Elizabeth Woodville

1437 – 1492 · Generation XX · House of Plantagenet

Elizabeth Woodville was the queen of Edward IV, the mother of the Princes in the Tower and, through her daughter Elizabeth of York, the grandmother of Henry VIII. She was born about 1437, probably at Grafton Regis in Northamptonshire, the first child of a marriage that had scandalised the court. Her mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, was the widow of the Duke of Bedford, Henry VI’s uncle, and one of the greatest ladies in England. Her father, Richard Woodville, came from the gentry and was later created Earl Rivers. Around 1452 Elizabeth married John Grey of Groby and bore him two sons, Thomas and Richard. Grey was killed fighting for Lancaster at the second battle of St Albans in 1461.

Three years later the young Yorkist king married her in secret. Tradition places the wedding at Grafton on 1 May 1464, with only her mother and two ladies present. Edward revealed it that September at Reading, and she was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 26 May 1465. No king since the Norman Conquest had married one of his own subjects, and this bride was a widow from a Lancastrian family. The Earl of Warwick, who had been negotiating a French match for the king, took it as an affront. Resentment grew as her many brothers and sisters were married into the great houses. Her sister Catherine wed the young Duke of Buckingham, and her brother John, aged twenty, took the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who was in her sixties. Warwick rose in revolt, and after the battle of Edgcote in 1469 he had Elizabeth’s father and her brother John executed.

When Warwick restored Henry VI in October 1470 and Edward fled abroad, Elizabeth took sanctuary at Westminster Abbey with her mother and three small daughters. There she gave birth to her first son by the king, the future Edward V. She left in April 1471, when her husband came back to win at Barnet and Tewkesbury. The couple had ten children in all. As queen she became a foundress of Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1465, and built a chapel of St Erasmus at Westminster Abbey.

Edward IV died suddenly in April 1483, and her world fell apart within weeks. The king’s brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, took control of the twelve-year-old Edward V and arrested her brother Anthony, Earl Rivers, and her son Richard Grey. Elizabeth fled into sanctuary again with her younger son and her daughters, but was made to give up the boy, Richard, Duke of York, who joined his brother in the Tower. On 25 June Rivers and Grey were executed at Pontefract. Her marriage was declared invalid on the ground that Edward had earlier been contracted to Lady Eleanor Butler, her children were pronounced illegitimate, and Gloucester took the throne as Richard III. Both boys disappeared soon afterwards.

From sanctuary she struck a bargain with Margaret Beaufort that Margaret’s exiled son, Henry Tudor, should marry her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, and so join the claims of Lancaster and York. In March 1484, after Richard swore publicly that her daughters would be safe, she came out of sanctuary with them. Henry’s victory at Bosworth in 1485 and his marriage to her daughter restored her rank as queen dowager. In February 1487 she withdrew to Bermondsey Abbey. Historians disagree over whether Henry VII pushed her out or she chose a religious retirement. She died there on 8 June 1492 and, as her will asked, was buried without pomp beside Edward IV in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Every English and British monarch since Henry VIII has been her descendant.

Place in the family

• Elizabeth Woodville was a grandmother of King Henry VIII.
• The archive records 119 of her descendants, across 20 generations.

Images

• The marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, as imagined in a 15th-century manuscript of Jean de Wavrin’s chronicle (Unknown illuminator, public domain)

One of 26 people of House of Plantagenet (1126–1485) in this archive. The longest-reigning English house, counting its Angevin beginning and the rival Lancaster and York branches that fought the Wars of the Roses.

Read more on Wikipedia

Partners

• Married King Edward IV (1442 – 1483) in 1464 — 2 children together

Children

• Elizabeth of York (1466 – 1503)
• King Edward V (1470 – 1483)

Life

• 1437 — Born
• 1464 — Married Edward IV of York
• 1492 — Died

Sources

1. Elizabeth Woodville · Wikipedia
2. Elizabeth Woodville · Westminster Abbey
3. Foundresses and patronesses · Queens’ College, University of Cambridge