Elizabeth Woodville : mother of the Princes in the Tower

Elizabeth Woodville is undoubtedly a historical character whose life no novelist would ever have dared invent.

She has been portrayed as an enchantress; as an unprincipled advancer of her family's fortunes and a plucky but pitiful queen in Shakespeare's histories.

She has been alternatively championed and vilified by her contemporaries and five centuries of historians, dramatists and novelists, but what was she really like?

Elizabeth Woodville's role in the conflicts and dynastic struggles of the Wars of the Roses makes her a figure of importance and an assessment of her true place in these struggles is well overdue.

This gripping study will interest anyone who wants to find out more about this shadowy, much maligned figure and her real historical significance.