THE WOODVILLES.
About the opening of 1464, Edward, King of England, then in his
twenty-fourth year, was diverting himself with the pleasures of the
chase in the forest of Whittlebury.
One day, when hunting in the neighborhood of Grafton, the king rode
to that manor-house and alighted to pay his respects to Jacqueline,
Duchess of Bedford. The visit was, perhaps, not altogether prompted by
courtesy. He was then watching, with great suspicion, the movements of
the Lancastrians, and he probably hoped to elicit from the duchess,
who was a friend of Margaret of Anjou, some intelligence as to the
intentions of the faction to which she belonged--forgetting, by-the-by,
that the duchess was a woman of great experience, and had long since,
under trying circumstances, learned how to make words conceal her
thoughts.
Jacqueline of Luxembourg, a daughter of the Count of St. Pol, when
young, lively, and beautiful, found herself given in marriage to
John, Duke of Bedford. John was a famous man, doubtless, but very
considerably the senior of his bride; and when he died at Rouen,
Jacqueline probably considered that, in any second matrimonial
alliance, she ought to take the liberty of consulting her own taste. In
any case, one of the duke's esquires, Richard Woodville by name, was
appointed to escort her to England; and he, being among the handsomest
men in Europe, made such an impression on the heart of the youthful
widow, that a marriage was the result. For seven long years their union
was kept secret; but at length circumstances rendered concealment
impossible, and the marriage became a matter of public notoriety.
The discovery that the widow of the foremost prince and soldier of
Europe had given her hand to a man who could not boast of a patrician
ancestor or a patriotic achievement caused much astonishment, and such
was the indignation of Jacqueline's own kinsmen that Woodville never
again ventured to show his face on the Continent. To the esquire and
the duchess, however, the consequences, though inconvenient, were not
ruinous. A fine of a thousand pounds was demanded from Woodville; and,
having paid that sum, he was put in possession of Jacqueline's castles.
As time passed on, the Duchess of Bedford, as "a foreign lady of
quality," insinuated herself into the good graces of Margaret of Anjou;
and Woodville was, through the interest of his wife, created a baron.
About the same period their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, became a maid
of honor to the queen, and, subsequently, wife of John Grey of Groby,
a zealous Lancastrian, who died after the second battle of St. Albans.
Finding herself a widow, and the times being troublous, Elizabeth
placed herself under the protection of her mother at Grafton. There she
was residing when the Yorkist king appeared to pay his respects to the
duchess.
Elizabeth probably regarded Edward's visit as providential. She had
two sons; and, as the partisans of York were by no means in a humor
to practice excessive leniency to the vanquished, the heirs of Grey
were in danger of losing lands and living for their father's adherence
to the Red Rose. Believing that she had now a capital opportunity of
obtaining the removal of the attainder, she resolved to throw herself
at the king's feet and implore his clemency.
An oak-tree between Grafton and Whittlebury Forest has since been
indicated by tradition as the scene of Elizabeth Woodville's first
interview with Edward of York. Standing under the branches, holding
her sons by the hand, and casting down her eyes with an affectation of
extreme modesty, the artful widow succeeded in arresting his attention.
Indeed, there was little chance of Edward of York passing such a being
without notice. Elizabeth was on the shady side of thirty, to be sure;
but time had not destroyed the charms that, fifteen years earlier, had
brought suitors around the portionless maid of honor. Her features were
remarkable for regularity; her complexion was fair and delicate, and
her hair of that pale golden hue then deemed indispensable in a beauty
of rank.
Edward's eye was arrested, and, being in the fever of youth, with a
heart peculiarly susceptible, he was captivated by the fair suppliant.
Too young and confident to believe in the possibility of his addresses
being rejected, the king made love, though not in such terms as please
the ear of a virtuous woman. Elizabeth, however, conducted herself with
rare discretion, and made her royal lover understand that monarchs
sometimes sigh in vain. At length the duchess took the matter in
hand; and, under the influence of a tactician so expert, the enamored
king set prudential considerations at defiance, and offered to take
the young widow for better or for worse. A secret marriage was then
projected; Jacqueline applied her energies to the business; and, with
her experience of matrimonial affairs, the duchess found no difficulty
in arranging every thing to satisfaction.
The ceremony was fixed for the 1st of May, and, since privacy was the
object, the day was well chosen. Indeed, May-day was the festival which
people regarded as next in importance to Christmas; and they were too
much taken up with its celebration to pry into the secrets of others.
It was while milkmaids, with pyramids of silver plate on their heads,
were dancing from door to door, and every body was preparing to dance
round the maypole, that Edward secretly met his bride at the chapel
of Grafton, and solemnized that marriage which was destined to bring
such evils on the country. As the duchess probably suspected that it
was not the first time the king had figured as a bridegroom, she was
careful, in the event of any dispute arising, to provide herself with
other witnesses than the priest and the mass-boy. With this view she
brought two of her waiting-women; and the king, having gone through the
ceremony, took his departure as secretly as he came. Ere long, however,
Edward intimated to the father of the bride that he intended to spend
some time with him at Grafton; and Woodville, who still feigned
ignorance of the marriage, took care that his royal son-in-law should
have nothing to complain of in regard to the entertainment.
