Was Elizabeth Woodville ENGLAND’S FAKE QUEEN? Who was Edward IV married to? Lady Eleanor Butler

was Edward IV a bigamist and was his reputed wife Elizabeth Woodville nothing more than England's fake queen if so then their children including the famous princes in the tar were illegitimate and Edward's Brother Richard III was perfectly justified in taking the throne from his 12 year old nephew Edward V in 1483. as you can see there was a lot riding on this question but is there any truth to this story and who was Edward IV married to really was it Queen Elizabeth or was it a woman largely forgotten by history called Lily Eleanor Butler this is history calling where I bring you new videos every week on all aspects of the past and today I finally made it back to a video I've been promising to give you for absolutely ages we're going to go through the primary sources for this incredible story and try to get to the bottom of it [Music] the story of how Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville came to be married is legendary and I've already covered it in detail in my videos on Elizabeth's life so I'm just going to give you the cliff notes version here supposedly they met in 1464 when he was an unmarried youth of 21 who had been King for three years and she was a roughly 27 year old widowed mother of two then known as Dame Elizabeth gray and the daughter of Amir Baron Lord Rivers he fell in love or lost with her she may or may not have resisted the idea for some time but eventually the two were married in a secret ceremony at which there were hardly any attendees see if the necessary Churchman and perhaps the bride's mother jakera of Luxembourg Dowager Duchess of Bedford the wedding was possibly on the 1st of May but no contemporary Source provides that date and a marriage later in the summer might be more likely as it shortens the amount of time we have to believe that Edward was able to keep his wife a secret when the king made the marriage public in September his family and advisors were livid Elizabeth was not Royal not rich she had a large family to support and find marriages for her and he'd thrown away the chance to make a strategic marriage alliance with a foreign power furthermore her first husband had died fighting on behalf of King Edward's enemies because oh yes this was all happening in the middle of the wars of the Roses the multi-generational conflict for the throne between two branches of the plantagenet royal family the Yorks that's Edward and his family and the lancasters nevertheless despite all these drawbacks he stood by Elizabeth and together they had 10 children including two boys who outlived their father these were another Edward known as the Prince of Wales and Richard Duke of York also known as Richard of Shrewsbury in April 1483 Edward died suddenly leaving the throne to his twelve-year-old son NY Edward V in less than three months though Edward IV sole surviving Brother Richard Duke of Gloucester had taken the crime as Richard III and imprisoned the deposed Edward V and his little brother in the Tower of London these two boys are known to history as the princes in the tower and they were never seen again leading to speculation then and now that King Richard had had them killed how did he go about claiming that he was the lawful heir to his brother Edward IV though the answer to this question brings us to the Crux of this video Richard asserted that Edward IV was a bigamist who had married another woman named lady Eleanor Butler knee Talbot we don't know when this supposed marriage occurred but Eleanor was married to Sir Thomas Butler in 1450 and he died in 1461 so any second wedding had to have occurred after that and before the marriage to Elizabeth was announced in 1464. if this is so and bearing in mind that Eleanor died in 1468 then the marriage to Elizabeth had taken place during lady Butler's lifetime making it invalid and its Offspring illegitimate and ineligible for the throne now Edward had had another surviving brother younger than him but older than Richard named George Duke of Clarence he had been executed for treason in 1478 but his children a son called The Earl of Warwick and a daughter called Margaret were still alive in 1483 and under normal circumstances their claims would have trumped Richards however their father's attender had cost them their right to the throne and so this left their Uncle as the only legitimate Clement I did this story that Edward IV was a bigamist come about though and is it credible before I answer that if you're enjoying this content and would like to watch more from history calling please remember to give this video a thumbs up and hit the Subscribe button with the notification Bell switched on so that YouTube lets you know when I upload you can also find me on Instagram which is linked below for you and on my patreon site where I provide bonus materials including blog entries mini podcasts and early access to ad-free videos this is also linked below for those of you who already support me on patreon or by making one-off donations using the thanks button underneath videos thank you again for your