And within a day or two after, he sent to Grafton to the Lord Rivers, father unto his wife, showing to him that 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. And so this marriage was a season kept secret after, til needly it must be discovered and disclosed.27
Edward may have been secretive, but he was no fool carried away by adolescent infatuation. The King knew well that the sword of political marriage could cut both ways. Most recently, the union of Margaret of Anjou and Henry VI had produced more chaos than national advantage. If that sad situation may be blamed on the husband’s insanity and general ineptitude, other infamous royal examples revealed that marriage for financial and political gains could be personally infelicitous, most notably the unions of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine and Edward II to Isabella of France.
Beyond Elizabeth herself, Edward may have been seduced by the life he witnessed at Grafton manor. The Wydevilles were a happy, loving family who cared deeply for each other, a sharp contrast to the malevolent rivalries within the family of York. While Edward’s brothers were still too young to indulge in the sibling treacheries that would ultimately annihilate the family, the King must have felt deeply the differences between the two homes. The Wydeville sons would never have slandered their mother as an adulteress – as both Clarence and Gloucester subsequently pronounced their mother – in their quests after power.
Neither had Edward’s childhood been particularly joyful. He and his brother Edmond, Earl of Rutland had been sent to Ludlow Castle at an early age for their education, and while no place was more beautiful and bustling than medieval Ludlow, Edward’s experience there was not always pleasant. ‘On Saturday in Easter week’ 1454, the twelve-year-old Edward and eleven-year-old Rutland sent a letter to their father thanking him for ‘our green gowns now late sent unto us to our great comfort’ and asking that ‘we might have some fine bonnets sent on to us by the next sure messenger, for necessity so requires’. But the letter went on to plead:
Over this, right noble lord and father, please it your highness to wit that we have charged your servant, William Smith, bearer of these, for to declare unto your noblesse certain things in our behalf, namely, concerning and touching the odious rule and demeaning of Richard Crofte and his brother. Wherefore we beseech your gracious lordship, and full noble fatherhood, to hear him in exposition of the same, and to his relation to give full faith and credence.28
The boys’ complaint about ‘odious rule and demeaning’ may represent nothing more than schoolboy whining, but Edward’s subsequent adolescent years grew progressively worse. He had just turned thirteen when his father challenged Henry VI at the first battle at St Albans on 22 May 1455. While the Duke of York negotiated a deal to serve as ‘Protector and Defender of the Realm’ during the insanity of Henry VI, he chafed at his limited power and openly rebelled in 1459. The disastrous rout of York at Ludford Bridge on 12 October 1459 caused him to flee to Ireland while Warwick, Salisbury and Edward, then seventeen, fled to Calais.
The year of 1460 saw more political skirmishes, war, and personal tragedy. The Yorkists won a battle at Northampton in July, but the year ended with their defeat on 30 December at Wakefield, the beheading of Edward’s father – his head spiked on a pole over Micklegate Bar – and the killing of his younger brother Rutland. That brother, who had shared Edward’s love for his green gown and request for a fine bonnet just six years earlier, was dead at the age of seventeen, thanks to his father’s ambition. At eighteen, Edward succeeded his father as head of the Yorkist clan.
Grafton manor offered a bucolic retreat from this brutal existence. Edward could hunt in the nearby royal preserve or saunter through the open fields surrounding Grafton village. From the London road, he could ride down either of two lanes lined with farmers’ cottages to the Wydeville manor house and the Norman church of St Mary the Virgin. Inside the peaceful, quiet country church, the tomb of Elizabeth’s ancestor Sir John Wydeville displayed a lifesize engraving of the man who had built the church tower with its five bells early in the fifteenth century.
A hermitage established in the twelfth century lay just a short distance away. The hermitage had flourished during the fourteenth century, with the Wydevilles appointing its masters. After the Black Death, however, the hermitage declined and became part of the Wydeville estate. With a cloister, chapel, dovecote and malt kiln, it was renovated during the fifteenth century. Excavations in 1964–5 discovered tiles decorated with the shields of the Wydevilles and the House of York, leading to speculations that Edward and Elizabeth were married in the hermitage. But the church of St Mary the Virgin, just steps away from the manor house, also offered a close and convenient site for a wedding. In the absence of records, the site of the ceremony remains unknown.
