Tudor Queens of England by David Loades Page A

marriage had been sons but the opportunity for a little family solidarity was not lost. However, two years into her marriage to the King, she had not yet presented him with an heir.
    It has sometimes been suggested that Edward immediately set out to build up his wife’s large family into a political faction, capable of balancing the Nevilles, or his own brothers, but there is little sign of that. What he did was to establish an aristocratic context for Elizabeth by securing marriages for her numerous unprovided sisters. Over the next few years Margaret was wedded to Thomas, Lord Maltravers, the heir to the Earl of Arundel; Anne to William, Viscount Bourchier, heir to the Earl of Essex, Jacquetta to John, Lord Strange of Knockin; Catherine to Henry Stafford, grandson and heir to the Duke of Buckingham; Mary to William Herbert (Lord Dunster), heir to Lord Herbert and Eleanor to Anthony, Lord Grey of Ruthin, heir to the Earl of Kent. Not all these unions were obtained without a certain amount of arm twisting and it was alleged that the Woodville girls had exhausted the pool of eligible young noblemen. However the kinship established through their wives did not in any sense pull these men together into a coherent party and apart from causing a certain amount of resentment among other noblemen with daughters to dispose of – notably the Earl of Warwick – its impact upon the political scene was negligible. No doubt it was more noticeable at court, but none of these ladies appear to have been

T U D O R Q U E E N S O F E N G L A N D
    way of the Woodvilles. No one had been starved of royal patronage to feed the Queen’s relations.
    Nor were the Queen’s own revenues granted with a lavish or ill considered hand. After careful consultation with the Council, dower land to the value of
    £4,541 was settled on her, drawn mainly from the Duchy of Lancaster.
    11 This was signifi cantly less than the 10,000 marks (£6,600) that had been awarded to her predecessor, but it was secure revenue, and was several times adjusted upwards. With careful management Elizabeth was able to maintain her household on a lavish scale, and to dispense her own patronage generously. The main benefi ciaries were her servants, to whom she remained conspicuously loyal, and the remoter members of her family – cousins usually – who did not come within the range of direct royal bounty. Apart from securing his marriage, and his rights of inheritance, there was not much at this time that she could do for Thomas, her elder son, who was only about 10 years old, and Richard, the younger, does not feature at all. Yet despite all this evidence of restraint and good management, Elizabeth undoubtedly remained very unpopular, and the question remains as to why this should have been so. Her direct political infl uence was very slight. She stood for no programme and had no agenda and yet the evidence of dislike is contemporary and does not depend upon later Yorkist and Tudor mythology. This was partly due to sheer snobbishness against her parvenue status. Despite all that Edward could do, and despite the fact that Richard had been created a baron by Henry VI in 1448, Elizabeth was seen and represented as the daughter of a
    ‘mere knight’. It was also partly due to her own personality. In spite of her obvious sex appeal, she seems to have been a chilly and unamiable creature, very much wrapped up in her own affairs. Her patronage was always calculated to enhance her own position and the unattractive side of her good household management was a tight-fi sted acquisitiveness. She was a generous patron of Queens’ College, Cambridge and is seen as its co-founder, but that seems to have been occasioned less by an enthusiasm for education than from a desire to blot out the memory of her predecessor. With the possible exception of Lord Scales, the rest of her family showed similar characteristics, as the persecution of Sir Thomas Cook by Lord Rivers and his wife in 1468