generosity and kindness which helps to make this a viable career for me there are no documents from the 1460s or 1470s which suggest that Edward had married anyone apart from Elizabeth instead the first we hear of it is in sources from 1483 and 1484. shortly after his death then in accounts written by letter historians during the Tudor period one of the earliest comes from an Italian monk Dominic Mancini or Dominic Mancini in 1483 Mancini was in England only leaving shortly after Richard's coronation in July and that CM year he wrote his memories of his time there for his Patron the Archbishop of vienne completing them on the 1st of December he says that Edward IV had married quote unliary of humble origin named Elizabeth much against the will of the magnets of the realm who to stay into show Royal honors to an undistinguished woman promoted to such exalted rank he not only alienated these nobles with whom he afterwards waged War but also most vehemently offended members of his own house indeed his mother fell into such a fit of Madness that she offered to submit to a public inquiry asserting that Edward had not been conceived from her husband the Duke of York but was begotten in adultery therefore was by no means worthy of the Eminence of kingship now Mancini was just reporting the gossip he'd heard while he was in England and it's important to note that he didn't speak English so he had to rely on translations of sad gossip provided to him by Third parties that might help to explain the errors in his work for instance although there were rumors that Edward IV had been illegitimate which I already have a whole video on they certainly weren't perpetuated by his mother Cecily Duchess of York that would have been completely insane Mancini has not yet mentioned the story that the marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was bigamous merely stating that it was grossly unequal in Social terms and therefore against the wishes of the royal family and the leading magnets but he does go on to discuss the bigamy rumors a little later on saying he meaning Richard III so suborned preachers of the Divine word that in their sermons to the assembled public they did not blush to say contrary to Heaven's law and all religion so Mancini doesn't believe the stories he's about to repeat that Edward's Offspring should be rooted out forth with because he had not been a legitimate King nor could his offspring be so having been conceived in adultery Edward was wholly unlike the deceased Duke of York whose son he was falsely said to be he claimed that it seemed wrongful to confer the honor of the crime on this boy who was illegitimate his illegitimacy arose by reason that his father King Edward when he took Elizabeth in marriage was contracted in all legality to another wife to whom the Duke by which he means the Earl of Warwick had bind him indeed it was on Edward's Authority that the Earl had earlier covenanted the other lady by proxy as they say over the channel besides Elizabeth herself have been wear to another husband and Edward had taken possession of her rather than married her as a result all their progeny were Unworthy of the realm so according to Mancini Richard had preacher's claim in 1483 that his brother Edward was illegitimate and looked nothing like their father the long dead Duke of York there was also talk that King Edward had been pre-contracted to a foreign princess by his cousin the Earl of Warwick and that was the reason his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was void and their children illegitimate no prior marriage made in England is mentioned and Lily Eleanor Butler doesn't come into it the claim that Edward had not actually married Elizabeth was also apparently doing the rounds and Mancini seems to be under the impression that she too was married to someone else rather than a widow Warwick was indeed trying to arrange a foreign match for Edward to Bonner of saboy at the time the Woodville marriage had been mere public but I've never seen any other suggestion that this made Edward a bigamist furthermore there's no doubt that Edward and Elizabeth Woodville went through a marriage ceremony what you're seeing here is the medieval equivalent of social media as wild rumors some of them absolutely ridiculous and easily disproved swirled around England this is not a reliable account of what was going on Behind Closed Royal doors though it is an interesting insight into what was being said on the street or at least whatever version of it was being translated for Mancini what makes it really special though is that it was written before Richard III lost the crime to Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and therefore before any Tudor revisionist history took hold it tells us that Mancini was hearing a lot of anti-icardian Rumblings in England in the summer of 1483 as those he was in contact with expressed their doubts that either Edward IV or Edward V was illegitimate how do we know that Richard III was behind any of these rumors though or that he believed them to be true the answer lies in an extraordinary document called the titulus richius