The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors

by Dan Jones

  Young, vigorous and single, Edward was a royal bachelor whose choice of wife was a keen matter of interest to a very great number of people. Marriage offered the chance to make a lasting alliance with one of the powers beyond the Channel. It was an opportunity for Edward to produce a son and heir – a need that was as pressing as any before him. And of course, it would allow the king to show the realm that he was growing up and taking his duties seriously, since, as one chronicler put it, ‘men marvelled that oure sovereign lord was so long without any wife, and were ever feared that he had be not chaste of his living’.5

  There was a clutch of possible wives, each of whom represented a different path through continental politics. In 1461 Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, had suggested a marriage to his niece, a daughter of the duke of Bourbon – apparently rather a beautiful young lady – and it was hinted in 1464 that this proposal remained open. An alliance with Burgundy had strong trade advantages, and was bound to be well received by the merchant elites in the city of London, who had for so long been staunch supporters of the Yorkist cause. There was also a tentative offer for the hand of Isabella, the sister and heiress of Henry the Impotent of Castile – a kingdom with long ties to the English crown and the Plantagenet family, stretching back to the twelfth century. Or Edward could look north: at one point during the worst troubles of his early reign there were thoughts of marrying the king to Mary of Guelders, the Scottish regent and mother of James III, albeit a woman whose reputation for chastity was worse even than Edward’s. Finally, and perhaps most promisingly, negotiations were advanced with Louis XI of France to create an Anglo-French alliance through a marriage with a princess of the house of Valois.

  A French match was by far the most attractive offer to those who thought they held the English king’s ear. Warwick and Lord Wenlock had been leading secret negotiations with the French since at least the spring of 1464, and possibly the previous autumn. By September 1464 Warwick felt that he was close to securing the hand of the French king’s sister-in-law, Bona of Savoy. The most obvious advantage to a marriage alliance with Louis was that it would finally poison the stump of Lancastrian opposition – for without the support of the French and their allies, there could be no hope of Margaret of Anjou ever leading an invasion to restore her limp husband to the English crown. There were also possible trade advantages, which could compensate for the loss of business that would accompany an abandonment of Burgundy. Warwick had a certain amount of personal prestige bound up in the negotiations: he revelled in the fact that he was spoken of in the courts and corridors of European palaces as the power behind the English throne, and the man who moved the young king he had created. The ambassadors and dignitaries joked that, as one put it in a letter to Louis XI, the English had ‘but two rulers, M. de Warwick and another whose name I have forgotten’.6 This sort of thing tickled Warwick, whose landed power was quite equalled by his love of finery, display and personal grandeur. But as he discovered abruptly at Reading in September 1464, his role as the chief mover of English policy was not quite so solid as he had reckoned it to be.

  Warwick came to Reading fully expecting that he and Lord Wenlock would be asked to go to a conference with Louis XI in St Omer – a town not far from Calais – to finalise Edward’s marriage to Bona of Savoy. The council at large wished to hear the broad thinking behind the French alliance that would naturally proceed from the union. Yet when Edward met them in the abbey church he relayed news that shocked the realm. He announced that he would not be marrying Bona of Savoy – or indeed any other foreign princess. For he was already married, and had been for several months. His wife, the new queen consort of England, was a widow in her mid-twenties with two children by a recently deceased member of the lower nobility. Her name was Elizabeth Woodville.

  She was a fair-skinned woman with dark eyes and auburn hair above a fashionably high forehead, her slender and hard-ridged nose finishing in a little bulb that mirrored the smooth, round ball of her chin.7 At twenty-six or twenty-seven years old she was certainly still beautiful, and although she was not a member of the highest ranks of the nobility she was somewhat famous thanks to her father, Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers. Rivers had been a minor landowner in Kent and Northamptonshire until 1437, when he married Jacquetta of Luxembourg, the widow of Henry VI’s mighty uncle John duke of Bedford. The spectacular match catapulted the hitherto unimportant Woodvilles into the aristocracy, with connections both to the Lancastrian royal house and various great European families including the Luxembourg counts of St Pol and the dukes of Burgundy. Rivers had followed up his own excellent marriage by providing solid noble unions for his family. His son Anthony Woodville wedded the heiress of Lord Scales, and as a young lady Elizabeth Woodville had been married to Sir John Grey, heir to Lord Ferrers of Groby, whom she had borne two children, Thomas and Richard Grey.