Having thus wedded her daughter to the chief of the White Rose,
the Duchess of Bedford converted her husband and sons from violent
Lancastrians into unscrupulous Yorkists, and then manifested a strong
desire to have the marriage acknowledged. This was a most delicate
piece of business, and, managed clumsily, might have cost the king
his crown. It happened, however, that while Edward, in the shades of
Grafton, had forgotten every thing that he ought to have remembered,
Montagu, by his victory at Hexham, had so firmly established Edward's
power that the king deemed himself in a position to inflict signal
chastisement on any one venturesome enough to dispute his sovereign
will. Nevertheless, it was thought prudent to ascertain the feeling of
the nation before taking any positive step; and agents were employed
for that purpose.
Warwick and Montagu were not, of course, the men for this kind of
work. The chief person engaged in the inquiry, indeed, appears to have
been Sir John Howard, a knight of Norfolk, whose family had, in the
fourteenth century, been raised from obscurity by a successful lawyer,
and, in the fifteenth, elevated somewhat higher by a marriage with the
Mowbrays, about the time when the chief of that great house was under
attainder and in exile. Howard, inspired, perhaps, by his Mowbray
blood, cherished an ardent ambition to enroll his name among the old
nobility of England; and, to get one inch nearer the gratification
of his vanity, he appears to have undertaken any task, however
undignified. Even on this occasion he was not by any means too nice for
the duty to be performed; and he was careful to return an answer likely
to please those who were most interested. Finding that the Woodvilles
were rising in the world, he reported, to their satisfaction, that the
people were well disposed in regard to the king's marriage. At the same
time the aspiring knight was not forgetful of his own interests. He
entreated the Woodvilles to obtain, for himself and his spouse, places
in the new queen's household; and, by way of securing Elizabeth's
favor, presented her with a palfrey, as a mark of his devotion to her
service. What dependence was to be placed on the faith or honor of Sir
John Howard, Elizabeth Woodville found twenty years later, when her
hour of trial and tribulation came.
And now Edward, whose fortunes half the royal damsels of Europe, among
others Isabella of Castile, afterward the great Queen of Spain, were
eager to share, resolved upon declaring his marriage to the world; and,
with that purpose, he summoned a great council, to meet at the Abbey of
Reading, in the autumn of 1464. Having there presented Elizabeth to the
assembled peers as their queen, he ordered preparations to be made for
her coronation in the ensuing spring.
In the mean time, the king's marriage caused serious discontent.
Warwick and Edward's brother, the young Duke of Clarence, in
particular, expressed their displeasure; the barons murmured that
no King of England, since the Conquest, had dared to marry his own
subject; and ladies of high rank, like the Nevilles and De Veres, were,
in no slight degree, indignant at having set over them one whom they
had been accustomed to consider an inferior. At the same time, the
multitude, far from regarding the marriage with the favor which Sir
John Howard had led the Woodvilles to believe, raised the cry that the
Duchess of Bedford was a witch, and that it was under the influence of
the "forbidden spells" she practiced that the young king had taken the
fatal step of espousing her daughter.
But nobody was more annoyed at Edward's marriage than his own mother,
Cicely, Duchess of York, who, in other days, had been known in the
north as "The Rose of Raby," and who now maintained great state at
Baynard's Castle. From the beginning, Elizabeth found no favor in the
eyes of her mother-in-law. With the beauty of the Nevilles, Cicely
inherited a full share of their pride; and, in her husband's lifetime,
she had assumed something like regal state. To such a woman an
alliance with third-rate Lancastrians was mortifying, and she bitterly
reproached her son with the folly of the step he had taken. Moreover,
she upbraided him with faithlessness to another lady; but Edward
treated the matter with characteristic recklessness. "Madam," said he,
"for your objection of bigamy, by GOD'S Blessed Lady, let the bishop
lay it to my charge when I come to take orders; for I understand it
is forbidden to a priest, though I never wist it was forbidden to a
prince."
Not insensible, however, to the sneers of which Elizabeth was the
object, Edward determined on proving to his subjects that his bride
was, after all, of royal blood, and therefore no unfit occupant of
a throne. With this purpose he entreated Charles the Rash, Count
of Charolois, and heir of Burgundy, to send her uncle, James of
Luxembourg, to the coronation. The count, it appears, had never
acknowledged the existence of the Duchess of Bedford since her second
marriage; but, on hearing of the position Jacqueline's daughter had
attained, his sentiments as to the Woodville alliance underwent a
complete change, and he promised to take part in the coronation.
Faithful to his promise, the count appeared in England with a
magnificent retinue; and his niece was brought from the palace of
Eltham, conducted in great state through the city of London, and
crowned, with much pomp, at Westminster. Hardly, however, had Elizabeth
Woodville been invested with the symbols of royalty, than she found
the crown sit uneasily on her head. The efforts made to render King
Edward's marriage popular had failed. Even the presence of a Count
of Luxembourg had not produced the effect anticipated. Still the old
barons of England grumbled fiercely; and still the people continued to
denounce the Duchess of Bedford as a sorceress who had bewitched the
king into marrying her daughter. Ere long, this widow of a Lancastrian
knight, when sharing the throne of the Yorkist king, found that, with
the White Rose, she had plucked the thorn.
