The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family

by Higginbotham, Susan

  For the Crowland Chronicler, this brotherly strife was almost too painful to write about:

  The mind recoils from describing what followed in the next Parliament – so sad was the dispute between two brothers of such noble character. No-one argued against the duke except the king; no-one answered the king except the duke. Some persons, however, were introduced concerning whom many people wondered whether they performed the offices of accuses or witnesses. […] The duke swept aside all charges with a disclaimer offering, if it were acceptable, to uphold his case by personal combat. Why make a long story of it?14

  Parliament condemned the Duke of Clarence to death on 7 February 1478. Edward, however, delayed carrying out the sentence until the Speaker of the Commons asked that it be carried out. On 18 February 1478, the Duke of Clarence was executed privately, quite possibly through drowning in a vat of Malmsey wine or in a bath made from a Malmsey barrel – a curious method of death indeed, but the only one specified by the English and foreign chronicles. Before his death, Clarence asked that certain land be given to Anthony Woodville ‘in consideration of the injuries perpetrated on him and his parents’ by the duke. Edward IV carried out this wish.15

  Where do the Woodvilles fit into all this? In 1483, Dominic Mancini, an Italian observer who had been visiting in England earlier that year, wrote:

  The queen then remembered the insults to her family and the calumnies with which she was reproached, namely that according to established usage she was not the legitimate wife of the king. Thus she concluded that her offspring to the throne would never come to the throne, unless the duke of Clarence was removed; and of this she easily persuaded the king. […] At that time [of Clarence’s execution] Richard duke of Gloucester was so overcome with grief for his brother, that he could not dissimulate so well, but that he was overheard to say that he would one day avenge his brother’s death. Thenceforth he came very rarely to court […] After the execution of the duke of Clarence, and while Richard, as we have said, kept himself to his own lands, the queen ennobled many of her family. Besides, she attracted to her party many strangers and introduced them to court, so that they alone should manage the public and private businesses of the crown, surround the king, and have bands of retainers, give or sell offices, and finally rule the very king himself.16

  As a contemporary observer of the events leading up to Richard III’s taking the crown, Mancini is an invaluable source, whose account is often consistent with English accounts. When Mancini speaks of events occurring several years before his visit to England, however, he is less reliable, and there are several reasons why his claim that Elizabeth procured the death of Clarence should be regarded with scepticism. Mancini’s statements about Elizabeth ennobling her family after Clarence’s demise are demonstrably wrong, nor is there evidence of ‘strangers’ being introduced to court by the queen. As for Gloucester’s brooding Hamlet-like in the north, there is nothing to suggest that he avoided court because of the Woodvilles; rather, he stayed in the north because of his enormous responsibilities there, which demanded his full attention. He came to court when family ties demanded it, as when his sister Margaret visited in 1480, or when his responsibilities as a great lord required it, as when Parliament met early in 1483. As A.J. Pollard points out, these slurs by Mancini likely have their origins in the propaganda being put forth by Richard, Duke of Gloucester in the spring and summer of 1483, when he was in the process of seizing the crown and was intent on destroying the Woodvilles.17

  But what of Mancini’s claims that Elizabeth feared Clarence because she believed that her children would never come to the throne if he survived? Mancini’s explanation is that in 1483, Richard claimed that Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth was invalid because before Edward married Elizabeth, Edward had been married by proxy to a continental bride, the betrothal having been arranged by the Earl of Warwick.18 In fact, Gloucester’s official claim, as enshrined in the 1484 Act of Parliament spelling out Richard’s claim to the throne, was not that Edward IV had been betrothed to a foreign princess, but that he had been precontracted to an Eleanor Butler, a widowed daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury.19 One source, the Burgundian Chronicler, Philippe de Commynes, would claim that Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who had been appointed keeper of Edward IV’s privy seal in 1460, actually married Edward to Eleanor, although he adds that Edward’s promise was made to the lady only to delude her so that he could enjoy her body.20 From this, and from the arrest of Stillington for obscure reasons in 1478, it has been suggested, chiefly by Paul Murray Kendall, that Clarence had learned about Edward’s previous marriage from Stillington and was killed at the instigation of the Woodvilles because they could not risk the truth being known.21

