Free Tudor Queens of England by David Loades Page A

as a demoiselle d’honneur . This would probably not have happened until she was of a marriageable age and can therefore be tentatively dated to 1449. She seems to have been a very attractive girl and was fi rst sought in marriage by Sir Hugh Johns. Although Johns’s suit was promoted by both the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick, he found no favour. Elizabeth apparently did not fancy him and his backers came out of the wrong political stable to fi nd any favour with Queen Margaret between 1450 and 1453, when this is alleged to have happened.
    In fact she was not rushed into marriage at all but, in about 1456, at the relatively mature age of 19, she married John Grey, the son and heir of Edward, Lord Ferrers of Groby. This was a very suitable match for a young lady of her status and connections and argues the management of Sir Richard and his wife, although Elizabeth seems to have been suffi ciently strong minded to veto the suggestion if the proposed groom had not appealed. Both Lord Ferrers and his son were good Lancastrians, and that mattered by 1456. Various manors in Northamptonshire and Essex were settled on the young couple and when Lord Ferrers died, on 18 December 1457, John inherited his title and with it

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    the splendid estate of Bradgate in Leicestershire, where Elizabeth took up her residence. The new Lord Ferrers, however, was suffi ciently committed to the King to be a fi ghting man, and on 17 February 1461 was severely injured at the second battle of St Albans. He died of his injuries on the 28 February, leaving Elizabeth as a young widow with two small sons. More importantly, she was on the wrong side of the tracks. St Albans had been a Lancastrian victory and Margaret had recovered control of her husband. This had virtually forced the young Earl of March into advancing his own claim and, because he swiftly secured control of London, it was there that he was proclaimed on 4 March. For about three weeks there were two kings in England but Edward’s victory at Towton on 29 March proved decisive. The forces of Lancaster were reduced to a remnant, and Henry and Margaret became fugitives. Posthumously, Lord Ferrers became a traitor and his estate was forfeit. The Crown seized Bradgate, and Elizabeth and her family, in much reduced circumstances, were forced to retreat to her dower manor of Grafton. She was 24.
    How much Edward may have known about Elizabeth at this point is not clear. He certainly knew Richard and Jacquetta and was on good terms with them in spite of the latter’s Lancastrian connections. In the fi rst year of his reign he made them a grant of £100 ‘by especial royal grace’ for no known reason apart from general goodwill, so it is entirely likely that he had fallen for the charms of their young widowed daughter well before he famously encountered her in 1464. At that time he was 22 and one of the most eligible bachelors in Europe. He had also been on the marriage market almost from the day of his birth. In 1445 his father had tried to match him with Princess Madeleine of France (then aged 18 months) and in 1458 he had been dangled under the nose of Philip of Burgundy. Neither of these approaches had been successful but in 1461 the Burgundian proposal had been revived, the target in this case being specifi cally Philip’s beautiful niece. That did not work either, but once Edward was on the throne the managerial Earl of Warwick tried to turn his unmarried status to political advantage, proposing fi rst an improbable union with the Queen Mother of Scotland and then another French princess. As recently as February 1464 Henry of Castile had taken the initiative of proposing his own sister. It may have been that the King found these pressures intolerable and resented the presumption of the Earl of Warwick but, in April 1464, he decided to take his destiny into his own hands. On his way north to deal with the Lancastrians who were later to be defeated at