Warwick The Kingmaker

THE QUARREL BETWEEN WARWICK AND KING EDWARD

Then came the last nail in the coffin: he was already married to Dame Elizabeth and couldn't have another wife.

In truth, King Edward had secretly travelled from Stony Stratford to Grafton in Northamptonshire. He married the woman on May 1, five months earlier, when he should have been well on his journey to the North. Nobody had suspected the marriage since they knew little to nothing about Elizabeth Grey, who had been living a secluded life ever since her husband, a Lancastrian knight, died during the second Battle of St. Albans in the final moments of triumph. After meeting her casually, Edward was seduced by her beautiful face and made passionate love to her. Elizabeth was intelligent and wary; she would only consider a formal marriage proposal. The young, completely enamoured with her, had secretly married her at Grafton in front of her mother and two other witnesses. His crucial private business prevented him from showing up to greet York's Parliament.

The marriage came as a complete surprise. The lady's father, Lord Rivers, had been an avid Lancastrian. He was the one who had been caught at Sandwich in 1460 and brought before Warwick and Edward for that peculiar reprimand that has been previously documented. The father-in-law is now this "created lord, who had acquired his money through his marriage." Dame Elizabeth had children who were 12 and 13 years old, making her seven years older than her new spouse. The populace was so shocked by the match that it was frequently said that the Queen's mother, the elderly Duchess of Bedford, must have given King Edward a love philtre because there was no other way the situation could have been explained.

This unexpected news left Warwick, and the other lords of the Council irritated and shocked. The Earl had brought up the idea of King Louis and the French royal wedding, and he was scheduled to show up soon to present the plan for approval. King Louis must now hear him out on how he was deceived in the most heinous way and why he had been kept out of his master's trust the entire time despite the knowledge that the plan was unachievable. Naturally, the Earl decided to cancel the mission since he did not dare to go before the French and request peace when the unity, he had pledged to cement was no longer conceivable.

Even though he must have been frustrated and incensed by how he had been treated, Warwick was too devoted of a York household servant to leave his master's Council. He submitted to necessity and accepted what he did not agree with. Warwick, with George of Clarence, the brother, walked Dame Elizabeth up to the seat provided for her alongside her husband and bowed to her in her capacity as Queen the following day when the proclaimed his marriage in Reading Abbey on the feast of St. Michael.

For a few months, it seemed like the marriage had resulted from a single freak act of adolescent ardour, and the Neville family's dominance in the royal Councils seemed unaffected. Then, as if to atone for how he treated Warwick in the past, Edward appointed his brother George Neville the Chancellor, to the open position of Archbishop of York. Finally, as a show of good faith, he ordered the Earl to prorogue a Parliament that had been called to a session on November 4.

These signs of respect, however, were not meant to last. Even if there was no visible rift between them and his great Minister, the favours would come from somewhere else in the future. The Queen had two sons, five sisters, and three brothers; for them, the royal influence was used in the most astonishing ways throughout the following two years. The house of Rivers was almost as productive as the family of Neville. King Edward didn't only waste his fortune and abuse his position for the sake of his wife's family out of excessive love, though. It quickly became apparent that he had decided to form one of those vast allied groups of noble families, whose power the fourteenth century knew so well, with the help of the Queen's family. This group would set him free from the Nevilles' rule. A few days after the Queen was acknowledged, the Rivers family started experiencing a string of weddings that continued for the next two years. The Queen's sister Margaret wed Thomas Lord Maltravers, the affluent Earl of Arundel's heir, in October 1464, soon following the incident at Reading.