 Elizabeth
Woodville
(1502-1536)
Born: 1437 at Grafton Regis, Northants
Queen of England
Died: 26th May 1465 at Bermondsey Abbey, Surrey
Queen of Edward
IV, daughter of Sir Richard Woodville, 1st Earl Rivers, and Jacquetta,
Duchess of Bedford, of the great house of Luxemburg, Elizabeth Woodville was
probably born in 1437. Her first husband was Sir John Grey of Groby, a
Lancastrian, who fell at St. Albans in 1461. By him she had two sons, Thomas and
Richard, and it was when she was supplicating King Edward IV for the restoration
of their estates that he fell in love with her.
Edward married her privately
in 1464, and, when the marriage was declared at Reading Abbey (Berkshire), it at
once provoked the hostility of the family of Neville, which had put Edward on
the throne. The rivalry of the Nevilles with the Woodvilles soon succeeded to
that of the Yorkists and Lancastrians, for Elizabeth was a greedy, unscrupulous
woman who insisted on the King showering lands and wealth on all her relations.
She bore Edward numerous
children, the first of whom was her eldest daughter, Elizabeth,
afterwards Queen of Henry
VII; the best known were the 'Princes in the Tower,' Edward
V and his brother, Richard, Duke of York, afterwards murdered,
apparently, by their uncle, Richard III. The elder of these boys was born while
Edward was in exile in 1470 and the Queen had 'taken sanctuary' at Westminster.
On the death of Edward IV the
unpopularity of the whole Woodville family was at once manifest and the Queen
had to take sanctuary again. The most extraordinary point in her career was
reached when the wily Richard tempted her to come to his Court again and she
went through some sort of reconciliation with him. Henry VII never trusted her
and, in 1487, she went to reside in the nunnery at Bermondsey on a pension. The
refoundation of Queens' College, Cambridge, in the beautiful gallery of which
there is an authenticated portrait of her, is the only good thing recorded of
her.
Edited from Emery Walker's "Historical
Portraits" (1909).
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