But Elizabeth knew well the ways of men, as More takes great delight in recounting:
Whose appetite when she perceived, she virtuously denied him. But yet did she so wisely and with so good manner, and words so well set, that she rather kindled his desire than quenched it. And finally after many a meeting, much wooing, and many great promises, she well espied the king’s affection toward her so greatly increased, that she durst somewhat the more boldly say her mind… And in conclusion, she showed him plainly that as she knew herself too simple to be his wife, so thought she herself too good to be his concubine.5
Some critics dismiss More’s tribute to Elizabeth’s virtue as nothing more than Tudor propaganda, since some of his information came from John Morton, who served Henry VII (Elizabeth’s son-in-law) as Archbishop of Canterbury and as Chancellor. More himself was in service to Henry VIII when he wrote The History of King Richard the Third. Yet decidedly non-Tudor sources tell similar stories about the encounter and Elizabeth’s virtuous actions.
Antonio Cornazzano, a minor Italian poet, romanticised Edward’s courtship of Elizabeth in ‘La Regina d’ingliterra’, a poem written sometime between 1466 and 1468 and published as a chapter in De mulieribus admirandis. While the poem contains many errors of fact, its dramatic homage to the widow’s virtue indicates that her fame had spread to northern Italy soon after her marriage to the King. In Cornazzano’s poem, Edward attempts to seduce Elizabeth, who had appeared at his court as a reserved, shy, retiring lady. Her modesty only inflamed the King, of course, who ordered her father to force his daughter to submit. Her father begs her to acquiesce to the King’s pleasure, but she refuses – causing her father and his sons to be banished from the kingdom. Her mother, who also begs her to comply with the King’s demands, is frustrated to the point of saying that she wishes her daughter had died at the moment of birth.
With her mother in tears, Elizabeth regrets the anguish and distress she has caused her family and finally agrees to be presented to the King. But she stands before the King not as a ‘meretrice’ (prostitute), but as an ‘immaculata una phenice’ (a pure, perfect, rare human being). She kneels before him and begs ‘una gratia’ (a gift from his Grace). The affable King tells her that he would give her the tallest mountain or make Antarctica navigable or pull out Hercules’ columns, and swears that he means what he says.
At that point, the lady presents the King with a knife she had hidden under her dress and says:
I implore you, my dear Lord, to take my life: this is the ‘gratia’ that I want from you, because, since I will lose what makes a woman live in glory, I want my soul to leave my body… Think, my Lord, King of Justice! Your vain pleasures will soon be over, but I’ll remain in eternal filth and squalor… To be your wife would be asking too much. Let me then live and die on my terms and may God save you in a peaceful Kingdom.
The King, amazed at the lady’s words and actions, becomes still and silent like a statue. He leaves the knife in her hands, takes a gold ring from his finger, lifts his eyes to heaven and says: ‘God, you be my witness that this woman is my wedded wife.’6
If Cornazzano’s idealised romance contains more fiction than fact, the story of the dagger was repeated almost twenty years later when Dominic Mancini, an Italian visiting England in 1482–3 to gather information for Angelo Cato, advisor to Louis XI of France, recorded a similar version in his official report:
…when 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.7
Adding to the Queen’s mystique, a contemporary chronicle compiled sometime between 1468 and 1482 commends Lady Elizabeth for her wisdom and beauty:
…King Edward being a lusty prince attempted the stability and constant modesty of divers ladies and gentlewomen, and when he could not perceive none of such constant womanhood, wisdom and beauty, as was Dame Elizabeth, widow of Sir John Grey of Groby late defunct, he then with a little company came unto the Manor of Grafton, beside Stony Stratford, whereat Sir Richard Wydeville, Earl of Rivers, and Dame Jacqueline, Duchess-dowager of Bedford, were then dwelling; and after resorting at divers times, seeing the constant and stable mind of the said Dame Elizabeth, early in a morning the said King Edward wedded the foresaid Dame Elizabeth there on the first day of May in the beginning of his third year…8