With thirteen children in the Wydeville family (two others died as infants), the manor house was the busy centre of ploughing, planting and harvesting – rural activities that dominated the life of the landed gentry. But Grafton manor was different. Jacquetta, its highly cultured matriarch, had grown up in Luxembourg and Burgundy, where classical learning and humanism were fast moving the medieval world towards the Renaissance. She transferred her culture and her love of books and knowledge to her children.
During Jacquetta’s youth in Luxembourg, Flemish painters were flourishing, classical authors were being translated into French, and French writers were developing a new literature. Women of the nobility added reading and writing to the traditional female skills of music, dancing, embroidery and riding. When Christine de Pizan, whose Italian father served the French King as physician and astrologer, was left a destitute widow in 1389, she supported herself by writing. Jacquetta owned an exquisite illuminated manuscript of the Oeuores poètiques de Christine de Pison. Her neatly handwritten name, ‘Jaquete’, on the flyleaf of MS Harley 4431 in the British Library provides a rare instance of contact with this fascinating woman.
The Wydeville children shared Jacquetta’s love of culture and the arts. The eldest son, Anthony, became the most erudite humanist of fifteenthcentury England, his education derived in part from the Oeuores poètiques de Christine de Pison. His name, too, appears on the flyleaf of the manuscript, a proud hand-lettered ‘ARIVIERES’ that may record a gift from mother to son. Years later, Anthony would translate The Morale Proverbes of Christyne into English, an early text to be published by Caxton in England. A younger son, Lionel, became Bishop of Salisbury and Chancellor of Oxford University.
Lord Rivers shared his wife’s love of books, and commemorated his daughter’s coronation as Queen Consort by purchasing a copy of The Romance of Alexander in 1466 and inscribing on folio 274r:
Cest liure est a monseigno’ richart de Wideuielle seigneur de riuieres vng dez compaignons de la tres-noble ordre de la jartiere & le dist seigneur acetast le dist liure lan de grace mille cccclxvj le premier jor de lan a landres & le Vo an de la coronacion de tres-victorieux roy eduard quart de che non & le second de la coronacion de tres-vertueuze royne Elyzabeth lendemain du jo’ de sainct more. [This book belongs to Lord Richard de Wydeville, Lord Rivers, one of the companions of the very noble order of the Garter, and this Lord bought this book in the year of grace 1466, the first day of the year, in London, and the fifth year of the coronation of the very victorious King Edward, the fourth of this name, and the second of the coronation of the very virtuous Queen Elizabeth, the day after Saint Maure’s day.]29
The entire family loved books. A signature, ‘E Wydevyll’, appears at the back of an early-fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Arthurian romances, Romance of the Saint Graal (Royal MS 14 E.iii). This autograph on folio 162 may indicate that Elizabeth owned the manuscript before her marriage to Sir John Grey. That the text was a family treasure is indicated by other names on the flyleaves: ‘Elysabeth, the kyngys dowther’ and ‘Cecyl th
e kyngys dowther’, children of Edward IV and Elizabeth. Another inscription on the same folio states, ‘Thys boke is myne dame Alyanor Haute’ – one of Elizabeth’s cousins through the marriage of her aunt Joan Wydeville to William Haute. A fourth name, ‘Jane Grey’, may connect the manuscript to Elizabeth’s sister Eleanor, sometimes called Joan, who married Anthony Grey of Ruthin, but it is tempting to speculate that the manuscript ultimately ended up in the hands of Elizabeth Wydeville’s great-great-granddaughter, Lady Jane Grey. Ownership of the manuscript is uncertain, however, and the ‘E Wydevyll’ signature might belong to Elizabeth’s brother Edward. Equally, the order of ownership is impossible to determine from the signatures, but collectively, the inscriptions certainly indicate that reading was a family affair and that books passed lovingly from one family member to another.