  Appropriately, given Lord Rivers’s connection to Henry VI, the Woodvilles had been loyal Lancastrians and active participants in the wars against the Yorkists. Rivers was one of those assembling a fleet for Henry VI at Sandwich in January 1460 when he and his comrades were kidnapped in a lightning raid by the earl of Warwick and taken to Calais for interrogation. It was at Calais, indeed, that Rivers had first encountered the future Edward IV: for in a humiliating torchlit ceremony before assembled Yorkist partisans, Warwick and Edward (then earl of March) had ‘reheted’ – that is, berated and scolded – the captive Lord Rivers for his humble upbringing, ‘calling him knave’s son’ and scoffing at his ignoble blood.8 Released from their ordeal, Rivers and his son Anthony had both gone on to fight on the losing side at Towton. They had survived that bloody field and been pardoned by Edward in the aftermath, but Elizabeth Woodville’s husband, Sir John Grey, had been less lucky in the business of war: he was killed fighting for the Lancastrians at the second battle of St Albans.

  The circumstances of Elizabeth’s marriage to the king were intriguing. It was said the couple had been wed ‘privily in a secret place’ on the amorous occasion of May Day 1464, most likely in a ceremony in Rivers’s house at Grafton in Northamptonshire.9 The wedding had subsequently been kept secret for nearly five months. A story went about – embellished with every retelling – that the king had promised to marry Elizabeth as the most direct means to get her into bed, and that Elizabeth had attempted to defend her honour by threatening Edward with a dagger before eventually succumbing to his youthful charm.10 This titillating tale was included in the Italian courtly poem De mulieribus admirandis (‘Of wonderful women’), written in terza rima by Antonio Cornazzano some time before October 1468, so very clearly it had romantic appeal across Europe. There was probably more poetic fancy than journalistic truth to Cornazzano’s account. All we know from sources immediate to the event is that within a week of Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville becoming public knowledge, diplomatic channels were buzzing with the news that the king had ‘determined to take the daughter of my Lord Rivers, a widow with two children, having long loved her, it appears’.11

  The idea that the new king had married for love, rather than for hard-headed political gain, must have made a certain amount of sense to the bewildered ambassadors who gossiped together in the courts of Europe. How else to explain the astonishing rise of Elizabeth Woodville – the unlikeliest queen consort in English history? Not least among her imperfections was the fact that she was an Englishwoman. Since the Norman Conquest, a matter of four centuries, no king of England had married one of his subjects; the last to do so had been Edward the Confessor, who married the impeccably noble and virginal Edith of Wessex in 1045.12 As an English subject Elizabeth brought with her no obvious diplomatic gain and no useful foreign alliance. Quite the contrary: her large family were already noted for their social ambition and obvious desire to advance themselves by marrying into other families’ titles and estates. With two sons, a father and more than ten siblings, Elizabeth brought with her obligations for royal favour and grants that would have to be met in part out of the Crown’
s precious resources. She promised even less to the Crown than the impoverished Margaret of Anjou had brought when she married Henry VI in 1445.

