The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [202]
For the moment, however, he swallowed his gall and pretended that all was as it had been. On Michaelmas Day Elizabeth Wydville was escorted into Reading Abbey by Clarence and Warwick and presented to the magnates and the people as their sovereign lady and queen. The assembly knelt and honoured her, and a week of celebrations followed.
The new queen was aware of what people thought of her and was careful to insist on the most elaborate ceremonial whenever she appeared in public to emphasise her royal status. Even her brother Anthony had to kneel when addressing her. Like her husband, she followed the courtly fashions set by Burgundy, yet her household was not so extravagantly wasteful as Margaret of Anjou’s and was better administered. Her jointure of 4000 marks a year was less than that allocated to Margaret, but she lived within her means. Edward gave her Greenwich Palace, which had formerly belonged to Margaret, and a London house called Ormond’s Inn in Knightrider Street, just beyond the city walls at Smithfield. In 1465, the King ordered that her predecessor’s arms be removed from Queen’s College. Cambridge, and replaced by his wife’s.
Elizabeth knew well how to manipulate her husband, and used her considerable influence over him to obtain favours and promotion for her family and friends, much to the disgust of the older nobility. Important posts in the Queen’s household were filled by her Wydville and Bourchier relatives. Mancini says ’she attracted to her party many strangers and introduced them to court, so that they alone should manage the private business of the Crown, give or sell offices, and finally rule the King himself. The Wydvilles, a grasping, rapacious clan, quickly became a power in the land, but they were also a liability. Their influence at court was soon immense, ‘to the exaltation of the Queen’, but also to ‘the displeasure of the whole realm’. Mancini says that the Wydvilles were ‘certainly detested by the nobles because they were advanced beyond those who excelled them in breeding and wisdom’. Above all, this new faction was actively hostile to the Nevilles, whose power over the King they resented. Warwick himself was determined never to play a subordinate role to the Wydvilles, while they naturally came in time to oppose the French alliance so desired by Warwick, and supported the King’s attempts to forge a friendship with Burgundy. This led inevitably to a rift between Edward and Warwick, whose friendship never recovered from the blow dealt it by the King’s ill-advised marriage. Wydville opposition on matters of foreign policy threatened Warwick’s personal ambitions, which were closely linked with the successful outcome of negotiations for a French alliance, and created dangerous tensions at court. The resurgence of rival factions there boded ill for the future of the House of York.
To the ‘secret displeasure’ of Warwick and other magnates, Edward advanced the Wydvilles by lucrative promotions and advantageous marriages. Overnight Lord Rivers found himself one of the most important men at court. His heir, Anthony, was already provided for by virtue of his marriage to the heiress of the late Lord Scales, whose title Anthony now bore. The younger sons, Lionel and Edward, were made Bishop of Salisbury and Admiral of the Fleet respectively. The first of the Wydville marriage alliances was made in September 1464, when the Queen’s sister Margaret was betrothed to Thomas, Lord Maltravers, son and heir of the Earl of Arundel, and in January 1465, Elizabeth’s nineteen-year-old brother