meaning title of the king which was written in 1483 and confirmed by parliament in 1484 and which had to have been approved by the new monarch it was designed to shore up Richard's claim to the throne and it did so by calling his brother's Union with Elizabeth quote the ungracious pretensed marriage as all England hath caused to say made betwixt said King Edward and Elizabeth sometime wife to Sir John Gray Knight late nieming herself and many years heretofore Queen of England and here also we consider high that the sad pretensed marriage betwixt the above named King Edward and Elizabeth gray was made of great presumption without the knowing or Ascent of the Lords of this land and also by sorcery and Witchcraft committed by the said Elizabeth and her mother jacquette Duchess of Bedford see my video on jakera which I've linked below for you to hear more about this accusation as the common opinion of the people and the public voice and theme is through all this land and Hereafter if and as the case shall require shall be proved sufficiently in time and place convenient and here also we consider how the said pretensed marriage was made privately and secretly without additions of bands in a private chamber a profane place and not openly in the face of the church after the law of God's church but contrary there onto under the laudable custom of the Church of England so as I said a couple of minutes ago no one was seriously disputing that a ceremony did occur and how also that at the time of the contract of the said pretensed marriage and before and long time after the said King Edward was and stood married and Truth plight to one damn Eleanor Butler daughter of the old Earl of Shrewsbury with whom they said King Edward had made a pre-contract of matrimony a long time before he made the said pretensed marriage with the said Elizabeth gray in Manner and form a force said which premises this might mean promises being true as in very truth they've been true it appeareth and followeth evidently that they said King Edwards during his life and the said Elizabeth lived together sinfully and damnably in adultery against the law of God and his church also it appeareth evidently and followeth that all the issue and Children of the sad King been illegitimate and unable to inherit or to claim anything by inheritance by the law and custom of England I'm just going to add in a quick disclaimer here when I use the word illegitimate just now I actually changed the original Source because it had another word which means the same thing and which starts with the letter B but which is not used as a swear word this word pops up four times in the sources I'm quoting for this video and I've made the decision to alter it each time as I don't want to get in trouble with the algorithm which doesn't like swearing okay with that out of the way let's get back to the good stuff the titulus Regis was absolutely damning here in the official governmental records of England Elizabeth and Edward's marriage was called adultery he was decried as a bigamist and their children were left as illegitimate and unable to inherit anything least of all a crime it also clears up beyond a shadow of a doubt the name of the woman to whom Edward was supposedly married far from being some foreign princess it was the English woman Lily Eleanor Butler a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury this story is repeated by another near-contemporary source the croyland or kroland Chronicle there were all sorts of debates around who wrote the earlier part of this Chronicle and when but the later parts of it which deal with the 1480s are more generally accepted as having been written close to the events they describe though we don't know who their author was the chronicle says that Richard usurped the throne because quote it was set forth by way of Prayer in an address in a certain rule of parchment that the sons of king Edward were illegitimate on the grind that he had contracted a marriage with one lady Eleanor Butler before his marriage to Queen Elizabeth added to which the blood of his other brother George Duke of Clarence had been a tainted so that at the present time no certain and uncorrupted lineal blood could be fined of Richard Duke of York except in the person of the said Richard Duke of Gloucester what Mancini the titular Regis and the Krillin Chronicle don't tell us though is what the ultimate source of this story was and why it only popped up in 1483 at the most convenient time possible for Richard III we get a possible answer however from the Memoirs of the French diplomat and Courtyard Philippe de Comins which were written mostly in the 1490s but not published until the 1520s he tells us that it was Robert stillington Bishop of bath and Wales who told Richard that his brother's marriage had been bigamous because quote King Edward being in love with a certain lady whom he named and otherwise unable to have his desires of her had promised her marriage and caused the bishop to marry them upon which he enjoyed her person though his promise was only made to delude her commands does not tell us who the lady in question was