Perhaps most significantly, Elizabeth’s affectionate family treated each other with playfulness and gentle humour. Anthony describes how he was asked to represent England in a tournament with the champion of Burgundy during Easter week of 1465. Just before Elizabeth’s coronation, the court was in residence at Sheen Palace, where Anthony was making the traditional greeting to the Queen:
And as I spoke unto her Highness kneeling, my cap out of my head, as my duty was, I wote not by what adventure nor how it happened, but all the ladies of her court came about me; and I took no heed than that they of their grace had tied about my thigh a collar of gold garnished with precious stones, and was made of a letter [the letter was an ‘S’, meaning Souvenance or remembrance] the which, for to say the truth, when I perceived, was more nigh my heart than my knee… And then they all drew each of them in to their place. And I, all abashed of this adventure, rose up for to go thank them of their rich and honorable present.30
While the ladies were playfully tying the gold necklace around his knee, someone else placed in Anthony’s hat ‘a letter written on fine parchment, sealed and enclosed with a small thread of gold’. The letter officially engaged Anthony’s services as knight for a proposed tournament. This charmingly elaborate invitation was surely orchestrated by the Queen’s winsome hand. Elizabeth had brought to her court the ceremony of the medieval romances she had read and loved.
No wonder Edward IV fell in love with this delightful, cultured woman. Even the historian Edward Hall, whose Chronicle blames the King’s marriage for most of his subsequent problems, commends the qualities of the woman he chose:
…she was a woman more of formal countenance, than of excellent beauty, but yet of such beauty and favour that with her sober demeanour, lovely looking, and feminine smiling (neither too wanton nor too humble), beside her tongue so eloquent, and her wit so pregnant, she was able to ravish the mind of a mean person, when she allured and made subject to her the heart of so great a King.31
Hall repeats the story told by More and Mancini about Elizabeth initially rejecting the King’s offer to make her his ‘paramour and concubine’ and credits her refusals for fuelling Edward’s determination to marry. Hall attributes Edward’s choice of wife to ‘the confidence that he had in her perfect constancy and the trust that he had in her constant chastity’.32
If the marriage angered those who lost stature and status and power, the fault must lie with those displaced, not with the charming, virtuous wife Edward chose: Lady Elizabeth Grey, née Wydeville. Though not of the ‘blood royal’ of England, her heritage combined the blood of European nobility with that of the English landed gentry, a patrimony that produced children with wit and charm sufficient to irritate and intimidate the entrenched nobility.
CHAPTER THREE
The Truth About the Wydevilles
If mothers count, Elizabeth Wydeville could take her place among the highest ranks of European nobility.
Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, was the daughter of Pierre de Luxembourg, Count of St Pol, Conversano and Brienne. Jacquetta’s mother, Marguerite, was daughter of Francesco del Balzo, Duke of Andrea in Apulia (a dukedom in the kingdom of Naples). Descended from the most noble and powerful families in Europe, Jacquetta could claim Charlemagne as her ancestor.1
Jacquetta’s father, the Count of St Pol, was a significant player in the ongoing conflicts between France and Burgundy that dominated fifteenthcentury Europe. He and his brothers were major supporters of the Duke of Burgundy, who controlled a powerful fiefdom within the Kingdom of France, and had long fought against the Dauphin. When Jacquetta’s father was captured and held for ransom by the Dauphin’s allies, he was freed by no less than the intervention of Henry V of England. Jacquetta’s uncles were powerful men. Jean de Luxembourg, the Duke of Burgundy’s chief captain, was the very man who delivered Joan of Arc to the Church prelates for trial. Louis de Luxembourg, Bishop of Thérouanne, became Cardinal and Archbishop of Rouen, Bishop of Ely and chancellor and treasurer for the English in France.2
In the mid-fifteenth century, Burgundy extended north almost 500 miles from the southern Duchy of Burgundy and the Franche Comte to include the Low Countries of Holland, Zeeland, Flanders, Artois, St Pol, Hainault, Brabant and Luxembourg. Not only was the Duke of Burgundy as rich and powerful as the King of France, whose principal wealth lay in the relatively weak city of Paris, but the Burgundian court set fashions in architecture, literature, music, pageantry and festivities that were modelled throughout Europe.3
Lying directly across the Channel from England and surrounding Calais, Burgundy’s financial and manufacturing centres were vital to England’s mercantile trade. London merchants always favoured close ties with the port of Bruges, the cloth-manufacturing centre at Ghent and the financial hub of Lille, as well as the wine-, spice-, and olive-growing regions of southern Burgundy. Centrally located between the Hanseatic League and the Italian cities, the Burgundian Low Countries offered England access to all of Europe.