The new queen conducted herself in such a way as rapidly to increase
the prejudices of the nation. After her marriage she too frequently
reminded people of the school in which she had studied the functions
of royalty. Indeed, Elizabeth Woodville, when elevated to a throne,
assumed a tone which great queens like Eleanor of Castile and Philippa
of Hainault would never have dreamed of using. Charitably inclined
as the patrician ladies of England might be, they could hardly help
remarking that Margaret of Anjou's maid of honor did credit to the
training of her mistress.
The people of England might have learned to bear much from Edward's
wife; but, unfortunately, the queen was intimately associated in the
public mind with the rapacity of her "kindred." Elizabeth's father,
Richard Woodville, was created Earl Rivers, and appointed Treasurer of
England; and she had numerous brothers and sisters, for all of whom
fortunes had to be provided. Each of the sisters was married to a noble
husband--Katherine, the youngest, to Henry Stafford, the boy-Duke of
Buckingham; and for each of the brothers an heiress to high titles and
great estates had to be found. Unfortunately, while the Woodvilles
were pursuing their schemes of family aggrandizement, their interests
clashed with those of two powerful and popular personages. These were
the Duchess of York and the Earl of Warwick.
Among the old nobility of England, whose names are chronicled by
Dugdale, the Lord Scales occupied an eminent position. At an early
period they granted lands to religious houses and made pilgrimages to
the Holy Land, and in later days fought with the Plantagenet kings in
the wars of Scotland and France. The last chief of the name, who, after
Northampton, suffered for his fidelity to the house of Lancaster, left
no sons. One daughter, however, survived him; and this lady, having
been married to a younger son of the Earl of Essex, was now a widow,
twenty-four years of age, and one of the richest heiresses in England.
Upon the heiress of Scales, Elizabeth Woodville and the Duchess of York
both set their hearts. The Duchess wished to marry the wealthy widow to
her son George, Duke of Clarence; and the queen was not less anxious to
bestow the young lady's hand on her brother, Anthony Woodville, who was
one of the most accomplished gentlemen of the age. The contest between
the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law was, doubtless, keen. The
queen, however, carried her point; and the duchess retreating, baffled
and indignant, wrapped herself up in cold hauteur.
Of all the English heiresses of that day, the greatest, perhaps, was
the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Exeter. The duke, having fought
at Towton and Hexham for the Red Rose, was now braving poverty and
exile for the house of Lancaster; but the duchess had not deemed it
necessary to make any such sacrifice. Being a daughter of the Duke of
York, she remained quietly at the court of King Edward, her brother,
and, while enjoying the estates of her banished husband, acquired the
right to dispose of his daughter's hand.
The heiress of the Hollands was, of course, a prize much coveted;
and Warwick thought her hand so desirable, that he solicited her in
marriage for his nephew, young George Neville, the son of Lord Montagu.
The queen, however, was determined to obtain this heiress for her
eldest son, Thomas Grey, who had been created Marquis of Dorset. The
Duchess of Exeter was, accordingly, dealt with, and in such a fashion
that the earl was disappointed, while the queen congratulated her son
on having obtained a bride worthy of the rank to which he had been
elevated.
Warwick was nephew of the Duchess of York, and both had already a
grievance of which to complain. They were now to have their family
pride wounded in a manner which, to souls so haughty, must have been
well-nigh intolerable.
Long ere the Wars of the Roses were thought of, Katherine Neville,
elder sister of the proud duchess, and aunt of "The Stout Earl," was
espoused by John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. The duke departed this life
in 1433, and Katherine gave her hand to an esquire named Strangways.
When time passed on, and Strangways died, she consoled herself with a
third husband in the person of Viscount Beaumont. The viscount went the
way the duke and the esquire had gone, and Katherine found herself a
third time a widow. But the dowager had buried her share of husbands;
she had passed the age of eighty; and as to a fourth dash at matrimony,
that was surely a subject which could never have entered into her head.
The Woodvilles were aware of the existence of the old Duchess of
Norfolk, and knew that the venerable dame was rich; and the queen's
youngest brother remained to be provided for. Setting decency at
defiance, they resolved upon a match; and though the wealthy dowager
had considerably passed the age of fourscore, and John Woodville had
just emerged from his teens, a marriage was solemnized. The nation
was deeply disgusted with the avarice manifested on this occasion.
Even Sir John Howard must now have confessed that the king's alliance
with the Woodvilles was not quite so satisfactory to the people as he
had predicted. The clamor raised was too loud and general to be either
disregarded or suppressed. The Nevilles must have writhed under the
ridicule to which their aged kinswoman was exposed; other adherents of
the White Rose must have blushed for the disgrace reflected on Edward
of York from his wife's family; and the Lancastrian exiles, wearing
threadbare garments and bearing fictitious names, as they climbed
narrow stairs and consumed meagre fare in the rich cities of Flanders,
must have felt hope and taken heart, when to their ears came tidings of
the shout of indignation which all England was raising against the new
"queen's kindred."