Ricardian Fiction

Queen of the Woodpile / Waif in the Woodshed:
The Dramatic History of the First Queen Elizabeth

Laura Blanchard

Some years ago, Sharon Kay Penman remarked that she would never have dared make up for her historical characters anything as dramatic as what actually happened in their lives. The life of Elizabeth Woodville is a case in point. The startling events of Elizabeth's life are equally open to conflicting interpretation, allowing novelists to portray her variously as the enchantress and the daughter of an enchantress; a conniving, ambitious, avaricious, and conscienceless advancer of her family's fortune; and the plucky and/or pitiful queen in Shakespeare and a dozen hyperventilating Victorian novels. The legends began to grow around her life and reputation about the same time as her marriage, and she has been alternately championed and vilified by her contemporaries and by five centuries of historians, dramatists and novelists.

"My Life is a Soap Opera"

Even the date of Elizabeth's birth is open to debate, springing from the first drama of her life. Elizabeth's mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, daughter of the count of St. Pol, and widow of Henry V's brother the Duke of Bedford had, like her royal sister-in-law Katherine of Valois, secretly taken a husband of much lower social status. As the queens' biographer Agnes Strickland, no slouch herself as a hyperventilating Victorian, observes, "What scandals, what court gossip, must have circulated throughout England in the year of grace, 1436!" Strickland puts Elizabeth's birth at "about 1431." Since the Duke of Bedford did not die until 1435, this seems unlikely, and other authorities put her birth at 1436.

Although her mother had definitely married beneath her, the Woodvilles were not entirely parvenus. According to Kenneth A. Madison, historian at Iowa State University and author of the forthcoming Historical Dictionary of the Hundred Years War, "During her lifetime, the Woodville family's gentle status was seen as

having originated with her grandfather, Richard Woodville, esq. (d. 1441), who had served the first three Lancastrian kings in England and France. In reality, the family had descended from Hugh de Widville, who, according to the Domesday Book, held lands in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire in 1086. From Hugh's to Richard's day, Elizabeth's ancestors had stood solidly within the ranks of the English gentry."

Elizabeth's first marriage, to Sir John Grey, produced two sons, Richard and Thomas. The marriage ended when Grey was killed at the second Battle of St. Albans, leaving Elizabeth an impoverished Lancastrian widow. To further complicate her situation, she had to struggle to enforce her dower rights in the face of opposition from her mother-in-law, who had recently married Sir John Bourchier, Edward IV's uncle. She appealed for assistance to William, Lord Hastings, with whom she negotiated, in 1463 or 1464, a marriage between her son and one of Hastings' daughters.

Her secret marriage to Edward IV spawned both sympathetic and hostile legends almost from its outset. We can choose from the appealing widow and her two sons waiting beneath an oak tree to plead for the King's intercession on her dower rights; the two sorceresses, mother and daughter, who enchanted the young king; and the beautiful woman who spurned Edward's lascivious advances, even when threatened at knifepoint, in defense of her virtue. Some of these stories were circulating in England and on the continent as early as the mid-1460s.

Over the next thirty-odd years, Elizabeth's life would see a dramatic series of reversals -- from impoverishment in 1460 to queenship in 1464; the birth of ten children; two years, 1469-1471, which were partially spent in sanctuary with her husband a fugitive, her life possibly in danger, and her future uncertain; twelve years of prosperity until Edward's death in 1483; a return to sanctuary, the disappearance of her sons, and the emergence from sanctuary in 1484; a return to court life from late 1485 through her retirement to a convent in Bermondsey Abbey in 1487; and her death on June 8, 1492.

Dishing the Dirt

Very little of Ricardians' received wisdom about Elizabeth Woodville stands up to serious scrutiny. In a recent article in The Ricardian, Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs examine, and cast doubt upon, many of the accusations leveled against Elizabeth Woodville, including several that Ricardians hold dear. In their article, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs draw upon the work of several recent historians, including A.R. Myers, J. L. Lander, and Michael A. Hicks.

Were the Woodvilles really so grasping and avaricious? If the work of recent historians can be relied upon, their gains in the first reign of Edward IV were matched, or possibly outstripped by, those of the Nevilles. What about their pernicious influence on King Edward? That, too, comes under scrutiny. But what about all those terrible things Elizabeth did, like the shabby way she and her parents treated the London merchant Thomas Cook -- didn't she extort a whopping fine while at the same time her parents were looting Cook's house? Or what about her duplicitous order of the execution of the Earl of Desmond, using a purloined Privy Seal letter, just because the Earl had made a remark critical of her marriage? According to research reported by Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, Ricardians must discard these cherished myths as well. Although Cook was fined heavily by Edward IV for treasonable activities, Elizabeth actually waived her right to the "Queen's Gold" surcharge to which she was entitled; and there is no evidence to support the accusation that her parents used Cook imprisonment as the opportunity to seize a coveted tapestry. Likewise, there is no contemporary evidence to support the Desmond story -- it came from a sixteenth-century "family memoir" -- and the letter from Richard III quoted to support the story is actually a general commiseration on the difficulties of civil war. Her complicity, or that of her family, in the downfall of the Duke of Clarence was argued by Mancini based on gossip current in 1483, but all that is really known is that Edward ordered Clarence's execution for reasons of his own. It is possible that Elizabeth Woodville knew those reasons; it is also possible that she was equally in the dark. Her alleged hauteur, argues Lander, stems from a foreign account of the banquet following her churching in 1465. It results from an ignorance on the part of the writer about English banquet custom at the time, which was to eat in total silence, and for servitors, irrespective of rank or relationship, to approach royals on their knees. According to Lander, this was standard practice of the day, however peculiar or repugnant it may seem to our twentieth-century sensibilities.