  Kendall’s theory has attracted a great deal of support, yet there are sound reasons to doubt it. Prior to 1483, no trace of any rumour that Edward IV’s marriage was invalid can be found, though such an allegation would have been of immeasurable value to the king’s and queen’s enemies. Kendall’s suggestion that Clarence knew of the precontract but dared not to reveal it makes little sense, as Mortimer Levine points out, since he apparently had no fear of making the even more explosive accusation that Edward IV himself was illegitimate.22 Moreover, if Clarence or anyone else had been raising uncomfortable questions about the validity of Edward’s marriage, the solution lay in Edward’s hands via an application to the pope to smooth out any irregularities: Eleanor Butler, having died in 1468, was in no position to complain.

  As for Stillington, his arrest, which was noted in passing by Elizabeth Stonor on 6 March 1478, may or may not have some connection with Clarence; he was pardoned in June 1478 for the offence of uttering words prejudicial to the king and his state. No more specific information is given to us.23 Even before his pardon, however, he was appointed to a commission of the peace on 14 April 1478, suggesting a short imprisonment and perhaps an equally short royal displeasure.24 Moreover, having released Stillington, Edward IV did not treat him as a person with dangerous knowledge; indeed, on 21 January 1479, he was appointed (along with the Earl of Essex, the Bishop of Ely, and Anthony Woodville) to treat with the Bishop of Elne, Louis XI’s ambassador in England.25 Surely a man ruthless enough to murder his own brother in order to keep his marital escapades from coming to light would have not risked the possibility that a disgruntled Stillington might gossip to the French. Following this assignment, life went on smoothly enough for Stillington, who continued to be named to commissions of the peace by Edward IV.26 As for Kendall’s claim that Stillington ‘was held in intense enmity by the Woodvilles’ after Clarence’s death, there is simply no evidence to support this; whatever the Woodvilles’ thoughts about Stillington were, no one took the trouble to record them.

  In the end, attempts to deflect responsibility for Clarence’s death off the shoulders of Edward IV and onto those of the Woodvilles are unconvincing. Regardless of his motives for proceeding against his brother, Edward IV was no one’s puppet, as Warwick had found out in the 1460s. He took the leading role in the prosecution of Clarence: as Crowland puts it with stark simplicity, ‘No-one argued against the duke except the king’.

  There is no reason to assume that the Woodvilles did anything to dissuade Edward from his purpose; indeed, given the deaths of the queen’s father and of John Woodville at Warwick’s and Clarence’s hands, they might well have approved and applauded the king’s actions. They might well have done their part in making certain that Parliament was complaisant. But the evidence does not point to more than this. The simple fact is that Clarence’s record of disloyalty, his coldblooded destruction of his wife’s old servants, and his association with men who had committed the treasonous act of forecasting the king’s death in itself made him a volatile and dangerous subject. In a ruthless age, such a man was courting death, and no help in the wooing would have been required from the Woodvilles or from anyone else.

  10

  Before the Storm

  Having disposed of Clarence, Edward
IV was free to turn his attention to foreign affairs, specifically, Scotland. Edward IV’s daughter, Cecily, had already been betrothed to James III’s heir. Now James III of Scotland proposed that his sister, Margaret, marry Anthony Woodville. Earl Rivers might not have had the rank or wealth to appeal to the Burgundian heiress, but he clearly was considered suitable for a king’s sister.1

  Edward was amenable to the match. On 14 December 1478, he appointed the Bishop of Rochester and Edward Woodville – the latter making his first recorded appearance on the diplomatic front – to enter into negotiations, which quickly bore fruit. Margaret was to have a dowry of 4,000 marks, which because of James’s straitened finances would be deducted from the payments Edward was making toward the dowry of his daughter, Cecily. Margaret was to come to England by 16 May 1479, for which purpose Edward issued her and a retinue of 300 as safe conduct. On 6 March 1479, the Scottish parliament granted James 20,000 marks toward the expenses of the marriage.2 The bride’s arrival was delayed, however, apparently by James’s difficulties with his own troublesome brother, the Duke of Albany. Edward IV nonetheless made plans for the wedding, which was to be held at Nottingham. On 21 August 1479, he instructed the magistrates of York that when Margaret arrived there on 9 October 1479, they should give her ‘loving and hearty cheer’.3

