Richard Woodville, Third Earl Rivers

Here's another Woodville mini-biography I've posted on my website:

By far the least known brother of Elizabeth Woodville is Richard, who eventually became the third Earl Rivers.

Richard seems to have been the second oldest Woodville brother. Cora Scofield in her biography of Edward IV refers to his having been pardoned in 1462 for his adherence to the Lancastrian cause; his father and older brother, Anthony, had been pardoned the previous July. His brother John was born around 1445 (he is said to have been 20 in 1465), and Anthony is said to have been born around 1440.

In 1465, Richard was made a Knight of the Bath, along with his brother John, as part of the festivities preceding Elizabeth’s coronation. In 1467, Edward IV attempted to have him appointed Prior of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, though he was not a member of the order; the royal intervention failed, however, when the order elected its own chosen candidate.

Scofield writes that in 1469, Richard captured Thomas Danvers, who was accused of plotting with Edward IV’s Lancastrian enemies. Later in 1469, the Earl of Warwick, taking advantage of unrest in the country, issued a manifesto condemning “the deceitful, covetous rule and guiding of certain seditious persons,” including the elder Richard Woodville, Anthony Woodville, and “Sir John Woodville and his brothers.” The elder Richard and John were seized and executed, and Anthony appears to have either eluded capture or to have been captured by men who were reluctant to execute him. Richard must have been in danger himself during this time, but nothing indicates his whereabouts. In November 1470, however, during the readeption of Henry VI, he was issued a pardon by the Warwick-controlled government. It seems likely that he would have fought for Edward IV at Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471, but his presence is not mentioned there; perhaps as a mere knight who did not play a notable part in the battle he was simply too lowly to mention.

Richard played little part in the remainder of Edward IV’s reign. J. R. Lander states in Crown and Nobility that he was “employed on various embassies and commissions” and notes that he found no evidence of grants made to him. He owned Wymington in Bedfordshire, where he served as a justice of the peace. Wymington was a manor that had been in his family. Was he considered ineffectual or incompetent, or was he simply a man who preferred the life of a country gentleman to a public role? Perhaps after having witnessed the strife of the previous decades, including the violent deaths of his father and his brother, he was content to live an existence of relative obscurity.

Following Edward IV’s death in April, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, having seized and imprisoned Richard Woodville’s brother Anthony at Northampton, confiscated Anthony’s land. According to Rosemary Horrox in Richard III: A Study in Service, the soon-to-be king seized Richard Woodville’s manor of Wymington as well on May 19, 1483, despite the fact that Richard Woodville stood accused of no crime. (Though Richard III has been praised for his enlightened legislation, he wasn’t much concerned with legal niceties when his own interests were involved.)

Given this high-handedness and the subsequent executions of Anthony and of Elizabeth Woodville’s son Richard Grey, it is not surprising that Richard Woodville, along with his brother Lionel Woodville, joined the interconnected series of uprisings against Richard III in the fall of 1483 known as Buckingham’s rebellion. (Richard and Lionel were brothers-in-law of Buckingham.) Richard Woodville was among the rebels who rose at Newbury. This rising, like all of the others, collapsed in the wake of Richard III’s swift reaction and Buckingham’s own capture and execution.

Richard Woodville, along with many other rebels, was attainted in the Parliament of 1484. As Richard III had executed his own brother-in-law, Thomas St. Leger, for his role in the uprising, as well as sundry other rebels, one wonders why Richard Woodville was spared. He does not seem to have fled abroad. Perhaps he went into sanctuary like his brother Lionel. In any case, by 1485, Richard III was trying to win over some of his former opponents. He pardoned Richard Woodville in March 1485 in exchange for a bond of 1,000 marks and a pledge of good behavior.

Whether Richard joined Henry Tudor’s forces at Bosworth is unknown. Following Richard III’s defeat there, Richard Woodville was restored to his estates, including those of his father, and became the third Earl Rivers, the title that his father and his brother Anthony had held before him. He took part in some of the ceremonial occasions of Henry VII’s reign, participating in the coronation of his niece Elizabeth of York and apparently at the christening of her first child, Arthur. During the reign, he served on commissions of the peace in Bedfordshire and Northhamptonshire and was among those commissioned to take musters of archers. Richard was also commissioned to investigate treasons, felonies, and conspiracies in Hereford in 1486 and to try petitions presented to Parliament in 1487. I have found nothing indicating whether he was at the battle of Stoke.

Though Elizabeth Woodville is generally condemned for using her queenly status to enrich her grasping family, Richard’s case illustrates how exaggerated this accusation is. Richard acquired neither great wealth nor power while his sister was queen; his lands came from his own family, not from royal largesse. Like his younger brother Edward, who also gained little materially from his royal connection, he does not even seem to have married.

Richard died on March 6, 1491, without issue. He was the last of the Woodville brothers. In his will, he requested burial at the Abbey of St. James at Northampton and bequeathed his lands to his nephew Thomas, Marquis of Dorset (Elizabeth Woodville’s surviving son by her first husband). He asked that the underwood at Grafton be sold so as to “buy a bell to be a tenor at Grafton to the bells now there, for a remembrance of the last of my blood.”

