The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (5 page)

In September 1464, King Edward IV, one of the most eligible bachelors in Europe, informed his council at Reading that he had married. As the councillors waited, no doubt expecting to hear that the king had at last contracted himself with a foreign princess, the king told them that he had married an Englishwoman. The councillors’ jaws dropped, and the king in turn dropped his final bombshell: his new bride was no duke or earl’s daughter but Dame Elizabeth Grey, the widowed daughter of Lord Rivers and Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford.

For most people in medieval England, years of birth, much less days of birth, were not recorded, and Elizabeth Woodville was no exception. We have only one source for her birth year: a portrait labelled ‘Elizabeth Woodville’, supposedly dating from 1463 and giving its sitter’s age as 26. This would put Elizabeth’s year of birth in 1437, the same year her parents were fined for their marriage. The 1437 date is plausible, then, but John Shaw’s suggestion that the painting was made in 1463 by the king’s own painter, John Stratford, is highly unlikely.
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First, as Frederick Hepburn has pointed out, this and other extant paintings of Elizabeth appear to be derived from a lost original, so we cannot know what any original label, if there was one, said.
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Had Elizabeth been on such terms with King Edward in 1463 that he was having her portrait done, she would have hardly needed to ask his friend Lord Hastings for help in 1464, as we shall see later. The possibility that Elizabeth or her parents commissioned the portrait is even more unlikely, given Elizabeth’s straitened circumstances in 1463 and the fact that portraiture in England was very much in its infancy. It seems far more likely that someone labelling the portrait years later (with the modern spelling of ‘Woodville’) simply was mistaken in his recollection of when Elizabeth became Edward’s queen. Thus, while a birth date of 1437 certainly cannot be ruled out, the portrait is not a reliable source, and it is just as likely that Elizabeth was born somewhat later. As for her traditional birthplace of Grafton, given the uncertainty of her year of birth and her father’s responsibilities abroad, it is possible that she was born on another one of her family’s properties or even in France.

Beyond her first marriage, little is known of Elizabeth’s youth. Both Edmund Hall and Sir Thomas More, writing in the sixteenth century, claimed that Elizabeth had served Margaret of Anjou as one of her ladies.
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At first glance, this appears to be confirmed by the records. An Isabel, Lady Grey, was among the English ladies sent in 1445 to escort Margaret to England,
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and an Elizabeth Grey, in her capacity as one of the queen’s ladies, received jewels from the queen in 1445–46, 1446–47, 1448–49, 1451–52, and 1452–53.
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‘Isabel’ and ‘Elizabeth’ were often used interchangeably during this period, and it is possible that young Elizabeth Woodville had married her first husband, John Grey, as a child and thus was already known as Elizabeth or Isabella Grey. It is unlikely, however, that the lady named in Queen Margaret’s records was the Lancastrian queen’s successor. Little Elizabeth would have been a mere child in 1445–46, and therefore rather young to serve in the queen’s escort or to receive jewels from the queen. It is far more likely that the person referred to in Queen Margaret’s records is Elizabeth, ‘late the wife of Ralph Gray, knight, daily attendant on the queen’s person’, who received a protection on 27 June 1445. Alternatively, Elizabeth Grey could be Elizabeth Woodville’s own mother-in-law.
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It is still possible that Elizabeth did indeed serve Margaret, of course, given the favour her parents enjoyed with the queen, but it is more likely that she did so in the late 1450s, a period for which Margaret’s household records do not survive.

A story associated with Elizabeth’s youth but now largely discredited is that at some point, she was solicited by both Richard, Duke of York, and Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, to marry a Hugh John, who was in favour with the two noblemen. As George Smith has pointed out, however, the letters appear more likely to have been directed to a prosperous widow, Elizabeth Wodehille, than to the similarly named Elizabeth Woodville. Moreover, as David Baldwin notes, had Elizabeth Woodville been the prospective bride, the matchmaking duke and earl would have approached her father, not young Elizabeth herself.
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Like the date of her birth, the date of Elizabeth’s first marriage is unknown. Her spouse was John Grey, the son of Edward Grey, Lord Ferrers of Groby, and his wife, Elizabeth. Sir John Grey was aged 25 or more at the time of his father’s death in 1457, putting his birth year at around 1432 and making him a few years older than his bride.
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According to John Grey’s 1464 inquisition post-mortem, Thomas Grey, John Grey’s eldest son by Elizabeth Woodville, was 13 or more in 1464, which would put his birth date at 1451, but a 1492 inquisition post-mortem, that of his uncle Richard Woodville, names him as being 37 and more, putting his birth date at around 1455. The latter date seems more probable, in light of this document dated 8 January 1455:

    Letters patent from Richard, Duke of York, Earl of Ulster, Lord of Wigmore and Clare that Richard Castleford, cousin and heir of Richard Castleford, clerk has sworn in his presence that release made of manor of ‘Mew & Gyngjoyberdlaundry [Buttsbury]’, Essex to Edward Gray, Lord Ferrers, for the settling of a jointure on the son of Lord Ferrers and the daughter of Lord Rivers, is to be disavowed if found to be to the prejudice of Edward Ferrers of Tamworth.
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As jointure arrangements were being made for Elizabeth in January 1455, it is probable that she had recently married John Grey or was about to marry him, which would coincide neatly with a 1455 birth date for their first son. This boy was duly followed by another, Richard, whose birth year is unknown.

