
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the chroniclers do not suggest this. Moreover, Edward’s subsequent generosity to Elizabeth’s family was hardly what one would expect of a man who felt that he had been trapped into acknowledging his marriage.

If Edward had delayed announcing his marriage because he knew it would incite controversy, he certainly was correct. Albrico Malleta, Milanese Ambassador in France, wrote on 5 October 1464 that the match had ‘greatly offended the people of England’, while the Crowland Chronicler, writing some years later, wrote, ‘This [the marriage] the nobility and chief men of the kingdom took amiss, seeing that he had with such immoderate haste promoted a person sprung from a comparatively humble lineage, to share the throne with him’.
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Dominic Mancini, an Italian observer during the fraught summer of 1483, wrote that by Edward’s marriage:

    not only did he alienate the nobles with whom he afterwards waged war, but he also offended most bitterly the members of his own house. Even his mother fell into such a frenzy that she offered to submit to a public enquiry and asserted that Edward was not the offspring of her husband the Duke of York but was conceived in adultery and therefore in no way worthy of the honour of kingship.
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As J.R. Lander has pointed out, though, many of the English accounts were written after Edward’s relationship with his nobles had soured, when it was natural to look for an explanation of the breakdown and find it in Edward’s unconventional marriage. Also to be considered, as Anne Crawford observes, is that while the nobility may have been displeased at the marriage, the average man of the shire may not have minded an English queen, particularly after Henry VI’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou had had such disastrous results. The household book of John, Lord Howard, contains a draft letter in John’s own hand, addressed to either Lord Rivers or his son, Anthony, in which Howard states that he had spoken to many people in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex about the marriage and that only one opposed it.
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The person supposedly most offended by the marriage (aside from, presumably, the groom’s mother) was Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who had been instrumental in helping Edward IV gain his crown. It used to be claimed that Warwick’s anger arose because he had been made to appear a fool, having negotiated abroad in good faith for a foreign marriage which Edward knew could never take place because of his Woodville match. Fortunately for Warwick’s pride, however, this is not borne out by the evidence. As A.L. Brown and Bruce Webster concluded after examining the records, there is no evidence that Warwick was employed as an ambassador abroad in the summer of 1464; instead, he was in the less glamorous environs of the north of England.
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His true cause for dissatisfaction probably lay in the fact that Edward had not confided in his close advisers, as a friend of Warwick, John, Lord Wenlock, pointed out in a letter to a French correspondent, and that he had thrown away the opportunity for a strategic marriage.
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Elizabeth, however, had been wedded and bedded, so the council had to accept this
fait accompli
; as Wenlock said, ‘We must be patient despite ourselves’. There was nothing to do but to smile when on Michaelmas Day, 29 September 1464, the king formally presented his new bride to his subjects, or at least as many of them who could gather in and around Reading Abbey. There ‘Lady Elizabeth was admitted into the abbey church, led by the Duke of Clarence and the Earl of Warwick, and honoured as queen by the lords and all the people’.
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For a few weeks, the couple remained at Reading, no doubt enjoying the usual pleasures of newlyweds.
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If the marriage brought Edward neither wealth nor useful foreign alliances, it did bring him a host of new relations, whose futures now became the subject of royal attention. Elizabeth had five brothers, Anthony, Richard, John, Lionel, and Edward, and six sisters, Jacquetta, Anne, Mary, Margaret, Joan (or Jane), and Katherine. Anthony had married Elizabeth, the heiress of Thomas, Lord Scales, who had been murdered in 1460 by London boatmen after holding the Tower against Warwick’s men following the Battle of Northampton. Jacquetta had married John Strange, Lord Strange of Knokyn, by 27 March 1450, when the manor of Midlyngton in Oxford was granted to the couple by John’s mother, Elizabeth.
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The rest of the siblings, however, were unmarried, as were Elizabeth’s sons.

Edward IV and Elizabeth were still at Reading when Edward arranged the marriage of his new sister-in-law Margaret to Thomas, Lord Maltravers, the heir of Thomas William Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel. The couple were married by 17 February 1466, when John Wykes wrote to John Paston II that Arundel’s son had married the queen’s sister.
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Anne Woodville married Henry Bourchier, the heir of William Bourchier, Earl of Essex, around February 1466; on 15 August 1467, she and her husband received lands worth £100 a year.
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Also around February 1466, Joan Woodville married Anthony Grey, the eldest son of Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, who had deserted to the Yorkists at Northampton and who had been made the Earl of Kent on 30 May 1465.
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Mary Woodville followed her sisters into matrimony in September 1466 at Windsor Castle. Her groom was William Herbert, Lord Dunster, the eldest son of a Welsh baron, also named William Herbert. The elder William was made Earl of Pembroke in 1468. The marriage indenture for Mary and the younger William was made on 20 March 1466.
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The grand prize in this marital sweepstakes went to Elizabeth’s youngest sister, Katherine, who married Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a royal ward. Although the anonymous chronicler the pseudo-William Worcester lumps Katherine’s marriage as taking place the same time as those of her sisters Anne and Joan in February 1466, Katherine may have been married around May 1465, as she is given the title of Duchess of Buckingham at her sister’s coronation that month and played a prominent role there, in the company of her fellow duchesses.
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Only one of Elizabeth’s unmarried brothers, John, gained a wife as a result of his sister’s marriage, but John’s marriage generated so much controversy by itself so as to supply the rest. The 20-year-old John’s new bride was Katherine Neville, Duchess of Norfolk, who was well into her 60s. The pseudo-William Worcester, who gloomily recorded each of the Woodville marriages, reserved most of his spleen for this match, which took place in January 1465. He called it the ‘
maritagium diabolicum
’ – the diabolical marriage.
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Thomas Grey, Elizabeth’s oldest son, gained a bride as well – Lady Anne, the only child of Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, and his estranged duchess, another Anne. The Duchess of Exeter was Edward IV’s sister; the Duke of Exeter, who had never got on with his father-in-law the Duke of York, was a staunch Lancastrian who was living in exile abroad. Young Lady Anne had been slated to marry Warwick’s nephew George, the son of John Neville, Earl of Northumberland. The queen paid the duchess 4,000 marks for the marriage, which took place in October 1466 at Greenwich.
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How controversial were these marriages? The pseudo-William Worcester indicated that the Buckingham marriage was to the ‘secret displeasure of the Earl of Warwick’ and that Thomas Grey’s marriage to Lady Anne was ‘to the great and secret displeasure of the Earl of Warwick, for a marriage was previously bespoken between the said Lady Anne and the son of […] Warwick’s brother’.
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(One wonders how secret Warwick’s displeasure actually was.) Warwick, who had no sons and two young daughters, had obvious reasons for resenting the marriage of the wealthy young Buckingham, who would have made an excellent catch for one of his own girls. Moreover, the heirs to the earldoms of Kent, Arundel, and Essex had also been snapped up by the Woodvilles. This would not have been a problem if the king had been willing to let Warwick’s daughters marry the king’s brothers, George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, but Edward preferred to keep his younger brothers in reserve, perhaps, with what must have seemed to Warwick to be maddening inconsistency, for the foreign princesses that Edward himself had cheerfully bypassed.
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Warwick also had good reason to feel displeasure over the loss of his nephew’s bride, although later Edward attempted to rectify matters by promising George Neville to his own firstborn, Elizabeth of York.