As a daughter of Burgundian royalty, Jacquetta first married John, Duke of Bedford and eldest brother of Henry V, on 22 April 1433. Bedford, almost twenty-seven years older than Jacquetta, was one of three sponsors at the baptism of Henry VI, who was born while Henry V was fighting in France. When Henry V died in 1422, leaving a nine-month-old son, Parliament gave Bedford precedence to rule while he was in England and designated his younger brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, as Protector of England while Bedford was in France. The continuing battles with France forced Bedford to spend most of his time on the continent, however, and effectively he gave over the governance of England to Humphrey of Gloucester. In 1423 Bedford had married his first wife, Anne, sister of the Duke of Burgundy, a marriage that strengthened the bonds between England and Burgundy, but antagonised the French King, Charles VII.
Anne died in childbirth just before All Hallow’s Eve 1432, and the widower Bedford remarried the following April, choosing as his new bride the seventeen-year-old Jacquetta of Luxembourg. The Duke of Burgundy, Anne’s brother, resented not only the unseemly haste of the ceremony, but the close liaison it created between Luxembourg and England. Even though Jacquetta’s Luxembourg family were his rich and powerful supporters, Burgundy began to shift his alliance from England to Charles VII of France, a shift that contributed to the decline of English fortunes in France.
Bedford and his new young wife soon visited England, where the beautiful Jacquetta was warmly welcomed. As Duchess of Bedford, Jacquetta enjoyed pre-eminence as one of the first ladies of the land. King Henry VI, only eleven years old, was not married, and the dowager queens, Katharine of Valois (widow of Henry V) and Joan of Navarre (widow of Henry IV), could not compete with the young, lively, cultured and beautiful wife of the man who held all the power. In Coventry, the couple were greeted with gifts to Jacquetta of fifty marks and a ‘Cup of silver & overgilt’ that cost five marks.4 When Jacquetta’s father died in late 1433, a memorial service was held for him in St Paul’s Cathedral, a sign that she had won the hearts of the English. In 1435–6, Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, was one of the ladies for whom robes of the Order of the Garter were provided.
The declining English fortunes in France forced the couple back to the continent, where the Duke of Bedford died on the night of 14-15 September 1435. Jacquetta was a widow at the age of nineteen, but she retained her dower as Duchess of Bedford by a patent granted on 6 February 1436, which included the provision that ‘she do not marry without the king’s consent given under the great seal of England’.5
The next time we hear of Jacquetta, she was being pardoned by Henry VI on 23 March 1437, ‘for intermarrying without the King’s consent’.6 Would that we knew what happened between 6 February 1436 and 23 March 1437! Jacquetta petitioned Henry VI to forgive her the offence of having taken ‘but late ago to Husband your true liegeman of your Realm of England, Richard Wydevylle knight not having thereto your Royal license and assent’. The petition claims that the couple had suffered both ‘in their persons as in their goods’ as a result of the unsanctioned marriage and requested that they be assessed ‘a reasonable fine’ as punishment and be pardoned for their transgression.
That ‘reasonable fine’ turned out to be £1,000, an enormous sum in 1437.7 Jacquetta may have paid that amount by signing over to Cardinal Beaufort her Bedford dower interest in Charleton Camvile manor in Somerset and other property in Dorset and Wiltshire. Entries in the Calendar of Patent Rolls transfer property owned by ‘Richard Wydevyll and Jacquetta, in right of her dower’, to the Cardinal in exchange for his payment of 13,350 marks to the King. In return the King ‘pardoned the trespasses herein and granted the said possessions to the use of the Cardinal’.8 Jacquetta’s pardon was dated 24 October 1437.9
Jacquetta had no trouble retaining the good will of Henry VI. Numerous entries in the Calendars of Patent Rolls, the Fine Rolls, and the Close Rolls reveal that Henry VI carefully protected Jacquetta’s dower, usually a third part of the extensive and enormously rich Bedford manors, when the rest of the property was transferred to others. The Fine Rolls, for instance, exempt from transfer to a new holder Jacquetta’s rights to ‘a third part… of the manor of Swalowefeld’ on 7 May 1439, her dower in the manor of Bradwell on 19 February 1445, and a third part of ‘lands in the town of Scotford’ on 17 October 1446. When Bradwell was subsequently transferred to John Poutrell and John Croke on 26 October 1447, the grant again excluded Jacquetta’s dower, a specification reiterated on 6 May 1451, when the lease was extended to forty years. Similar lifetime rights to her dower property and income appear in grants to John Penecok on 2 March 1457, as well as in innumerable patents issued throughout Henry’s reign.10
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