and there are drawbacks to using him as a source he was writing some years later though not too many it has to be said he was not in England himself in 1483 and there are obvious errors in his work for instance he says that Richard used Parliament to make two of Edward's daughters illegitimate when in fact it was all of them but although we cannot prove his accusation against stillington it is the best explanation we have as to where this story came from and given that other details in this part of his work are mostly accurate there is no particular reason to doubt it we now move on to the tutor era writers who unlike comings were living in the England of Richard III's successors like Mancini whose work he couldn't possibly have read the author polydor Virgil writing in the early 1510s also talks about Richard having Churchman preach that he was taking the throne due to illegitimacy in his brother's line but Virgil says that the preacher in question who he names as Ralph Shah or Shaw only claimed that Edward IV was illegitimate not his sons citing as evidence Cecily Duchess of York's letter complaints about being accused of adultery by her own child when she was she said entirely innocent we know that Virgil is wrong however the titulus regius proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Richard III did claim that the Woodville marriage was void and although the claims against Cecily don't appear in it the fact that these rumors surface in several sources suggests that he may well have also put out the story that Edward IV was illegitimate for good measure what I think we're seeing in Virgil's work is tutor propaganda Henry VII took a throne in 1485 married Edward IV's oldest daughter Elizabeth of York and had the titulus Regis repealed thus removing the stain of illegitimacy from his wife he also tried to expunge it from history by having all copies of it destroyed though it was alluded to by other sources such as Comins and one copy survived which is how we know its exact contents to me this determination to pretend that Elizabeth of York had never been declared illegitimate explains why Virgil attempted to brush aside this story during the reign of her son Henry VII his credibility is further hampered by the fact that although he had access to people who were adults and living in England during the 1480s he was writing a generation letter and wasn't in the country himself during The crucial time period making him reliant on the memories and truthfulness of others Thomas Murr minister of Henry VIII who was only born in 1478 provided an even more confused Narrative of the history of the Woodville marriage and the reasons Richard gave for claiming the throne according to him Edward IV announced his intention to marry Elizabeth before the marriage had taken place and refused to listen to the objections of his mother and counselors they then called in a woman whom Miracles Elizabeth Lucy not Eleanor Talbot who was pregnant by the king and who they tried to get to claim that Edward was betrothed to her she refused to make such a claim and the Woodville marriage then went ahead this completely flies in the fierce of the Contemporary evidence from the 1460s and the titulus regius which specifically stated that the marriage was made quote without the knowing or Ascent of the Lords of this land Moore's work is almost certainly a fabrication Edward did have an illegitimate son called Arthur Who Lived until 1542 and whose mother is assumed to be the mysterious Elizabeth Lucy but no one is quite sure who she was though some identify her as Elizabeth wait with Lucy being a married name Murray later says that I have rehearsed this business about the marriage somewhat the more at length because it might thereby the better appear how slippery a ground The Protector meaning Richard III built his pretext by which he pretended King Edward's children to be illegitimate again we're in the Realms of tutor propaganda here Murr wanted to keep Henry the eighth and the rest of the royal family Suite by making the Woodville marriage seem water tight and so he eliminated the secretive nature of it and nuked any talk of it being bigamous he does follow the same line as other writers in certain details though saying neither as I began to show you it was by the protector and his Council concluded that this Dr Shah should in a sermon at Paul's cross signify to the people that neither King Edward himself nor the chick of Clarence were lawfully begotten nor were the very Children of the Duke of York but gotten unlawfully by other persons by the adultery of The Duchess their mother and that also damn Elizabeth Lucy was verily the wife of king Edward and so the prince and all his children were illegitimate that were gotten upon the queen this is the first time we're hearing that Cecily Neville Duchess of York was accused of producing two illegitimate Sons both Edward IV and George Duke of Clarence and I think Murr is fabricating this extra detail to further Sully Richard III's reputation in fact as I've mentioned in other videos myrrh was a terrible historian I sometimes get people in the comments under