Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
said, ‘had well considered all the lineaments of her body and the wise and womanly demeanour that he saw in her’ he tried to bribe her into becoming his mistress (under the more flattering courtly appellation of his ‘sovereign lady’) in the hope of later becoming his wife. Whereupon she answered that ‘as she was unfitted for his honour to be his wife then for her own honesty she was too good to be his concubine’, an answer that gave rise to a ‘hot burning fire’ in the king so that he become quite determined to marry her. The same technique worked again when Anne Boleyn practised it on Elizabeth’s grandson Henry VIII, whose likeness to Edward has been much remarked.
Thomas More described the same scenario, which Shakespeare would echo almost exactly – the king struck by this woman ‘fair and of good favour, moderate of stature, well-made, and very wise’ who claimed that if she was too ‘simple’ to be his wife she was too good to be his concubine; virtuously refusing Edward’s advances, but ‘with so good manner, and words so well set, that she rather kindled his desire than quenched it’. Hearne’s ‘Fragment’, written in the early sixteenth century by someone who was probably at Edward’s court in its later years, similarly recorded that Edward ‘being a lusty prince attempted the stability and constant modesty of divers ladies and gentlewomen’ but, after resorting at ‘diverse times’ to Elizabeth, became impressed by her ‘constant and stable mind’.
Mancini, writing in 1483, even has Edward holding a dagger to her throat; again, as both More and Hall described the scene, ‘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… .’ One of the most dramatic versions appeared in Italy very soon after the time, in Antonio Cornazzano’s De Mulieribus Admirandis (‘of Admirable Women’). This reverses the scenario, to have Elizabeth holding the king off with a dagger – the very stuff of melodrama.
These are stories that equate the nobility of virtue – which Elizabeth could be allowed – with the blood nobility she did not possess. But how much of them is mere story and how much can be substantiated by historical evidence, is uncertain. The tale of the meeting under the tree may well be a myth, and its dating is confusing. It had been as far back as 1461, after Towton, that Edward had ridden slowly south and first found the Lancastrian Woodville family, with their widowed daughter Elizabeth Grey, licking their wounds. One account suggests that, because the romance started there, when the king left the district two days later he had not only ‘pardoned and remitted and forgiven’ Elizabeth’s father all his offences but ‘affectionately’ agreed to go on paying Jacquetta her annual dowry of ‘three hundred and thirty three marks four shillings and a third of a farthing’.
Woodville was indeed pardoned in June 1461, in December of which year the king also agreed that Jacquetta should receive her dowry; and Jean de Waurin early claimed that it was Edward’s love for Woodville’s daughter that had got the man his pardon. But the actual dates suggest a more prolonged and pragmatic sequence of events.
It is not until 1463 that Elizabeth Woodville next appears in the records, and then it is in the context of a property dispute over her dowry from her first husband. Indeed, in mid-April 1464 she was still negotiating for her dower lands as if she had no idea she was about to become queen.
It is possible that Elizabeth did indeed stand by the side of the road, but in 1464 rather than 1461; however, since her father had been appointed to Edward’s council in 1463 she would surely have had better ways to put her plea. Elizabeth may simply have met Edward at court after Woodville had been restored to favour. Caspar Weinreich’s Chronicle of 1464 claims that: ‘The king fell in love with [a mere knight’s] wife when he dined with her frequently.’ This would make sense. In the early 1460s his advisers mooted various foreign marriages for the new king, and Edward seemed quite content that negotiations should begin. This suggests that he was indeed several years into his reign before he met Elizabeth and changed his mind.
Hall and More have Edward first determining to marry Elizabeth and then taking secret counsel of his friends; but the more popular, and more dramatic, version talks of a marriage made in total secrecy. Robert Fabian, contemporary compiler of the New Chronicles of England and France and probably also of the Great Chronicle of London, describes a wedding at Grafton early in the morning on May Day ‘at which marriage no one was present but the spouse, the spousess, the Duchess of Bedford her mother, the priest, two gentlewomen and a young man to help the priest sing’.
After the ceremony, he says, the king ‘went to bed and so tarried there upon three or four hours’, returning to his men at Stony Stratford as though he had merely been out hunting but returning to Grafton where Elizabeth was brought every night to his bed, ‘in so secret manner that almost none but her mother was council.’ May Day is a suitably romantic date – as Malory put it: ‘all ye that be lovers, call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did Queen Guinevere’. It is also Beltane, an important date in the pagan calendar, and in the future accusations would be made that witchcraft had been used to produce so unexpected a match.
The ceremony was certainly sufficiently covert that Richard III’s first parliament would later be able to denounce it as an ‘ungracious pretensed marriage’ by which ‘the order of all politic rule was perverted’ – one which had taken place privately ‘and secretly, without Edition of Banns, in a private Chamber, a profane place’. The secrecy of this marriage did not in fact make it illegal (other reasons would be brought in to support that allegation); indeed, the mere consent of the two parties before witnesses might have been enough. But it did seem odd, at a time when the Church was endeavouring to regulate marriage ceremonies – all the odder in view of the very different style in which a king’s wedding would usually be celebrated.
Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta would be blamed for her part in making this marriage; but there were two mothers in this story. Whether Cecily heard before the event and failed to dissuade her son, or learned of the marriage afterwards, she was furious. More’s account of her arguments against Elizabeth goes on for pages, urging the vital importance of marrying for foreign alliance, and complaining ‘that it was not princely to marry his own subject, no great occasion leading thereunto, no possessions, or other commodities, depending thereupon, but only as it were a rich man would marry his maid, only for a little wanton dotage upon her person’.
Her person, of course, was very much the question. The medieval ideal of female beauty favoured golden hair, dark eyebrows, pale skin, a high forehead, small but slightly full lips, and eyes that were sparkling and usually grey. As for the rest of the body, to quote one contemporary writer, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, ‘Let the upper arms, as long as they are slender, be enchanting. Let the fingers be soft and slim in substance, smooth and milk-white in appearance, long and straight in shape … Let the snowy bosom present both breasts like virginal gems set side by side. Let the waist be slim, a mere handful … let the leg show itself graceful, let the remarkably dainty foot wanton with its own daintiness.’
The depiction or description of queens at this time often owed more to the ideal than to reality. Marguerite of Anjou, for instance, appeared in one illustration with honey-blonde hair, despite the Milanese description of her as dark. Queens were usually shown as blonde because it was attributed to the Virgin Mary. But surviving images of Elizabeth Woodville do suggest a genuine beauty that shines down the centuries as well as conforming to the medieval ideal – beauty enough to eclipse the trying fashion for a high shaven forehead and hair drawn plainly back. A depiction from the 1470s shows her wearing a red dress beneath a blue cloak, like that of the Virgin Mary – red for earthly nature, blue for heavenly attributes – with roses, emblematic of virginity, and gillyflowers, which stood for virtuous love and motherhood. Elizabeth had chosen the deep red gillyflower as her personal symbol; the name itself meant ‘queen of delights’.
So even Cecily had to admit that there might be ‘nothing to be misliked’ in the person of ‘this widow’. But she, and many others among Edward’s advisers, found plenty more of which to complain. Firstly, of course, there was the simple difference in rank, and the fact that Elizabeth brought no great foreign alliance. Warwick – convinced that only a French marriage would put an end to French support for Marguerite of Anjou – had been in the process of negotiating