  Indeed, Edward’s sudden marriage threatened to do active damage to England, both at home and abroad. The French king was completely blindsided by the news of Elizabeth’s presentation: the first he knew of it was when Warwick and Wenlock failed to appear at St Omer for the conference concerning Bona of Savoy. Isabella of Castile would much later complain that she was ‘turned in her hart’ from England ‘for the unkindness the which she took against the king … for his refusing of her and taking to his wife a widow of England’.13 It is almost certain that Warwick, like most of the rest of the English peerage, was also taken by surprise. He had fair cause to ‘grumble a bit’, as it was reported by one chronicler, over his young protégé’s eccentric, apparently lovestruck choice of wife.14 Puzzled observers wrote that the marriage caused ‘great displeasure to many great lords’ and ‘greatly offended the people of England’.15

  It would be foolish totally to disregard love – the most common contemporary explanation – as an important factor in the Woodville marriage.16 But it is also possible, with hindsight, to detect a line of political thinking that may well have allowed Edward to convince himself that his love-match was also a useful tool of public policy. Could it be that the romantic writers and tattling envoys who gossiped about the king’s incontinent libido missed the broader political dimension of the Woodville wedding?

  Unquestionably, in 1464 Edward was a charismatic and extremely self-willed twenty-two-year-old who had enjoyed no apprenticeship or education to prepare him for wearing a crown and was essentially inventing the role as he went along. But he was not completely reckless or heedless of convention, and his crown had been won at a greater personal cost than that of any Plantagenet king before him. Perhaps, then, we can see his choice of Elizabeth Woodville as fitting into a pattern of bold and well-intentioned, if occasionally very naïve kingship that characterised at least the first five years of Edward’s reign.

  In the spring of 1464 Edward was still fighting for his throne. Part of this effort was military, and part involved a concerted campaign of persuasion: an appeal to his realm for allegiance. Specifically, he made it a plank of his reconstruction to reach out wherever he could to the exiled and defeated Lancastrians.

  The most prominent Lancastrian – albeit the most ungrateful – to find Edward’s conciliatory hand outstretched was Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, one of the chief commanders at Towton, and a man whose opposition to the Yorkists had been most motivated by hate and fear. Somerset fled the realm in 1461 and had been attainted in his absence, but after becoming embroiled in the castle wars of Northumbria in 1462, he had been captured at Bamburgh and surrendered himself to the king’s custody.

  Instead of executing, humiliating or otherwise punishing Somerset – as Queen Margaret surely would have done had her side been victorious at Towton and a Yorkist of Henry Beaufort’s status fallen into her custody – Edward treated the twenty-eight-year-old duke with an amazing degree of affection and forgiveness. One chronicler noted with astonishment that Somerset ‘lodged with the king in his own bed many nights, and sometimes rode a-hunting behind the king’, with the royal bodyguard containing as many of Somerset’s men as Edward’s. ‘The king loved him well’ was the chronicler’s judgement, and it was quite accurate.17 Within six months of his capture at Bamburgh, Somerset’s attainder had been reversed and his estates restored; he was allowed to serve in arms alongside Warwick and he was invited to great tournaments in the south. It was a lightning political rehabilitation. Not everyone was overjoyed, and a correspondent called John Berney wrote from Norfolk to John Paston, complaining that there was much grumbling among local Yorkists, who thought that the king’s ‘great enemies, and oppressors of the commons’ were rewarded instead of punished, while not enough of the spoils of victory found their way to ‘such as have assisted his Highness’.18 But Edward had made up his mind: he would use Somerset as living proof that he could govern as a king, drawing the whole realm and not just his partisan allies to his side.

  Unfortunately Somerset’s rapid rehabilitation was followed by an equally swift fall from grace. While enjoying Edward’s hospitality, ‘the duke thought treason under fair cheer and words’.19 In late November 1463 Somerset rode to Northumberland to meet with the enfeebled Henry VI and rouse insurrection anew. It took two battles in the far north, at Hedgeley Moor on 25 April 1464 and at Hexham on 15 May, to squash the rebellion and rout the final embers of Lancastrian revolt for good. Lord Montague led the royal forces at both battles; Somerset was captured at Hexham and executed the following day, along with several dozen other Lancastrian renegades.