my Wars of the roses and shooter videos disagreeing with me on something because they say that Thomas Moore wrote something different if mirror wrote it though I think you should be more suspicious of it not less his work is absolutely littered with errors just because he's famous and was living during Henry VII it's rain doesn't mean he was a good scholar his work often reads like historical fiction and is very unreliable when it's talking about things he didn't personally witness please treat him with great caution so what can we make of all this was Edward IV a bigamist well conveniently for Richard by the time these accusations were made public both his brother and Eleanor were dead neither of them ever alluded to having been married to each other though and we must ask why if Eleanor had such strong morals that she was unwilling to sleep with Edward until they were married and believed herself to be the queen of England she never mentioned it Edward II proved himself willing to admit to An Inconvenient marriage with a widowed older woman when he acknowledged Elizabeth so why would he not have admitted to the union with Eleanor was he really so desperate to have Elizabeth that he would commit bigamy knowing that his true wife and the man who married them were still alive and might out him at any time destroying his dynasty we also need to think about how reliable Robert stillington was as a source if indeed he really did tell Richard that Edward had married elsewhere stillington's interactions with the crown don't seem to tally with those of a man who had it in his part to bring the whole monarchy Crashing Down he had a good career during Edwards Reign but he wasn't especially favored by the king and Edward even had him imprisoned in the Tower of London in late February and early March 1478. as Michael Hicks has written in the Oxford DMB this episode is sometimes explained by collusion in clarence's treason perhaps by telling the Duke of Edward IV's pre-contract of marriage but this interpretation seems unlikely both because stillington was only arrested after the dissolution of the parliament during which Clarence was tried and executed and because no mention of the pre-contract is known at this stage whatever happened stillington was pardoned on the 20th of June if Richard III was heavily indebted to him for helping him to procure the crime he also didn't show his gratitude very well for as Hicks says stillington was not noticeably favored by Richard III in fact we must acknowledge that the entire stellington connection might be a red herring based on an error by Philippe de car means the titulus regius and Mancini are two sources written by people in England in 1483 and 1484. don't mention him on the whole it seems unlikely to me that Edward despite being a known womanizer who cheated on Elizabeth during their marriage risked everything by committing bigamy and then didn't even bother to make sure he kept those in the new on side in the Years afterwards if you've seen my video when the prince is in the tar you'll know that the timing of these rumors makes them highly suspect as they emerged just after Richard III had seized control of his nephew Edward V and had the boy's maternal half-brother and Uncle arrested and soon executed this suggests to me that discrediting the Woodville marriage was a way for Richard to further clear his path to the throne using seemingly legal measures his other nephew the Earl of Warwick might have met a similar Fiat if not for the fact that his disbarment from the throne was already well established and accepted by 1483 and he didn't pose as much of a threat Richard may have also known this boy and his sister better and had enough affection for them that he didn't want to see them harmed he'd likely barely ever met Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury before he had them incarcerated in addition little Lord Warwick and his sister Margaret who were ultimately executed on the orders of Henry VII and Henry VII respectively weren't just Richard's niece and nephew but also the niece and nephew of his wife as he and George had married their cousins and and Isabel Neville so perhaps the new Queen Anne was helping to Shield her dead sister's children this is pure speculation on my part though the theories around the Woodville and possible Butler marriages have endured for centuries and will I have no doubt continue to do so let me know in the comments below if you think that Edward was a bigger mist or not and if you're in the mood for more on the plantagenets might I recommend my Wars of the Roses playlist I'll be back next time with a new video and until then keep learning

Channel: History Calling

Views: 65,781

Keywords: england's fake queen, was richard iii really king, who was edward iv married to: 100 how did richard iii take the throne, england's secret queen, the real queen of England, famous royal scandals, most scandalous royal marriages, how richard iii took the throne, history calling, edward iv and elizabeth Woodville

Id: Z2SnrL5p6qg

Length: 26min 28sec (1588 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023