Widows and the Wars of the Roses: the Turbulent Marital History of Edward IV’s Putative Mistress, Margaret, daughter of Sir Lewis John of West Horndon, Essex

Summary

Soon after the death of her husband, John Talbot, second earl of Shrewsbury, at the battle of Northampton on 10 July 1460, his widow, Elizabeth, sister of James Butler, earl of Ormond and Wiltshire, presented a petition to Pope Pius II. She recalled how her vulnerability in the wake of her husband's death had led her to make undertakings that she was now anxious to repudiate. Her husband had fallen on the defeated Lancastrian side, and so, fearing the loss of her lands and goods, she had pretended a readiness to marry one of the victors, Walter Blount of Barton Blount in Derbyshire. Blount was, as she rightly insisted to the pope, ‘unequal and inferior to her in nobility and wealth’. Yet she felt her situation was desperate, and Blount's influence offered protection ‘from the attacks of her enemies and the perils which threatened’. Now that the danger had passed, she asked the pope to release her from her promise. Her plea illustrates an obvious point: the normal hazards facing the wealthy widow were amplified in times of acute political dislocation, particularly if, like Elizabeth Butler, they found themselves alone in the world, with neither parents nor adult children to support them. Such widows had one obvious recourse, namely to marry into the new political establishment. Elizabeth contemplated that solution but found unpalatable the social derogation that, in her case, it entailed. Other widows were offered what were, at least in appearance, better options, none more so than Elizabeth Wydeville, widow of Sir John Grey of Groby (Leicestershire), a Lancastrian who fell at the second battle of St. Albans on 17 February 1461. Her marriage to Edward IV in May 1464 is the ultimate example of a Lancastrian widow finding a Yorkist protector. This paper concerns one of two women who may, as Michael Hicks has suggested in his Edward V, have unsuccessfully taken the path Elizabeth later followed. One of these is well known. Eleanor, daughter of John Talbot, first earl of Shrewsbury (d.1453), and sister-in-law of Elizabeth Butler, was the widow of another Lancastrian, Sir Thomas Butler, son and heir-apparent of Ralph, Lord Butler of Sudeley. It was to her that, according to the Titulus Regius of 1483, Edward IV had been pre-contracted, to the invalidation of his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth Wydeville.