Thomas More, therefore, was reporting a story that was generally current in England and throughout Europe. He further writes that Edward, who ‘had not been wont elsewhere to be so stiffly said ‘nay,’ so much esteemed her countenance and chastity that he set her virtue in the stead of possession and riches. And thus taking counsel of his desire, determined in all possible haste to marry her.’9
Thus begins the modern reputation of Elizabeth, Queen Consort to Edward IV of England, as a ‘calculating, ambitious, devious, greedy, ruthless and arrogant’ woman (to quote Alison Weir’s The Wars of the Roses).10 In describing the marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth, Anne Crawford, editor of Letters of the Queens of England, more subtly demeans the Queen: ‘She was several years older than her royal husband and was generally believed to have demanded marriage as the price for her virtue.’11
‘What price virtue?’, one may well ask. Because Elizabeth refused to sell her virtue to please a King, history (or more accurately, historians) has maligned the woman mercilessly. To the majority of historians and novelists today, Elizabeth is a conniving, grasping, overreaching female, who was manipulative at best, greedy and ruthless at worst. Scholars who, on the basis of irrefutable facts, have applauded Elizabeth’s benevolence, piety and lifelong loyalty to husband, children and siblings seem to have whispered their words into the wind. Perhaps even worse, to the general public she is an unknown woman.
The slander began immediately when the marriage was announced. Enemies attacked Elizabeth as unfit for a King who could choose his bride from the daughters of European royalty. Critics sneered the word parvenu in her direction. A whispering campaign accused both Elizabeth and her mother, Jacquetta, of witchcraft and sorcery in seducing Edward. Why else would a King, the handsomest man in England, marry a widow five years older than himself?
These attitudes have infiltrated the historical record. Charles Ross, Edward IV’s biographer, accuses Edward of showing ‘excessive favour to the queen and her highly unpopular Woodville relatives’ (‘Woodville’ is a modernised spelling of the family name) and describes the Wydevilles as ‘a greedy and grasping family’.12 Michael Stroud identifies Elizabeth as ‘a social-climbing widow of the lower nobility’.13 Alison Weir succinctly summarises: ‘In his choice of wife, King Edward was “governed by lust”’.14 Hardly. Edward IV easily and frequently satisfied his lust elsewhere. He bragged about his illegitimate children before his marriage and about his mistresses afterwards. It was not lust, but love, that compelled Edward to marry Elizabeth, a love that persisted through nineteen years of trauma and tragedies that would have destroyed less devoted relationships – and lesser women.
The biographies of this remarkable woman vary in their objectivity and understanding of her life. Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England blames Elizabeth for many of Edward’s problems as King:
…over his mind Elizabeth, from first to last, certainly held potent sway, – an influence most dangerous in the hands of a woman who possessed more cunning than firmness, more skill in concocting a diplomatic intrigue than power to form a rational resolve. She was ever successful in carrying her own purposes, but she had seldom a wise or good end in view; the advancement of her own relatives, and the depreciation of her husband’s friends and family, were her chief objects. Elizabeth gained her own way with her hu
sband by an assumption of the deepest humility; her words were soft and caressing, her glances timid. 15
Not until 1937 did Katharine Davies provide a more balanced and less hostile judgment of Elizabeth in The First Queen Elizabeth. In the next year, however, David MacGibbon’s better-known biography repeated spurious tales that subtly demeaned the Queen, in Elizabeth Woodville: Her Life and Times (1938).
Subsequent articles should have set the record straight. A.R. Myers in 1957 proved that Elizabeth was a careful manager of money who spent less on her household and personal needs that any predecessor Queen of the previous century. J.R. Lander in 1963 cleared Elizabeth of charges that she sought prestige and money for her family through inappropriate marriages for her siblings (see chapter 7 below: ‘Marriages Made in Court’). Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, in 1995, verified Elizabeth Wydeville’s piety and culture in ‘A “Most Benevolent Queen”‘, just one of several meticulously researched articles that refute past slanders.
