The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [198]
Elizabeth had once been one of Queen Margaret’s ladies-in-waiting, which firmly placed her in the wrong camp to start with. She was of medium height, with a good figure, and she was beautiful, having long gilt-blonde hair and an alluring smile. Edward was oblivious to the fact that she was also calculating, ambitious, devious, greedy, ruthless and arrogant.
By 1464, his subjects were concerned that he had been ‘so long without any wife, and were afeared that he had not been chaste in his living’, according to ‘Gregory’. He had not been chaste, but this was one woman who was not prepared to fall into bed with him and then be discarded. Whatever ruses he employed, she foiled them all and held out for marriage. Yet she was a commoner, and no king of England had married a common subject since before 1066.
Before long, Edward became obsessed with Elizabeth’s cool beauty. Many lurid tales were told of his courtship, even one that, as he tried to rape her, she seized a dagger and made as if to kill herself, crying that she knew herself unworthy to be a queen but valued her honour more than her life. ‘Now take heed what love may do,’ wrote ‘Gregory’, ‘for love will not cast no fault nor peril in nothing.’ Edward’s proposal of marriage was a triumph for the ambitious Elizabeth, for love rarely figured in the unions of kings. Mancini observed that in his choice of wife the King was ‘governed by lust’. His decision to marry this commoner from a Lancastrian family was an impulsive one and was unlikely to have resulted from a plan to build up a new faction at court to counterbalance the power of the Nevilles. That came later.
The Wydvilles were an old Northamptonshire family, said to be descended from a Norman called William de Wydville, and Elizabeth’s father and grandfather had been loyal servants of successive Lancastrian kings. Lord Rivers had started his career as a country squire, but had improved his social standing and caused a tremendous scandal by marrying Bedford’s widow, Jacquetta of Luxembourg. After their marriage they became known as the handsomest couple in England and produced fourteen children. In the reign of Henry VI Rivers had allied himself with Suffolk and the Beauforts, and he also had connections with the influential Bourchier and Ferrers families. The family seat was at Grafton in Northamptonshire.
Rivers and his eldest son Anthony were cultivated men of many talents and were respected abroad as knights of valour, Anthony especially excelling as a jouster. Mancini describes Anthony as ‘a kind, serious and just man. Whatever his prosperity he injured nobody, though benefiting many.’ Pious and even ascetic, he loved learning, and his treatise The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers was the first book to be printed by William Caxton.
For all this, Elizabeth was not a suitable bride for a king whose marriage was a matter of national importance, and in choosing her Edward IV showed appalling political judgement and irresponsibility. By marrying her he gained no financial or political advantage, and threw away the chance of making an advantageous foreign alliance. That he was aware of the unsuitability of the match is proved by the fact that he arranged for his wedding to take place in the strictest secrecy.
At the end of April 1464 the King was riding north to deal with the Lancastrian rebels. On the way he stopped at Stony Stratford, near Northampton, where he ordered the sheriffs of sixteen counties to have all men between sixteen and sixty ‘defensibly arrayed’ and ready to join him at a moment’s notice. Then, before dawn on 1 May, he rode secretly to Grafton, pretending he was going hunting. There, early in the morning, he was married to Elizabeth Wydville in a small chapel called the Hermitage, tucked away in the nearby woods. Recent excavations there have revealed tiles bearing white roses and the heraldic shield