Richard III and Elizabeth Woodville Were Enemies Long Before 1483

Richard III and Elizabeth Woodville Were Enemies Long Before 1483 The story of 1483 is usually told as an explosion: a king dies in April, and within three months his brother has the throne, his sons have vanished and his widow is in sanctuary. It reads as though everything went wrong at once. It did not. Richard III and Elizabeth Woodville had been enemies for the best part of twenty years — and the man who made them enemies was Edward IV. This video follows the whole development from the secret marriage of 1464 to Richard’s public oath of March 1484, from both sides in turn, and argues that the catastrophe was designed into the way Edward chose to govern. Note: no historian has properly analysed this relationship across the whole period. What follows leans on the printed primary sources, and an archive search would be worth a great deal. Sources and Further Reading • Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard III, ed. C. A. J. Armstrong, Oxford 1969 • The Crowland Chronicle Continuations 1459–1486, ed. Pronay and Cox, London 1986 • Thomas More, The History of King Richard III • Titulus Regius and Richard III’s oath of 1 March 1484, Rotuli Parliamentorum VI / BL Harleian MS 433 • Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, in the publications of the Richard III Society • David Baldwin, Elizabeth Woodville. Mother of the Princes in the Tower, Stroud 2002 • Susan Higginbotham, The Woodvilles, Stroud 2013 • David MacGibbon, Elizabeth Woodville. A Life, Stroud 2013 • Charles Ross, Richard III, London 1981 • Chris Skidmore, Richard III. Brother, Protector, King, London 2017 Hashtags #RichardIII #WarsOfTheRoses #TudorHistory