Still, defamatory attacks rage on. Most egregiously, The Book of Shadows, a deservedly obscure novel published in 1996, sets its fictional stage with this demeaning and inaccurate ‘Author’s Note’: ‘The Woodvilles, as a group, were robber barons of the first order: brilliant, brave, charismatic and totally ruthless’.16 The novel depicts Queen Elizabeth as a vain, hard, harsh woman actively involved in black sorcery. Edward is a hot-blooded fool besotted with love. A fictional commissioner of the King describes the Queen: ‘She’s a very dangerous woman. No injury, no slight, no threat is ever forgotten.’17 Though historical fictions traditionally sensationalise their subjects, this characterisation is a particularly cheap shot.
Bertram Fields in Royal Blood (1998) defames ‘the ambitious and greedy Woodvilles’18 and condemns their social ‘overreaching’19 by studiously ignoring their stature and service in both Lancastrian and Yorkist courts. Cornazzano’s contemporary poem, for instance, compliments the Wydevilles by comparing them to the wealthy and influential Borromei who served the Sforzas of Milan. Fields also repeats the speculation that Elizabeth might have plotted to kill Richard III, an accusation first promulgated by Richard himself, but the source of this charge is not mentioned. More subtly but no less demeaning, Fields refers to Edward V and Prince Richard as ‘the Woodville princes’ – as if their father had no part in their begetting or nurturing.20
More recently, Geoffrey Richardson’s The Popinjays (published in 2000) characterises the Wydevilles as vain, pretentious, empty people. Richardson takes his title from Bulwer-Lytton’s characterisations in his fictional The Last of the Barons, a paean of praise to Earl Warwick – the very man who hated and executed Elizabeth’s father and brother, Warwick’s personal bête noire. As with too many of his predecessors, Richardson relies on fiction and fabrications to build his case.
Countering such inaccuracies, David Baldwin’s biography, Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower (2002), begins by objectively examining the evidence, but concludes with unsubstantiated speculations about Elizabeth’s opposition to Henry VII. Baldwin believes that Elizabeth supported the son of Clarence, a man she loathed, and Robert Stillington, the bishop whose testimony invalidated her marriage and bastardised ten of her twelve children. Such highly improbable speculations distort the final seven years of the Queen Dowager’s life during the reign of Henry Tudor, her son-in-law, and Elizabeth of York, her daughter.
Telling the true story of Elizabeth Wydeville is important not merely to disprove the slanders and retrieve her from obscurity, but to explore how history happens. Her story provides essential insights into the historical process and the creation of reputation. It reveals that errors, if repeated often enough, become facts. It shows that writers, even if they may desire to tell truth, always and necessarily present information from a limited perspective. If we study history to avoid repeating it, the story of Elizabeth Wydeville embodies a quintessential warning about the power of propaganda to pervert truth.
As one small example, a letter written on 16 August 1469 to Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan helped establish Elizabeth’s reputation: ‘The king here took to wife a widow of this island of quite low birth’. The letter’s Italian author, Luchino Dallaghiexia, accuses the Queen of exerting herself ‘to aggrandize her relations, to wit, her father, mother, brothers and sisters’. This letter perpetuates the lies about Elizabeth’s social status and the myth of her rapacious advancement of family. No one seems to notice that Dallaghiexia was a supporter of Warwick, the man who had just executed Lord Rivers and Sir John Wydeville four days earlier, even though Dallaghiexia commends ‘the Earl of Warwick, who has always been great and deservedly so’.21 In 1469, Warwick, a sworn enemy of the Queen and rebel against Edward IV, was spreading lies to promote his own quest for the throne. While the Italian correspondent should not be blamed for disseminating the propaganda of Warwick at the height of the Earl’s power, subsequent historians must be chastised for not considering the letter’s source, context and perspective.