John Grey’s death at the second Battle of St Albans in 1461
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left his young widow in difficult straits. Her mother-in-law, Lady Ferrers of Groby, had married Sir John Bourchier and was balking at the prospect of allowing Elizabeth to enjoy her jointure of 100 marks, consisting of the manors of Woodham Ferrers in Essex and Brington, and New Bottle in Northampton. Elizabeth and her father were obliged to go to chancery to recover her jointure, and apparently succeeded.
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Elizabeth also had the inheritance of her oldest son, Thomas, to safeguard, and this proved a more difficult task, so much so that Elizabeth needed assistance. Although her father had been made a member of Edward’s council in 1463,
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the erstwhile Lancastrian must not have been sufficiently influential to be of much help. Elizabeth, therefore, chose a much more powerful ally: William, Lord Hastings, Edward IV’s long-time companion and close friend. On 13 April 1464, Hastings and Elizabeth agreed that her eldest son, or his younger brother in the event of Thomas Grey’s death, would marry one of Hastings’s as-yet-unborn daughters or nieces. If any lands formerly belonging to Sir William Asteley, Sir John Grey’s late great-grandfather, or any of the inheritance of Lady Ferrers of Groby was recovered for Thomas or Richard Grey, half of the rents and profits while Thomas or Richard was under the age of 12 was to belong to Lord Hastings, half to Elizabeth. Lord Hastings was to pay Elizabeth 500 marks for the marriage, but if both of Elizabeth’s sons died or there was no female issue on Hastings’s side, Elizabeth was to pay Hastings 250 marks.
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J.R. Lander described the arrangement as a ‘very hard bargain’ from Elizabeth’s point of view.
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The arrangement never came to fruition, however, because soon Elizabeth had an even more important ally: Edward IV himself. When Edward and Elizabeth had first met is unknown. It is possible, but purely speculative, that they might have encountered each other on social occasions at court, one possible occasion being the Loveday festivities, when Elizabeth’s brother Anthony jousted before Henry and Margaret. The Burgundian chronicler, Waurin, claimed that it was Edward’s infatuation with Elizabeth which led to her father’s and brother Anthony’s pardon in 1461, while Caspar Weinrich, writing from Danzig, claimed that Edward fell in love with Elizabeth ‘when he dined with her frequently’.
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Thomas More, writing years after the fact, claimed that Elizabeth met Edward when she petitioned him to have her jointure returned to her.
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The traditional, and virtually unshakeable, story has it that Elizabeth, knowing that Edward was hunting nearby, took her two sons and waited under an oak tree in the forest of Whittlebury. When the king came across this affecting tableau of the widow and her little boys, Elizabeth knelt at his feet and begged for the restoration of her children’s inheritance, winning the king’s heart in the process.
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Wherever and however the couple met, both the king and Elizabeth would have liked what they saw. Dominic Mancini describes Edward as captivated by Elizabeth’s ‘beauty of person and charm of manner’, while the author of Hearne’s Fragment wrote of her ‘constant womanhood, wisdom and beauty’.
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Her portraits, even if all copies of an original, amply bear out contemporary descriptions of her good looks, although no more than broad generalisations about her appearance were recorded by her contemporaries. Even her hair colour is uncertain. The chronicler, Hall, writing years after her death, refers in passing to her ‘fair hair’, which is difficult to confirm from the sliver of hair visible in Elizabeth’s portraits.
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Manuscript illustrations invariably show Elizabeth as a golden blonde, but as J.L. Laynesmith has noted, queens were generally depicted in this manner.
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What can be dismissed is the famed description of Elizabeth’s ‘silver-gilt’ hair: this appears to be the invention of the novelist Josephine Tey, whose fanciful description was picked up by subsequent novelists and even by popular historians.
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For her part, Elizabeth saw a young man ‘in the flower of his age, tall of stature, [and] elegant of person’.
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In 1789, a measurement of his skeleton found Edward IV to be 6ft 3½in; the hair found by his skull was brown, as it is in contemporary portraits.
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Even if the tall, handsome 22-year-old in question was not the most powerful man in England, a woman might have found it difficult to resist the lure of his bed.

Yet Elizabeth, if two accounts written during her lifetime can be believed, did just that. According to Antonio Cornazzano, an Italian writing no later than 1468, Elizabeth refused to become Edward’s mistress and was ultimately rewarded for her virtue by becoming his queen; the virtuous Elizabeth brought a dagger to the meeting, with which she threatened to slay herself rather than to sacrifice her virtue.
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Dominic Mancini, writing in 1483, has the king wielding the dagger:

    [W]hen the king first fell in love with her beauty of person and charm of manner, he could not corrupt her virtue by gifts or menaces. The story runs that when Edward placed a dagger at her throat, to make her submit to his passion, she remained unperturbed and determined to die rather than live unchastely with the king. Whereupon Edward coveted her much the more, and he judged the lady worthy to be a royal spouse who could not be overcome in her constancy even by an infatuated king.
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Thomas More, writing in the next century, omitted the dagger altogether but otherwise gave a similar account:

    [S]he showed him plain that as she wist herself too simple to be his wife, so thought she herself too good to be his concubine. The king, much marvelling of her constance, as that had not been wont elsewhere to be so stiffly said nay, so much esteemed her continence and chastity that he set her virtue in the stead of possession and riches.
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