Elizabeth Woodville

Elizabeth's family stood in the middle tiers of 15th-century England when she married a Lancastrian knight, John Grey of Groby, who died at the Second Battle of St Albans in 1461. Three years later, as a widow with two young sons, she secretly married King Edward IV — the first English monarch since the Norman Conquest to wed one of his own subjects. The match scandalized the realm and enriched her relatives, stoking the fury of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, whose retaliation cost Elizabeth her father and brother in 1469. After Edward IV's death in 1483, her young son Edward V was deposed…