The Skaggs-Files

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).