Richard Woodville, First Earl Rivers

As I come along with my novel in progress, I'm going to be adding short biographies of members of the Woodville family to my website. Here's the starting entry:

Richard Woodville’s father, also Richard, had been chamberlain to John, Duke of Bedford, a younger son of Henry IV. The younger Richard was knighted in 1426. Like his father, he served the Duke of Bedford, who in 1433 married the seventeen-year-old Jacquetta of Luxembourg. Bedford died two years later. Sometime in 1436 or 1437, Richard Woodville, a mere knight, shocked the court by marrying the widowed Duchess of Bedford.

Henry VI fined the couple ₤1,000 for the match, but they were soon forgiven. Richard served Henry VI militarily and administratively and became a knight banneret in 1442, Baron Rivers in 1448, and a Knight of the Garter in 1450. Like his eldest son, Anthony, he was an accomplished jouster, taking part in a 1440 tournament at Smithfield where he fought Pedro de Vasquez, a Spanish knight.

When hostilities broke out between the houses of Lancaster and York, Richard sided with the Lancastrians. He and Anthony were taken captive at Sandwich in 1460; at that time, the two Woodvilles underwent the humiliating experience of being “rated” for their low birth by the Earl of Salisbury, the Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of March—the latter being the man who would marry his daughter four years later. Sometime after this dressing down, Richard and Anthony were released. They returned to fight at the Battle of Towton in March 1461, where the Lancastrians were soundly defeated. With the Lancastrian cause appearing hopeless, Richard and his son made their peace with the new king, Edward IV. He was pardoned in June 1461. From thereon to his murder nine years later, Richard served Edward IV loyally. By 1463, he had become a member of the king’s council.

Richard might have continued as a minor courtier had it not been for the extraordinary event of May 1464—the secret marriage of his widowed daughter, Elizabeth, to Edward IV. Whether Richard had any role in bringing the couple together is unknown; later sources credit only his wife, Jacquetta, with promoting the match, and Richard III later claimed that Jacquetta and Elizabeth had procured it by witchcraft.

In September 1464, Edward announced the marriage to his council, and in May 1465, Elizabeth was crowned. Richard soon reaped the rewards of being father-in-law to the king. He was made treasurer of England in March 1466 and raised to an earldom in May of that year. In 1467, he became constable of England. His income from his offices was ₤1,586

Though Richard seems to have filled his positions competently and the favor shown to him was not grossly disproportionate, his success and the gains made by other Woodville family members aroused the resentment of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known as “The Kingmaker” for his role in bringing Edward IV to the throne. Warwick’s formerly all-encompassing influence with the king was waning just as the Woodvilles’ was growing. The earl had other grievances besides the Woodvilles—Edward’s foreign policy and his refusal to allow Warwick’s daughters to marry Edward’s younger brothers among them—but they and other men who had risen high in the king’s service as royal favorites were easy targets. As Warwick began to plot with the king’s maladroit younger brother, George, the Duke of Clarence, discontent in the North over taxes and the dispossession of Henry Percy from his family’s earldom created a volatile situation of which Warwick and Clarence took full advantage. In Calais on July 12, 1469, they issued a proclamation complaining of “the deceitful, covetous rule and guiding of certain seditious persons,” naming Richard Woodville, his wife, his sons Anthony and John and their brothers, and several other men.

Warwick returned to England and began to raise men. Edward IV, evidently underestimating the seriousness of the situation, had left William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, and Humphrey Stafford, the Earl of Devon—two of the men named in Warwick and Clarence’s manifesto—to deal with the rebel army. Herbert’s army met Warwick’s army at Edgecote on July 26, 1469. Outnumbered, Herbert’s Welsh troops were defeated and Herbert captured and beheaded by Warwick’s men. Humphrey Stafford was captured and executed by a mob some weeks later.

Richard Woodville, in the meantime, had gone on pilgrimage with Edward early in June. By July, Edward IV, fearing all too correctly that his in-laws might be a rebel target, sent them away for their safety. Richard and his son John, however, were captured by Warwick’s men. On August 12, 1469, they were beheaded near Coventry without trial. It was an act that has rightly been described as one of private revenge on Warwick’s part rather than one justified by charges of treason. Richard’s burial site is unknown. Interestingly, Walter Blount, who had given up the treasury to Woodville in exchange for a barony, an annuity, and 1,000 marks, seems to have borne no grudge against his replacement; he asked in his will several years later that masses be said for the souls of Richard and John.

Though Richard Woodville, along with other members of his family, has been described as greedy and grasping, the hard evidence for this is somewhat lacking. Richard does appear in a bad light if one believes the story that he and Jacquetta schemed to ruin Sir Thomas Cook based on charges of treason simply because he refused to sell them a tapestry Jacquetta coveted. Recent scholarship, however, has cast doubts on aspects of this story, which I’ll be posting on later.