Lynda J. Pidgeon - Brought Up of Nought: A History of the Woodvile Family

In September 1464, Edward IV had no choice but to admit to his lords that he had secretly married Elizabeth Wydevile. This unequal marriage of king and commoner subsequently led to the family being seen as manipulative, greedy, and grasping. If this were not sufficient to blacken their reputation, Elizabeth and her mother, Jacquetta, were also charged with witchcraft. When, in 1483, after the untimely death of her husband, it was alleged that Elizabeths two young sons, the Princes in the Tower, had been murdered by Richard III, sympathies might have been expected to change. Gone the manipulative queen to be replaced by the grieving widow, mourning not only the loss of her husband but the death of her sons and brother. Despite these tragedies, the story of the Wydeviles has essentially remained unchanged. To quote Keith Dockray, the Wydeviles have long had a most unsavoury reputation as a family of grasping upstarts who single-mindedly exploited their connections with the crown in a thoroughly blatant and unscrupulous manner.

Rumour aside, what exactly is known about the Wydeviles? Crucially, they seem to have appeared out of nowhere during the fifteenth century, the beneficiaries of two very fortunate marriages, although this is by no means the full story. Despite their position in the later fifteenth century, there are no family archives or large collections of personal papers that can be drawn upon to provide a fuller picture of the Wydeviles. Brief mentions of them can be found scattered across the numerous records of government, a mention here and there, and, frustratingly, in legal cases we only have the opening papers and not the conclusions. Wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers are even more rarely mentioned. From such brief references in the Pipe Rolls, Patent Rolls, Fine Rolls, etc., and later in the chronicles, a faint picture of the early family becomes visible. However, from these sources, we can see a family emerge who did well for themselves in the first few centuries after 1066, rising to baron, then falling back down the social scale into the country gentry. In the fourteenth century, the Northamptonshire branch of the family made the most of their connections, first establishing their position within the county and then within the household of the royal family. This was the springboard for their success in the fifteenth centuryalthough even they could not have foreseen that their royal connections would lead to the crown itself.

Underlying this rise and fall and rise again is the English preoccupation with class and social mobility. Status was a touchy subject; even in the fifteenth century, people were sensitive to the charge of being descended from serfs and made great efforts to prove that they came from freeborn stock. Not only did status matter, but the lack of it, or even the suggestion of the lack of status, could prove to be a useful weapon. It is these sensitivities to status that make it necessary to trace the origins of the Wydevile family. The impression arising in the later fifteenth century was that they were nobodies who, coming from nowhere, were suddenly everywhere, both at the court of Edward IV and married into all the important noble families. A family of arrivistes who did not know their place and who, through the wiles of a beautiful woman, manipulated a young and lusty king. The reality is rather more complicated.

Brought Up of Nought is an attempt to discover more of the familys origins, to find out if they really were the nobodies they are portrayed as, brought up of nought, or if they were like many other families of the fifteenth century (such as the Nevilles) who made equally advantageous marriages but who have not received the same opprobrium as the Wydeviles. A brief look at the familys arrival and establishment in England will be followed by an in depth account of the Wydeviles later reputation, using the chronicles written in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to trace how they were portrayed and how the story of the family and their two remarkable marriages developed.