  It is in the context of all of this – and not the confections of many later chroniclers and poets, who piled romantic myth onto the fact of the king’s affection for his new wife – that we must see Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville.20 He was trying desperately – probably too desperately – both to endow allies old and new with the landed power and royal trust that he needed to secure his kingdom, and to extend the hand of friendship to those who had found themselves on the wrong side of the civil war. He had not been wildly successful in concentrating his efforts on the more senior Lancastrian families – for as well as Somerset’s treachery, Edward had also tried and failed to bring Sir Ralph Percy to reconciliation and had found his generosity abused. At precisely the time that he secretly married Elizabeth Woodville, the Nevilles were once again taking to the field to defend his crown in the north, while other allies were ducking down and covering their ears against the boom of siege guns as they tried to subdue obdurate defenders of northern castles. Edward was becoming over-reliant on his longstanding friends, and frustratingly unable to bring his longstanding enemies within his peace.

  Then, between the battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham, Edward found himself close to Grafton, in the presence of a moderately famous if second-rate Lancastrian family, a daughter of whom happened to be extremely sexually attractive to him. Elizabeth had been dealing very closely with Edward’s chamberlain and confidant Lord Hastings in making a deal to protect her share of her late husband’s lands from the Bourchier family who had a claim to them: her name and her situation were therefore unquestionably familiar to the king, and with Hastings’s blessing, Elizabeth had probably put her case to Edward in person. Thus he knew her by sight, and understood her background thoroughly: here was the eldest daughter of a Lancastrian family actively seeking royal favour and patronage. A covert marriage must have seemed like a policy that had very few serious risks and a number of advantages: this was a bride who would demonstrate Edward’s commitment to even-handed kingship, but whose family was not so grand or proud as to feel they had anything to gain by betraying his trust. There was an important foreign dimension, too, since a domestic marriage that could be explained by the romantic impulsiveness of a young and callow king also meant that Edward could avoid marrying Bona of Savoy, avoid committing his foreign policy so early in the reign to France and avoid upsetting his Burgundian allies, whose favour – and trade – was vital for the health of London’s merchants.

  The marriage would prove embarrassing to the earl of Warwick, who was leading the foreign negotiations, but Warwick had benefited more than handsomely enough from the Yorkist victory. To take a bride of the Neville family’s choosing would have reinforced the already unpleasantly strong perception that Edward was Warwick’s puppet king. To fly in the face of his ally made the point that in marriage as in all other things it was the king’s ultimate prerogative to do as he and he alone chose.21

  Still, the wedding was made in secrecy – perhaps in the hope that it could be denied if necessary – and then kept quiet until such time as an announcement became politic or unavoidable. That time was Michaelmas 1464, when his council pushed him to commit to a foreign marriage. This was the moment at which his crown was secure enough to admit to a controversial st
ep, but also at which he could forestall a decision on a French marriage no longer. Thus the shock and surprise on Michaelmas Day when Elizabeth Woodville was presented to the English court at Reading, processing into the public presence on the arms of the fourteen-year-old George duke of Clarence, the king’s heir presumptive – and a somewhat disgruntled Richard Neville, earl of Warwick.

  *

  Sand crunched underfoot on London Bridge as Elizabeth Woodville crossed the river Thames and entered England’s capital to be crowned a queen. During the previous winter the bridge had been cleaned and cleared of its foul vapours, and forty-five loads of sand were dumped along its length to assure the grip below the feet of the many lords, ladies and dignitaries who were to cross it in the weekend of celebrations that followed.22 It was Friday 24 May 1465, and the kingdom was about to welcome not only a new queen but also a whole new generation of nobles, all learning their places in a world still being rebuilt.

  As ever when celebrating a moment of great royal dignity, London put on a spectacular show. The centre of the bridge was awash with colour, in the form of a massive stage, draped in cloth and paper in gold and green, black and white, red and purple, which provided the setting for actors and actresses dressed as blonde-headed angels, their wings made from hundreds of dazzling peacock feathers. Another actor dressed as St Elizabeth read a greeting while the high-pitched voices of boys rang out from the windows of St Thomas’s chapel, singing songs of praise to the incoming queen. The whole of London, as was customary, thronged with crowds and pageants, and Elizabeth, like so many queens before her, took her stately progress through the cramped but well-scrubbed streets, absorbing the proud scenes that unfolded before her.