  While Anthony awaited his bride, Queen Elizabeth awaited the arrival of yet another child. Katherine was probably born in early 1479 at Eltham; her name suggests that the queen’s youngest sister, Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham, acted as one of her godmothers.4

  Sadly, at about the same time Katherine came into the world, the king and queen’s little-known third son, George, departed from it.5

  Edward IV named George as his Lieutenant of Ireland on 6 July 1478 and appointed Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor, as the infant’s deputy. Young George never got a look at the emerald isle before he died in March 1479, probably a victim of the plague or another epidemic disease. Ralph Griffiths believes that the boy was staying at Sheen at the time of his death.

  George’s half-brother, Thomas, Marquess of Dorset, attended George’s funeral at Windsor on 22 March 1479, as did his uncle Anthony, Earl Rivers; John, Lord Strange, the husband of Elizabeth’s sister Jacquetta; John Blount, Lord Mountjoy; Richard Hastings, Lord Welles; and Lord Ferrers of Chartley. No narrative of the funeral is extant; we know of the mourners and their attire only through wardrobe accounts. Edward IV himself was issued a robe of blue, the colour of royal mourning, suggesting that he might have observed the ceremony from a private chamber, screened from public view. The queen’s accounts, which would have listed her own expenses, do not survive.

  For Lionel Woodville, one of the queen’s younger brothers, 1479 was more auspicious. In a typical moment in his biography of Richard III, Paul Murray Kendall praises Anthony Woodville (meagerly, which is as far as Kendall could bring himself to praise a Woodville) by first cataloguing his family’s supposed vices. He writes, ‘Anthony Woodville’s father was a rapacious adventurer […] His brother Lionel was a type of their father in the gown of a bishop’. Elsewhere in the book, Kendall describes Lionel as ‘haughty’.6 As is far too often the case when Kendall writes about the Woodvilles, he offers no evidence to support his assessment of Lionel’s character, and indeed there seems to be none.

  Described in 1482 as being 29 years of age,7 Lionel was intended for the Church from a young age. John Thomson notes that he received a canonry at Lincoln in 1466 as his first benefice, when he would have been around 13.8 Lionel was educated at Oxford, where appears to have been studying as late as 1479: on 22 May 1479 Walter Paston, a fellow student, wrote that the queen’s brother should have ‘proceeded’ at midsummer but would ‘tarry now till Michaelmas’.9

  The newly graduated Lionel did not have to wait long for honours. That same year, William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, appointed him Archdeacon of Surrey,10 and he was also Dean of Exeter by then.11 Most important, Lionel’s alma mater elected him as its chancellor in 1479. University officials then offered him, in fulsome terms, an honorary degree:

  Our predecessors always seem to us to have acted wisely, O most eminent lord, in showing especial respect for learning in men of high social rank; for this is demanded by the degree of their nobility and the greatness of their merits. So great was the nobility of many and so great were their merits, that the one redounded to the glory of the University and the other to the advancement of its work. Therefore since we know that you are powerful in a nobility to which none of your forbears could have aspired, it is right that we should not be behindhand in conferring upon you a corresponding degree of advancement in the academic disciplines long practised in Oxford. […] It has pleased us to agree by unanimous consent, that you should first be admitted to the extraordinary reading of decretals; your excellency is to understand that you are not compelled to begin lecturing at any time. […] This gift is certainly not unworthy of your dignity. Therefore there is, O most distinguished man, a great expectation of your uprightness in protecting our community, for you have already aroused expectations by your many merits, and so we hope the more readily that you will long be the special patron of our University.12

