Why did Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward IV appal so many people?
When, in the autumn of 1464, Edward IV informed his councillors that he had made a secret marriage, his choice of bride – Elizabeth Woodville – went against all the conventions of his day. Kings were supposed to marry in order to cement a foreign alliance – Elizabeth would be the first English queen since the Norman Conquest. Kings were also supposed to marry fellow royalty – Elizabeth was the daughter of a mere knight.
The secrecy of the ceremony was another problem. In the years ahead, the first parliament of Edward IV’s brother, Richard III, would denounce this as an “ungracious pretensed marriage”, having taken place “secretly, without Edition of Banns, in a private chamber, a profane place”.
Worse still, in an age when many people believed a king’s bride should be a virgin, Elizabeth was a widow. If that wasn’t bad enough, her first husband had been killed in the Wars of the Roses fighting for the Lancastrians against Edward IV’s Yorkists. And she was even five years older than Edward – though, as the king pointed out, with two young sons by her first marriage, she had at least proved her fertility.
More seriously, it was later alleged that Edward had no right to marry Elizabeth at all, having been earlier secretly precontracted to someone else. The charge was raised in 1483, after Edward’s death, when Richard of Gloucester signalled his intention to take the throne as Richard III on the grounds that Edward’s sons – Richard’s nephews – were illegitimate. One Bishop Stillington was said to have declared that he had earlier married Edward to Eleanor Butler (née Talbot), daughter to the Earl of Shrewsbury.
The evidence for Stillington’s accusation is, at best, circumstantial – Eleanor was dead by 1483, so no one could ask her, and the earlier marriage hadn’t been an issue in 1464. But for it to be raised at all shows that the marriage was, indeed, hugely controversial.