Because such testimony has too often been accepted at face value, the negative reputation of Elizabeth Wydeville and her family grew. Lies, gossip and character assassination by enemies, both personal and political, slandered this woman who lived during one of the most troubled and violent eras of human history. In fifteenth-century England, this woman fought for family and life with intelligence and persistence against men who used swords, power and propaganda to annihilate their enemies. Her victories were few; her losses eternal.
Most famously, of course, Elizabeth Wydeville was the mother of the two princes who disappeared from the Tower of London during the reign of Richard III. Everyone knows about the two princes. Hardly anyone knows that they had a mother. Yet this mother desperately tried to save her sons from the grasp of ambitious men. The tragedy of the two princes was but one of many. Elizabeth’s few years of glory and grandeur as Queen Consort to Edward IV were framed by profound suffering and personal tragedy:
1461
The death of her first husband, Sir John Grey, killed at the second battle of St Albans. Her dowry property was challenged by her mother-in-law.
1469
The beheading of her much-loved father, Earl Rivers, and her brother, Sir John Wydeville; murders ordered by Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick (Edward IV’s cousin) and by George, Duke of Clarence (Edward IV’s brother).
1470
The exile of Edward IV, leaving Elizabeth alone in London, eight months pregnant and the sole custodian of their three daughters Elizabeth, Mary and Cecily (ages four, three and one).
1470
The birth of their first son and future King, Edward V, while Elizabeth was in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.
1483
The untimely death of Edward IV at the age of forty on 9 April.
1483
The execution on 25 June of her cultured and scholarly brother, Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, and her son, Sir Richard Grey (murders ordered by Richard III).
1483
The disappearance of her two sons, King Edward V and Prince Richard of York, from the Tower of London. They were last seen in late summer, and Elizabeth never knew their fate with any certainty.
1484
A parliamentary decree in January declaring her nineteen-year marriage to Edward IV to be adulterous and their ten children illegitimate.
1464, 1469, 1483
Repeated accusations of witchcraft and sorcery against her mother and herself, charges that had sent earlier royal women to imprisonment and exile.
1492
Death at the age of fifty-five while living in Bermondsey Abbey with so few worldly possessions that her will mentions only ‘such small stuff and goodes that I have’ for distribution to her family and debtors.
Elizabeth Wydeville was a survivor who ultimately found her own peace in a hostile world. Her contributions to posterity are enormous. Her grandson, Henry VIII, and her great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth I, are among the most famous and imp
ortant of English rulers. Both of these famous monarchs inherited much of their spirit, intelligence and gutsy fortitude from the first English Queen to bear the name ‘Elizabeth’. She was also the ancestor of Mary, Queen of Scots and of Lady Jane Grey. In fact, Elizabeth Wydeville’s blood runs in the veins of every subsequent English monarch, even until today.
Elizabeth Wydeville’s story deserves a fresh look and a reconsideration of the facts that have fallen into the cracks of history. Perhaps, after all, truth can be the daughter of time.
CHAPTER TWO
Edward’s Decision to Marry Lady Elizabeth
No one knows exactly when Elizabeth and Edward IV first met. The encounter in Whittlewood Forest near Grafton manor, described by Edward Hall in his Chronicle of 1548, is dated ‘during the time that the Earl of Warwick was in France concluding a marriage for King Edward’:
The King being on hunt in the forest of Wychwood beside Stony Stratford, came for his recreation to the manor of Grafton, where the Duchess of Bedford sojourned, then wife to Sir Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers, on whom then was attending a daughter of hers, called Dame Elizabeth Grey, widow of Sir John Grey, Knight, slain at the last battle of St. Albans, by the power of King Edward. This widow having a suit to the King, either to be restored by him to some thing taken from her, or requiring him of pity, to have some augmentation to her living, found such grace in the King’s eyes that he not only favoured her suit, but much more fantasied her person…1
Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England placed their meeting under an oak tree:
Elizabeth Page 2
