• General Notes

  Queen of Edward IV, daughter of Sir Richard Woodville, 1st Earl Rivers,
  and Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, of the great house of Luxemburg,
  Elizabeth Woodville was probably born in 1437. Her first husband was Sir
  John Grey of Groby, a Lancastrian, who fell at St. Albans in 1461. By him
  she had two sons, Thomas and Richard, and it was when she was
  supplicating King Edward IV for the restoration of their estates that he
  fell in love with her.
  Edward married her privately in 1464, and, when the marriage was declared
  at Reading Abbey (Berkshire), it at once provoked the hostility of the
  family of Neville, which had put Edward on the throne. The rivalry of the
  Nevilles with the Woodvilles soon succeeded to that of the Yorkists and
  Lancastrians, for Elizabeth was a greedy, unscrupulous woman who insisted
  on the King showering lands and wealth on all her relations.
  She bore Edward numerous children, the first of whom was her eldest
  daughter, Elizabeth, afterwards Queen of Henry VII; the best known were
  the 'Princes in the Tower,' Edward V and his brother, Richard, Duke of
  York, afterwards murdered, apparently, by their uncle, Richard III. The
  elder of these boys was born while Edward was in exile in 1470 and the
  Queen had 'taken sanctuary' at Westminster.
  On the death of Edward IV the unpopularity of the whole Woodville family
  was at once manifest and the Queen had to take sanctuary again. The most
  extraordinary point in her career was reached when the wily Richard
  tempted her to come to his Court again and she went through some sort of
  reconciliation with him. Henry VII never trusted her and, in 1487, she
  went to reside in the nunnery at Bermondsey on a pension. The
  refoundation of Queens' College, Cambridge, in the beautiful gallery of
  which there is an authenticated portrait of her, is the only good thing
  recorded of her.
  Edited from Emery Walker's "Historical Portraits" (1909).

Details of Elizabeth's family with John De Grey