Richard III by Desmond Seward Read Free Book Online Page B

long, flowing golden hair and heavy, hooded eyes. The Tudor chronicler Hall probably reports an accurate tradition when he speaks of ‘her lovely looking and feminine smiling (neither too wanton nor too humble)’.
    Unfortunately her social and political background were not so enamouring. Admittedly her mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, was sister to the Burgundian Count of Saint-Pol and the widow of the Duke of Bedford, Henry V’s brother. But Jacquetta had married a second husband beneath her. Elizabeth’s father, Richard Woodville – one of the handsomest men of his day – had been made Lord Rivers in 1448, but was always despised as an upstart by his peers. Salisbury once called him ‘a knave’s son’ while Warwick told him his ‘father was but a little squire’ and that he had ‘made himself by marriage’. Old Rivers and his sons were Lancastrians. So was Elizabeth’s late spouse, Lord Ferrers of Groby, who had been killed at the second battle of St Albans. She herself had been woman of the bedchamber to Margaret of Anjou – ‘in service with Queen Margaret’, as More puts it.
    When she heard of the marriage, the Duchess of York threatened to denounce the King as a bastard. (Richard always remembered the threat.) She told him that a monarch must be all but priestlike and could not be ‘defiled with bigamy’. According to Thomas More, Edward answered that being a widow was an advantage since she ‘hath many children. By God’s Blessed Lady, I am a bachelor and have some too. And so each of us has a proof that neither of us is like to be barren.’
    The King compensated for Elizabeth’s unsuitable origins by giving her a truly regal Coronation on Whit Sunday 1465. When she processed into Westminster Abbey under a canopy of cloth of gold, with a sceptre in each hand, she was preceded by Clarence and followed by her royal sisters-in-law. Her mother was with her, supporting the crown with her hands when it proved too heavy for her daughter. Jacquetta was amply recompensed for many humiliations. Writing twenty years afterwards, Mancini says both Richard and Clarence were ‘sorely displeased’ by the marriage and that the latter’s anger was publicized by ‘his bitter denunciation of the Queen’s obscure family’. Yet George was forced to play a prominent part in the Coronation, even having to hold her wash basin.
    The new Queen was not a woman to worry about upsetting the King’s brothers, let alone his friends. Thrusting and grasping, she had inherited her father’s avarice with her mother’s determination not to be slighted. Elizabeth was insatiably greedy for herself and her vast kindred – two sons by her first marriage and a whole tribe of needy brothers and sisters. She also behaved with repellent haughtiness, insisting on being treated with more respect than Margaret of Anjou.
    Edward made things worse by heaping favours on the entire Woodville clan. Old Rivers, now an Earl, was made Lord Treasurer of England, enabling him to divert large sums of money into his own pocket. The Queen’s eldest brother Anthony, who in the family tradition had already married his heiress to become Lord Scales, received the Governorship of the Isle of Wight. A younger brother, John, only twenty, was also provided with a rich heiress – the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who was nearer eighty than seventy. The Queen even tried – unsuccessfully – to have her youngest brother Richard made Grand Prior of the English Knights of Rhodes, although he was still a boy and not even a member of their Order. Her penniless sisters were married to the heirs of the Earls of Arundel, Essex and Kent and of the Lords Herbert and Strange of Knockyn and, greatest catch of all, to the eleven-year-old Duke of Buckingham. Her eldest son, Thomas Grey, obtained the hand of the heiress of the banished Lancastrian Duke of Exeter. All this was done before the end of 1467.
    She caused much popular indignation and made her husband somevery