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The high nobility dismissed the Woodvilles as a provincial family of little consequence. The Woodville matriarch, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, had blood of the bluest blue; yet her husband, Richard Woodville, was a minor knight who failed to be a major player even in his own district. Marriages of social asymmetry unsettled the high nobility, and if England’s greatest families had their way, they would have let the Woodvilles fade into footnotes of history. The Woodvilles, though, proved the fluidity of England’s rigid social pyramid and became one of Medieval England’s most powerful and controversial families.
Elizabeth Woodville, Jacquetta and Richard’s daughter, had heavy-lidded eyes and delicate pale features. Even her enemies admitted she was beautiful. But she was also a widow with two children, from a family with neither power nor land, and several years passed the prime age for matrimony. Despite all of that, the brash and victory-drunk new king, Edward IV, fell in love with her. Edward had ascended to the throne amid the War of the Roses when two of England’s great noble families—Edward’s House of York and his enemies’ House of Lancaster—fought for power. Edward did not even object that Elizabeth’s first husband had died fighting for the Lancastrian cause.
A less passionate man than Edward may have admitted his love for Elizabeth, but held back from marrying her. But Edward always preferred to relent to his most immediate desire: He used emetics to vomit so that he could eat more, drank to excess, and ignored his closest counselors when their advice inconvenienced him. A king’s marriage was one of the most politically consequential acts of his reign. Civil war still threatened to overflow into open battle, and Edward had a slippery hold on power. He needed a politically advantageous marriage. His closest advisors, themselves members of powerful, high-ranking noble families, urged him to choose a bride with ties to the French royal family who could help him defend the throne. But when they went so far as negotiating with the French, Edward had to admit that he had already married the obscure Elizabeth Woodville in secret. No English king since the Norman conquest had married one of his own subjects. When the Privy Council learned of the marriage, its counselors did not hesitate to reprimand the king for choosing a woman who was “no wife for a prince such as himself.”
Edward made a show in the face of scandal. Elizabeth’s coronation by the Bishop of Canterbury in May 1465 reached the apex of splendor. Elizabeth wore cloth-of-gold, a luminous fabric made from yarn wrapped in gold. Courtiers wore scarlet robes while the queen’s chairs were draped in white. Edward ordered the finest jewels to bedeck his bride, and he had basins of gold made for the wedding feast. The peers of the land and their ladies, draped in the richest robes money could buy, journeyed to London for the pageantry. As the day turned to evening, the banquets gave way to tournaments between the new queen’s mother’s illustrious, if distant, European relatives and English knights. The coronation announced the rise of the Woodvilles and Elizabeth’s retinue of siblings were catapulted to the center of power. The great noble families at court resented the minor gentry family who suddenly had prestige and influence, but Edward did nothing to appease them. He knighted two of Elizabeth’s brothers—including Sir Anthony Woodville of Middleton Towers—and three of her brothers-in-law at the coronation. Anthony would leverage his sister’s newfound status into a position at the heart of power.
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