  By the following year, Anglo-Scottish relations had deteriorated, putting paid to Anthony’s Scottish marriage. Sometime in 1480,13 Anthony remarried. His bride was not a foreign princess but a young Englishwoman. She was Mary FitzLewis, the daughter of Henry FitzLewis, who had died in May 1480, and Elizabeth Beaufort. Elizabeth Beaufort was a daughter of Edmund, Duke of Somerset, killed at the first Battle of St Albans in 1455, and Elizabeth Beauchamp. Through her father, Mary inherited the manor of Bromfields in Newington; the moiety of 862 acres in that parish and Wickford, along with the advowson of the church of Newington; the parcels of Oakfield and Shortcroft; and 130 acres of land in Vange. She was said to have been 15 at the time of her father’s death; a calendar in a book of hours made for Jacquetta Woodville, however, gives the birth date of ‘maria fitz loys’ as 30 May 1467, making Mary around 13 at the time of the marriage.14

  For Anthony to turn his sights from a princess to a minor heiress seems odd. Both Michael Hicks and Lynda Pidgeon suggest that Anthony might have sought to claim some of the Beaufort inheritance through Mary’s mother, whose brothers had all died fighting for the House of Lancaster.15 Pidgeon goes on to speculate that Anthony chose such a young bride ‘because he was not really interested in having a wife and providing an heir’ – though this seems to lose sight of the fact that even if Mary was only 13 in 1480, she would be at an age suitable to safely begin childbearing in only a couple of years.16 Indeed, the very opposite could be true: with no legitimate offspring of his own, Anthony, having married his first wife when she was in her twenties, might have found the fact that Mary was just at the cusp of her childbearing years to be appealing. Moreover, Mary was well connected: she was a first cousin of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, married to Anthony’s sister; Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, was her aunt. Her Beaufort blood meant that, like the king, she was a descendant of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford.

  Sadly, we know even less about Anthony’s second marriage than we do his first. In his will, made three years later, Anthony asked that prayers be said for the soul of his father-in-law. He left Mary the plate – items of precious metal such as cups, bowls, and salt cellars that were among the most valuable items in a medieval household – that had belonged to her father and enough of his own plate to make up any deficiency. Mary was also to receive the plate that had been given her at their marriage, a sparver of white silk with four pairs of sheets, two pairs of fustians, a featherbed, and a chambering of Griselda – presumably a tapestry illustrating the famous tale. She would also, of course, be entitled to a jointure interest in her husband’s land. But we have scarcely a glimpse of Mary during the couple’s marriage, though this is hardly unusual for women of her time.

  Around the time that Anthony entered into his second marriage, Edward IV’s court prepared
for a visit from the king’s sister, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy. Edward Woodville and Sir James Radcliffe, described as knights of the king’s body, were appointed to travel to Calais to meet the duchess, who was travelling from Bruges. Edward and Radcliffe were splendidly attired for the occasion in jackets of purple velvet and blue velvet, supplied to them by the king especially for this purpose. Edward’s ten servants received jackets of murrey and blue cloth. Even grander were Anthony and his nephew the Marquis of Dorset, who were allowed purple cloth of gold upon satin.17

  Edward Woodville left England in the Falcon, a royal ship, and brought Margaret from Calais to Dover in late June of 1480. It was the first and the last time she was to return to England since her marriage to Duke Charles, and she would spend more than three months there. For the first time, she met her nephews, Prince Edward and Richard, Duke of York, both of whom had been born during her absence. It was a meeting that would prove to be of significance some years later.

  In mid-September, the king rode with Margaret to Rochester, where Margaret wrote a letter home stating that she and the king would be staying at Anthony’s estate in Kent, before she embarked for the coast.18 Margaret had met William Caxton, the printer, while he was resident in Bruges, and had become his patron. Seeing a translation from French into English on which he was working, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, she had corrected his English but ordered him to complete his translation, which he did, and duly dedicated to her. It was printed abroad, probably in late 1473 or early 1474, several years before Caxton brought his press to England.19 As Anthony had translated three books for Caxton’s press, the most recent, The Cordiale, being published the year before Margaret’s visit, the duchess and the earl would have likely found common ground in applauding the success of the man, and the industry, they had each supported.