Elizabeth Woodville - Life Under Richard III

Life Under Richard III

Elizabeth, now referred to as Dame Elizabeth Grey, conspired to free her sons and restore her eldest to the throne. However, when the Duke of Buckingham, one of Richard III's closest allies, entered the conspiracy, he told her that the princes had been murdered. Elizabeth and Buckingham now allied themselves with Lady Margaret Beaufort and espoused the cause of Margaret's son Henry Tudor, a great-great-great-grandson of King Edward III the closest male heir of the Lancastrian claim to the throne with any degree of validity. To strengthen his claim and unite the two feuding noble houses, Elizabeth and Margaret agreed that Henry should marry Edward IV and Elizabeth's oldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, who upon the death of her brothers became the Yorkist heiress. Henry agreed to this plan and in December publicly swore an oath to that effect in the cathedral in Rennes, France. A month earlier, an uprising in his favour, led by Buckingham, had been crushed.

On 1 March 1484, she and her daughters came out of sanctuary after Richard publicly swore an oath that her daughters would not be harmed or molested and that they would not be imprisoned in the Tower of London or in any other prison. He also promised to provide them with marriage portions and to marry them to "gentlemen born". The family returned to Court, apparently reconciled to King Richard. After the death of Richard's Queen Anne Neville in 1485, rumours arose that the now-widowed King was going to marry his beautiful teenaged niece Elizabeth of York. Richard issued a denial; though according to the Crowland Chronicle he was pressured to do this by the Woodvilles' enemies who feared, among other things, that they would have to return the lands they had confiscated from the Woodvilles.