Royal Marriage Secrets, by John Ashdown-Hill – review

My brother Pericles Wyatt, as my father liked to say, is by blood the rightful king of England, the nephew of Richard III in the 18th generation, and as such the senior surviving Plantagenet. Richard was crowned king of England on 6 July 1483. It was described at the time as a joyous occasion. Little did anyone present imagine that it would become an event of rancorous controversy, for never has it been so true, sadly for my own family, that history is written by the winners. Just two years later, an exiled adventurer called Henry Tudor took Richard’s life and crown at Bosworth Field and unleashed an assault of unprecedented viciousness on the reputation of the last Plantagenet king of England.

Henry’s own claim to the throne was so tenuous that he spent his reign in a state of permanent anxiety. His propaganda machine, which utilised the most brilliant and malignant minds of the day, set about justifying the new regime by declaring Richard a usurper. Within weeks of swearing loyalty to his nephew, Edward V, the rapacious Duke of Gloucester had the boy declared illegitimate on the grounds that the marriage of Edward IV to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid. To the disbelief of the country, it was announced that the late king had conducted a previous marriage with a low-born harlot called Elizabeth Lucy, who was conveniently dead

The tale of Edward and Elizabeth Lucy, who had briefly been one of his many amours, was preposterous, and was meant to seem so. What really occurred, and what the newly crowned Henry VII so successfully suppressed, was quite different, as John Ashdown-Hill amply demonstrates in his scintillating and elegant book covering six disputed royal marriages. As far as we know, Richard, who had been appointed Lord Protector in Edward’s will, planned to have his nephew crowned in June 1483, going so far as to order coronation robes not only for the boy but for himself.