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 by his uncle Richard III; the boy and his brother disappeared into the Tower, and no proof ever surfaced of their fate. Elizabeth helped secure the throne for Henry VII in 1485, whose marriage to her daughter Elizabeth of York fused the warring houses and founded the Tudor line. She lived to see her grandson - the future Henry VIII - but spent her final years pushed to the margins by the new king's mother, fading from court into retirement before her death in 1492.