Well, what about her unpopularity? After all, everyone knows that the Woodvilles were universally hated. Or do we? Sutton and Visser-Fuchs offer some evidence to support Elizabeth's popularity, especially in London.

Much of Elizabeth's unpleasant reputation seems to have come down to us as the result of two propaganda campaigns: one by Warwick in 1469-1471, and another by Richard duke of Gloucester in 1483-85. Some historians would lay it more toward the latter. Pestered for a quote on a busy day, A.J. Pollard offered up this summary: "Today I am in the giving vein. Basically Elizabeth Woodville was the victim of a calculated and sustained campaign of vilification mounted by Richard of Gloucester in the early summer of

1483." (Pollard will speak on the topic, "The Witch, The Hog and Historians: Elizabeth Woodville and Her Male Detractors" at the May 1998 Richard III Society conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Irate Ricardians can grill him about his sources at that time.)

There is, of course, Elizabeth's perplexing conduct from 1483-1485. Recalling, however, the traumatic events of 1469-71 -- her father and brother executed, her husband fled, herself in Sanctuary, her marriage and her reputation the subject of a calculated propaganda campaign -- her haste to see her son safely crowned and her panic at his seizure perhaps is more understandable. With her husband gone and a strong and potentially hostile magnate heading to London from Middleham Castle, Elizabeth may well have felt a sickening sense of deja-vu. Or, as Sutton and Visser-Fuchs comment about later events, "The duplicity of the 'stage character' in which Elizabeth Woodville made her later appearances...is also the creation of later uncharitable and uninformed commentators who have criticised her successive actions, though these were clearly forced upon her by circumstances: first her inevitable accommodation with Richard III, secondly her supposed involvement in plots to marry her eldest daughter to Henry Tudor, and lastly the part she is said to have played in the plots surrounding Lambert Simnel...Elizabeth herself is rarely given credit for the impossible and unpleasant situation she found herself in after the death of Edward IV."

Elizabeth Woodville spent her last years in Bermondsey Abbey, a house of the Cluniac order. It is almost an article of faith with Ricardians, based in large part on Josephine Tey's dramatic assertions in The Daughter of Time, that Elizabeth had been stripped of her fortune by Henry VII and ordered into a convent to keep her inconvenient questions about the fate of her sons to a minimum. The reality, as outlined by Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, is probably quite different. Elizabeth's history is studded with evidence of both her piety and her charitable works, in keeping with the contemporary image of queenship as involving intercession on behalf of her subjects in "imitation of the merciful Queen of Heaven" [Sutton and Visser-Fuchs]. Seen in this light, her retirement to Bermondsey seems more the normal progression for a woman of her age than of a forced march to oblivion.

Lisbet, We Hardly Knew Ye

Although Elizabeth Woodville receives star billing in earlier centuries, she's usually one of the supporting characters in twentieth-century fiction. "Surprisingly few novels deal with Elizabeth Woodville as the main character in view of her interesting life," comments Roxane Murph.

The characterizations of Elizabeth Woodville fall into three main types:

1. The Gallant Heroine of the Great Love Story. Jan Westcott's The White Rose falls into this category. Characterized alternately as spritied or cloyingly spineless, this Elizabeth marries for love, remains dizzyingly in love till her widowhood, endures perils and hardships, all uncomplainingly.
2. The Enchantress. The most compelling of these is Rosemary Hawley Jarman's We Speak No Treason. In this novel, offering views of Richard from three perspectives, the first view details the spells and incantations used by Elizabeth and her mother to bind Edward to her using the dark arts of magic.
3. The Opportunist. Of these, the most satisfying because the most richly textured is the Elizabeth Woodville of Sharon Kay Penman's The Sunne in Splendour. This Elizabeth has a relationship with her Edward that is a startling but credible blend of ambition, sexual attraction, hard-headed practicality, and a deep bond that endured despite each character's clear-eyed assessment of the other and despite varying degrees and levels of mutual distrust.

Sources (nonfiction):

Hicks, M. A. "The Changing Role of the Wydevilles in Yorkist Politics to 1483," in Ross, Charles (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England, Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979.

Lander, J. L. "Marriage and Politics in the fifteenth century: The Nevilles and the Wydevilles," in Crown and Nobility, 1450-1509. London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1976.

Madison, K. A. E-mail to author, November 1997.

Myers, A. R. "The Household of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, 1466-67," in Crown, Household and Parliament in the Fifteenth Century. London: The Hambledon Press, 1985.

Pollard, A.J. E-mail to author, November 1997.

Ross, Charles D. Edward IV. London, 1974.

Scofield, Cora. The Life and Reign of Edward IV, 2 volumes, London: Longman's, Green & Co., 1923.

Strickland, Agnes. "Elizabeth Woodville, Queen of Edward IV," in Lives of the Queens of England, Vol. III. Third edition. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1847.

Sutton, Anne and Livia Visser-Fuchs, "'A Most Benevolent Queen': Queen Elizabeth Woodville's Reputation, Her Piety, and Her Books," The Ricardian, X:129, June 1995. PP. 214-245.

About the Author: Laura Blanchard, formerly Vice Chair and currently Webmaster for the American Branch, is the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries and electronic publishing manager for the Department of Development, University of Pennsylvania Library. She lives with her husband and Reluctant Ricardian Roy and their two cats, Quaker City and Ferko, and their German Shepherd, Mr. Darcy, in Philadelphia.

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